Pamela is made of (hemlockandhoney) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-09-09 15:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | poison ivy, white rabbit |
Who: Cerise & Ella
What: The bb Beth trade off
Where: McDonalds
When: A couple days ago.
Warnings: None!
The parking lot was crowded when Cerise wedged the aging sedan into a spot between two trucks that were much taller and provided sufficient cover. She didn't think that Ella would have called the police on her, since she'd agreed to bring the baby without much provocation. Still, Cerise twisted her dark hair beneath a Las Vegas Wranglers cap and reached for the cranky child that was fussing through the heat in the backseat. Cerise was plenty early, she knew, and that meant taking up a small corner booth inside the McDonalds.
The journal proved to be only slightly distracting, what with Drake's demands that she leave Sid alone to live his own life without her. She couldn't blame him for feeling that way, and even she knew that Drake was probably right. Sid only managed to get hurt and in trouble when she was around, that'd been proven more than once, and Cerise realized that it wasn't just him but anybody who got around her in any sort of way tended to get doses of the same. Not that she wanted to think about all of that now, because that got her to thinking about Ian, which was a whole separate and confusing bundle of memories. Cerise determinedly set the phone aside and focused on Beth, who was sitting in a high chair at the plastic table's edge, ketchup on her face.
Ella hadn’t thought of police once. She’d stepped over the threshold the minute Rabbit had caught word and she’d seen the news catch alight, like old flame fed bright, dry piece of paper and she’d watched on the TV in the living room with both arms wrapped around herself tight as tight as blue and red light stroked over the small, nothing-house Ian Russell had been found in. She watched without blinking as the trucks came and the sirens roared and a body was carried out in black plastic. Ella had seen death before, had cried herself to dry husk over it but she didn’t weep one tear for Ian Russell. She looked at the pictures in the pages of the little book, and there was nothing soft or sweet or vaguely innocent about her then. She didn’t think of the police, she thought of Beth and she thought of the thin, bruised woman with a butterfly-hesitancy about her and she scrubbed away a week’s worth of worrying in a long, hot shower.
She didn’t take the bus this time. She took the keys to Max’s shiny truck from the table in the hall where they’d sat since Max went wherever the hell she’d gone, and she took them in sweat-sticky hand out to where it sat alongside the sidewalk, intimidatingly large and wide and big. Ella had learned to drive where the roads were mostly choked full of people in cars, laughing as Coop reached over with long arm to steer her out of harm and if worry clogged her throat just a little as she looked at all that siding, then knowing trouble couldn’t find her so easy up that high off the road made it easier. The truck pulled into a bay with the the yellow arches right on above and if dust scuffed up a little beneath the wheels, it wasn’t any harm to the truck itself.
The cool rush of air-conditioning kissed along her sweat-sticky arms and was blissfully welcome. The small blond woman who’d walked on in was in jeans - neat and creased and washed-worn blue and a button-down shirt too big for any woman’s own, and she looked around the place like she was frantic, like she’d lost something. She saw the baby before she saw the woman beside her, and Ella’s face lit like fireworks in July, bright incandescence and the fear slid away like a fish from a line.
She didn’t say anything at all first, she picked Beth out of the chair, Beth who began on crying right off like she’d been left and she knew it and she hadn’t known it right until she was snuggled up close once again. Beth who was heavier, sturdier in the way babies got day by day and she’d missed a heap of them all at once, Beth who was sticky-smeared with ketchup she’d never let her baby eat. Only then, with warm-weight on her hip and smears from Beth’s face now stark against all that worn cotton, Ella smiled, blissful-calm at the woman sitting down at the table, as if all was forgiven.
“You brought her back,” she said, like maybe it had been in question but now was smoothed over, like silk tugged straight.
Cerise had her eye on Ella since that dandelion blonde showed up in the parking lot. She was familiar enough with fear and hope to recognize them from a distance, and maybe she'd had that malt blend swirling in her own gut all morning as well. She'd been prepared to run out the side door if any police cars pulled up in tandem with Ella, but that didn't seem to be the case. Antsy on the edge of her seat, Cerise watched Ella walk up to the colorfully-plastic restaurant. Beth was content with two handfuls of french fries, mashed potato and grease oozing between chubby fingers as she laughed that baby laugh, slapping some fingers into ketchup.
"Hey, stop that," Cerise reacted with a stack of napkins, wiping the food from the baby's hands and pulling the plastic tray away from her reach. "Your mama's coming," she explained as the girl began to fuss, reaching desperately for some more french fries with her newly cleaned fingers. Then Ella was there, motherly arms and a familiar smell that had Beth crying immediately. Cerise wiped her own hands off with some napkins and avoided eye contact from the woman reunited with her child.
"Course I did," she said with a note of offense. Only then did she tick a glance up where Ella stood with her child held close to eradicate all of those lost days. Cerise was tired green eyes, barely noted with the red that came from a long night of crying. "I said I would," she explained in an attempt for cold disinterest as she went to standing. She had a couple hours drive ahead of her to go meet Sid in the middle of a nothing desert, and there was no wasting time with that. Cerise was already on her way to the door, baby trade mission accomplished.
She hesitated for a moment though and turned, motioning to the orange tabletop. "Take those fries with you, she likes 'em."
She was right there for a minute and Ella was inhaling the strange scent of someone else’s laundry detergent and motel soap in Beth’s soft curls of hair and not looking at Cerise wearing all that death and expectation like a shadow over her shoulders - and then she was half-way across the restaurant. “Hey,” Ella’s voice was classical-trained - not loud, but it carried, there across sticky fourtops and scuffed tile, Ella who stood with the baby tucked back against her hip, even if Beth was grabbing for the french fries, and looking over at tired grief and bruised green eyes stood half a room away.
“Thank you. Are you going to be all right?” Beth was heavy against her side, but the tall, lean woman who had had her for the time between fear and the time between certainty, didn’t look like ‘all right’ was something any of them would know right off. “I owe you,” Ella said with the certainty of terror assuaged, of Beth back within her grasp and she didn’t ask ‘was she hurt’ because it was more than McDonalds, surreal plastic reality, could take.
When Ella spoke, Cerise lingered. This wasn't a desperate escape with Reeboks pounding against tile, and this wasn't her usual self-aware edging out of social situations that she was too awkward to contribute to. Sid was waiting on her, or she hoped he was, and that alone was what put an rust-scratch edginess in the delicate cage of her freckled shoulders. That pentagram was still scar-slick on her shoulderblade, old and forever, just like the memories. When Ella told her that she owed her, Cerise gave a faint smile. A curve of mouth that was noncommittal and always just a little sad. "Alright, sure," she said with a nod. The agreement carried her out the door and into the summer heat once more. It seemed to make Ella feel better to say that she owed her, so Cerise went along with it. A part of her knew though that if she was too late, or if things went for the worst out in the desert, Cerise wasn't going to come back.