Lineage(83)

“The night she died, my dad and I were visiting. At first we stayed in the hospital with her, but after I started falling asleep in school, Dad insisted that we come home to sleep. Although some mornings I would wake up and my aunt would be there and Dad would come home exhausted from lying in an uncomfortable recliner next to her bed, holding her hand all night.” A line of tears ran in a vertical river down her cheek. Lance restrained himself from reaching out to wipe it away, and after a moment she wiped it with the back of her hand. “That night, Dad went down to get us some food from the cafeteria. Mom hadn’t been awake for a few days, but we decided to stay late and play Uno on the table near her bed. I was sitting there looking at her face—she’d aged so much in that year she looked more like a grandmother than a woman of forty. I was holding her hand and talking to her when her eyes came open and she looked at me. I reached up to get some water for her, like we’d done when she was still lucid, but she held me where I was and said, ‘It’s so warm. It’s so warm.’ Then her eyes closed and I felt her squeeze my hand one last time.”

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.