PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-12-28 14:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | lily evans, pepper potts |
Who: Russ and Marina
What: Money post-gambling trip and a doorstep fight. Oh, and Nathan.
When: Backdaaated. Like, a lot.
Warnings: Foul language.
November had always seemed like a kind of holiday limbo to Marina. With gutted pumpkins going to rot on front porch steps and the vague notion of Christmas around the corner. These months didn't mean a lot to a girl with no family. Foster parents got tip-toeing around the holidays, never sure if they were overstepping or how much was too much. Sometimes they just didn't do anything in favor of doing too much. Even when she'd had a family, the celebrated holidays had been strange ones. Marina didn't remember Halloween or Thanksgiving, she remembered the Moroccan independence day with the streets full of paint-faced people and flower-shaped cookies dipped in honey. Her life had never been one for witch costumes and yule time pecan pie. By the time she'd turned up in foster care, she was too old for trick or treating and too jaded for the make believe comfort of family meal time. She spent those foster Thanksgivings with her headphones on tight, smoking on the roof. She knew nothing of green bean casserole or how to make it, and she was really regretting that now.
Marina was entirely unprepared for all of the little things that came along with motherhood, like holidays. She was trying, though. Carving pumpkins and dropping a frozen pie in the oven meant finding some shred of normalcy for her son where normalcy didn't exist. She was still figuring out the details. The pumpkin, for example, it had a crooked smile, and the top had been lost somewhere, but that provided Marina the perfect excuse to use it as an ashtray until she finally got the energy to throw the damn thing away. Until that day, it could keep sitting on her front step. It could keep going brown. Marina imagined that most people had a map, some kind of geography for doing right that was laid out by their own childhood, but she had nothing. It was all kind of hit and miss, which was a little more terrifying because it meant admitting that she didn't know what she was doing and everything was up in the fucking air. Even the prospect of green bean casserole.
It was the same apartment it'd been all those years ago. Same ground level shithole with the same neighbors who couldn't mind their own damn business. Years ago, they complained about the noise like they thought pissing her off was going to change anything, but today they didn't mind the noise so much. Most nights it was movies played too loud or Marina shouting on the phone, but today it came from around the back corner of the building, where Nathan was playing with the neighbor kids in a rousing game of five year old birthday tag, which took precedence over interest in any kind of presents that Marina had been able to claw together. It felt guilty to be grateful over something like that, that he had friends to distract him from how little she could give him, and she smoked to alleviate the worry.
Today she was bare feet and a red dress that she pulled an old zip-up hoodie over to combat the bite in the air. One of the dads came with her up front to smoke away from the kids, and their conversation mapped the usual demographic of single mom meets lonely married man bullshit. She wondered when she'd stopped caring about if what came out of somebody's mouth was so rehearsed, like Mr. upstairs' clearly was. Marina didn't analyze it too far, she just took a drag off of her cigarette and flicked it into the empty head of the pumpkin.
There were no pumpkins squatting on the porch where Russ lived. Pumpkins read family, they read a bowl full of cheap Halloween candy that was ready to be handed out, instead of eaten in the dark, washed down with swigs of cheap-as-fuck beer or better yet, the house unlit, left alone until Halloween had ended itself, little kids running around like spooks. He’d lost the details of holidays sometime down the line; a vague notion Thanksgiving resided in November and a surer certainty of Christmas. Russ hated Christmas, he hated expectation as weighty as a brick through the fucking window and his own hope that maybe this year things would be better. It never fucking was. There wasn’t face-paint and costumes and there was no fucking tree, no presents shoved under it like gift-wrapped surety of parental love. Normalcy was sparse nothing, a lacking rather than the pencil lines encouraged by school, colored in.
The motorcycle was a thick and throaty purr, choked up at the edge of the road. Russ knew the damn way. He knew it well enough that the first couple of months had been remembering not to drive that way, conscientious effort not to drive past, leave the night silent instead of lit up bright. He knew the neighbors, interfering assholes and he knew police lights painting the night bright blue when it was late.
