Cracks in the Armor

By accident.

I’m at Marcus Vane’s house for the fourth morning when I get the fresh towels in my bathroom.

It is Anna who tells me, not Marcus. She does not mean to.

She smiles at me, greets me as she’s dropping off the towels when she asks how my mother is doing an if she is settling well at the new facility. She asks so casually, clearly speaking under the assumption that I already know about the move.

I freeze.

"What new facility?" I ask.

Anna’s face changes. Slowly. I see the shift in her expression. The moment she figures it out that she has spilled information that was not hers to share. She recovers fast, She sets the towels down on the end of the bed and runs her hands over them uncomfortably, especially as they do not need it.

I look at her square in the eyes, then ask again. “What facility?”

The confusion is obvious in her eyes, even her voice when she says "I'm sure Mr. Vane can explain …"

"Tell me, Anna." It does not come out as a question.

"A private care facility, Miss Brooks." She still will not meet my eyes. "North side. Very good reputation. She was moved last night, I believe."

Last night. While I fell asleep in the massive white bed, completely in the dark about my own mother’s care. I had been absolutely exhausted thinking about worst case scenarios because I could not call her, no thanks to Marcus’s rulebook. I did not even remember when I slept after the hours of staring at the white ceiling, thinking about my mother and hoping to God that she was fine.

So all this time, she was at the county’s private facility receiving proper care from nurses that knew her name. So she was okay.

I sit with that for exactly three seconds.

Then I get up and go to find Marcus.

* * *

I find him in his study.  This time, I am surprised to see the door open and Marcus just standing behind his desk. He is reading something in a folder and for a moment, I wonder what it is. By now, he probably feels eyes watching him, so he looks up and sees me. I expect something in them, but I get nothing. His expression is just flat, like it usually is, not giving away anything, so in that moment, I have no idea what he’s thinking.

I don’t care though, not right now. I’m here for business. The business of my mother.

"You moved my mother," I say.

He closes the folder. "Yes."

"Without telling me."

"Yes."

"Without asking me."

He sets the folder down and straightens to his full height, which is considerable, and which I refuse to be intimidated by. "The county facility she was in has inadequate monitoring for her condition. The new facility has a full cardiac team on rotation, a dedicated nursing ratio of one to three, and a specialist she has needed to see for eight months but could not get access to. She is safer there. She is receiving better care there."

I slowly start to see red. Is he kidding me? Who the heck made him think moving my mother, MY sick mother, without my permission was okay?  And now he is mansplaining her condition to me? Where was he when I was struggling to get her seen by professionals and failed because we couldn’t afford the care? So he swoops in, without MY permission?

“Are you kidding? That is so not the point.”

He tilts his head to the right and narrows his eyes slightly. “What is the point then, Callie?”

"The point", I step fully into the study, "is that she is my mother. My mother. Not a variable in your operation. Not a loose end you need secured somewhere you can control. She is a sixty-one-year-old woman who has spent the last three years fighting her own body and fighting the system and fighting every person who has ever looked at her like she is too difficult and too expensive and too much trouble, and she deserves to know what is happening to her. And so do I."

"I made a decision that was in her best interest …"

"No. It was in your best interest." My voice has climbed and I am not pulling it back. "You needed her somewhere you could monitor. Somewhere safe for your operation. Don't dress it up as care when it was strategy, Marcus. At least be honest with me about that."

Something shifts in his face. Not anger, something tighter. He clenched his jaw. "I am trying to keep both of you alive."

"By making every decision about our lives without us. For us. As if we’re inanimate objects and you’re our owner or were your subjects and you’re our master.”  I’m on the other side of his desk now. We are face to face with just the desk between us snd you could cut the tension with a knife right now. It was that thick. "You took me out of my apartment, however uninhabitable for you it was, supposedly trying to protect me by keeping me in a room in a building where I have to follow some annoying rules, even locked away my phone so I can’t reach anyone. To now make matters worse, you have moved my mother to a facility I have never seen, that I did not choose, and I found out from Anna." I let that sit. "Anna, Marcus."

"Callie …"

"Do not say my name like that right now."

"Like what?"

"Like it's supposed to calm me down."

He is quiet for a moment. That jaw thing is happening. A muscle moves in it, just once. "I should have told you," he says finally. The words come out level but slightly stripped of their usual precision, like the careful arrangement of them cost something. "I acted quickly and I did not consider how it would land. That was a mistake."

I stare at him in obvious shock. "Are you actually apologizing?"

"I am acknowledging an error." A beat. "It is the same thing."

"Nope. No it is not."

He looks at me pointedly this time. And I notice something ever so slight in his expression. Gosh, it was so tiny I almost missed it. Heck, I would have if I wasn’t looking directly at him. The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something more hesitant than a smile, something that seems to arrive against his will.

"Your mother's major diagnosis is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy," he says. "She has been managing it with medication for six years. The dosage was adjusted eighteen months ago after a minor episode that the county facility recorded as a fall. Her current cardiologist is overbooked and underfunded and she missed two follow-up appointments in the last year because the transport assistance program in her district was cut."

The anger in my chest does not go away. But beneath it, something shifts.

"How do you know all that?" My voice has dropped now.

He holds my gaze and he does not answer. And the silence that follows is its own kind of answer, wide and layered and full of things he is not ready to say. There is clearly a whole lot more to this .

"Marcus." I say his name quietly. "How long have you known about my mother?"

"Callie." He says my name the same way; slow, deliberate, like he is placing it carefully. "Not tonight."

"When?"

"Soon." He picks up the folder. "I'll have Anna set up patient portal access so you can review her records and speak to her care team directly. You will be consulted on all decisions going forward."

