Work Text:
January 11th, 2011, 4:26am, Chicago, Illinois
“Hey, hon?”
“Mmn?” You blink, glancing over at Marc.
“You alright?”
“Actually. Can you take over, I’m getting spotty over here.”
Your car was crawling along the snow covered highway. Everything just looked gray. It had for hours.
“We’re not going to make it back tonight, are we?”
Marc leaned forward against his belt, peering through the windshield wipers making furious Sisyphean progress against the onslaught of fluffy white clumps covering your car.
“Mmm. Uh-uh. I am exhausted, can you take over or not?”
“I… do I have to?”
Rebekah cries once from the backseat and you pull off the highway and unbuckle.
“I would really like it if you could, please. I’m tired.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Marc gets out and trudges around. You climb over into the passenger seat.
He shuts the door and puts his hands on the wheel, takes them off, puts them back again.
“It’s still in park.” You point.
He looks at it.
The whole car sits, heat off, lights on.
He puts it in reverse.
“Marc do you not know how to drive?”
“No. I just need a second.” He stares down at the pedals.
“You don’t know how to drive.” You knock your head back against the headrest.
So much made so much more sense. How everything’s been arranged to avoid this.
“I don’t know how to drive.” He admits, resting his hands at three and nine. “He usually does that stuff.”
“Okay, get him.”
Marc’s brow knits tighter.
“Or not. Talk to him, then.”
“I’m not gonna talk to him.”
“We don’t have any place to stop tonight.”
You look out through the dark trees. Your reservation was left with a night back there, the one you were having here instead.
“I’m not talking to him.”
“Marc you already ruined this vacation will you stop acting like a damn child!”
Your baby cries again, louder, and you unzip your coat, maneuvering around to free her from her blankets and seat and get her into your lap, rubbing her back. She seems to have noticed the lack of heat, and seems much more content buried against you under your coat, up on your chest. After a minute or two of cuddling, she settles.
“Can Steven—”
“Don’t bring Steven into this!” He snaps.
“Can Steven drive, Marc! Jesus, can he drive?”
“No, he says he can’t.”
You scrub your forehead.
“Marc.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you see we’re a little stuck here?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to say anything else?”
“What should I say?”
“You should get him.”
“Other than that.” He says. “I’m not doing that.”
“You should know how to drive, Marc!”
Marc flinches, his grip tightening.
“What?” You say, bouncing your knee.
“I’m afraid… afraid every time you get that voice, I upset you, that you’re going to break up with me.”
“Oh, good God…” you take a deep breath.
“Say it. Call me pathetic. I know how it sounds. I don’t care. It’s what’s real as far as I know and that is all I know. I didn’t choose this, okay?”
“I know Marc. I know.”
“I should have myself together. I should be better. You deserve that. I keep thinking that.”
“You know what I think?” You huff and your breath trails from your mouth in the dim light.
“I think I don’t deserve someone so patient, careful, selfless, and gentle. Who puts his whole heart into everything he does no matter how hard it is. Who stepped up to this. You take such good care of her. You know that? That’s not a guy I’m leaving.” Your working against the aggression, fighting your own frustration.
“You never think you want to?” He sniffs. “You think about– breaking up?”
“Rarely. And I mean rarely.”
During stuff like this.
“But you do.”
“Do you?” You ask.
“Of course. It’s just… it’s not something I would ever do to you. Things would have to be bad. Really bad.”
“You see.”
“Are things not really bad for you?”
Bekah is rooting through your shirts, trying to get to your breast, tapping her finger on it, and you don’t have an answer for him that he won’t refute, so you work on untucking and loosening your clothes.
Marc pulls down and stares at his reflection in the sunshield and shakes his head, flipping it up.
“What is it like an hour or more into town? Are we just staying here?” You say.
“Looks like it.”
“Fine. I didn’t wanna be home yet anyway.”
You finally pull up your inner shirt, get your nursing bra open, and latch your daughter on. She hasn’t breastfed since you picked her up.
Marc watches, detached.
That kid in your arms was the reason you were married at all, this, all this, was him trying to do right.
As scared as he was to have this kid and marry you he was terrified of it all ending.
You being somewhere else, being someone else, raising a kid he didn’t know.
He just wanted this baby. More than anything, he wanted that kid to have both her parents.
His family.
You yawn. “Talk to him, Marc. Please. I know you can.”
He doesn’t answer.
That family sleeps on the side of the road the rest of that morning, till dull sun raises over heavy pines and fills white, a snowglobe left in the window, settled, the stretch of highway untouched, empty except for your secondhand black Honda Odyssey.
Marc’s already woken up when you start to.
“Hey, baby,” he whispers, kissing your temple and the baby at your chilled breast.
“Did you talk?” You rub your eyes.
“Yeah. We talked. I’m sorry I ruined our anniversary. Let’s just go.”
“If you talked can’t he drive?”