He was rangy length in the middle distance, clean and his hair was desert-dark, plastered to his head still damp from the shower. Russ was easy lines in worn denim and clean cotton, the gathered tension beneath the surface thin-stringed worry. A little of it, the worry of weeks had sagged out, air escaped like a balloon. There was only ten thousand, in the bag he lifted off the back of the bike, not the twenty Marina had demanded like a banshee in the middle of the night, but ten grand was enough, Russ figured, for school and whatever debts stood gathering dust from hospital visits five years hence. He’d drop it off, and if there was an ask for more, legality hung heavily and uneasily at the back of his mind, the unambiguousness of paperwork, of names written down in blank boxes. Marina didn’t want it anymore than he did, didn’t want a damn of pinning the kid to him like a lost mitten tied to a string.
Russ took in the scene, whoever the fuck he was stood on the step making real clear what it was he wanted, expected and Marina, loose red licking around her knees. The cut of his jaw was clear-set, the clarity of blue eyes sharply unpleasant.
“Interrupting?” The bag hung at his side, loose in fingertips; Russ looked past Marina to whoever the hell he was, wedding ring and cigarette.
With her tongue in her teeth and a shot of memory acid lingering on the tongue, Marina watched Russ walk up like a reprint of bad news. Russ was that issue of the post that people kept wrapped up and collected in the attic like they didn't think anything that bad could ever happen again. But it always did, didn't it? Marina mapped his unhappy eyes and the sad refrain of whatever he'd brought along with him in that bag that hung like some kind of dead weight that he couldn't wait a minute longer to cast loose. Marina managed not to really look up until he spoke though, as if Russ' voice was the only real clue that he was here at all. Not that there was any way she'd missed the violent purr of his bike as it made its way down memory lane and back into her parking lot. Her neighbors must have thought it was some twisted kind of deja vu. Single dad certainly made a face, and Marina actually smiled when Russ asked if he was interrupting. "Usually," the word was a sigh of smoke on its final escape.
But she tipped her head at the guy that was her smoke break company, and that was enough for him to take it as a clue that he could get out of there. Some guys might have wanted to stick around to ensure that she wasn't going to get the smile slapped off of her face, but anybody who'd spent any sufficient amount of time with Marina suspected that she could handle herself or she just deserved what was coming for her. Either way, it left her alone with Russ on the sad state of the front stoop. One-eyed pumpkin the only witness to their budding tension.
"You can't come over here without calling, that's not how this works. You can't just show up," she bristled.
Russ didn’t let the man skedaddle without a long look at his back, at the heavy weight of the ring on his finger. Standing up in front of an altar and swearing to love someone through death just looked sicker and stupider each time you caught someone who had that band pinning them down breathing hard in someone else’s direction. Not that Marina didn’t draw attention, she’d been the central knot in a strand of men, bars all over the damn city, her fingers around his wrist or her voice rising over the melee each time she tried running his blood hot enough to give a damn, each time he walked toward instead of away. She was dangerous as broken glass and barbed wire, always had been until the blood ran down his palm, until the sirens squealed.
Russ grunted contempt, shoved a hand into the soft-as-silk pocket of his worn denim jeans and looked her over, long and slow. She’d been trussed up like it was battle the first time, the hard topaz of her eyes pure poison, and she’d been middle-of-the-night bad dream the last time, cotton rubbed thin with five years to make it thinner and the frazzled ribbon at her neck to draw attention to the hollow of her collarbone. Now she looked more like the Marina he knew, the Marina who’d dance bare-foot in the middle of the street, step into damn fountains in the front of hotels and laugh hysterically as he hauled her out damp and dripping. Now she looked even more like danger.
He didn’t give a damn if he was interrupting. He dropped the bag and it fell with a sick, final weight - a heavy, unyielding sound beneath nylon. Russ unfurled his fingers where the handles had scored into his palm, across the digits, worked blood back into fingers with his thumb. “Why not? You showed up with spray paint.” Quiet venom in answer to a cobra-sway; Russ wasn’t spoiling for the damn fight but hell, he’d do it anyway.
"You know full well why the fuck not!" Her liontamer tongue did a whip-snap from behind her teeth, part voodoo curse and part wild animal snarl. They'd never been phone people, and apparently the tendency toward casual drop ins hadn't budged an inch in the last five years. When they'd been in a smooth state of getting along, there'd never been phones. Russ wasn't anything close to talkative even on a good day, and its not like either of them had much of a need for conversation anyway. No point in talking about shit jobs or how the day went, it worked out a lot better when Russ would just show up on her front step with a six pack and knuckles still greased from the shop. When they got along, Marina didn't even mind the way he stained her clothes while pulling them off her, and Russ wouldn't complain if she forgot to put the beer in the fridge. They'd drink it hours later, when it was just a little warm, and that too took up any need for conversation.
