31. Lance #3
“Maybe as Jonny Bishop. But it sure wasn’t Parker who loved me. He couldn’t stand me.”
“I always loved you, Lance. And what does this matter? It’s just a name!”
“It’s not just a name. I loved Parker Bishop. And you erased him. Like he was never there. And I miss him.” My eyes prickle with tears. “I loved you when you were Parker Bishop and young and scared and I loved you when you were Jonny Bishop.”
“And scared,” he finishes. “When do I get to be somebody who saves himself?” he says. “Because I have been doing it since I was eighteen, and you have never once noticed.”
“You did it in India, where I couldn’t see it.
” It’s out before I can stop that one either.
“Do you know what I’ve had? A box in my father’s basement.
That is what I have had of you for ten years, and you didn’t even know I had it.
I needed you and I made myself settle for the guy who filled the gap you left.
And he didn’t. He couldn’t, because he wasn’t you. ”
We look at each other across the crack that’s opened in the floor between us.
I have to fix this. I know I can fix this. I just need a minute to get my feet back under me.
A knock at the door snaps the room back into focus. I dry my face fast; Jonny is the one who calls that it’s open.
Rex Harlow leans his head in. Golf shirt, visor pushed up. “Came as soon as I heard,” he says.
I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to be. “Sir. Mr. Harlow—this is Jonny Bishop, our speaker. Jonny, my boss. The Comptroller’s Office.”
Jonny stands too, steadier than I am. Harlow crosses the room and takes Jonny’s hand in both of his.
“You’re the one who found Alice, aren’t you?” He shakes his head. “She was a treasure. Unspeakable. And now this. Whatever you need from us, we make it right.”
Jonny visibly swallows and I don’t know what he’s going to say next. He looks long at my boss. “Thank you. Honestly, I just want to get back on the road and put all this behind me.” He withdraws his hands without shaking them.
Harlow nods, the very picture of an avuncular man. And I see it. He’s managing us. A speaker got attacked on university ground and he is here to make sure it doesn’t occur to that speaker to make it loud.
“Well, there’s plenty of pretty country to see in the meantime,” he says.
“I’ve got a rental in Staunton. Lovely little town, easy drive from here.
I know we couldn’t approve your airfare, but the least we can do is to get you out of town.
I understand you do travel videos. There’s plenty here in Virginia you can talk about, if it helps. ”
The wrinkle crosses Jonny’s face half a second before my stomach drops through the floor. He looks at me for a beat too long.
“Thank you,” Jonny says, and the note in it is all wrong.
“Let me go make sure the organizers are squared away. Quite a circus.” Harlow smiles and pats his shoulder on the way to the door. “Take care of yourself, son.”
His face tightens at the last word. “Goodbye,” he says.
He turns around slowly.
“Couldn’t approve. You want to explain that?”
I hold his eyes and say nothing.
He turns away and sets both hands on the windowsill. “You were going to pay it yourself. Out of your own pocket.”
“Only because what they did on that contract was wrong. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But if I couldn’t go back to New Delhi, I could go to Colombo, or Bangkok, and it would have been just another season to me. I could have covered it, you know. The royalties come in eventually.”
“I wanted to do this for you. You wanted to be free, and I wanted to make you happy.”
“But you lied to me. You decided I had to be protected even from the consequences of my own actions. Like a child. You asked me a question earlier and I didn’t answer it,” he says. “So I’m going to answer it now, and then I’m going to go.”
“Jonny—”
“You asked me to marry you and the answer is no. It is the hardest thing I have ever said and it’s killing me, but it’s a no.”
“Is it what I said about your family? I take it back. I’ll take all of it back.” I can hear myself. I can’t stop myself either. “Is it the combat thing? I’ll get—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “And it isn’t anything from today, either.
Though you should know you’re carrying about a hundred red flags.
You can’t stop yourself from trying to save me, and it’s crushing me.
I will never love anyone the way I love you.
I know that. I’ll know it the rest of my life.
And we still have to be over, because I can’t see how this ever gets better. ”
And then, before I can find one single thing to put against any of it, he gives me the rest.
“And the worst part isn’t you,” he says. His voice has gone somewhere very quiet. “It’s that I like it.”
“What?”
“Every time you put yourself between me and something, part of me goes quiet. It is the only time I’m ever quiet.
” He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“And I know exactly what that is. That’s the boy in the photograph.
That’s the one who couldn’t do a single thing for anybody and had to be carried out of a burning neighborhood.
I have spent ten years building somebody who doesn’t need that, and I can feel him dissolving when I’m around you, and the terrible part is that I am not fighting it. ”
I don’t have anything at all.
“I don’t want to be a person who is frightened all the time and gets carried. And I want to be carried. Both of those, every day, at the same time, and I can’t hold both of them.” He wipes his face with the back of his wrist. “And the only way I know how to stop wanting it is to not be here.”
The hole where my chest was is so wide my cracked ribs seize around it. I can’t make a word come.
“Take care of yourself, Lance.”
He gives me the saddest smile I have ever been handed, and he goes to the door. He hesitates, looks back over his shoulder, and then he’s gone, without another word.
I stand in the middle of the emptied room with my arms still half-open around a shape that isn’t there anymore, and I can’t make myself put them down for a long time.