27. Lance
Chapter twenty-seven
Lance
Neither of us slept well. We lay in the dark for a long time after I told him, not talking, not touching, just lying next to each other while the streetlights made patterns on the ceiling.
At some point he rolled toward me and put his hand on my chest, and I covered it with mine, and that’s how we fell asleep.
When I wake up, his hand is still there, but the rest of him has turned away.
I make coffee. He sits at the table and holds the mug without drinking. The roses on the windowsill look too bright for the mood.
“I keep thinking about the portrait,” he says. “In the lobby. I walked right past it. I looked at that face and saw Elliott, and the whole time it was—” He stops. “He’s been right there, Lance. For years. And he either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care enough to look.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I sit down across from him. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what the options are.
Knock on his door? Write him a letter? Pretend I never found out?
” He takes a sip of coffee and grimaces.
“How do you walk up to a man and say, I think you’re my father, and by the way, you paid my mother twenty thousand dollars and never came to find me? ”
“You don’t have to do anything right now.”
“I know. But it’s sitting on me.” He looks at the window. “Everything is sitting on me. Alice. The memorial. My father being your boss. I feel like the ground keeps shifting and I can’t get my balance.”
I want to fix this. I want to fix all of it.
I want to call Rex Harlow and put him through a wall, and I want to solve Alice’s murder, and I want to make the memorial go away so Jonny never has to stand at a podium and talk about the worst day of his life.
But I can’t do any of those things. So I do the one thing I can.
“How’s it going with prepping for your engagements?”
He looks at me. “My what?”
“Your speaking engagements. The conference panel.”
“That’s not until—” He stops. “When is that?”
“Monday.”
“This Monday?”
“You left it on the counter,” I say. “I wanted to see when it was, so I could come along and listen. Did you read the whole thing?”
He rubs his face. “Most of it.”
“There’s a Q&A session with an upper-level communications class. It’s in the contract. They’ve been assigned three episodes of your show and they’re expected to produce ‘meaningful questions and critiques.’”
“Meaningful questions and critiques,” he repeats flatly. “About a travel blog.”
“About you. Your platform. Your choices. These are communications students, Jonny.” I put my mug down. “Wow, are they going to give you a grilling.”
He picks up his coffee again and this time actually drinks it. “Okay. So what do you suggest?”
“Let me throw some questions at you. The kind they’ll ask. Then we’ll see if I’m joking.”
He nods. “Fine. Go.”
I pull up a chair. “You run a travel show in India. What’s your responsibility to expose corruption and injustice in the places you visit?”
“This is not political—it’s a travel blog. My responsibilities are in the arena of giving accurate and helpful travel advice.”
“Good. So if you’re not political, what advice do you give to gay travelers in India?”
He shifts in his chair. “The same advice I’d give somebody going to rural Alabama. Know where you are. Know who’s around you. A city is not a village and a village is not a country, and none of it is the same as the last place you were.”
“So your advice is to go back in the closet.”
“With respect, that’s not what I said.” He sets the mug down.
“And I’d want to know why the question assumes I’ve come from somewhere safe.
Two men can’t hold hands on most streets in this country either, and I don’t recall anybody calling that going back in the closet. It’s called reading the room.”
“I’m being a student, Jonny. They like to provoke. You think you’re not going to get at least one activist who accuses you of not standing up for gay rights?”
His voice is stronger now, like he’s latched onto something he doesn’t want to let go of.
“I’m not a spokesman for gay rights. I’m a travel host. I show people beautiful places and help them not get ripped off.
If someone wants to make that into a political statement, that’s their agenda, not mine. ”
“But you are a gay man with a platform. Don’t you have a duty to use it?”
“I have a duty to be honest. And honestly? Telling a gay traveler to pay attention to where he is isn’t cowardice. It’s survival, and I have been doing it for nine years, in Goa and in Georgia both.”
That’s good. That’s really good. But they won’t all be reasonable, so I decide to throw a curve ball.
“Try a hostile one,” I say. “A student stands up and says: you left this town to go running around India. Why is that? Did you try to monetize your fame as a survivor of these wildfires to jumpstart your career?”
“Wow. No. I explicitly used a different name, and I think only a handful of people from Fairhaven ever reached out to me. And to whatever you’re implying, I’d say grief doesn’t come with a required address.”
“Good. Now they push. They say the channel proves it—that you built a whole life out of showing strangers only the parts of India that you’ve carefully edited.”
His jaw tightens, barely. “I don’t hear a question in that.
But I’ll engage with this. All places that you show on a travel show are carefully edited.
If your cousin is coming to town, you don’t get to show him the Walmart or Jefferson Parkway or the power plant.
You show him the downtown. The nice parts. ”
“And what about you?” I say. “You’ve been doing this for about a decade. Is it still fun?”
“Sure, or else I wouldn’t do it.”
“Is it always fun, or do you think that there is something hollow about advocating for a lifestyle of permanent impermanence?”
I can see he’s starting to get irritated. “All things are permanent impermanence. That is the basis of several major religions.”
“That’s a cop-out. Why did you choose India and why couldn’t you have waited for me to go with you?”
The temperature in the room drops ten degrees.
“I went because it was cheap and far away,” he says quietly.
“I went to India, learned to speak Hindi, and figured I could make money by telling people about my experiences. And to answer your question, you know exactly why I couldn’t wait for you.
