Parents, Chapter 4 ~ Tumbling Tumbleweed, part 2

When they had first shown their faces after returning from the Mill (and worlds beyond) everyone from Mr. Berdilo to Liseli’s 14-year-old half-brother thought they’d spent two weeks in a seedy motel somewhere off the highway, doing the nasty and watching pay-per view pornography.  This had made a few people angry with them; the ones who hadn’t been sure beforehand that their joint disappearance meant lots of consensual sex in a seedy motel somewhere.

The local police weren’t at all surprised.  When the pair had been reported missing the police had looked at the facts and decided they all pointed to young love, or lust, take your pick.  This had been accepted by Liseli’s mother but distressed her oldest sister, who knew Liseli enough to know she just didn’t do that sort of thing.  Liseli’s mother measured her daughter against her own actions, and since Candace had a definite weakness for men, she didn’t find it surprising at all that her daughter would not have fallen far from the tree.

Leona had not fallen far from the tree.  Russ didn’t know this as a fact, but Liseli had told him so and he believed her.  But Leona did not measure her sister by her own actions, and she had been distressed.  Having never met Russ, and never heard her sister talk about him, she could only assume that he was evil and violent and had kidnapped her sister.  The fact that Liseli had disappeared without a change of clothes or any other personal possession, and had in fact left her jacket behind at the Burger House, had not worried the police, but it had set off Chinese rockets in Leona’s imagination.  Russell J. Markson, Junior had become a monster and a sadistic madman in her mind over those two weeks Liseli was gone.

Russ didn’t blame her, since when he saw the picture of himself that Kyla had provided for his missing persons report (his last high school mugshot, from when he was seventeen — and, incidentally, childless) would have convinced even him that he was a desperate and dangerous person.  Also possibly addicted to crack cocaine and heroine, though he had never taken either.  He’d had the flu when that picture was taken.  He always seemed to be sick during important and inopportune moments in his life, like yearbook pictures and his first journey to an otherworld.

Leona still didn’t like him.  He felt bad about it because Liseli had assured him before he met her that there was not a young male that Leona didn’t like.  Liseli had flattered him in a very un-Liseli like manner, telling him how cute and sexy and charming Leona would think he was.  That worried him, and as far as her never meeting a guy she didn’t like, he’d worried that there could always a first, and that it would be him, and he’d been right.  Nothing he could do would ever make Leona Luenford like him.  She had spent too many tortured hours and sleepless nights imagining the heinous crimes he was committing against her sister to be able to look at him without the image of his desperate, fluey mugshot overriding everything else.

She had been more than a little upset with Liseli when she discovered that she had not, in fact, been chained up in an underground bunker where she was subjected to daily rapes and ate dog food, or any of the things that young women on crime shows suffered.  It pained Liseli that she couldn’t tell Leona the truth, and it pained Russ that Liseli was pained, but they had agreed not to try and convince anyone of what had happened.  They would either end up in a psych ward, or Russ would be viewed as a freak and exploited should the world at large learn of his abilities.

This only compounded Leona’s dislike of Russ, because even though Liseli swore up and down that she and him had been madly in love two weeks ago when they disappeared, and had spent those two weeks in happy bliss, Leona knew her sister well enough to see that Liseli was lying.  Also, she had interrogated their Burger House co-workers at length and learned from all of them that Russ was obsessed with Liseli on a stalkerish level but that Liseli hated his guts.

Adding to this, Liseli had returned home thinner than when she’d left, and it wasn’t the sort of thinness that you got just from vigorous sex in a motel.  That also didn’t tend to make you stare off into space with a troubled, haunted expression, which Liseli couldn’t stop herself from doing for a long while after they’d returned home.  The only thing that had prevented Leona from figuring out the truth was that she couldn’t imagine something that exotic.

She just knew that something rotten was afoot, but could never put her foot or finger on it.

She just knew that whatever had happened, Russ had abused her sister somehow.

On the upside, Liseli’s brother Lance and little sister Lara liked him.

He’d battled Lance at PlayStation games for several hours and impressed him by being pretty good for a novice but had known his place and lost 90% of the time anyway.  Liseli had warned him beforehand that he should lose, but not lose too badly so that he looked like an incompetent moron.

That was, Russ decided, the secret not only to forming friends over PlayStation, but the secret to life itself.  People didn’t like to be beat, but they didn’t like you if you smelled of loserness and incompetence, either.  You should always lose gracefully and with a good fight.  Unless, that is, you didn’t give a shit about whether the person liked you or not, and just wanted to cream their guts.  Figuratively speaking.  But not always.  Sometimes literally.  But only literally if you were not in your homeworld.

Liseli’s mother had gotten married and left on a honeymoon while they were in Alisiya.  That was how sure Candace had been that Liseli was okay.  Or maybe she just didn’t care.  Russ didn’t understand mothers.

Take his own, for instance.

When Russ arrived home and presented Liseli to his mother and sister, a storm had erupted.

Sandra Markson had always said he was just like his father.  She always treated him as useless and in the way, but said things that let him know if he ever left he would be deserting her, just like his father had done.  It didn’t surprise him, then, that she would not speak to him when he came home.  He didn’t blame her.  If he had just run away with his girlfriend without a second thought for the feelings of his family, he’d think he was rotten, too.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t run away, that he’d got caught up in something he couldn’t control, because he couldn’t tell them that.  And there was the fact that if it were not for Liseli, he would never have come back.  Russ wouldn’t run away without thought for his family, but he didn’t see why, since he had disappeared anyway, he couldn’t just stay disappeared.

