Work Text:
Stranger Than Fiction: A Treatise on Happiness
OVERTURE
Three months after that terrible birthday party, two months after complete silence, and one month after a terse email exchange, Ransom comes back to the Thrombey estate.
It’s noon, an hour or two after he woke up and stared at the ceiling, blankly. He made himself a protein shake, reread the email response from Harlan. Then he took the BMW and drove to his grandfather’s.
The Thrombey estate is as he remembers it, albeit dusted with a light coating of snow, frosting the edges and softening it with a wintry glow. The dogs fucking hate him, the house still smells like musty dead animals and old people, and the help still treats him with the dismissive bare minimum that he always remembers. Ransom missed Christmas, and some of them clearly hold it against him.
When he was younger, Christmas here was magical. Christmas was when he looked forward to family gatherings most—with the panes all lit up and the icicles forming on the eaves of the porch, the house looked like one of those gingerbread houses that he could never successfully make. Then, Granddad and Grandma, when she was alive, would open the door with matching ugly holiday sweaters, full of holiday cheer. Back when Ransom was a kid, at least the family knew how to pretend to be happy during the holidays, though in retrospect, that had been Grandma Jo’s mediating force all along.
But the best part of Christmas, by far, was when Harlan would wink at Ransom, say, “Ready for your surprise?” and then the two of them would go off to his study, where he’d have set up a special end of year murder mystery, just for Ransom. The widow and the orphan. The penknife and the snake. There were cards, clues, testimonies, and Ransom would sift through it all tucked in the safety of his granddad’s arms, back when he was small enough to still fit in them. Even when Meg came along and started ruining every activity by being twelve years younger than him and yet his responsibility, their Christmas routine had remained, up until Ransom went off to college and discovered drugs; their relationship had frayed ever since then. But he can’t help but confess—when he thinks of his granddad, he thinks of Harlan’s wrinkled smile whenever Ransom got the mystery right.
Anyway. Ransom missed Christmas this year.
“Harlan’s in the study,” says Fran with that nasty expression on her face as she passes by with a basket of laundry in her arms.
He sneers at her as she exits, but it’s half-hearted; he already knew that. His feet had been dawdling for whatever insurmountable reason. But Hugh Drysdale wasn’t raised to stall, but instead to confront, so he walks to the study and knocks on it sharp, twice.
“Come in.”
Someone’s in his seat when Ransom sweeps in, and he notices her as he’s already tossing his jacket over the back of the squishy, corduroy-upholstered chair in the back where he always dumps his stuff. (That’s not Ransom’s chair. His chair is the leather upright to the right of Harlan’s office chair, which he’d unofficially claimed as his when he served as a research assistant in his twenties, having dragged the damn thing from a different part of the house all the way over. Harlan had never moved it back.)
Marta Cabrera uncrosses her legs from underneath her, stands up from the leather upright. Even though the office itself is almost stifling hot—in his old age, Granddad’s been running cold—she still is bundled up in a soft pink knit, her hair swept up and away from her face. She tucks a book underneath her arm and says with a warm smile for his granddad, “I’ll see you for dinner, Harlan,” and exits the study without a word to Ransom. She smells like a nurse when she passes by Ransom—carefully antiseptic—and she does not brush even one hair up against him as she leaves.
Harlan gestures for Ransom to sit. He does so in the prewarmed seat and he can’t read a single thing from his granddad’s expression. But that’s to be assumed. It was Harlan, not Richard, who taught Ransom how to quash the anxieties; how to assume power through poise. It was Harlan who taught Ransom a lot of things. Many of Richard’s teachings happened by accident, or by example of what not to do: e.g., cheat on Linda.
So he waits. There’s the crackle of the fire. The sighing of the winds outside as they whipped through leafless branches. And the tapping of his granddad’s fingers against the table as his eyes, made firelight-bright, contemplate Ransom. Then he pulls out from a drawer a thick sheaf of paper, wrinkled from annotation and heavy use, and with little bright sticky notes tabbing throughout. The top page, in proper formatting: Knives Out by Ransom Drysdale.
Harlan says, “It’s excellent.”
Ransom exhales. He hates himself for it, for that lack of composure. He wishes it didn’t mean so much, that glittering look of pride in Harlan’s eyes, but after a frantic two months of restless typing, of staring out the window thinking of the next twist at 2 a.m. in the morning, the validation is a weakening relief.
“I have made notes,” says Harlan, pushing it across. “Of some moments where I noted the plot to be more loosely connected. No suggestions, of course; the tale is yours to navigate. But on the whole, I am impressed, even if I suggest you not lambast the family quite so much in your final draft.”
“Are you suggesting that the Exingtons are based on the Thrombeys?” asks Ransom, innocently scrunching his face, and Harlan gives a gruff, hoarse laugh.
“I must thank you for committing this just to fiction,” Harlan says. “100 grams of morphine sounds like a terrible way to die.” And then those clever eyes look up at Ransom, and he says, “You should know that despite her curiosity, I did not let Marta read this. But I think she’d find it flattering.”
Ransom’s stomach flips. He understands too much, then, in what Harlan is not telling him—he sees that Harlan is, is, fucking proud of him for making a Cuban nurse the heroine of his story, when he should be reading it the opposite way, that Ransom is just playing to the market, extracting value from DEI fuckwits who yearn to be told they could ever be more than the sum of their parts, that Ransom is exploiting, not venerating Marta fucking Cabrera, who is outside right now and probably doesn’t know she’s right now Harlan’s sole inheritor, though she definitely earned it by pouting her lips and batting her long lashes like the elder-abusing predator she probably is. The point is, Ransom doesn’t know her well enough for his Elena García to actually be a flattering portrayal of her, and frankly, Ransom doesn’t care.
He still looks away, though.
“I am happy to send this over to Blood Like Wine, if you’d like. Now that Walt’s officially been…” Harlan pauses and then says, delicately, “extricated from the procedures, the new publisher is someone I think you’d get along with, and I think he’d be very interested in seeing your work.”
Ransom laughs, and laughs. “Fuck no,” he says. “I’m showing you this as a courtesy, before I take your spot on the NYT bestseller list with a rival company. Thanks for the meeting, Grandpops.”
He grabs the annotated manuscript and heads out without another word. But he still catches Harlan’s half-smile as he slams the door closed. Outside, Marta is down the hall, sitting on the plush windowseat reading by the pale, wintry light; they exchange only half a look, just long enough for him to see the startled widening of her expressive eyes, before he storms back out to the snow.
I. ALLEGRO
Two Years Later
Google Maps isn’t working on Marta’s phone.
It’s one of the things she’s learning to hate about New York. One would think that in the “cultural capital” of the country, there would be adequate cell service, but instead, the tall buildings seem to muddy up everything. And Alice happens to live in the most skyscraper-heavy area, that awful stretch below Central Park, and so Marta is wandering around in the dismal early March rain with her rolling suitcase, getting drenched by the second, trying hopelessly to find her sister’s apartment amidst the cacophony of Midtown. How things can be so crazy on a Wednesday, she’s unsure.
“Marta!”
Marta shades her eyes, squints. There, through the gray haze of rain, she can see a figure frantically waving at her—and then Alice is running up to her, black hair slicked to her face from the rain, screeching with joy at the sight of her. “You made it!” she crows. “Oh my god, come in, come in, it’s so wet out here!”
Inside, Alice’s apartment is a welcome respite from the clamor of the outdoors, though the blaring of sirens and cars can still easily be heard through the glass windows. She shares the apartment with four (!) other roommates, and all four of their heads pop out from the living room (which functions also as a kitchen) and bedrooms to say hi to Alice’s big sister, come to visit her in New York.
“It’s not much, I know,” says Alice, but she says it with some amount of pride and trepidation.
“No, it’s wonderful,” says Marta, sincerely. Because Alice should feel proud; she was the one who got the hotly-coveted production internship with Hessbounder Studios that turned into a full-time job once they rightly assessed her potential. All those years of constantly watching TV and movies, all those years of her talking Marta’s ear off bout them—all of that paid off, because Alice looks more tired, and happier, than ever. “A real New York apartment, I’m so proud of you, sis.”
Alice perks up at the praise. “Well,” she says, and then smiles a little. “Well, go warm up and dry off and get hot, because there’s a huuuuuge studio party tonight, after how successful Beat Life was.”
Marta internally groans, but Alice has been talking about Beat Life and all the work she’s sunk into it for eight months now—so Marta forces a smile and says, “Can’t wait.”
She changes out of her clothes and into the nicest clothing she has, exits the bathroom to Alice’s closet, where Alice looks at her in horror and says, “You have to be joking me.”
Marta looks down at her black pants and blue button down and says, “What?”
“You look like a little church boy!” cries Alice. “Oh my god Marta, it’s a party! Come on, Jesus, you can borrow one of my dresses—”
Twenty minutes later, Marta is dressed in a silky brown slip, heavy faux-gold earrings weighing down her lobes, her hair swept up and away from her face. Alice herself is wearing a tight red sheath and matching lipstick, in sky-high heels that she totters in. (Marta declined the high heels, opting for the kitten heels Alice begged her to trade in.) Luckily, it’s finished drizzling outside, as Alice told her, Nobody wears a rainjacket on a Friday night! Which is patently untrue; there are plenty of people dressed reasonably for the weather, unlike Marta and Alice, who gather attention as they totter their way to the subway. They attract some whistles; Marta wants to melt into the ground.
“You just ignore them,” Alice says fiercely. “Asshole idiots, all of them. But Mama taught us to be tough and that’s how you last in this city, you know? You out-tough everyone else.”
New York looks good on her sister, Marta thinks. She’s always been confident, but it’s like there’s a new sharpness to her look that suits her. A surefoot attitude that she’s gained since leaving home. Marta had missed her, of course, but seeing her like this makes it worth it.
“How’s Harlan?” asks Alice.
“Good.” The word is almost half-lost in the blare of their train arriving, and Marta waits until they’re inside, holding tightly onto a support pole, before continuing. “He had a rough cold during the winter, but he’s doing better now.”
“And is James still being a dickhead?”
Marta’s face warms at the reminder. James, one of the gardeners of the estate. The two of them had gone out on a date—James had asked her out and Marta, after consulting Harlan, had said yes. But it had been a miserable date, one where Marta had fumbled over her words over and over again, and at the end James had kissed her, his tongue slopping all over her mouth in an attempt to worm its way in and Marta—
Had laughed at the sheer horror of it, at the clumsiness of his kiss, at the nightmare the date had been. James had reeled back, offense flickering over his face, and Marta had apologized—even before realizing what she was really apologizing for—but the damage was done. Now, he speaks to her only coldly and in passing.
“We just don’t talk much,” she says in response.
“Hm.” Alice leaves it be and instead starts chattering about all the people they were going to meet at the party. Some of her friends, of course, and some of her work enemies. She cheerfully blathers on about it and Marta, relieved, listens.
The party is held at a very fancy bar downtown, at a private room set aside for the Hessbounder crew. Alice swans in and is greeted by at least half a dozen people all at once, who cheer, “Alice!” in warm and friendly ways. Marta, tugged along by dint of Alice’s arm being locked firmly through hers, shrivels at the sight of so many.
She forces a smile to her face, makes polite conversation, and drinks the gin and tonic that Alice orders for both of them, even though gin makes her stomach turn a little bit. They eat hor d’oeuvres, but it’s not really enough; even just on one drink, Marta can feel herself starting to get tipsy. It gets to the point where she’s a little worried about acting clumsy in front of their current conversational partner, who is clearly some high level exec.
Marta extracts herself from her sister’s arm, says, “I’m going to go get myself a fresh drink,” and Alice pats her distractedly, schmoozing away.
It is with some relief that Marta slides onto an available stool near the back of the polished wooden bar. She takes a moment to breathe, to snack on one of the canapés near her, and then just as she’s waiting for the bartender to take notice of her from where he’s on the other side of the bar, she sees Ransom Drysdale not ten feet away from her.
She blinks, hard. It’s still Ransom Drysdale.
The last time she saw him was at Wanetta’s funeral last fall, dressed in all black, a blank look on his face. He’d spoken only to Linda and Harlan, ignored Richard’s attempts to talk with him, and given everyone else the cold shoulder. Here, he is completely transformed—she has never, she realized, seen him in his “true” environment, only in the stultified, highly-emotional environs of the Thrombey gatherings. Here, she can see that fake, sleazy smile drawn over his face. He’s wearing a sleek navy suit with a cream shirt that’s straining at the buttons and he looks like any other man here, and yet, she can’t stop staring because surely, this is a product of drunk (even though she’s only mildly tipsy) imagination. Ransom Drysdale cannot be here, because New York is enormous, and to have them intersect like this would be outrageous.
But it becomes more and more clear that she is not imagining anything. Ransom Drysdale is here.
Oh my God, she thinks. I have to leave.
But it’s too late. In the midst of his conversation, he turns, scans the crowd absently. She watches him glance over her dismissively, just another face, before that gaze comes sharply right back to her. He pauses mid-word, mid-sentence, and his companion cranes his neck to see who Ransom is staring at, who Ransom has lost his train of thought over.
“Shit,” says Marta.
She should’ve left. Instead, she watches as Ransom says something short to his conversational partner, then the two of them shake hands and Ransom is there, next to her, smelling of woodsy cologne, a bright, malicious glint in his eye.
“You,” he said, “are not anyone I’d thought I’d see at a bar, let alone in a New York bar. What are you doing? Granddad kick the bucket?”
“No,” she says sharply. “My sister works at Hessbounder. I didn’t—what are you doing here?”
Their conversation is interrupted by the bartender, coming finally to their side. “What can I get you?”
“Old fashioned for me,” Ransom tells the bartender. “And—what do you want?”
“Oh, you don’t have to—”
“Champagne for her, then. Hell, cancel the old fashioned, just give us a bottle—top shelf—and two glasses.” He smiles at her, dagger-sharp. “You’ll celebrate with me, Marta, won’t you?”
Resigned, she takes the bait. “Congratulations on your bestselling book.” She’d seen Harlan reading the starred reviews, months ago, had watched him tuck away carefully the NYT issue where Ransom made the list. Had helped him, on occasion, to print out other favorable reviews, profiles done by Esquire, the Guardian. She feels disinclined to share this information with Ransom.
“Oh, that’s old news, Marta.” The bottle arrives, pre-popped, and Ransom pours elegantly for the both of them. He clinks his glass against hers. “We are celebrating that Knives Out was picked up for adaptation. By Hessbounder, actually. I was invited by the to-be producer.”
“I see. Congratulations.” She takes a sip of the champagne. It’s light, potent. The bubbles hit her nose almost immediately.
Ransom slouches against the bar next to her. Like this, with her hoisted up on the stool and him insouciant, they’re more at eye level than they’d ever been before. “It’s just the option,” he says. “A measly fifty thou. I almost thought about ringing Granddad up, letting him know that I was embracing the new millennium. I texted Walt instead.”
She snorts, despite herself. At the sound, he grins, and she feels like he has earned a point, somehow, so she smooths her face back to nothingness.
“Yeah, he was delighted for me.” Two fingers tap against the polished bartop, restlessly. “Familial love. Nothing like it. So your sister works here, huh? Should I ask her to be promoted for Knives Out?”
“Alice doesn’t need your help,” Marta says sharply. She does feel a little bit guilty, saying that—Alice could probably use the promotion, so she could get a place with only three roommates. But she doesn’t want Ransom anywhere near her sister.
“You’re right, they’ll probably tap her in anyway, get that Latina voice so that they can tell their shareholders they’re being inclusive.”
She grimaces. She can tell he’s saying this to dig at her, words aimed like a knife to the ribs. Ransom, the exact type of bully to have been raised in wealth, in private schools, in Ivy League frats, in the Thrombey household; only knowing how to dig, never to hold, to heal. Marta’s not vindictive, but she does have one response up her sleeve.
“I did read Knives Out,” she said, and watches that information hit him. That confident, smug smile flickers before being pasted right back on. “I hadn’t thought of you as anything remotely approaching self aware.”
He waves a hand. “All my editor.” A pause, then, as his fingers run around the edge of the champagne rim. Then, almost unwillingly: “So. Liked it? Hated it?”
Marta thinks of the hardcover she’d nabbed from the carton he’d sent to Harlan, at how worn-out the edges were, at how dog-eared the pages had gotten over the past year of reading it. She told herself she was reading it for research, to prepare herself for future Thrombey family drama, but in the end, sullenly, she had to admit that she liked it because it was addictive, honestly, and even better on the reread, like the best mysteries all are. All she says, however, is, “It’s been entertaining, hearing your family discuss it at every gathering since.”
She watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. But he gives that uncaring smile and says, “Why would they? It’s all fictitious. But now you’ve brought it up, so you have to tell me what they say.”
“Well,” she says. “You know that Linda likes it, I’m sure.”
“Mom likes it because she thinks it’s both diegetic and nondiegetic validation of the ‘core values’ of hard work she’s ‘taught me’ and chooses to overlook anything negative as purely fictional construction.”
Marta pauses, decides to continue. “Walt and Donna hate it, obviously, I’m sure you saw Walt’s rant to the AP...?”
She can tell from Ransom’s smug grin that he did, in fact, read the expose that AP ran on the similarities between the Thrombeys and the Exingtons, a deep-dive into the curious fact that just as the fictitious Justin Exington was booted from his father’s literary empire, so did Walt Thrombey suddenly decide to pursue other paths. They, of course, highlighted other curious similarities, like the split of Ransom’s parents, much like the fictitious Hugh Exington’s (whose name, of course, was shared with the author). Walt was one of the few Thrombey family members that deigned to comment, and his polemic against Ransom was truly magnificent, ranging from indictments on his intelligence and his lack of discretion, to referring to the many drugs he’d used in this twenties, and the shame he’s always brought on the Thrombey family. He and Linda had almost gone to fisticuffs over it, and he’d ended up apologizing profusely, but things remained cold between them two.
Marta had read through it all, even through the section where the author—who had clearly done their research—even investigated Harlan Thrombey’s Cuban nurse and drew comparisons between her and the ambiguously Latina Elena García. One of the key differences, of course, was that Marta’s mom had secured her green card years ago, and she had read through speculation on her mom’s immigration status with a sort of muted fury at the invasive nature of journalism and a resentment at Ransom for bringing this upon her. But then she had to stop looking up anything about Elena, because that led her down a rabbithole where social media users were speculating, So like, is Ransom Drysdale in love with Harlan Thrombey’s nurse or what? And that was when she slammed her laptop shut, because she couldn’t contemplate that in any entirety.
She shakes off the memory, says, “And Meg likes it, actually. Jodi refuses to read it, says that it would disrupt her inner peace, but Meg thinks it’s funny.”
Both his eyebrows went up. “Really?”
Meg had been super high when she’d told Marta that, actually—she and Fran had decided to power through Fran’s blunts, and she’d let it out almost accidentally. She’d never spoken of it before, had still rolled her eyes at any mention of Ransom, but it was only in that sloe-eyed haze of weed that she’d said, “Y’know, like—it’s kinda true, you know? Like, what would I do if I were put in that situation? Would I stick by my values? Or would I just be reduced to base survival instinct?” Then she blew out a long pillar of smoke, and added, quietly, “And now, given the observations someone else has made on my situation, my personality, could I make a change?”
“Jesus,” said Fran. “Should I read this, now? I’ve been, on principle, ignoring it, because I don’t care at all what Ransom thinks of me.”
“You die,” Meg informed her. “And you have a cousin that works in forensics.”
“My cousin works for the Gap,” said Fran with visible confusion, and when high, apparently, that was so hilarious that she and Meg dissolved into hysterics.
Marta blinks out of reverie to see Ransom watching her closely. “And Harlan loves it, obviously,” she says. Before she can see that truly hit him—and it does, she can tell—she tacks on, “Tell me something, though. Why’d you keep the name Hugh?”
He groans, rubs a hand over his face. “Because one of the lynchpins of the story was in hugh and you, and I couldn’t think of any other wordplay. Besides, it was obvious that it was about the Thrombeys—about me. Might as well just keep the fucking name.”
It was interesting, the differences between Hugh Exington and Hugh Drysdale. Marta thought that perhaps that was why Linda was so proud of Ransom—that he had created such a capably evil version of himself, the type of person set up for murderous intent and execution. Maybe that was how he’d felt, blasting out of Harlan’s 85th birthday party with that rage contorting his face, his anger so palpable she’d felt it wafting over her as he stormed out. Maybe he’d felt capable of murder. But he’d put it down into words, made it into a money-making machine, the first real action of worth he’d maybe ever done, and though he’d warped and revealed every member associated with the Thrombeys, he’d perhaps done the worst crime to himself. What did it mean, when a man immortalized himself in his work as a villain?
What did it mean, when a man immortalized you in his work as his heroine, whose strength was her heart of gold?
