11. Lance
Chapter eleven
Lance
Nine Years Later
“My boy is back,” Mom says, as if I’m fourteen and just home from sleep-away camp. It’s at least the third time she’s said it. Each time it sounds like she’s just discovered it afresh.
Bree rolls her eyes and helps herself to more gravy to soften up Mom’s pork loin.
When I enlisted, she was still a little kid in pigtails, drawing with crayons.
Now she’s seventeen, in ripped jeans and a cropped top, with a pink phone she checks every four minutes and a mouth that doesn’t quit. I don’t really know her at all.
“You don’t have to go paying rent to a stranger,” Mom says. “There’s always room here. And your father could use some help keeping the backyard mowed.”
“Now, Jackie,” Dad says. “I can do my own damned yard.”
“I’m just saying his room’s still available,” Mom adds, which is her way of saying she’d keep me here forever if she could.
She was almost personally offended when I accepted the University’s offer of temporary housing while I was still looking for a place of my own, and has never given up her quiet campaign to have me think better of my apartment and come home to be her little boy again.
“That Ellie Hopkins across the street asked if we needed a man to come around and do the lawn for us. I’ve never been more humiliated. ”
“And what would happen when he meets someone?” Dad says, and Mom glances at me and reddens.
“I’m not really in the market for that just yet,” I say. “I’ve only been divorced for six months.”
“Good riddance,” Mom says, with a firmness that surprises me. “I’m glad that chapter is closed.”
Bree catches my eye. She knows more than Mom thinks she does. She was on the phone with me when Nash came home drunk and determined to pick a fight. She was fifteen. I should never have put that on her.
“You should get back out there,” Dad says. “Time to get back in the saddle.”
There are times when my father’s job running a feed store bubbles to the surface. Bree and I make eye contact and we both crack up. Some things never change.
Dad doesn’t laugh with us. He turns his water glass a half-turn on the tablecloth.
“He called the house,” he says. “Tuesday.”
The table goes quiet.
“Nash?” Mom says. “You never said.”
“He wanted to know how Lance was settling in.” Dad looks at me. “I told him we hadn’t heard from you in a while, and then I hung up the phone.”
Settling in. I signed that lease eleven days ago, and there is nobody outside this room who knows I’ve moved.
“He’s three thousand miles away,” Mom says, to nobody in particular.
“Sure,” Dad says, and picks up his fork.
“So, tell me about the new place,” Bree says, redirecting.
“It’s on Flint Street, next to the university. Five-minute walk to the office. It’s just a studio, but that’s all I need, and the building’s beautiful—one of those big brick ones from the nineteenth century, when the walls were built to last.”
Bree wrinkles her forehead. “Flint Street. I feel like I knew someone who lived up there. It’s not a very long street.”
“Honey, would you like some more pork?” Mom starts, picking up the serving bowl.
Bree is undeterred. “Didn’t Parker Bishop live out there after his aunt took him in?” Bree asks.
Mom freezes for a second and looks at Dad.
“Wow,” Bree says, not reading the room. “That’s a name I haven’t thought of in a while. Whatever happened to him?”
“He left,” I say. I take a bite of mashed potatoes so I don’t have to say more.
I know what happened to Parker Bishop. He sat me down in the Bean Stop courtyard the day after we kissed and told me he was going away for a while.
I asked where. He wouldn’t say. I asked for how long.
He said he didn’t know. I asked him not to go.
He said he had to. And then he said the thing I’ve carried for nine years: that he needed to find out who he was without me.
I assumed DC, or maybe New York. Somewhere big enough to disappear into.
I called the Bean Stop a week later and Liam told me he’d given his notice.
I called Shelley. She was polite and closemouthed.
Parker was doing well, she said, and he’d asked for privacy.
That was the last real information I got.
“He’s fine,” Mom says. “Shelley’s in my book club. He moved away, that’s all. Travels a lot for work. She doesn’t talk about him much, but when she does, she’s very proud.”
Travels a lot. I turn that over in my mind. Not DC, then. Not New York.
“I had to do a school report on the Fairhaven fire back in eighth grade,” Bree says, “Parker was one of the people I focused on. Do you know, they still don’t know for sure what sparked the original forest fire?”
“It was dry that year,” Dad says.
“And then there’s the Curse of Denning Court,” Bree continues, because she’s seventeen and has no off switch.
“So, like, thirty-one people died in the fire, right? But if you track what happened to the survivors from Denning Court specifically. Two of them have died of cancer. And they count the streets backing onto Denning too, so the lady who used to babysit the Bishop kids is on there—”
“Martha Gillibrand died?” I ask. My stomach drops.
“Like, five years ago,” Bree says. “The conspiracy people track all of it. Every time something bad happens to someone from that street, they add it to the list. It’s got this whole subreddit.”
“It’s nonsense,” Dad says. “Just people with too much time and not enough sense. You have a traumatic event like that, of course people are going to scatter. Of course there’s going to be health problems. That’s not a curse. That’s just what happens.”