When they were in the midst of a breakup or a three day spat, there definitely weren't phone calls. They'd just show up drunk and surly, ready to make a point that occurred to them in the middle of another sleepless night spent going over the details of an unending argument just one more time. Or she'd show up, full-tilt investigative madwoman mode at dusk. Ready to wait in the parking lot all night if she had to just to find out who he was screwing now that he had the free time to do so. Not that Russ was any better. Even when they'd been broken up, she couldn't get a date at half of the bars she usually haunted. After enough guys lost enough teeth, Marina's jealous ex-boyfriend became a ghost story told by the regulars to whatever fresh faced idiot that tried to buy her drink. That kind of guerilla warfare didn't need phone calls or advanced notice. In fact, the only people in their lives that used phones were their neighbors, and that was usually to call the police when the shouting got too loud and they thought for sure somebody was going to die this time.
"Its called common courtesy, Russ. I've got a life here, and I don't need you comin' around and.. What the hell is this?" Her attention befell the bag with all the lip curling distrust of a woman who had perfect grounds to expect a pipe bomb from any ex that came sniffing around her door. That didn't stop her from picking it up though, kitten claws tipped molten tangerine like suzy homemaker gone nuclear. What she saw inside pushed Marina into a long moment of stunned silence, and that alone was really worth ten grand. She blinked up at him, Colorado gold dust blooming wide. "You got lucky in Atlantic City?"
No, warning wasn’t their style. The low, humming incoming certainty of a bad mood came like a tornado’s whistle, the tempest knotted up between the two curdled milk, peeled paint, set skin itching like impossibility of scratching instead of anything like warning. Russ shuffled old boots on terracotta tile, watched the pattern of her bare feet sketch out her steps like a dance, the arches stretch and flatten as she peeled apart the bag like it was a present instead of blood money. There was no such thing as common courtesy when he’d had her nails, whatever damn color they’d been then, score into him like stripes and there was no such thing as common courtesy now, Marina a bad dream to be had over and over. He looked instead, as she picked over hundred dollar bills still clean and bound up the way no casino would bother with, at the gray puff of ash at the edge of the step and he took no further step forward. His thumbs stayed hooked into his pockets and the damp gold of his hair was sticky on his neck.
“It ain’t twenty,” he said, hastily, and cleared his throat when it came out wrong, like expectation mounted up and sticking against his back teeth. “It’s ten and you can find a fucking school for ten.” Russ had hospital bills that were under a hundred, where they charged for the thread they stitched you up with and the doc who did it was terse with boredom and bad temper, snapped the white gloves like the punctuation at the end of the sentence. He could not imagine hospital bills that ran much higher, stays in places that smelled like plastic and cleanliness. There was comfort in being home. He lifted his hand to the back of his neck, scratched slowly with fingernails cleaner but dark-rimmed from habit, oil crammed into the corners so many times they were stained.
He didn’t like the poisoned-sugar look, kitten-innocence now she had her damn way. She hadn’t given a shit about money before, he’d caught her lighting her cigarettes with ten dollar bills once, see if the smoke tasted different but she was horror-movie music tense now, the orange fingers (Russ didn’t know tangerine from any other damn shade) flicked over the contents like she was still deciding whether to throw something.
Money had never meant much, which was convenient since neither of them ever fucking had any. An abstract concept that she'd never put a lot of thought or worry into. No real grasp on things like saving bonds or bank accounts, any money she ever got ahold of was burned through(sometimes literally) for the immediate thrill of it. Even when she was piss poor, she could be so happy. There were lots of nights comprised of lit candles when the power got cut off, and dinner was a case of mangos that she bought off some Salvadorian kids down the street for a handful of quarters. Three dollar bottles of wine and a radio that ran on batteries. Those nights were peasant beautiful.
