Vegas: log Russ C/Marina S Who: Russ, Marina and Nathan What: Extremely bad parenting. When: Before the doors melded! Warnings: Russ and Marina.
The throb of the bike pulsed out over the neighborhood quiet, scrap metal and wheels and a choked, throaty kind of roar. This end of town, people kept behind the screens and they dialed the police before they heard the fights end, but Russ figured enough people had moved in and moved out of the boxy houses on the street that some didn’t know exactly when the fights started. The boot came down before the judder of the engine cut out, scuffed work boots and washed-to-white denim, and the silence, now seemingly unreal, drained back in around the bike drawn close up to the curb where Marina’s house sat squat.
There was the rustle of pharmacy-fresh paper, crumpled bag centered in a fist as Russ shoved the helmet to the side, fished out of the back pannier and swung himself off the bike with the weighted certainty of a really old dog expecting to be kicked good for showing up at the back porch. He didn’t know a damn thing about kids, and illnesses. He didn’t know anything that couldn’t be fixed with the cough syrup from the school nurse, and maybe a thermometer in the mouth and the kid sister had been as hardy as him, more likely to be bruised and bleeding from picking fights than out and out sick. He’d thought about maybe looking it up, the computer in the office at work but Boss was in, and Boss was ornery, and Russ circled out wide and worked on a car that had been sat there a while rather than flitter in on the tail-end of another tiger-rage.
The screen door squeaked when he opened it to knock on the inner door, and the rust had parsed through a hole, eaten away at the mesh until it spidered out, oxidised red. He knocked quiet first, rap of knuckles same way he knocked when expecting Boss to yell, and then harder.
It was the whine of the screen door that roused her with a cold snap of adrenaline in her stomach. Jerk, inhale, blink. A barely-there dream dissolved in the backlot of conscious memory, and Marina rubbed a hand across her eyes, trying to simultaneously figure out when she'd fallen asleep and what had awoken her. Then, she heard the knocking. Rolling sideways on the blue couch, a fingertip pulled at the blinds. It was still daylight, but the sun was sinking, and even with her sharp lean and tilt, she couldn't quite see who was knocking.
When the knocking didn't stop, Marina got up with a wince, muscles protesting from seven hours sat in a hospital chair. She shook the nap off, pushing the swollen, black chaos of her hair out of her face. She could be heard on the other side when the knocking got more fervent, disgruntled Haitian voodoo swirling in a pot of shadows, and she jerked the door open with a What that was default unfriendly. But upon realizing it was Russ, she softened momentarily. Then steeled right the fuck back up, the collateral damage of their last encounter not quite forgotten.
"What the hell do you want?" She glanced instinctively over one shoulder as the words came out, but Nathan wasn't behind her. She suspected he was still taking a much-needed nap, although she'd have to rouse him soon if she didn't want him wide awake at 2 AM. Bristled, Marina looked back to Russ. Eyebrows arched high, expectantly waiting for a reason to bitch. The effect was usually worthy of recoil, but not today. Today she had on a slept-in tee-shirt and old jeans, clothes pulled on in the early morning dark on her way to the hospital. She looked tired, and when the amber flare of her eyes lifted, it was obvious she'd spent some of the day crying.
He’d been a little kid once, watching some show about circuses on the TV, picture a little fuzzy from a fight that had been one too many vodka bottles thrown at the set. There weren’t no circuses out there at the back end of nothing, a strip of dirt and a handful of trailers thrown down like marbles, but he’d been intent and right up close next to the picture when they said something about approaching the lions, opening the cage door right up to feed them something. The little man, fuzzy like static walked right on up as the man who was nothing but a voice said something about fear getting you eaten right up. Russ stood on the doorstep with the sun blotted out at his back, soft twilight seeping over the edge of his jacket and paper in his hand expecting the snarl of a tiger beneath the snap of the worn-out screen door.
The lion in the cage had backed up, ignored the man for the meat in an ecstasy of bathetic disappointment for the little boy with dirt under his fingernails and the adrenaline of anticipation hissing through his veins. Marina’s voice held the fragmented spite expected but in pieces not jagged enough to hurt. Russ lifted his head from the intimate study of her front step to her face with the same feeling of acceleration draining down to the tick-tick-tick of an engine kept idling instead of full speed ahead. She looked broken in, like late nights and cigarettes one after the other, reddened eyes and a witch-halo of unbrushed hair. Russ slid his free hand into his back pocket, kicked his chin up past the lurch of unauthorized adrenaline into his veins like a cheap shot of tequila at the beginning of the night and shoved the paper bag forward without a word to its contents. Alarm bells, like late-night wake up calls.
