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It wasn’t that he didn’t know, alright? Pops loved to make a big deal about it, but Ransom did know the difference between a real knife and a stage one. He was honestly kind of pissed the old man didn’t know better than to think so. How many of his plucky heroes relied on being underestimated, and then he went and believed whatever the fuck he wanted to about Ransom. That was the privilege Grandpa’s words had bought him, and never let it be said that the old man didn’t know how to press an advantage.
Fuck, maybe that was genetic.
Prop knives felt different in your hand. That was the main thing. Even when they weren’t cheap as shit and light, they didn’t have the heft of a real knife. They couldn’t. Had to have hollow space for the blade to collapse into.
Maybe that was the name of Grandpa’s game, though. Man loved a metaphor, and what was Ransom if not a prop knife of a person. Hiding hollowness. An empty space for someone else to fill.
Good thing Marta had more than enough substance for both of them.
More than enough knives, too - she kept more of Grandpa’s shit than Ransom would’ve. Though, Ransom probably wouldn’t have kept any of it. His conscience would’ve wanted it all gone. Y’know. On account of how he tried to kill the guy. Did kill him, in every way that mattered.
Hey. Ransom knew the rest of his life would be trying to make up for that. A dependent clause, tacked onto the end of the only sentence about him that mattered. And there was even a neat double entendre to make there, what with sentence being the thing he served. All so literary.
But he had to cut the pity party short most of the time. Couldn’t really get a good sulk in. Marta didn’t like when he got like this, and Marta didn’t waste time on passive aggression. The nurse thing always threw him, he never saw it coming. Really should’ve known better by then, though. She was Alice’s sister, after all. That title was equally given and earned. So, when Ransom got too miserable she would flick his ear or poke his cheek and tell him to knock it off with exactly zero sympathy. If he was really unlucky, she’d subject him to compliments. Practically psychological torture. Ransom wasn’t into that at all. It was more the physical torture that did it for him, but that was a whole other thing.
So. All that to say - and Ransom did like to say things, clearly - he did his best not to let Marta know when he was feeling like a piece of shit. And that left him slim fucking pickings in terms of confidantes.
Take Alice. “Hey dipshit. You look like you want to kill yourself.” Her bedside manner left quite a bit to be desired, but it was the best Ransom got right now.
“You been reading my diary again?” he said to her with a broad smile.
“Please. Like you’d ever do something as vulnerable as commit your feelings to paper.” She flopped down on the couch next to him, making sure her heels landed on his thigh. Then she got more comfortable, curling up with some healthy space between them. “What are you watching?”
“Monk marathon.”
“Yawn. Gag. That’s why you’re depressed.”
“Well, then you pick something. If your taste is so impeccable.” He tossed the remote to her, aiming so it landed in the pocket of space between them. Alice leaned over, pulled it closer by the fingertips and then pulled the guide up. “Not a bad idea to be aware of the competition.”
“If you think your competition is the goofy dude who loves numbers, I’ve got news for you. The demo of this show has very little crossover with Blood Like Wine readers. Think more like… My Favorite Murder, or something.”
“What’s that?”
Alice kept flipping through channels. “Podcast. True crime. All Harlan’s books look like the most slow burn foreshadowing ever now, so. The freak bitches who love to think about murder are all over this.”
She settled on something. Dawn of the Dead, the classic one. After pumping the volume up a bit, she tossed the remote back down on the couch. Close enough that he could pick it up if he stretched. “Food incoming, by the way,” she said then. “Dumplings and lo mein.”
“Enjoy.”
“I got some for you, dumbass.”
“Oh. She’s a philanthropist.”
“Shut up.” Alice rolled her eyes, and they subsided into a friendly enough silence. Sometimes silence was as friendly as they got.
They made it two full commercial breaks before Alice spoke up again. “Seriously though. WTF. Why the face.”
