Who: Max and Ella What: A sisterly reunion Where: The library When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Nope
She’d taken as long as she could.
Two days, of sitting beneath the choked whirr of the air conditioning unit, watching the kind of mindlessness that was cheery tunes and bright colors, the kind of thing that in the books said helped babies to focus, gave them something to look at. Two days of eating the stale Cheerios at the back of the cupboard because Ella didn’t want to take anything out of the checking account before rent got due. She’d sat on the couch, and she’d watched Beth sleep on a blanket on the rug - she’d done a lot of watching Bethie sleep, since she’d been back, admired the clutch of fingers around a toy. Beth didn’t seem to much mind having been in someone else’s place, at having some stranger look on after her, and she let that sit beneath her skin just long enough for it to prickle.
But two days was long enough, long enough for phone calls to the restaurant and the shift leader at the bar, of wheedling, putting the sunshine Coop had called persuasive back in her voice; she’d looked at herself in the hall mirror, phone to her ear and smiling like they were right there in the room with her, warm enough for mid-summer. But it hadn’t worked. Two days, and then hauling out the stroller and taking Beth down to the public library to search for jobs.
It was a low, boxy red building, hunkered down on the sidewalk and big enough to be intimidating - but there was cool air in there Ella didn’t have to pay for, and the bathrooms were clean. She’d gone the first day with real good intentions, there’d be something out there - a bar, maybe, even if she’d miss the restaurant with its honeyed, expensive hush and the maitre’d who kept the girls in line. Maybe even an audition. And then the next, and then the next she’d idled, between searching for open calls and looking for bars that didn’t require everything hanging on out, and she’d tapped that name - the name singing behind her teeth, the name she thought the brusque commenter with strings to pull with the CPS might have - ‘Maxine Main’ into the search bar instead.
Wasn’t much there. Nothing easy, nothing quick that said ‘hey, Ella, honey, your sister - she lives right up the road, here’s her address’. Less than she’d figured on, seeing how Max was the kind to do the brave stuff that people talked all over the news about. A whole lot of nothing, in fact - and the second day, as the air chugged overhead and Beth dozed in the stroller, she tried it on again, elbow propped up beside the slow, five-years-out-of-date computer, with one leg drawn up beneath her and the kind of sundress bought at Goodwill, denim-washed blue, bright gold curls, long and shower-damp sprawling down her back.
Max had gotten the ping the moment Ella searched.
It was a simple precaution, one all good undercovers fearing an agent name sale took, the pingback when someone searched for them on the internet. It was easy enough to swing, and it didn't even require calling in special favors or twisting arms. Max got that ping, and she got the location, and she was out the door.
Max was still in the chair. For long trips, or anything without the nearby support of a vertical wall or flat counter, she was in the chair. She refused to use it at home, where she would rather lurch unseen than sit her ass down on that imitation leather. At home, exhaustion came from five steps across the bedroom and seven across the living room. The kitchen was the best place in the entire townhouse, tight and sandwiched between two counters. The kitchen would have been considered a detractor, when it came to selling points. For Max, it was a reprieve. She was so much better than she'd been, but she still took the hated chair when she left the place, knowing she couldn't rely on a sturdy cane yet. Soon, but not yet. And yet the prospect of eventual freedom did what nothing else could: it made her hope.
And Max was stressed, which really didn't help matters. When she got the ping, she immediately thought of Tijuana, of rogues and of name sales. She didn't think of arsonists, because that ceasefire was still in effect. She didn't think of the woman on the journals with her sister's first name and the wrong last initial. Max hated the journals, and she generally only used them to talk to the kid, Corvus or Daniels. And no one from her family could be stupid enough not to have proper back-up childcare, anyway.
Max had no idea where Ella was, but the little sister that had gotten to grow up with mom, free and happy, was surely prospering somewhere. Probably married, Max thought, to someone who didn't demean her or make her ashamed of herself. Probably somewhere with a kid, or one on the way, a kid that she actually got to live with. Max had grown up in hell; she always assumed Ella had grown up in heaven.
But none of that was on Max's mind when she pushed into the library that day. She'd come by the previous day, when the ping had come, and she'd gotten the description of the tatty blonde with the stroller that had been using the computer. Tatty blonde didn't describe anyone she knew but Wren, and she didn't see why Wren would be in a library searching for her name. So, Max waited, and she came back the second day. The second ping lit up her cellphone just as soon as she rolled into the library, track pants and a black tee, hair scraped back in a long, dark ponytail.
