by Zoe Kane
“I know,” Annie said hastily. “I get it. I need to do better, I need to make sure Marcus is in the loop. But it's not like they never - I mean, they had Danny. I know it’s too soon for them to think of him without it being painful now, but when they’re older, when the girls are grown adults who are thinking about their own parenting choices. Even if Marcus wasn’t here, they’d have Danny. They've already had a good example of a man doing the emotional labor of parenting. Danny did that. Always. They already know what that looks like.”
Dr. Sharma looked at Annie in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment, her face unreadable. Finally she spoke, and her words were very simple but they devastated Annie entirely.
“Dr. Walter, I’m concerned that you’re not fully comprehending the stakes here if you and Mr. Rey can’t establish a harmonious parenting relationship,” she said bluntly. “You haven’t seemed to grasp the fact that Danny Walter is not the father these children are going to remember.”
Annie stared at her.
“Lucy is four years old,” Dr. Sharma went on. “Her memories of her father, by the time she reaches adulthood, will be barely flickers. Probably Isaac and Sophia will retain somewhat stronger impressions. But they will be impressions only. By the time these children turn eighteen and leave your care, you will have had them much, much longer than their own parents did. I’m not sure how to make this any clearer to you, but Danny and Grace Walter will not be the defining parental influence shaping their children’s lives. You are.”
* * *
Annie’s only consolation, by the time the three of them got back into the car, was that it didn’t seem like Isaac or Sophia had fared any better than she had. They were both taciturn and expressionless the entire drive home. Nobody said a word.
Vera was upstairs in the playroom with Lucy when they got home. Marcus was waiting in the living room, his arms folded. The stern look on his face temporarily united Isaac and Annie in a secret hope that it was the other one he was angrier at. (It had not been lost on either of the children that Aunt Annie forgot to tell Uncle Marcus not to come pick them up from school, and Aunt Annie was louder on the phone with him in Doctor Megan's waiting room than she realized. Isaac was mad at everybody right now, but he thought he might be the littlest bit less mad at Uncle Marcus, since he hadn’t really done anything yet. Though he sure looked like he was about to.)
“Sophia,” said Annie carefully, “I need you to go upstairs to the playroom with Lucy and Aunt Vera, okay? Uncle Marcus and I need to have a talk with Isaac by ourselves.”
Sophia plainly did not want to leave her brother to his fate, but she had never seen Uncle Marcus mad either and decided it wasn’t worth risking being the first to push him over the edge. So she scampered up to the top of the stairs, where they couldn’t see her eavesdropping.
“Inside the playroom, and close the door behind you!” called Marcus, who was not an idiot, and Sophia sighed from her hiding place and disappeared into the other room, closing the door with a passive-aggressive slam behind her as Isaac flopped dramatically onto the couch with a grouchy sigh.
Once they were alone, Annie was not quite sure how to proceed. She was still too angry at Chase Clifton herself to be able to muster much in his defense, which made her worry a little. Was her rigidity, her black-and-white judgment, something that Isaac would see and absorb from her? Were the children watching her and repeating her mistakes? Isaac was the responsible one, the child she had always secretly felt was the most like her, but no matter how much she loved her sister and brother she would never have hit someone in their defense.
Would she? Or did she simply have the luxury of thinking that because it had never come up?
She had no idea what to say to Isaac.
But Marcus did.
"You hit a boy at school," he said in a measured tone. "That's not acceptable."
"But he said – "
"It doesn't matter what he said. There is nothing that makes this behavior okay."
"Why are you even here?" Isaac shouted back at him. "Why don't you go home? You're not my dad."
"No, I'm not," said Marcus, who was completely unfazed. "But I'm the grownup right now. Me and Aunt Annie, we're the grownups. We know we're not your mom and dad, and we know you miss them a lot, and it makes things hurt in weird new terrible ways, and we understand that. But the fact that you're hurting inside does not give you the right to take that out on other people. Not even with words, but especially not by hitting them."