It meant nothing, Marta told herself, when she finished reading it—it meant actually the opposite of what Linda thought it did. Sure, Ransom made Hugh evil. But Hugh was still a delight to read, a fan favorite; they loved to hate him, and Ransom surely reveled in the love, in the attention. So it couldn’t be true self-awareness. It meant nothing, in the end.
“I liked Benoit Blanc,” she says. “Are you writing a sequel?”
“I am,” says Ransom, again with that slightly twisted smile. “Well. I’m trying.”
They keep talking. He tells her of the auction for his novel, the whole thrilling bidding war, the fact that they’d crashed the novel through as quickly as possible; she in turn listens, and when he gives space for her to speak, or asks her point-blank questions about her life, she skips right past them, or answers them as briefly as possible. She’s unwilling to give up precious information of her life for him to mine for future stories—she is vehemently against seeing any more of this Elena García. But he pries some out of her anyway, asking after her mother, asking how Alice liked her new job, brushing off some of the questions as just investigative work into Hessbounder. “After all,” he says, “if they’re going to adapt my novel, they better be up to scratch.”
“She likes it,” says Marta. “And New York suits her. It’s—a little overwhelming here.”
“Is this your first time?”
“Second. But I was young the first time, so I barely remember it.”
He hums. “I can’t remember how many times I’ve been to New York. My mom had a lot of work here, so she ended up taking us a lot, and my dad and I would explore the city.”
She can tell by the sudden, skittish look in his eyes that he realizes that he shared too much—it is maybe the first sign of inebriation she’s been able to see from him, though he’s drunk twice the amount she has, and ordered an Old Fashioned after all. She pretends to not notice, however, and asks lightly, “Anything I should see in particular?”
“The Hamptons are probably out of your price range. But I can take you, if you’d like. This Saturday?”
“I leave on Friday night,” she says. It was only ever meant to be a two-day trip. She doesn’t know what she’ll say if he offers Friday morning, or tomorrow night—she has no plans, really, but since she came to spend time with her sister, she should say no. But it’s concerning that she doesn’t have a certainty in herself that she would say no.
“When?”
“My train’s at ten.”
“Pity. I’ve got a dinner with my editor that night.”
And now, a new humiliation, that she feels almost disappointed.
Marta looks down, into her empty glass. When she looks up, she can’t read the expression on Ransom’s face. They’ve been talking for almost two hours, now, the longest conversation the two of them have had, ever. Alice must be wondering where she is.
“Granddad buy you those earrings?”
His fingers are touching her right earring, twisting it very lightly. She should move away, bat away his hand. She doesn’t, though, and feels the warm edge of his hand brush against her cheek, and she swallows.
“No,” she replies, belatedly. “I borrowed them from my sister. She did this whole outfit, actually.”
He takes that as an invitation to look her up and down, his gaze lingering obnoxiously. “She did a good job. You should dress like this all the time.”
“That would be incredibly impractical for my job.”
It is then that she realizes that Ransom has moved very close to her, over the course of their conversation; that she as well has turned to face him more fully. She’s three glasses of champagne deep, and though she’s been nibbling on every crudité and canapé that’s come her way, she’s well and truly tipsy, in a way that she so rarely is. And Ransom’s dark eyes are intent on her, and he just looked her up and down. They are on the knife’s edge, now.
As if reading her mind, he reaches for the bottle, which now has only a scant amount remaining. He offers it to her; she shakes her head, and he shrugs, drains the remainder himself. His mouth is wet when he lowers the bottle, and she stares.
“I should get back to my sister,” she blurts out.
“Okay,” says Ransom, the word shaped carefully in his mouth. “Yeah. You should.”
There’s a sort of rationality in the way he says that. You should, as if he’s reminding himself, too, of the fact that he is the wastrel, asshole grandson of her friend that she cares for and to cross the paper-thin boundary they’re both pretending doesn’t exist would be foolish and gluttonous—though when Ransom learned any modicum of temperance, she has no idea. There’s a sort of resignation in his voice, some kind of finality that sends a shiver down her spine, and she understands, intrinsically, as he gives her a little nod and turns to leave, that opportunity has shuttered for the both of them, that this rain-flecked night is wending to a close.
Marta catches his arm. It’s the first time she’s ever voluntarily touched him, she thinks, and perhaps he recognizes that too, because he looks not at her, but at her hand on his suitjacket. “Wait,” she says, and feels the hot flush cover her face. She doesn’t do this—she doesn’t know how to do this, how to express the cavernous want bottoming out within her, is disgusted at the carnality of it, is embarrassed by her own desire, that sensation within her yearning to find out what happens next to girls who wear pretty satin dresses and accept top-shelf champagne from attractive men they loathe. Girls who aren’t Marta. But she has every day of the rest of her life to be Marta Cabrera, sensible from head to toe, a good daughter, a good nurse, a good friend. For this, she only has tonight, and though practicality is screaming at her to stop, yet her hand remains on Ransom’s arm.
To her relief, he understands.
The venue is fancy enough, thankfully, that there are single-use bathrooms, a rarity in a space-pressed New York, and never has Marta been more grateful for such a small blessing than when Ransom is pressing her up against the door of one.
It’s a nice bathroom. It’s got warm lights, the thick kind of paper towels, a pleasant scent diffuser. A round mirror. None of that really matters, though, because Ransom is groaning into her mouth, and his hand is slipping down the strap of her dress.
She’s equally as bad. She’s tearing off his suitjacket, fumbling with his buttons, one hand tangling in his hair. His mouth slips down to her neck and she moans in surprise, yanking at his hair reflexively, and the noise that he lets out rumbles through them both.
“Fuck,” he says into her neck. “Fuck.”
His fingers find the zipper of her dress. He draws it down.
Alice’s dress easily falls from her body. Cold air washes over Marta, exposed as she now is. She’s wearing sensible underwear, a plain bra. Ransom, however, looks crazed at the sight of her, and before she has any second to feel embarrassed about being practically naked while he’s still mostly clothed, it’s swept away when he crushes his mouth against hers once more and hoists her into the air.
Marta gasps at the weightless sensation, hisses at the cold of the sink underneath her ass. But then he’s tugging the straps of her bra down, her sensitive nipples catching on the cups as he, too lazy to unclasp it, just tugs the whole thing down to free her tits. “Ah, fuck,” says Ransom, at the sight of her exposed to him, and she burns at the thought of what she looks like: disheveled, with nothing but her underwear on, flushed all the way down to her chest, halfway to pieces. “You look—fuck.”
“Ransom,” she gasps out as he cups her, strokes his thumbs across her nipples, tongue a hot line down her neck. He’s everywhere, he’s overwhelming. “Ransom, at least take off your shirt—”
“Busy,” he says, and then sucks her nipple into his mouth. Her head falls back as she gasps and unconsciously, she grinds against him, anything for that bright pleasure that he’s surrounding her with. She can feel him through his pants. At the motion, his hand clutches at her hip, hard, a silent request for her to continue.
She does, deliriously worrying that she’s soaking the front of his pants, she feels so wet. She clutches at the back of his neck, stuffs a hand into her mouth and bites down when he delicately tugs at her nipple with his teeth. At the muffled sound, he looks up and grins at the sight of her desperately trying to stifle her sounds, and she feels herself clench, unconsciously, at his sharp smile.
“I’m not going to get a moment’s rest now,” he says, sucking kisses into the undersides of her breasts, “knowing that you look like that under your—lumpy sweaters and sensible clothing—”
“Hey,” she starts to protest, but then his fingers slip underneath the scrap of cloth that is her underwear and she sees stars. She’s so slick and he curses at the sensation, runs his fingers up and down to slip over her clit, stroke over her entrance. One finger goes in, then two, and Marta clamps a hand back down hard over her mouth.
Ransom starts to wriggle down, kissing down the softness of her stomach, sucking on the iliac crest of her hip, shoving one leg, then another, over the breadth of his shoulders. She has just a second to realize what he’s doing, her heart jumping in her chest, before he’s tugging aside her underwear and his mouth is on her.
The sound she lets out can’t be muffled through her hand. She flushes crimson as a result, flushes even harder when she can feel him laugh, an airy puff of amusement sending shivers across her. Then his tongue is sweeping over her clit, forming patterns that have her eyes rolling back into her head.
“Fuck, Ransom—” She yanks at his hair, uncaring of what pain she might be doing—and from the sound of it, the sensation crosses over into pleasure for him. He’s picked up that she likes it low on her clit, and he’s stroking over that pathway with his tongue incessantly, over and over again, while his fingers crook perfectly within her—
Marta comes, shaking and involuntarily closing her thighs around his head, clutching at the cold porcelain of the sink underneath her, ecstasy turning quickly into overstimulation as Ransom cruelly continues. She lets out a sob at his ministrations, but she doesn’t tell him to stop, and instead what pours out of her mouth is a litany of, “Oh, oh, keep going, Ransom, just like that, oh God, you’re so good—”
Ransom lets out a hoarse sound at those last words. She cracks open an eye, sees that he’s pulled himself out of his unzipped pants, that he’s stroking himself, and a bright zip of arousal jolts through her at the sight of him, mouth buried in her cunt, eyes closed like the only sense he wants is her on his face. She feels it again, that warm surge of pleasure rushing over her, the knowledge that she can orgasm again and is approaching that precipice more quickly than she’d anticipated, and she pulls him up, says breathlessly, “Condom, Ransom.”
He blinks at her, slow-stupid. “What?”
“Do you have a condom?” She sure as hell doesn’t carry one around.
“Fuck.” Realization is slowly dawning on him, eyes widening as if he hadn’t thought it would get this far, as if he’d thought this whole night would be spent with him on his knees. And he digs into the back pocket of his pants, pulls out his wallet, from whose depths emerges a gold-wrapped condom. He rips it open with unsteady hands as she undoes the last few buttons of his shirt and tugs it open to guiltily admire the solidness of his torso. She helps him roll the condom on, smooths a hand over the shape of him a few times, just to watch his eyes flutter close from the sensation, the twitch of his abdomen as he fights not to fuck up into her grip.
And then she’s guiding him to where she’s wet and open for him already, and he glides the head over her clit a few times, eyes intent on her, before he’s inside, a thickness stretching her that seems to press on every pleasurable spot all at once. She gasps—it’s been a while—and bites down on his neck involuntarily, which makes him choke and buck up another inch deeper. Bottoms out. But then he waits for her, every muscle straining from the effort to keep from moving. She can feel his sweat-damp head against her shoulder, his hot breath on her neck, can hear the low noise he’s making at the feeling of her around him.
“Move,” she whispers, when she’s ready. “Ransom, move.”
He groans out a noise of assent, and begins to fuck into her.
It’s so unlike what she’d thought sex would be like with Ransom, though she confesses she’d never really thought of it before in any tangible way. But she, if pressed, would likely have said that Ransom would’ve been the type to take and take and demand adoration and toss around his lovers with the same careless nature that he treats everything else in his life. She wasn’t expecting this, this single-minded desire to please, a palpable look of anxiety in his eyes, the look of a man in desire of salvation, and she’s also not expecting the fire that it rips through her to be looked at in such a way.
It’s not gentle. He fucks her hard enough that she genuinely starts to worry about the sink’s base, but she also can’t really give a shit, because she’s never enjoyed sex this much before. Never thought of it as anything other than perfunctory, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes outright bad. But his hand is stroking down her side, digging into her curves, the roll of his hips lush and inexorable, and she, unconsciously, reaches up to touch his open mouth as he pants from the exertion of fucking her.
He moans at the touch, sucks her fingers in, and then guides her fingers down to her clit, where he thumbs over the nub and has her crying from the friction. He’s close, she can tell from the tight breaths he takes, his lungs hitching, and she begins to touch herself as he kisses her hot and open-mouthed, his lips roaming down her neck with hard, biting kisses that have her gasping. She comes like that, Ransom pressing perfectly into her, her own fingers gliding over her clit, and throws her head back so hard that it hits the mirror, the moan emerging from her so loudly that she hopes the outside is still clamorous enough to mask what’s happening in this bathroom.
At the feeling of her wringing down on him, Ransom also comes. She can’t see his face, because it’s buried in her neck, but she can feel the stuttering of his hips, hear the sounds, he’s making, raw open noises, and she clutches at the back of his neck to soothe him through it.
She’s the one completely naked—he’s not even got his shirt fully off, he’s barely shoved down his pants, and yet, in this moment, she’s not feeling like the one exposed.
The only sound in the bathroom, now, is that of their ragged breathing. After a few minutes, boundaries begin to reassert themselves—Ransom draws his face out of her neck, they avoid eye contact. He pulls out and she gasps at the sensation. Then it’s quiet cleanup, Ransom buttoning himself back up, Marta sliding her bra and dress back on. Her underwear is a mess, and she grimaces at the thought of putting it back on, instead wrapping it in toilet paper.
“Should we—” Ransom starts to say.
“I need to clean up.” Her hair’s a mess. She looks incredibly sex-disheveled.
“Right.” Ransom hovers for a long moment, then clears his throat. “I need to head out, anyway. Long way back to my hotel. So—”
“I’ll see you at the estate,” Marta says.
Her point must come across clear and hard, for Ransom doesn’t say anything, just nods. The door closes behind him, and Marta locks it.
Her legs are still a little bit wobbly. She leans against the door and breathes. Everywhere she looks around the bathroom, it makes her flush—it feels like she’s seeing the ghost visages of them, making out against the door, him eating her out, them fucking, their ghost cries echoing in her ears. She has to get out. So she splashes cold water on her hot face, fixes her hair, and exits avoiding eye contact with anyone nearby.
She finds Alice, who is now giggling with a girl around her age, sitting on the plush couches near the back. At the sight of her, Alice stands up, comes close.
“Sorry,” says Marta. “I—”
“No, I saw you,” says Alice, sending a frisson of fear down Marta’s spine. Then, blessedly, she clarifies: “When you didn’t come back, I went looking for you—but I didn’t want to interrupt!” Her eyes are twinkling. “Who was that you were talking to? He was so hot. Y’know, for a gringo.”
“That was Ransom Drysdale,” Marta says bluntly, and Alice chokes on her drink.
It takes her a moment to recover, and then Alice says, “What,” and, after looking at a blushing Marta, at the frayed edges of the hairdo Alice had painstakingly done up, she repeats, in tones of complete and horrified understanding, “What?!”
As is her prerogative as little sister, Alice does not let it go. Instead, she takes the absolute piss out of Marta for the rest of her stay there, which increases once the hickeys on Marta’s neck fade to aubergine and yellow. Alice seems to be caught between horror and outright amusement.
“At least he’s hot,” she rationalizes as they take the ferry around Staten Island and take a selfie with the Statue of Liberty to send off to their mother. “Right? It was good, right?”
Marta refuses to answer.
“Are you going to tell Harlan?” Alice asks another time, as they cup their hands over hot cups of tea at a teatime parlor. “Are you guys going to keep hooking up?”
Marta selects an egg salad sandwich triangle, so petite and small, and says, “No. And it’s not going to happen again, seriously. It was a one-time thing.” Out of her system, as the saying goes.
Alice’s eyes say all too well that she doesn’t believe her.
At the end of her stay, Marta finds herself unaccountably emotional to be leaving her sister. Not because she wants to stay—she’s tired of sharing her sister’s twin bed, she hates how loud and crowded New York is, and frankly the bathroom situation is a nightmare—but because there’s something so poignant about leaving your baby sister and knowing that she’s in her own capable hands. That she’s all grown up now, that she’s a fully realized human being in her own right. All things that Marta, consciously, already knew, but which still hit her like a truck as she packs to leave.
Maybe Alice feels it too, because she hugs Marta extra tight. “I’ll see you for Mom’s birthday,” she says.
Three months away. Marta nods, once and then again, and says, “I love you.”
“Oh my god, don’t be so emotional,” laughs Alice, and kisses her on the temple. She helps Marta drag her suitcase down the three-story walkup. “Now, you remember how to get to Moynihan, right?”
“I know, I know,” says Marta, pushing the apartment building door open. “Skip Penn, make sure to keep MSG in sight, and—”
Marta’s voice slows to a stop. Alice follows her gaze.
Ransom is standing there, halfway down the block, next to the BMW, a loathsome, familiar sight. At the sight of them, he raises a hand. Alice snorts.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” she mocks and Marta pinches her.
Aware of Alice’s judgmental gaze, Marta slowly approaches. Her sister follows.
“What are you doing,” she says, sharply, when she’s in earshot.
“I am escorting my grandfather’s cherished friend home,” he answers, blithely.
“I don’t need a ride. I already paid for a train ticket.”
“I’ll reimburse you.” He raises an eyebrow. “I just drove through fucking Midtown to pick you up, Marta. Are you seriously going to turn down a free ride?” He holds out a hand for her suitcase.
Her house is a forty-five minute bus ride away from the Boston train station. Reluctantly, Marta hands him her suitcase, watches mutely as he puts it in the back, and opens the passenger seat for her.
Marta hugs Alice, then. “Call me if anything happens, okay? Anytime, even if it’s two a.m.”
“Two a.m.?” laughs Alice.
“Your roommates are crazy, okay? Any time.”
“Okay, okay.” Alice squeezes her back. “And you have a…safe trip back to Massachusetts.” To Ransom, she says, “Anything happens to her, asshole, I’ll kill you.”
“Looking forward to working with Hessbounder,” he tells her with a certain amount of glee, and Alice juts her jaw out at him in response.
He’s still clearly waiting for Marta to get in, so Marta slides into the bimmer, which smells like coffee and whatever woodsy cologne that Ransom likes to wear, and he closes the door behind her. She buckles up and sits there silently as he takes his seat on the driver’s side, starting the car and beginning the delicate process of inching his way out of New York’s minuscule street parking spots, his arm a solid weight behind her headrest.
Marta stares straight ahead and says, “Let me be clear. I am only accepting a ride back home, and nothing else will happen between us. You know why?”
“Enlighten me,” he says as he successfully pulls out of the parking spot. Slowly, they begin rolling away.
Marta waves at Alice, a tiny figure waving back, then turns back around. “Because it was stupid, that we even—”
“Hooked up?”
She winces at the sound. “Yeah.”
“You can say the words, you know,” he says pointedly. “Adults can have sex.”
“Adults can. You and I can’t.”
“Afraid I’ll tell Granddad?”
“I assumed you would say it, at one point or another,” she says dryly. It was a reality that she had come to terms with—Ransom was exactly the kind of person who would let it ‘slip’ at the most opportune time to hurt either her or Harlan. “Should I tell him first, to get ahead of the story, or are you waiting to deal maximum damage with it?”
“It’s up to you.” He’s remarkably calm as he navigates the absolute warzone of making his way to the West Side highway. “Harlan doesn’t need to know my business.”
They’re at a red light now, and he turns to face her fully. In her periphery, she can see the fine slope of his nose, the gelled-back slick of his hair, and even as she loathes the fact that she essentially fucked Wall Street, she can also hear in her mind’s eye the little, hurt noises he let out as he fucked her, can hear the sounds of him moaning into her cunt, and it has her thighs pressing together involuntarily.
“Hickeys are fading nicely,” he says, touching her neck. She jumps at the sensation, slaps his hand away. “Oh come on. I’ve had to hide yours as well.”
“What?”
Ransom tugs down the turtleneck he’s wearing, to show a luridly-colored lovebite on his neck, and little ones scattered down, down. She is, absurdly, initially proud at the sight of them—she remembers the feeling, the give of his skin under hear teeth, that breathless moan he let out when she bit down—and then whips her head back around to the front in horror.
“Green light,” she says, just as the cars behind them erupt into a litany of honking. Ransom curses and hits the gas.
“But let’s talk about it,” he says as they exit the crush of Manhattan and are in the endless highway hell to upstate New York. “You had fun. I had fun. Why are you acting all...?” He waves a hand in her general direction and allows her mentally to fill in the rest. Prissy. Uptight. Whatever adjective she’s imaging, she’s sure the one he’s actually got in mind is far worse. “Is it because you’ve never hooked up before?”
When she doesn’t respond, he lets out an involuntary snort. “Really? C’mon, Marta, you’re like what, twenty-eight?”
“Thirty.” Harlan had gotten her a lovely, two-tier cake, and her birthday had been before Alice left for New York, so she’d been able to celebrate with both her and Mama. A lovely, quiet celebration for the end of her twenties, very suitable for the nature of her entire twenties. She knows Ransom is thirty-six, and she also remembers how messy the celebration for his thirtieth had been, how horrorstruck Linda and Richard had been when Ransom crashed his car—a Porsche, at the time—into the lightpost outside the very fancy restaurant they’d booked out for the party. How Ransom had struggled out of the driver’s seat, laughing and high as hell, and Marta had felt that shiver of complete disgust at this man, this man who put his life and others at risk driving under the influence. And he didn’t even get arrested for it, the entire incident smoothed away by Linda’s wallet.
