by Hart, Joe
“What?” Mary asked, noticing Lance’s expression. He hardly heard her, all the sound in the world became muffled—his chair falling and cracking hard on the floor behind him, his footsteps clicking on the wood below his feet, Mary’s question again.
The pillar loomed before him. He could see his father’s shoulder hunched forward over the table. The rest of the body came into view. A white head of hair, a large nose, two hands holding a fork and knife over a piece of steak.
The elderly couple at the table looked up as Lance stepped close and shifted the wild sockets of his eyes between them.
“Can I help you?” the man said, his brow furrowed.
Lance looked at him, words of apology hanging on the back of his tongue. He turned his head toward the woman at the table—a grandmother most likely, her matching white hair tied tight into a bun and her lips pinched together.
Lance opened his mouth but shut it again. He looked past the elderly couple. He could see shadows beneath several tables and other pillars. He started to walk toward them, to find where his father hid, but hands grasped his forearm and he spun toward them, sure he would see Anthony’s smile there. Instead, Mary held his arm, a questioning look on her face, her delicate eyebrows knitted together. Lance shook himself and looked back at the table beside him.
“I’m … I’m sorry. I …” He turned away from the couple and let Mary lead him back to their table, where the waitress had righted his overturned chair and waited, wringing her hands on a small towel.
“We’re fine, just give us a few minutes,” Mary said, guiding Lance back into his seat. He sat there, feeling waves of shock roll over him and welcoming their distraction, as Mary sat down across from him.
“What the hell was that?” she asked, leaning over the table.
The words registered and he brought his unsteady gaze up to meet hers. He couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder at the pillar and then sweep the room in general. When nothing leapt out at him from the rest of the restaurant, he felt reality begin to weigh on his shoulders like a lead cape. The image of what he must’ve looked like a few minutes earlier ran through his head. He breathed deeply and felt the urge to weep flow over him before he swallowed it down and looked at Mary.
“I thought I saw my father,” he said.
Mary leaned back in her seat, confusion taking the place of indignation. “Why? Is he here visiting? Were you expecting him?”
Lance breathed out an effort at dark laughter and shook his head as he looked at the floor between his feet. When he raised his eyes to her face again, he felt the first trembles of anxiety prodding at his mind, but when he spoke, he only heard his voice waver once.
“No. I watched him die twenty-two years ago.”
A rock stairway dropped down from the restaurant and zigzagged across the face of the hill like an uneven scar. Mary led him down the switchbacks until they walked along the stone-studded beach. With a little urging, Lance began to speak and the trickle of words that Mary coaxed from him became a torrent that he couldn’t stop. As each sentence spilled out, more hideous than the last, he fully expected Mary to stop and walk back in the direction from which they came. He wouldn’t have stopped her. But instead, she kept pace with him, her head down, never looking at him but never looking away. Her gaze remained on the rock-covered shore at their feet, the lapping of the waves the only sound competing with his voice.
He laid his childhood out before her, a massive chunk of pain and suffering, almost acidic at times as he spoke. When he finally fell silent, they stopped walking without agreeing to. A jutting ledge of basalt created a natural bench, and they sat, staring out at the deepening purple the lake had become. A layer of clouds blanketed the evening sky, hastening the darkness that longed to converge on their corner of the world.
For a long time Mary said nothing, her eyes remaining fixed on the fading horizon. Lance stole furtive looks at her every so often, his eyes searching for a sign of regret, or even panic, on her smooth face. He had just begun to think that his early life had stunned her speechless when her voice broke his musings.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked over at him, and still, even in the dying light, her eyes shone green.
“Thank you. Thanks for not running away.”
“What made you think I’d run away?”
“I guess that’s what I’d expect of anyone.”
“I’m not anyone.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said.
She looked over at him and smiled. He met her eyes and held them, the urge to lean closer to her nearly overwhelming. Her face sobered as she looked out across the breadth of water, and her next question caught him off guard.
“What do you think happened to your mom?”
Lance frowned and looked down at the speckled beach beneath his feet. The question, so familiar to him, sounded strange coming from another’s lips.
He shrugged. “A part of me hopes my father was telling the truth, that she ran away in the night, got out of his reach where he couldn’t find her and just kept going. Maybe she thought if she couldn’t save both of us, she’d at least save herself. I always hated her a little, you know? She was my sanctuary at times, and at others she was the prison that kept me there, locked tight. I guess she was always both. I was just too young to see it.” Lance nodded to himself and felt tears cover the surface of his eyes for the second time that night.
“What’s your heart tell you?” Mary asked.
“That my father killed her,” Lance said. The words were as cold as any rock in the nearby waves, and just as heavy. The feeling had always been there, but before tonight, he had never voiced it aloud.
“So why do you think you saw your father tonight?” she asked.
Lance took his time answering. “I’m not sure. I’ve had dreams—nightmares—with him in them, but never a hallucination. God, I sound like a mental case. You must want to run away screaming at the top of your lungs.”
“Only until I find help.”
Her laughter cut the cool air with its warmth and Lance relaxed. Until then, he had been expecting a polite brushoff or a request to return to the restaurant so she could leave. Unless he misjudged her, she appeared calm and in no way threatened or frightened of him or his past.
They sat side by side, the night cooling and a crispness that spoke of fall settling into the air. Lance was about to suggest that they head back to the restaurant and try to salvage the remainder of their night, but Mary spoke first.
“I was the only one there when my mom died.” Lance looked at her, just an outline now against the last vestiges of iris light in the sky. “She was in the hospital by then, Dad couldn’t take care of her anymore at home. She was always so cold. All throughout her treatment, and even after she became bedridden. We’d pile up blankets on her and give her warm baths. I took her temperature once, and it was a hundred and one. But she still shivered under all the robes and comforters.
“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.
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 de
ep 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.