But things were different now. She couldn't afford(funny enough) to think like that. Marina didn't count the money, but she ran some fingers over it, letting a graffiti bright fingernail ticker the bills. It was damn obvious that her continued state of quiet that she hadn't expected this. Hadn't expected a fucking crumb or even loose change from him without a bit more of a fight to be put up. Her thoughts were a witches brew of bad words and bitch venom, so going back to some kind of default setting for congeniality felt like unsteady ground. She'd been plenty prepared to give Russ a hard time for some time longer, but…
Behind her back, the front door opened with the kind of quickness that made the secondary screen door shudder, gasping metal on metal. The screen nudged her shoulder, and when Marina glanced back, there he was. Ninja Turtles t-shirt and a yellow party hat bound to his little head with an elastic string. He didn't look near dark enough to be hers, but Marina was only a quarter Haitian herself. He had her hair, though. Unruly black silk that was beginning to curl around the ears, begging for a haircut. In the game of genetics, Nathan got freckles and those big blue eyes that were all Campbell. "Manman, can we have birthday cake?" The question started out with breathless excitement, but coiled softly at the end as the little boy glanced between his mother and the man she was talking to.
"Looks like you already got into it, bebe," she said of the smudge of blue frosting on his cheek. Marina wasn't expected the metallic note of fear on the back of her tongue, and she determinedly didn't look at Russ as the taste swam with a sea of worried fish into her bloodstream. "Go back inside, Nathan." She rubbed the frosting away from his cheek with the ribbed sleeve cuff of her hoodie, nudging him back into the direction from where he came.
"Mais, manman, the protest began, and Marina cut it off at the knees with a word in clipped French that sent the five year old back inside with a huff, door falling shut behind him. Only then did Marina look to Russ, weighing what to say as she cleared her throat and debated another cigarette. "Birthday party," she explained of the frosting that now stained her fingers and sleeve.
Russ stepped off terracotta and back to the dirt that lapped up to the step, grass yellowed and untrimmed and unkept despite the softly half-rotten pumpkins lining the steps. It looked same way it always had, like deja vu and the dream you woke from, sweating from and thanked all things you prayed to that it hadn’t happened yet. Marina looked the same. He didn’t know if he recognized the dress or he just thought of Marina in red, the flared line of her collarbone naked and the sparked gold of her calculation obvious. Her fingers slip-slid over bills he’d counted stonily over a fold-out poker table in a city that set up its altars to slot machines and blackjack tables, in a sweaty-hot back room with a bunch of men who’d kill him if they caught a card in the wrong place. He felt relief, like a piece of broken glass, lodge itself in his rib-cage, jagged on each breath. Done. She’d asked for twenty but she’d take ten, way she was looking at it and he was done.
And then the door eased open, squeaky hinges and rust-ripe metal and Russ looked up from an examination of the porch at her bare feet, the crack in the stone where the weeds had crept in, and he turned the mottled color of old milk. It could have been any little kid. The hat meant a birthday party, or it did on TV; Russ and his sister had never had the kind of birthdays celebrated with cheap paper hats or cake, anything except a clip around the ear. Kids had other kids to birthday parties but this one wore Marina’s smile, the kind that could light a dirty bar, flame out the seedy until she drew you on in. Russ didn’t self-examine in the mirror, he hadn’t five years of parting chromosomes one by one in the still of the nights, tracing baby flesh through to sturdiness to find himself in there too. He saw the drakes’ tails curls of a little kid, inky as Marina’s at the neck and he heard the French, sliding over his memory like rain falling on dust.
It felt like he stopped breathing. His lungs sagged, papery-empty in his chest and his ribs squeezed tight like a vice. The loose, calm look that had seized up the minute one boot had stepped down onto dirt at the side of her house, that was gone. Russ looked like death had stopped by to pay a visit.
He didn’t say a word. His teeth tasted like sand, his tongue wouldn’t part from the roof of his mouth. He looked at her, dismay and betrayal coupled together like old friends as the screen door slammed closed with a shriek of rusted metal.
The betrayal on his face was a wedge gone thick and barbed between them. Different from anger, because Marina wanted to push at that until it fell over, but this was a two-edged sword that looked like it would hurt her right back if she started clawing her way in. Russ looked at her like she'd planned it, and that brought about a sad, tired tick of a smile to her mouth's unpainted edge. Marina was actually a little disappointed in herself that she hadn't planned it, that was an orchestration of events worthy of her Machiavellian mother. But Marina wasn't her mother; she didn't have that cool, European grace, and she didn't treat her child like he was fully capable of handling whatever game or trick she felt like dragging him into for cheap thrills and profit. Yeah, her mother would have had Nathan show up whining of hunger, barefoot and powdered to look pale. Just a little something to plant the kind of guilt that didn't ever go away. Marina had been quite the little actress by the time she was five, she remembered.