"Fine," huffed Isaac, "sorry," in a sullen little voice that made it plain just how very not sorry he really was.
Annie was just about to step in and send Isaac to his room with no dinner when Marcus said something that stopped her in her tracks.
“Our dad used to hit us,” he said, in an extremely calm and balanced tone of voice, and both Isaac and Annie stared at him with wide, astonished eyes. “Did you know that? Did your dad ever tell you?”
Isaac shook his head.
Marcus sat down next to him on the couch, a perfectly-calibrated distance apart – wide enough that Isaac still felt safe, had room to breathe, was not stifled, but close enough that suddenly the two of them were the only people in the whole world.
“He would get mad,” Marcus went on, “or he would have too much to drink, or my mom would say something that he didn’t like. Or maybe nothing happened. Sometimes there wasn’t even a reason. Honestly I think sometimes it was because he just – he liked the way it felt, you know? To hit things. He liked the feeling it gave him. Does that make sense?”
Isaac nodded silently again.
“Has anybody ever hit you?”
Isaac shook his head.
“Then you don’t really understand,” said Marcus, “how scary it is. And how much it hurts, how mad it makes you. But most of all you don’t understand how hitting doesn't get rid of that bad feeling inside you, it just gives it to somebody else instead. You love your sister. You want to protect her. So you want to hurt the person who hurt someone special to you. But you know what? That boy is special to somebody else. No matter how much you don't like him, there are people that do. Everybody has someone who loves them. So by hitting Chase, you’ve hurt other people the way Chase hurt Sophia. You know what it’s like when you love somebody and they’re sad and you can’t make it better. You know exactly what that feels like. Right?”
Isaac nodded, tears welling up in his eyes.
“So what I need you to think about,” said Marcus, moving just the tiniest bit comfortingly closer to Isaac, “is how that boy felt after you hit him, and how his mom and dad probably felt when he came home from school with his nose all bloody, and how scared I bet they were. I want you to think about what happens when you take the hurt inside you and you put it onto somebody else. And I also want to tell you something very important, about protecting your sister. I’m going to tell you something that Sophia might not have the words to tell you right now, but this is what my mom said to me. When my dad hurt her, when he would slap her on the face or when he would smash up her things or when he would yell at her to scare her and make her cry, I wanted to hit him. I always wanted to. Every time. But I never did, not once. Because when I told my mom that I wanted to hit Dad back, she shook her head and you know what she said to me?"
"What?" sniffled Isaac, curiosity winning out over silence.
"She said he would rather have Dad scream at her all he wanted than for her son to grow up to be a man who hits. She couldn’t change my dad. She couldn’t make him a nice man. But the reason that she finally left was because she wanted me to be safe. Not just safe from his fists, but safe from becoming him. She knew that I loved her and she knew that every time he hurt her it made me so mad I wanted to stand up on my tiptoes and stretch as tall as I could and just whomp him one right in the face. But she also knew that that’s how it starts. Sometimes all it takes to turn a person into somebody violent is doing it just one time, for maybe what seems like a good reason, to prote
ct somebody that you love. But then it feels good. You feel powerful. You want to do it again. It makes you want to hit somebody else. You stop caring who you hurt. My mom didn’t want me to be that boy. And Sophia doesn’t want you to be that boy either. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Isaac?”
He nodded, tears in his eyes.
“And I’m going to tell you one last thing,” Marcus said. “This is important too. Sophia sometimes needs to fight her own battles. I know you feel like she’s your responsibility. I know you feel like you have to be the dad sometimes, because you’re the oldest. But you’re still a kid. You need to let me and Aunt Annie be the grownups. Your sister knows that you love her, Isaac, and she knows that you want to keep her safe. But there isn’t a single bad, sad thing in your life, or in hers, that’s going to be fixed by you hitting people. In this house, that’s not what we do. Not ever. Do you understand me?”