She had slept with that man. She was now in a car with that man, and granted, he had yet to break sixty on the speedometer, but it was probably the congestion of traffic to thank for that. She wasn’t ashamed of never hooking up with anyone. She was purely, cogently, ashamed of hooking up with him.
“So tell me,” he says, “What’s the big deal? Do you have a boyfriend already?”
She whips around to glare at him, aghast. “You think I would cheat on someone? For you?”
He grins in response.
“No,” she grits out. “It may be hard for you to believe, but some people, upon having regrets, choose not to act in ways that would produce more regrets.”
“So what exactly did you regret? Feel free to get X-rated. Was it when I ate you out? Or when you gave me a handjob?”
She says nothing, but feels her face grow hot.
To her horror, he continues. “Was it when you came? Which time, the second time?”
“I am going to get out of this car,” she informs him calmly.
“Relax, I’m joking.” But he shifts in his seat and in doing so, she notices that he’s a little hard.
For a moment, she does entertain the idea of reaching over, of palming the front of the chinos he’s wearing, of doing all the reckless things she would never do. And then she reminds herself: such terrible thoughts are exactly why she shouldn’t be even around him.
“You can’t deny it, Marta,” he says calmly. “We may not be friends, but we had excellent sex.”
His voice dips low at those words, pulling to the front of her mind, in full Technicolor, their whole last sexual encounter. She shudders.
“I would rather never have sex again,” she says, “than for that, us, to happen again.”
An eyebrow quirks. “Ouch.”
They drive for the next fifteen minutes in complete silence. And then—
“Never have sex again is a crazy statement when you’re thirty,” he says. “Does that include masturbation?”
“Oh my god,” she says, but she’s laughing now, almost ruefully so, rubbing a hand over her face. “This is a three hour drive, right? Is there any conversation we can have that isn’t horrible in every way, or should I just put in headphones right now?”
“Fine. Let me tell you about the horseshit my publisher is trying to pull—”
The rest of the drive back to Massachusetts flows by. They don’t have much in common—he’s playing some video game that sounds awful, she’s trying to brush up on her Spanish literacy by reading one of Harlan’s novels in translations, but they have common ground by dint of shared experience, of the fucked up family that they have endless stories about. She finds out that Linda was the one to teach Ransom how to ride a bike, that Ransom learned to knit from his deceased grandmother. He finds out that in her spare time, she’s volunteering at a hospital for the low-income, and he says in a mocking tone, “Aren’t you doing enough charity as is?” and she says, calmly, “If that’s what we’re referring to what happened on Wednesday, sure,” and takes some pride from the way he chokes on his own spit.
So. It’s not the most pleasant conversation she’s had. But it’s fun in its own way.
The sky is completely dark when they pull to the pivotal intersection. To the left would be to the direction to her neighborhood, to the right, the winding path to his. Ransom slows down as they approach and he says, his voice light but humorless, “Last chance.”
She shakes her head. Without questioning it, he turns left.
Marta directs him to drop her off a block away from her actual house. Somehow, he knows that, and asks, “And I’m dropping you off here, so far away, why?”
Marta, who didn’t expect him to be able to differentiate her house from the many other apartments on the block, sputters. “Does it matter?”
“What,” he huffs with a half-laugh, “afraid that your mother will see the bimmer and ask questions about me?”
“Yes,” she says.
He frowns. “What, are you embarrassed?”
“Yes,” she enunciates, clearly. “One hundred percent.”
She doesn’t know how to interpret the look on his face then. She thought he’d laugh, as he has an unerring tendency to do in any situation, that obnoxious guffaw of disdain. But Ransom instead just rubs at his chin for a moment, and says, “Fair enough.”
He pulls off to the side, takes her suitcase out of the back. Then they look at each other for a long moment and she says, “Thanks for the ride home.”
Ransom laughs. “Yeah, all right. See you around, Marta.”
She resolutely doesn’t watch him go.
A week passes, then a month. The only lapse in judgment that Marta makes in that time is that she dreams of their encounter and wakes up gasping and wet, her hand already on herself before she can think better of it, orgasm whiting out her brain before she can feel disgusted by it. Afterwards, though, she takes a long, hot shower and emerges chastened.
Otherwise, life moves on. She finishes reading her book in Spanish, and she and Harlan start buddy-reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which she has never read before and which Harlan calls the original revenge plot. She volunteers at the hospital. As she always does, she wonders if she should be advancing in her career path, but it is hard to justify the job hunt when she’s amply compensated for, essentially, hanging out with a good friend of hers. At this point, maybe even her best friend. What did it mean when your best friend was an 87 year old man? That you probably needed a better support system.
She does have Alice, and questionably, Meg and Fran. That’s definitely not a robust support system. So she joins the local craft group, does crafts quietly along with them, feels the awkwardness of her stilted conversation, finds herself doted on by the older women (who also use her for free medical advice—not that she minds), and leered at by some of the men who frequent. When one of them asks her out, she ends up not returning.
“I don’t really know how one makes new friends when you’re thirty,” she tells Harlan.
“Now that, my dear,” he says, “is a mystery that even I cannot solve.”
To her surprise, salvation comes in the form of cycling. She’d never been much of an exerciser, but when her car breaks down unexpectedly and requires three weeks in the shop, she dusts off the old bicycle and starts cycling to work. She ends up loving it as a late spring activity, biking early in the morning when the air was still cool, enjoying the air of the night as well. There’s an active cycling community, which she shyly joins, and while there are still some creepy men, there are enough incredibly gorgeous women involved that Marta is able to avoid them. She ends up getting drinks with a woman named Quỳnh, who has glossy black hair to her elbows, a hearty laugh, and who works with children with special needs. It’s a good night; Marta gets a little too tipsy and ends up walking home happily.
“Did you have fun with your cycling friend?” asks her mother the next day, who deemed it impossible to pronounce Quỳnh.
Marta smiles into her coffee and says, “Yes.”
Quỳnh turns out to be the type of lovely extrovert who is forward enough to invite Marta out, the next week, to drinks with some of her other friends—or perhaps Marta’s loneliness is palpable enough that Quỳnh takes pity on her. She meets Quỳnh’s girlfriend, a butch redhead who gives Marta a hug upon meeting, and a few of their shared friends. Everyone there is outdoorsy—some of them met foraging mushrooms, while others are regular climbers, and before long, Marta finds herself spending her meager time being very active. She hadn’t realized the pursuit of new friends would mean becoming a jock, but they’re good, honest people, and she’s happy to put in the effort.
She discovers new muscles to be sore, ones that she ostensibly learned about in nursing school, but which she had forgotten existed on her own person until she wakes up wincing. She learns she’s pretty fearless when it comes to heights. She learns, after one of Quỳnh’s friends, a sloe-eyed girl with cropped hair, asks her out, that she is not attracted to women, but she learns this after Anita says, “Are you sure you’re not interested?” and they end up drunkenly kissing, Anita’s hand sliding up to cup Marta’s ribcage, until Marta extracts herself flushed and giggling and saying, “No, I’m really very sure now,” and Anita laughs in a confident way that doesn’t remind Marta of anyone, nobody at all.
So. Her best friend is still 87 years old, but now she has other friends. She teaches Quỳnh how to play Go and somehow everyone gets obsessed with it, and now they all play Go regularly on the weekends, and Brandon is dropping hints about teaching everyone how to play bridge. She calls Alice on the weekends. She and her mother are currently into K-dramas, even though her mother catches maybe every fourth word and is mostly gathering the story by quizzing Marta and through vibes.
All of that is to say: it is three months before she and Ransom see each other again.
Marta is at work—which means she is forcing Harlan to do his evening stretches—when she gets the text from her mother. They’d spent the past six months preparing for the naturalization interview and test, even as her mother bemoaned the fact that she had to learn how many years a senator was elected for when there were citizens in literacy-dead areas who got the Senate and the House mixed up. It involved a lot of flash cards, and some tears. Today was the test; Marta initially took the day off, but then Harlan got in a bad way, and her mother said, “Mija, you’ve already spent so much time helping me, and you being there won’t change the outcome, no? The rest is up to me. Go take care of Harlan.”
So she’s spent the whole day nervously checking her phone, and now, it comes, at 5:34 p.m., to the group chat with her and Alice, the words, I passed, and three American flags. Immediately, Alice sends party poppers and exclamation points. Marta feels a smile break out of her face at the sight, and Harlan says, “Your mother…?”
“She passed,” says Marta, helplessly joyful.
Harlan’s face creases in a broad grin. “Well,” he says, and then, at a loss for what else to say, slaps his thighs with both hands. “Well, that calls for some celebration, no?”
“Yes,” says Marta. “Yes we—we had plans for dinner, at Greco’s, that little Italian spot down the block.” For some reason, whenever her mother wants to dine out, they end out going to Italian, even though she knows her mom has a soft spot for sushi. “Celebratory or—consolatory.”
“That’s very good,” he says. “Allow me to donate libations for the celebration.”
They end up in the wine cellar, where Harlan frowns between two dusty bottles of red and white, and ends up giving one to Marta. She’s sure it costs over five hundred dollars, so she doesn’t ask, otherwise she won’t be able to drink it with her mother out of pure guilt. Instead, she says, “Thank you, Harlan, really—you don’t have to—”
“It’s the least I can do, my dear,” he says. “You should just take the rest of the day off, anyway.”
“No, I’ll be back to administer the cold medicine after dinner.”
“My nurse, drunkenly medicating me,” he muses.
She laughs, hugs him. “We’ll wait to drink until after I’m back. We’re halfway through our drama, anyway, so maybe we’ll watch two episodes today to celebrate.”
“That sounds fun,” he says, a little wistfully.
“Linda’s coming for dinner for you, right?”
“Oh yes,” says Harlan. “She has been going on dates and wishes to tell me about them.” He shudders, Marta laughs, and then she’s off for dinner with her mother.
When she comes back, it’s 9 pm, a little earlier than she expects. Harlan doesn’t get his medicine until 9:45, so she sits outside the dining room, in her favorite window seat, and pulls out Count from her bag. Dantès is about to wreak his revenge on Morcerf when the door slides open and from within the dining room emerges Ransom.
He stops at the sight of her, a strange expression on his face. She, similarly, freezes.
He looks—well, the same as always, which is to say that he looks good. She’s all too aware, then, that she looks as plain as always, just a t-shirt and jeans, and his loosely-open button down is probably Gucci or some other ridiculously expensive brand. After a moment, Marta scrambles to her feet.
“Hi,” she says. “You must—you came with Linda?”
Ransom stares at her for a moment longer, and then slowly walks over, until he’s right next to her, still with that peculiar look on his face. “Yeah. I did. Granddad thought you wouldn’t be back until later, because you were out celebrating?”
She’s unable to repress the smile on her face. “Yes. My mother just officially got her citizenship.”
And she’s shocked by the look on his face, then—surprise melding into something that looks very close to delight, before quickly covered up with indifference. “Oh good,” he says. “Another Cabrera, officially sanctioned by the USA to terrorize us.”
She shakes her head then, and laughs, too happy to do anything but be mildly grateful he hadn’t said anything truly racist. He watches her closely.
“What are you here for?” she asks. “Harlan said Linda wanted to talk about her dating life, I can’t imagine you wanted to be there for that.”
“Well, I wasn’t told that was the subject of dinner,” he says. “In fact, I left just now to escape the horror of hearing my divorced mother discover Bumble. Actually, I helped her set up the profile so I already knew, but she’s getting nudes, Marta. She won’t tell Granddad that, of course, but I know because she accidentally showed me. The elderly, I regret to tell you, are amorously inclined.”
Marta shudders at the thought. Ransom laughs.
“How are you doing?” she asks, because that’s the kind of thing you would presumably ask someone you slept with once upon a time. “How’s the, er, sequel going.”
He winces. “Well. Maybe part of me is hoping that Granddad does something hideous enough to inspire a sequel.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What, I can’t kill my grandfather fictitiously twice?”
“They’ll call you a one-trick pony.”
“That’s not so bad,” he says, and leers a little. “Ponies like to be ridden, after all.”
It surprises both of them when Marta flushes, gets visibly flustered. She tries to cover it up, but—it’s like all her hard work of the past three months is undone, with him so nearby. All her attempts at creating some bulwark against time and memory, destroyed by the smell of him, summoning up every image she’d tried so hard to forget. The smile he made before laving his tongue over her. The stroke of his thumbs over her nipples.
“Marta.” He’s not smiling, now. “When do you administer medicine to Granddad?”
She shouldn’t answer. She answers anyway: “9:45.”
He makes a show of checking his watch. “Well. I’m going to go to the upstairs bathroom, you know, the one nobody wants to go to because it’s very, very out of the way. And I might just be there for a while.”
He brushes past her. The stairs creak as he heads up the stairs. Marta stares very hard at The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’s words swimming before her eyes, and curses before she slams the book shut.
“You know,” Ransom says between kisses, “someday we should try doing this on a soft surface. Like a sofa, or a bed, or really anything that isn’t a fucking bathroom floor.”
“Shut up,” gasps out Marta, lacing her fingers behind his neck. “Just—stop talking.”
“Are you seriously going to tell me this isn’t going to happen again?”
“Do you seriously want to have this conversation now?”
He tears her t-shirt off over her head, his pupils so dilated his eyes almost look black in the bathroom’s dim lighting. “No.”
What he wants to do, apparently, is suck on her nipples until they’re so sensitive that she’s almost in tears, all the while fingering her with one, two, three fingers, the sound embarrassing to her ears. Harlan’s sink isn’t nearly as sturdy as the one in New York, and so that’s how Marta finds herself half-falling, backwards over the toilet, one leg looped over the sink, the other over Ransom’s shoulder, as he hungrily eats her out like it’s the only thing he ever wants to do again. “God,” he says, his mouth wet with her. “God, I missed the taste of you.”
It almost seems like a repeat of New York, except just as she’s on the edge of coming, Ransom pulls off, bites the inside of her thigh and says, “I don’t have a condom.”
She blinks for a second, thoughts sluggish. “You don’t?”
“Who brings a condom to dinner with his mother and grandfather?”
Well, there’s absolutely no way that Harlan stocks his rarely-used bathroom with condoms, but Marta gives it a shot anyway. But she’s distracted by Ransom running his hands all over her, her breasts, her stomach, her hips, as she pulls open drawers and cabinets, and he whispers, “Do we need a condom, anyway?” while pointedly nudging his cock between her thighs, his own pants discarded in one of the other corners. At least, this time, the both of them are naked.
“I will not have unprotected sex with you,” she says, rolling her eyes, and irked by the fact that it’s the exact sort of sentiment that she’d expect from someone like him.
“Fine,” he says, and she clutches at the bathroom sink as he slips two fingers into her. “You should start carrying one around then, since it matters so much to you.”
She gasps as he crooks his fingers, and gathers her thoughts just enough to say, “Or you carry one around if you ever want to have penetrative sex with me again.”
“These are double standards,” he whispers in her ear, and then bites her earlobe, sucks it into his mouth. And then he’s kissing down the knobby line of her spine, down, down, and licking into her from behind, the angle strange until she struggles to turn over. He lets her, pries her legs open again to dive back in, and then his tongue is curling around her clit and she comes, so on edge that even a stray breath could’ve tipped her over.
She catches her breath, pushes him off, and resumes searching. There are no condoms to be found, which is probably for the better because any condoms that they would’ve found likely would’ve been years outdated, and Marta was glad to not have that choice in her life. So instead she turns around, pushes Ransom down on the seat and straddles him.
“Oh my,” he says. “Come around to my way?”
“No, Ransom,” she says, and saying his name does something to him, she can see that, in the involuntary, convulsive swallow he makes. His eyes skitter across her, hovering on the sheen of sweat on her collarbones, on her breasts, on her face. She wants to flay him open, to watch him shatter underneath her, suddenly, and it inspires her to grab the back of his neck, bring their foreheads together, and say, “I want to watch you make yourself come.”
His eyes blow open. “You want me to what?”
She grinds down on the length of him, watches his eyes flutter closed from the feeling. “Show me how you like it.”
There’s a war going on in his face, she can see. After a moment, he opens his eyes, licks his lips. Without saying a word, with color high in his face, he wraps a hand around himself. And then, silently, he begins to jerk himself off.
She’s never had this desire before; she’s not sure where it comes from. But this is what she wants, she knows that; she wants Ransom, underneath her, unable to keep eye contact with her, his thumb passing over the glossy tip of himself over and over again, making these tiny, flinching moves every time he gets himself just right. Wants Ransom’s other hand on her hip, flexing and clutching, until he remembers she’s there, she’s touchable, and then his other hand is raising to cup her breast, to stroke her clavicle, to touch her mouth. Then they are staring face to face, and it’s one of the most intimate things Marta feels that perhaps she’s ever done, their breaths mingling, his eyebrows creasing together with pleasure. When his eyes start to flutter close, precum weeping from the tip of his cock, she says sharply, “Open your eyes.”
He does, letting out a small, agonized sound that she’s not sure he meant to let out. “Marta,” he says, and his hips are bucking now, from sheer desperation. “Marta—”
“Are you about to come?” she says.
Ransom nods. He’s sweating now, a faint gleam across his forehead and chest. She thinks about making him wait. But it’s 9:35, now, according to the ancient bathroom timepiece. Not much time left.
“Okay,” she says. “You can come.”
Ransom gasps. And then he’s coming, thrusting jerkily up into his hands, pinned by her body and his own restraint, spilling all over his hands but also onto her, the warmth splattering onto her bare stomach. She breathes with him, clutches him, holds his face close to hers, kisses the side of his sweaty face. She doesn’t say, You did such a good job, but somehow she thinks it anyway, thinks of him pridefully, because he had done it for her, had waited until she let him come, and then she thinks, This is a whole can of worms that I can’t unpack right now.
She wriggles instead, in his lap, feeling vaguely unsatisfied. She did come, but watching him jerk himself off had—done something to her. She is slick and wanting once more. But she’s prepared to ignore it, and starts to stand, to clean herself off, when Ransom’s grip on her tightens. He cocks an eyebrow. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Ransom, it’s almost 9:45,” she says.
“It’s 9:37,” he says, showing her his stupid Rolex. “I’ve got time.” And then he’s slithering to his knees and his tongue is lapping up the come he spilled on her stomach, tracing downward, and she thinks, Okay, maybe we do have time.
They get all cleaned up and are outside, attempting a facsimile of normality when the clock hits 9:47 and Harlan and Linda come trotting out of the dining room, thank God they were late. “Oh, there you are,” says Linda to Ransom. “We were wondering where you ran off to. Hello, kiddo.” She’s never stopped being polite to Marta, but Marta thinks that Linda’s been slightly more attentive to her ever since Knives Out came out, with this probing stare of hers as if trying to see why her son made Marta the protagonist.
Marta smiles politely, hugs Linda back. Then Harlan is saying to Linda, “I’ll walk you both to the car,” and Marta trails after them, aware that Ransom’s eyes are boring into the back of her head. She doesn’t expect him to catch her arm, though, when his mother and grandfather are safely out of earshot, to spin her around, and stare at her with those hot, hungry eyes.
“At least,” he says, “give me your phone number.”
She does, in that moment of weakness, her clit still buzzing and sensitive from the memory of two orgasms, of his solid muscle restrained beneath her. She regrets it, of course, in the minutes after. She administers Harlan’s medicine and drives mutely back home in her now-fixed car, where her mother is waiting with that stupidly expensive wine—“Did you know,” she tells Marta, in both shock and wonder, “that this bottle is worth a thousand dollars?”—and Marta, without saying anything but instead effacing a weak smile, downs half a glass in a single gulp.
She wishes she can say that she was strong thereafter, that she clung to her support network and had a spine of iron, but instead what happens is a comical tableau of debauchery. Suddenly, her days are very full, between balancing Harlan, her mother, Quỳnh and that circle of friends, and Ransom. She finds herself driving to Ransom’s house after a long day of work, where they spend a harried half-hour taking each other apart, the most she can spare without her mother getting suspicious. His apartment is a brutalist nightmare, but its key merit is that of its plush, king-sized bed, which they fuck on again, again, and again. He texts her a picture of his cock, hard in the bathroom of some fancy restaurant, with the accompanying text, can’t stop thinking of you, and she thinks about blocking his number, but instead he shows up at her house fifteen minutes later and they almost give her a concussion by having car sex in the bimmer, a new low.
