Who: Marina and Russ What: Debt-collection Where: Russ's place When: Right after Ford ponied up the address. Thanks Ford, you're a peach. Warnings: Peripheral references to abusiveness.
It was too damn late to start a turf war, but Marina was feeling impatient. She had the neighbor watching after Nathan, who was asleep but also mischievous enough that Marina wouldn't have put it past a sleeping almost-five year old to burn the place down while she was gone. She wasn't going to be gone long, though. Just a quick detour to aggravate ever unfinished business. She wasn't a woman with a plan, even as she raced across the freeway and balding tires chewed up sandy asphalt. She was fifteen minutes from his place when going ninety, and the old Mazda complained of a bad ticker while the temperature gauge teetered dangerously into the red. Her escalating fury had no such warning sign.
She slammed on the brakes in front of Russ' place, barely throwing the dying compact into park before she had the door open and one long leg out on the cement. The backseat was an olio of children's toys, none of which were shiny and new. There were paint-scuffed dinosaurs and robots that didn't light up anymore, some 80s nostalgia that was way too worn to be collectible. Thundercats, He-Man. There was one thing in the backseat that didn't belong like the others, it didn't fit with the empty juicebox, torn out coloring book scribble motif. She snatched it up in her fist before spilling out of the rust bucket and into the flickering streetlight. He plan was a heuristic one one, not well thought out, but rather intended for trial and error. When she passed what was assuredly Russ' bike on the walk up, she was tongue-in-cheek disappointed that she hadn't thought to run it the fuck over.
She was done with any attempt at bamboozling him. Marina wasn't her parents, she wasn't cunning, she wasn't discreet. Marina was fireworks in the middle of April, explosions out of time and place. She was too emotional to be tricky, her parents had been taken away from her before she'd been old enough to learn anything that useful from them. Part of her wondered if she was even their kid, they'd stolen so many things throughout her childhood, and Marina vividly recalled that her big gold eyes and sad smile made plenty of cash for her daddy's schemes set in the field of grieving father daisies. No way to feed his baby, freshly robbed and out of luck.. Marina remembered it all, but she didn't look on all of that with the discerning disgust that a mother should have. She envied it. She didn't know how to do it herself, or maybe she was too scared to try. Borrowing money from the mob had seemed so much easier, and now all that Marina envied was the fucking naivete she'd had when she thought so way back when.
Nathan was going on five, and she'd been paying more than ten grand a year for his daycare so that she could work during the day. That didn't even take into account the hospital bills that came with preemie care. She'd been dumb in the beginning, Marina hadn't realized that you could just avoid those bills by running fast and phoneless. She'd asked Russ for twenty k so that he wouldn't be surprised when she did it again. It was a shitty plan, but it was all she had. She got money from Connor now and then, but it wasn't nearly enough when she worked for damn near fucking free in an effort to pay off her debt.
Marina was past playing nice, because coming into his job and screaming was nice for her. Now it was just time to be cruel so that Russ would want her gone in the easiest way possible, cold hard cash. On his front step, Marina whipped the spraypaint can out, and in leaking black letters, she began to scrawl across his front door. A S S H O L E.
Showing up screaming at his workplace had done nothing for a mood that was oily-black and dangerous. About halfway through his shift the quips and the snapping relay he only half understood, of a woman who was spite and poison and spit on long legs and sneered at the coffee, traded off with the murky pity and the careful distance observed between that corner of the garage reserved for the man who had the vision haunting him like Christmas fucking Past and the rest of the living, breathing world. They were resolutely fucking cheerful, problems dragged along into the garage of wives and women pissed over the trash not taken out or the kids crashing after a day dedicated to sugar - it paled in the solidly nuclear wasteland, fall-out marked by the set, dredged-in scowl carved out on Russ’s face and the dangerous silence that soaked him through like a thunderstorm about ready to break. And it hadn’t moved on. A novelty, something that buoyed the spirits of the muchacho fuckers who Russ had happily tormented in the back-and-forth of men who gave shit as good as they got in the mongrel mixture of English and Spanish that volleyed over car parts. It was close as it came to friendship where paperwork was on the thin side and what they had in common was mechanics rather than people.
It took two days of marinating in it and Russ had called out of his damn shift and gone out drinking with the solid and set intent of forgetting the sulphuric taste of his own anger wedged up against the back of his teeth, of unclenching a jaw jammed tight against obscenities. Two days of being furious at the past hauled up, dusted off and shaken out new as if five years had never fucking happened and he blew through half a paycheck and half a bottle of tequila at the kind of dive bar with sticky floors and ambivalent bartenders that people didn’t start conversations at. He was drunk, a fifth away from being good and damn gone and the mood had coagulated, clotted thick like an open wound. He was on the couch with the blue flicker of the TV climbing the curtainless windows and an open bottle and a glass in the spread of his knees determined to get all the way to oblivion in the stretch of a night when the sound of an engine climbed in between canned laughter and the patter of a two-bit comedian not good enough to be screened before ‘past caring’ came around on the clock.
The door flung wide and stretched the ‘o’ past yawning into obscenity; the hallway was dark, the yellow of a bare-bulb kitchen light glowed at the far end of the hall and the TV’s blue shimmer threw long, half-shadows across the hallway carpet. Russ stood in bare feet and jeans slung low, the engine-grease-smeared comfort of not giving a shit and black oil a slick of a stain up his right knee. The blue eyes focused in with difficulty, swimming in the late hour, Cuervo and someone in his goddamn neighborhood making progress toward his door, the only one without the remnants of a pumpkin sitting on the stoop. When his gaze caught, it narrowed, sharpened down to bloodshot rage.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you fucking bitch?” the can got snatched at by heavy-handed grab, stared at and lobbed with unerring pitch toward the hood of the car.