Isaac nodded.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Marcus,” he said, sniffling and wiping his nose, and Marcus opened his arms so Isaac could climb into them. “I miss Dad,” said Isaac, face muffled in Marcus’ sweater, and from the doorway Annie could see the warm golden lamplight shining off tears in the corner of Marcus’ eyes that matched her own.
“I know,” he said. “I know, kiddo. I do too. But maybe instead of being unhappy separately, we could be people who miss your dad together. Maybe we could talk about it, sometimes, instead of squeezing everything up tight inside. How would that be?”
Isaac nodded and snuggled in tighter, and even as her heart turned over inside her chest at the unexpected sweetness of it, Annie wondered which of them those words were really meant for.
Marcus kissed the top of Isaac’s head and sent him upstairs so he could go hug his sister, and then call Chase Clifton to apologize. Then he turned back to Annie, who was – by her estimate – about to receive her fourth angry lecture of the day.
Marcus had been firm but gentle with Isaac, but from the way he rounded on Annie the second they heard the twins’ bedroom door close, he had no intention of being equally gentle with her.
“Are we really back to this?” he said, making a disbelieving sound that was almost a laugh. Annie looked down at the floor, both abashed and defiant. “I thought we’d made some progress since that day in Charles Miller’s office, but we haven’t, have we? Not at all. You still don’t want me here. You still don’t think I belong.”
“You were great with him,” she said honestly. “You’re good at this.”
“And that surprises you.”
“No, I didn’t mean that.”
“I’m your partner, Annie,” he said. “You didn’t ask for this, and I didn’t either, but this is what it is. It’s you and me. You can’t shut me out.”
“Marcus, I forgot, I'm sorry, I forgot to call you, I didn’t mean to –“
“You never mean to,” he said, exasperated, “you always think you’re right, you always think you’re doing the right thing, you always think you know what’s best for everybody else. Always. Every time. You were surprised, just now, that I was the right person to talk to Isaac about what happened today. Weren’t you? You were surprised because it never occurred to you that Danny might have wanted me in his children’s life for exactly this reason. That I might be good for them.”
“I never said I thought you didn’t have anything to contribute,” she said snappishly, finally losing her temper, “it’s just frustrating always having to be the bad guy while you get to be Fun Uncle Marcus, with the sleigh and the bedtime stories -"
“No,” he growled at her, standing up from the couch and coming closer to her, eyes dark with fury. “No. Goddammit, Annie, you do not get to stand there and tell me how hard it is for you carrying the weight of all the real parenting when the only reason you’re doing it alone is because you shut me out.”
“Marcus –“
“You wouldn’t have had to do this alone if you'd called me, Annie! I could have been there with you for the principal, for the therapist, for all of it. You could have equal balance in this household any time you wanted it, but you don’t. You don’t ask for help. You say ‘It’s handled.’ You say ‘Don’t worry, I took care of it.’ You were so wrapped up in handling everything yourself that you forgot I was even here. I don’t want to just be Fun Uncle Marcus, Annie, I want to be in this with you. Don’t turn this around and make it my fault."
"Marcus, I promise you, I'm not shutting you out, I didn't do this on purpose."
"Of course you did," he said. "Jesus, Annie, of course you did. Since the day you met me, you've shut me out and pushed me away over and over and over again. The first thing you said to me, the first thing, was that you didn't want me here because you could handle this yourself. I thought we had made progress, the things that have happened between us, I thought we had moved past all that – “
"We did.”
"No, we didn't! We're right back where we started. We've gotten nowhere, Annie. We're going in circles."
"Marcus, I'm sorry," she said honestly. "It's not about you. I'm just - look, this is who I am. I'm used to making decisions by myself. I'm used to handling things alone. I'm trying to be better, I really am, but this is just - this is what I'm used to. I'm doing the best I can."
"It's not who you are, it's who you choose to be," he said coldly. "Because it's safer than letting anyone else in. You're alone because you want it that way, Annie. You always have. And you know it.”