Everyone notices, of course. Her mother keeps commenting on her new late hours with a lightly suspicious look in her eyes; Quỳnh straight up, and simply says, “Are you in a relationship? Because girl, you’re glowing,” and Marta, horrified by the insinuation that anything Ransom would ever do would make her glow, says, “Oh God, no, not at all.” Quỳnh narrows her eyes in suspicion, and Marta slinks lower in her seat, takes a long sip of the margaritas they’re all having for brunch. She is grateful when Ella, Quỳnh’s girlfriend, loops a lankily muscular arm around Quỳnh’s neck and says, “Oh come on, baby, if she doesn’t want to talk about it, leave her be.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Marta tries to say pathetically, but then ends up running to the bathroom and throwing up from the lie.
She refuses to be seen in public with Ransom, much to his annoyance. “I’m tired of takeout,” he says, on the rare occasion that she has time for a meal. “Everything is so soggy. Come on, nobody’s going to see us.”
“I don’t care,” she says curtly. “Are you going to eat your pad thai?”
“Stay away from my pad thai.”
Still, he persists. He finds a drive through movie, says, “Come on, Marta, you can’t argue with this, the whole point is that nobody will see us together” and begs until she agrees reluctantly. It’s a reshowing of Ferris Bueller and she spends the whole time frowning at the screen; she’s never seen it before and is immediately irritated by this Bueller kid. He laughs at the look on her face and says, “Well, drive throughs are for messing around, anyway.”
“Oh really,” she says.
“Yes.” His fingers are edging underneath the collar of her blouse, hot against her skin. “They are.”
The movie, in fact, is so irritating to her that she allows him to mess around anyway, allows him to flick open the button of her jeans and ruck her blouse up, his lips insistent against hers. This, at least, this makes sense, that he would want to take her out just to add variety and danger to their sex; the other alternative is unfathomable. He makes her come on two fingers curling inside her, his thumb circling her clit as she moans into his mouth, and then looks so pathetic afterward, bulge tenting his stylish pants, that she takes pity on him.
“Shit,” he says, as she tugs his belt free, pulls him out already hard and leaking, his voice trailing off weakly as she leans down across the console. “Oh fuck, Marta.”
It’s not an act she likes to do, going down on a man, doesn’t like the way they fuck her face or try to assume dominance in the role. Though perhaps that was because all the men she’d been with before were half-assed about it, too scared of hurting her to commit, but too tied up in the ideology of porn to release control. Ransom does neither of those things; he leans back and shivers, instead, and every time her eyes flick up to him, he’s biting the inside of his cheek and white-knuckling the overhead handle. “Fuck,” he says, and his hips twitch in that tiny, repressed way that she remembers from when he jerked off, the glide of her mouth syrupy slow over him. “Ah, fuck.”
So. Maybe she likes it in a specific way after all.
They fuck in the enormous, luxurious shower of his place, she rides him on the mahogany slab of his kitchen table, they break a condom and he buys her Plan B while she hides in the car. He’s obsessed with eating her out, loves it when she wears skirts for that very reason, and one day when she knows he’s coming over for lunch with Harlan, she wears a flippy knee-length red skirt and ignores him all through lunch, which riles him up so much that when Harlan excuses himself to use the restroom, Ransom crawls under the table, ignoring her hisses for him to stop, and pilfers her underwear, tugs her to the edge of her seat, and then commits to winding her up as quickly and efficiently as he can until the creak of the wooden boards alerts them to Harlan’s approach. Then he wipes his mouth with his napkin, and calmly resumes conversation with his grandfather while sawing himself off another bite of his filet mignon. Marta presses the slippery tops of her thighs together and plots her revenge, which comes later that night and involves many ropes, and lasts until Ransom is trembling.
Afterwards, he flops onto the bed, rubbing at his wrists, and says, with blank astonishment, “If you had told the Ransom who first met you, six years ago, that sex with you would be like this, I’m not sure he would’ve believed you.”
“I could say the same for you.”
He shrugs, an expansive roll of muscles under his broad shoulders. “But I’m pretty sure that whatever you imagined I would be, I was, just with other women.”
“What, so you’re saying I made you who you were?” Her voice is skeptical, but even as she says it, she’s seared with realization that—well, all the other men she had sex with, it hadn’t been like this. It had been gentler, less frantic, more…normal. Whether or not she wanted to admit it, sex with Ransom was different.
“Nah.” His smile is sudden, broad with humor. “I’m just saying I think you unlocked it. Not that I’m complaining. But I feel like—I would’ve thought sex with you would’ve involved a lot of crying and I love yous and safewords and very transparent consent.”
“I’m not as much of a saint as you’d like to portray me as,” she says waspishly.
He pauses, a peculiar look crossing over his face. It’s one of the only times they’ve referenced, even obliquely, the fact that she inspired Elena. She can’t stand the thought of him ruminating on it for too long, however, so she bids him farewell as quickly as possible, and goes back home, where her mother once again levels suspicious eyes at her.
“Mom thinks you have a boyfriend.”
Marta pauses when Alice says this. She’s grocery shopping at the moment and she accidentally squeezes the banana too hard when Alice says this, so she places it back down delicately and books it out of the produce section. “She said that to you?”
“Is it him?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” No nausea, so it’s the truth.
Alice knows Marta and her half-truths, though, because she presses onward. “Are you fucking Ransom still?”
“Oh my god,” hisses Marta, even though Alice is on the phone and nobody possibly could’ve heard what she said, except for maybe her terrible four roommates (kind of five now, apparently, one of them has entered a relationship and is basically raising their partner, according to Alice). “Don’t—I mean—”
“Oh my god you areeee.”
Alice’s voice raises to a painful squeak. Marta pulls the phone away from her ear and waits for it to subside, but when she returns to Alice’s call, the questions are coming a mile a minute. “How long? Since New York? Oh my god, do you like him? Or is it just sex? Or has he really grown up? Wait, is he the one that’s an incel, or is he the grandson who drunk drove?”
Marta rubs at her temple and says, “Drunk drove.”
Alice whistles. “I mean. Fuck.”
“Look, Alice,” says Marta, with some grasping at composure, “it’s not—look. It’s not anything. It’s not love, it’s not a relationship, it’s just sex, okay? Because he’s—he’s Ransom.”
“I know,” said Alice with equanimity. “And he basically wrote you a love letter in Knives Out.”
Marta flinches in surprise. “You told me,” she hisses, “that you hadn’t read it.”
“Well I hadn’t at the time, but I’ve officially been bumped to the main team for it, so I did have to read it, and now I regret not reading it before. He’s funny, sis, and he clearly wrote tension between Hugh and Elena, I mean, that last scene where he’s dripping vomit onto her face and they’re basically humping on the floor in front of Benoit Blanc—”
“Ew!” says Marta, her voice rising high enough that she attracts the attention of some of the passerby shoppers. She winces, regulates her voice. “Okay, stop talking. Please stop talking.”
“I’m just saying, let me know if you guys go public with this, okay, because it’ll be great PR for the movie.”
“There is nothing to go public with,” whisper-shouts Marta and hangs up on Alice.
She can’t stop thinking about her conversation with Alice, however, for the rest of the week. The result is that she’s hyper-vigilant about her every reaction, is so twitchy that Harlan asks her as they have tea in the garden, “Have you had too much coffee today, or is something the matter?”
Marta jumps at the sound of his voice, accidentally drops her pen. “What?”
His words process as they both stare at the pen she dropped. “Oh,” she says, belatedly. “No. Nothing’s the matter.”
“Marta,” says Harlan, and his voice is so kind that it makes her want to cry. “It is immeasurable, the number of times I’ve talked your ear off about familial nonsense that weighed me down. Burdens are meant to be shared. If there is any way that I can do the same for you—”
She shrivels at the thought of telling Harlan that she’s hooking up with his grandson. “No,” she says, her voice an affrighted high. “There’s—truly nothing to share.”
“Oh,” says Harlan, his voice more quiet now. “Very well.”
They sit there in the garden a moment longer. Bees bumble into each other on their way to pollinate lavender, and the air is rich and heady with the late-summer bloom. Marta looks at Harlan’s thoughtful face, swallows, and says:
“Back when I went to visit my sister, I bumped into Ransom and he ended up giving me a ride back from New York.”
Harlan’s a smart man. It’s one of the things she admires most about him. One so rarely needed to connect the dots for him, even when the dots are as unfathomably far apart as the ones she shares now. He sits there, lets the information percolate, cross references it to the abashed, confessional way she says it, and then understands what she’s trying not to tell him. She can see recognition dawn on him.
And then he laughs.
She sits stiffly as he laughs and laughs, the sound ringing through the otherwise-quiet garden. There is the rustle as a hare, startled by his hysterics, erupts out of the undergrowth and pelts for safety in the forest. He laughs for so long that she starts to be concerned for his lungs, in a medical way, and then he wipes his eyes and says, “Oh hell.”
“Yes,” says Marta, dourly. “Yes indeed.”
“Well,” he says, that familiar twinkle in his eyes now. “Well, you’ve been responsible for long enough in life, I suppose that—disordered urges come across everyone now and then.”
“You’re not going to tell me to stay away?” says Marta, surprised. She had assumed he would go on a whole rant about how, though Ransom is starting to finally figure out his life, it didn’t mean he needed to go messing around with hers. She had written out a whole response in her head, she had been so certain. It had a lot of, I knows in it.
But to her surprise, Harlan shakes his head. “My dear, with you, I try not to twist the knife.”
She straightens, unnerved by how visible her shame and disgust is. She wonders if Ransom, just as easily as Harlan, can see those emotions within her, and a prick of regret tinges at her. Even someone with an ego as massively inflated as Ransom’s would be punctured by something like that.
She nods, after a second. “Well, thank you for listening.”
He counters: “And good luck to you.”
They slip back into their peaceful silence. She does feel better, actually, having spoken with him. She had been consciously hiding it from him, for obvious reasons, and it did feel like a burden had been lifted.
It inspires her to ask one more question, another one that has been weighing on her, heavily, for who knows how long. “Harlan?”
“Yes, my dear?”
Her long silence provokes him to examine her, a puzzled frown on his face. She musters up, finally, the strength to say: “In Ransom’s novel, we know a lot of things were true.”
“A lot of things were false, as well.”
“I know. But—that argument you had, on your birthday. You didn’t tell him—you wouldn’t have—”
Her words trail off. But Harlan, as he always does, as a testament to their long and true friendship, understands.
“It is an unkind thing, what the patriarch Exington did to Elena,” he says. “You can rest easy knowing that I would not do the same to you. The edits to my will have not been quite as large as that. But I did tell him that I might as well make you my sole inheritor, because…”
He trails off, but she understands—because of the drama that always inevitably happened between him and Ransom, the love of twisting the knife in one another, as he said. Never mind all that. The confirmation that she was not his inheritor unlatches something in her, relief rushing through her body. He observes this and it makes him smile, a tired smile, a knowing one.
“That being said,” he continues, “you should expect on my death to receive something.”
“Harlan—”
“No arguments,” he says. “It is one of the great perks of death, writing a will. It’s like a mathematical, logical puzzle of sorts, one might say. The ultimate plot. What can you give someone to help them out in life—not what makes them happy, but what makes them whole? Of course, who am I to be the arbiter of such a lofty goal? But I’ll be dead, so what happens after won’t matter anymore to me, and that, Marta, is the best part.”
He looks so gleeful that she can’t help but laugh, even as her eyes prick with tears at the thought of Harlan dying.
Every whirlwind time needs to come to an end, eventually. After two months of this frenetic lifestyle, it finally comes to a head.
It arrives on a Saturday that she specifically schedules to be for Ransom, telling her friends that she’s spending the day with her mother, telling her mother she’s spending the day with Quỳnh, when in fact she’s spending it getting fucked on practically every surface of his house that hasn’t yet been christened by them. The uncomfortable velour loveseat. The coffee table. The garage, up against the BMW. Ransom has goals.
Such hedonism is, frankly, a waste of time, but she allows it because she’s never had this sort of marathon sex, never had someone else’s focus so wholly concentrated on her. Ransom knows every spot that makes her moan, exploits every single one of them, and in return, she knows the exact pressure to put on his neck to make his pupils blow wide, knows how hard to rake her nails across his back to make him come, knows how to string him along the edge of release until his cock is purpling at the head and he’s quaking like he’s on hour three of a workout.
She’s pleasantly sore by that evening, nods sleepily when he proposes sushi delivery. Inputs her order into the phone when he tosses it to her, scrolls through his subscriptions on his massive smart TV to judge what he’s watching. Mostly documentaries, it looks like.
“A little boring for you,” she says.
“Best way to come up with ideas.”
“Oh yeah? How’s the sequel going.”
Pointed silence, and Ransom says, in a mock-hurt voice, “Cruel, cruel woman.”
Marta snorts. Her hair is wet after her shower, which he insisted on crowding into, leading to round four, after which she firmly said, “Enough, you’re going to give me a UTI.” It’s starting to dry, now, curling in the uncontrollable way it always does when she doesn’t have any product to put in it after a shower. The couch dips as he sits down next to hear, and she doesn’t know what to say when he reaches out to touch, gently, one damp curl. She’s wearing his clothes, she smells like his shampoo. She doesn’t like the look in his eyes.
Marta bats away his hand and says, “You just need to write a terrible first draft.”
“Such easy advice for you to say. How many novels have you written?”
“Oh, one fewer than you.”
“I’ll have you know that I’ve written several novel-length sequels already,” he informs her, distracted enough by this thread of conversation that he’s stopped looking at her in that way, thankfully. “They just all happen to be terrible and so I burned them. Metaphorically. I moved them to the trash app.”
“What was terrible about them?”
Ransom frowns into the distance, now. And he says, reluctantly, as if every word was being pulled out of him, “Their endings. They all had bad endings.”
“Bad how?”
“In every sense.”
“Not every ending has to be a happy one.” She likes a sad ending, herself. So many of her favorite books end bittersweet; Alice loves the gushy, genre-conforming romance novels, and Marta likes them too, up until the endings. Sometimes, that’s why she likes the k-dramas she and her mama watch more, because sometimes they end in abject tragedy and everyone dying, and she and her mother are in tears. It balances out the saccharine sweet ones.
“It’s not that they’re unhappy,” he says. “But happy endings do sell better, so I’ll probably just write those.”
He catches the wrinkled look she gives him and laughs. “You know that I chase the market.”
“But you don’t,” she says, confused. “Everyone was predicting that the mystery bubble was ending. Harlan’s last books sold fine, but—nowhere near as well as they had in the nineties. If you wanted to chase the market, you could’ve written shitty knockoffs of the current bestsellers, but you wrote Knives Out instead.”
She realizes now how rarely she gives him praise, because he looks uncomfortable at the sound of it. “Well,” he says after a moment. “The ending of that one was good.”
“Sure.” It was critically acclaimed, after all. It’s an objective fact that Knives Out had a good ending, one that tied up all the loose ends, cleverly subverted expectations with its twist, and stuck in the reader’s mind.
Ransom laughs. “Clearly, I only ever desire a happy ending for you.”
He says it sleazily, clearly indicating the orgasmic overtures befitting the current, post-coital situation they found themselves in, but his words sent ice down her spine. She sits ramrod-straight. “What did you say?”
His brow crinkles. “Huh? It was a joke—”
“No, I know what you meant. But—are you saying that Knives Out has a happy ending for Elena?”
He stares at her, utter confusion writ over his face. Well, yeah, is so obviously sitting in his mouth.
“Ransom,” she says, hating the quiver in her own voice. “Do you think it was a happy ending, the one that you gave Elena?” That ending, the one where Elena now has to live her life in paranoia that she can never trust the ones around her, can never tell if they love her or her money, can only throw cash at problems because nobody expects other solutions. The ending where her close friend died needlessly.
He’s still blankly staring at her, and she says, more loudly now, “Is it happy because in the end, she has her comeuppance against the family and she has all their money?”
It was the one point that had rolled over and over in her head upon closing Knives Out, the triumphant written ending of a woman who persevered, who was rewarded. But Marta, upon reading it, had found it hard to believe the ending to be anything other than a sentence. Extreme wealth, injurious power, all of it iron shackles with no key. How could she desire it when she witnessed the exhaustion on Harlan’s face? At that age, one deserved nothing but comfort and love in their final years, but instead Harlan found himself surrounded by people who, even years after being cut off, still cajoled and pleaded and manipulated and clawed at him, at his fortune, at his soul. Even charity was only a temporary panacea, the necessary medicine that the uber-wealthy imbibed in order to feel, for one moment, any sense of belonging in a world they otherwise cut themselves off from. She observed this, and more, every day.
So, when she’d finished reading it, remembering Ransom’s disdain for her, she’d drawn the only conclusion that she could. Elena was getting an unhappy ending, same as everyone else. Sure, there were elements of heroism for her. But there was equality to the idea that everyone satirized in Ransom’s novel got the same ending treatment: doomed to a dismal, money-grubbing life.
Ransom doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t have to. The confusion on his face is answer enough, the palpable evidence that yes, despite all the points she just made, he did see it as a happy ending. Because in the end, Elena was the one with the money, and therefore she was the one with the power, and in Ransom’s pea-sized brain, that is the end-all-be-all of the mercenary goal of living.
It is not a mere mismatch in ideology. It is a gulf. A chasm. A void.
And Marta knows, in that moment, that he would never change.
Oh God, she thinks. What am I doing?
The way an avalanche happens is snowflake by snowflake, the production of variegated elements that need to come together for such a precipitous and dangerous event. A weak layer in the packed snow. A slope a little too steep. But they always have a trigger, some unlucky skier or the temperature rising too high, whatever, an incident that launches an unstoppable snowfall. Marta feels that plummet within her, her heart frozen, her stomach turning. “I have to go,” she says.
“Marta—wait—”
He tries to stop her as she haphazardly throws on her clothing, putting on her sweater inside out, stuffing her feet in the wrong shoes at first. “Come on, let’s at least talk,” he keeps trying to say, but there’s nothing to talk about. It is a crystalline truth, impervious to change. There is only action and inaction, and eventually he gives up, rubbing the back of his neck as he watches her leave, a small figure in his massive, empty house as she drives away, her eyes dry, her mind clear.
Thank God that it’s over, she thinks. Only now can she see what danger she was almost in, what had almost happened to her. Thank God it ended before she broke her own heart.
Her days clear up. Life and work balance once more. He tries to text her, once, twice, thrice, and she ignores him, so he eventually gets the message. He doesn’t try any harder than perfunctory texting—why would he? They were nothing to each other. She is Marta Cabrera again, with her steady, reliable schedule, and her steady, reliable lifestyle. No more Plan B, no more late night excursions, no car sex. Every day, she comes home at the same time and watches dramas with her mother, and pretends not to notice her mother’s concerned, questioning eyes.
Quỳnh, after two weeks of observing Marta at the regularly scheduled group events, tugs her aside. “Did you break up with him?”
“It wasn’t a relationship to begin with,” Marta says stiffly, and is unprepared for the hug that Quỳnh gives her, capacious and strong. She doesn’t realize, until that moment, how much she needed a hug.
“Do you want me to buy you a drink?” Marta shakes her head no. Quỳnh clasps her shoulder, that terribly understanding look in her eyes, and she says, “You are worth twice of whatever dirtbag screwed you over.”
To Marta’s humiliation, she chokes up. She says, “It wasn’t—really it was me—”
“I don’t believe you,” Quỳnh says loyally, but she doesn’t know, and Marta can’t explain, how when one engages in coitus with a man beyond flawed, diametrically opposed in every way, it is your fault. Like an adult, scarred from burns, grabbing a flame open-palmed. She is stinging, not from the surprise, but from the desire for the heat, the acute sense of the loss.
II. ADAGIO
The call comes at 7:31 on a Monday, a month after Marta dumps him. Ransom knows because he’s grabbing dinner with one of the Hessbounder bigwigs, and they’re laughing pleasantly over a bottle of aged Longrow. The first draft of the script has already been written—the process has been expedited because, paradoxically, Harlan’s refusal to adapt any of his novels has made the populace lust for a proper adaptation, and his grandson seems to fit the bill. Ransom has the script now, in his bag, for his later review.
So Ransom is drinking, and laughing, and deliberately catching the eye of the gorgeous blonde in the purple dress a few tables away, when Linda calls.
Linda is not the kind of mother who calls. She texts, 99% of the time, because calling is a waste of time and she’s very busy. Sometimes, texts lead to a call, but often not. So Ransom’s stomach drops a little at the sight of her lighting up his phone. “Excuse me,” Ransom tells his companion. “I’m afraid I have to take this.”
He heads to the smoking lounge and answers. “Mom?”
“Ransom.” Her voice is thick with emotion. “It’s your grandfather.”
The life of a bestselling author isn’t much more glamorous than that of being a trust fund baby. Less so, maybe, because even though he ended up getting a six figure deal from his publisher, it’s doled out in four lump sums, and his profligate lifestyle is only able to be sustained by his trust fund’s interest. So he remains a trust fund baby, and yet, it feels somehow worse than when he lived solely on that trust fund; there is a betrayal upon the first time he realizes he’s dipping back into the trust fund’s accrued interest, because he is working more than he ever has before, and it’s still somehow not enough. Is this what it’s like to be poor?