It was like a trap door to the past, when he pulled those old hinges wide. Some Twilight Zone version of it where words minced like knives, but silence was worse. She was unplanned in bare feet, with old jeans dragged up beneath the grey knit of some threadbare nightgown that had blue ribbon peeling away from the hemlines in an effort to escape because it was old enough to know better. The nightgown remembered these kinds of fights, because that was how the ribbon got torn in the first place. Marina stared at him like cold vengeance, clammy soup to a starving man in the dead end of winter. She wasn't going to give him an explanation, that much was obvious, because when he called her a bitch she smiled that real smile. That got you smile. Canary chewed up in her feline teeth smile. No more singing warnings to the miners smile.
But it flickered when he wrenched the can away, mid-mist. She hissed, listening to the thing ping off of something solid way behind her. Her hair was down and knotted from an afternoon nap on the floor, where her little boy watched a movie cartoonish enough that it didn't require any questions asked. She was sober, and he was drunk.. but even that was familiar. Marina took a deep breath, chin tossed up at the end of the exhale like a woman who'd just ran a mile. Proud, but worn. "Selling girlscout cookies," she preened. "Two hundred dollars a box." After all, it was Friday.
It was worse when she showed up without the ambiguation of looking like she’d set out for war. It was danger that bloomed in the dark, unfurled poisoned petals, when Russ blinked in the watery yellow light of the porch at the unreadiness, at worn grey knit he knew without thinking about it and had seen curled into drifts on the threadbare carpet of a place two places back and time after time. His eyes swam from the top of snarled hair to the toes of bare feet, snagged on that blue ribbon and caught. It was familiarity, close enough to sucker-punch and she smiled like a knife twisting in to bruised gut, slicing through blossoming blood. He knew the smile too, had seen it sharp as broken glass smashed into his face like a punishment enough times for wariness to dawn beneath the sea of alcohol swimming through his bloodstream.
The can made a solid noise as it bounced somewhere and his heart-rate was nowhere near satisfied with fragile expedition of roaring obliteration of adrenaline, dumped wholeheartedly to mix in noxious combination with so much mid-shelf tequila. He didn’t register the jibe, slicing like rusted metal for a half-second, staring on a porch step at five years waltzing away arm in arm with stoic conviction and his little brother’s hopeless hero-worship. And then he snarled, back of the throat vitriol and tried to close the door in her face.
Her hand was there with merciless arrogance, curling at the door's lip, demanding that he break her fucking fingers if he wanted her gone so bad. And because Russ really just might, Marina wedged her knee there too with her other palm gone flat and fearless against the door's front, pushing right back. The anger wasn't skulking tonight, the moon called it out in a crippling exorcism, anointed in the smell of his tequila, and tied down with her taste buds embittered by the past. All affection had been ostracized years ago, beheaded in the wake of lonely nights, and what remained was the bloody stump of something that she couldn't even name. It made her heart go fast, like those songs in tragic movies when the violin goes high and frightening and you just know that something godawful is going to happen but you can't turn away, and maybe you really want it to happen anyway.
There were too many autocrats in her life, determining every step that she took and in what direction. Control was missing, and Marina floundered with the need to find it in the most unlikely of places, like moonlit porch steps that led to a five year ache. Russ was beholden to her, and as nightmarish as it was to consider the blood test option, it would at least be a hook in his side that he couldn't shake for another fourteen-odd years when Nathan would turn eightteen. Not that she really expected a piece of paper would make Russ do anything he didn't want to do. To Marina, it seemed to be about the money. Russ didn't want to give up anything out of the pot that he was building for himself here, or maybe he suspected that she'd try to make him babysit and ruin whatever pathetic attempt at bachelorhood he had left. She figured it was mostly about the money, though. A selfish bitterness that sprung out of his obvious hatred for her. She saw nothing to hint that fear or self-doubt factored into anything, wounded pride gave her tunnel vision.
"You want the goddamn test?" It was a means to an end, but it felt like less of a concession than outright failure on her part. "Fine," she knocked the door back into Russ again, ensuring that he wouldn't be able to close it on her. "But you're never going to see him, not fucking ever. Am I understood?" Even as she said it, Marina wasn't entirely convinced that she could go through with it. Russ was a weight that she wanted to get as far away from as possible when she could.
He wasn’t quick enough with the door, hand wrapped around the jam to slam it shut but the slender fury of her fingers spread against the hinges like a scourge and Russ was roiling drunk, sodden with tequila but there were forever-lines drawn out in oil-black in the recesses of his head that were never crossed. The door knocked itself back, bounced on cheap hinges and against rented magnolia paint, put a handle-shaped dent in the chipboard and admitted a nightmare, ticket for one. Marina was a tempest, a wrecking ball narrowed in on the tiny hallway and Russ’s head snapped back, self-preservation backing the fuck up just long enough for the neighbors to hear the residual echo of fury in a string of spitting curses. The drink hadn’t marinaded long enough to mellow anything, but blunted the flint-edge response of get her out before she’d had time to sharp-elbow her way in. She stood on the scrubby mat on the inside of the door and screamed and five years slammed in and ploughed through him like a football running back.
He didn’t want the goddamn test. He didn’t want some white-coated snotty bitch wrapping her plastic-gloved fingers around his wrist, pinching up a vein and running his blood into some vial so they could hand him his escape route on black and white printed paper, above a bunch of numbers that said his chromosomal profile remained at one, nil repetition of drunk-ass poor parenting in a double-wide in the dust. He didn’t want antiseptic or the weight of panic, poor decisions and broken rubbers a noxious cocktail inside his skull until some cheap lab in the desert cooked the chemicals long enough to prove he was still free and unencumbered, the ties of music played late night in his kitchen and laughter over fights poisonous enough for their fractured memories to still find the bite in his bones, relinquished.
The bile and loathing wrote themselves into bloodshot blue eyes, Russ reeled with tequila and the yielding soft familiarity of grey knit sliding over brown skin. He held up hands, palms turned out like warding off bad ju-ju and a woman he wanted to throttle as much as he wanted her gone. “I don’t wanna see your damn kid,” he said, fury and drink eliding syllables into something that flowed over anger rather than elucidated and clear. “I don’t wanna see you!” This seemed to him to be abjectly clear, distance a better mediator than Marina written into his hallway like blood on the walls. “What the fuck are you doing? Ain’t you supposed to be home with your fucking kid?”