Max didn't even need to get halfway to the computer before recognizing her sister. She had no idea why someone from her family looked like they'd joined the white trash nation, but she figured the stroller might have something to do with it. She frowned. "Where's Mr. Dean?" she asked, because come on, the world wasn't filled with that many coincidences.
Ella startled easy. It was the kind of guilty-jumpstart, all idling limited time with something that wasn’t looking for work, not really and a line of people right behind her who wanted free air-con and the computers and somewhere that wasn’t out in the sun to sit awhile. It would have been the same for anyone who’d said anything in particular, that twitch of shoulders and the jerk of her head upward, toward the speaker who wasn’t up at all and then she was wide, wide blue eyes fixed on the chair and the woman in it.
When Ella thought about Max, it was movement. It was restless physicality, the kind that didn’t settle much - she’d thought (a while back, writing invites with an ink pen, lying on her belly on a bed in a too-small apartment) maybe Max was Army now, maybe she’d gone back after cold Seattle and a baby and a man who didn’t talk much. Maybe Max was somewhere where all that fluidity in motion got used properly. She didn’t think about accidents and she didn’t think about death - the General had, in his own way, been pretty much indestructible and Ella had figured that was Max too. Indestructible.
She stared now, at the wheels and the seat and then at the woman in it, recognizably her sister but her sister four years on; she still looked like the chair was maybe a joke, that Max would get on out of that and move, hard-grooved physicality in stillness. Ella half-wondered if she’d summoned her, genie-in-a-lamp, typing her name on into the computer that still guiltily displayed a row of results for anyone who wasn’t the woman sat in the low, utilitarian-looking thing, but the look Ella gave her was surprise faded out to sobriety.
“Dead,” she said without a speck of emotion to it, the word flavored with growing up near enough to the Army and how dead worked there. She stretched out a hand for the plastic structural familiarity of the stroller’s handle, and she uncurled from the chair, feet tucked up beneath her stretched out to full height. There wasn’t much height to Ella, all their mother’s stature with the same generosity of hip and curve. Had she worn lipstick - or make up at all, she would have looked a great deal like her.
Ella was right about one thing; Dead wasn't the same kind of word for spooks as it was for normal people. Dead wasn't even a word spooks used. Death, in Max's line of work, was washed over to the point of numbness. It was anesthetized - assets, collateral damage, justifiable loss. Nothing that brought to mind families at home, or people crying over caskets. Max's career had involved multiple instances where she stood by, seemingly unfazed, while another agent was executed in front of her after being outed. Undercover meant being able to stand there, to not care, and to not give away the mission the agent had died for. What would be the point otherwise? The best way to mourn someone lost in the field was to succeed, and to take whatever progress they'd made and run with it. Make the loss, as it would always be labeled, justifiable. There was a non-permanence to her life that made that dead something that settled without weight. Her mind turned to practical things; no money, obviously, and no life insurance, and Ella hadn't done anything with the college degree Max had to assume the General made her get. Max's father didn't talk about Ella, and Max never asked.
To Max, Ella was a lifetime of things she'd never had. She reminded her of the woman that hadn't ever known what to do with the eldest daughter that the General had turned into a son, and Max could already see the same kind of vulnerability and lack of practicality that had always made her wonder why the General had chosen the wife he had. It wasn't love, Max knew that much, but her mother wasn't particularly capable in any way at all; Ella didn't seem to be either, at least not if losing her child and not being able to afford a decent stroller or a background check was any indication.
And Max, terrible with outward emotion, had no real response for that "dead."
"The hotel brought you out here?" Max finally asked, hands on the wheels of the custom chair, and slight roll back and forth indicating her discomfort and that inability to stay still that had plagued her all her life. Sitting and talking about hard things; it just wasn't something Max was good at. "Do you have somewhere to stay, and did you figure out childcare?" Because whatever was (or wasn't) between them, Max was always good at practical things, tangible things.
She moved. It wasn’t expected, that little back and forth, Ella figured the chair eliminated the moving, but it was so Max - come Christmas, in and out rather than sat down and still, that Ella smiled, brief and bright behind institution-old computer. It was something that wasn’t surprising, something that was a little bit (maybe) of knowing that went a little way to smoothing out the rough-edged ball of crumpled not-knowing everyone in the whole city that was knotted up tight inside. Not far. But a little bit.