“What’s wrong?” He’d never passed high school math and was struggling over cheap, library textbooks with basic algebra, but he could put one thing and the next together. It sounded edgy, he looked past her shoulder as if the kid would magically come forward and explain himself; he looked at her, as if the tearstreaks would translate. Russ pushed the paper bag at her hand as if this would make her take it, and put his other on her shoulder, stepping neatly past the doorstep and into the frame of the hall. “What happened? Where is he?”
"Nothing," was automatic. Like he'd slid a coin into the slot and a word fell out the bottom instead of a prize. There was then a flinching squint and a backward step when Russ shoved the bag of whatever at her. Raised voices and broken glass made Marina laugh lifelong in the throes of danger, but a what's wrong could make her frown worried like a warrior who'd only now realized they'd left their armor back at home. Oh well, battles(like shows) must go on. Her shoulders reeled back and her chin tipped high with eyebrows raised and the tip of her tongue balanced between wet fangs.
But then he was stepped past her. Not pushing or yelling or scowly anger.. just.. concern that looked as out of place on him as a flowered church hat would. The iron-hammered hostility stilled when he stepped into the dusky-dark entryway where sunset brought shadows into air that smelled like the potted mosses and ivys on every feasible windowsill. Marina watched after him for a moment, frowning before she pulled the front door shut and let the screen slap metallic back into its broken latch. "He's lying down, so how about you keep your goddamn voice down," she said in passing. The words lacked venom, though. Probably due to the peek she'd taken into the bag he'd brought. The look she gave him was a little amused, but mostly entertained disbelief. "Did you just buy one of everything?"
The look he gave her skittered like a billiard ball, bounced off raised eyebrows and a frown and weighted the corners of his mouth and the lines beside his eyes. The kid didn’t immediately present himself, bleeding or consumptive or dying for all the way Russ leaned around her like she presented no blockade at all, and he rocked back onto his feet and shoved both hands deep, cradled them in pockets rather than lay a single finger near her, venom bound up in tear-soaked exhaustion. Lying down could mean anything, but some of the pulled-down iron of Russ’s mouth that had set itself off at the look of tears, of delicacy of being rubbed-away, alleviated.
“No,” it was an echo of automation, the seamless push-pull of a fight bubbling at a levy still standing strong. He’d stood at a counter, impatience unraveling the stitches of whatever civility he had until it pulled into pieces as the doc (Russ equated white coats to medical staff, it didn’t matter if they had a fancy degree on a wall) recommended a raft of little bottles and boxes. “What they recommended.” The air smelled damp-heavy, green like no desert. It smelled like early mornings drinking coffee at the table beyond, like rinsing his teeth before the sun climbed high enough to care he was even there. The blue eyes flickered up and down, swept over sleep-creased cotton and wild hair with the uncritical eye of the observer. Russ turned his back, examined the walls, rotated on his heels to look at the offending screen when it slammed home, all with his hands in his pockets.
“Home remedies don’t do shit,” he said roughly, grasping for the bricks of hostility to build the wall between them high. It lacked volatility, the bitterness dissolving on his tongue like coffee.
"Yeah? And how would you know? You've never been sick a day in your life," she said with knowledge that extended years back, and sounded only just slightly like a compliment. Marina couldn't remember him ever even having a cold, but the desert was forgiving with that kind of thing. Dry air and smooth winters. She moved toward the kitchen, aware of him behind her where he stood still as a terracotta warrior. The paper of the pharmacy bag bunched in her hand, the top folded down and scrunched to close it nice and tight. Something to do with her hands while she paused mid-step and hesitated.
"Sit down" She said with a slight tilt of her head toward the blue couch. The television was off. The coffee tables was empty except for her keys and some crayons. The place seemed impossibly empty and quiet, despite all the stuff that decorated the walls and windowsills. Marina could have asked if he wanted to sit, but telling seemed a lot quicker. "You want some tea?" She asked it on her way through the little kitchen's entryway, depositing the paperbag on the counter just around the corner. She knew he didn't drink no damn tea, but she was inclined to make it for him anyway and watch him struggle through it.
Russ couldn’t remember sick himself that wasn’t two days whited out in nothing but sweaty-clinging cotton sheets and waking up groggy, something dead on his tongue. He remembered the other kinds, TV kids and chicken soup made on stove-tops, wrung-out wash cloths and doctoring. He remembered damp paper towels and canned soup microwaved half the way through, a tee-shirt damp-dark with sweat. There was nothing about being sick that shouldn’t be wiped away with drugs or sticky-red syrup if it could be afforded; Lou’s version of it was half-assed, like maybe she’d drunk herself so stupid she’d forgotten how it felt. The pharmacist had lined up boxes, counted off age-groups like this was magic you learned just by being around. Russ felt the hairs on the back of his neck crawl upward, static-wavering.