Oh, it was glaringly clear that he didn't want to see her. That had kind of been the entire point of driving all the way out here in the black of night. Their rising voices and half-bitten shouts were a soundtrack to the mapped adventure where Russ and Marina met at the crossroads of white bellied fear and cold desperation. It was all hidden away behind the stagnant bloodred glow of something angry that was easier to capitalize on. She dug claws into hips gone skinny through worry, bare arms jutted sharp, eyes gashed determined. "Good," she spit when Russ reiterated his lack of interest in intersecting a life barely built. She said the word with teeth grinding, as if they hadn't just agreed on something.
The final brushstroke in a dysfunctional portrait, Marina went a little pale when he said that last bit. His words, practically voluble for Russ standards, and the weight of accusation that pulled on them, had Marina immediately reeling. She turned on him with eyes blazing, leaping at an excuse, fomented into blind rage, and flat palms shoved him hard. The sound she made could have stripped flesh from bone, turning her mouth ugly and accusing. "I'm a good mother! What the hell are you? Some deadbeat fucking dad, and that's it!" She wasn't here to be vituperated with halfway suggestions at otherwise. He was the one who vanished, and she did the best with what she could scratch out of the ashes he'd left behind.
"You don't know a goddamn thing about what you put me through or what I've done to make sure that kid has a good life."
He had the bland kind of life that ticked over like a rusted engine during daylight hours, time punched in on a clock that didn’t notice the difference between hungover as shit and his hands shaking as the drink wore off or high on a good night and a hand of cards and the stink of sex clinging to his skin like an expensive suit of clothes. Night was when the gut of the garage belched him free, when stupidity hadn’t aged out of his twenties. He was drunk on poor decisions and good tequila and fury that had sunk teeth to the bone at the back of his neck, fucked off by the piss-poor crabbed writing of his little brother pointing the gaping holes in logic he pulled together like a shroud to fend her off with. He didn’t want to see the reminder, flay away the skin from Marina gone and the missing pieces scabbed over until he couldn’t see the clockwork jar without them. Russ avoided the women who came into bars looking for short-term and temporary alleviation from monotony of life alone, who had baby powder and desperation in the backwash of their perfume. He had no intention of flitting in and out of a life that involved crabby children, temper tantrums and bedtimes, and Russ didn’t give a damn for sticking around past that point.
Vituperative Spanish and cussing over the family tree he didn’t know beyond one manipulative bitch sitting out at desert’s edge waiting for death or the man who’d left her there, that was the cumulative conscious knowledge of how fights with Marina started, broken glass and shattered pieces of whatever the fuck he’d been doing, they’d been doing before it began. Foggy reflexes skipped on the runaway-train speed as she slammed palms up against the spread of his ribs and knocked him back into his own wall, head smacking on magnolia with an ugly clunk. Russ grunted out breath, thick callouses fastened themselves around her blown-glass wrists and held her hands at bay. He pushed - a little, with the length of his arms and he stepped out from the wall with a thunderous look like sour, turgid anger rolled over for one more go-round.
“I’m nobody’s dad,” and if it rattled the fucking windows, so fucking be it, denial was a line to lay down and paint thick and good. “You wanna go round screaming about how much shit you go through, you go do it to the fucker who gave it to you,” he wanted to shake her, rattle the teeth in her head and toss her out like dice on a table, didn’t want the full-blown force of a reminder of this is how it was and had begun and ended, time after time until drinking shitty coffee in a booth two over from the one she worked, her frosty ignorance of his presence dissolving over the course of a night heckling the hecklers until three am worked its way around and she punched out.
‘What the fuck are you doing, you go around asking my fucking brother?”
This was the opening riff of their ballad, something played through so many damn times that the record was scratched useless, the tape was eaten by the deck, and she could still sing it in her sleep from perfect recollection. This was how it began and how it ended, and it'd pitched its bad tempered tent all down the stretch in between, relenting only when between the covers. Yeah, she remembered these kind of fights well. Always throwing his coffee mugs and her ashtrays, as if either of them had shit to spare.
Guilt had only wormed its way in after if their warrior dance didn't descend into tangled arms and mouths that could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing no apology would be needed. Like the night her aim had been a little too good and she sat beside him later in the jaundiced glow of the emergency room, crying in response to his stony silence while the doctor sewed him up with stitches that Russ bitched were unnecessary.
Marina twisted at her wrists so that the skin burned and she could get at the flesh of his forearms with piano fingers tipped white by unpainted claws. An animal in a rusted trap conceding to chewing off a limb, Marina was willing to suffer a little if she could get free. His scoffing confidence was self-evident, boiled hard over the coals, like he'd done nothing wrong. Russ wore dark justification up to the neck, like a man cheated, a man who knew he was right. He really bought his own self-righteous bullshit, and Marina actually stopped trying to throw herself against the gate of his body in murderous siege.
She stared up at him, closer than she'd ever come close to at the garage. Tonight she wasn’t polished youth under the glow of makeup, tonight she looked tired. There were shadows hiding under the gold of her eyes, like the woman only slept when she was too exhausted to run anymore. "You’re a coward," she whispered. The words were a weak ghost from a freshly cursed grave, so soft when cast against her earlier shrieks.
Marina wrenched away, wounded by she didn't know what. "What are you so fucking afraid of? Or do you just really not care that he's yours?" She didn't admit anything about talking to Ford, her lip only faintly curled, determined not to change the subject.
Had he been a little less beneath the pale gold liquid level of the bottle behind the bar, the slow and inevitable pitfall that his gut twisted around would have been evident. His forearms burned and he yelled as her fingernails rasped down exposed skin; Marina was a feral cat backed up against a corner, the unpredictability of feline rage wherever it could reach. Russ liked his women complicit not compliant; when the nuclear storm blew itself to pieces and they were in the exhausted glut of sticky flesh and tangled limbs, sheets a knot or the hospital painting a disinfectant stripe amid the mixture of cigarette smoke, cheap liquor and shame in plastic seats, he was never the captain of these uncharted waters. And then she stopped, the violence lost its turbulent inevitability and old scars twinged like warning.