Whatever. He just has to write a bestselling next novel and it’ll all be fine.
At least, that is what he thinks the first year after Knives Out is picked up, but by the time the actual publication date happens—this is why the publishing industry is dying, he thinks, because it takes so fucking long for books to come out, of course they can’t capitalize on any trend in time—he still doesn’t have a draft for the next Benoit Blanc mystery.
His editor says, “No worries, take your time,” the first year. The next year, he says, “You know, diamonds are formed under pressure.”
Ransom stares him down until Jesse, uncomfortable, hedges, hems and haws, and says, “Well, keep me posted.”
He goes to book signings, to festivals, to panels to promote Knives Out; because it’s the breakout hit of the year, he’s accepted easily, and with great envy. Objectively, he’s one of the most attractive men there—damn, publishing is full of ugly, slope-shouldered folks, full of exposed gums and frizzing hair and bad skin—and so the few attractive female authors flock to him. Only a few of them hold any interest for him, however. When one’s regularly exposed to yacht girls whose professional lifestyles revolve around being attractive, it sets a high standard. Nevertheless, he ends up sleeping with a few, not calling them back, and gets the cold shoulder from them the next time he sees them. It’s a crash course in the incestuous, insular nature of the industry and it’s frankly not worth the drama.
For those two years after he writes Knives Out, he doesn’t see the Thrombeys much. With his parents’ divorce, him basically writing a hitpiece on the whole family, and the ability to finally have something worthwhile to blame for being busy, he suddenly has an ironclad excuse for not attending family events. His mother tries to guilt him—“Your grandfather’s not getting any younger, you know!“—but he knows that she, too, is fairly relieved by his absence. If she and Walt almost came to blows, he and Walt definitely would’ve given each other a few good punches.
He expects this to be his new life, this book life, or at least until he gets bored of it and blows it off. At least there’s a movie deal—maybe screenwriting will be his next venture, or he’ll get involved in the glitzy Hollywood scene, move to Los Angeles, and never have to think about the Thrombeys again other than when they die off, one by one. He’s committed to this vision of his future life, is wondering when to debut it to the Thrombeys, when he sees Marta at the Hessbounder party.
And then—
Well.
Two months. Two months, they saw each other, if seeing each other was even the right way to say it. Five months, if you count the Hessbounder party, the tension-laden ride back to Massachusetts afterward. He’s had guinea pigs that lasted longer.
After Marta leaves, Ransom gets drunk. Stays drunk, for about twenty-four hours straight, then wakes up with a hangover so massive that he contemplates getting drunk again to get rid of it, except he’d accidentally shattered the whiskey bottle in his blackout state (reached for it, ended up pushing it off the table), and he refuses to get drunk off anything else. So then he has to sit with nothing but his own mind to keep him company, and the disquieting thought that this is the strongest he’s ever reacted to any relationship being broken off.
So Ransom goes out. He still has a few connections around the area that are reliable for solely the act of being sloppy; some of them have wives, he knows, but they don’t care, so why should he? They all go out, they hit on younger women, and Ransom ends up taking one of the older women they talk to home. She’s a leggy brunette, flexible enough that he can fold her in half and pound away, and when he stuffs his fingers in her mouth he pretends it’s because he finds it hot and not because the sound of her is a undeniable reminder to his sodden brain that she’s not Marta.
After his call with Linda ends, Ransom comes back to the table, his good mood vanished. Perhaps the creative officer from Hessbounder realizes it, because his jovial facade slips—or perhaps never existed strongly enough in the first place—and he asks, “Everything all right?”
Gossip travels quickly in Hollywood. The last thing the Thrombeys need are a pack of vultures, swarming the hospital. So Ransom stays away from the specifics, just says, “A family affair, I’m afraid. I’ve got to head out tonight.”
The thing nobody realizes about growing up rich is that, it’s not a frog-in-the-pot situation, where the water heats up slowly until the idiot frog boils alive without realizing what’s happening. Instead, it’s a frog, immortal to the death of boiling alive, but susceptible to both the pain and any other means of immolations, and it’s tossed in a pot of boiling water, with an array of designer drugs and other destructive behaviors easily within reach. And there’s a lot of other frogs in the boiling pot with you, and they all look at each other and go, We’re so lucky to be here! And then they compare the temperatures of which they can withstand and this poor, bastard frog that was born a tadpole in this scorching environs never knows temperate water. But it’s okay, you’re here, living in that boiling water, and meanwhile there are frogs out there that freeze to death.
It’s a bad metaphor. It’s an apt metaphor. There’s no real way to describe being rich, because either you are, or you aren’t. It’s certainly preferable to being poor, or worse, middle class. No handouts for the middle class members, no golden teat to hang off of.
Ransom grew up with pedigree, because it’s what Richard and Linda grew up with as well. He didn’t find out, until it was probably too late, that Harlan had wanted him to go to public school, had told Linda and Walt point-blank, “If I could do it all over again, I would never have put you in Deerfield.” He knows because Linda tells Walt about it when he’s thirteen and already on track to be a second-gen Deerfield kid, and the two of them sip their red wine and laugh about how concerned Harlan is.
“I loved Deerfield,” says Walt with a shake of his head. “Makes a man tough. You know, Jacob’s already showing 99th percentile activity. He’s got shapes down! That’s, what—three months ahead of schedule? Public school would ruin all of that.”
Ransom, picking at his peas, catches the subtle look his mother gives Richard, this amused, Oh, Walt, expression that she quickly schools away as she says, “That’s wonderful to hear, Walt.”
Being a Thrombey’s not the boiling water. Deerfield’s not the boiling water. It’s all of it—the live-in nanny who taught him French growing up, the casually catered celebrations for every single family gathering, the quiet competitiveness that he witnessed in his aunts and uncles and their attempts to outdo each other’s gifts monetarily, until the grandparents have to step in and institute a gift money limit just as Walt’s writing a $100,000 check to Ransom, who, at the age of six, had no concept of money. It’s growing up with kids who have access to cocaine at the age of 12, because their older sibling is already in rehab; it’s seeing that Lilianna, whom Ransom lost his virginity to, stole diamond earrings belonging to her best friend Marie’s, not because she didn’t have her own, but because she liked them. It’s all of that, cultivating an ideology that’s constantly attacked by iconoclasts who, of course, are only just envious that they don’t get to live life in that easy mode. Sure, they couch it behind pedagogy like universal healthcare for all, and other idealistic slop, but at the end of they day, they’re jealous. Anyone, everyone, would switch places with him in a heartbeat and maybe they’d pretend or believe that they’d donate it all, but instead they’d become draconic, drown in their hoard, and emerge monstrous. If they survive at all.
Well, he says everyone. But he can’t stop thinking of Marta’s face, pale with horror, as she says, Was that a happy ending, to you?
He’s been trying to understand what about that conversation was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Even after all this time, he’s not sure he’s anywhere closer to the answer.
He hadn’t needed to rush. If there’s anything Harlan has displayed over 87 years of life, it’s a remarkable ability to fight, and he is unconscious, but stable, by the time Ransom arrives. It started with aortal complications that led to a collapse during breakfast, a confused look of shock crossing his face before he toppled out of his chair. Ransom hears this all secondhand—how Marta performed CPR on him while Fran ran for the phone, how the ambulance took 17 agonizing minutes to make it to the mansion, how they resuscitated him, how now, it’s just a slow crawl to death.
Still. After Linda’s call, Ransom is there by 8pm and desperately pisses in the hospital bathroom after refusing to touch the hideously smelly McDonalds bathroom where he had scarfed down twenty chicken nuggets and ate another twenty on the eighty-minute drive left. Most of the family is already there, barring Donna and Jacob, who are somewhere in Sweden or something with Donna’s maternal family and are trying to source a flight back. And, of course, Marta is there, standing next to the doctor in charge of Harlan’s care, whom Linda is thoroughly interrogating.
The conversation doesn’t stop when Ransom arrives, though Linda takes a moment to pat him approvingly on the shoulder, and Walt looks surprised, for a second, that Ransom arrived so quickly. But the doctor keeps speaking and there’s a whole jumble of words that Ransom only vaguely recognizes; Marta is translating it for the family, best that she can, but he understands what is important: there is pain, written all over Marta’s face, which can only mean that it really is the end.
He doesn’t even have space to feel anything upon seeing her again, other than perhaps the sensation of a gut-punch upon seeing her wan face, bags enormous under her eyes. She only looks at him once, a quick flick of her eyes to him, and otherwise she ignores him, which is fine.
Meg is consoling Jodi, who is, of course, obnoxiously sobbing her eyes out on one of the plasticky hospital chairs. Nobody is allowed to visit Granddad, not yet, so of course Jodi is already hard at work sucking up all the air in the room. Ransom stifles an annoyed noise and crosses the waiting room to be as far away from her as possible.
He stares at his phone for a lack of anything else to do, but the screen goes dark and he doesn’t bother to wake it. Harlan, dying in hospice. At least the death he’d immortalized his fictitious Harlan with had been splashy and dramatic, a death befitting of the king of murder. If he had to choose his own method of death, shitting in a bedpan would not even broach top fifty.
Someone moves close to him. He doesn’t have to look up to know that it’s her.
“How long do you think he has?” he asks her.
He already heard her careful answer to Walt when Walt asked a similar question. I really can’t say, Walt. To his relief, she gives him a less bullshitty answer. “Prognosis for patients is normally within the week.”
He nod, rubs his chin. “Okay. Thanks.”
It’s a nightmare, the next few days. Harlan slips in and out of coherence, and whenever he blinks open watery eyes, Linda is there asking if he recognizes him, or Walt is there asking if Harlan needs to talk to anyone. Donna and Jacob arrive after a few days, when it becomes clear that Harlan’s condition has slipped to worse, Ransom doesn’t talk to them. Marta is always in the room, sitting in her corner chair, face drawn and dark, watching.
At some point, Harlan cries out, “Josie,” and Jodi perks up, saying, “Is he asking for me?” until she, too, remembers that his first wife was named Josephine, but everyone had called her Jo—everyone but Harlan.
“Mom’s not here,” says Linda, holding Harlan’s hand. But he waves her aside, beckons at Marta, who looks nothing like Grandma Jo had—Grandma Jo had been a redhead, fading to blonde in her older years, had been tall and skinny and sharp of feature. Marta comes anyway, holds Harlan’s hand as he raves in delusions.
It’s brutal. Ransom gets very familiar with each and every painting in the hospital, with the taste of the shit coffee in the cafeteria, with the smell of death approaching. Sometimes, he thinks to himself, I want this shit to be over, and then thinks of being eight and spending Christmas with his grandparents. It’s September. Christmas isn’t for another three months, and Harlan won’t make it that long, and then Ransom has to take a very long walk.
His mother tries to talk to him about it. He lets her talk, because it’s clear that trying to help him is, inadvertently, helping her. “He’s lived a good life,” she says, lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. “The life I’d want to live.”
“What, surrounded by needy children and whiny grandchildren?”
“Yes. If only my dear only child would produce some.”
He snorts, grabs a cigarette from her pack. She smacks it out of his hand, says, “Don’t start with that nasty habit,” and he gapes at her in incredulity.
Richard shows up at some point. Ransom half-expects Linda to slap him for the audacity of showing up—what is he here for, other than to see if he’s in the will? He’s living with his mistress, he has no right to be here—but he goes earnestly to her, hugs her, says, “I’m so sorry,” and Linda’s face crumples. She starts crying, silently, mouth downturned and big and sad in a way Ransom has never seen, and she allows herself, stiffly, to be hugged by Richard, though she does not hug him back.
Richard tries to approach Ransom as well, but Ransom rolls his eyes and says, “You don’t have to make an effort.” And Richard, like the coward he has been all of Ransom’s life, acquiesces.
On the fourth day, he catches Marta half-dozing in the morning, brings her coffee the way he knows she likes it—heavily sugared, no milk. “Thanks,” she says, and he takes it as an invitation to sit next to her. It’s early enough that nobody else has arrived yet, so it’s safe to be there, away from any prying eyes. Harlan’s eyes aren’t open, anyway.
Maybe she feels the same, because she says, “How are you doing?”
Ransom gives her a disbelieving, scathing look. In response, Marta sighs. “Yeah. Me too.”
He knows that she lost her father when she was too young to understand it, lost her grandparents before she was even born. Maybe there’s no comparison of one grief to another, but he thinks that Harlan might be the first real big loss of her life that isn’t abstracted, or a what if in any way. It’s not his.
“None of us got to say goodbye to Grandma Jo,” he said, and Marta’s gaze snaps up, fixing on him. This had been sixteen years ago; well before her time. Maybe Harlan had never told her anything about Grandma Jo, Josie, or maybe he’d told her everything. “She was the kind of woman who went on a walk every morning, never ate any red meat, never smoke, barely drank. We all thought Harlan, with his horrible habits, would be the first to kick the bucket, but Grandma Jo was the one to have a heart attack. DOA.”
It was the only time he’d ever seen Granddad in such a state. None of his kids had been able to help him; tears had run continuously down his wrinkled face as he held Jo’s hand at the funeral, unable to leave the side of the casket. The only person he allowed near him was Meg, just five at the time, in her frilly black dress. Her, he let sit on his lap, buried his face in her wavy mass of baby hair as he cried. Meg, somehow socially aware despite her young age, remained there with her sweet upturned face visibly confused but willing enough to not squirm. Entirely possible that Neil and Jodi had bribed her to stay put, Ransom never knew.
Ransom had been twenty and grieving in his own, stunted way. Mostly he’d been irritated at his parents who, in the stress of the whole funeral, kept snapping at him; mostly, he avoided looking at his grandfather, this titan of wealth and solidity, reduced to a man sobbing into the hair of a five-year-old, holding the waxen hand of his dead wife. Ransom, under the pretense of grief, had gotten his best friend from college invited, a frat bro named Wes, and the two of them nipped searing gulps of Grey Goose from his father’s flask throughout the course of the funeral.
He thought he’d gotten away with it—there had been no obvious gaffs, no untoward snickers during the service, nothing except a little stumble when he’d gone to be a pallbearer. But at the misstep, Harlan’s eyes had flashed to him, that sharp intellect still honed despite grief, and Ransom had seen the censure there. He had known.
Harlan was different, after. Maybe he’d always held it against Ransom, for being dumb and drunk at the love of his life’s funeral. Or perhaps it had just been the last time Harlan had been able to feel such emotion—he had been colder, after that, like Jo had been the one to imbue him with the previous familial, genial warmth. Christmas was less bright, more cursory, as if Harlan had been merely acting out the motions of being a loving grandparent. It was the one and only time Ransom had ever felt bad for Meg and Jacob—that they had not only missed out on Grandma Jo, but that they also got this facsimile of Granddad.
Well. Walt and Neil’s faults, for having them later on in life. Also, he supposed he felt bad for Meg when her father had died a few years later, but mostly he had been watching Harlan, at the hard emotion on Harlan’s face, the way he’d signed checks and told Jodi, I will always take care of you—all the overtures of care, none of the emotion.
“It’s more common with women,” says Marta. Ransom blinks at her, takes a moment to process. Right. Heart attacks. “The signs are less commonly known.”
“Sure. All I’m saying is—it’s all bad.”
Marta reaches across, holds his hand. Her grip is warm and dry from overwashing; she really needs to use moisturizer, he thinks. But he holds her hand tightly, pathetically grateful, for the twenty minutes of silence they get before the rest of the family arrives. Then, Marta retreats back to her corner chair, and they continue watching Harlan, lost in the hellscape of his mind.
On the fifth day, Harlan perks up. He’s talking in full sentences, he recognizes everyone around them, he even laughs, hoarsely, upon hearing that he’s been insensible for days. “I hope I didn’t let any dark secrets slip!” And then, upon hearing that the majority of them have been here the whole time: “All of you need hobbies, or jobs.”
The effect it has on the family is immediate. Everyone smiles more, tensions alleviate, Meg leaves for the doctor. Only Marta remains with a cloud over her, and when Ransom notices, he draws close to her. “What’s wrong?”
When she looks up at him, her eyes are wet. “It’s—in terminal patients, it’s common for them for them to be lucid, energetic, right before death.”
Ransom lets the words sink in. “Oh.”
He turns away from her, then. He should know that, he thinks. He’s researched death so much, for Harlan, for his own works, he knows all about the angles of stabbing, the veins that would lead to instantaneous bleeding out, the ones that would allow a man to live, what happens to a body after death, rigor mortis, et cetera—but he doesn’t research this kind of death. The quiet death, the long death, the kind that sends family members scattered all over the globe scurrying back for an opportunity to say goodbye, the cruel kind that allows for a window of coherence right before the end, like God’s poetic justice.
Marta pushes him, lightly. “You need to take advantage of it.”
He catches her hand. “The fuck do you mean? You need to take advantage of it, too.”
She protests, he refuses to bargain, and in the midst of it, he catches Linda looking over at them and he drops Marta’s hand. By that time, Meg has come back with the doctor, who confirms that Harlan’s vitals have not improved, indeed have worsened. The mood plummets.
Harlan looks across a sea of somber faces and says, “Well, let’s do one by one, then.”
He talks to the in-laws first, even Richard, gives them each a few minutes. Then, the grandchildren—Jacob first, who has grown into a pallid collegiate incel with a perpetually sneering expression on his face, but who still comes out looking shaken. He doesn’t even reject Donna’s hug when she wraps her arms around him. Then Meg, who has been snot-nosed and crying ever since the doctor said, I’m sorry to say…, and she emerges in the same miserable state she entered, bypassing her mother to pull out her phone, where she’s already calling someone by the time she blows past Ransom. Some college boyfriend or girlfriend, no doubt.
“Ransom,” calls out Harlan from his room.
Ransom grunts as he hoists himself up from the uncomfortable hospital seat, too aware of everyone’s eyes on him as he enters the hospital room, closes the door behind him.
The room, which felt too small when everyone was crowding in, passing through, suddenly feels cavernous. At the center is his grandfather, looking small amidst the blue hospital sheets, hooked up to a thousand machines. Every liver spot seems to be on display, every wrinkle deepened.
“Take a seat.”
Ransom does. Even scoots it to be out of the ray of sunlight filtering through the hospital window. Harlan watches him the whole time, with that familiar, clever gaze.
Ransom clears his throat. “Before you start—you don’t need to do any platitudes, or whatever you’ve been doing with everyone else. I’ve had five days to come to terms with the fact that you’re leaving the mortal plane. I just hope wherever you’re going to next is better.”
The words don’t come out as confidently as he intends them too. Rather, they come out a little hollow. Man, made small before death. But they do make his grandfather smile, knowingly.
“I don’t fear death,” says Harlan. “Funny—I don’t remember saying that to you, if I ever did. But I agreed with it when I read it in your first draft, and I feel it more truly than ever, now.”
Ransom can’t even crack a grin at this reference to his novel, the echoing of a sentiment written—God, three years past, now. How three years could go by so quickly, he has no idea, but somehow they feel longer than perhaps the last decade of his life. “You said it to me seven years ago. During Easter.”
“How terribly sacrilegious of me.”
The room is silent, other than the ever-present beeping of the machines. Harlan says, suddenly, “In my delirium, I created a mystery that even I cannot puzzle out. Would you like to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“Man, Death, and Wisdom sit at a poker table. Wisdom deals a hand, they all check, and she reveals the flop. It’s all hearts, and upon seeing it, Death folds the winning hand. Why?”
Ransom turns it over in his head. Finally, he says, “It’s medicated nonsense. You must’ve been high as a kite.”
Harlan laughs, hoarse from his intubation, and general weariness. “I figured as much.”
They continue talking. It’s all they can do, after all.
Harlan talks to Marta last. By that time, he’s more exhausted, a fact that one can tell from how his summoning voice gets weaker and weaker. Walt is visibly offended by this placement of Marta as last, the obvious preference for her, but nobody else looks terribly surprised—it is Marta, really, that he has spent his sunset years with. Six of them, to be precise. Maybe Walt is thinking of the fifty-odd years he’s spent being Harlan’s son, but arguably, Marta outshines all of them when it comes to quality time with Harlan. Six years, eight hours, or more every day. She spends the longest time in there, comes out blotchy and with clear evidence of having cried, and tells everyone, “Not long, now.”