That was such a dad joke that Ransom turned to look at her with something close to alarm. Alice was never lame. And then the penny dropped. Oh. She was worried about him. It was strangely humiliating to consider, but that was definitely Alice trying to sound nonchalant about some very real concern for him.
Fuck. Ransom must look worse than he thought. Definitely glad Marta was at work; he had to get it under control before she got home.
“I’m fine,” he tried to tell her.
He didn’t have to look at her to hear her eyes roll. “Oh sure. You’re fine.”
“No worse than normal,” Ransom had to concede.
The movie came back on. A zombie shambled across the screen. “So the normal shit, then,” Alice said.
“Basically.”
“You thought about therapy?”
That should’ve sounded like a dig. The fact that it didn’t was goddamn sobering. “Yeah, totally. I’d love to spill my guts to some rando wearing hemp and a crystal.”
“Bringing a lot of baggage to the idea of a therapist.”
He brought a lot of baggage to a lot of things. Kind of a specialty, along with heartless murder. None of that made it out of his mouth. It seemed dangerously like she was going to try and help him, and that was the last thing Ransom wanted. “Oh sorry, I forget. How many years have you been seeing a shrink?” he asked with faux concern.
Alice kicked him. “Okay, loser. Be like this forever.”
“That’s the plan,” Ransom said.
Felt like a death sentence. That was what he deserved, though, so he couldn’t exactly complain.
“How long are you here for?” he asked her.
“Couple weeks. Marta misses Mom, so. I’m here to make sure she doesn’t get too mopey without someone to take care of.”
Ransom glanced over at her. “I don’t count?”
“Psh. You don’t let her take care of you. You owe her too much.”
Kind of terrifying, to be read for filth so easily. By his soon-to-be in law, no less. But that was always the risk with family. Always why he never particularly cared for his, before now.
With the Cabreras, not caring wasn't even an option. Quite the family legacy to live up to - or, realistically, to fail to live up to. Either way, it'd be his burden soon enough. The wedding was set for the end of summer. Ransom thought it would've been a good bit to do it the same weekend that Grandpa died. Really rub everybody's faces into it. But Marta didn't like that. When he threw that date out there, she said absolutely not.
Well, her exact words were So you can use me torture yourself forever? Absolutely not. Ransom was used to being out-maneuvered by her, but it never got any less strangely satisfying.
So Marta picked the weekend. She went for early September, told him she wanted to get married at the church her mom went to. Ransom hadn’t believed in God since he was in the single digits, if that, but he agreed to it. Who the hell was he to disagree? A felon with empathy issues who hadn’t earned a single thing he had, ever, and still managed to feel like he’d gotten the short end of the stick. He was really quite the catch.
A loud buzz sounded, the sound of the gate doorbell being rung. Their food was there. “Don’t forget to tip,” Alice said loudly to his back.
“Fuck off,” Ransom said.
He tipped 50% just to be safe.
They were eating on the couch when Marta got home. “My two favorite people,” she said when she saw them, which was the kind of thing Ransom could feel him and Alice both struggling not to undercut with a joke. “Enough for me?”
“Are you hungry? I thought you had a dinner tonight,” Alice said. Words practically taken out of Ransom’s mouth.
“Please. As if I could get full on dry salad and a drier chicken breast.”
It was hot when she got bitchy, but Ransom was trying this thing called not telling her just how often he found her hot. Y’know, in the interest of protecting his dignity and playing anything close to hard to get. So he didn’t say that, and he waited for her to let her shoulder bump into his before he leaned any closer.
“And how was your day?” she asked, a smile in her voice. She was picking all the pork bits out of his pork fried rice. Criminal behavior for which she showed no remorse.
“Another day of freedom,” Ransom answered.
Marta was trying too. She didn’t call him out on his shit every chance she had - which, thank God. That’d take a lot of time. But she did give his hand an extra comforting squeeze once she got ahold of it, so Ransom knew she’d noticed something.