He didn’t want to look at her. He had looked himself to satisfaction at that garage, she’d painted herself up for looking at and he’d looked with the same distant appreciation that Carlos and Miguel had shown feet away, early warning system boiled away in the intentional heat of battle-dress. Marina was close enough to see a poor night’s sleep and then some; Russ’s eyes tracked slowly, down to the pincer-pain of her fingernails now removed. Fear throttled itself on the heavy treacling of liquor through his blood, Russ’s hand was solid but the push to her shoulder was enough to let him past, not fling her across the room. There wasn’t a damn place to go this time of night, Ford was a line of question marks on Pepper’s phone and he was too drunk for the bike, even dissonant fury made headroom for what the likely outcome of taking a corner when he couldn’t see straight, nothing but the feeling of being the fly trapped in the damn amber of her eyes.
He wanted her mad. He wanted her yelling, even if she was on his damn doorstep, in his hallway. So angry she was spitting, this Russ knew. The look of entrenched disappointment, a sliver of what looked like knowing and old bones rattled behind the doors of locked-tight closets closed years before.
“You got no right, asking Ford anything,” he said caging for the space, the room in which cowardice could be ignored. “I said I’d take your damn test and you’re writing fucking words on my door. This is what you ask him for?”
Glaringly sober and familiar on her feet, Marina took one quickstep to the side, righting her bare heels in the warmth of his floor when Russ lit past her like a storm being chased back into the sea. She didn't say anything for a moment, Marina just watched him with the caged, analytical eyes of a predator at the end of a long leash, at the end of a longer table at the bloodthirsty bitch school for manners. She was trying desperately to remember how this went, if there'd ever been a flight plan for the kind of freefalling syndrome that had become their relationship. Of course, there hadn't been. The arguments had always been a warring cyclone where hot meets cold. Hot-blooded emotion gone full tilt screaming and his cold shoulder across the room.
She didn't chase after him with words or closed fists or solid glass flung from behind his back. She remembered how easy it was for him to walk out the door like it was the last of the dog days and he had nothing more to lose. It'd happened before so many times. Her heart was beating pathetically like the wings of a sparrow walking the volcano's edge, and Marina crammed fingers against her collarbone in a dig, the heel of her hand rough against the nightgown at her sternum as she bit back everything she wanted to scream. Reliving five years ago when her curses had ran him off the block, and six hours later when she was lonely, sob-gasping for air.
"This isn't about your brother," she spoke gently. Not quite a whisper, but not really a legitimate attempt at continuing the conversation. The words pulled loose from her lungs like pieces of ash expelled from the freshly burned fields of her youth. She could see what he was doing, but maybe only because she'd stopped swinging and started looking. "Stop making it about your fucking brother!" A brother she hadn't even known he'd had, but no surprise there. That thought alone served to remind her of just what kind of man she was begging at the heels of. It made her a little sick to her stomach actually, and Marina closed her eyes. The desperation that had carried her here was cold and clammy now, fever broken in the wake of reality.
He would have preferred her screaming. Even with his head ringing, a wasteland of reproaches and bad decisions, tequila warring with basic instinct, he would have preferred her screaming and filling up the hallway with noise instead of the danger of understanding. She gave him noise and he had a damn door he could walk through, bare feet on asphalt until he found somewhere other to be until she’d cleared out the tempest from the inside of his house. Russ was calculating the trajectory between where he stood and the great beyond, the yellow wink of the porchlight a lighthouse for a ship smashing itself against well-known rocks.
It was about his brother because he said so, because he could picture Ford’s face and put that plaintive disappointment up against the look on Marina’s and the two disparate parts wove themselves together in crazy refusal of separation for their own damn good. “You asked him about the fucking test,” he said and he would have preferred the glass, a trip to the ER with a doc charging him two hundred bucks for his own piss-poor taste in women, he would have preferred the exorcism of a woman he didn’t want to give a damn about, even that sad little of curl ribbon needed banishing from memory. “You asked him about the fucking test, you dragged him in. He ain’t got a fucking clue about any of it.” The way Ford looked at him was confusion knotted around a certain, sinking, cold pride; he’d dragged himself out of bed in the early hours and he’d put a fist into the face of a man he wasn’t sure he didn’t like, when it came down to the bones. Ford was young and Ford was stupid but Ford was the kind of kid so full-grown Russ couldn’t fuck him up anymore than he already was.
“You spraypaint shit on my door to make me go to the damn doctor?”
"You don't have a clue about any of it!" A tripwire broke, casting tight against the words as they rose up her throat, her voice sounded strained and just a little desperate. Amber cured eyes welled up, her mouth went tight, and she sniffed. Marina didn't cry though, she hadn't done that sort of thing in a really long time, and it seemed like a horrible idea to start now. Russ hadn't ever known what to do with her when she cried. She remembered only one time that their arguing had broke her, and in the wake of hands over her eyes and shaky breath, Russ had edged out the door like a boxer conceding from the ring.
"I didn't ask about the test," she bit the last word off like sour mash at high noon and glared. It wasn't an offensive idea that she might have done so, it was within her right to tell anyone close to Russ just what kind of man she knew him to be. "I only asked him for your address," which was cutting corners around the truth because she had discussed the test, she just hadn't been the one to bring it up as she remembered through a white-hot haze of what had then been fresh fury.
"And I spraypainted shit on your door so you'd give me money, I don't care if you take the fucking test." The rapprochement of this situation, with all of the space between them and the words going cold, made Marina wrap two arms around herself before she pushed forward, deeper into the state of house. The curiosity of investigation and the rerun perspicacity of just how this was going to end if she didn't make it hard for him compelled her. Sometimes she could still feel the bruise, when Nathan would look up at her with lit eyes and a smile too unguarded to be a perfect replica of his father's. She could see all of those similarities though, and Marina didn't know why it pulled at her, except that she never wanted to look at her son and be reminded of something or someone she hated.