“He said no. Let’s just go. Please.”
You sit up, fixing your clothes and passing off the baby so you can clamber around to the backseat and he can get into yours, so you can climb up into the driver’s.
Marc shushes his daughter softly as she adjusts around the switch up, getting her a quick fresh diaper from the bag in the backseat and buttoned back up, sitting up in his lap.
You turn the ignition and it stalls. You curse under your breath and try again. It stalls again.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“No shit, really?”
“What?”
You sigh. “Buckle her in. Help me clear the snow.”
“Is that gonna help—”
“You need to learn how to drive, Marc!” You slam your palms against the wheel, shouting in frustration.
“You need to— learn how to talk with each other, you can’t do this!”
Marc opens his mouth then closes it again, nodding.
“What is going on with you?”
“I’m… I’m waiting for you to figure out what a big mistake this was.” Bekah looks up at him with big penny brown eyes. Marc can tell she can tell he’s upset. The way she looks at him.
She’s so big already. Sixteen months old, pulling herself up and starting to throw things.
“What. All this?” You say.
“All this.” He says.
You stare ahead. Your nose is running, more than a little.
“Do you want this to work out?” You ask slowly.
Marc breathes, feeling his throat and chest get tighter.
“Yes.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
“No, don’t lie to my face.”
“I—”
“Don’t sabotage yourself so you can prove to me I shouldn’t have married you. I wanted to!” You try to keep your voice down. “I wanted to marry you!”
“You haven’t been seeing it!? You’ll just work later or get a babysitter to stay up with my bullshit and it’s terrible. I’m terrible for you!”
You want to scream.
“You even consider, Marc, does it go through your head when I tell you I do these things because I want to, I mean that I want to?!”
He doesn’t look at you, and even knowing his thing with eye contact you wish he would tell you he’s listening, that you don’t have to search him for it.
“It’s work, and I wish it was easier, sure, but I signed up for this. You did too. Not just to help me, not just for the baby, but to let me, help you.”
It goes quiet. Really quiet. Bekah sneezes. Once. Twice. Third time she exclaims like it surprised her. She’s tired.
“They’ll be through to clear the roads within a day.” Marc says, wiping her face.
“What’s going on with you and him?” You ask.
“We don’t need him.”
“We do need him! He is the one who can drive, who knows where everything is, pays the bills, writes the grocery lists, knows how to fix the damn car, unless you figure out how to do those things on your own, we need him!”
“You should just marry him then!”
You put the car back in park.
It’s silent, the only sounds your baby fussing, annoyed at all the shouting.
“Marc, I don’t know how this is supposed to work. I don’t think anyone does. I just know that we all need each other. You don’t have to like him. But you need to do what the books say, talk, write notes, I don’t care what! You just can’t fight like this!”
“I wasn’t—” he wasn’t trying to fight. When he told you it was because you needed to know, his system was broken, you didn’t know what was going on. But he didn’t tell you. Steven did, because he couldn’t.
“I wasn’t ready. To be– a dad, because I can’t. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to work with them. I wasn’t ready.”
“I know.” You sigh. You’re getting a sinus headache of some kind.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have married you, maybe I was just being selfish, but I— I wanted to feel like I was doing the right thing, for once.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” You grumble, rubbing between your eyes with cold fingers.
“Frick.” He sniffles, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand.
“I like you. Love you, even. I love our baby. That’s… married is what I wanted. I love you more than I love myself.”
“You know, Marc, I think that’s the biggest problem we have.”
He shifts up in his seat, fingers pressed to his upper lip. “I have something I gotta tell you.”
“What?”
“Are you chill or are you gonna freak out about it?”
“I’m chill, Marc! I’m freezing, tell me what it is!”
“I didn’t talk to him.”
You groan hard and try to keep in to your chest.
“Marc, I know—”
“No, I haven’t been talking to him, I haven’t been letting him around at all. I’ve been pushing him down on purpose and lying about it.”
You breathe a sigh.
“Marc, you’re not a native Spanish speaker. You’re high school level. I can tell.”
“You knew?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I needed you to tell me. I need you to do that work. Don’t you get that? Yes. Yes, I’m tired, and yes, this has been hard, but I have seen how good you take care of Bekah and how happy we are when things are going well. You could make it so we have more of that.”
You inhale and rub your dry nose, checking the glove compartment for some chapstick or something. Just a bunch of expired coupons, nicotine gum, an extra pair of gloves, a tiny flashlight, backup batteries and a newsboy cap.
“It’s true that I can’t just take care of everything indefinitely.” You click it shut.
“I mean look at where we are. That’s where I need you to put in the work, so we can work.” You say. “You do want to work out, right?”
“Yeah. I want that.”
“Act like it.”
He shuffles his legs to get some feeling back into his toes. It is really cold.
He takes a deep breath.
“He wants to cheat on you.” He says, feeling like he’s falling to pieces with the words, that this is it, him ruining what you put together.
