Nine years ago.
Every time Robbie has to speak to Lance’s father, he gives himself a long lecture first. His inner voice alternates between sounding like his dad and sounding like Megan—the two voices of reason he’s been lucky enough to have in his life. Obviously, he never had the opportunity to talk through the conundrum that is Lance Taylor with his dad, but Megan has listened to him rant time and again. He’s never had any hard evidence that Lance’s father is a complete waste of air, certainly never from Lance himself. But it’s obvious Lance doesn’t get everything that he needs at home.
Today is Danny’s thirteenth birthday party, and Lance has been home sick for three days. Last year, Robbie finally convinced Lance to take a cell phone that he could keep for emergencies, and now he’s used it to text Danny and tell him that he can’t come to the party. An illness that would come between Lance Taylor and sugar in one of its purest forms—birthday cake—much less the chance to celebrate with Danny, must be serious enough that he should be in a hospital.
Or, Robbie’s other, more complicated fear is correct: Lance isn’t sick at all.
He tried calling the Taylors’ landline number first, but it only rang. And then, while he was finishing up the chore of picking up party supplies and debating driving out to the Taylors’ house, he saw the familiar rusted-out Dodge that Paul Taylor, Lance’s father, drives, parked in front of the roughest bar in town. That meant Lance was home alone, and if Robbie stopped in to check on him, no one would be there to get in his way.
He drives faster than he probably should, skidding out on the gravel in the turns. He’s driving the pre-owned sedan he bought right after Danny outgrew his booster seat, and he can hardly believe it hasn’t quit yet, though the engine complains every time he nudges the gas pedal. When he gets to the Taylors’ and turns down the driveway, he checks his rearview mirror about a dozen times, half-expecting to see Paul’s truck appear behind him. It doesn’t.
One of the house’s windows is boarded over, but strangely, it’s boarded over from the inside. The other windows are dark. Robbie feels like he’s approaching an abandoned place as he parks, jogs up to the door, and knocks. No one answers.
“Lance?” he calls.
Nothing.
Suddenly too frightened to hesitate, Robbie opens the front door. It isn’t locked, which isn’t a surprise; most people don’t bother with locks in Trace County. The house is dark inside. A wave of fetid air greets Robbie, offering a gut-turning combination of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and old trash. He fights the urge to cover his nose as he steps past the threshold.
“Lance?”
There’s a thud from his left, where he finds a closed door straight off the messy living room. It must lead to the room with the boarded-over window that he noticed from the outside. Robbie walks over and rests his hand against the door’s surface.
“Lance? Are you in there?”
Another thud. Then, he hears a muffled voice. “Robbie?”
“Yeah,” Robbie calls, struggling to keep his voice even. “I was just coming by to see if you’re okay. You’ve been sick. You said you couldn’t come to Danny’s party.” He’s rambling a little, all in an unnaturally cheerful voice, standing in the dark interior of a house that feels haunted by past anger and raised voices. “Can you—can you come out?”
There’s a very long pause, and then Lance speaks softly, almost whispering. “Is my dad here?”
“No,” Robbie says, his voice threatening to break. He clears his throat. “He’s in town. It’s just me.”
There are a few more thuds, and then the door opens. Robbie steps back, surprised and worried. His eyes skate over Lance, relieved to find him whole, not bleeding or bruised, and dismayed to find him looking paler than usual, his eyes wide and his lips dry.
There are various things on the floor. Books, a square nightstand, a few other items—all relatively heavy. The thudding sounds must have been Lance moving them. Robbie thinks uneasily that he was likely using them to form a barricade against the door. The plywood is fixed to the space over the window with at least two dozen nails, set in haphazard rows along each edge.
Lance is watching Robbie study the room with visible uneasiness. Robbie recalls a dozen brief exchanges they’ve had before—Robbie suggesting something might be wrong at home, Lance hurrying to assure him that everything is fine. Robbie feels like he’s walking on the very thinnest ice when he looks at Lance and smiles. “You seem like you’re better. Want to come to the party?”