"I'm not leaving until I get it. I'll fucking camp out."
A long time back, before little brothers got made by women who couldn’t drag their sorry selves up, let alone little children born at the wrong time, to the wrong people, he’d made himself a pact, signed in the fury whistling through little boy blood and the white stringy spit of disgust (blood flecked) as he sat on the steps of a goddamn trailer and fished a tooth from the inside of his cheek with the dirt-limned finger of his eight-year-old hand. There was worse, than being left to be, someone run off long time before he was Russell instead of someone’s bad choice, someone’s mistake. There was worse, coming around and play-acting like you were something when you weren’t, when you were no uncle or father or substitution that made sense and your clips around the ear hurt a little too hard. Marina drew in shaky air, torn up by bad feeling and the sour stench of fears come home roosting, and the sound sketched fingernails along the vertebrae of his back, flicked and hopped him back to sitting in rooms with a couch a little more beat up than this one and Marina a sodden ball of ‘go away’ and ‘come back here’, both at once, a tangle of sentiments he was too damn tired to chase down to its knot. He took a heavy step back, weight levered over his knee and cantilevered toward the door where the tv flickered shadows up stained walls.
“You can’t fucking stay here!” His head lifted, alarm too wetted sharp to be guarded, as she pushed out of the boxy hallway into the darkened recesses of the rooms beyond. He needed this like he needed a hole in the damn head; he’d come home to pass out, to crawl atop the rucked sheets from the morning and to head into oblivion without dreams and he needed sobriety to handle Marina sharply more determined than he’d seen her a day in his life prior.
“I told you I ain’t giving you shit until you prove that kid,” a pause, a conversational swerve around the awkward twist on the tongue that was is mine. Russ counted backward with difficulty, ringed off card games in Atlantic City played with the desperate determination of a man at the table with nothing to lose where he’d won big, scuttered past the last big fight before, she’d pitched an ashtray through his window and they’d sat in silence on the front step waiting for the late night glazier to come out and fix up the broken glass. He didn’t ask how old, and he didn’t ask what the kid’s name was. All small facts that drew you in, yanked you like iron cleaving to the old magnetic draw of the woman wading through the mire of the past with it clinging to her like damp clothes.
“Go home to your fucking kid, Rina.” He sounded tired, he sounded like the wall was crashing up where there had been an exit and the seams of where it began and ended closed over. Russ edged a shoulder against the wall, peeled himself away and yanked the long light-string in the kitchen, a morbidity of yellow glow as the water ran, the stirrings of making coffee.
Marina didn't know how parents were supposed to act, how a mother was supposed to play both sides of the fence while still being present and warm. Homecooked meals in the oven and a smile to pick them up from school for a walk home, hand in little hand. There hadn't been a lot of television in her childhood, her parents were too cult, too artistic to see the purpose in watching a dream world in a box when they could just make their own at a dual wristed whim in the next town. By the time she was a teenager, passing through momentary doorsteps in foster care, television was darker. Less laugh tracks, less stories about lovely ladies with three very lovely girls. So now she didn't know, there was no blueprint. She knew not to get angry with Nathan, she knew to teach him how to make his bed. She knew to make sure he was fed on colorful things and not boxes of pasta and cheese. She knew the worry that cleaved through her chest on late nights, where the hall light had to be turned on so she could peek in and check that he was okay. She knew how to play with toys, and she knew how to marvel at the intelligence of life.. but she didn't know how to be a mother. If there was anything more to it, and she felt that there was, that there had to be, she wanted to know. The only thing she was worried about(because fuck the mob and fuck her debts) was hurting him. Having him look back on it twenty years down the road, and having him say that she did it. She fucked him up.
Maybe it was the integral knowledge that such a thing was inevitable that crippled her so much. Nathan's birthday was coming up in two weeks, and she couldn't even pay the rent in this one. It left the taste of metallic failure in her mouth when she idly checked the time on the prepaid cell phone in her back pocket. She'd instructed Connor to go check on her little boy if she didn't call, but there was still a good hour of open timeslot to do so. Marina trusted Connor more than anything or anyone, but she also knew that it was because she didn't have a choice. She needed Connor to look out for her, she needed his help. She needed a lot of help, and the lack of stoic untouchableness that she'd once scratched after now felt like roadrash. How the mighty fall, right?
Marina didn't say anything. She ignored Russ completely, in fact, while moving through the hall. Past the beaten couch, past too few furnishings, none of which she recognized. Marina wasn't sure why she thought something would look the same, maybe because it felt horribly, thrillingly familiar to be here. A revival act on a new stage. She sulked, past the kitchen where the lightbulb sizzled and Russ was doing something with water that she didn't linger to capitalize on. She moved on until she found a barren bedroom with stale sheets on the bed, and she climbed in, hauling cool cotton tight under her chin with the determination not to move. He could try to throw her out a window, and he could try to drag her out by one ankle, kicking and screaming.. but wouldn't it just be easier to hit the ATM?
The coffee pot was old. It was the cracked plastic of something that should have been tossed and the fifteen bucks spent on buying something that would crank through boiled water and dirt-cheap coffee grounds that little bit faster, that little bit more efficiently. Russ rammed the filter-holder home too hard with a little vindictiveness and a lot of blind, ambiguous anger seeking whatever small target it could find, oiling up whatever vent available. The lightbulb swayed, picked out dirty dishes piled in the sink and the half-loaf of bread shoved untidily into a corner in ruffled plastic and the coffee pot bit back, attacked with half-boiled water and spitting clots of dark grounds. Russ’s yell was a war-whoop, was raging, wordless sound expended for the fucking sake of sound and the clatter of broken plastic finally tossed hard against the tiled wall.