They gather. The last few hours are not pleasant. Harlan is no longer lucid, and the choking, sputum-logged sound of his death rattle is omnipresent in the room—it upsets Jacob enough that the kid leaves, Donna following after him. Richard leaves too, muttering something about decency, and is followed by Jodi. But Walt, Meg, Linda, Marta, and Ransom all remain, Linda and Walt holding Harlan’s hands, Meg with her face buried in Marta’s shoulder, Marta’s hand stroking up and down her back. Ransom sees it and seethes, not because he’s jealous (maybe he is, a little bit), but because like this, Marta has to be a pillar, when in reality, she’s grieving just as much as the rest of them.
They might as well not be there, little help they are. Maybe if Grandma Jo had been there, her voice could’ve soothed Harlan through the worst of it. Linda and Walt try, Meg tries, hell even Marta and Ransom tries, but he is restive with pain, which the doctors dull with morphine. Somehow, that’s worse, seeing the slackness of his face, knowing that deep down inside, Harlan Thrombey is trying to fight, like he fought every day of his eighty-seven years, through life and limb and word.
At the sight, Ransom rubs a hand over his face, feeling tired in that bone-deep way, wanting it to end, wanting it to never end. At that moment, he catches Marta’s eye from across the room, over Meg’s shoulder, and they stare at one another, caught in the shared torment of grief held and suspended. Only for a moment, though. They are not here for each other, after all.
Harlan Thrombey dies at 6:48 P.M. on September 18th, age 87, survived and surrounded by loved ones.
There’s a funeral, of course, and a memorial. Linda asks him to stay at the house for the duration, but he declines; it would be ridiculous, after all, because he lives so close and the others don’t, which means he would be signing up, needlessly, for at least a week’s worth of claustrophobic family time, when he has better things to be doing, like staring into an unlit fireplace with a bottle of Octomore that he keeps forgetting to swig from.
He says a few words at the funeral, some drivel about how Everything I know about writing and life, I learned from my Granddad. It’s probably good, because he sees his mother crying profusely throughout, sees most of the congregation wiping away tears, but it’s absolute blankness to him. He doesn’t even remember writing it—was he drunk? He definitely doesn’t remember reading it. Honestly, most of the service is a huge blank space in his mind, which is ironic, given that he’s largely sober throughout it all.
At some point, he finds himself next to Meg, who’s double-fisting two glasses of champagne, one with Jodi’s sparkly lip gloss on it. She’s cut her hair short now, to her chin; it makes her look older and younger, all at once, because it emphasizes where she’s lost baby fat, but it mirrors the hairdo she sported when she was in elementary school. She gives him a cursory look and says, “Your speech was dogshit.”
Ransom snorts. “I know.”
“Did you write it with AI or something?”
“Drunk, actually.” He makes a note to check his computer history when he gets home, just in case she is right.
“Whatever. Stick to writing mystery novels.”
“Yeah, Marta told me that you were a Knives Out fan.”
He expects her to splutter and deny it, but instead Meg just shrugs at him. “Yeah, so what? It was a fun read. Mom hated it though.”
“I’m surprised Jodi can read.”
She elbows him, nearly spilling champagne in the process. “Now that was a dickish thing to say.” Two years ago, such a comment would’ve resulted in a screaming fight between the two of them. Now, she just rolls her eyes.
“Huh.” He squints at her. “Are you getting to the age where you’re finally ready to not be an obnoxious brat?”
“Shut up,” she says, scowling at him. “The opposite, actually. You’ve been less of an asshole, these past couple of years. Or maybe that’s just because you haven’t been to enough family events that I’ve forgotten how much of a fuckhead you can be.”
The sad truth is, Ransom thinks, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. She doesn’t feel as revoltingly bratty anymore, maybe more settled. Maybe her whole bullshit before had been insecurity, masquerading in some sort of taking up of causes. Maybe his whole bullshit had been—
Too much navel-gazing. Ransom downs his champagne and the two of them watch Jacob, his phone about four inches away from his face, ignoring the whole world around him, probably saying some heinous shit online.
“We have to wait a few more years for him,” said Meg with a look of disgust.
“Yep.”
The memorial is more fun. People who have travelled from all corners of the world tell stories about Harlan, about working with Harlan, traveling with Harlan. One of his friends from his first post-college job, before he made it big as an author, said between great guffaws, “And then we got chased out of there, because the owner of the restaurant was convinced that Harlan was trying to poison someone! All because he wanted to learn how effective potato peels could be at murder.” The entire room laughs at the thought, and the friend wipes tears from his eyes, and says, this time to the grandchildren, “You kids don’t know how good you have it these days, with Google.”
Ransom doesn’t cry throughout the whole thing. He hasn’t really cried once since Linda called him—or maybe he had cried when he was drinking, he doesn’t know. He’s just been going through the rote motions of life: gym, food, staring blankly at his computer screen, at the 4th draft at what is now a year-overdue sequel. Pats his mother on the shoulder when she cries, resolutely ignores his father when Richard tries to talk to him.
Then: the will reading.
Here is where the family perks up. Ransom tries not to compare it to how he imagined it, years ago, but it’s futile. Everyone is anticipating the dissolution of Harlan’s vast empire, as if they haven’t already been sucking it dry for as long as they’ve been a part of it. The house, the publishing company, the assets.
The lawyer unveils a thick sheaf of paper. At the sight of it, everyone breathes out a sigh of relief and nobody looks at Marta, though she is already scrunched in on herself, looking miserable. She doesn’t look like she wants to be here, but the fact that she is probably means that Harlan told her she needed to attend.
The house and the dogs go to Linda, but an equivalent value of money goes to Walt. Stakes in the publishing company are carefully disseminated to them all, even Marta, done in such a way that no single familial alliance could possibly have a controlling stake in the company; clearly, Harlan was enjoying his new publisher too much to give anyone the chance to oust him. Walt makes a sour face at the circumvention. Specific items are willed, one by one—his collection of art goes to Meg, because Neil had been the curator for much of it, and his music collection goes to Walt. Jodi gets $350,000 in liquid assets, and a similar amount goes to Donna. Only $25,000 for Richard, which makes the man’s face goes sour. There is money for the staff, who cry when they realize, and then lump sums to be donated across charities: literacy funds, domestic abuse funds, immigration help firms—over half of his fortune, settled outside of the Thrombey estate.
The list goes on and nothing goes to Ransom, save the stakes in the company that exist to prevent any single one of them from gathering control. He sees people realize it around the room, the faint crinkle in their brow as they realize, one by one, that his name isn’t popping up. He sees outrage in Richard’s face, sees confusion in Linda’s. There are only two people who aren’t surprised: himself and Marta. He’d expected this. He’d been told this. He sits there, the words washing over him, amused and feeling a little drunken still, even though his last drink has been almost four hours ago and he hadn’t been drunk even then.
Finally, much of the assets are divided up, the lawyer winding to a close. He can see Richard doing the calculations, and then his father says, “This can’t be right,” interrupting the lawyer.
The lawyer pauses. “Pardon?”
“Ransom is his eldest grandson,” snaps Richard. “Meanwhile, that red-pilled little shit over there got almost half a million in assets?”
“Hey,” says Walt warningly, as Donna bristles angrily next to him.
“Please let me finish,” says the lawyer, and Richard sits back down angrily. Linda pats him on the shoulder, her eyes narrow. There is a hideously long period of time as the lawyer finds his place once more, and then he reads out, “To Marta Cabrera, I bequeath three million, to be distributed to her in half lump sum and half in investments.”
Ransom hears a tiny gasp behind him. Walt and Richard both puff up in outrage, Linda and Jodi share a rare, commiserating look, and Ransom passes a hand over his face to mask his grin. In his peripheral vision, he can see Marta, hand pressed to her mouth, and then he has to look away, because all he can do is remember the last time he saw her try to stifle the noises she made.
He’s distracted enough that he almost doesn’t hear the next few words the lawyer says, sharply refocusing when he hears, “…Hugh Drysdale, I bequeath my entire library collection, in hopes that he finds the reference books useful for his future endeavors.”
Everyone looks at him, with matching horrified expressions. Marta just got three million dollars and Ransom gets—well, what is maybe charitably 300K in books, and just from sheer size of library. Harlan collected many things, but books of value were not among them. Most of them were fiddly kinds of books, specialty nonfiction, encyclopedias, the kinds of things one had to hoard if you lived far away from a library and have—had—a pathological hatred of the internet.
“Well,” Ransom says. “How lucky I am, to live in the time of Google.”
What’s worst, Ransom thinks, isn’t the actual slighting in the will, but the pity with which everyone treats him, afterward. The visible confusion. In the past few years, Ransom and Harlan had been on better terms than they’d ever before—perhaps all of them thought it had been Ransom sucking up to Harlan, trying to get back into his good graces before the inevitable end, and this was Harlan’s final play, final fuck-you.
But Ransom knows better. Harlan had said to him, three years ago, You don’t get a single red dime from me, in my will, with that look of steel in his eye. You couldn’t backtrack from that, not even if you wanted to, if you were someone like Harlan, whose word was the iron code of law by which he lived his life. He’d given Ransom shares, sure, but money? Ransom hadn’t even dared to hope.
But it still stings, the family’s collective condescension. Poor Ransom, he only has his trust fund to live on, now. He contemplates stealing the painting worth the most value, just to see how long it takes for Meg and Jodi to figure out what’s been taken, but even that act of pettiness wouldn’t help and besides, he feels like he’s finally getting onto good terms with Meg.
So Ransom escapes to his grandfather’s study, sits in that leather chair that he’d claimed as his, all those years, all those lifetimes ago. Tries to imagine his grandfather in the chair next to him, tries to envision a conversation they could have now, but perhaps his imagination is what ultimately fails him as a writer, because the room feels spiritless. As if Harlan’s living, breathing presence in the world was what gave it that particular warmth in Ransom’s memory, and all that was left now was an empty shell of a room. It’s also physically cold. The chill of October has crept in early, in these last dragging days of September, and without a fire crackling away, Harlan’s office is eerily frosty.
The door opens. Marta slips in, still in her funereal wear, an lumpy black dress that does her no favors.
“Just who I wanted to see,” says Ransom. “Tell me, how does it feel to be suddenly a millionaire?”
Marta doesn’t bother to respond to that. In fact, she doesn’t even acknowledge him, instead crossing behind Harlan’s desk—Ransom half-opens his mouth to protest, because it feels like she’s transgressing some imaginary border, before sullenly remembering that she probably has more right to transgress it than he would—and crouching to the drawers. She opens the second one and within is a mess of papers and one book which, though slim of spine, is roughly the size of a laptop.
This, she hands to him. “It’s not technically part of his library,” she says. “But it’s a book, and I think you should have it.”
Ransom, after a second, takes it from her. Opens it to the front page.
GRANDSON OF THE KING OF MURDER LANDS SIX-FIGURE DEAL IN AUCTION.
He remembers this article. He’d sent it to his mother, in a vicious sort of triumphant way. She must’ve forwarded it to Harlan—or perhaps Harlan was the type to still subscribe to the Boston Globe and get it delivered every morning, he couldn’t remember. Hands shaking, he turns the page.
An Interview with Ransom Drysdale, his profile in the New Yorker. Another page. The Guardian’s review of Knives Out. The starred review from Kirkus. The controversial profile from the AP, with Walt’s angry rant. ‘Knives Out’ is a tour de force, from the L.A. Times. Another profile of him, this time with GQ, his own smug mug beaming up at him, the article printed out on printer paper in the wrong format with the words cut off haphazardly at the bottom. Some articles that he hasn’t even seen himself, lost in the rising tide of a media frenzy, all positive reviews, though he knows there were certainly negative ones out there. The announcement of the optioning from Hessbounder, another profile of him, all these clippings, carefully, painstakingly laid out, and admired, and saved.
Ransom opens his mouth and what comes out is an ugly sound, the likes of which he’s never heard come from himself before, and which feels ripped out from the depths of his chest. His hands clench on the sides of the scrapbook, but he can’t close it, not even when the tears drip down his nose and land on the paper, ruining it with splats of water.
Marta takes it out of his hands, takes the time to pat off the waterstains with a tissue from the table. And then she, firmly, enfolds him into her arms.
He doesn’t know how long he cries, only that every time he thinks he’s about to stop, a new fresh wave of grief crashes over him. He should’ve talked more to Harlan about the book, he hadn’t—he hadn’t realized the scope of Harlan’s pride. He hadn’t realized how humbling it feels to have one’s grandfather proud of you, and to only realize the fact after they’re gone.
Finally, finally, the tap runs out. Ransom’s entire face is stuffed up with congestion, at that point, and he mops it with his sleeve. Pulls away from Marta, who offers him a tissue. He accepts it, wipes his gross, dribbling nose, and says, with feeling, “Fuck.”
She laughs. She’s crying too, he realizes. He doesn’t know when she started crying, only that her nose is a fierce red and she’s sniffling too, and without thinking, he wipes a tear from her cheek. She turns into the touch of his hand and they’re already so close, it’s not even really leaning in, but a more of a swaying forward, when he kisses her, a disgusting kiss, snotty and wet, somehow the sweetest kiss he’s had in his long-short life. She kisses him back, for an instance, before she freezes, and he pulls away, pain lancing sharply through his chest.
“Shit,” says Ransom.
Marta looks away.
Ransom withdraws from her, from the warm cage of her arms. He has to force out the word, but he does anyway. “Sorry.”
She’s staring at her funeral heels, face inscrutable. “It’s okay.”
“I’m gonna go,” he says, standing and and picking up the scrapbook from where it’s on the table. “I—yeah.”
But he doesn’t leave. Not yet. He grabs his coat, he makes as if to leave, but his feet don’t cross the threshold. Can’t cross the threshold. Instead, he turns to her, and she’s a miserable lump still sitting on the edge of the table, next to his leather seat, and he says, rejection coursing fresh-hot through his veins, “Can I ask—” and then laughs at himself, almost angrily so, for couching the question when he should just ask it directly, which he does: “Why did you end it?”
She doesn’t ask him to clarify. “Does it matter?”
“Yes.” She had kissed him back.
Marta surveys him for a long moment, then sighs. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”
She’s not vomiting, so it’s at least the truth. But— “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
Delirious with hurt, hateful with embarrassment, Ransom’s next words come out cruel, mocking. “Is it because I remind you too much of Harlan? He said those words to me, you know, before he died. I see too much of myself in you. Maybe that’s why you slept with me, because good ol’ Granddad couldn’t get it up—”
She should’ve slapped him. Most women would’ve in her situation, he thinks. For a moment, it almost looks like Marta is going to as well, she comes at him in such a rush, but instead of hitting him, she gets in his space, turns her tearstreaked expression up to him with those beautiful green-brown eyes bright with anger, and answers coldly. “Listen to yourself. That’s your answer.”
She leaves him like that, eyes stinging, hand clutching the scrapbook, no retort to give back to the truth she’d delivered to his doorstep.
Bitch. He thinks the word, but it’s ineffectual in his mind; there’s no strength or conviction to it. It’s just a hollow word of consolation, so he eventually gives up trying to assign it to Marta, and instead just can’t stop thinking about that resigned look on her face. I couldn’t do it anymore. But he can’t figure out why.
So he thinks back, instead, to the tremble in her voice. Do you think that was a happy ending? He almost wants to ask her, Do you think it’s unhappy, now that you’ve been gifted three million dollars? Money changes people. The absence of money does, too, and he thinks of Harlan. Not a single red dime.
Thirty-six seems awfully old to change; he’s comfortable with the way he is, the person he represents. He tells himself that as he drinks a third of a handle, wakes up with a bloody scrape on his hand that he can’t figure out the origin of, until he finds that the wound matches perfectly to the dent punched into the door of the BMW, in some dysfunctional attempt to get inside, to drive who knows where, do who knows what.
The next day, he signs up for a therapist.
Unsurprisingly, he hates the first nine therapists he sees. They’re all reasonable people, the epitome of what a therapist should be—all comfortably middle-aged, with graying hairs, soft-voiced and full of uh-huhs and how did that make you feel? He doesn’t even know why he keeps going, except then he meets the tenth. Upon immediate sight, he hates him too. He only went to this therapist, Oliver Barlowe, because of good reviews on Google, and he grits his teeth upon the sight of this—very obviously queer, green-haired dude who doesn’t look older than him at all, maybe even younger, and has thick tortoiseshell glasses and a slightly high, nasal voice. He looks like the kind of guy, Ransom thinks, who would enter into a polyamorous relationship with the third party being a virtual anime waifu.
He resigns himself to a terrible hour and never having to see this person again, but the first thing Oliver Barlowe says, looking at Ransom over those coke-bottle glasses, is,“Well, you’re not my usual patient.”
Ransom fixes his eyes above Oliver’s shoulder, where the Harvard PhD degree is proudly displayed. It was that credential which sold Ransom initially to going to Dr. Barlowe in the first place, except now he’s rather thinking that Harvard will let anyone in, these days. “What, because I’m not a Marxist queer?”
He expects Oliver to huff, to delineate a boundary, Let’s not use slurs or make assumptions in this safe space. But Oliver instead smirks, bright and vindictive in a way that reminds Ransom of something, or perhaps someone, and says, “Just wanted to address the elephant in the room. Anyway, what are you doing here?”
“You’re fifteen minutes away from where I live.”
“Snazzy neighborhood.”
“You must get fancy patients.”
“I get all kinds of patients.”
“But I’m not your normal one?”
Oliver raises an eyebrow. “Does that surprise you?”
No, it really doesn’t. Ransom slouches a little lower in his seat.
The rest of the session is as tortuous as he expects, all boring intake stuff—What do you hope to achieve in therapy? What is your family like? Work like? But at the midway point, Oliver, who has been absently taking notes this entire time, says, “And are you happy?”
It catches Ransom off-guard, and in his surprise, he says, “No.”
Oliver’s pencil stills for a second, before continuing its idle scratch. Ransom is pretty sure he’s doodling. “Okay then,” says Oliver, and continues on.
Ransom leaves the office thinking that perhaps therapy isn’t for him. But when Oliver calls and asks when he wishes to schedule his next session, his nasal voice even more grating over the phone, Ransom ends up making time.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Benoit Blanc #2
Hi Ransom!
Just wanted to check in on the status of Benoit Blanc #2. Anything I can help out with? Outlines, brainstormings, whatever? Happy to grab a cup of coffee if you find yourself unexpectedly in NYC—just let me know.
—Jesse
“I’m here for the same reason most people come to therapy.”
“And why do you think most people choose therapy?”
“Because they’ve messed up.” Whatever pot-pourri that Oliver is using for his office is surprisingly pleasant. It smells like a brisk wind in autumn. “Done something shitty, or feel shitty.”
“And which one are you?”
“Well, I feel fine.”
“You look hungover.”
“That’s a rude thing to say.” Ransom is actually, extremely hungover. “This could just be how I naturally appear. I’m pretty sure therapists aren’t supposed to insult their client’s good looks.”
“Therapists are trained to adapt to situations,” says Oliver. “So what video games are you playing these days?”
He’s spending a ridiculous amount of money on weekly sessions to talk about absolute horseshit with Oliver, which means that he should probably start cracking on draft #5 of his sequel, though half of him is hoping that the movie does so well that he can transition fully to Hollywood. Except Oliver is clearly making noises about him stopping the drugs and alcohol usage—“So, you don’t like the person you become when you’re under the influence?”—which would pretty much negate that entire scene for him.
So he hunkers down, writes 25,000 words of absolute shit, disgustedly deletes it all. Then he gets his eighth text from his mom in three days, another reminder that she wishes him to expeditiously clear out his desired texts from Harlan’s library, because Harlan has let the house sink into precipitous disarray.
His BMW is being fixed in the shop, both for the cosmetic dent he’s responsible for, and also for some other issues that the mechanic “miraculously” found once he saw Ransom’s Rolex. He doesn’t know enough about cars to protest getting scammed, so he just lets it be and drives the Corvette instead, which is dusty and stagnant inside. He drives with the windows down to air it out.
“There you are,” says Linda, crossly, when he finds her sorting through papers in Harlan’s study. “My god, this place is a mess. The foundation’s a disaster, and the surveyor thinks that there might be Japanese Knotweed only an acre away, what a nightmare.” But she doesn’t sound miserable or overwhelmed, but instead gleeful, in that way his mother gets whenever she encounters a particularly tangled real estate problem. It’ll be good for her, fixing up the house. Maybe she’ll be too busy to ask him advice about Bumble.
She leads him to the main library, tells him, “I don’t care if you want to keep it all, just let me know, and I’ll tell them to pack it all up carefully for storage until you have a permanent place to keep it.” He doesn’t ask her how she knows that his current house, with its concrete-and-wood elements, isn’t a permanent place, and she leaves him there, hands in his pockets, surveying Harlan’s massive private library.
