Lineage(23)

Lance began to cry, and the hot tears brought on by fear ran in rivulets down his face, onto his father’s hand. Anthony stared at Lance’s wet face for another moment before snorting in disgust and shoving him backward into the front of his dresser. Lance cried out in pain as a drawer handle bit into his spine, but remained standing. Anthony studied him for several long seconds, turned half away, and stopped. The light from the windows that had been warm minutes before was now gray and lifeless like dead skin. It coated the side of Anthony’s face and gave Lance the impression that his father was already deceased, killed from the poison that flowed through his veins.

“The sweetest thing is, you don’t know where she went. I think about that sometimes at night and it’s just poetic. You sit and wonder, while I know.” A smile pulled at the corners of Anthony’s mouth. It looked like an upside-down grimace.

Without another word, Anthony left the room and shut the door behind him, leaving Lance in the silence interrupted only by the clock’s heartbeat.



Winter edged its way across the land like an uninvited houseguest. It wedged its foot in the door of November with temperatures that dropped lower and lower, until most everyone wore heavy sweatshirts beneath heavier coats. Snow tested the waters of gray-skinned ponds and coated the fields a bit at a time, until one December night it decided to set in for good and dumped nearly six inches on Black Lake and the surrounding farms. Plows were hooked to the front of trucks, salt began to grow like a white mold on the highways, and dogs were allowed in to sleep on porches at night. Lakes became solid and, in the afternoons, accumulated children who gathered, strapped used ice skates to their feet, and raced one another up and down the bumpy surfaces, hockey sticks in hand as they pursued a jumping black puck. The people in the community settled into a comfortable routine: wait for the snow, complain about the amount when passing one another on the sidewalk or in the bars, and shovel and plow it when it came, only to do it all over again a few days later.

The snow had been light as of late, especially for January, but Lance was glad for the reprieve as he walked in the narrow tire track that ran on the right side of their long driveway. Less snow meant less wading through the drifts that inevitably piled up across the drive, and his feet stayed a little warmer as he waited for the long yellow bus that was now trundling purposefully toward him on the icy road.

Once Lance boarded the bus, he began to gradually sink in upon himself, bit by bit, until he felt as though he could have faded into the gray paint that covered the inside of the large vehicle. As he approached a seat that looked empty, a tenth-grade boy suddenly sat up and stared menacingly at him.

“Keep movin’, you frickin’ weirdo.” Several kids in nearby seats shouted laughter as Lance steered himself past them to an empty row in the very back of the bus. The other children moved away from him as if he harbored some type of contagious disease.

No one wanted to be associated with the weird kid that rarely spoke and never laughed. He sometimes wondered why he didn’t have even one friend within the school he spent so many hours each week. It seemed that in every story he’d read, the main character, no matter how outlandish or ostracized, always had a best friend. A sidekick. Someone who saw through the oddity of the main character and decided to stick with them through thick and thin. Granted, they were sometimes quirky or strange, but they were still a friend. He hoped that one of the other children would eventually reach out to him, as he didn’t know quite how to do it himself. The spastic hustle and bustle of the kids, and at times even the teachers, overwhelmed him to the point that he would gradually shut them out and recede until the words within his head replaced the conversations that he wished he could have. His hope of friendship had been fading over the years, and had nearly dried up altogether like a stream in a drought when his mother had vanished.

There had been questions about his mother. Hundreds of them, in fact. His teachers had barraged him with them until he just stared at the floor and gave the same answer each time she was brought up. She had left and he didn’t know where she had gone. Yes, maybe she would come back. Yes, he was all right. Could he go back to class now? It was the same for weeks, until everyone finally realized that they weren’t really getting anywhere and Lance became a backdrop for the classroom again, a fixture that neither existed nor disappeared entirely.

The bus shuddered to a stop outside the squat brick building that children flooded into in lines like ants filing into a hill. The walk to his homeroom was uneventful, and after depositing his tattered book bag onto a brass hook that bore his name in black Sharpie, Lance slouched into his seat and felt his stomach tighten as he noticed the sheriff sitting in a chair a few feet from Mrs. Murphy’s large desk. Their eyes met, the sheriff’s soft brown orbs probing at Lance’s with questions. Without thinking, Lance reached up and furtively buttoned the top of his faded flannel shirt, and he hoped that the collar was high enough to cover the spot where his father had punched him the night before.