“The hotel didn’t bring me anywhere,” Ella thought a lot about practicalities even if there was nothing much there to make of all that thinking; twenty-two didn’t take out life insurance even if he was the bold, thoughtful sort and twenty-four didn’t get to cash anything in. There was a policy filed somewhere in the tiny apartment, something all fresh and clean paper with Ella’s own name written on the top but policies required putting money aside every month and there wasn’t much for that. It wasn’t the hotel that had sent her clear across the country but the cool, clean and empty grief that was finding all the places Coop had talked of, warm-voiced and sleepy, lying beneath hospital-crisp sheets. Practicalities submerged beneath sentiment; Ella looked at her sister. Maybe the hotel had pulled her but Ella doubted Max was ever going to be pulled past her own will. Indomitable.
No ‘hello’. A snap-to list of questions. The smile didn’t flutter but something in Ella’s eyes steeled. “I’m fine. I live here. And I can manage.” Pause. “Thank you.” Something about that thank you was nothing sweet and nothing polite. It was quiet, nothing that made a scene. Main women didn’t make scenes (her mother, her mother quiet and firm, hands on her shoulders as Max and the General sauntered back out). But it wasn’t sugared tea and soft voice, either.
Max didn't say anything to that the denial that the hotel had anything to do with Ella being in Vegas. It wasn't that she believed her sister, but she wasn't going to argue about something insignificant; it was a waste of time. Whether the hotel had brought Ella here or not, here she was. As for being fine and managing, Max managed to keep her gaze from traveling the steps it had already traveled. She understood pride, and she understood what it meant to lose it. What she didn't understand was putting it before the welfare of a child, but then Max didn't want to get into a parenting fight with this sister of hers either, not when it would likely end in some emotional outburst about how Amanda was across the country and nowhere near her.
"Don't be stubborn," Max finally said. It was, for her, exceptionally tame, but Ella's presence brought back so many things that she'd believed dead and buried. "You don't have to like me. I'm asking practical questions about the state of your affairs." Her gaze did slide to the stroller then, brown and immediately warm. She remembered Amanda at that age; she remembered how terrified she'd been when Amanda was small. She didn't think of fathers, present or absent or dead. And she didn't ask the question that was so prominently on her mind: how did you end up like this? Instead, she lifted a brown brow and the chair rolled back and forth again. "First things first, did you find a sitter who won't hand your child over to a stranger?"
Family wasn’t anything but an argument. It was letters written and returned, the address struck through and it was Christmas cards that never came. It was a phone call, when she’d stood in the hall of the New York apartment with the cord wound round and around her fingers and her belly too big to see her own toes and sweat beading between her shoulder-blades and listening to the long dial-tone and no-answer of the Louisiana house. It was trying, when Beth was so small she was breakable, that old Seattle number, ready to ask - words on the tip of her tongue when she was so tired she was dizzy and grief greyed out everything but the trips to the grocery store and back.
Ella’s smile was a curl of the mouth, all slip-slide and rueful. Stubborn. The Max she remembered was stubborn in the way of rocks and trees and things that didn’t move even when you hauled off and shoved. There wasn’t anything to Max but stubborn right off, and she smiled because it was familiar where the chair wasn’t and the blunt pushing was another familiar, even if it wasn’t college applications and goals but things that had nothing to do with Max at all, things long after sisters had exited stage left.
“You don’t want me to like you?” Ella caught that little look toward Beth fast asleep, and the warmth went a little way toward unfurling the hard, tight ball in her throat as Max reeled off her questions, as formal as paperwork to fill out. “Or you just don’t mind? The state of my affairs,” the formal phrase didn’t sound right in her mouth, she said it carefully, like learning a new piece of music in a foreign language, “Is fine. I manage. We manage.” And she purposefully didn’t think about the sitter and about the man the sitter had bundled the sleeping baby over to, like a lost package but the reminder was coppery fear at the back of her throat, worry creeping into clear blue eyes.
Even if Max had known what Ella was thinking about family, about going it alone, she wouldn't have thought anything of it. Life on Army bases with the General was a life alone, and that was just reality. It made for a strong soldier; it was conditioning. And any amount of crumbling those walls had done for the two years she spent in Seattle had resulted in stronger walls and a reinforcing of the foundation. It was hard, not being around her daughter, and she would have a hard time finding sympathy for anyone who had their child with them, and who still didn't make the most of it. But Max wasn't a very sympathetic woman. Loyal, yes. Caring in a stubborn, little affection way, yes. But not sympathetic. In her world, problems were dealt with, and that was just what life was comprised of - problems to be dealt with, disappointments to be shouldered.
