Lineage (11 page)

“Ellen, wait.” He rose and walked over to where she stood, her hand already on the doorknob, the too-high heels strapped dangerously to her feet. “I’m sorry. I just can’t go through it all with you now; it’s not the right time. There’s so much. I can’t …” His words trailed off, and he hoped she would take the cue in this play they had rehearsed so many times before. Ellen turned her head just enough for him to see both of her eyes, her eyebrows drawn down in anger, with a hint of sadness.

“You’ll never let me in. I know that now. I won’t wait around for someone who can’t face his fears.”

“I’ve faced my fears!” Lance yelled. “I’ve seen things that would break you!” Ellen grimaced and closed her eyes as she turned away from him. For some reason he very much wanted to see her face, maybe to know if she’d opened her eyes or not. She kept her back to him when she spoke again.

“You faced your
past,
you just can’t bear to look at the future.” Without favoring him with another glance, Ellen turned the knob as if it were an emergency exit on an airplane and stormed out of the house, into the brightness of the summer day.

The slam of the door was like a bold exclamation point at the end of an angry sentence. Lance stood with his hand pressed against the cool wall and waited for the boiling anger in his center to subside. It didn’t.

With a yell, he spun, grabbing the closest object at hand—a vase he had received as a gift from Andy when his second novel won a Bram Stoker award—and flung it as far and as hard as he could. The heavy blue vase glittered in the sunlight as it flew and shattered into a thousand sparkling pieces on the far wall. The tinkling patter of the shards hitting the floor snapped the trance of his anger. The rage that had been so sharp and crystalline seconds ago now seemed foolish and alien, as if he had been playing surrogate to someone else’s emotions.

Sighing deeply, Lance went about vacuuming up the glass on the floor, and then remembered the broken lamp from the night before.
I’ll have to redecorate entirely if I don’t get a handle on this,
he thought idly, and a halfhearted smile surfaced on his face. When he went to clean up the lamp, he found that Ellen had already swept it up and disposed of it, seemingly while he slept deeply that morning. The sight of the clean floor made his heart sink a little as he returned the vacuum to its place in the closet downstairs.

Lance shoveled the lonely egg along with the turkey bacon into the garbage, and set about making a protein shake in the blender. He had consumed half the shake when his
iPhone
buzzed briefly. When Lance picked it up, the text message that graced the screen didn’t make sense for a moment.
You ready?
Andy was nearly always short and to the point in his messages, but even this was succinct for him. Then the date came to Lance’s mind: a picture of the number
24
on his desk calendar and the words
Meeting w/Ellington & Field
scrawled in blue ink just below it.

“Shit,” he said to the empty room. His voice sounded flat, his emotions only fumes of before. How had the meeting slipped his mind? The morning just kept getting better. Another sigh escaped his parted lips as he mounted the stairs yet again and heard the sliding of tires on the concrete drive outside his house, which coincided with two short beeps of a horn.
Andy’s here,
Lance thought as he ignored another impatient burst of sound from his best friend’s car and tried to decide what shirt went best with disappointment.

“You said you wanted me to pick you up, and then you make me wait out here for fifteen minutes?” The door to the Audi had barely opened an inch when Andy’s voice started to pepper him with accusations. “I suppose you forgot all about the meeting, didn’t you?
Typical fucking writer.
Typical.”

“It wasn’t fifteen minutes, you asshole. I got your message at ten and now
it’s
ten twelve—you do the math.” Lance slid into the black leather interior of the car and looked over at the man who sat in the driver’s seat. Andy could have passed for a young Aidan Quinn if the actor’s hair had been a lighter shade of brown and he swore almost constantly. Andy’s eyes were the only feature that ruined the likeness; color was nearly nonexistent. It seemed as if a blue-green had tried to bend the irises to its will but had lost and settled for a watered-down gray. Andy’s slight build looked out of place in the Armani suit tucked into the plush interior of the car. A joke about being a malnourished limo driver surfaced in Lance’s mind before being shoved away. He was pretty sure Andy wouldn’t appreciate it.

