Chapter Text
Part I.
For as long as Scott McCall can remember, someone’s been living in his guest room.
It’s never the same person, and they never stay very long. Sometimes, Scott can hear his mother shuffling them into the next room way past midnight, and when he wakes up in the morning, the room is empty, and his mom is putting new sheets on the bed. Sometimes, when he goes down to breakfast, there is another person at his table with a black eye or a fat lip, eating Cheerios with his parents. Sometimes they stick around for a week or so, taking up slight spaces and making little noise. They are a few that make lasting impressions, big personalities bullied into bruised capsules. There are a few who are as bitter and angry as they should be. There are a few who become friends.
Every once and a while, they get a letter or a picture. There’s never a return address, but they’re always smiling and less purple-d in the photos. Melissa keeps these photos on a corkboard in the kitchen. Every year, she takes them down, files them in boxes, pulls them out when she’s having a particularly bad day.
For as long as Scott McCall can remember, his family has been growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking.
For as long as Scott McCall can remember, his mother has been a hero.
He’s six years old when Melissa brings in her first survivor.
Her name is Irina. She’s Russian, blonde, and very, very pregnant.
From his bed, Scott hears soft weeping in the hallway, and by the direction of his Winnie the Pooh night light, rolls off his mattress and pads to the crack in his door.
“Thank you, Melissa, thank you,” Irina whispers. Her accent is thick enough that Scott can hear it but not so much that he doesn’t know what she says. He closes one eye to laser focus the other into the dark hall. He notices a thick white plaster wrapped around her arm and that one of her eyes is puffy and dark. He presses himself against the door, trying to hear more.
Melissa, with a flashlight, roots around the linen closet for sheets. “It’s the least I can do,” she says. She wears a set of wrinkled periwinkle scrubs, and her flyaway curls are stuffed into a bun at the nape of her neck. She looks like Mom is supposed to look, but there’s something different about her. She offers an arm to the woman and says, “Come on, the bedroom is this way. We’ll get you on the first bus out of here in the morning.”
Scott’s dad wakes him up in the morning and makes him breakfast. Melissa and Irina are mysteriously missing even though Tuesdays are Melissa’s mornings to take Scott to school, and she’s never missed one in literally ever. When Rafael pulls up to the curb, Scott doesn’t budge from his car seat. His father watches in the rear view mirror. “What’s up, buddy? You’re normally halfway to the building before I even stop the car.”
Scott loves his mom, his dad, Stiles, and kindergarten in that order. It takes a lot of worry about the first three to keep him from the last one.
“Who was the lady that came over last night?”
Rafael visibly hesitates, and Scott hangs onto the drops of silence, wide-eyed. “She’s one of Mom’s friends.”
“Then how come I never met her before?” Scott is innocently doubtful.
“Because you don’t know everyone Mom and I know, mijo ,” Rafael laughs, breathy and insincere. “Now go on. You’re going to miss the Pledge of Allegiance if you keep asking questions.” He scoops Scott’s Power Ranger backpack from the floor of the car and stretches out, offering it to be taken.
“Where did she go?” Scott asks.
Rafael droops, though the corners of his lips quirk at Scott’s persistence. “Where did who go?”
“Where did the lady go?”
“Mom took her to the bus stop. I don’t know where she was going.” He shakes the backpack, a signal for his son to take it. “We aren’t supposed to know where she was going. Now, will you please take your backpack and go inside? Otherwise you and me are both gonna be in a lot of trouble when Mom finds out you were late.”
Scott unclips his belt and takes his backpack, planting a wet but distracted kiss on his father’s scruffy cheek before exiting the car and sprinting, more backpack than boy, up the front steps of the school.
Irina was the first survivor of Melissa McCall’s Home for Battered Women and Children, but she certainly was not the last.