He didn’t know a damn thing about parenthood except it scared him stupid, the maw of it crawling up out under copious and deliberate drunkenness to scuttle back up his throat and choke him with it. He knew buying the white bread for cents when the store was about to close and walking hand in small hand along the sides of the roads, careful to dodge tossed beer-bottles and the squeal of horns at a little girl with a pony-tail half falling out because when you were ten you didn’t know how to tie a girl’s hair. Russ knew the albatross-sink of being needed, being wanted, when the stale breath of someone else’s sleeping stole whatever you had left of you to save yourself. There wasn’t a damn reason Marina’s kid (and he didn’t think about a little boy or a little girl, the anonymity of childhood given form only with one three letter word and squarely in Marina’s court) needed anything to do with him, even if a damn test showed up positive. Ford’s simplicity was fucking naive. You could be shitty, even if you tried, why screw something up all the way if it could make it out?
With watery coffee, grounds surfing the thin scummy surface in hand, Russ expected her cat-curled on the corner of his couch, yellow eyes gleaming, vindictive-furious in the quiet pressure-cooker of her temper, left to sit. She wasn’t there. Russ stared at empty space, glared toward the front door, caught on the catch. She’d left. Given the hell up, beaten a path back. It didn’t mean an end, it meant she’d come back spiteful the next time and the next. He left the mug sitting on the hall table and took the stairs up with the drained looseness of a slurry-pit adrenaline, fear and the kind of cheap tequila no one drank for the taste, roiling in his belly.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
She thought it was obvious, with a sheet dragged into the likeness of a death shroud, leaving her face unseen but her dirty bare feet peeking from beneath the hem, where long legs tucked at the knee when she twisted ignorantly onto her side for more comfort to be dug out of a strange(but not a stranger's) bed. Cotton caught in her knees, pinned between vintage denim and held tight with curled fingers, like the threadbare final shred of a lifevest while she was cast out upon the furious sea. Marina was fearless, but there was still pain to be found in the quiet distance, in the dull hoot of breaking plastic in the other room, in the solid echo of his steps coming around the bend. With a deep breath that pinned the butterfly quiet-still, she listened from beneath the sheet.
When he spoke, she smiled because it was unseen and felt even more covert to take pleasure in something that he couldn't see. The smell of weak coffee pervaded the ruched, untreatied border of the sheet by her face. Marina wiggled a knotted elbow out from beneath her cocoon, which smelled so much like the past that she tried not to breath at all except for shallow, half-inhales taken through the mouth, held there on the tongue to deteriorate slowly while nobody was watching, and nobody knew but her. After all, who was she going to tell? The production of her hand in the dim light of the window contorted into a busted fist, knuckles bent, middle finger high.
"You can sleep on the couch, fucker." Her voice was muffled, deep in the refuge of that bedsheet. Marina had no intention of staying, she'd already cased the bedroom window to see how difficult it would be to climb out of. Not very, and more than worth it when it meant costing Russ' a few good hours of sleep.
Five years collided backwards into the uncoiled and deliberate sucker-punch to the goddamn gut. He’d seen this before. Marina pissed or Marina tipsy or Marina fucking around for the sheer shits and giggles of fucking around, clambered in between the sheets before he could get there or hell, twined up in sheets pulled so tight he couldn’t pry them from her, in the kind of sleep so deep it felt like a door being slammed between them. It wasn’t the same bed; he’d tossed that out on the curb as he hit the road, bike eating the miles with every pounding ventricle push of his heartbeat shoving blood through veins. It wasn’t the same but all cheap box-springs looked the goddamn same, and the dark didn’t do a thing for memory, painting everything the ashen color of dreaming his past back into his present, wiggling bare toes the final fucking touch.
“You want to take over my fucking bed?” Russ floundered at motivation, at motion, his head was easing past the cotton-thick fluff of being past too drunk to give a shit and ticking over into pounding, his heartbeat in his ears. Marina trussed up in a sheet like an argument straight out of five years back and he’d lost pace, fallen back and faltered at the door as the visual did enough to smack him over the back of the neck after Marina had already gone at him to the solar-plexus. He’d never won these fights. He’d never fucking tried, he’d picked up flotsam pillows, unfurled a damply-crisp sheet from the laundry pile and curled up in a foul mood on the couch every damn time, sometimes she reappeared like a ghost in the middle of the night, icy feet and warm, middle-of-the-night breath on the back of his neck as she slid into the space between back of the couch and him, and others the night stretched long, lonely and lit by the light of the tv. She had dumped out the playbook and was ripping through old plays; Russ lit on the nearest damn thing and hauled it out.
“You gonna fuck me over and fuck your kid the same time? What the hell kind of mother leaves her kid at home to do this shit?”
There was a burn in his voice that she remembered like an old song on the radio, and Marina hated herself for coming here. She'd talked herself into it, and it was easy to say she had no choice, but when space and time deteriorated around in her a quantum tunnel of memories bad and warm, she thought it surely must have been easier to hold up a liquor store. Less risk at the automatic gates, despite the prospect of shotguns and Nathan's orphanages, this hammered deep and haunted. It wouldn't leave her for days, probably weeks. Marina tugged the sheet down to her nose, devil lamplight in her eyes as she watched him from across the bed. She didn't remember him being this stubborn, but that was likely because Russ had fallen back with concession so many times during the death rattle of a not-quite relationship. Now he was just angry and vacant, so she started turning up the daisies in his garden of memory in the same way she dug her bare heels deep into the mattress, troweling. Sharp enough to leave grit from the walk up the drive and blackened oil she'd picked up from the curb.
It was the second part that made her sit up. A cheap shot to the already wounded, and the sheet fell away from her in a sideways toss that made the torn ribbon on her nightgown flutter helplessly, warning. She walked up to him slowly, the hurt on her face so solid that it might as well have been carved from ice. "Yeah? And what kind of father skips the fuck out before even knowing. You say you want to take a test, Russ? No, you want to fucking run. If you wanted a test, you would have taken one then.." She searched his face with roving lioness hide gone to shallow irises in the dark. She didn't see anything new, just a familiar brick wall that she could bang her fists against forever with no response from the other side.