The painfully thin shoulders go round with relieved tension as Lance exhales, and his grin, despite the stark paleness and gauntness of his face, is still sweet. “Yeah. Just let me change, okay?” He wets his dry lips and his smile turns strained. “And grab a drink of water.”
Reluctant to leave him, Robbie nonetheless goes outside and sits on the front step. His head feels heavy suddenly; he can’t help briefly resting it in his hands. When he hears Lance coming, though, he quickly stands up, smiles at him, and follows him back to the car.
When they get in, Robbie starts up the driveway before he dares to ask. He’s pretty sure Lance won’t jump out of a moving vehicle to escape this conversation, but he’s not absolutely sure.
“So,” he says as casually as possible, “I saw you’ve got a broken window. That happened at the house last winter. I still have some left-over caulk and window glass, if you want help fixing it. I could show you how.”
Lance glances at him. “Sure, maybe.”
“Lance.” Robbie doesn’t know how to ask, but indirect questions apparently aren’t going to get him anywhere. He swallows. “Are you afraid of your dad?”
Lance goes utterly still.
Robbie, acting on pure instinct, lays his hand on his shoulder. For a moment, Lance’s tension seems to double, tangible against Robbie’s palm, and then it leaves him in a rush. Robbie gives him a gentle rub, like he would an uneasy animal, or Danny when he’s crying. He doesn’t usually offer Lance comfort; Lance doesn’t seek it, not like the other boys do. Not from him. And Megan’s warnings are ringing in his ears, but he thinks that in this moment, she’d understand why he can’t help himself.
“You can tell me. I promise I won’t do anything about it that you don’t want me to.” He regrets the words as soon as he says them, but at the same time, they seem to do the trick.
Lance swallows, and then answers slowly, each word sounding pried loose from his chest and flung past his mouth. “Sometimes I take things. Just little things.” He wrings his hands in his lap between his spread thighs. “Dad doesn’t like it.”
Robbie swallows. “When he gets mad, you go in your room?” That was a very generous description of what Robbie guesses happened—Lance barricading himself in for three days—but he’s still straining not to spook Lance so badly that this unprecedented moment of honesty will vanish.
Lance nods, like he’s relieved Robbie figured it out so that he won’t have to say it. Taking that cue, Robbie goes on, carefully choosing each word.
“And that’s because you think if he gets angry enough, he might…?” But that’s a sentence he doesn’t know how to finish without breaking the fragile bubble they’re in, or giving too much fuel to the coil of anger in his stomach that makes him glad he doesn’t own a gun. He’s afraid of what he might be capable of if he did.
Lance nods again with a heavy sigh. He leans slightly into Robbie’s hand.
On the far side of the wooden bridge, when they’re no longer at any risk of running into Paul on his way home, Robbie pulls over onto the shoulder of the road and pushes down the brake. He doesn’t want to take his hand from Lance’s shoulder to reach for the gear shift.
“Has he ever hurt you, Lance?”
Lance’s eyes are wide as he turns and locks his gaze on Robbie’s. “No. Never.” He swallows and shakes his head. “He just yells a lot. Sometimes, I think—but…no. He never has.”
Robbie nods, trying to plan the next question, but Lance speaks again before he can.
“Do you remember Caleb Parker?”
Robbie blinks. “Lance, that’s not—that isn’t what usually happens to kids in foster care.” Caleb Parker was a local boy who’d gone into the system after his grandparents, who’d raised him, had suddenly died of a bad case of the flu. He’d been placed with a seemingly harmless couple in the next town to the east, and after he’d been checked into the hospital for a broken arm a year later, several healed fractures had been discovered in his legs, proving that he hadn’t just fallen down the stairs and hurt his arm on accident, but that he’d been pushed. And not for the first time.
“Well, I’ve been on the internet. I know he’s not the only one to end up like he did, or worse.” Lance drags his sleeve over his nose, which is running. His eyes are glassy with unshed tears. “My dad’s not that bad, okay, Robbie?” His shoulders quake. “And if I get sent away, I’ll never see you anymore, or Danny or Johnny. Please, don’t…please don’t do anything, okay?”