This is way too personal. Students don’t give a damn about this. ”
“I want you to be prepared. Sometimes you have to train past the hurt.”
“How often were you in combat?” he asks. His voice is gentle, which somehow makes it worse.
“Enough.”
“And how much therapy did the Corps give you after that?”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Honey, it’s been about you for the last ten minutes. You stopped being a student asking questions and started being a man I hurt a lot, who’s asking me questions I can’t answer without hurting him more.”
“I’m not hurt!” I shout.
“Then you’re afraid of losing control of this situation, and you’re doing everything to make sure you don’t feel like that. Does that land better, Lance?”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out of it, because he’s right.
“I’m not trying to come at you,” I say.
“I know you’re not. I think a bit of your military training influenced your style there.”
“All I want is to make sure you’re prepared for this.”
“I know. And I appreciate it. But I need you to hear me when I say: I’m never going to be yours to command. When you were learning to obey at all costs, I was doing the exact opposite, and it suited me fine. So whatever you’re trying to do right now, I want you to stop.”
The apartment is very quiet. I can hear the fridge humming.
Through the window, the campus is golden with late-afternoon light, and people are walking dogs and pushing strollers and living lives that don’t involve sitting across from the person you love most while they calmly explain that you’re broken.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Be aware.” He stands and comes around the table and puts his arms around me from behind. I feel his chin on the top of my head. “You’re going to have to unlearn some of that if this is going to work.”
“I know.”
“And I think you should talk to someone. Not me. Someone trained.”
“Hard copy,” I say. “I hear you. I’ll think about it, I promise.” And then, because it won’t sit down in me: “I just can’t bear the thought of you out there on your own, unprotected, in that goddamn country, without me. What if something had happened to you?”
“It did and I was fine,” he says.
“I need for information about this.” I know there’s a tone creeping into my voice, but Jonny hasn’t tracked it yet.
“I got robbed in Varanasi. A guy followed me through a night market in Chiang Mai once. Bar fight in Goa I didn’t start. It happens. Bad luck can happen to anybody.”
“It isn’t only bad luck I’m worried about,” I say. “Nash is here. He turned up at my door two weeks ago, and he does not take no for an answer, and I lived with that man for four years. I am telling you he is capable of hurting somebody.”
“Okay.” Jonny says it evenly. “But he doesn’t know me, Lance. He’s never met me. He has no reason on earth to do anything to me.”
And that is exactly the problem, and I do not have the words for why.
Bad luck. Something goes cold and hard behind my sternum. I pull out of his arms and turn around so I can see his face.
“Yeah.”
“You went alone. Into countries where you didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the exits, didn’t have a soul who’d notice if you didn’t come back—and you’re calling it bad luck.
” I hear my own voice flattening into the register I used on nineteen-year-olds who didn’t check their gear.
“That’s not bad luck, Jonny. That’s walking into a threat environment with no plan and no backup and calling it a lifestyle.
You could have been killed. You could have disappeared and I would never even have—” I stop. Too late.
And there it is. His face sets, and every bit of the warmth goes out of it, and when he speaks his voice could take the skin off a wall.
“I already asked you once,” he says. “Two minutes ago. I’m going to say this one more time.
I am not one of your Marines. You do not get to debrief me on how I survived the last ten years without you.
I did survive them. Alone. Unprepared, by your standards, and alive anyway.
” He picks the towel back up. “Go take a walk, Lance. I’ll be here when you get back. ”
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. I get my running shoes and think about how easy it was to slide into that mode—the interrogation, the escalation, the need to break him down so I could build him back up. That’s not love. That’s training.
He walks past me into the bathroom. “Go for your run,” he says, without turning around, “and get a grip on yourself.”
I lace up my shoes and head out into the late afternoon.
The air is warm and the campus smells like cut grass and the faintest trace of honeysuckle.
I run the loop around Black Lake—the same path where Alice walked every morning, the same path where everything changed—and I think about what just happened.
I was seventeen when I decided I was going to be strong enough to protect Parker Bishop.
I joined the Marines to become the man he deserved.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped being a protector and became a handler, and I didn’t know the difference until a man with a smoky voice and a phoenix tattoo sat across from me and said, in the gentlest possible way, that I was doing it again.
He didn’t just leave. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. Parker would have left. Jonny went into the bedroom and shut the door.
Oh God. What if he’s packing his bags?
I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I know how. But as I round the far side of the lake and see the boathouse in the distance, still wrapped in police tape, I think about what Jonny said: “Be aware.” Not “be different.” Not “be better.” Just: be aware.
Maybe that’s where it starts.
I run the second lap faster. My lungs are burning and my legs are screaming and I feel something loosening in my chest that I didn’t know was clenched.
I don’t know if I’ve blown it. I don’t know if the man in my apartment is packing a bag while I run circles around a lake.
But I know that he told me to come back, and he’s never told me that before.
Every other time—every single time—he was the one who left.
By the third, my lungs are burning and my legs are screaming and I feel something loosening in my chest that I didn’t know was clenched.
I acted like his commanding officer instead of the partner he needs me to be. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do need help, and maybe I’ve needed it for years, and maybe every single person who ever tried to tell me that was standing exactly where he was standing.
I’ll do whatever it takes. Just please let him be there when I get in.
I slow to a walk. I catch my breath. And I go home.