He took a breath. A visible one. “Didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t provide for my family, ‘cause I was brainwashed like the rest of them. To think struggle was normal. Those nights you stay up unable to sleep ‘cause you’re thinkin’ of bills, credit, shit like that. I was working on Christmas Eve. My parents were staying with us for the holidays. Helping with the baby. Keeping Sandra company. She enjoyed it. We both did. My parents were good people. The best.”
He had good parents.
I should be happy about that.
Lance having people to love him. Teach him love.
But I wasn’t.
Because I remembered the conversation we’d had on the sofa. Him asking me how I loved like I did, like such a concept was foreign. He loved his parents. His child. His wife. He had loved them. He had known how, in the past. But something had happened. So terrible, so horrible, that it erased it all. It killed it all.
“They had me late in life, didn’t think they could conceive,” Lance kept speaking. “They were getting up there. We knew it. They knew it. Didn’t know how many grandchildren they’d see born or grow up.”
Lance’s mouth twitched, not that full-on, terrible grin from before, but something more genuine, something that might’ve been born from real happiness.
“I reasoned quite a few, since my father’s diet of steak and cigars seemed to somehow be balanced by my mother’s strict vegetarianism and yoga regime. Regardless, they didn’t take life for granted, didn’t take family for granted. So they were with Sandra, Christmas Eve.”
He looked out the window again.
Back to me.
“She was driving. They were going to a cheap diner we went to every Christmas Eve. A tradition. I was meant to be home.”
A pause.
A violent one.
He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture I’d never seen him make. A common gesture that most people made daily, out of frustration, habit, whatever. Lance didn’t make gestures like that.
But he was right now.
“Fuck, I was supposed to be driving,” he hissed, tearing his hand from his hair. “But shit came up at work that was more important. I said I’d meet them there.”
He paused. A lost future loaded into the silence. A tragic past was a bullet that he was about to blast through my chest. “Sandra knew how to drive in the snow. She grew up in the Rockies, for fuck’s sake. We both did.”
Another thing I hadn’t known about the man I loved. Apart from he had a wife, a son, a family.
He grew up in Colorado.
“Truck was good,” he said. “Made sure of that. Was in crippling debt because I wanted my wife and son in the safest vehicle they could be in. I wasn’t there enough. Always working. We’d fought about that earlier in the day. Over the phone. But she didn’t even really fight me on it. She was too tired. Tired of this being the regular. I was too. But I didn’t see a way out. She didn’t understand. I was the one that didn’t fucking understand. Didn’t understand why they all weren’t at our regular table when I arrived fifteen minutes late. Why they still hadn’t arrived fifteen minutes after that.”
My hands started to shake at this point.
I knew where this was going.
I knew and I couldn’t stop the hurt. Because it was already done. Despite the fact his cuts were still bleeding, it was done.
“No one answered the phone,” he said, voice no longer blank. “I made excuses about that as I drank shitty coffee and stared at the door covered in cheap decorations. The baby got sick. Needed a diaper change. Outfit change, whatever. That’s something you learn with kids, they always fuck up best laid plans. You’re never on time with them. I convinced myself of that right up until the two cops walked through the front door. They knew me. Small town. Which was why they knew to find me at that diner. Tell me that my wife, son, mother, and father had all died on the scene of a wreck ten minutes away.”
“Lance,” I choked out, unable to fathom what he’d gone through. Unable to fathom the fact he was still standing, recounting this story.
“Need to get this out, cupcake,” he said, he whispered.
With great effort, I stayed where I was, his eyes were willing me not to go to him. Then I nodded. “Okay.”
“I developed ways of coping,” he said, not wasting a second of silence. “Of surviving, I guess. First way to survive was to kill the man I was before. Simple enough.”
I swallowed glass.
Lance kept going.
“It’s not like I knew anyone in my hometown who specialized in creating new identities, but a man is desperate enough, determined enough, he figures it out. I did. Quick. Also figured out that in order to truly kill the man I had been, I had to do things that were unrecognizable. That would disgust my wife, make my parents disappointed, my son hate me. I did all those things.”