"I didn't say that. If I don't want you to like me, Ella, I'll tell you," Max said bluntly, unwilling to play word games. Ella didn't shrink from her like their mother did, but her expression was close enough that it made Max even more guarded than normal. This was just like work; tasks and practical things and a dearth of emotion.
Max didn't look at the stroller again.
"Your state of affairs is not fine, or you wouldn't have a sitter who hands your child over to unknown men for no reason whatsoever. I don't care how nice the guy looks, your sitter should know better than to hand that child over to anyone you haven't authorized to pick her up," Max clarified, repeated, disapproval thick in her tone. "Listen, kid," she said, her tone turning very similar to the one she reserved for Luke, "I'll help you, but being stubborn isn't going to help that baby, and it isn't going to help you. You need a sitter that won't give your kid away to a stranger, and you need some backup childcare." She wasn't even touching the obvious subject of monetary problems or work. Maybe she could get someone else to talk to Ella about that. Her sister knew Luke and Corvus; either of them would do better with this particular subject than she would.
It had been long enough and far enough (wasn’t Vegas far enough from Louisiana and church-on-Sundays to do away with disapproval?) since that sound, all rules and should-bes implied, that Ella was bright-hot color flaring along cheekbones, a searing stain visible even from a distance and obvious right up close. There were plenty of looks in New York - young, stroller out front, but those looks flicked over to her hand and the ring there and those looks subsided and in Vegas those looks didn’t even start. There was a hollowness there alongside that disapproval and it wasn’t sisterly, wasn’t anything but echoes of a man who hadn’t known how to be anything but. Max did.
“You planning on asking her name right after you’re done? Or you want to talk some more about what I do wrong?” It was coolly sweet as a glass of tea poured out for a stranger, the mild-mannered pleasantness that every woman who had a baby learned for the unsolicited advice on anything and everything. Ella sat a little straighter in the chair and she curled her hand around her knee, and she looked at Max, as calm as if color wasn’t a flush along her throat, as if she weren’t mad, climbing up the back of her neck and prickling there.
“I know I need backup childcare. I’m working on it. I don’t know anyone in Vegas yet, I moved three months back.” Ella was as matter-of-fact as if addressing a stranger; Max had slid that half-step toward the sister she recalled from Seattle, all dispassionate command and adult bossiness. It threatened, that ‘kid’, her voice wobbled briefly, recovered. “You want to help? I don’t need help.” She didn’t say help would have been welcome, a year or so back. She didn’t say help was wanted then. She blinked solid blue at Max and her spine was military-straight.
"Her safety is more important than her name," Max said with practicality. And, in the end, what did it matter? Ella had obviously gotten married and had a child without anyone needing to tell her. And that cooly sweet thing wasn't going to work with Max. It was too subtle for the soldier in the chair. Anyway, the baby's name was Beth; Ella had said on the journals. As for what every woman who had a baby knew, Max hadn't gotten that memo. She'd had plenty of trouble that first year, and no one had come along with advice.
Max had to swallow back a comment about how moving with an infant, without money, or friends, or family was an irresponsible thing to do. It was a hard swallow, but she didn't want to pick a fight. She wanted to help Ella first. They could figure out their own problems later, once everything was secure. It was an extremely military approach to the situation, but it made sense to Max. Ella was an adult, and so was she; their needs were secondary, and so were their emotional reactions. When Ella asked her if she wanted to help, Max immediately began to agree. Yes, that's what all this was about? The sheer terror that this baby had been handed over to someone who could have molested her, sold her, kept her, and a dozen other things. Max knew the people on the journals weren't inherently trustworthy; Max didn't inherently trust anyone.
But then Ella followed up the question with the assurance that she didn't need her help, and Max had always had an impossibly hard time with rejection. It made her emotions spike the way little else did, and she stared at her sister for a moment before rolling the chair backward awkwardly, hating that she was in the thing. "Don't get indignant, Ella, not when you haven't checked on me in years, or on Amanda, or even asked why I'm in a fucking chair." She glanced at the stroller one last time, fondness, and then her expression became all soldier, guarded, nothing warm to it whatsoever; door closed. "And try not to look me up on public search engines," she added, already turning the chair toward the door, "I don't need everyone with a good search engine hack knowing I'm in Las Vegas."