“Yeah, excuses. Always excuses. Sometimes I wonder if the world would be a better place if everyone was an
Aspie
,” Andy said, monotone, as he deftly flipped the car into drive and tore out of Lance’s turnaround as fast as he could go. The tires spun and caught as the landscape fled outside Lance’s window while he struggled to buckle his seat belt.

“Christ, can you slow down? I’m
gonna
get air sick over here,” Lance said as he finally snapped the buckle home.

“No time, my friend, no time. We’re late and your publishers are going to be very angry when we get there. What’s the expression you like to use? ‘Crawl up your ass’?”

“Jump down your throat, seriously. I’m surprised you haven’t picked that one up yet.”

“Yeah, well, I have more important things to do than learning expressions that don’t really make sense.
Like figure out why my star author isn’t done with his rough draft that should’ve been turned in to his editor a month ago.”

Lance turned his head away from his friend and watched the small neighborhood that he resided in mesh with an on-ramp and then transform into a bustling divided two-lane. He opened his mouth and a loud snap filled the car as his jaw clicked into place.

“I hate it when you do that,” Andy said.

“I know.”

“So, are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me why your draft isn’t done.”

Lance sighed and gazed ahead at the asphalt rapidly disappearing under the nose of the Audi. There wasn’t an easy way to explain. He was about to try to describe what had transpired in his mind and in the study of his home over the past six weeks when Andy spoke again.

“You got writer’s block, didn’t you? About the same time the dream started, I’m guessing.” Andy looked over at him, his watery gray eyes looking through Lance the way no other person’s could. Lance’s mouth opened and then closed as Andy went back to watching the highway. “I figured as much. Tell me about it.”

Lance began to retrace the events that had unfolded in the past month, beginning with Ellen slamming the door in his face and ending with the first night he had woke from the nightmare, sweaty, a scream echoing off the walls of his dark bedroom. He started to speak, the sound of the tires singing on the road beginning to resemble scraping footsteps. “I told you I had the dream the first time about six weeks ago.”

“Nightmare, go on.”

“Yes, okay, nightmare. I had it in the middle of the night, just like I’ve had it ever since. I wasn’t able to sleep the rest of that night. Ellen was staying over, so I just went downstairs and thought I’d write a little until I was tired enough to go back to bed.” Lance paused, as if saying the words out loud would make them true. A childish belief system, but nonetheless, he hesitated. “I couldn’t think of anything. I’ve never had that happen before.
Never.
It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting down without a single idea in my head and staring at a blank page, I’ve
never
not
been able to write.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

Lance looked over at Andy as if he’d just made reference to an intention of desecrating his neighbors’ plaster impression of Jesus in their front yard. “It felt horrible. I felt lost. Everything I’d written to that point didn’t seem to fit together. And the ending …” Lance rubbed his jaw and shook his head in exasperation. “It didn’t work anymore. I felt like I’d spent the last six months writing complete shit.”

Lance fell silent and the dull hum of the car pervaded the air between them. Andy chewed the inside of his cheek, just as he had been doing the first moment Lance saw him standing alone in the lunch line at St. Cathleen’s orphanage twenty years before.

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that you got writer’s block the same night that you had a horrific nightmare about your father?”

“No, believe it or not, I made the connection. I just don’t see why a dream would stave off my creativity. I’ve lived worse than that. I’ve always been able to write …” Lance’s words trailed off into silence.

Andy swerved onto an off-ramp and made a left turn before racing south on a two-lane once again. The bright sunlight hurt Lance’s eyes and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The different businesses and stores lining the sides of the highway that normally drew his attention had lost their flare. The tops of high-rises and office buildings loomed into view over the trees as they rounded another corner. Lance hadn’t been into the cities since his last meeting with Ellington & Field three months prior. He hadn’t been much of anywhere, he realized. His writing had kept him completely busy up until six weeks ago, but even after his inspiration had evaporated into thin air, he still preferred to stay near or at his home, hoping that at some point the switch that had so unexpectedly been flipped off would be turned back on again.

