Who: Ella and Max What: Mortification and hard truths. Where: Grocery store. When: Recently Warnings: Mentions of sex work
Days slipped past quick where they had inched in aching uncertainty. The townhouse smelled clean now, it smelled fresh. There’d been laundry, load after load and the downstairs scrubbed clean like if Ella got on hands and knees and rubbed until she was good and sweaty, she could take off the fear and the terror and the shame along with half an inch of skin from her knuckles and the dirt off the tile and carpet. She’d watched Beth toddle from the couch to the door, with a sturdy kind of lurch that was two weeks’ worth of practice and the heart-squeeze ache of having something taken that would never be back and she’d listened over and over to the soft bubble of baby laughter that could be teased out of Beth with tickles and kisses until maybe, just a little, the fear that something had been broken beyond repair, assuaged. She had shut the townhouse door and she had locked it, and she had turned on the fancy alarm that would tell the world if anyone wanted to come on in and find them and they had been two, just two without a bit of world to intrude.
But they couldn’t be two, just two forever. Upstairs was quiet, quiet that went beyond Laura trying and straight on in to Laura gone. New York, and Ella was grateful in the tight, raw place beneath her breastbone where she was selfish, not a sound in the house that wasn’t hers or Beth’s. But Laura wasn’t there to help with grocery runs and chores, and when it got down to just a couple tomatoes and milk turning blue in the fridge, unlocking the door a little while and taking them both back out there was lined up like inevitability.
The truck was gone; one day at the side of the road and shiny white intimidation, and now it was not but Ella didn’t think Max was thinking much about anything except job losses and drinking the kind of beer that made your gut clench up after. They took the bus, sticky-warm and cheap seats and the grocery store’s heavy air-conditioning was welcome along with piped music. There were no soft dresses and no loose hair just now, Ella was clean blue jeans, the kind of worn that came off the rack at a thrift store instead of made that way, and a plain shirt the color of stone and walls and things that didn’t take up time to notice, and all that blond hair gathered right back in a braid. The baby on her hip struggled some now and then, for down and walking, blond hair tufted on her head and blue eyes taking it all in without fear.
Max was hungover. She was the kind of hungover that didn't allow for the thought of a fresh drink, not without her stomach revolting. It was precisely how drunk she always got when things went wrong, and it was precisely the kind of drunk that ended a binge. After this, she'd dry up and find a solution to everything. But this kind of drinking had been with her since her father had somehow managed to make her intentionally botched psych for special forces get misplaced, and it had gotten her through plenty of rough patches in her life. But, well, she wasn't drunk anymore, and now it was just a matter of getting to the point where her pores didn't smell like the sick-sweet scent of old booze.
After collecting the truck from the townhouse at sunrise (and leaving a note on the door saying she'd done so), Max had spent the morning trying to work. She needed an in for Dhaka and, with her hopes dashed that McKendrick would want to come along and fix what they'd fucked up in Mexico, she was left trying to find one that would work for a single woman, in a place where single women couldn't do anything. It had left her with a splitting migraine, and she'd dressed in shorts and a tank top, hair scraped back and needing a wash, and she made her way to the local grocery store in search of some Excedrin and some generic Gatorade.
Sunglasses down, Max barely noticed her sister in the store's aisle, not with her head pounding like it was. She noticed Beth first, and the smile she gave the little girl was immediately. Max knew, by now, that Ian was dead, and she'd stopped worrying about Beth the moment Corvus said the little girl was alright. But her anger toward Ella, that was still there, still simmering, and the last thing Max wanted right then was a fight. Her grip tightened on her cane, fingers going white as she leaned heavily against it. "Ella," she said tightly. A greeting and - she hoped - a farewell, because she didn't have anything good to say to her sister, and that was just what it was. There was nothing she could do about it.
Ella didn’t know drinking well. There’d been no heavy drinking in bars when she’d been in college, because by the time she’d been old enough for IDs and getting in places that would serve her, there’d been Coop and Coop wasn’t all that interested in bars and heavy drinking, having done his share in his own time. She’d worked the bar in the restaurant and then the club in Vegas and she’d seen people get the sweaty kind of drunk, red and porous and drunk enough to hand over phone and keys and tell her with the beery-slur to their voice, not to let them call home, to fractured family and the kids they didn’t see - but Ella thought this was usual of anyone who visited the shitty kind of strip club when there were plenty that were better, all over Vegas.