Martha Gillibrand. I think of her at the wake, pulling me aside to ask me my intentions. I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t have a good answer for her. And now it’s too late.
“Do you think you could get Parker’s email from his aunt?” I ask Mom. “I’d really like to catch up.”
I’m surprising myself, that’s for sure. Oh, look, there’s a sword, Lance.
Would you like to throw yourself on it? Why yes.
Yes I would. “There’s so many people I’d like to reconnect with,” I add quickly, because now I need to make it look casual.
“Remember Toby Gilham? He’s a pharmacist at the CVS now. Have any of you seen Rochelle Lewis?”
Nobody has. I keep going anyway, like I’m reading off a roster, making it sound like those were my glory days when I couldn’t have cared less about Farley or anybody in it. Dad rescues me by complimenting Mom’s cooking.
I spring up to clear the table, but Dad stops me. “Before you go. You said you wanted crates for the move—there’s a stack of them down in the basement.”
I follow him down. He shifts boxes of Christmas decorations and an ancient sled that’s seen better days. Then he stops, with his hand on a small carton, taped shut and furred with dust, FROM THE TRUCK written across the lid in marker.
“I didn’t want to make a thing out of it,” Dad says.
“I found this behind the seat of the truck when I took it in after the fire. I put it down here and I forgot it was there until I went looking for the Christmas decorations last year. It’s Parker’s.
But by the time we got the truck back, he was long gone, and you were about to join up, and I didn’t want to talk about something that hurt you so much.
But this needs to go to Shelley Bishop at the very least. She’ll see it gets to him. ”
“I thought Mom and Shelley were friends.”
“They are. But I think you need to be the one who gives it to her.” He hands it to me. “It’ll make it less awkward when you see each other on the street if you go and say hi first.”
“I’ll take it,” I say, too fast. I try to work out which window Parker pointed at from the Bean Stop courtyard, but I can’t. “Mom’ll have to give me her address.”
“When you’re ready.”
“Have you looked inside?”
He shakes his head. I know I should resist the temptation, but I’m too greedy for him. I sit down on the ancient rocking chair that’s been in this basement as long as I can remember. The tape is curling. I pull it off and open the box.
Sketchbooks. Three of them, heavy, hardcover. They must have been in the truck when I drove Parker out of the fire. He grabbed what he could and I stowed it behind the seat. Then the world kept going. Nobody thought to look.
I open one at random. Then I don’t turn the page for a long time.
Faces. Dozens of them. His teachers, rendered in careful pencil.
His friends—Pete, Rochelle—caught in the middle of laughing or talking.
His mother, Angela, drawn from what must have been the kitchen table, her face tired but focused on something in front of her.
Elliott, asleep on a couch with one arm hanging off the edge and his mouth open.
I saw that boy twice. Once with his hands clamped over his ears and the sound coming out of him like something being torn, and once hanging out a car window telling us he’d beaten us.
Parker saw this. Parker sat and watched his brother sleep and got out a pencil.
I have to put the book down on my knees for a second.
And me. Page after page of me. In profile, from across a classroom.
Grinning at something off the page. Looking down at my hands.
I didn’t know he was drawing me. I didn’t know any of this existed.
“Jesus,” I say. “Dad, these are his sketchbooks. From before the fire.”
Dad clears a spot on one of the dining chairs he’s been meaning to fix forever and sits down.
“That boy lost everything. Every photograph, every stitch of clothing, everything his mother and his grandmother ever put away for him.” He rubs the back of his neck.
“This is all he’s got. And it’s been in my basement. ”
There are a few other things in the box—a plastic bag of papers with Angela’s name on them, insurance or bills by the look of them, and a spiral address book with a rubber band around it, so stuffed with loose things that it won’t shut flat.
I don’t look closely. They’re not mine to read.
None of this is mine to read, and I’ve already been through three sketchbooks.
“He’ll want these,” Dad says quietly. “Whatever else, he’ll want these.”
I nod, but I’m not listening. I’m looking at a sketch of myself from the back row of a classroom, drawn by a boy who was watching me when I didn’t know I was being watched.
What else didn’t I know?
That I’d marry a man partly because he reminded me of Parker. That the marriage would implode, and Nash would turn out to be the kind of man who throws phones and slams doors and calls you worthless when he’s drunk.
And that none of it—not the scars, not the fear, not one day of it—would ever eclipse Parker Bishop.
I close the sketchbook and hold it against my chest. Upstairs, I can hear Mom and Bree clearing the table, the clink of dishes, the murmur of their voices. My father sits across from me in the basement and says nothing, because he’s always known when to let a silence be.
An hour ago the most I wanted was an email address, and I hadn’t worked out what I’d put in it. Now I have a reason. Not a pretext. Three sketchbooks and a bag of his mother’s papers and every right in the world to knock on a door.
And it occurs to me, sitting in my father’s basement with the picture of a dead boy’s sleeping face on my knees, that a man can have the best reason there is and still be told no.