His wide, unnaturally blue eyes are beseeching. So, Robbie gives him what he’s asking for, knowing even as he says the words that he’s going to wonder, one day, if his promise was a horrible mistake.
“I won’t, if you swear you’ll tell me if he ever lays a hand on you. Okay?”
Lance nods eagerly and wipes his nose again. “Thanks, Robbie. And I will, I will. But he won’t. I just go in my room when he gets like that.” A ghost of something passes over Lance’s face and he swallows convulsively. “It’s not so bad.”
A minivan passes them on the road, honking. One of Danny’s few friends smiles at them through the passenger window, waving excitedly at Robbie and Lance, oblivious to what he and his mother are interrupting.
“Can we go to the party now?”
“We’d better,” Robbie says, “before the other kids raid the birthday cake and there’s nothing left for you.”
“That would be a nightmare,” Lance agrees with exaggerated distress. “What kind did you get?”
“Yellow, with chocolate frosting.”
Lance bounces in the seat, grinning. And just like that, he looks sincerely excited. His ability to cast aside the dark and seize the light leaves Robbie briefly awestruck, and then Robbie gives the slender shoulder under his hand a final squeeze, and smiles back, taking his foot off the brake.
It isn’t as easy for Robbie as it was for Lance to shake off the shadows of the last hour. In fact, they never really leave him at all.
Today.
The seat of Trace County is Dell, population 2,833. Dell is as familiar to Robbie as the back of his hand. He could navigate its neat, rectangular blocks blindfolded.
Every house he passes calls to mind the names and faces of the people who have lived there from the time of his earliest childhood memories on until now, thirty-odd years later. He remembers taking Johnny to bible school at the Methodist church, which is a single-story brick box that squats at the first turn into a city street off the highway, over by the gas station. The only thing that clearly denotes its status as a place of worship is the plain metal cross bolted to its west-facing wall. He’d thought sending him was the right thing to do; their parents had sent Robbie. But Johnny had returned with so many unanswerable questions after the first day, Robbie had never taken him back.
The little white bungalow a block down used to be hunter green, and it’s where he attended his first sleepover when he was nine. Or, he attempted to. He had to ask his host’s mom to call Robbie’s mom around nine o’clock, after he panicked and shut himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. He still remembers the bathroom very clearly—it had that old hex floor tile, but instead of in classic black and white, it was blue. There were several broken tiles next to the old iron tub. A single spider web clung to the upper cabinet above the sink.
At the edge of downtown is a big, ornately painted Victorian that belongs to Sadie Bannister, whose daughter, Chloe, Robbie once flirted with at a tailgate party to see if it was possible to make Megan jealous. His experiment had ended with Megan slugging him in the arm and kissing him silly, tasting like chocolate and rum. He’d been unable to look Chloe in the eye after that. She’d left for college and hadn’t been back since. She was a university professor somewhere, now.
It isn’t nostalgia that Robbie feels when he takes a good look around at Dell; it’s stranger than that. More like all the years of his life overlap and time loses its meaning. Robbie’d rather just stay at the ranch.
The farm store, Cal’s, takes up the space where there was once a Sears. Robbie can remember buying school clothes there, and a shiny propane grill that his dad used exactly once before giving it up as a lost cause. The farm store opened about a decade ago. It’s named after the original owner, but his son and namesake runs it now. They charge twice as much as one of the chains would if anyone cared to drive another fifty miles. And luckily for Cal’s, most people who live in and around Dell don’t leave the area unless forced.
Megan said Cal’s will have what he needs. He didn’t bother questioning her or calling ahead. Where Megan is concerned, he’s used to doing what he’s told.
At least, he does when he understands what she’s telling him, which isn’t always. He thinks back to the lecture, or whatever that was, which she gave him in the cab of her truck earlier, and still isn’t sure what his takeaway was supposed to be.