Russ hadn't said a damn word, and she hadn't either since explaining the party. The money under her arm was a win for the house and that softened her. Her temper was notorious, but it was also capricious, fallen by the wayside and forgotten in favor of other things so regularly that it could make a man's head spin. One day she was throwing steel pots at his head, and the next she was slowdances in the kitchen. Sins momentarily forgotten, but never quite forgiven, as she dragged up the past like a gravedigger looking for gold when it suited her. And even if Russ had ridden up to her door with a half-cocked scowl and the readiness to bite back, Marina wasn't in the mood to fight. Not at her kid's party.
"Come inside," she said while stepping back and easing the screen door open with the kind of shrill cry that said the hinges never got greased because that was what functioned as an alarm system on this side of town. It was difficult to tell if she was asking him to come in, because it really sounded a bit more like telling. "He doesn't know who you are, no harm in it." And maybe there was a bit of vindication purring through the words. Russ looked like he'd just tasted glass, and she wanted to watch him chew on it for awhile.
The screen door yelped like a dog but Russ could hear the words just fine, like counters clicking down, ten thousand on red sixteen, the years that lined up ahead until the little boy with Marina’s smile beyond the door, was all grown up. He had no vivid example of past as future-present, nothing of birthday parties beyond the cartoon birthday cards that had cycled around his class at school, Russ sat deep and sulking in his plastic chair with his knuckles scuffed bloody from someone else’s nose and the taste of cake frosting a saccharine imagining on his hungry tongue. He was not a man who imagined most things, his world was one that could be put together and taken apart with a little oil and grease and effort and imagination stretched it beyond the neat and mechanical grooves it ran upon.
He looked at the door now with the doubt of a man poised on the mouth of hell, like all that lay behind it was ten times worse than imagination could make it. Behind it was that kid, and Russ heard he doesn’t know who you are with the condemnation his brother would have weighted it with, with the quiet contempt from Sam and looked at her instead. There was something of the drowning man in there, dogpaddling toward the only safety known. His boots scuffed to the edge of the step, non-committal and his hands rammed deeper into the known mysteries of his pockets.
She didn’t look like a mother. She still didn’t look like one, even though that kid had come out - Nathan, Russ had a name now like a piece of broken glass to add to all the others, a name he hadn’t wanted, had ignored - and acknowledged her as one. But Marina didn’t look bitter as battery acid stirred into honey, but she was.
“Yeah, better not,” he said, looking uncomfortable as if he were holding something hot that was better dropped before it scalded, “He might,” Russ gave the yawning dimness beyond the screechy door a baleful eye, “Ask shit.” He would have done. Five was old enough for questions, even the kind of five babied enough to be smeared up with frosting and to whine in French. Five was old enough to wonder what the hell your mama was doing. “‘Less you bring strange men home all the fucking time.” Chin up. Challenge.
"Not all the time," was what she said when he challenged. Words stirred slow and thickened with lies, sweetened by the timely drawl of her voice, as if she really had to think about what constituted 'all the time.' Her eyes were rust and topaz mottled with coal dust, bronze age beauty that had stared up at him through heavy eyelids and moonlight five years past. They were eyes that glowed in the heat of it, but burned in the hate of it. This was when it was the hardest to tell if she was lying.
Marina lied for the taste of it. She stretched her own truth thin, twisted it into a knot for the sole purpose of pissing others off. She wasn't her parents, she didn't lie to get things, unless that thing was a reaction. Marina could bend the truth until it snapped, then shoved the broken pieces into somebody else's hands for the emotional clean up that she was inevitably too ill-equipped to deal with. She didn't lie to make herself look good, she'd never been that traditional. Right now, she lied to stitch herself a scarlet letter.
If Russ could imagine her bringing home a pantheon of strange fucks, that was fine by her. It was certainly more exciting than the truth, which was that single moms weren't the hot commodity that romantic comedies would have one believe. She'd dated a handful of times to no avail, and even that had been back in the days when Nathan was still in diapers. Marina cocked her red hip into the screened door jamb, reading the man down a step from her. "And they don't stay long," she continued, deadpan as a poison drinking battle of wits.
