Lineage (26 page)

Lance reached out and pressed his fingertips to the bottom edge of her palm where it met the cold, flat stone. Mary lifted her hand and set it in his, her nose sniffling in the dark.

“Thank you,” he said. He watched her head tilt in confusion.

“For what?”

“For giving me that.”

Mary snorted laughter. “Giving you a depressing story on top of all your suffering?”

Lance shook his head. “Our worst memories are precious, things we can’t or won’t forget, and sometimes they’re what we guard the most.” She stared at him in the dark, and he could feel her eyes on him like two soft fingers, probing, wondering.

“You know, for a horror writer, you sure are a downer.” They both laughed a little, and Lance felt her grip his
hand tighten
. After a moment of silence, he could feel Mary looking at him again.

“Is that why you write what you write?
To let out your worst memories?”

He dipped his face toward the shore and was quiet for a long time before he finally spoke. “Horror is just explicable people doing inexplicable things. I don’t think I’ve let anything out.”

He saw her nod and then
gaze
out at the water. “Do you ever feel like you’ll be whole again? Like you’ll find the piece that other people seem to have that’s missing from yourself?” she asked.

He sighed, knowing exactly what she meant. He sometimes stared at people in a crowded place, wondering how they went about their lives without ever having to feel the loss and despair that had become his constant companion. “I think everyone is missing something, whether they know it or not, and they try to make up for it in other ways that never really fill in the voids. The people that know they’re not whole, I think they have a better chance at becoming so since they’re always searching for it. If you quit searching, you’re dead.”

 Mary nodded. Their eyes were now locked through the obscurity of nightfall, and the voice in Lance’s head cried out for him to kiss this woman. But then the moment passed. She turned from him, still holding his hand, but lighter than before.
Just fingertips now, although he wouldn’t complain.

“How about we finish our drink at the bar?” she said as she stood from the ledge, pulling him up with her.

“That sounds great,” he admitted. His nerves had calmed somewhat since leaving the restaurant, but a stiff drink would do wonders for the panic that still threatened to flatten him beneath its prodding fingers. The warmth of Mary’s hand in his own comforted him more than any other coping method Dr. Tyler had shown him over the years, and he focused on it, trying to commit the feeling to memory.

They walked in the darkness on the whispering beach, separate but linked, not speaking but instead enjoying the feeling of the night around them and knowing that neither would let go.

The Lighthouse had emptied considerably by the time Lance and Mary stepped back through the patio door they had exited over an hour before. Most of the tables were barren, the staff having picked them clean of their tablecloths and candles. An older couple sat at the bar sharing a drink, and a tired bartender stood with a towel over one shoulder, his eyes already studying them as they sat down on two stools.

“I’ll have a whiskey sour,” Mary said, shifting onto the barstool.

Lance raised his eyebrows and she shrugged and smiled. “I’ll have the same,” he said.

The bartender turned from them without a word to fix the drinks, and Lance was about to ask Mary how long she’d been drinking whiskey when he felt a hand on his arm.

“Lance! Nice to see you again!” the older woman from the bar exclaimed in a thin voice. It took Lance a split second to place her lined face, and then he remembered her sorting through the produce in the grocery store.

“Hi Josie, nice to see you too,” he said, turning toward the older woman.

Josie’s smile lit up her whole face, and as she leaned to look over Lance’s left shoulder at Mary, it seemed to broaden even more. “Hello, Mary! Well, isn’t this cute.
You two out on a date?”

“Hi Josie, and if you must know, yes, I suppose we are,” Mary answered in the tone of an exasperated grandchild dealing with a doting grandparent.

“Oh, that’s great! I just knew you’d fit in here, Lance, and if Mary’s taken a shine to you, you must be okay! Harold, come over here and meet our new resident author,” Josie called over her shoulder to the man who still sat on a barstool several spots over.

Harold threw a pull-tab into a growing heap and snorted his annoyance before walking over to join their small group. Harold smiled as he outstretched a small hand, his watery eyes blinking at Lance through a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses.
“So nice to meet you, Lance.
So you’re the one who bought the old Metzger place.”

Lance’s hand
spasmed
and he saw a look of pain shoot across Harold’s face. Lance instantly released his grip and cocked his head to one
side,
sure he had heard the other man wrong.

“Did you say Metzger?” Lance asked, reaching out to grip the bar with his left hand, assuring himself the world wasn’t tilting or falling away.

“Yes, the old house on the bay up north. I suppose there
isn’t
too many people that still call it that. The bay is the town’s namesake, you know,” Harold said, rubbing his hand, the polite smile returning to his face.

“Yes, I know. Why is it called the Metzger place?” Lance asked somewhat more forcefully than he meant to. He noticed Mary sidle closer to him and Josie take a little step back.

Harold scrunched up his small face and then raised his eyebrows before continuing. “Well, it was the last name of the very first owner. He built the place back in 1950. Wasn’t from the country, if I remember correctly … name was Erwin, I believe.”

A feeling began to flow through Lance’s chest, like freezing motor oil seeping into the pit of his stomach. It collected there as the thoughts, indistinct at first like distant figures in a thick fog, began to gain edges and shape. Lance swallowed and realized his hands were trembling. He heard the words before he knew his mouth had spoken them. “Did he have any children?”

Harold looked up to the ceiling as if he intended to roll his eyes all the way back and inspect the archives of his brain for the answer. The older man nodded finally, and Lance felt his heart begin to pick up its already thundering pace.

“Yes, just one.
A boy.”

“What was his name?” Lance asked so quickly that Harold and Josie frowned at almost the same time.

Harold glanced at Mary, who now stood beside Lance, a hand resting on the back of his arm. He then looked back at Lance, who had leaned farther toward him, his eyes wide in his pale face.