The silence that followed was awful.
Annie stared at him, stricken, her eyes wide with astonishment and humiliation and fury, and Marcus tensed up a little, as though even he realized he'd finally gone too far. They both stared at each other for a long moment, neither one willing to speak first, when the silence was broken by the sound of Marcus' phone buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket.
“I’m leaving,” he said, and pulling his coat off the hook and heading for the door. "Don't wait up."
"You're - wait, what?"
"You heard me."
"Marcus, this is - where the hell are you going?"
“Out," he said shortly, hating himself a little for how childish it sounded but unable to stop himself.
“For God's sake, Marcus, talk to me.”
“I can’t be in the same room with you right now,” he said abruptly. “I need to cool off. We both need to clear our heads. We can talk in the morning.”
“Marcus –“
But he was already gone.
Chapter Eighteen: Unspeakable
The sound of the coffee grinder roused Annie the next morning.
It was an electric one, probably fifteen years old at this point, and louder than a freight train, but Annie didn’t mind it, smiling a little to herself at how the sound always took her back to her childhood. It somehow always made her think of Christmas morning, when her father would be the first one up and the children would be roused from sleep by the noisy grinding of coffee and the smell of frying bacon. As an adult who lived alone, you were denied these simple pleasures; as irritating as Marcus could be, still, having someone else to make coffee in the mornings had turned out to be a pleasant thing to get used to.
She rubbed her eyes a little blearily and looked at the clock. It was only nine. And she hadn’t heard Marcus come home last night, which meant he’d been out until after midnight – how much later, she didn’t know, since midnight was simply when she’d given up pretending that she wasn’t waiting up for him and had gone to bed. It was a surprise, though not an unwelcome one, that he was awake in time to actually make her coffee.
Maybe it was an olive branch after last night. Maybe she would have a chance to apologize, for real this time, and they could start fresh.
She yawned and stretched and slowly eased out of bed, throwing a cardigan over her cotton nightdress. This had been her one concession to living with a man in the house – attempting to look ever-so-slightly more pulled-together in the
mornings. Gone the faded floral old-lady nightgown she had loved for nearly a decade, which Burke had once described as “the least sexy garment ever manufactured in the United States” (“It’s made in China” had been her comeback, which he hadn’t thought was funny), to be replaced by a series of equally comfortable but far less threadbare jersey shifts that fell below the knee. By no means would you call them lingerie, or even remotely seductive – today’s was a plain heather gray with the tiniest bit of white lace trim at its very modest neckline – but with one of her loose, comfortable cardigans and her hair pulled up into a hasty bun it made her feel like enough of a human being in the morning to be in the same room with Marcus before she was fully dressed.
She padded downstairs softly, careful not to wake the children or disturb the sleepy silence on the other side of their closed doors.
“I heard the –“ she began, then stopped short.
Because the person in her kitchen, casually opening and closing cupboards to hunt for mugs as though she’d always lived there, was a girl with caramel-gold skin, a long dark ponytail, and no clothes on except one of Marcus Rey’s white shirts, which was far too big for her. She reached up on her toes to pull down three mugs from a shelf and the hem of the shirt rose up enough to reveal the flawless ass of a woman still on the right side of thirty inside a pair of navy blue cotton panties that read "HELLO SAILOR."
She turned as she heard Annie’s voice. “Oh, hey!” she chirped happily, for all the world as if she were not a total stranger standing half-naked in someone else’s kitchen wearing no pants while three children were sleeping upstairs. “Annie, right?”
“Who are you?” Annie said through gritted teeth, forcing her voice to remain level.
“I’m Linnet,” she said. “It’s so great to finally meet you. Do you want coffee? I’m making lots. Our idiot is gonna have a hell of a hangover when he finally wakes up.”
“I didn’t know you were in town,” said Annie carefully as Linnet handed her a cup of coffee. The girl's brow furrowed.