Mulling that over, he leaves the truck running in a parking stall close to the entrance and runs into Cal’s, not bothering to button his coat, his bare hands shoved down in the pockets. He’s only exposed to the cold for ten seconds or so, but it’s long enough that he’s shuddering as the door falls closed behind him in the vestibule at the entrance, where he scrapes the snow off his boots and passes through the second set of doors into the store’s much warmer interior.
Cal Senior was an avid hunter in his youth, and when the store opened, it became a gallery for his moth-eaten trophies. As kids, Johnny and Danny had been torn between horror and fascination by all the taxidermy, and Robbie understood the feeling. Even now, he carefully avoids the stare of a coyote’s slightly crooked glass eyes and the antelope that looks like its narrow lips are pulled into an eerie smirk.
The trophies are interspersed with actual, untidy inventory. The place looks like a hoarder’s garage sale, but the Cals always magically know where everything is. So, Robbie heads toward the counter without bothering to try looking for himself.
Cal Junior is behind the counter on a tall stool, his feet propped up on the counter and a giant automotive parts magazine spread open across his thighs. He peers at Robbie from under the flat brim of a trucker-style ballcap and grins.
“Hey, there, Mr. Chase,” he says, pulling his feet off the counter one by one, unhurriedly. “You need somethin’ in particular?”
Being called “Mr. Chase” always makes Robbie feel old, especially right now, speaking to someone who’s probably a year or two older than Lance.
“Yeah,” Robbie says, and tells him.
Cal nods, sauntering out from behind the counter. “I was just talking to Mel. He was in here a little bit ago. Mel Pryor?”
“I know Mel,” Robbie says, following Cal around the end cap of the aisle adjacent to the counter and down the narrow gap between shelves. Mel was a couple years ahead of Robbie in school, and he’s been a part-time police officer in town since he graduated, working more when things are slow at the family farm, less during harvest and calving season.
“He asked if I’d been past the cop lot. Guess they’ve got an impounded car. A Mercedes. Blue. You believe that?” He pauses and knocks back his hat so that he can read the labels on the various stacks of paper sacks filled with dehydrated milk, which he’s found tucked between a plastic-wrapped block of mulch and a stack of garden hoses. “Here, this is what you want.”
“A Mercedes, huh? Some out-of-towner?” Robbie asks casually.
“Well, it don’t got snow tires on it, that’s for sure.” Cal winks.
Robbie heaves a bag of the milk replacer over his shoulder.
“I’m going to drive by after I close up. Bet it has to do with that al-ter-cation at the care home.” He gives the ten-dollar word deliberate emphasis and slants a too-innocent glance over his shoulder as he leads Robbie on a zig-zagging path toward a row of big plastic bottles next to the birdseed. “Y’all still close with Lance Taylor?”
Robbie is spared answering that question because the landline phone rings.
“Be back in a sec,” Cal says, and heads for the counter.
Robbie grabs an extra bottle, then follows and sets all of his supplies by the register.
“What was that? The twelve-footer? Let me just check.” Cal has the phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear while he thumbs through a supplier catalogue.
Robbie settles in to wait, thinking about the gossip he just heard. An out-of-town Mercedes in impound, and a stranded Lance who Robbie retrieved from jail two days ago; an altercation at the care home, where Robbie knows Lance’s father lives.
“Or there’s a sixteen-foot panel, but that’s not in stock,” Cal is saying, and he looks like he isn’t going to be done answering the caller’s questions any time soon.
So, Robbie finds himself wandering from the counter to a few displays adjacent to the door that he didn’t notice when he came in. He knows the farm store started selling some locally produced items a couple years ago, but he’s rarely thought to browse them.
There’s a table of honey, but not just the kind meant for eating—though that’s there, in little jars adorned by hand with paper labels and ribbon. There’s also small, vacuum-sealed chunks of raw honeycomb and a row of beeswax candles.
Next to the honey is a rack of hand-sewn purses in vivid prints and colors that make Robbie wrinkle his nose. Maybe he has an old-fashioned aesthetic, but he doesn’t see the appeal.