“Umm, something Italian.
He moved away after he graduated.” Harold scratched his balding head, and then nodded with assurance. “Anthony. His name was Anthony.”

The Land Rover slid to a stop a few feet from John’s garage door, the brightness of the headlights blinding on the white paint. Lance threw the gear into park and turned the ignition off so forcefully that the key nearly snapped off in the narrow slot.

His feet crunched across the gravel and then became silent in the softness of the grass, the cold dew wetting through the tips of his shoes. Through the red glaze of rage that filmed his narrowed eyes, Lance saw a light come on in the living room of the house. The steps of the front porch groaned under his weight as he launched himself up them. He punched the doorbell with his fist, feeling skin tear from his knuckles and hearing the plastic around the button crack.

He could still hear his father’s name sliding off Harold’s
lips,
still feel his legs giving way and the seat of the barstool connecting with his lower back. Mary had braced him, and if it hadn’t been for her hands, he would have fallen onto the floor of the restaurant. His father’s face had replayed over and over in his mind, sliding back behind the rock pillar, the crooked smile playing at his lips. As the shock set in and questions, too many and too fast to register, ripped through his mind, something else began to build there. Anger, so deep and pure it seemed elemental, pulsed in time with the image of John’s face. He could hear the caretaker’s words from the first day they had met again:
There’s nothing for you here.
They had echoed in his mind as he sped from the restaurant to John’s home.

Lance felt his fists clench as the inner door opened before him and John’s sleep-addled face peered out. The screen door was suddenly open and Lance was through it. John stumbled back from the thrust of Lance’s outstretched hands, his old legs unable to keep up with the velocity of the shove. John cried out as he hit the wall behind him and began to slide down it like a wet sponge. He wore only a pair of flannel pants and his pallid flesh sagged with age above the waistline, but Lance felt no pity or regret. Rage of the kind he had never experienced before coursed through him, a thrumming energy that tingled in his muscles and propelled him effortlessly through space.

“Lance, what—” John began, but then Lance’s hands were around his throat, pulling him into a standing position and pressing him against the wall. Garbled sounds rasped from John’s open mouth as Lance leaned closer, hissing through clenched teeth that his anger refused to unlock.

“Shut the fuck up! You knew my father! You knew who I was the moment you laid eyes on me!”

John blinked and tried to suck in a choked breath, but Lance pushed harder on the soft skin at the other man’s neck. He could feel the power in his hands, the urge to crush the life out of the man before him, the anger building exponentially. An image of his father pushing his mother against the wall flashed across his mind. His father’s teeth bared in exactly the same grimace that pulled at his own face now.

Instantly, he felt his hands go slack and fall to his sides.

John dropped, gasping, to the floor, knocking over a flowerpot and spewing its black dirt across the kitchen in a fan. Lance stumbled back until his shoulders met the opposite wall and he crumpled into a ball. He put his face in his hands, smelling John’s after-shave, and felt tears leak out of his eyes as a sob racked his body. John retched weakly onto the floor, the liquid mixing with the dirt there, and sucked in great bellows of air. Lance continued to weep, unable to look up at the man a few feet from him. They stayed that way for some time, both men trying to quiet themselves, until John’s voice, ragged and wet, murmured.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes squinting through broken blood vessels. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I …” His voice trailed off and he shook his head, whether to clear it from the attack or from his thoughts Lance couldn’t tell.

“Why?” Lance finally managed. He sat up and stared across the dimly lit kitchen, his eyes red and raw from the tears.

John breathed in and out for a while, the air still rattling across the inside of his ravaged throat. “I lost so much. It’s my fault, couldn’t see it then, but I do now,” John said.

Lance pushed himself to his feet. He felt utterly empty as he crossed the space to where John rested, the anger having drained, leaving him a frail husk held together by his skin. He knelt beside the old man and spied the red marks left by his own hands on the drooping skin around John’s neck. They would be black tomorrow, evidence of something terrible barely avoided.

Lance reached out a hand and held it before the caretaker. John’s head rose until he looked Lance in the eye.

“Tell me everything. I need to know.”

They sat at the kitchen table, a bottle of whiskey and two glasses filled with the amber liquid and ice rested between them. They had cleaned the kitchen together, mopping up John’s vomit and dirt. Lance had begun an apology that John stopped short, his hand held out and his head turned to the side. The expression on the old man’s face read
no need,
and Lance held back the urge to continue regardless of John’s guilt.

I nearly killed him,
Lance thought as he watched John sweep up the last vestiges of dirt from beneath the counter.
I almost became
him
tonight.
The thought brought a fresh bout of trembling, which he tried to calm by downing the first half of his drink as John settled into a chair at the other corner of the table.

John sipped the whiskey, and then regarded Lance before he finally began to speak. “Like I said before, when May and I moved here, we had a rough go of it. There wasn’t much work and we were thinking of going back south when your grandfather moved here and built that place you’re living in now. It was funny, the way he came to town. For a while there was only the old shipping bay, and then there was a house there, like it’d been plopped down out of the sky. I went up there on a hunch that he’d need some sort of help, and I was right. Your grandmother led me in and introduced me to Erwin—that was your grandfather’s name.”

“I know, found out tonight from Harold in town,” Lance said.

John only nodded before continuing. “They were from
Germany
.
Refugees from the war.
There were a lot like them back then, people still in shock and so broken from what they’d seen over there that they pulled up roots and got the hell out. From what I understood, Erwin and Annette had owned a good chunk of land over there when Hitler came to power. They weren’t on the same wavelength with that bastard, just like a lot of common people weren’t, but didn’t dare say a thing lest they would end up in a camp like the Jews. So your grandfather got an idea to harbor as many Jews as he could, to get them to take care of his land and work for him in general. It was almost like that movie awhile back, the one where the German industrialist hires all those people …”