They slept up in the old man’s bedroom. Easy to forget who it used to belong to, now that Marta was all over it. Not that she’d girled the place up or anything. But she wasn’t a ninety year old man, so the place looked different with her decorating it. More comfortable. She’d done a lot to fix it, too - first thing Marta did was redo the damn squeaky steps. All but one, so she could get up silently but a killer wouldn’t. Granddad would definitely approve.
All of that went through Ransom’s head basically every time they climbed the steps to bed. Nearly nightly. Talk about a haunting.
Dramatic, considering that what they were doing was putting on pajamas. Especially considering how Marta wore the most boring matching pajama set in existence. Like it would kill her to put on something skimpy every once in a while? No wonder he was waxing poetic over stair construction.
“You know what today is?” Marta asked.
“Thursday,” he said energetically. “TGIF tomorrow, am I right?”
“You would’ve gotten out of jail today.”
He stopped where he was. Closed his eyes for a second. “Oh. That.”
“Don’t try to convince me you forgot,” she said pleasantly, as she rubbed in her nighttime moisturizer.
Despite the warning, he thought about going for it anyways. What could it hurt? This was a conversation he really didn’t want to have. “God. Time just passes so quickly,” he said, which really was more of a neutral statement than anything else.
Marta was not amused. She turned and gave him one of those flinty looks over her shoulder, her dark eyes going a little scary. “Ransom.”
“What? What have I done to earn being treated like a fucking schoolgirl who can’t-“
“You wish I’d treat you like a schoolgirl,” Marta interjected, and that did derail his self-righteous indignance with some sudden horniness long enough for her to get some more words in. “Listen to me. I’m glad you’re out. I’m glad you’ve been out. I love you.”
“Yeah.”
She rolled her eyes, and crossed the room to her side of the bed. Ransom stayed right where he was, waiting for the rest of that. He knew her voice. He knew more was coming. “I think you need to do something besides sitting at home and feeling sorry for yourself,” she said, as she got in between the blankets.
“Get a job?” he asked dryly. Now that was a conversation he was familiar with in this house. Jesus.
But his soon-to-be wife was kinder than that. “Or a hobby. Just, something. A sense of purpose, you know? A reason to get up.”
“We could always have a kid,” he said. Flippant, to get her to shut up.
Marta only shrugged, though. “We could.”
“Or maybe I’ll get really into stamps.”
“You don’t have the patience.”
Well. She had a point on that one. He should’ve said something else, like rock climbing. Parasailing. Something high-adrenaline.
“Ransom,” Marta said.
“I’m here,” he answered, and something in his tone was enough to make her leave him alone. She took his hand between them, once the lights were off. That was when he remembered. “Love you too,” he whispered, and she squeezed his hand back.
Ransom took up kickboxing. It helped basically not at all.
He did get in shape for the wedding, at least, and that was better than nothing. At the end of the day, at least he could take a good wedding photo.
Did it feel good to get socked in the fucking face every once in a while? Of course it did. What felt even better was going home and waving off Marta’s concern.
There was probably a psychosexual reason for that. Ransom wasn’t really interested in getting too deep into that, though. He had a life to squander.
They got married on a rainy day. Ransom couldn’t even pretend to be anything less than totally happy.
The only members of his family there were Meg and Jacob, and even they were probably more on Marta’s side than his if they were doing sides. But that was the thing. She didn’t want to do sides. Which was lucky for Ransom, because in this case better half was pretty literal.
Not that it was a new occurrence, but they did fuck on the wedding night specifically. Ransom suspected it was because Marta followed rules that were unspoken as diligently as anything explicit, but hey. He wasn’t complaining. She was adventurous. That’s what he’d say if he was telling somebody about their sex life in family-friendly terms - though, that was really a wacky scenario to envision. Who would he talk to that wouldn’t hate that level of detail? He didn’t have like, friends.
Among other things, his unpopularity made small talk with Mom awkward. “How are your friends?” she always asked, usually along with a sip of her gin and tonic. After she asked about Marta and before she asked if he’d spoken to Dad. There was a rhythm to these things. And he had to decide whether he was going to say the truth - what friends? - or make the proper vaguely positive noises that got the interaction over faster. Usually he opted for the second. But today, for some reason, he didn’t.