He didn’t want to sit. He didn’t want memory crawling out of the black spaces to point out the couch was tilted further left than it had been, the plants sprawling wider than they had before. He wanted to be certain there was nothing that was meant to be cried over and to get the hell out, to put several feet between him and hindsight, the echo of moving through this place as comfortably as if it were home. He flinched, the blue eyes flicked up from the studied examination of the plants to her with a degree of irritation. “No tea.” He folded his arms as if this would constitute a stronger barrier and remained resolutely standing, scuffed work-boots on polished boards.
She said nothing to the refusal of tea, and merely vanished around the corner long enough for water to spill from a tap and metal to clang on the coiled stovetop. When she reemerged, it was on a fresh wave of silence. All noise from the kitchen gone, everything beyond them, deeper into the home, sleepy quiet. She cocked her hip into the edge of the kitchen's entryway before resting her temple against it as well, it was a vantage point to watch him where he stood. She picked him apart in the quiet, her gaze a vulture circling his bones. He looked like he came from work, which made Marina belatedly realize that she had no idea what time it was, or how long she'd been asleep. It might have been time for Nathan to take his prescription medicine again, but a glance back to the glow of numbers on the oven said not yet.
"So you don't want tea." Her own quiet always got the best of her, and Marina was moving again like she couldn't stand the stillness anymore either. She went for the blue couch, since he obviously wasn't going to. Marina pushed her feet onto the coffee table, black nailpolish on her toes along with one skinny silver ring. "And you don't want to talk." Obviously. She leaned back, using the edge of her hand to fluff some hair out of her tired eyes. "You were just in the neighborhood and had a cough syrup coupon, is that it?" She didn't quite get the motivation, and was extremely reluctant to label it as genuine concern.
Russ didn’t much like quiet. He liked the clatter of the shop, he figured he thought better with aimless noise in the background and the neighborhood where the rented place, the one with faded spray paint over the door, it wasn’t much for quiet anyhow. Marina’s place was somehow full of it, the obvious and heavy silence of blankets and naps, of illness. It climbed up the back of his neck and pulled at his nerves until he was tense without knowing the reason for the tension, strung-wire tight. He stood without examining the parts of the room that made it different, five years’ worth of sprawl, of shadows, of sun-stained pallor to the couch and he didn’t twitch as the redolence of the place crawled up his nose. Silence he could handle, sparsity of words doled out over background sound but Marina never could take silence. Even rattled, broken-doll damaged, she couldn’t take silence; anticipation was in the way Russ eased back on one foot to allow her trajectory to pass him by, angles lined up like expectations.
He didn’t want to talk. He had come, largely because there had been nothing that had stood particularly in his path and now Russ discovered the reality of it, standing there in her living room with sick-people quiet curled up in the corners and the mandate for his arrival crumpled on a kitchen counter. Marina looked goddamn comfortable now, the dilute acid of the jab-jab-jab of her voice parental-pitch in volume. He turned on his heels once again, discomfort riding him like a familiar friend and looked her over as if trying to find a lost key.
He snorted annoyance, “You were asking any fucking person out there about stuff for the kid.” This felt like explanation enough, he looked over at a picture that had been re-hung, the glass refitted into its frame from the last time he remembered it, off the wall and on the floor, a shoe flung at his head had decimated it. He looked back at her.
“Were you crying?”
"What the hell else is that book good for if I can't ask for advice?" She stretched an arm over her head, elbow bent so that fingers could play with the crown of her hair. The idle queen of Bohemia taking a break from her bloodletting to mingle. She folded a knee, the arch of a bare foot sliding beneath opposite thigh. She watched him like she was tired, serpent slit eyes and a pursed mouth. She wanted to figure him out, but she just didn't have the energy for it right now. It was the same reason she hadn't dissolved into screaming when he showed up unannounced and uninvited. Marina in full vigor mode would have spit in his face or punched right through that flimsy metal screen. But her ambivalence was shortly lived.
When he asked if she'd been crying, her answer was an abrupt, resounding, "No." She said it while staring, aware that her eyes were a little red and a little swollen. Marina thought that anyone else would have only asked that out of a misguided attempt at politeness, then let the subject drop when she denied it.. but not Russ. Russ wasn't trying to be polite, he wasn't the type to try at what he wasn't capable of. Unless she manipulated him into it with suggestions that he couldn't. So she didn't know why he asked, and rather than try to figure it out, Marina got to her feet.
The kettle was going off as her saving grace, and she walked into the kitchen to kill the stove burner. Bag of darjeeling in a chipped coffee mug. She poured the hot water and let silence steep. She didn't look back, but suspected that Russ was still standing awkward in the living room. There was a digging ache in her bones or maybe her head, somewhere. She didn't immediately recognize it as nerves, but she did just hope that he'd take the fucking hint and leave.