They came in hungover, and they came in with that tight, shiny look to them - but Ella didn’t marry up ‘drunk’ and ‘her sister’ in her own head. Max was the woman who’d put together security where there had been none, the one with secrets like shadows pooled at her feet. Ella thought Max was too strong and too smart to get that drunk nor to keep on going after, even if she’d gone after drinking places in sloppy handwriting right out in public. She noticed Max when Beth did, squirming like a puppy - Ella followed the baby’s gaze right over to where her sister stood in all the florescence of the lights above. Sunglasses hid eyes but Ella could about predict the look in her eyes - same as it had been all the times before. Her shoulders narrowed and her tongue went bitter with ashamed, like biting into cloves. Max who stood there like a stranger, after all the trouble and Ella right on there with Beth like it hadn’t happened.
“Hi,” she said, hesitant, and ‘thank you’ rode up high in her throat, along with ‘I’m sorry’, right there behind it, but she said neither. Beth stretched out arms, demanding and Ella hitched the baby higher against her hip, apologetic, “She learned to walk, so she’s not real happy with riding along anymore.”
Max had spent a lot of her time in Seattle drunk. After Amanda was born, after things finished crumbling with Brandon, after her lack of maternal instinct caused a rift so wide that she couldn't see clearly to the other side, she'd lost herself in more twelve-packs than she cared to remember. She'd wallowed for months, and it had taken the better part of a year for her to get it all back together. This? This was nothing, even with her unexpectedly serious feelings for McKendrick, and even with the end of her career, this wouldn't take the better part of a year, and she was grateful for that.
The sunglasses stayed put. Max didn't need her sister seeing her bloodshot eyes, and it was easier to hide her expression behind the impossibly dark panes of not-glass. Max didn't say anything to Ella's comment about walking, not at first. She hadn't been there for Amanda's first steps. She hadn't been there for Amanda's second or third steps, either. Max wasn't the parent that was there for the firsts, and she never would be; she'd accepted that years ago. "Amanda wouldn't stay still at that age," she admitted, finally, after an endlessly long pause beneath the fluorescents. She smiled at the baby, a hand reaching out to touch the fingers on one of those outstretched hands. "I'm glad she's not hurt." Which she meant, and she said it vehemently, some of her anger seeping through in the words.
One Seattle Christmas was like looking at one piece of a jigsaw puzzle impossible to put on back together. Ella knew Seattle as cold inside as well as out, she knew expensive furniture and the gloss that came from professionals picking out designs instead of anyone that loved the home they were living in. She knew Max as distant-quiet, and she hadn’t seen one bit of red-eyed tears or drinking right after, creeping back to college after that Christmas without knowing her sister one better. Hesitation rode Ella like it held the reins; she was apprehensive look in blue eyes, the faded shadows of sleeplessness and the new knife-sharp caution that was shoulders tight and a stiffness where all had been soft welcome. The curves had been carved away, two weeks of restlessness and eating little and when Beth leaned out after the finger-touch to palm, all strong kicking baby struggling for freedom, Ella’s grip slid, Beth rocking back within her grasp to grab.
Ella smiled, brief flutter-thing at the thought of Amanda, of a niece who was chatterbox on the end of a phone-line and faint memory of a baby smaller than Beth, but the smile died quickly, abruptly, at the anger that bled through, spilled milk in an aisle no one was calling round to clean up. “So am I,” she was, achingly so and her eyes dropped to the blond head as Beth wriggled for the new, more exciting attention than anything so mundane as a mother so recently reunited. “She doesn’t seem like it worried her at all. I thought maybe there’d be something. But there isn’t.”
Blue eyes met that reflective, show-nothing surface, “Thank you for trying to keep her safe.”