“I don’t have any.”
She rolled her eyes, which grated worse than expected. A lifetime of Mom’s dismissal and still. Ransom had an itch in his chest. “Hey, you asked,” he said, as lightly as he could.
“To be polite. Not for to get the whole…” She waved her hand at him. “Theatrical production.”
Ransom raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, God forbid I share a feeling.”
Mom frowned at him, had that sip of her drink then for punctuation. “Alright. Let’s not get into this.”
It had been a while since Ransom had done anything rash. He’d been keeping it under control. Figured something had to pop. And hey, he’d killed the old man. Be fitting if he snapped and killed the next generation too. But Ransom couldn’t manage to work up an anger like that right now. Call it growth or being a pussy, all he could do was snap at her. “Course not. Let’s get into Dad, right? I’ll pretend like I’m the reason we’re talking about him, and you’ll pretend like wanting to fuck him and wanting to kill him are diametrically opposed instincts. Sound fun?”
“Now hold on, you self-righteous little shit,” Mom said.
“Always a pleasure,” Ransom answered, and left before it could get any worse.
He wasn’t just being dramatic. There really wasn’t anybody but Alice, who kept threatening to move out now that she was done with college and a career woman but never quite got around to it. Never mind her huge number of friends, the guys who would drop everything and move in with her if she only asked, her roller derby team, and whatever random people who passed her on the street and fell in love. There were a lot of those, too.
Maybe that was what Marta was getting at. He should join a fantasy football league or something. Make a few acquaintances. Broaden his social circle. There really wasn't much camaraderie at kickboxing. He went in, kept his head down, and got out.
Marta had friends. Maybe if he was slightly more normal, he could co-opt some of them. It was just kind of hard muster up some small talk with people who knew full-well that he'd tried to drive a knife through Marta's sternum. It had never come up, but. They knew. The news coverage had been extensive. Pretty hard on him.
"Right," Alice had said. "Poor little you. Hold on, let me pull out a violin."
“Okay,” Ransom began.
“Shut up. I’m talking, you’re listening.”
“You want to watch the way you talk to me?” Ransom said. Not mad, just genuinely curious. “Real free with the insults.”
Alice rolled her eyes hard, so hard her whole head moved. “Oh sure. Go ahead and kill me. As if you’d have the balls.”
“I did before.”
“We’re not talking about before, we’re talking about now and I know for a fact you wouldn’t have the balls.”
Compelling point. Ransom meant to spit that back and didn’t. Distracted, he supposed, by the stacks of Grandpa’s books they were going through. And by Marta coming back with the beers she’d gone to get.
The thing nobody told him about trying to kill his grandpa was that remorse, once he let it in, would eat him alive. That he’d wish he’d just tried to seduce Marta from the start if he’d known how easy that would be, and that every time he had that thought he thought everybody might be better off if he took a long walk off a short pier. Or something like that. Nobody drowned themselves anymore. And if he was going to drown himself somewhere it certainly wouldn’t be Chesapeake Bay. Or anywhere else in the Atlantic. The cold would be worse than the dying.
Realistically, he’d also have trouble getting that far. There was still that part of him that, every time he left the house, was waiting for them to lock him back up. Or at the very least, pop an ankle monitor on. Part of why he generally didn’t go a ton of places these days.
“You’re being quiet,” Marta said that night.
Shit. So much for keeping a lid on it. “I thought I’d give you a night off,” he said.
“Been doing a lot of thinking, haven’t you.”
“A bit.”
There was still a dance to this. Conversations with Marta. Ransom spent the first few months out of prison waiting for this rhythm to settle into something more normal, something a little less like a knife fight. As much as he hated the pun, it was the thing that came to mind. Stalking around each other, poking out with something sharp just to see if the other person could still get around it.