Marina blew on the darkening surface of the tea and teethed her lip while watching a rather unfascinating stain on the counter. The sound of a little cough is what made her turn around, eyes widening. Nathan stood in the kitchen entryway, spaceship pajamas and a fist rubbing against his eyes. "I'm hungry," he said sounding pitifully half-awake with his Haitian. Then he glanced over to where Russ was standing and sniffed, bright blue eyes opening a little wider. Little body crammed against the edge of the kitchen doorway, half-hiding in a show of the shyness that was strong in any five year old, even if both parents were the furthest thing from shy themselves.
He was standing awkward in the living room. There were echoes as she padded past him, panther-quiet on bared soles (did she ever wear shoes? He couldn’t remember a time when she had, flung them at the ceiling or the floor or at his head, kicked them off in the middle of a fucking bar full of people and danced on the pool table in her bare feet but wearing them? Marina liked shoes as much as she liked violence). He could have reached out and caught her hip, spun her like old dance-steps on scratched up tile and told her he could read the ugly traces of crying like a kid with a book, like a man who’d put them there before. He kept his hands to himself, tucked beneath his arms. Little matches struck fire, and he didn’t know why yet, so he let her skim past him, left him in the room with too many fucking plants.
There was a cough like a wet cat at his back and Russ span, neat on booted feet, and then turned the ugly color of sour milk. The blood fled downward from his face, leaving summer tan sitting on the surface like tannin on cold tea. Distantly, he recognized the lilt of the language, without distinguishing its meaning, old pieces of a vocabulary rustier than broken down car parts sitting on the bench. He flinched, and he stared right back with eyes as blue as unblinking as the little boy’s own. Had to be Marina’s kid, same halo of dark dandelion fluff. The sickening drop of his stomach felt like being a kid on a roller coaster ride, illicit lurch and height only to lurch again. It was fine to think about. Fine to sign off pieces of paper and march ‘em down to a lawyer’s office to be stamped because paper was paper and money moved in and out of his bank account like mice skittering toward food, it was there or it wasn’t. But paper wasn’t a kid in pyjamas standing rubbing his eyes like he was meant to be asleep still.
“Hi,” Russ said with suspicion. He didn’t stoop or bend down, he looked down the length of his height and his shoulders hunched in like the little kid stood half a meter away from him was going to bite. And then he raised his voice and looked past the kid to the woman in the kitchen, and said, “Marina,” with some degree of urgency.
Their staring, wary eyes matched up, color for color. Nathan's were nothing like Marina's eyes, none of the lioness in them. Just that wide, bright blue stuck like jewels in a cherub's face, almost reminiscent of another Campbell younger than Russ. Nathan stared at the man, and when that hi came, a smile sprouted. Just a little crooked when his head tilted to the side. "I want french toast," he declared, as if expecting the unknown man to somehow procure it for him. Children, like animals, could sense fear. They could sniff it out and poke it like bullies on schoolyards and simultaneously smooth it over like balm on a wound.
Marina watched from the sidelines, sipping at her tea. She smirked from around the edge of the mug when Russ called her name with an obvious edge of alarm riding his voice. She didn't mind seeing Russ sweat. She could watch that all day, and thought the interaction was proving to be surprisingly harmless up until the point that Nathan asked, "Who are you?" Marina raised an eyebrow, sputtering into her tea before she set the mug down with a heavy sound. She interrupted before anything else could be said, "That's uncle Ford's brother," Marina explained with a heavy dose of eyes given to Russ from over the child's dark head.
He looked like Ford, Russ realized. The notion of connectivity, the knots of blood vessels and the aortic pump of brother-blood through veins, bypassed him completely; Russ stared down a kid who barely made it past the oil-caked knee of the faded denims and saw the way Ford stared cheerfully and guilelessly back, same blue to it that made him look like a baby cherub someone had stolen off the top of the Christmas tree half the time. This curled itself snarl-tight under his breastbone, and remained there, even as he blinked helplessly at the demand. Helpless translated itself into the tic of a muscle in the side of his jaw where he’d clamped down his teeth so tight he could feel his pulse leap in his neck, and he folded his arms even more tightly across his chest, the fabric pulling.
“I can’t make french toast. Ask your mom.” There was no cadence to Russ’s voice particular to parents. He didn’t possess the sing-song of adults-to-children. All his experience with small people had been when he was small himself, and he spoke with the weight and sternness of one adult to another, even if he was still the color of stale milk. And then his head snapped up, and toward Marina, who looked like maybe she was just fine after all and Russ mistook the snort for laughter, and the heavy, black look settled a little further over his eyebrows before he looked back down at the kid.
He was a lot smaller than expected. A lot softer-looking. Russ remembered little boys as grazed knees and scabbed knuckles, fights behind the trailer park and fights in the schoolyard. This kid looked both impossibly soft and barely old enough to be out of diapers; Russ warred with this and the notion that Ford had been given ‘uncle-hood’ right off the bat, and scowled straight over Nathan’s head at Marina.