"She's too young to remember," Max said, brusque and straight. She wasn't good at saying things that made people feel better. When bad things happened, she was the person standing against a wall, arms crossed and the hope that no one would think to come talk to her. She'd been to military services early on, before she realized that soldiers died and it was better to remember them at some no-name bar with a good beer, and she'd always hated them. Hugging hadn't been part of life with the General, and tears hadn't been either. When things went wrong, you picked yourself up and you went for a run, or you did some strength training, or you shot things at the range. She'd been shooting things every night for a week, and her hands were calloused and red from it, but she didn't feel any better yet. Even drunk, she could always hit the bullseye, because twenty-five years of drills made shooting things more natural than breathing was some days.
And maybe Beth wasn't too young to remember. Max knew that it might depend on what Ian had done to her, but she didn't see any signs of distrust from the little girl with the outstretched hands. It wasn't familiarity that did it; Max had seen Beth two, maybe three times now? She was a stranger to the little girl with the blonde hair, just like she was a stranger to her sister. There was nothing to do about that now, though, because they didn't understand each other, and Max accepted that they never would. She'd hoped, once she'd gotten over hating Ella for having the life she'd never had, that could change; she didn't think it could anymore.
Max considered bringing up the elephant in the room, because she knew that Lin - with his big mouth that never quit - had probably told Ella that his Cat had disclosed her profession. But what was the point? That job, and Max's completely lack of understanding as to why her sister could do that, was just another crack, and there were too many to fill in. "It didn't work very well," was all she said, and she turned, as if to go. But she stopped, remembering. "Don't talk about the General's work with Lin. My work either. I can't discuss it, and he just throws a tantrum about me not sharing and caring." Because the last thing she needed was for Lin to go running his mouth to Tighe or, God help her, someone else.
Maybe it was that Max was tall and straight and firm besides the cane (and wasn’t that Max all over anyhow, the soldier who got on up out of chairs and stood and walked like she’d never been in one at all?) and that the delivery came with no soft edges to it at all, nothing that sounded like appeasing. But Ella believed Max thought it, looking at the baby arching her back and drumming her heels in clear command down, that nothing had touched her, nothing that wouldn’t slide into the twilight remembering of babyhood. It didn’t make a difference on the inside. It didn’t stop the hurt at missing first steps nor the pain of not knowing where she was, or what was happening to her. But that Beth would forget, well, that was fine.
“It worked best as you could,” Ella said quiet-firm and there was no modifying that, nothing soft to take away the taste of her own opinion. “It would have worked fine if I’d stuck to it.” And if that was shame under bright lights and in an aisle close enough to packets of cereal to make it surreal, then that was what it was, Ella didn’t think Max would let her say it at all, elsewise.
And then she blinked, the General’s work and Max’s - and not at all a mention of her own; Ella smiled quiet, sad. It was the kind of smile her mother had smiled, right after they’d both walked out on her at Christmas, a call back to base and the faint, simultaneous look of relief on both faces. “I won’t. I told him you’d been fired, I didn’t say nothing about what from. You planning on bringing up mine as well?” And there it was, clear as hangovers and babies who didn’t want to know. Ella didn’t think her sister wanted to know nor wanted to know her but if all of that recognition, all that bad scraped up from the bottom and stirred out on top to look at, then that was one piece.
Max was practical. Beth wasn't bleeding, and she wasn't dead, and she wasn't shying away from strangers, and that was her primary concern. She didn't see Ella as the victim in this situation, though she knew it was the societally accepted way to view the situation. But she'd spent her life learning about assets and targets, and Ella had just been the person waiting at home, not the person requiring extraction. That person was tiny and squirming in her sister's arms, and the extraction had been successful. She assumed there had been people around to hug Ella through her wait, to rub her sister's back and make her feel better. That wasn't Max's job. No one would ever think to assign her to that job; she just wasn't qualified for it.
Ella's assertion that Beth would have been fine if she'd just stuck to the plan was met with a sound that was decidedly agreement, but Max didn't add anything more to it than that. She wouldn't have mentioned Ella's work, either, had Ella not walked right into the subject, and even then she was quiet a few seconds, her hungover mind trying to decide how to proceed. She didn't want a fight. The last thing she wanted was a fight when she felt like her life was shattering around her, but she wasn't good at keeping her opinions to herself. The General had taught her that men spoke up, which meant she spoke up.