“He– what?” You don’t think you heard right.
“It’s been two years, since the– since that night, how we said we were gonna break it off, that we messed up, th-then the positive pregnancy test, and he hasn’t done anything, since, he hasn’t and I know he hasn’t, I know he wouldn’t, but– but he wants to date.”
“Like…?”
He doesn’t get it, how unaffected you sound.
“Like date, like, go out.” He doesn’t want to spell it.
“Like we do?”
“Mm-hmn.”
You think for a second.
“With me?”
You don’t know if you should bring back up the flirting right now, that kiss.
He looks like he’s about to start crying.
“Are you enabling me?” He says.
“Huh?”
“Is this one of those relationships where the husband can’t do anything and the wife just– she just has to manage; everything.”
You look out across the dashboard.
“I don’t do the laundry.” You say. “I don’t clean, I don’t think I even know where thermostat is. You seriously think you don’t do anything??”
“I mean…”
“Bekah, Marc.” He holds her a little tighter, like you’ll take her back and he isn’t ready for you to yet. She’s practically asleep, curled against his stomach, holding on. It’s the biggest comfort he has right now. That she’s okay. Too tired to care.
“I’m supposed to.” He says, watching her breathing. “That’s not…”
Bekah was his daughter. One he wasn’t going to let stay an ‘accident’. He knew what not to do. What she needed. Sometimes it felt like there was nothing else. That if he was just good enough at this, nothing else mattered.
And then she wouldn’t be there, and he would wonder why the hell you even liked him, how you could put up with it.
“Marc, you’re mentally ill. I know you are, you know you are, we know that going to someone–”
His whole body locks up, for a moment breathing stuffs his head, you don’t fail to notice, but you know addressing it won’t help at all, that he just needs to hear it more so it isn’t like this every time.
“Could make things a lot, lot worse.”
He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t that bad, or that it hadn’t taken years of his life when you brought it up. Getting out of there had been so much most days he didn’t even remember Putnam Medical Facility existed, much less that it did anything to him.
He had forgotten to tell you go out of your way so you wouldn’t pass it on the way out of town. It was in the back of his head the whole trip, what they said, that he belonged there.
“So sure, I’m enabling you. Trying to enable you to participate in this in a way that hurts you and me the least.”
The least. Not none. It would never be none. No matter what he did.
“He was there. All that shit.” Marc said. He couldn’t act like he went through that, either. “We’re only here because of him.”
“Yeah.”
“Am I getting worse?” He says softly.
“You’re not getting worse, baby.” You gently touch his coat arm, rubbing into his shoulder. “You wanna talk about that now?”
“No.” He lets his eyes shut. “I just wanna go home.”
There was so much. All Marc’s life, no one really talked to him about it safely. Everything he said seemed to be used against him. How he felt, lived, tried to cope, when you met him he was in one room shut off from the house of his pain in all these compartments, a place he did and didn’t want out of. And a pregnancy burst down that door, but he still went back there. Still needed it.
“All this is conversations, Marc. We’re gonna do this five hundred thousand more times. Do you want to keep doing this, for every thing, for the rest of our lives?”
“I like talking with you.” He says gently, thinking of all those times you make him feel real, even when that reality is small, and it hurts, it’s enough for the him he knows exists to anyone else.
“I do.” He says.
“I do too.” You say. “So talk to him. Work through this. And we can work on something else tomorrow.”
The snow falls.
That was something he could do. For both of you. Even if he didn’t want to.
“This was supposed to feel good. We made it a whole year. This whole year, with everything, I mean, we were already living together but it really… it changed.”
“Did you think we weren’t going to make it?”
“I did. Until you– until my parents.”
You put your hands behind your neck and pull, stretching.
“Talk to him, Marc.”
“Okay.” He lets out.
He sets Bekah carefully back into you, against your front, zips up his coat, forces the frozen driver’s side door open, and steps out into the cold, knocking some of the snow off when he throws it shut.
You watch him straighten his back and stare down the side mirror with a deep frown on his face. He shouts a little, something about you being his wife, how nothing is ever just his, then he sighs, holds his face in his hands.
You think you might want to intervene until he pulls his head up and cracks the hood of the car. He trails around to the trunk, gets something out, comes back around. He pops the door and turns the ignition, keeping turned from you, focused. You think he jumpstarts it.
You take the time to get sleepy Bekah buckled back in her seat and comfy with a blanket canopy, and you back into the passenger side, sunlight and lack of wind helping some against the temperature.
You hear some shoveling, some Spanish, a few minutes pass, and then he gets back in the car, stomping snow off his boots and tapping it off the scraper.
“Guay de mí, siento.” He gives you a smile and straps himself in.
He shifts the gear, then pushes back in his seat, tugs his glove off, and puts his hand out to you on the center console.
You look at him, then his hand, then take it in your own, palms flat together.