There’s the classics, of course, and perhaps those are the nicest books he now owns—leatherbound editions of Steinbeck, Christie, Dumas, Shakespeare, even some Nabokov, Austen, Tolstoy. And there’s the more modern books, from sci-fi classics to pulpy horror, a surprising sprinkling of self-help books—Ransom pauses in front of Family of Dysfunction, reads the back, and snorts—and an entire shelf of tawdry romance that he remembers his grandmother reading. But Ransom blows past those and heads for the references, which Harlan had directly referred to in his will. He pauses in front of the A-Z encyclopedia that looks like it hasn’t been touched in well over a decade, the almanac of plants that’s the size of his torso, the carefully organized academic journals on all the various ways a human body can be tormented. Gruesome, really, this section of the library.
Ransom pulls down the E volume of the encyclopedia, not for any real reason, other than the fact that it is the closest one to him. He carries it over to the window, to the weak midafternoon sunlight that’s dappled from the shade of a foliage-heavy tree, and when he opens it, the first thing he sees is Harlan’s handwriting. Harlan’s annotations, heavy in the margins, spilling over onto the text, almost rendering some of it unintelligible.
His vision blurs. This is the second time Ransom cries that year. Before Harlan’s death, he can’t remember the last time he cried, and yet, here he is, getting unreasonably emotional over his grandfather’s spidery handwriting. He blames therapy.
Ransom spends the rest of the day flipping through all the reference books, glancing over them to see the density of his grandfather’s annotations. By the time his mother raps on the door, saying, “It’s dinnertime, Ransom,” he’s surrounded by precarious towers of books. He only has the time to look up and see her astonished face before one of the stupid dogs comes barreling in yapping, makes a beeline for him, and crashes into one of the towers, sending him straight to the bottom of a book avalanche.
Nothing is broken, thankfully, though Ransom’s sporting some remarkable goose-eggs by the time dinner is done. Fran brings him ice. “Thanks,” he mutters as she hands him rags to tie them to the worst of his bruises, and she pauses for a moment before saying, in a voice less angry than the one she usually uses with him, “You’re welcome.”
That whole day, Ransom has managed to successfully restrain himself from asking about Marta, but on his way out, he passes by the windowsill seat that she liked to sit at so often. He stops, stares at it, feeling a horrible clump of emotions in his stomach, and only blinks when Linda says sharply, “What’s the matter, Ransom?”
“Nothing,” he says and forces himself to keep walking.
Linda, however, is Harlan’s daughter, with the Thrombey observational skills. She says, airily, as if they had been talking about it already, or as if she’s just imparting a particularly juicy bit of gossip, “You know, Fran told me the other day that Marta’s taken up a volunteer position at free clinic in Holyoke, isn’t that nice? She could go off and retire in the Bahamas or something, but she’s still working. What a good girl. She’ll need to be frugal, of course, three million isn’t really enough to sustainably retire at the age of 30 these days, when you also have a mother to take care of.”
He works his jaw, finally gets words out, though they aren’t as flippant as he wants them to be. “Maybe she’s just taking a break.”
“Mm, maybe.”
She escorts him out. He takes the A-Z encyclopedia home, asks his mother to have the storage people save the rest of the library, even the bits that look unsalvageable or useless; that’s a problem for future him. That night, he pours over the encyclopedia volumes, page by page, unravelling the pathways his grandfather made with every entry. He pauses in front of a section of the Beatles, feels something dim in the back of his mind spark.
The next week, he’s so busy working that the only time he leaves his house is for his therapy session. It’s his eighth one with Oliver, which means that he has officially completed two months of therapy, which means that ostensibly, he’s undone two months of horrid behavior. Oliver tells him that’s not the case.
“I would say you’re not even 1% less horrible. You know why?”
They’re playing Go Fish. Somehow, Ransom is losing.
“I’m paying you. You can’t call me horrible. Do you have any sevens?”
“Go fish. Restitutions can’t be made on a one-to-one basis. Like—let’s say you toss a plastic ring, what do you call, the ones that go around beer cans. Six pack rings. You toss one into the ocean, but then fast forward a month, and you end up picking up one six pack ring from the beach sand and putting it in the recycling bin. Does your good action cancel out your bad action? Do you have any fours?”
Ransom hands over two fours. “Sure. Let’s say my one six-pack ring is out there strangling three turtles every year. But now I’m also saving three turtles every year by getting rid of that six pack ring, and over the next million years that it takes for those plastics to degrade into microplastics to make us impotent, it’ll probably average out to balance each other. Do you have any eights?”
Oliver hands him one. “That’s the tricky thing, see. Just because you’ve undone future potential harm doesn’t mean that those sea turtles that you killed forgive you, or their families, or like, the sea turtle that now has insane scarring from when it got tangled in your plastic ring and had to wrestle free. See, your focus is on consequentialism, whereas mine, personally, is centered around virtue ethics, all those positive values of courage and compassion and owning up to your mistakes, so that an army of wronged sea turtles don’t wreak their vengeance on you in the future. But these views aren’t incompatible, or necessarily even that different, unless you’re unable to reconcile one with the other.”
Ransom digests this, before saying, “You’re one to talk about virtue ethics.” Because Oliver tends to use his hands when he talks, and in doing so, Ransom can see at least two sevens in his current hand. “You’re cheating at Go Fish.”
“But with compassion,” emphasizes Oliver, but hands him the sevens anyway, as well as a stray three that Ransom didn’t even want or need.
By all means of comparison, Oliver is a pretty shoddy therapist, and Ransom is now suspecting the Harvard degree is, rather than wrongly-allotted, maybe just plain fraudulent. But their weekly meeting is a needed respite from the new draft he’s working on, this one flying along. He’s typing until three a.m., some nights, waking up restless and with the plot already starting to fly tantalizingly out of his reach. The words pour out of him, easy, almost viciously so. He’s so lost in the haze of it all that it takes him a few minutes of staring out the window before he realizes his ears aren’t ringing, someone is actually hitting the door bell.
Ransom opens the door to find his father and his father’s mistress there, both carrying takeout. “Evening, son,” says Richard brightly, as if they talk regularly, rather than as little as Ransom can bear. “In the mood for some gnocchi?”
“Pass,” says Ransom, and tries to slam the door, but Richard wedges his foot in the doorway before he can succeed. It probably hurts, but Richard doesn’t let it on, only the merest suggestion of pain flickering over his face. He muscles his way in and his mistress follows him. Ransom learned her name before and deliberately forgot it.
They both make disturbed sounds at the state of his kitchen, which is starting to get that sweet, fetid stink of aged takeout. The mistress starts clearing off the table, while Richard claps a hand on Ransom’s shoulder and says, “You doing okay?”
Ransom shrugs his hand off. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Linda says you aren’t responding to her texts.”
“I’m busy.”
Richard’s eyes dart around the messy room, at Ransom’s unshaven face. “I see.”
“I am,” says Ransom, unwilling to prove himself but also irritated by the clear assumptions his father is making. “I’ve got deadlines, you know. Anyway, if she was so worried, she should’ve come herself.”
“She’s got a whole house to fix, son,” says Richard. “Contracting is difficult in the winter. And a business to run, you know, now that she won’t accept my help.”
Ransom snorts. Won’t accept my help is a weird way, he thinks, to frame, She doesn’t want to pay for me and my mistress to live in luxury.
“So she sent you,” he settles for instead, injecting you with as much disdain as he can. He can audibly hear the mistress falter in her clearing off of the table.
Richard, however, raised Ransom, and many of Ransom’s faults stem in Richard himself, including his habit of talking back. So Richard says, archly, “And who else was she going to call?”
Maybe it’s secretly a sentiment of love, what he says to Ransom. Maybe what he’s secretly saying is: She called me because I am your father and I wanted to make sure you’re okay. Maybe if he had said it a different way, with sympathy and, god, compassion in his voice, maybe if he hadn’t been a shit father to Ransom all his life, maybe if his answers to Ransom’s childhood questions hadn’t been, That’s how the world is kiddo, sorry about it, he would think that Richard was here, as a father, because he cared.
But he also knows what Richard is seeing when he looks at Ransom. Richard got pennies in the inheritance, lost everything in his prenup to Linda. So Ransom is Richard’s last hope for solid footing. A golden titty, to hold on to. What Richard said rankles at him. Who else was she going to ask, when you didn’t respond to her? Because the answer, unfortunately, is nobody.
He stews throughout dinner, through the mediocre, cooled and clumping gnocchi, throughout Richard and his mistress’s flimsy excuse for conversation. She lets out an inane giggle she lets out at Richard’s every word. He also doesn’t miss the glances they give each other, the way the mistress keeps widening her eyes at Richard. Tell him, her eyes keep saying. So Ransom waits.
Richard caves, eventually, like he always does. “April and I,” he says—April, what a stupid name—”are having a baby girl. She’s due in February.”
At that, Ransom laughs. “Jesus Christ. You’re fucking with me. What, are you guys too stupid to use birth control? Or, what, you thought he was shooting blanks?”
April flushes a deep, angry red. Richard says, tersely, “Watch yourself, Ransom.”
“No, that’s perfect,” says Ransom. “My little baby sister and her geriatric dad. As always, Richard, your life choices leave something to be desired.”
Richard slams his fist into the table. “Shut your fucking mouth, I’m warning you.”
“Here’s hoping,” says Ransom in his most insolent tones, because this is familiar ground, it always is, “that you’re at least a better dad to her. I don’t know if that’s possible, though, if you’re Broke Dad this time around. I mean, at least last time it was Broke Dad, Rich Mom, right? Now it’s, what, Broke Dad… Broke Mistress? Are you guys having this baby out of wedlock?”
April lets out an involuntary, injured noise. Her hand clutches at Richard’s, convulsively. And at that sound, at that gesture, Richard does something that infuriates Ransom.
He calms down. He takes a breath. His fingers flex in April’s, and then his shoulders, which had been hiked up all the way to his ears, relax.
“Ransom,” he says, his voice so tired, so weary. “I—I want to be part of your life. I want you to be a part of her life. I know—I know I wasn’t the best dad to you. But I’m not looking for this baby to be, you know, a redo. It’s just kid number two. I have always been, and always will be, your father.”
Ransom stares at him. Richard stares back.
“Get out,” says Ransom. When Richard and April don’t move, he shout it: “GET OUT!”
They scamper. He allows himself half a second to feel bad about yelling at a pregnant woman, stares at the leftover alcohol in his cabinet for a solid sixty seconds, before pouring it all down the drain. $750, easily, into the pipes to go murder more innocent ocean creatures. Then he emails Oliver, uncaring of the fact that it’s 10 p.m., and asks if there’s any slots available for the next day. Oliver emails back within the hour, offering up a noon slot, and Ransom sends a thumbs up in reply.
Ransom storms into Oliver’s office at 11:55 the next day, and is treated to the sight of Oliver scraping bread crumbs off of his desk into the trash can situated below, his mouth still distended with the last bite of a frantically horked-down sandwich. At that, Ransom halts. “Is this your lunch hour?”
“Well, yeah,” says Oliver after swallowing. “Noon is most people’s lunch hour. Have you never worked a 9-5?”
Ransom sits down and says, “You think this a 9-5?”
“I think that I worked an office job before getting my degree.” Oliver folds his hands. “I must admit, I was surprised when your email came in so late last night.”
“Eh, I just love to give you money.”
He expects a laugh from that, as Oliver so often is willing to give. But this time, Oliver doesn’t laugh. Just watches him, eyes magnified by those ridiculous glasses, curiously somber, probing. They’re ten weeks into knowing each other, now. Oliver’s green dye needs to be touched up.
Ransom scratches at his chin, grimaces. “My father and his mistress told me they are expecting a baby.”
“Ah,” says Oliver, very eloquently.
“I know what you’re thinking,” says Ransom. “Spoiled only child throws a hissy fit about getting a sudden sibling.”
“Well, you’ve had thirty-six years all to yourself, it wouldn’t be out of the question.”
“But it wasn’t that.” Ransom stares at his hands. The scrape from punching the bimmer has fully healed, but there’s a scar from the amount of skin that abraded off. He knows it’ll fade eventually, but it’s still got that shiny, new-skin look to it, even after almost three months. “My dad and I always got into these screaming fights, you know? About regular inane shit, but we just never got along about it. It got worse when I was a teenager, because he hated my friends and thought I was a waste of space, and I thought he was a fucking useless, incompetent man. And that hasn’t changed for thirty-six years, so why would it change now? But he did change, because now he has that fucking mistress, and a new baby on the way, and now, suddenly, he wants to be Mr. Patient, Mr. I Can Be A Better Man. And he expects me to believe him?”
Oliver doesn’t respond until Ransom, irked suddenly by his silence, says, “Well?”
“Are you unwilling to believe him because of your experience with him in the past, or because you’re convinced he can’t change?”
“Yes,” snaps Ransom, and when Oliver just keeps looking at him, realizes the absurdity of saying that when one is literally in therapy, ostensibly for change. “He’s tying this change with the state of being with his mistress. If I don’t believe that he’ll stay with her forever—which he won’t, because she’s an idiot—then by that definition, I can’t believe he will change.”
“Well, that’s fair,” says Oliver, calmly. “Though I will point out that in the grand scheme of the human experience, it is not uncommon for trivial experiences with temporary people in one’s lives to greatly reshape trajectories.”
Ransom stares at him, unable to discern whether that is a targeted shot, or an unerringly accurate guess. Oliver’s poker face is remarkable.
Slowly, Ransom’s head sinks into his hands. There is some great unworking happening within him, one that he’s unable to put to words, which is a terrifying feeling, because Ransom has always been good at articulating, in cold reptilian terms, the emotions he feels. Emotions are just a puzzle to be picked apart, cues are clues into further insights, culprits leaving threads to be plucked and followed and unwound. He runs his fingers through his hair, uncaring of the mess it creates.
Then he looks back up to where Oliver is waiting. No pretense of doodling, now, just laser focus, as if he knows that Ransom, if given the opportunity, will slither out of the responsibility of answering if Oliver offers even the slightest bit of exit.
“I think,” he says slowly, “the person I was last seeing broke up with me because of fundamental, philosophical differences on the meaning of happiness.”
“Ah,” says Oliver and then, as if to demonstrate why Ransom keeps him around, tacks on: “Sea turtles.”
Ransom rubs the new scar on his hand. “Yeah. Sea turtles.”
Ransom finishes the draft of Benoit Blanc #2, retitles it on a whim, and then sits looking at the manuscript. Objectively, it’s shit, but not in the irredeemable way the other five drafts were, so he deems it ready for other eyes to see.
Since he can’t talk with the two people he wants to share it with—one’s probably got him blocked, and there isn’t cell reception in heaven or hell, whichever one Harlan’s in—he sends it off to his editor, who will probably cry or orgasm upon receiving the email. Then, after careful consideration, he texts Meg. This requires a not-inconsiderable amount of effort, because while he’s in a million and one group chats with her that have been created since the family discovered group chats, he’s never bothered to save anyone’s number other than his parents’. But eventually, he figures out who she is.
Since you’re such a big fan, do you want to read the next Benoit Blanc book?
Her response comes in the next twenty minutes, as he’s lying around wishing for a drink. depends, does it have any hot goss about the thrombeys?
Fuck no, he texts back. I’m over that shit.
ugh, fine, send it over.
He knows, intrinsically, that whatever Meg’s hot takes are, he probably won’t take her notes. She’s a piece of Thrombey shit, just like him, and she’s got that Smith brainwashing imbued in her. But, pathetically, he’s glad she responded. He has the unerring, irritating feeling that if Harlan were here to witness it, he would’ve been proud, the absolute bastard.
III. FUGUE
At the age of thirty-one, Marta Cabrera is a homeowner. It’s not a reality she had ever envisioned for herself, in any capacity, but miraculously, it happened. Sure, her best friend had to die for it, but at least she got a house out of it.
She never used to be one much for dark humor, she thinks. She doesn’t know whether to blame Harlan or Ransom for this new personality quirk.
The house she and her mother choose is a little bit closer to Boston, now that Marta doesn’t have to drive to the Thrombey estate every day. She offers for them to move elsewhere, somewhere temperate, closer to the Cuba weather her mother grew up in, but Mama says, “I’ve liked it here in Massachusetts,” and that’s that. So they buy a house.
Alice, upon hearing the news, insists on coming down for moving weekend. Everyone’s dressed in their most ragged sweats, there’s boxes everywhere, and the moving guys keep bringing more boxes. But Alice is just wandering around the new house, her mouth agape.
“Holy shit,” she keeps saying.
Marta can’t help but be relieved. She was worried that the process was too fast—it’s only been six months, after all, since Harlan’s funeral—but after her realtor kept showing her dingy house after dingy house, she hesitantly reached out to Linda. Linda almost immediately responded, and within days, there was a new realtor showing Marta place after place, for prices she’s sure has been slashed because of Linda’s influence, or perhaps their desire to get on Linda’s good side. Privilege, from the proximity to the wealthy.
But she can’t be too upset about it, because it would be hypocritical. And besides, she loves this place, loved it ever since the realtor unlocked the teak-colored door. She’d barely listened to him as he blathered on about how it was a great neighborhood, within the Boston Latin school district, et cetera, because upon stepping foot into the house, she’d known, bone deep, that this was it. Most houses in New England are made of clapboard, but this one is solid brick, well-maintained by a loving owner who recently moved to Seattle to be with her daughter’s family. Inside, the ceilings are high and airy, there’s four bedrooms, three baths, and a round living area adjoint to the kitchen that has a view of the backyard, fenced-in and manicured. The previous owner had also kept a trim garden out front, with trellises festooned with thorny branches that she said would develop into nodding heads of roses, roses of all colors. She’d clasped Marta’s hand, earnestly, and said, “If you are able to—some of these roses have been around for decades—”
“I’m not very good at gardening,” responded Marta, “but I’d like to give it a try.”
Between the inheritance and the comfortable nestegg she’s collected from six years of Harlan’s generous pay, it’s no problem to get a surveyor out, who confirms that everything looks good. Then, she talks with the realtor, makes an offer, which thrills him. And now, standing in the center with boxes surrounding her, it’s overwhelming to realize that she owns this place, this wonderful little home, and tears prick at her eyes.
Alice’s arms come around her, her sister kissing the side of her head. “You did it, Marta.”
Their mom comes in from the kitchen, joins the hug. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispers into Marta’s hair. And, when Alice makes a noise, “I’m proud of you too, Alice, but you can’t buy a house in New York.”
“Well, why not,” says Alice, who is definitely living with five roommates now.
Both Alice and her mom insist that she gets the master bedroom, which sits ill with Marta. But her mother prefers the bedroom downstairs, which Marta’s clinical nursing brain approves of because of future mobility problems. Her mom’s reasoning, however, is not quite so practical; she just wants to be able to stare out the window and snoop on all the neighborhood.
Alice stormed around each bedroom and Marta eventually says, “Which one do you like?”
Alice laughs. “Marta, I’m not a little girl. You don’t need to give me a bedroom. What about your guests?”
Marta frowns. “Well, there’s four bedrooms.”
“So, two guest bedrooms, then.”
“Alice.” When her sister turns to look at her, Marta says, as firmly as she can, “I want you to have a room because you will always have a place here. Why is that so wrong?”
She’s unprepared for the sudden emotion in her sister’s eyes. But it’s an emotional day. After years of renting, of moving, they finally have a place of their own—but it can’t make up for the fact that their entire childhood lacked that stability or security. She’s relieved when Alice, mutedly, nods and then chokes out, “I like the one above Mom’s room.”
“Then that’s yours,” she says.
“Yeah, well, feel free to convert it to a gym in between my visits. But what about when you get hitched? What if your future lover doesn’t want a wife who needs two extra rooms for her mom and sister?”
Marta shrugs. “Then he’s not my future lover.” Simple as that, really. She takes a box labelled Alice’s Stuff and begins moving it to the bedroom Alice chose. After a moment, she hears her sister following.
She knows what Alice is trying to segue into, is unsurprised when Alice says, “You know, speaking of ex-lovers—”
“Oh Alice, I really don’t want to talk about—”
“No, but it’s such a good story,” says Alice, and then bulldozes over Marta’s protests. “So I’m with my boss, right, Sven, and he and I are going over the list of meetings in that day when in comes Ransom with the person we’re trying to negotiate with as director for Knives Out, and when he sees me, he says, ‘Alice!’ even though we’ve like, barely met before. And then he gives me a hug, and when Sven says, ‘How do you two know each other?’ in his really confused Swedish way, Ransom says, ‘What, did Alice not tell you? Her sister inspired Elena Garcia!’ In front of the director and my boss. And so he talks me up and then leaves with the director and later Sven tells me that he’s officially promoting me to key set PA because of my intimate knowledge of the source material.” Alice makes an excitable, screeching noise. “And that’s huge, Marta!”
Marta stares at the cardboard box underneath her, picks at the tape peeling on the right side. “That’s so great, Alice,” she says, but her voice lacks the enthusiasm that Alice deserves, so she tries again. “I mean—it’s so exciting! Is this a permanent promotion?”