“So what do you propose we tell them when we get there? Cole’s going to demand to know the reason why you haven’t finished his next bestseller.”

“I’ll just tell them I need more time,” Lance said with more confidence than he actually felt. He saw Andy turn his head toward him, and could nearly make out the frowning expression on Andy’s face in his peripheral. Andy studied him for a few seconds before turning back to the road and shaking his head.

“I’ll have to shake a stick at them, I suppose.”

“You mean, go to bat for me?”

“Whatever, I’ll have to stand up for you in any case, repay you for getting beat up with me when Ronnie McGovern wanted to stand me on my head in the toilet back at Cathy’s.”

Lance grinned a little as the memory came back to him of a giant red-faced kid with hair to match holding a much smaller and even skinnier Andy over a dirty toilet bowl in the high-ceilinged bathrooms of St. Cathleen’s. Andy had been trying to strike McGovern in the crotch and legs as he swung like a slim pendulum over the yellowed water, which no doubt contained the urine of the person holding his ankles. Lance had rushed in and pulled the swinging Andy away from the older boy, who in turn let them both fall to the wet floor in a heap. Ronnie then proceeded to practice his already accomplished soccer kick on the two smaller boys, until both had managed to crawl to the lavatory door and pull it open to call for help. At the moment, it hadn’t been funny at all. Somewhere during the eighteen years that had passed, it had taken on a humorous shellac that all memories not ending in death or extreme bodily injury seemed to accumulate with time.

“Yeah, you owe me big time,” Lance said as he smiled at Andy, who was still shaking his head.

“Well, figure out whatever excuse you’re going to use on these guys, ’cause we’re here,” Andy said as he slid the Audi to a stop near a five-story brick building on an active side street. Lance gazed up at the structure and grimaced before opening his door to let the busy sounds of the city invade the quiet of the car.

The meeting room was unremarkable. The walls were dull beige and, in Lance’s opinion, needed re-painting. The light fixtures above him and Andy were fluorescent and buzzed faintly. There were five chocolate-chip cookies lying on a plate in the center of the oak table that sat between them and the room’s door, along with a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. Lance followed the trails of condensation trickling down the obese sides of the glass that held the water and ice cubes. A clock ticked aggressively on the wall, as if it couldn’t wait to pass the time that its hands groped so desperately at. Andy began to tap his foot on the tile floor at twice the speed of the ticking on the wall, and Lance looked over at his jittering foot.

“This place is nasty,” Andy said, looking around as if seeing their surroundings for the first time. “Why don’t they spend a little money and clean it up? They have meetings with paying clientele in here?” With a disgusted sound, he sat back in his chair and began chew on the side of his cheek.

“I’m guessing since this is just a satellite office they don’t want to put a lot of money into it. Everyone’s
gotta
keep an eye on overhead these days,” Lance said. Andy made the same disgusted sound, which barely died away before the door opened and two men in dark suits strode into the room.

The first man Lance knew. Howard Cole was tall, well over six feet, and very slender. His head was large and it seemed that most of it was made up of face, as the man’s hairline had retreated almost into nonexistence. His features were exaggerated—his eyes looked to be the size of golf balls and his nose was flattened to reveal two nostrils that opened up like a set of tunnels into the man’s head. His mouth had slim lips, which barely covered a set of enormous horse-teeth. As Howard smiled and extended a pale hand to him, Lance was struck by the idea that if the publishing rep had been born 150 years earlier he would have made a great undertaker in a small western town. The thought curled his mouth to mirror the same polite smile that graced Howard’s countenance. The other man who had entered the room behind the publishing rep was of average height and build, and held a black briefcase lightly in one hand. His eyes appraised Lance coolly and he made no attempt to approach, but instead sat easily into a chair at the far end of the room. Howard, on the other hand, glided across the room with his arm extended.