"Lin is too curious for his own good," she said, which weighed heavily on her. She wasn't sure she trusted him or Ella when it came to the possible truth about his parentage, and that just left her feeling more tired than she already did. "As for your job, your pride is your business, Ella." Simple. Direct.
Ella didn’t expect much of people these days. There had been Neil and there had been Lin and there had been Laura and there had been reasons enough for all of them not to think of it and that was fine. Ella hadn’t been the General’s best-beloved and she hadn’t been dragged up military-style but there had been a lot of instruction about pride and tears and nothing in public and despite all that softness out there in public, the upbringing Max thought about wistfully like it had been a gift, hadn’t been all stories and kisses at bedtime. She had wanted her sister the way once, as a little girl she had wanted her daddy - the way you looked toward heroes when you were sad and hurting, but you accepted that they were heroes and a lot of people out there in the world were hurting too. Heroes didn’t hug; they were the people who put the pieces out in the world back together and were celebrated.
“My pride?” Ella’s voice rose upward as it curled toward a question, and she ignored everything about Lin and curiosity because it was true, if there was an answer she thought Lin would get it for all the questions he had. She sounded incredulous just then and she shifted Beth on her hip and dug something out of the bag over her shoulder to hand the baby, bright plastic and rattling and passed it to her. “Pride doesn’t pay bills, Max. I gave up on pride a long while back. What Lin told you,” and she didn’t say it right out there in the grocery store, she didn’t say sex for money or anything like it because it was surreal as everything else, it felt like years passed since she’d seen the Artist or any one of those clients, “If I could afford pride, I wouldn’t have done it.” The clatter of plastic keys on a chain rattled through, Beth determined on joining in this conversation and filling in all those gaps.
"You have a college degree, and you have family, and there are other ways to make a living, Ella," Max said, and she said it direct and straight, and it was obvious she didn't understand, and that she would never understand. Ella could say whatever she wanted. "I'm paying over half of your rent. You can afford four hundred dollars a month on a McDonald's salary. And don't tell me it's about bills, because you aren't required to pay your husband's medical bills. No one can come after you for medical bills that belong to a dead man, even if you were married to him, because you have no assets. And even if you thought you needed to pay them, for whatever reason, you could get on a payment plan, or declare bankruptcy, which is better than becoming a prostitute." It was straight, direct, and the way Max best dealt with problems. 1, 2, 3 and ignoring all the emotional baggage that might come with losing a husband to an illness, because Max didn't have a way to deal with that. Like when Beth was missing, she focused on practical things. She understood practical things, and no one was going to change that about her at this stage in the game, not Ella, and not Lin. If she'd been less hungover, she might have kept her thoughts to herself, but she wasn't less hungover.
"So, there you have it. You wanted my opinion? You brought it up? There it is," Max said, a rub of her fingers to her pained temple, and a smile at the baby, even if the rattle was just making her eye throb more. "Now, go ahead and think I'm a bitch. That's nothing new, Ella."
There had been, in the brief and gray period between Coop dying thin and wasted in a hospital bed and the time he had been in the ground, all kinds of paperwork. Ella had signed whatever was passed under her nose with no attention to what was in it. There had been a conversation with the billing department, right back when there had been tests and fear thick enough to choke, and her name coupled up with Coop’s on something so soothingly vague about costs it had been frightening, come middle of the night.
Ella shook her head, but her face was smeared with that moment between hope and fear, knife-blade balanced, “We signed. Together, right at the beginning. I asked about a lawyer, right off but he said because we’d signed that the center would say I was liable and I couldn’t afford to go back to the lawyer anyway. I had to pay off the hospital I went to when I had Beth. And then they started sending things through and I thought,” Her heartbeat was sickeningly fast, she could feel it pulse in her throat, “I tried to speak to Mom,” and she had, phone calls that hung up soon as it was her voice on the end, and Ella trailed off right then. She had gone waxy-white, and she could feel heat rising up on her neck, hear her own voice as if it was far away.