“I’m Russ,” he said flatly, but without animosity, redirecting his line of sight down. And then had to tilt his head somewhat further.
Nathan didn't counter Russ on the issue of french toast, the little boy seemed to take that single refusal as just that, a solid no. French toast seemed exotic to a five year old, and if this man wasn't familiar with the particulars and elements, it seemed best to bother his mother for it instead. At least she knew how to make it. Nathan gave the man a long considering look, nose scrunching as he mentally mapped his way through the vague familiarities that came with the name, Russ. It was a name he'd heard his mother curse in the dark on those nights when she drank too much, and a name he'd heard her whisper to one of the neighbor moms when she thought he wasn't paying attention. At five, Nathan hadn't met all that many people yet.. so names seemed singular. Marina was his mom, he didn't know any other Marina. He was Nathan, he didn't know any other Nathans. And now this man was Russ, the only one.
He went to his mother without a word, head dropped back with another weak, pitiful cough. Marina smirked, and she gave a brief glance Russ' way when she said, "Don't believe him, ti bebe. He used to make me toast all the time." When Nathan coughed again, she reached for the jar of raw honey that Shane had brought by, put some onto a spoon, and instructed Nathan to open his mouth.
Her attention strayed back to where Russ stood, and she cocked a glance as if trying to discern just how much he was freaking out right now.
Russ’s mouth had opened to argue and the blue eyes snapped with something unambiguously irritated over to Marina; he hadn’t made her toast like some kind of short-order chef, he’d cooked because she couldn’t, because when they were aching-exhausted and sweaty, stumbling into her kitchen in search of something that wasn’t olives and half-molded cheese, cooking had saved them from starvation, the hiss-spit of the griddle sparking fat on bared flesh to make her squeal. But his mouth snapped shut at the wet-cat noise again, the rattle of breath. Kids weren’t meant to make those kinds of noises, were they? He remembered sick as damp washcloths, as day-time tv, as licking his finger to moisten cracker crumbs from the corners of the packet. Not pitiful little noises like dying ghosts.
“What are you giving him?” It wasn’t from a box or a bottle in the paper sack, he remembered the colors. It looked like ordinary honey, and Russ squinted at the spoon like he’d invite it out back to be knocked bloody and blue if he could, suspicion riding the creased lines of his forehead, the crumpled-bag collapse of shock now reinflated. Russ was inherently a practical man, he prefered to tilt at solid things than ghosts or windmills. Given the substance of a small boy in the room, a small boy whose wild curls were sweat-dampened to his forehead, who had his little brother’s eyes, a little boy who was over there and no longer asking questions, he was able to neatly bystep the problem presented by the little boy’s existence by narrowing in on any possible problem that could be naggled out and set-upon.
“Honey ain’t going to do shit for the kid,” Russ argued, with the renewed energy of a partisan disagreement. “What did the doctor say?”
Nathan made an appreciative sound at the introduction of the honey, which seemed more like candy than medicine. Marina pushed some of the fever-damp hair away from his forehead, murmuring in wordless disapproval over how it'd gotten so long since so recent a haircut. Marina's eyes were all for the little boy who stared up at her, heart-wrenching charisma in a trusting, toothy smile. He coughed again, and Marina's smile crumbled briefly, but she righted it again with a deep breath before turning back to her tea. She took a long drink from it, despite it being still hot, as if she was wishing it to be something stronger.
When Russ mentioned the doctor, her eyes widened threatening from over the edge of the coffee mug. Nathan stared up at her, expectant and curious like he didn't know what the doctor had said either. "Go watch some tv, Nathan."
"Men mwen grangou," he complained before Marina pointed definitively at the fridge. "So eat some grapes," she told him. The little boy heaved a sigh, pulled open the fridge door, and pulled a small bowl of red grapes out of it before he made for the living room. Marina stared at Russ, silent until she heard the television click on with the noise of some nature documentary. After that, it took all of half a second for her stride across the kitchen and through the doorway so that she could slap Russ upside his head. "Don't ask about fucking doctors in front of him," she hissed. She groaned, turned, put hands in her hair and pulled gently in frustration. "He's sick, you want to make things worse by letting him know that its not going to get better?"
Marina turned back to him, jaw tight. "The doctor told me to get a humidifier because it will make his breathing easier."
He flinched once, the expectant crack of her fingers across the back of his neck and Russ put both hands on the counter-top behind him and rocked back like he’d been ready to launch forward, to snatch her wrist out of the air and hold it where her hands couldn’t be a weapon. And then what vestige of color had surfaced beneath the weak-tea tan drained abruptly and completely away. Russ turned the gray of dead moth wings, of dust. He looked both at once smaller and staggered, coupling a small boy who looked like maybe he played with trains and knew the words to Sesame Street (Russ’s memory of cracked tv sets, of the comforting static of lost channels to sleep to, like white noise for trailer kids) with sickness that swayed behind his knees and swung hard.
