Lineage (4 page)

A sudden snap echoed down the hallway, and his mother’s hand clenched painfully down on his own. Lance stared at the door straight across from them, knowing that the sound had been the latch disengaging. He knew his father would step out and grab them both, his bony hands latching around their arms like miniature vices, as they did whenever a beating was imminent.

A soft whoosh of air started flowing out of the grates in the floor at the end of the hallway, and a similar rush of air left his mother’s lungs. The furnace had kicked on, its thermostat sending a signal to the igniter, which caused the sound they had heard.

Without another pause, Molly led her son down the hallway, across the kitchen, and into the cramped entryway, where two small suitcases and Lance’s light jacket were waiting. She knelt down before him, her hands on his shoulders, steadying him and herself. He could feel her hands trembling as they gripped him.

“Okay, we’re going outside and getting in the car. You’re going to be a big boy tonight and steer the car for a minute while Mom pushes, okay?” Lance
nodded,
his eyes wide. He marveled at the change in his mother. The day before she had been the same withdrawn ghost she normally was. She had been devoid of life and hope, just biding time until the next bout of pain was delivered. The woman he looked upon now had a plan. There was purpose in her words and how she moved. It was as if a new life force had been born in his mother overnight. For lack of better words, she seemed alive.

“Okay,” she said, and opened the outside door. Lance winced as he waited for the sound of the old hinges to shriek in protest as they always did when someone entered or exited the little house. Instead, there was silence, and he noticed the bottle of WD-40 sitting on the floor near the closet.

The night was sharp with the cold bite of brisk wind and the clarity of the fall sky. The three-quarters moon shone down on them as they hurried across the rough gravel drive, which sloped away from the house, splitting the wide fields like a brown river, and out onto the paved county road a quarter mile away. Dead leaves danced and skittered across the drive, and Lance looked nervously over at his father’s 1970 Chevy pickup, the smashed right headlight black like a pierced eye that stared blankly ahead. He wondered if his mother had done something, before she woke him, to disable the vehicle to try to slow his father if he woke and tried to follow them.

Without any more thought about the strategy of their getaway, Lance did exactly as he had been told and went without pause to the driver’s-side door. He had never sat in the driver’s position, much less steered a vehicle. He opened the door and pulled himself into the seat. His mother placed the two suitcases behind him without a sound and leaned on the rear door until it latched. She then came to his side and reached across his slight form to place the keys in the ignition. After turning them only one click, she pulled the shift lever down so that the arrow on the dashboard pointed to the dark letter
N
.

“It’s going to be hard steering, okay? Just keep it in the middle of the driveway and we’ll be fine.” She stared deeply into her son’s frightened eyes, and tears welled up in her own. He was scared now. After all this time living in a nightmare and putting up with her cowardice, now was when his courage finally crumbled. She knelt there for a moment and hated herself all the more, before smiling tightly and pushing the door shut.

Lance turned his head over his shoulder and watched her walk to the back of the car. A moment later the vehicle started to move, slowly at first, and then quicker as it began to descend down the hill that led away from their house. Lance pulled the wheel back and forth as the car rolled, struggling to keep the nose of the vehicle in the middle of the driveway. Soon the car was traveling on
its own
volition, and he looked to the rear, expecting his mother to have fallen behind drastically. When the door was pulled open next to him, he started and the car swerved as it coasted.

His mother was there, jogging lightly as she held on to the frame of the car. “Move over, baby.”

Lance scooted over into the passenger seat as he tried to maintain a grip on the steering wheel. Molly jumped into the car and slammed the door shut.

“I’ve got it honey,” she said as she grasped the wheel and pushed
Lance’s hand off, nearly having
to peel his fingers away. She twisted the key in the ignition, and Lance heard the small engine hum to life. His mother pulled the lever down one more notch, and the transmission grabbed gears and propelled them forward. Molly kept the engine at a near idle, and they rolled gradually up to the line where their own dirt drive turned into the compacted tar of the county road.

Molly gunned the car and turned right onto the smooth surface, sending rocks and sand spraying behind them before the tires finally caught and held. As she accelerated down the highway, Lance heard another long breath escape the thin figure beside him. He looked over at her then, her face lit in the iridescent glow of the dashboard. Her eyes searched the rearview mirror every few seconds, as though she expected her husband to abruptly sit up from the back seat and grab her roughly by the throat. The image made Lance
shiver,
and he turned his attention back to the straight county road ahead of them, which was being eaten up by the tires of their small car.

Molly glanced down at the speedometer and reluctantly pulled her foot off the gas, watching the needle fall back below seventy. She searched the mirror to her left, then up, then to the right, all the while looking for any sign of pursuit. When she was satisfied that they were alone on the dark road, she looked over to her son slouched in the seat next to her. She reached out and laid a soft hand on his shoulder. Lance looked over at her, his eyes glowing briefly like an animal’s in a headlight.

“We’re
gonna
be okay now, baby. We’re going a long way away.” Lance nodded and then opened his mouth, about to say something, but shut it, as though the thought had made the muscles in his jaw spasm. Molly looked imploringly at her son and squeezed his shoulder again with what she hoped was warmth and confidence. “Go on, honey, what were you going to say?”

Lance looked out the windshield for a moment before turning back to speak. “Why tonight?” he asked.

Molly pursed her lips and looked at the rearview mirror before answering. “It was just time. Does that make sense?” she asked, and waited, with only the sound of the car’s tires thumping over the occasional patched crack on the road to break the silence. Lance finally nodded without looking at her. She dropped her hand from his shoulder, thinking that the answer had satisfied him, when he spoke again.

“We could’ve done this a long time ago.”