Russ didn’t lie well. He got tangled up in the loops, the oroboros endless and the twists and turns of it drove him impatient. Russ lied like a kid who’d been caught in too many to care, squared off and stubborn chin and hands shoved into the depths of his pockets like an asshole at a podium, ready to make a speech. He lied with cards, the flattened-down and careful look of the kid learning math by working out how far to stretch a dollar from the damaged goods shelf at the market, and he lied flippantly now. ‘I’ll call’, ‘we’ll do this again sometime’, his belt clanking against his jeans and his feet bare on someone else’s carpet.
Russ thought first now of who they were. He gave them faces, briefly, of people he disliked and of people who he thought were the kind. The man who cut him up on the road to the garage, only to pull in and demand a full fucking service on his car, that was one, the married guy with the cigarette and the cloying smell of desperation, that was another. He did not lie then, the wired-tension coiled into muscle and he shifted his weight on the spot, all of that rigidity apparent under thin cotton. He thought of the way Marina curled bare, unblunted nails into worn sheets, screamed until the windows rattled, until she laughed, of the way she slept twisted around someone else, bared long length of thigh with another man’s hand laid along it.
He didn’t have a reason. He could still smell the soap from the shower that morning, see the sleepy curl of Jenny’s mouth when he’d left. He didn’t have a goddamn reason but the old, familiar poison seeped into cracks not stopped up, a shitty repair job done in the aftermath.
And then he thought of himself again. The men had come. The trailer had smelled that salt-thick musk for hours after, the hustle behind the curtain his mom had pulled to, he’d been small enough to see it from his berth where the couch flattened down into a bed. Little flowers dancing on white cotton that fluttered with each heavy movement from beyond. He thought of voices rough with cigarette smoke on the steps of the double-wide the following morning, slugging from beer at ten am, men who ruffled his hair and called him ‘kid’, over and over before he realized they just didn’t know his name. Uncles, who weren’t family, and men who didn’t give a shit about pretending, who liked the look in his mom’s eyes and the way she held out her arms, and who shoved past him when he didn’t move fast enough. Russ looked at the rusted-dark of the screen and saw, instead, the little kid who’d come out, frosting-smeared, same way he’d imagined Ford in his place at the door of the double-wide.
The plane of Russ’s jaw was solid, the disgust a written line along his back. He looked like maybe he would like to spit, instead of reach for her, and he looked briefly past her, as if the kid - momentarily, tweaked by his own regret, Russ thought of him as his kid - would rematerialize.
“Call yourself a fucking mother,” Russ said, with all the slow, deliberate disdain of a hypocrite.
She knew it would strike flint and burn him up. She knew it like a dozen thrown punches in the dark dive bars of memory. Bloody lipped bastards that were too drunk or just too stupid to register the war stare in Russ' eyes at the pool table from way across the room. Marina remembered, although she couldn't decide if the memory was real or concocted, that there'd been some leniency when they'd actually been dating. Even if neither of them ever risked using the word date or together. They preferred possessive pronouns like mine. When she'd been his and hed been hers, violence seemed just a little less likely. If some lust-eyed kid wandered into the wrong bar one night and tried to buy Marina a drink, a rough look or a tight string of words from Russ was enough to get them gone.
It was when there was a two week wedge of single life between them that things got messy. It was when she took to the dancefloor with somebody new, sweaty hot and sin-close for three songs straight that a fight inevitably broke out. It was when she hadn't seen Russ for the better half of a month, and he suddenly appeared with a girl on his lap who was everything that Marina wasn't(tits and blond and giggles), those were the nights that drinks got thrown or a catfight erupted in the ladies room. It was when it was supposed to be over, when it seemed glaringly obvious that the other had moved on, that they just couldn't let it go.
That's what Marina remembered now, brought to life in Russ' bristling. And she wasn't naive. She knew there was nothing romantic in this kind of jealousy. The idea of Marina fucking other guys didn't raise Russ' ire because he thought of Marina as his any longer, but simply because she once had been his. She marked it up to all of that decidedly male, predatory, territorial bullshit. She stood her ground in the aftermath of his disdain, absorbing it with crossed arms, which was a practiced means of not lashing out at him with slaps or claws.