His eyes linger on the shelves next to the purses, where raw wood bowls and boxes display artisan soaps. He reaches for a bar and holds it to his nose, smelling the rich odor of pine over the damp scent of his glove. Pleased, he puts it back and tries another.
This one smells familiar and unique at the same time, and so pleasant that he takes a second inhale. Then, he studies the label. Sandalwood. The soap was molded to look like a thistle flower. When he runs his fingertip over the dozens of narrow petals, he can feel its pleasant roughness even through his glove.
For no reason that he can explain, Robbie imagines the soap worked into a lather over Lance’s white-gold skin, and his head swims. He’s never had thoughts like this about anyone, but he can picture the scene vividly. Lance’s hairless hands running all over his body, working the soap into his skin, leaving him bright-smelling and clean. And then, Robbie could put his face against the nape of Lance’s neck and smell this scent on him, like Robbie himself had marked him.
“Hey, Mr. Chase. Sorry ‘bout that. You ready?”
“Yeah,” Robbie manages, and he clears his throat. He brings the soap back with him to the counter and feels illicit when he sets it down, like he’s buying porn.
Of course, Cal doesn’t blink at it. He scans the stuff, gives Robbie a total, and pops the box of soap into its own tiny plastic bag inside the bigger one that contains everything else.
Back in the parking lot, Robbie drops the plastic shopping bag into the passenger seat and slings the bigger sack of milk replacer into the back seat. Then, he gets back into the driver’s seat and lets the blast of heated air warm his fingers after he unwraps his hands from his gloves and gets out his phone.
He has a browser. He can type names into a search engine. It just never occurred to him to do it, which, according to Megan, makes him the equivalent of an unenlightened octogenarian.
He types in Lance’s name, and after about a half-second of processing, the phone lights up with a little grid of images above the text results.
All of the tiny pictures are of Lance.
Heat suffuses Robbie’s face. He’s had this feeling before—when he walked into a room and surprised someone, getting the distinct impression that he wasn’t welcome there or that he was seeing something he shouldn’t.
But he can’t look away. More than mere curiosity has him bringing the screen closer to his face, swiping slowly to the right so that he can bring more images into view.
Lance with his hair a little longer than it is now, his curls falling over his eyes, his shirt half-unbuttoned, on one knee on a tile floor. Lance, mile-long legs encased in some kind of shiny fabric, with a matching jacket open so that his lean chest and whipcord stomach are displayed more enticingly than if he were nude. Lance lying on some sort of dark, furred surface, a strip of glossy black material wound around his arm and between his legs, barely hiding his cock and balls…and not concealing their outline in the least.
Robbie scrolls, his whole body turning feverish the more photographs he sees, until he consciously stops himself and carefully sets his phone in the console. He’s in no state for the grocery store, abruptly, so he drives mindlessly, turning at random blocks. There’s the laundromat, which he frequented for a time after the fire, before he got the facilities put into the hayloft. There’s the drug store where he used to let Johnny and Danny get candy bars if they behaved during a Saturday afternoon spent running errands.
He isn’t surprised when the seemingly random route he’s taken to try to clear his head brings him to the police station and the vacant lot across the street, secured by rickety chain link. The cop lot usually doesn’t offer much to see except an assortment of rusty bikes and a metal storage container with unknown contents. But today, in the midst of the rust and junk, draped in snow, is the elegant outline of a blue luxury sedan.
Robbie parks the truck on the street. He’s staring at the car even though there’s not much to see. Its paint color is evident around the sides and the undercarriage, bright against the snow. But it’s mostly covered by the snowfall. The shape of the car still draws the eye—a testament to its design, Robbie supposes.
He thinks of what it means that Lance drives something like this. That the pictures on his phone exist. That Lance’s body is a honed work of art, and yet there was such a hollowness to his eyes when Robbie first picked him up. A hollowness that was banished by the warm expression on his flushed face when Robbie held him.
Take care of him.
Robbie pulls away from the curb, more confused than ever by what that means. But he can start by getting some kind of terribly unhealthy cereal with a cartoon character on the box, in addition to a dozen eggs.