Sometimes he did think about what it’d be like to just put the knife down, in the same way that he thought about what it’d be like to fly a commercial jet into thunderstorm. Somehow he never managed to do either.
Still, he danced within range as best he could. “Maybe I should get into meditation. Have a whole Buddhist arc. Holding two things in my head at once is still a little beyond me.”
Marta didn’t look away from the mirror, where she was watching herself dab on some kind of serum or lotion or something. “I don’t know what that’s a reference to.”
“It’s a reference to what I’m thinking about.”
“Well, since some of us aren’t mindreaders, would you mind going back and explaining the first part?”
He didn’t mind exactly, but it wasn’t easy either. “Well. I don’t want to have the whole. Blame conversation again. But.”
“You know, I would’ve let you kill me if I knew surviving was going to be such a headache for you,” Marta said blandly. The exact kind of bitchiness he fell in love with. God, this woman.
“Selfless to the end,” was all he said. Because he definitely wasn’t damaged.
She didn’t call him out on it. Had a different bone to pick, apparently, given her response. “It’s this fucking family. You have a weird relationship with death. Have you ever noticed that?”
“What do you mean?”
Marta turned to look him in the eye for this part, nailed him with a hard-edged gaze that pinned him squarely in place. “Your whole family spent a birthday party talking about the best way to fake your own death,” she pointed out. “You were always threatening each other, and threatening each other, and standing right on the edge.”
“Of what?
“Of darkness.”
Ransom rolled his eyes and groaned. “Please, please do not give me the whole Catholic thing. We’ve been doing so good on that.”
“It’s not Catholic to say obsessing about violent homocide makes you weird about the whole concept,” she said disparagingly. “I think that’s just a fact. I mean, Harlan wasn’t even mad, at the end. That’s proof.”
That information was like a barbell straight to the cranium. Ransom was momentarily stunned. He got his question out eventually. “He wasn’t?”
Marta shook her head. “Did I not mention that before?”
“Uh, no.”
All she did in response was shrug, and walk past him out of the bathroom to the bedroom. Got in bed. She tossed her words over her shoulder. “I didn’t get it at the time. But. He thought it was funny. One of his thought experiments. Taking notes on the process of dying. I wasn’t able to find that one, though. Maybe the EMTs… what,” she added then, her face on him. “Your face is doing something strange.”
“I took something,” he said. “When I snuck in to switch the vials back. One of his little books. I don’t know. I wanted to know what he was thinking.”
Her mouth genuinely fell open. “You didn’t.”
“I mean I never opened it, but. I’m starting to think-“
“What do you mean you never,” Marta began, and he cut her off in return. Real soulmates shit.
“I mean that I picked the thing up and couldn’t fucking deal, so I just took it home and never opened it. I don’t know!”
“Why’d you take it?”
“I don’t know that either,” he said loudly, and then the silence sort of rang between them.
This was just about the most they’d raised their voices at each other, basically ever. A real departure for Ransom, who grew up falling asleep to the sound of his parents arguing. But he wasn’t much of a yeller himself. Never had been. With girlfriends or whatever - though, none of them really felt like much of anything compared to Marta, so comparing that to this was like comparing a… well, a smaller thing. To a bigger thing that was also way better. He needed to work on that metaphor. In the meantime, he got into bed next to her.
“Sorry,” he made himself say.
Marta leaned over to kiss him. “Thank you. It’s okay, I’m just… you surprised me.”
Yeah. Makes sense. He was surprised he did it, honestly. It felt too sentimental. Not enough to stop him.
Well, not then. Maybe now.
“Do you want it back?” he asked her.
“No. I don’t know what I’d do with it.”
Ransom could think of one thing, and he made himself mention it. “Could be nice to read it. Probably wrote some real nice shit about you, given that he was giving you everything he had.”
“No. I’m done letting his words tell our story.”
A beater to his beamer. That was the metaphor. Sure they were both technically cars, but like. Really, not even in the same universe.