Lineage(25)

“I’m fine.”

“Are you?”

Lance nodded and looked at the pattern in the carpet at his feet. There were coils of red ivy mixed with black backgrounds. He wished the ivy would come to life and pull him down. Down into the darkness where he wouldn’t have to answer questions or look forward to a long bus ride home, to the fists that would eventually meet him like old friends.

“Listen, son, I know what’s going on at your house. I know your daddy hits you. I know he hit your mom. I want to help you. I can bring you somewhere safe. You just have to tell me that you want help, that’s all. Just say the word.” The sheriff’s eyes were pleading now, full of concern. His eyebrows were drawn together and wrinkled up in the middle, as though they had collided and were smashed into a different shape.

Lance felt words rising up within him again. Words that were like poison, like the drugs Sheriff Dodd had just talked about in the classroom, loathing and vile things that only wanted to come out. Lance could imagine gagging as he tried to get his tongue to form them; he could see himself vomiting them on the red ivy at his feet. He could see the sheriff nodding and leading him away to an office somewhere, and then to a house that held other kids like him. He could see his father coming to pick him up and the sheriff avoiding his gaze as he was led away, his father’s hand already crushing and breaking the bones in his fingers. He could see a pale moon hanging over the low and dark curve of the Mississippi. His father straining to hold something on the riverbank under the flowing brown waters. He could see his face under the current, his mouth open in a scream and his eyes wide.

Lance lurched forward, his legs turning to jelly beneath him, and the sheriff caught him before he fell to the floor. Lance blinked and drew in a deep breath as he looked into the sheriff’s face. Without thinking, he shook his head sharply from side to side and looked away, ashamed of nearly passing out in front of the older man. The sheriff’s hands gripped his shoulders, holding Lance there while the sheriff studied him further.

Before he could pull away or stop him, the sheriff reached up and tugged the collar of Lance’s shirt away from the white skin of his neck and shoulder. The sheriff’s eyes lost their dull look of concern and slowly began to gleam with a light of their own when he saw the edge of the bruise that crept up from Lance’s collarbone.

The sheriff released his hold on Lance and turned from him as he stalked away down the hall, his feet thudding down, crushing the red ivy. Lance put his hand on the wall to steady himself and tried to call out as the sheriff swung around a corner and disappeared out of sight.



The bus ride home was the longest of Lance’s life. The bus was completely full, almost to the point of spilling over. Each seat was stacked three kids deep, and even Lance had to share a space with a teenage girl who sat as far away from him as possible, nearly hovering in the aisle, her back turned to him.

The bus jounced and tilted as it rolled laboriously down the snow-scattered roads. Lance stared out of the sectioned window and watched the low-hanging gray sky. The clouds were thickening, and he wasn’t at all surprised when a few minutes later light flakes began to twist past and fall on the fields around them.

Stop after stop came and went, the bus steadily draining of its occupants until there were only three other children remaining in the rattling bus. The familiarity of contemplating his own death slid over him once again and the repeating thoughts strode out of the darkness like smiling demons.

His bowels were painfully full as the vehicle slowed and shook to a stop perpendicular to the long drive running across the fields to his left. The bus driver looked up expectantly in his overhead mirror, his eyes seeming to ask Don’t you live here, dummy? Lance rose from his seat and cinched his book bag tight over one shoulder.

The cold air met him with a push of wind and the stinging feel of ice crystals on his face. The clouds seemed to have dropped in altitude, as if they would eventually touch the ground and push their way into the frozen earth. The driveway stretched out ahead of Lance as the bus’s engine revved behind him, and the bus shot away down the road as though something were chasing it. Lance could see his father’s truck parked in its regular spot just in front of the garage. His let his head fall nearly to his chest as he began to walk up the drive, one foot after the other, treading now in the tire track opposite the one he had walked that morning. His breath puffed out before his face, obscuring the white ground he stepped on, but not before he noticed another tire track that was mixed in with the familiar Chevy tread. For a moment it seemed like all his blood had rushed up and congregated in his head, and his vision dimmed because of it. Had his mother returned? Had he been mistaken in thinking his father had done something to her? Lance resisted the urge to sprint up the hill and tried to calm his thoughts into a rational order. He looked again at the space near their garage and could now make out where the vehicle had stopped and then some time later jackknifed around and left the same way it had come. His excitement waned when he saw this. His mother wouldn’t have left once she came back, not without taking him with her or bringing an entire battalion of police to haul his father away.