She wrapped a hand around Beth’s keys, the rattle was like her own thoughts clattering together, and the baby pulled at her fingers, content for a minute to register protest simply in trying to undo this adult obstruction of a perfectly enjoyable game. “I don’t - I thought they’d - he said maybe court if I couldn’t pay,” she said, a little desperately and she didn’t care one bit about Max’s opinion, she would have agreed if it had been anyone else, she agreed right off if there’d been any other choice to make. But there had been a cheap (and bad) lawyer who had said nothing of declaring bankruptcy, and there had been the exhaustion of grief coupled with a newborn and from then had been the struggle begun.
“I don’t think anything,” she said, the grocery basket slip-sliding down her arm from the crook of her elbow to the ground, “You mean I didn’t,” her voice cracked brief and sharp and the ‘have to’ was right there, even if it didn’t get said. “I thought I needed to pay.” It was very close to tears.
"It doesn't matter if you signed together," Max said tightly. "I'll send you someone."
And that was the end of that. Max had no idea how Ella could have been born in the same house as her or raised in the same house as her. It left her baffled that anyone who had any sort of childhood interaction with her father could be so naive and unaware of the world. She'd never known the man Ella had married, but she thought he must have been just as naive, not to have seen this all coming and fix it along the way. Standing there, hungover and with her head throbbing, Max felt like she was standing in front of a young girl in high school, and she had no idea how. She'd never been close to her mother, but her mother hadn't seemed this unknowing. She'd had no idea how to deal with a daughter who was more son than anything else, but she hadn't seemed like this. And it brought to mind all the times Ella was warned about Ian, and all the times she ignored the warnings. It also brought to mind the fact that a man had died, all because Ella insisted on being stubborn and not listening, and that made Max even angrier. She wasn't even sure who to blame. Her mother? The General? The dead man she'd never met? Herself? She had no clue.
Then Ella's voice was cracking, and nothing froze Max where she stood like tears. "Go home, Ella," she said, sounding uncomfortable, because she just didn't have it in her to bridge the gap and hug the blonde woman she barely knew. She'd find a lawyer and pay them from her savings. It wouldn't make Ella rich, because nothing could do that, and she'd still have bills from a baby, and Max knew being a single parent was hard. But at least there wouldn't be hospital bills. That also didn't mean she had any faith Ella would quit hooking. She knew, from unfortunate experience with Luke, that hookers didn't always quit just because they had to.
Cooper had been the kind of cheerful naive that elbowed in lines and was quietly secure despite knowing nothing at all. He had been big hands and a quiet, but sure voice that had said ‘we’ll see’ like he was confident in the answer even if he knew nothing about whatever at all it had been. And Ella had trusted him in the same way she had trusted adulthood as it had surrounded her, held at bay by lack of knowledge and then by lack of money to get up to much trouble and then lack of much of anything at all. The General might have been a loud voice, but he was an infrequent one, and one not much concerned with her at all. The tears that had threatened right there in the aisle were still furled up, painful-hot in her throat but Ella’s eyes were dry right then and she looked at Max’s mirrored-over gaze as if Max hadn’t torn down a wall she’d thought impossible just by saying ‘I’ll send someone’ as brusquely as possible. There was no doubt at all that she could. Whether Max was hired or fired, whether Max was army or something so secret she couldn’t talk about it, Max knew how things worked in exactly the ways Ella did not.
“I will,” she said, tight as if the threatening tears could be kept back by biting down hard on them. “But Max,” and she faltered, on all the things that could have been said about hating being saved from things she wanted to know how to save herself from. Beth was renewed struggle, and Ella looked at the baby instead of her sister, and some of the corded tension slipped a little. “I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t think of any other way,” and maybe it was ashamed, even if Lin had gotten mad as he ever did over that shame when he’d told her Cat had given things away. She smoothed her hand over Beth’s hair and she looked up just once.
“I didn’t think you were being a bitch. Sometimes, I wish I were you.”
Max, standing there, believed that maybe Ella hadn't seen another solution. It still made her angry, because there were other solutions, and there had always been other solutions. Just like working for Ian had been a choice, a willful one, so was prostitution. Along the way, there had been tons of them, and while she pitied the woman standing across from her in the store, the anger was still there. "You have a college degree, Ella. You have a good voice. Use it," she said, because giving up was something Max didn't do - she didn't know how. In Ella's situation, Max would have run the world over to get her shot, but she'd never had that talent or that chance, so she ran the world over in other ways.