“What’s wrong with him?” Russ looked along the jump-gap distance between the kitchen and the hall like something lurking beyond the linoleum, mistrustful as a kid with something beneath the bed. He didn’t know a thing about Nathan except french toast and creole and sickness; “There’s got to be some kinda medicine,” he protested, bullish - the stubborn swing upward of his chin, the deliberate refusal to allow it to be anything that couldn’t be shaken off. All kids got sick, all kids were running around the week after, falling off monkey bars and sassing the teacher, that was how childhood was.
“A humidifier?” Yeah, a humidifier was easy. A humidifier was maybe a trip to Walmart or one of the bigger stores that mapped the edges of the highway. But a humidifier just blew air around, suspicion lurked in blue eyes like Marina herself stood between the kid and health with her arms outstretched to block him off. “There’s got to be some kind of medicine, look, the pharmacy said there was stuff you could take for a cough,” he insisted.
Marina listened to him with the rarity of quiet, and she drew back with a tired shake of her head when he went on about medicine. The words were like a memory chased down a dark lane, she could remember asking similar things within a similar stage of reluctant disbelief. Five years ago, her questions were fear masked in rage, cajun profanity highlighting demands for the magic medicine that television promised existed. She didn't want to believe that the only thing that could help Nathan was time, and even that - the nurses told her with solemnity - might prove to not be enough. Marina turned back to her tea without a word, swirling the cooling darkness before she tasted it again, then finding it bitter, poured the remains down the drain before rinsing her cup.
"He had to sleep in an incubator," she said over the water faucet. A couple swirls of running water rinsed the tea out, and she set the mug on a small dish towel beside the sink to dry. "He couldn't breathe well," she explained, moving on to rinse off a plate that was still sitting in the sink from the night before. The mindless robotics of dishwashing made for easier conversation. Marina didn't say anything else after that, and she washed the same cup three or four times before she set it roughly aside. She turned the water off and shot Russ a glance from past her shoulder. "No medicine is going to fucking help, so I hope you kept the receipt," she said with a sideways nod to the pharmacy bag.
The mire of parenthood was boggy ground he’d never walked in. He didn’t know a damn thing about doctors that didn’t come with needles and painkillers to make the sewing up easy, and the belligerence of nurses who were matter-of-fact and hostile in equal measure. His heartbeat had begun to pound, up high, near his ears until he could hear Marina over the thud-thud-thud of his own sour-mouthed fear. Russ figured people with education knew all the answers or maybe they were just able to find them out. “Just need the right doc that’s all,” he insisted, ignoring the objectionable paper sack of rejected candy-colored medicines. What the hell did he know about sick kids? He didn’t know nothing about kids that he hadn’t forgotten the minute he’d got the hell out of living three people to a double-wide.
“What’s wrong with him?” Russ’s voice bounced on the edge of a blade, sharp with the acid bite of accusation bating at the back of it, a junkyard dog’s feral lip-curl at something wrong, something ruined. He could see nothing but the slice of her shoulder-blades as she bent over the faucet, the quiver of her hair; he couldn’t see self-blame or hell-bitch in the turned away cast of her cheek. “He looks fine.” The palm of his hand was heavy, the curl of his fingers around her shoulder impatient as he pulled to make her turn, to read whatever it was written out there, the split-sick climb of guilt without reason lodged in his throat.
His words, his one-sided conversation throbbed like a fresh wound just behind her. Marina tried to close her eyes against it as she ran a damp dishtowel over the beads of water that pooled in the dented clay of a sculpted bowl, kiln-fired by the old women at the art market. She twisted her fingers in it, and her nails bit into the fine cotton threads that were beginning to fray after a few hundred runs through the washing machine. She tried to be idle when she thought that she'd have to replace it soon, but the thought was one that was desperately sought out, urgently pried from the box of unused toys that read 'out of place'. Even thinking it didn't help her ignore him.
She'd never been very good at ignoring him. Pretending, sure. Displeased queen twisted sideways in her throne, corkscrew hair like a curtain, smoking and wordless for as long as it took for him to get fed up and split. So that then she could be furious that he'd left. Typical, she'd always known, etc. It didn't matter. Break some glass and make it true. Marina fingered the edge of the purple-glazed pottery, remembering. Russ was still asking questions from behind her, and her throat felt like a barbed wire noose was going tighter and tighter. She couldn't stop it. Marina swallowed against it, but she couldn't stop it.
When he pulled on her shoulder, she snapped out of it with a sniff. Gold dust eyes sparkled like the strip fringed in black, wet with tears. "Don't," she warned. But the word was sad, like she thought he was going to do it anyway. Don't make her cry. Don't ask questions. Don't touch her. Don't.