"I wish to hell he wasn't yours," she swore, and it was true. The words were irradiated, solid and real and poison, but without obvious hatred because it was just a fucking fact. "I wish he had.." Danger, danger! Her eyes were lit up, half-mad when she pushed in closer. ".. a chance to know what a father is supposed to be instead of dogging the goddamn failure you are for the rest of his fucking life." She had to laugh then, or she was going to scream. Yet even the laugh was hollow, a weak substitute for lungs better equipped at shredding skin from bone with words that hit way too close to home. "Instead of a man with whatever family problems that make his little brother as naive as a fucking child that you're some hero, when you're NOT! You're the liar."
It landed like the wastage from a nuclear eruption, catastrophic baring down to bone. He knew it, the minute he saw the sheet fly, tossed away from the mattress to hang like a spook left over, the room so full of the past that he couldn’t breathe without dragging in a lungful of coppery panic and shades of arguments past. She stalked close, close enough he could smell the sweat, the laundry detergent, the vestiges of humanity that made her someone else, someone’s damn mom in a faded nightgown that shouldn’t have jumped the space between the woman he’d fucked and fought and hated and come home to, to the woman she was now without losing more of what it had been in the space.
Russ flinched, granite chipped; she wished the kid wasn’t his and that was life correcting the course, running on the tracks set up ready and damn waiting for it. If she hadn’t wished it before she was fucking crazy, the kind of loco that flipped glasses off the counter at his head one too many times until he had nothing to fucking drink out of and a scar that traveled across his chin beneath the blond scuff of beard. Yeah, he flinched and blue eyes froze over like the cold day in hell come rising on up, hoar’s frost climbing the back of his neck as he stood still enough to let all snide-snapping poison cascade over his head like hot coals. He didn’t flinch after that. He didn’t give her a goddamn second’s worth of satisfaction, expectations come crashing down like a house of cards tumbling at a good long breath in. She sucked in a breath of arguments like thin shadows and said exactly what he thought she’d say, amber-glint in her eyes like truth finally fucking dawning. It felt like rocking back on the core, winded; Russ’s head lowered a half-inch, truth baring its teeth and snarling like a kicked old dog in the corner finally snapping at the end of its chain. And then she dragged in Ford by the back of the neck, hauled him into a conversation he had no place in.
“Don’t you ever,” it was iron soaked in acid, so quiet it could have been conversation, restraint tied up in chains, “Say a fucking word about him. Get the fuck out of my house before I throw you out.” It didn’t matter that Ford was wrong, it didn’t matter that he’d be fucked if he hung around for Russ to be a hero, something out of battered storybooks, from the TV shows he watched with his little sister when she was so hungry she cried and he nursed stomach cramps all night long. Ford hadn’t invited the she-bitch into his life, rolled around in the sheets and had her calling for vengeance.
“Now.”
Marina kept the trap door to the past locked tight, ignoring the totemic value of broken glass and the paphian ghosts of torn ribbons and breadcrumb trail bruises. She'd known that coming here was a mistake, but here she was anyway, barking up old trees. She had a cacoethes for confrontation, always had when it came to Russ. It was something dredged out of a pit of confusion, the kind where pushing Russ began to feel like the only way to get something out of him at all. It'd stopped working at some point five years back when the revolving door was replaced by boarded up windows that he never returned to. "I knew you were going to do this," she said of the nuclear shutdown that made his voice dead hollow and his eyes prison blue. Deny and ignore, rinse, repeat.
As if she'd made it easy for him to do anything else. Marina, who managed to turn the peaceful protest act of dharna into a full tilt grudge match. And its not like knowing that she'd been right about him made walking away any easier because now she had herself to blame as well. Had she really expected five years, or a kid brother, or her immaculate return to change him? This wasn't the fucking Disney channel. Her mood was a dark nimbus when she hissed Haitian, "Jezi Kris la." An accent then broken by the vulpine poison of words she didn't ever want to take back, "I hope the guilt crushes you."
When Russ threatened to toss her ass out, she edged back a step despite issuing a scoff of disbelief. Feral autumn haze dropped to monitor his hands, balancing on tenterhooks where an ounce of affection mutated into a deadly rage virus more than once. "So call a cop, bitch." If he wanted her gone so bad.
They hadn’t had cable, growing up. They’d had fuzzy static to listen to and a cacophony of hurled empty bottles and the slurring sliding in to full blown rage, the kind that cops didn’t come out to unless shots were fired, a note in the address logs probably read ‘burn itself the fuck out’, poison and salt sewn where land had been. There wasn’t a damn Disney channel, Russ didn’t know fairytales ended happily ever after, just the taste of his own blood on the inside of his cheek and shutting your eyes against the dark. Marina slid back into the sibilance of calling down plagues on ancestors he’d never fucking had, one stop on the line away from damage a deposit wouldn’t fix, the wail of sirens a forgotten melody they’d fought to, danced to, woke the neighbors with. Deja-vu; Russ took one step forward toward familiarity, toward fights that spat and hissed and carved up the night with spite.
She knew and yet she came in the middle of the night driving a piece of shit he would have laughed at had it shown up garage-side, Marina who’d ridden the bike round the block the first fucking time he’d slung her over the seat, bossy from the side of his shoulder and fearless on her own. They knew; “Shit ain’t changed,” Russ said from behind the barricade of folded arms, of fists clenched so tight it was half a step from holes in the drywall.
He’d watched his mama’s bruises appear like constellations, blooming galaxies of bad decisions, he’d watched his sister’s skin with the predator-twitch of starving dog. She could call it what she damn well liked, her poison runnelled into the canyon between. Then and now. He wasn’t anyone’s father, he’d fail before he set out trying and she knew it as well as he did, didn’t want his name on a piece of paper but she was still fucking here. He didn’t parse it apart to look at what that meant, livid certainty from a woman who threatened to torch his fucking house before. “Go home to your fucking kid.” It was another step forward, the cramming out of space until he was the flick of a finger close enough to close a palm over her shoulder, set memories wailing like ghosts. Russ’s hands clenched over his own upper arms, winch-white knuckles and the live-wire jump of pulse in the grit-teeth set of his jaw.