As for being a bitch, Max just shrugged. "Most people think telling the truth makes a person a bitch. That's just how the world is." And that was just plain fact. She shoved the glasses onto her head without thinking, and she rubbed at her bloodshot eyes. "Listen, Ella. I just want what's best for you and Beth, alright? Growing up around men who want sex for money isn't good for her. Growing up around men like Ian, who people tell you is bad, isn't good for her. If you'll swallow your pride and have sex with men you don't know, swallow it and take advice and help from people who you just want to see you get on your feet, alright? Talk to the lawyer when he calls. Stop paying the medical bills. I'll cover the apartment while you look for a new job. Get a roommate somewhere cheaper, if you need to. Living cheap isn't going to ruin her life," she said, nodding to Beth, "but finding out her mother does sex work will change how she sees the world, and they start noticing things earlier than you'd believe."
The glasses came back down again, and Max took a step back. "If saying that makes me a bitch, fine. I don't care."
There had been plenty of people ready to run the world down for a shot. Ella had wanted hers - badly - but she had wanted to know what being loved without conditions was like more, and she had given up thinking much on spotlights and where they were when she’d moved in to an apartment they could barely afford with Coop. It stung, plenty, that list of bare fact right out in public and Ella noticed the way a couple of people intending to pick up milk along with their groceries, skirting around the aisle along with noticing the red-rimmed look to Max’s eyes, but Max was back behind the blank safety of mirrored dark glasses before she might have said anything at all.
“Living cheap’s what I’ve been doing,” Ella said plainly as if it didn’t sting at all to hear it all laid out, “So it’s not that. But I wanted- ” and she looked again at that sister who was a stranger, who was giving her things again Ella wouldn’t have known how to ask for, that she didn’t think could be given. Ella didn’t know how you said I wanted you not to look at me like that, I wanted you not to have to save me speaking plain or at all so she closed her mouth, and she nudged the basket with the edge of her scuffed sandal as she thought it, and then she said, “I wanted not to have to ask you for things, anything, when you were living your own life.” It sounded like she meant, when we were strangers, and she said nothing about not working like that or giving it up because Ella thought it was obvious that no one would, if they could.
“I know you want what’s best for her,” a hitch-shrug of shoulders, as if it were as obvious as everything else; Ella had heard Amanda and she had gleaned what little she had and she knew Max thought things hard and blunt. “It doesn’t make you anything, saying it all out loud. I want her growing up the right way. Same as you do for Amanda.”
Max didn't argue. She'd said what she needed to say, even if she hadn't intended to say it at all. But it was done, and it was over. Whether Ella listened or not, well, she didn't have any control over that. She didn't say anything about not wanting to ask, or about wanting what was best for the little girl perched on Ella's hip, either. She just nodded down the aisle, toward the direction she was intentionally head. "I need to go," she said, and it wasn't necessarily true, but there was nothing left to say, and her hip was starting to scream as loudly as her head was. Behind the dark glasses, her gaze lingered. She wished - not for the first time in her life - that she and Ella had the kind of relationship that would allow for confidences, because even Max wanted that, and now Daniels was gone and she had no annoying blonde conscience, which she so desperately needed. But this had never been that, and there was no point in trying to wish it into being.
Max smiled at the squirmy little girl, and she gave Ella a nod, and then she moved past her sister and toward the Excedrin and generic Gatorade.
She watched the smile slide toward Beth, the smile Beth took and gave right back all fearless, tiny queen in arms, and she watched Max go, the straight-backed military lilt to her spine that said anything in Max’s path would get knocked on down. And if Ella wished for confidences and the kind of relationship that was smiles and laughter and holding out her daughter when Beth reached like it was something she wanted, then it wasn’t worth wishing over. You saved wishes for things you could take home and dream on, instead of things that just weren’t going to happen at all.
And if the lawyer called - Ella’s thoughts stretched to where life might be if an anchor didn’t weigh you down at the ankles. If the lawyer called, maybe it didn’t matter.