He’d seen the salamander glint of eyes sharp enough to pinion him in place (right before her hand cracked across his cheekbone, more than enough times to learn the shape of the look that came before) and Russ braced in dirty workboots on clean tile as her shoulder rolled into his hand and the blade of it bit into the heel of his palm, ready for a hand or acid words or the bowl she’d been cleaning for what felt like twenty minutes. Russ knew the steel bow of her back turned toward him, turning a handful of inches of cotton sheets into a wide, indigo sea. He knew the taste of her displeasure as salt and pennies, where his own teeth had caught his cheek, where her fist had caught his nose. But she wasn’t signaling a hit, the pottery clanked against the scarred metal of the sink, and Russ took hold of her shoulder with more surety and wore surprise like a clean shirt, out of place but not impossible.
Fear closed teeth on the back of his neck, discomfort pulled itself out of memory. He’d never learned comfort around crying women, “Hey,” he said, and the word crawled out of his throat thick and rough and impossible, and he took hold of her other shoulder as well, turned her toward where the light passed in through the watery glass. “Are you crying?” She was. It was an impossibility; Marina was diamond-edged and hard-bitten, she’d kick him rather than cry. It was a rule of the universe, Russ had learned it, and it was being unraveled, the entire law of how things were torn apart as her eyelashes went dark as paint. His hand slid from shoulder to cheek, the thickness of his thumb laid against that damp like testing the tears were more than illusion, and the tip of the joint came away wet and certain. Russ stared at it, before he pulled her in, close enough to share the scent of salt, of metal shavings and rubber, soaked in on fabric.
“Don’t cry,” she was fragile, bone-china thin the way he’d never thought of her able to break. This close, the mass of her hair springy beneath his chin, she felt delicate as Sam had once, bandages and blood and girl instead of friend. “I’ll fix it.” He didn’t know what it was he was promising to fix, but he figured cash and knowing things got you half the way to fixing anything.
"I'm not," she defended. Like saying it made it true despite the threat of breaking levees. Dragged into his tide by arms that she could have fought if she'd had even a teacup worth of anger left in her. But it was gone, slipping and vanished through a crack in the floor so that only the boxy weight of tired remained with her. Tired didn't allow for strength, it didn't even allow her to think of all the reasons that she needed to be stronger. Maybe she was entitled to a little forgetting just now.
Marina didn't reach for him, but she didn't fight the sturdy hold of his arms around her. It was comforting, like being closed in might be enough to keep her from cracking apart. There was a misplaced kind of safety in it, a safety that should have been kept off of Russ with barbed wire. Right now, she had so much more to be scared about than him being in her kitchen. The fact that it was him was mostly overlooked by a distraught mind that didn't let her draw air so that she wouldn't smell him, and Marina squeezed her eyes shut against the fabric of his chest. And in that moment, she let herself cry.
For years Russ had known that trying to hold Marina was like trying to circle a whirlwind with finger and thumb, like trying to cuddle a hellcat who’d leave bloody furrows down his arm for trying. He half-expected to be shoved halfway back across the kitchen into the comfortingly resilient warfare that was how he understood her, their broken language of insults and hatred slung across their distance like a bridge. But she didn’t. Danger mapped itself out under his skin through his veins, syrup-sweet as dulce de leche eaten with spoons in crumpled sheets. The ball of his thumb worked against the side of her neck, and he didn’t bulldoze down denial even as the tears dampened the cotton of his shirt. It wasn’t cruel, or perhaps it was crueller, this -up insight into falling apart within the balustrade of papered-over comfort.
The watery sound of her breathing kept Russ still, held in place by his own discomfort and the weighty mass of fear building in his throat until his own chest was too tight for air. This was really wrong, this was so-wrong-she-let-him, this was a paper grave constructed in the cornices of his head for the little boy who’d looked-so-healthy a beat or two of a rabbit-heart before. It was one thing, concrete-heavy to accept fatherhood conferred like someone else’s coat, two sizes too large. It was another to take on a little boy with a shadow behind him, with Marina’s fear made real in the bird-bone shiver of her shoulderblades. Could he fix it? Maybe he couldn’t. Doubt surfaced, drowning-man survivalist with dread teeth. Russ’s hand slid into the mass of her hair, like a dying sinner sliding prayer-beads through his fingers, as if redemption gave a shit.
She could have clung to him for awhile, there was a lot of chaos and hurt to flush out of her mind, and weakness came on strong when it really weaseled its way in. Maybe crying wasn't supposed to be thought of as a weakness, but if it meant that she had to hold onto Russ to do it, then it probably was. The seconds bled into a sea that deepened upon the minute mark before a sound roused her. Nathan called for her from the other room in between shallow coughs. Marina straightened with a sniff, and she said nothing immediately when she drew away from Russ. She didn't quite look him in the eyes when she pulled the edge of her shirt up in order to wipe away the mascara that ran black beneath both her own.