"Well, if Nathan needs a dad," she challenged. "I'm gonna find him one." Isn't that what single moms did? Found some guy that didn't mind and got married for the bullshit security of it? Didn't sound all that ideal, but she suspected Russ would buy it. Marina found that she liked the idea of Russ hating her. That curled upper lip looked good on him, and she didn't mind being the source of it. The truth was loud between them, there was no escaping it, it was written bold and signed off on by doctors and nurses, confirmed and highlighted. Russ could hate her because he had no choice but to comply with her, she was a part of his life forever now. It seemed like perfect justice for the five years she spent hating him for the very same thing, he was an asshole that had cursed her with a lifetime of having to think about him. Even if there came to be a point where it all was worked out in court and they never had to see one another again and the money came in the mail, she'd still think about him. Every time she looked at Nathan, she was sure she'd think of him. So Russ could hate her for a change, that was just fine.
It was like fragments of dry paper held to a candle’s flame, the hissing black smoke of intended incendiary outcome. Russ remembered hating her more than he’d hated anyone (hate was easy, it burned out everything else, scorched what it stood on and rotted away any notion of softer, smaller feelings) from across a bar, or a pool table, watching her laugh, leonine-gold locked in on someone else. He remembered hating her for all that she was and all she took away, the certainty of nonchalance - as much as he remembered the violent undoing and remaking, snaked hips and the curl of her fingernails scoring out a line on his back. Marina could do it. She could find a man willing to overcome the headfuck required to stay acquiescent to the bullshit, the fights in a shower of broken glass, she could find a man willing to ignore a little boy in the back room because there were plenty of those. Men who gave far more for the fuck than they did for the kid listening with his hands clamped over his ears to his mother screaming like it was blood and death.
He hadn’t thought much about Nathan. He’d tried hard to avoid acquiring a name, to picking up the pieces of a kid who was better off as far away as possible, dreaming of a dad who rode a firetruck or maybe some guy who added up for a living in a tie and a suit. Russ remembered the guys who came by and thought they were doing something good, playing pretend dad for the half hour before Lou got good and liquored up, knocked him back with her hip into the back of the trailer and out the fucking way of the main event. He’d thought Marina would find someone maybe, someone with a job that took clean nails and a white shirt, maybe boring but into kids, the kind of guy who’d drop his car off for an oil-change or for a flat, rather than do it himself.
But guys with clean nails and white shirts didn’t pick kids up when fucking their mothers and Marina, she’d fuck the world if she thought it owed her. Russ thought of blue frosting and washed-out Ninja Turtles, a kid who didn’t know how shit worked yet.
“Sure,” he said, acid scoring a line under disbelief made real clear, “Ain’t no good at being a mother so fuck someone else who’ll maybe give parenting a try, yeah?” It sounded like discord, like the first greedy snatch and crackle of flame. He didn’t want shit to do with the kid and he wasn’t any kid’s day-dream; this was exactly why he’d never wanted to meet it. Marina was flagellation and bad dreams, a kid was an anchor weighted in a sea he didn’t want to wade in on.
“Fuck this.” Russ wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the door, he was looking toward the kid who didn’t have Lou and didn’t have another kid on route to raise. But maybe Marina wasn’t doing it right, the way he figured she would.
Beyond the rust and the screen worn to the point of feathering metal, the apartment was afternoon bright. There were plenty of windows, so even on the ground floor, they got a blinding kind of sunshine. Marina had never been fond of curtains, which was a little surprising considering how aesthetically busy her design scheme was. The living room was patchworked with varying shades of blue, punctuated with multi-colored ceramic knick knacks from garage sales and flea markets. Lush plants both hung from the ceiling in macrame nets and were seated in terracotta pots on the hardwood floor, crammed into almost every corner whether it was convenient or not. Not much had changed in five years, except for the fact that Marina managed to acquire more stuff. The television was still old, and the couch was lumpy under its upholstery if Russ was up to remembering those kinds of details.