It stung; like dismissal when she was little enough to know Max was best and Max was boldest, that Max was everything an eldest was meant to be. Like an invitation in cream colored envelope, sent back stamped ‘not at this address’. Maybe Amanda was just fine even if no one answered at the old address, and maybe Max was sat when she should have been moving, should have been striding around with the same relentless, impossible sense of her own self but it was that final slide home of slammed doors and impossible-to-reach that stung like burned fingertips reaching for something that wasn’t happy about being held even for a moment.
But the last, that little bit about search engines, public or private, and Ella moved, she pulled the stroller after her and she left her coat swinging on the chair, the screen blinking whitely and Max’s name tapped in above a list of results that weren’t her. “What do you mean? Why would anyone be hacking search engines after you?” It was the bewildered of civilians, of lifestyles that weren’t death and shadows, wasn’t blood and finite decisions. It lost a little of the stubborn in the question, the kernel of things that were strings to pull with government agencies and a history of Army that ran through Max the way it had run through their father, steel-corded, solid.
It was unthinking for Max, reaching down from her easy, low height and squeezing the baby's hand with a soft shake that was surprisingly gentle. She'd learned the hard way, when Brandon guilted her for being a bad mother and not knowing how to hold her own child. It was second nature now, and she pulled her hand away easily and looked up at her sister, who had left everything in her wake. "Ella, your coat, and clear the history on the damn search," she said, looking back at the blinking screen. She sighed, and it was a tired sigh, a woman nearing thirty and with very little to show for it, at least in her daily life. "No one's looking for me, but search engines aren't safe. That's all I was saying." And it was true, just then, no one was looking for her. That might not be the case if the name sale went through, but she'd made peace with her current demon, at least for now.
Max rolled the chair back again, away from the stroller and away from her sister. "You know how to reach me, if you need anything." She started to roll past her, but it was the baby in the stroller that made her sigh and stop the wheels, her back already to Ella, dismissive. "You remember Luke and Wren? From Seattle? They're here. They have a kid. Wren's flaky and messed up; I wouldn't trust her with Beth," she said, not hiding the fact that she already knew the baby's name, "but the kid is trustworthy. He's on the journals."
Ella didn’t know much about her sister’s life. She’d walked into it when there was a baby, and there were raised voices and the kind of cold that hadn’t infiltrated the small house that was home - the kind of cold that was more than weather beyond the windows but misery that made the both of them, her sister and the man who wasn’t her sister’s husband, difficult to reach. She knew Max was brave and she knew Max did the kind of things men admired, the way they admired other men, in exactly the way she knew the General would not retire if anyone allowed him to continue. Search engines were harmless things you looked up restaurants and movie reviews, homework for class and maybe the names of babysitting services - they weren’t harm, they weren’t anything to worry about, except the dispassion in Max’s voice said they might be.
“Max?” and her voice was soft, the timid that was slipping right back to home, before there was school to shake her loose, “Why are you in the chair?” She thought of Luke and she thought of Wren with the brief, sharp gratitude that perhaps there were people in Vegas that might be known, even if ‘known’ was very little indeed - but Ella let go thoughts of people she’d maybe imagined, that first year of college when going home had been almost an impossibility and the rain had wrapped itself around her bones and squeezed until she was nearly as miserable as the cold house she’d crept through. She couldn’t see Max’s face, just the long tail of her hair and the set of her shoulders, and there wasn’t anything she wanted from her sister right then but an answer that wasn’t worry, blooming like water on paper.
Max waved away the question with a flick of a hand lifting from the wheel of the chair. "I didn't mention it in order to guilt you into asking, Ella. I mentioned it because neither of us have any right to be indignant. I was in a car accident," she added, an afterthought, harmless, and the cover that the agency had gone to lengths to make airtight, to the extent of having police reports and insurance claims filed. "Amanda's fine. She lives in New York with Brandon," she added, in case her sister was thinking of following up with that second guilt-ridden question. And, unfortunately, she had no reassurances for her sister. If she kept talking, she'd only go back to practicalities and all the reasons why Las Vegas was dangerous, and all the ways in which Ella was ill-prepared for the city and being childish about accepting help. She'd get in touch with Luke, and she'd have Luke do her following up for her; the kid was always better with people than she was.
"I have to go," Max said, which was a lie, but she wanted to be out of the library. She was still exhausted from Tijuana, worried about Corvus, and confused about her most recent conversation with McKendrick. She didn't need to add Ella to the equation. Ella, with mother's blue eyes and lack of understanding about what life was really like, even after losing a husband, apparently. They were as different as night and day, and not just when it came to coloring.