She thought about saying sorry, but that would mean admitting what'd just happened, and Marina suspected they'd both prefer for her not to. She knew how Russ got when she went into the shadowy territories of uncharted emotion. She remembered him going stiff-shouldered and wordless, hands out to ward words and worries off. Or sometimes he just left in silence until whatever brand of crazy she was going through passed. It was something to blame him for in the past, but right now she might have preferred a little of his swift exit strategy.
Marina didn't get uncomfortable. The woman took her heels off and danced on bar tops, she laughed loud in movie theaters, and she sang tunelessly everywhere, not just in the shower. But right now, she edged away from him and toward the living room without a glance or a word back toward Russ. A peek around the corner proved that Nathan was fine, sitting on the living room floor with his little toy cars strewn about. "Can he play," Nathan asked with a pointed finger toward the wall that kept the kitchen on the other side, where Russ was.
"Bébé, he doesn't want to play," she promised gently.
Russ didn’t want to drag weakness toward the window, examine it in the thin, tea-colored light. He let her go, pull away like they hadn’t briefly, temporarily tangled together in something between a ceasefire, arrayed on the same side against some greater foe than stood across a war-worn battlefield too familiar to fight across.
“I can play,” Russ said with the flat lack of tone that was both utterly factual and entirely intimidating to anyone under four foot (and undeniably some over it). He loomed without really intending to do so, having materialized at Marina’s left shoulder and surveying the chaotic array of cars, utterly deadpan. Only the faint twitch of the muscles at the corners of his eyes as he scanned the carpet betrayed that he was looking at all. Solidly blue Campbell gaze met small boy’s utter lack of inhibition and attempted to stare him down. Whether he wanted to play was immaterial; the kid had asked a question. You learned to ask the right one or you didn’t get what you want. It was a life lesson Russ had learned when he was still small enough for his mom to box his ears and get away with it, unconsciously, he slid back into the pattern of question-and-answer that had ribboned throughout the turbulence of a relationship that had never been called by its name. You asked the right question, or you didn’t get what you wanted. Maybe you got something worse.
“What’s the game?” Flat. Uncompromising. Showing absolutely no sign of getting down on one knee or behaving, in fact, like an adult who knew his way around children. Russ’s shoulders in the worn cotton shirt had tension bunching through them, he’d drawn himself up to full height with the flinch of staring down the barrel of a gun. “I can play,” he said to Marina, the irked sharp edge of his tone creeping out in the expectation of disbelief.
"Its called Race Car," he said. Nathan cruised a blue truck across the rug, it collided with a red sports car and kept going on the reckless road laid out before him. The woven pyramid pattern in the rug functioned as a disjointed highway. The car jumped from one block of gold weave to the next, proving that 'Race Car' didn't necessarily have to comply with the laws of physics. He made all the appropriate noises as the car accelerated, vroom, and also when it took harsh turns on two wheels, eeeeech.
From across the room, Marina was steel-eyed dislike, a throwback look from all those years ago when she vowed to give him no peace if he crossed her. The tears were gone and all that remained was the faint tint of red in her eyes that highlighted them with murder. The hostile distrust was more than a veil, it was a steel wall placed before uncertain fear that prickled horribly up her spine.
"He can't play, bebe." The placating mommy voice was gentle, explaining that it wasn't Nathan's fault Russ wasn't going to play. "He's got to go home now." She watched Russ from over Nathan, but dropped her eyes a moment later in a sign of guilt that betrayed her. She knelt down alongside her son then and felt his forehead. "And you need to rest." Nathan frowned, but seemed to know better than to argue when he glanced up to Russ with sad blue eyes.
It wasn’t so much a way out as the door propped open and a glacial wind rolling in to stand the hairs up on his arms. Russ had been squinting at the little cars, the droop in his shoulders corresponding to the car noises that made as much sense as they were familiar from his own childhood, playing with whatever imagination could turn into something that could take hairpin turns on streaking rubber - and the next Marina was alley-cat arched, hiss-and-spit across the distance, with her voice all caramel and cream over the kid. The kid who still didn’t look sick but turned big eyes up at him in a look that reminded Russ strongly and disturbingly of Ford. It was the same disappointment writ large, on a face too young to know better to hide it.
“Yeah whatever,” a weak parting-shot but Marina raw was splintered glass and fractured poison as soon as the kid was out of sight. Russ didn’t feel like catching the floor-show; he thought about some kind of gesture, touseling the kid’s hair maybe, but the thought telegraphed itself in the stiff awkwardness of set shoulders, tightly laced hands. Russ peeled himself free from the spot on the carpet and a minute later, the screen door screamed into place. Gone.