They’d believed in something once. Looked up at holes in the roof and called it a sky. It was a crock of shit. “You don’t want to end up arrested, and I’ll fucking call them.”
She could feel the mercurial night madness settling in the base of her spine like some infection transmitted between them the moment she'd crossed through his front door. Dogeared familiarity of an old book put back on the shelf and forgotten about for five years, then reopened on a rainy day. Wonderland flipside gunslinging where nobody said what they meant, just rattled and oppugned until the dark was all they had left to hold onto. Marina smirked when he said that shit hadn't changed, and it felt like salt in a wound. "You won't call them," of that she seemed damn sure. If nothing had changed in five years, Russ wasn't going to want to deal with the cops anymore than she wanted to. He had to have some kind of outstanding warrant.
She didn't step back again when Russ edged loose from where he'd been nailed to the wall by his past. She'd never been all that good at retreat, her gold star was earned down the line of a whole chart dedicated to ways of running him off. When he crowded in, Turkish gold lit on him like hope in the dark, and it didn't fit the way she'd cursed his blood and his name. She remembered to narrow her eyes and strike flint a couple seconds later, arms tight and fists curled at her side, unmoving. "I told you. Money, and I'll go. I promise." Promises, like apologies, had the high potential for meaning shit all to Russ. They were as out of place on her as kindness.
Somewhere, someplace, somebody wanted him for something. Russ knew concrete and the smell of piss, of sitting out behind bars until the gray light of the morning slid past the refuse of a night no saint looked over. He wasn’t certain there wasn’t a line out under his name, a forgotten bar-fight after a hand of cards went south or just the regular kind of fight when the night sweltered up and choked him until he hit something until it hurt. Not certain enough to summon blue lights and a raft of questions, of his name and her name fed back into the system like ticker-tape for a defeated parade. She knew it. He could see it, the light in the back of her eyes like she knew the truth twined around his bones along with too-old-for-this sinew, Marina who was incandescent with knowing and still dragged expectation up to his door and parked it on the fucking step for him to turn away.
A heartbeat of seeing something flare up, the kindled candle of those half-seconds where it was uncertain what the next step was; the curdle of mistrust climbed his jaw, flickered in deadbeat blue eyes and played along the back of his neck with one-two-three skip of fingers like a bad joke at a graveside. Marina was sitting outside the door whilst it stuttered rain on the roof, stubborn as screaming curses to a grandmother he’d never told her about and never had. Russ slid back into stone, hope something to curl fingers around and kill before it grew old enough to ask questions.
He wanted to win; shit, he wanted to win more than he wanted to shake her; “You promise,” he said and shook his head, like the words were broken mirror held up to show sharded truth. Russ knew promises. He knew them when they came sobbing, hand outstretched for the handful of bills he’d whipped out of the wallet of the fucker stupid enough to come to his mom looking for a bed and a warm place to sleep and an earful of abuse when he didn’t share his stash. He knew, I’ll do better, too and it’ll be okay, melted like sugar on sticky days. Promises meant nothing but giving hope a shape. She’d never promised a thing in her life, as if Marina knew they were mirages. She had never said a thing that wasn’t truth you could bite on like iron.
His wallet was creased leather, worn until the corners were whitened and cracked; Russ folded out a hundred bucks, added a thin-as-silk twenty, kept back forty bucks to work through until the next shift. Folded between two fingers, he held it out, “You get nothing else until I see a piece of paper.”
She didn't know what he would do, and there was a familiar way that her eyes blew wide and dark while waiting for it. Like too many tiger tails dragged across the dead street of the night, begging to be bit, she watched Russ with her chin tilted up. She watched him like the sourbellied alleycats that wanted every damn can of tuna he had, but would still scratch deep if he reached out a hand that wanted to touch her fur. It was a look that said she didn't quite know what she wanted, but it wasn't this. Whatever ditch laid deep inside of her now, it didn't bloom friendly, it bloomed sad like a young grave. She didn't know how to change that, either, but she told herself that she didn't want to.
On nights like this, half a decade back, Russ might have grabbed her and pitched her out the door on her ass without looking back, knowing she'd land on her feet. He might have grabbed her and pitched her onto the boxspring, wanting to bury them both. Marina could remember both scenarios, and she didn't know which one was making her heart climb up her throat in desperation of escape, like a pirate with a knife in between his teeth. It was like one of those dimestore fingertraps, dry bamboo and cheap paint, and neither of them could get away without ripping the thing clean fucking in half, and that's why destruction seemed better. Safer. A clean getaway where the only casualties were a good night's sleep and any semblance of self.
Marina watched his face because looking at the money made her feel like she needed it too much, and it was somehow easier to notarize the scowl of a storm in his eyes when Russ pulled open his wallet with the same expression as a man pulling his own teeth. She documented it with the silence of a sword laid to rest after battle, cool and bloody. Marina wanted to know what it cost him to take the dive, to suck it up, to be a man. She watched, mermaid caught at the helm of a sinking ship, carved and ready to sit the rest of her days at the bottom of the fucking ocean if she could just take him down with her.
"Maybe I don't want anything else," she hissed a scarlet fever and took the cash, elbowing her way past him and past the doorway, eager to take a breath that didn't taste like quicksand. "I'm never making this mistake again," she vowed. Overheated and scared of some monster that didn't have a face or a name, but rather existed as a feeling that she thought she'd hacked to pieces a long time ago, Marina fled. She was out of his face, and out of his hair, and out of his shitty house in five seconds flat. Old jeans dragged across a sad state of front yard grass, heels gravel-bitten, the moon licking its phantom lip and shaking its head behind a cloud like it'd seen this whole thing too many times before and didn't want to watch anymore. She couldn't blame it.