It is not enough and we both know it. But it is something, and I am too emptied out to keep pushing, so I take it and I leave.

* * *

I stay in my room throughout the rest of the afternoon.

My head is spinning. I’m in my feelings a bit, but mostly, I just really needed him to not be anywhere near me. I sit on the edge of the bed, pull my knees up and do something I have not quite done in a while. I talk to my mother in my head. I used to do this when I was younger and something was wrong at school. Not out loud. Just the internal version. The one where I imagine what she would say and let it calm me down.

I remain in my room for the entire afternoon. My head spins and though I feel some big emotions, the main need is for him to stay far away. I sit on the bed's edge, draw my knees toward my chest and perform an action I have skipped for some time. I talk to my mother inside my mind. I carried out this same practice during childhood when trouble appeared at school. I never speak aloud, it only form silent words. I picture the exact reply she would give and that imagined answer soothes me.

She would say: Callie, baby, don't let anyone make you feel small.

She would say: You got my stubborn and your daddy's sense. Use both.

I have literally NO idea of what my “daddy’s sense” is. The man died when I was seven and all I remember is his laugh and how his hand on my head felt so easy and warm, like  he was very proud of me, just the way I was. That’s all I remember of him. No memories or anything so I have always held the ones I do, close to  my heart.  

I think about my mother in a new room. New nurses. A cardiac specialist she could not afford before. Despite everything, despite the fury still sitting in my chest like a hot coal, I know the care is real. I know she is in a better place medically than she was three days ago.

That is the thing about Marcus Vane that I cannot work out yet. Everything he does is wrong in the way he does it and right in what it produces. He takes without asking and delivers without explaining and somehow the outcome is always something I cannot argue with. So far.

I do not know what to do with a person like that.

I do not know what to do with the fact that he knows my mother's medication history and missed appointments and the name of her condition without blinking. I do not know what to do with the gap between how long he has known about us and how recently I learned his name.

Anna brings dinner to my room at seven. I eat it because I am hungry and because it is good, like really good, the kind of food I have never cooked for myself and could not afford to order and I hate a little that even the food is impossible to complain about.

I do not see Marcus again until after midnight.

I have not slept well since I arrived but there is just something very different about tonight. Right now, I am not awake just because I am afraid and uncertain of what the future holds. I simply cannot get the conversation with Marcus in his study earlier, out of my mind. It is the way he said your mother's primary diagnosis is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, precise and clinical and without hesitation, like he had read that file so many times the words came automatically. It is how he called my name when I pushed him, like he just needed to use it as an escape from himself.

As I am staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep on the white bed, my mind wonders how many people in my life have had information about me and my life but never told me. The landlord who knew three months before he said anything that the building was being sold. The doctor at the county clinic who knew my mother's condition was worsening before he sat us down. Everyone knowing, everyone deciding what I could handle, everyone managing the information like it was theirs to manage.

And now Marcus Vane. Who apparently has known things about my family for longer than one night in an alley.

Around a little past midnight, I  forget completely about sleep since it is not coming anyway.

I pull on the robe from the bathroom hook and I go to the kitchen to get some water. I get halfway across the living room when I see him.

He doesn’t see me as he is at the extreme end of the room, near the long window, facing away from me, his defined back in my clear line of sight. He is not moving at all, just standing still, like a statue.

Actually, he looks kind of posed; his jacket off, still in his white shirt but the collar button is loose and the long sleeves are rolled up to his elbow, exposing his varicose veins, which looks so good by the way. He is holding a glass of whiskey in one hand, and the  other was on the glass. In his glass of whiskey, the ice is  almost all the way melted. Looks like he has been standing there for a long while.

I stand there by the hallway, just looking at him. This man who has taken me in and says he is protecting me. All I can still see is his back but from the way his shoulders are angled, his head having forward ever so loosely, it looks from my end like he is trying to lean into something I can’t see. Something maybe he can’t see too. I hear myself thinking this is what he looks like when he is alone, away from prying eyes, away from judgement and opinion. Just him in his rawest form; no desk to make him look accomplished or folder to make him look busy and evade conversation.

He does not turn to look at me. I doubt he has even heard me. He is just standing there, close to the window enough for his right arm to touch it, a glass on whiskey in his other and he still looks completely lost in thought. I can’t see his face, just his back and boy, it is a back worth looking at. Lean muscle, defined and firm. But I also see something; the way his shoulders are slightly slumped, his head drooping forward like he is trying to extend towards something but gets stuck trying.

The only thought that floats through my mind as I stand at the edge of the door looking at him, is this is what he looks like when no one is watching, far away from prying eyes. No desk to make him look like he’s doing a lot, and no folders to pick up when conversations gets too close.

This is the part of Marcus Vane that does not exist in boardrooms.

He looks like a man carrying unnamed burdens on his back. Weight he has been carrying alone for so long that the Marcus who existed before the weight is now a deeply buried memory from a long time ago.

This moment feels private so I get the feeling I should just go back to my room and mind my business. Because obviously, he did not invite me to hear the moment with him or fill the silence so trying to do that or anything to break his mind space right now, would do more harm than good, I think.

So I make my way back to my room.

Then I just lay there, a stranger to sleep, thinking about his back to me, perfectly chiseled and defined, the whiskey he just held, the way his eyes looked empty, yet full of thoughts he must have carried alone for so long. The way said Callie earlier, almost groaning it,  like he was realizing a need to be careful with me.

And my mind starts to wonder how a person can be a part of someone’s life, like a spectator watching the experience, knowing all that they know about the other person’s life think about how much a person can know about someone else's life, and how long they can watch from a distance, without the other person ever knowing they were seen.