In the living room alone there were memories ripe for the picking, if he was feeling brave enough to reach for them. Late nights with skin bathed in a television's glow. Sunday afternoons, coffee and a bit of samba in the kitchen. Lots of laughter. Now, metallic bows and wrapping paper were strewn across the vibrant throw rug where they'd once slept, too exhausted to make it down the hall to the bedroom. The torn packaging of a couple new toys laid there, vacant as unused caskets on a showroom floor. Children could be seen out back, as it was a clear shot from the front door to the sliding glass door of the patio. Patio was a generous word for the concrete slab that boasted the plastic beach chair that Marina laid out and sunned herself on during the warmer months. Distantly, around the corner that led to the kitchen, a couple of adults could be seen sitting at a small table, drinking dark bottles of beer.
She let him get the words out. She didn't interrupt, and she didn't attack him mid-sentence, even when a surge of hurt and rage clawed through her chest like a mutant fever. Marina stood valkyrie vigilant, and then she drew a deep breath. This was no dramatic gasp, but rather a low and slow pull to replenish what she'd lost in the minute before when she'd unknowingly held her breath while holding her tongue. When she spoke, the cultured cream of her voice was soft, but not gentle. "You wouldn't dare try to criticize my parenting if you were half the man you apparently think you are." Then, before he could challenge her on that, Marina stepped in closer, cutting in to try and block his view of the door, or just ensuring that she was the primary thing in his line of sight. "I'm a damn good mother, don't you ever say I'm not." Her bronze eyes looked wild, dangerous.
Russ remembered waking with the honey-warmth of early morning sunlight pooling on his bare back and on his ass, Marina felix-content with the springy mass of her hair coiled up against his nose. He remembered skidding on rugs, so drunk he could barely stand, and he remembered driving a fist through the sheetrock, white dust sprinkled over red-broken knuckles and shattered pieces from the glass she’d pitched at his head as Marina screamed loud enough to wake the dead and send them back.
Russ had not grown anywhere that looked like home and he hadn’t acquired the trappings as he went. The place she’d daubed with bad humor and poor taste in paint, it looked exactly the same on the inside as when the agent had walked him through, except a little shabbier, beat up in the corners, an ode to indecision and lack of taste. Russ didn’t stamp himself in on a room, he stalked other people’s. But he remembered Marina’s house, the pattern the springs in the lumpy couch tattooed on his back and the lazy warmth of it. Russ didn’t think of this as how home felt, exactly, but seeing it remade, discarded birthday paper and the happy shrieks of little kids from the yard - it looked like a half-price version of the shit on TV, a remake or a rip-off of something more substantial, mothers with casseroles and cookies, who couldn’t claw a man’s eyes out when she looked like that.
But she slid into the cut-out of the doorframe, danger cut clear in the taut twist of her neck and the smoke and whiskey burn of her eyes better suited to the bars and playgrounds of the city that stank of piss. Russ didn’t take a damn from that, Lou had got plenty mad when challenged, sob-stories reeled off with her hands clamped down on his shoulders until the bones bruised, holding him fast as he twisted, twitched like a goddamn puppet. Indecision was a war written over Russ’s face, blue eyes cool as contempt. He remembered Marina occasional-sweet as dulce de leche, things whispered in languages he didn’t understand when the night sweated dark, Marina who broke every plate in the cupboard in fury and then sobbed without consolement in a rage that rolicked through the apartment and sent the sirens wailing once again. She could have been a mother for lunchboxes and kisses at the classroom door, but she was barefoot and the dulled embered end of a cigarette now. All she needed was a fucking bottle half-empty and dulled-over eyes.
“Go back to your kid then,” Russ dismissed her, old ghosts lingering, flickering like cinematography in the corners of the porch. He turned on scuffed boots, toward the bike at the corner and away from memory lined up like a firing squad to take him down.
Marina's throat burned, building acidwashed words that she would have flung in his face like broken glass. But before she got a chance to say any of it, he was turning away from her, bristling with his fed up dismissal. Like so many doors slammed in her face. She set her teeth and narrowed her eyes and dug neon fingernails into her hips as Russ strode off, but she didn't head after him. There was a time when she would have, she would have stalked after him with shoves and spit words, but that kind of reaction belonged buried back with the days when she'd still been trying to make it work. Whatever it had been.
What she ended up saying was, "Don't you come back here." All warning and no dare, she crossed back to the little concrete slab that functioned as a front stoop without looking back. Bag of money tucked under one arm and fuming, the screen door slammed in a sharp rattle behind her when she vanished back inside, the metal scraped rusty on itself like a cry from a dusty trailer park nightmare.