Sandra told Kyla to tell Russ that he was not welcome in her home, and even though he was standing right there to hear her say it, Kyla relayed the message.  Sandra did not ask where he’d been — even if he’d wanted to tell her the truth about his absence, even if what had happened had been 100% plausible, she wouldn’t have listened.

Kyla put into words all her mother’s indignity and anger, starting in on a lecture about what a thoughtless dick Russ was and how dare he show his face there as if nothing had happened.  Russ had been prepared to take it all quietly, because based on the story he’d given, he agreed that he was pretty thoughtless.

Liseli was there, though, and seized Kyla by the throat, tore out her vocal chords, chewed on and spat out all her vital organs, and then shoved what was left of her body into a wood chipper.

Figuratively speaking.

Literally, this is what she did:

She stepped in front of Russ, putting herself directly in Kyla’s line of fire, and said, “Just wait a minute, you little bleach blond bitch, how dare you talk to him like that!  Russ doesn’t have to answer to you, he doesn’t have to tell you where he’s going, he doesn’t have to report to you!  He owes you nothing!  I know what you’ve done to him, you and your bitter, poor excuse for a mother both!  You’re lucky Russ doesn’t spit on the pair of you, he’s too sweet and forgiving for that.  But you know what?  I’m not!”

Kyla was speechless and horrified, having, for the first time in her life, met someone who was neither intimidated by her nor restrained enough to reign in her disgust.  And so, Liseli was allowed to go on, though Russ didn’t like to think what would have happened had Kyla tried to interrupt.

Actually, he would have loved to see it.

But Liseli went on unabated, while Kyla wiped spittle from her face in horror:

“All his life you’ve made him feel like a disease, unwanted, useless.  He didn’t have to tell me that, I know him well enough to read between the lines, and seeing you in the flesh just confirms it.  You’re poison, both of you, you’re responsible for every bad thought he has about himself, you’re the ones who have been holding him back, you’re why he dropped out of high school and got a lousy job and never dated and didn’t have any confidence.”

Russ didn’t think that was entirely true, but he liked the look on Kyla’s face, and liked the fact that he mother was sure to overhear it all, so he didn’t stop her.

“I can only imagine how much better Russ would be at everything he does or has never had the courage to do if you two hadn’t been sucking his blood all these years.  And you have the nerve, the utter gall, the temerity—”

Russ didn’t know what temerity meant but he guessed it was something worse than nerve and gall.

“—to dare tell him he’s ungrateful and thoughtless?!”

Liseli’s voice had risen an octave or two and he liked it that it was in his defense and not because she was upset with him, for a change.

“My God!  You should thank whatever god harpies like you pray to that he hasn’t burned down the house or poisoned you or shot you or beaten you to death with a bat by now!  Heaven help me, I would have!”

Russ believed her.  Kyla’s mouth was now hanging open in a very satisfactory manner.

“Now!  We are going to go upstairs, and pack up a few of Russ’s things, and I’m going to take him home to my house.”  They had already been by Liseli’s house and decided that, since her mother was gone on a honeymoon for the next week, they would move into the master bedroom for a little while until they could find a place of their own.  “You’ve had twenty years to suck all the life out of him and thank God you haven’t succeeded, but I shudder to think what would have happened if it was allowed to go on any longer.  He’s mine now.”

Liseli ran out of steam then, and Kyla recovered enough to say, “You’re welcome to him,” before making a hasty retreat.

Russ knew Kyla, and was very impressed that Liseli had reduced her to a rather pathetic four word comeback.

He knew that his memory of the events had embellished Liseli’s speech a little.  But he was sure it wasn’t by much.

He knew that most of her opinion of his mother and sister had been his fault — he’d filled her in on his life by her request, and though he hadn’t, as she said, told her outright that they were harpies who had made him feel like a disease and had drained him of all confidence and self-esteem, it really hadn’t been all that hard to read between the lines.

He felt kind of bad about that.  They really weren’t all that bad.

His mother had had an unhappy life, disappointed and then deserted by her husband, who could blame her for resenting the son he’d left her with even though having a son had been his idea in the first place?  Really, his mother had never wanted him but she was just being honest by letting him know that.  It was his father who was truly to blame.  He had done the worse thing, bringing Russ into the world, claiming he wanted him, then changing his mind and throwing him away like a half eaten sandwich he’d gotten too full to finish.  Sandra had been cold but at least she’d raised him, fed him, clothed him, struggling through it as a single mother.

He felt downright bad about the way Liseli eviscerated his mother, actually.

But he wasn’t sorry she’d ripped Kyla a new one.  He’d never asked Kyla to play the overbearing mother to Sandra’s distant one.

They had loaded his things into Hefty bags and stuffed the bags into the trunk of the car Liseli shared with Leona.  Liseli said it was really more Leona’s car, because she worked within walking distance and rarely went anywhere else, but it had in fact been a gift from their father for the both of them, when Liseli had gotten her license.  He’d driven up from Illinois and presented it to her, but told her right away that she had to share it with her sister when she was old enough because he wasn’t made of money and wasn’t going to be driving another one up anytime soon.  Liseli had been more than willing to share.  Even as a new driver she hadn’t had much use for a car.

They drove away in her car, and Russ felt he knew how damsels in distress felt when they were rescued from the dragon and escaped on the back of the knight’s horse.  He did not like to think of himself as a damsel in distress, though, so he squashed that line of thought.

It didn’t change the fact that, had he not already been in love with her, he would have fallen head over heels for Liseli the day she gave Kyla a sound verbal thrashing.