The words drove deep into her chest and then lay heavily in her stomach, waiting to give birth to an enormous litter of guilt. Tears began to form in her eyes, and in that moment she hated herself so deeply that she felt her own loathing was a living thing, something that breathed and moved. She feared it would tear free from the slight cage that bound it inside of her and slash its way out into the rest of the world.

“I know, honey, I know” was all she could manage through the tears and the shame that swelled in her throat.

Lance looked over at his mother and watched the emerald tracks of her tears race down her cheeks in the glow of the dash. Even though there was a blossoming in his stomach that swelled with relief at moving rapidly away from his father, he wanted to say so much more, to hurt her for waiting so long to save them. This is all it would have taken?
A bit of planning and a stealthy escape?
This was the giant hurdle that his mother had been unable to overcome for years on end while they both suffered at the hands of a man who harbored nothing but disdain and hatred for them? Lance’s face drew down in a scowl, and his breath began to heave as his mind searched for what to say to his mother next, to make her understand the folly of her waiting game, the utter wrongness of it all. He was about to unleash the fury of his anguish upon her when he noticed her eyes were bulging in their sockets, her mouth a dark tunnel as she stared into the rearview mirror. Lance spun in his seat to look out of the back window.

A lone headlight had crested the hill behind them.

Lance stared at the floating orb as it descended the rise and continued on like a spirit searching for revenge. He turned back around and sat in his seat, his heart thumping so solidly on the inside of his ribs that he could see his vision shake with each jarring beat. He’d found them. He was going to catch them. This was the end.

Lance looked over at his mother and was relieved to see that her expression had changed. The look of terror that had filled her face when she spotted the headlight had now turned into a grimace of concentration as she pushed the accelerator, and the car dropped gradually down another rolling hill, which blocked out the headlight behind them like a small sun setting below a black horizon.

“Mama.”

“I know, honey, I know.” Molly’s eyes shot from the left to the right in search of an exit from the small highway. There were many dirt roads that led from the main thoroughfare, crisscrossing the local farmland. But as they neared each one, she dismissed it as an escape since there was really nowhere to hide in the open country that surrounded them. For a moment she considered turning down one of the dirt roads and simply dousing their lights, in the hope that Anthony would not look too closely as he shot by, but the thought was banished as the single sphere of light appeared once again, this time much closer.

“We’re
gonna
have to outrun him,” she said hollowly. She saw Lance’s small head turn to look at her, but she had no time now to offer an encouraging smile or even eye contact. Her eyes were glued to the road in front of them as it stretched away into an ocean of darkness.
How many miles until town?
she
thought as the glow behind them began to grow. Could they make it there before he caught them and ran them off the road?

The yellow dividing lines passed by with increasing speed, there and gone in the night, counting off the seconds of their short-lived flight.
Lance imagined what death would be like, not for the first time. Would Jesus be waiting there for him in the dark with his arm outstretched like at church? Would it hurt to pass from this life to whatever lay beyond here? He knew it would hurt to die, his father would make sure of that, but what would become of him? Would he float up, weightless, into the night air? Would there be gates made of gold like the priest sometimes spoke about? Would his mother be there? Would God let her in after all of her waiting?

His thoughts were cut short as a sound began to invade his eardrums. It pushed itself closer and closer as it throbbed inside the car. Lance wondered crazily if it was a helicopter circling close overhead, like the ones he sometimes saw on
COPS
. The headlight behind them grew until it lit the back of his mother’s hair like a halo.

As the headlight approached steadily from behind, Molly’s hands shook on the steering wheel, and she thought for a moment that she might lose control and careen off the narrow highway and into one of the nearby power poles.
Maybe that would be better,
she thought. It would be easy to glide over to the right and strike one of the solid poles. She glanced down and saw the needle prodding eighty miles per hour. That would be fast enough.

Molly shook her head. She couldn’t do it. She may have hurt Lance in her own way by not doing something earlier, but she wouldn’t be the one responsible for robbing him of every possible experience he would have if they made it past this night. She wouldn’t take away getting his driver’s license, going to the prom, marrying a beautiful girl, having children of his own.

A rough thudding filled her ears and vibrated her hands. She glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that the headlight was only a few car lengths behind them. Any moment the old Chevy would pull even with them and her husband’s narrow face would glare at them from the driver’s seat, promising pain and much more.

The sound increased and the headlight swung out wide behind them, into the left lane. Lance leaned forward to look across his mother, terrified of what he was about to see, but helpless to resist.

A long-haired man on a huge motorcycle drew even with them, and for a moment Lance could see every detail of the bike and rider. The man wore full leather chaps and a matching jacket. His eyes were trained
forward,
and dark locks that must have been a full two feet long trailed gracefully behind him like a black comet’s tail.

The bike raced past them, because the biker was speeding well beyond the limit and Molly had released her pressure on the gas pedal. The biker signaled as he pulled into their lane, and then within half a mile signaled to the left and coasted off onto an unnamed dirt road, where his small taillight glowed in the night like a lone ember.

While the bike made its pass and exit from their view, Lance and his mother remained silent, relief spreading throughout their tensioned bodies. A mile past the road where the bike had disappeared, Molly began to cry. She cried in earnest now, her shoulders shaking with the exertions of her fear and exultation. Lance looked over at her, his own small face pinched with emotion. They had made it. The town was only another five miles away. In less than ten minutes they would be on an interstate heading in a direction his father would never think to look. They would watch the sun come up together, watch it rise like a strange, new god from the earth in the east. There would be happiness in the daylight, which seemed like a possibility now, the edges of it beginning to creep into feeling like a fire blooming in the deepest winter. Lance decided then that he would apologize to his mother when the sun was up and a new life was dawning upon them. He would tell her he was sorry for accusing her, for making her cry, for thinking the things that he wanted to say to her earlier. For hating her just a little bit. Lance was about to ask his mother if she knew where they would go when he saw it.