“Semi-permanent, but with a permanent pay bump,” sings Alice, but her excitement is, too, dulled. She says, “So have you…talked to him since Harlan’s funeral or…?”
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Marta says again, and maybe it comes out a tad desperate, so she tacks on, “Please.”
Alice’s hand comes down on her shoulder, warm and reassuring. “Okay.”
The answer to Alice’s question is this: Marta hasn’t seen Ransom since the funeral. She’s heard of him in passing, and last time she saw Linda, Linda had bragged about him in that proud, careless way that mothers do. Linda had also invited her to family Christmas, saying, “We’re going to keep it at the Thrombey estate, and heaven knows you’ve come to so many of those, you might as well keep coming,” and had even looked disappointed when Marta had gently turned her down. Christmas, instead, had been spent with Alice and Mama, in a home that was already starting to be boxed up by that point, drinking eggnog and watching old movies. On her way to refill her cup, Marta had glanced out the window, which faced north, where Ransom and the rest of the Thrombeys were presumably having their first Christmas without Harlan, like she was, and her heart hurt so much that she’d gone to the bathroom and cried for a little bit.
But she and Ransom had not texted, or communicated in any meaningful way. For all she knew—for all she hopes—Ransom has probably moved on with some buxom blonde, like the girls he always liked to bring to family events. Marta, too, has been on a few dates, even went on a date with Brandon, one of the friends in Quỳnh’s circle, but none of them really amounted to anything. So, she stopped going out on dates, because invariably, they invited comparison.
It’s not so bad, the idea of spending the rest of her life without a partner. She knows that Alice is horrified by the very notion. But Marta has always been comfortable by herself, and more importantly, she’s open to the idea of friendship and family being the most meaningful part of the rest of her life. She’s proud of herself, for forging those new connections with Quỳnh, Ella, Anita, Brandon, everyone. And she thinks: if she ends up in her golden years like Harlan, eclectic and befriending someone fifty years her junior, there would be something poetic about that.
Harlan. She still can’t think about him without her throat feeling tight. Sometimes she’ll forget and she’ll read something, think, I should show this to Harlan, and feel the bleak emptiness of grief closing over her. But he would’ve liked her new home, she thinks. Maybe he would’ve found it not to his grandiose, baroque taste. But he would’ve approved it, for her, all the same.
Ransom is in New York again and experiencing some serious déjà vu.
It’s March again, and it’s a drizzly March, just like that last March he was in New York. He’s going to a brunch that he’s frankly, dreading a little bit. He’d chosen a place that he remembers vaguely as being good. It’s not until he arrives and really relives the scenery that he realizes that this is the place he had lunch with the Hessbounder folks the day after the party, that party, and suddenly he’s remembering Marta, dressed in silky brown, looking at him wide-eyed. Marta, in that plain, perplexingly hot underwear; Marta, hot and wet on his mouth, around him, her fingers digging into his hair. It’s been six months since they last kissed, seven since the last time they had sex, almost a year to the day since the first time they did. A negligible amount of time, compared to the decades he spent not having sex with her, and it’s not like he’s been exactly abstinent in those months, but Ransom finds himself thinking about how death punctures the normal flow of time, and the whiplash of arousal to sudden grief is almost nauseating.
“Reservation under Ransom, for two,” he says to the maître d’, who pokes at her reservation software and nods.
He responds to a few emails while he waits, scanning the menu absently. Two minutes late, Jacob arrives, a gangly figure hovering by the table.
His younger cousin’s in his preppy clothes, a style he never grew out of, so he looks still like Donna dresses him, which she probably does. “Hi,” Jacob says, in that supercilious, yet guarded, tone.
Ransom lazily waves for him to sit. The chair scrapes against the floor as Jacob does, and he immediately hunches over the menu, staring fixedly at it. Ransom watches him. Jesus. When he had been in college, standards for guys had surely been higher. Jacob still looks almost prepubescent.
The waiter approaches, a rather square looking man with an ill-trimmed mustache. “Are we ready to order?”
“Order whatever you want,” says Ransom, folding the menu and handing it to the waiter. “I’ll have the steak and eggs.”
“I’ll have the French toast,” says Jacob. “With a side of bacon.”
“Anything to drink?” asks the waiter.
Ransom squints at Jacob. “You’re not twenty-one yet, right?”
“No,” says Jacob, frigid. “Nineteen.”
“No mimosas,” Ransom tells the waiter. “But bring some orange juice.”
He can tell that Jacob is on edge the whole time. Maybe he didn’t even want to come; Ransom can easily see Donna cajoling him into attending. It’s not like the two of them have ever gotten along—he had half-expected Jacob to not respond to his text at all. While Ransom’s not exactly a bleeding-heart lib, it’s sort of impossible to be raised by someone as domineering as Linda and emerge the internet troglodyte that Jacob is. But being raised by Donna, traditional, gender-normative Donna, and her masculinity-challenged husband Walt—well. Ransom understands exactly how Jacob become who he is now, but it does grate on him, trying to have a conversation with someone so chronically online.
“So,” says Ransom, as the orange juice is brought out. “How’s New York?”
“Fine.”
“You’re doing an internship for…?”
“J.P. Morgan.”
“I see.” Ransom finds himself absently swirling his orange juice, forces himself to stop. “So you’re studying finance in school?”
“Yeah. Economics.”
Jacob is watching Ransom with that faintly suspicious look. He’s got this nasty habit that he definitely got from his mom where, even though Ransom’s got half a foot and about 80 pounds on him, Jacob somehow looks sneeringly down on him.
“That’s good. I studied criminology.” Boy, that was a fake degree. He was the only one in his program who didn’t have a job in mind, who kinda fell into it because he liked his crim classes. He was surrounded by wannabe cops with dense minds, by steely-eyed women with a chip on their shoulder and a desire to fix something in the system, by lofty academics who cared about the theoretical of it all. Ransom fit neatly into none of those circles.
“Because you wanted to be a writer?”
At the question, Ransom pauses. “No,” he says, because it’s the truth. He had just needed to choose a major and he’d taken enough criminology classes to pursue that path.
Jacob, his energy for conversation spent, lapses into silence, a silence that endures and thickens until the waiter brings their food. And then there’s the sound of them chewing, of utensils clinking against the plate, as they both industriously work on their food. Ransom’s not even that hungry, but it’s better than the alternative, squeezing water out of a stone.
Their plates are halfway done when Jacob says, “Did Aunt Linda make you take me out to lunch?” He says it clinically, like someone trying out pieces in a puzzle to see what clicks.
Ransom wipes his mouth with his napkin. “No.”
“Are you getting married or something?”
Ransom chuckles, even as something within him winces. “No. C’mon, I was just in the city. Is it a crime for me to want to take you out to lunch?”
“You’ve never wanted to before,” points out Jacob, tone sharp but without offense. “So. I’m just confused what changed.”
It’s a fair question. Ransom rubs at his chin and leans back in his chair, the wood creaking. “Well, if you must know, my therapist asked me a month ago if I had any positive male role models in my family, and I said no.”
Jacob stares at him, half a sneer caught uncertainly on his face. “You have a therapist?”
He’s not sure why he reveals this information to Jacob, of all people. Even Linda doesn’t know that Ransom’s been seeing Oliver for oh, six months. And Jacob is reacting exactly the way Ransom would expect him to, with that disdain of someone fundamentally opposed to the idea of therapy, which makes it feel somehow more important for Ransom to be careful with his words.
“Yeah. I tried drunk driving after Granddad died.”
“Oh. So, court-ordained.”
Ransom huffs out a laugh. “No. I just sought one out.” Now Jacob’s back to looking confused, so Ransom takes a long sip of water and says, “Anyway, he asked me if I had any positive role models, I said no, and then I thought about you and—”
“What, you thought you could be a good role model for me?”
Now, Jacob’s voice is taut with derision, aggrieved with some deep hurt. Ransom blinks at him. “Well, no, but—”
“You know, I was bullied when Knives Out was published,” says Jacob, back so straight that he looks like he might snap. “I spent my entire senior year with people calling me a creepy pervy incel, asking me if I actually masturbated to dead deer. Thank God that my friends stuck with me, because that was the worst fucking year of my life.”
“Oh shit,” says Ransom, watching the tremble in Jacob’s mouth. “Uh, sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry?” Jacob cuts viciously into his French toast. “That doesn’t even cover it. And you roll up in here, acting like—like you’ve ascended with your book and your therapy. If you’re here to ‘fix me’ just because you’re putting yourself together after years of being an asshole, then I regret to inform you that I’m very happy with who I am and the life I lead.” He gives up on his French toast, half-stands, chair screeching. “Is that all you wanted me here for?”
“No, Jacob,” says Ransom, resigned. “Don’t—just, give me a second.”
Jacob glares at him. But he waits.
Ransom takes a second to gather his thoughts. His head is starting to hurt, the sharp pain of an irritation-induced migraine tight in his temples. Finally, he says, “When I was your age, nineteen, I got caught by the police breaking into the house of one of the professors I worked with. He’d threatened to give me a bad grade, my college friends egged me on, whatever, I got caught in his high-tech security and he almost shot me with his rifle before he recognized me as the asshole in his seminar. Of course, Mom and Dad paid off everyone involved, and I got off pretty scotch-free.”
There’s a faint crinkle between Jacob’s eyebrows. So what, it seems to be asking.
“My point is,” says Ransom, “I’m not a fucking role model. But I’m here, okay? I just wanted you to know that. In this world, there are exactly three people who know what it means to be a third-gen Thrombey. And I think that means something, even if none of us like each other very much.”
He doesn’t know how else to say, I was an idiot when I was nineteen, but everyone’s an idiot when they’re nineteen, you included. He doesn’t know how to tell Jacob, You’re too young to be this cruel, to have such a skewed view of the world. All he knows is that when he had gotten drunk at Grandma Jo’s funeral, it felt like that was the moment Harlan had given up on him changing, being a better person. And he remembers that moment keenly, like a gut punch, only rivaled by that betrayed look in Marta’s eyes when she said, Listen to yourself.
After a moment, thankfully, Jacob sits down. The people around them who were surreptitiously eavesdropping go back to their conversations.
Ransom takes a long sip of water. Jacob is still scowling at him, but it’s a thoughtful scowl, now. “Trust me,” he says, “my life plans do not include repeating any of the mistakes you’ve made.”
“Great,” says Ransom. “Tell me about them.”
Jacob takes a bite of his toast, swallows it delicately before saying. “I’m going to get a six figure job straight out of college. Work my way up the ranks. Marry before I’m twenty-five. Maybe run for a state seat, someday.”
Jacob winning an election in Massachusetts is…a horrible idea, almost unfathomable. But Ransom only says, “That’s quite a life plan. You know, if you want to get married before you turn twenty-five, that probably means you need to get a girlfriend soon.”
“I have a girlfriend,” says Jacob, cold and prim. “She’s president of the Republican club at UPenn.”
Ransom tries not to wince, says instead, “So she’s like, what, a hot blonde?”
Jacob nods, stiffly. “She’s a year older than me. She’s prelaw.”
“Wow.” Now that, Ransom wasn’t expecting. “All right. You bringing her around for the next holiday?”
“Yeah. She’s already met Mom and Dad.”
Ransom thinks of Meg, meeting Jacob and his Republican cougar, and has to cough so he doesn’t laugh. “Well,” he says, entirely truthfully, “Looking forward to meeting her.”
When he recounts this whole interaction to Oliver, a week later, Oliver says, myopic eyes blinking with embarrassing sincerity behind his glasses, “I’m really proud of you for reaching out, Ransom.”
“Jesus,” says Ransom, twisting uncomfortably in his seat. “Calm down.”
When Marta tells Quỳnh and everyone else that she’s officially moved into a house, she’s unprepared for Quỳnh saying, “Wait, I need to see la casa de Cabrera, when can I come?” and when she does arrive, she comes with Ella and bearing gifts: candles, a fresh bouquet of flowers, a huge box of oatmeal raisin cookies. Both of them embrace Mama, who adores Quỳnh (and can say her name, now), and Quỳnh says, “Oh my god, Marta, this place is so you.”
It’s a really nice thing for Quỳnh to say, given that, objectively, the place is a mess. Moving is overwhelming. They’ve really just unpacked the kitchen and all the furniture is sort of haphazardly placed in wherever it fits. Marta hates the look of it, knows that the house deserves something more harmonious, but can’t figure out what.
Ella, however, saves the day. She says, aplomb as if she isn’t doing Marta a huge favor, “You know, a huge round coffee table here would be so good, given that you don’t really have a couch, you only have a loveseat and some chairs.”
“But babe,” objects Quỳnh, “she should totally get a sectional. Look at all the space!” And both of them turn to Marta, waiting for her to weigh in on if she wants a sectional or to keep her existing loveseat.
Marta turns to her mother, helplessly, who chuckles and says, “You know I know nothing about home design.”
“It just seems so wasteful,” says Marta. “A sectional would be nice, yes, but we have all these things, already.”
Ella and Quỳnh exchange a look. Then Ella says, gently, “It’s not wasteful to want to love your home.” To that, Marta cannot argue.
So Ella and Quỳnh sit her down, get her to creating a moodboard on Pinterest, get her talking about vibes and Facebook Marketplace and Marie Kondo and Ella says, “I’ll bring my truck around next weekend, so we can donate anything you want to get rid of.” Marta looks at her mismatched furniture and laughs, incredulously.
Over the next week, she assembles a pile of furniture she reluctantly has decided doesn’t spark joy, just was adopted into the Cabrera household because of functionality. The next weekend, Ella and Quỳnh help her donate it all, then take her shopping: to high end stores, to Ikea, to secondhand stores, telling her firmly, You don’t need to buy anything, just take a look and see what works. But she falls in love with the pale brown leather sectional at the third store they go to, though she balks at the price tag. Yet, when she can’t physically get herself to rise from the comfort of it, Quỳnh says, “Oh Marta, girl, this is a sign,” and that’s how Marta finds herself peer pressured into spending money on herself.
Slowly, the vision for the house takes place. Warm-colored woods, lots of books, glass tables and kitschy vases. It still looks barren—Ella thinks it needs a rug—but it’s starting to look like a proper home. The first time Marta wakes up in the middle of the night and needs water, her feet unconsciously carry her down the stairs, to the kitchen, and she sleepily sips at a mug before startling into the realization that it’s starting to feel like a proper home as well.
It’s funny—she never thought of the importance of having one’s space, not when their past living experiences had been careful hoarding just in case (and yes, the basement is still filled with careful hoarding), but she can feel it, now. The palpable shaking off of the day’s stresses when she crosses the threshold and smells her mother’s picadillo. Of course, a lot of it has to do with the comfort of knowing survival is no longer the base means of her existence. Now, she has time to garden, which means staring a lot at the leafing rose vines and hoping that she’s not accidentally killing them by virtue of existing.
Is this happiness? The thought turns over and over in her head one languid Sunday morning as she lays in bed and listens to the sound of her mother shuffling downstairs. It should be, she thinks. All the metrics indicate so. If she lived and died like this, they would’ve called it a happy life, a peaceful life. And yet—
It’s a loss of identity, she thinks. To her mother, she was the hardworking breadwinner daughter. She provided stability to her sister, her messy younger sister, who needed someone to be her rock, a role that Marta was happy to provide. But now, there is no more breadwinning to be done. Alice is thriving on her own. Where does that leave Marta?
It’s entirely possible that she is still just grieving Harlan, that life won’t feel fully rounded and golden again until the memory of him no longer acutely tightens her chest. Harlan was the only person in her life who didn’t put her on some kind of pedestal. One time she said to him, idly laughing, that she was probably only able to keep up with the antics of the Thrombey family because she had nothing else going on in her life that was so dramatic.
And Harlan had looked at her with that keen gaze and he said, “There are certain people in life who have drama centered on them, inexorably, because of the nature of who they are. But there are others who find joy and fulfillment in being swept up in tangles and sorting through them, of neatly winding up strands of conflict that otherwise have no connection to them. After all, what else is a detective, really?”
To that, she had no response, perturbed by the knowing look in his eyes. She wanted to protest, to weakly say, I was never meant for a dramatic lifestyle, just look at me. But here she is now, living the life she knows to be idyllic, and yet there is something restless in the pit of her stomach, something unfulfilled.
This year, March is a wet and capricious month, with rain pounding away three days of the week, the sky a suspicious gray most of the other days, with the rare blue-skied sunny day emerging as if to apologize for the rest of the weather. It means that Marta’s outdoorsy friends reluctantly end up corralling themselves in more bars and indoor climbing gyms than ever. So, after her long shifts at the free clinic, Marta learns how to play darts, accidentally ends up entering a weekend shuffleboard tournament, and always comes home at a reasonable hour.
It’s on one of these inauspicious nights, a Thursday night, that she meets Ransom again.
If Ransom could’ve optimally chosen the circumstances under which he’d be meeting Marta Cabrera again, he would’ve chosen to not be flirting with another woman.
It’d been a long week of editing the sequel, now tentatively named Glass Onion, after the Beatles annotation in the encyclopedia that had sparked the idea. By now, it was on revision #3. Meg’s notes on Glass Onion had been, sick premise, very funny, I like the ensemble. u gotta figure out your ending though.
He’d be irritated, except his editor had pretty much said the same thing (except with a much more gushy email, probably to pad his fragile ego). They’d even talked about it in person in New York, over coffee, and Ransom had walked away both displeased by the amount of notes Jesse had to give him, and yet strangely buoyed by the mountain of work ahead of him.
He was less buoyed now. Now, the process of untangling a mystery and tying it in with character work and sociopolitical themes was a daunting one. He complained about it in therapy once, that whereas his first novel had poured out of him fully formed, like Athena clambering her way out of Zeus’s skull, Glass Onion is coming out in trickles of inspiration.
“You know, I’m a big fan of Knives Out,” Oliver had responded.
“You read it, then?” He’s not that surprised. Surely therapists like to internet stalk their patients, and Ransom is eminently stalkable.
“Read it when it came out,” says Oliver, with a little grin. “My girlfriend at the time was obsessed with Harlan Thrombey and had high hopes for your novel. But I ended up liking it more than she did.”
“Huh.” Ransom doesn’t know what part of that sentence to be most surprised by: that Oliver is a genuine fan of his book, or that he had a girlfriend two years ago. From the knowing, amused look in Oliver’s eyes, he can tell what’s going on in Ransom’s mind. “Thanks, I guess. Isn’t it awkward for you, being a fan of a book that one of your patients wrote?”
“Separation of personal life and practice is a challenge for any therapist,” said Oliver. “We all have our unconscious biases. The question is, are they affecting our ability to treat our patients? Anyway, I have a therapist to talk to about that.”
For some reason, that struck Ransom as hilarious. “You have a therapist?”
“Oh yes. And I’m sure that they have a therapist, and so on. Sometimes, I think our practice is held up by perpetuity. Anyway. You have a team for Glass Onion that all want it to be the best book possible, no? Have faith in them, and in yourself.”
Perpetuity. The word does something for Ransom, unlocks some glissendo between one stress-point and another. He types frantically that night, pinning the squirming conflict down and baring its bitter soul—of fear, of jealousy, of the small-animal mindset that it truly is—and like that, Glass Onion is done. He can feel it, settled in his bones, in his soul. There will be edits, but this is the best he can do, with what skill he has now, and that has to be enough.
Bitterly, reluctantly, he adds an acknowledgement to Oliver in the ending author’s notes, a cursory, Thank you to Oliver, for perpetuity. It’s the least he can do.
That given, he goes out, because he’s spent 48 hours straight in his musty-smelling home and needs, desperately, to be somewhere, anywhere else. He intends to go to the high-end bar not fifteen minutes away from where he lives, but they turn out to be closed for renovations. Rather than googling another one, he just starts driving aimlessly, until he sees a dive bar named Harley’s and it’s just close enough to Harlan’s that he falters at a yellow light he normally would’ve sped through, stares at it with dry eyes until honking behind him indicates that the light turned to green.
He turns into a parking lot, the bimmer standing out ostentatiously against all the other, nondescript cars. Gets drizzled on—God, March has been a disgusting month—as he comes into the bar.
He’s working on moderation when it comes to alcohol. Rather than order an Old Fashioned or whiskey on the rocks, he instead opts for a beer, which is delivered to him with water vapor still wisping off the surface. He chose this part of the bar because next to him is a terribly attractive redhead, wearing a blouse low-cut enough that he can see the suggestion of a sternum tattoo.
She gives him a heavy-lidded look up and down. “Now this doesn’t seem like the proper place for you,” she says.
He settles more comfortably onto the hard barstool, affects a casual shrug. “My usual place is renovating. They need to, you know, add more gold to the bathrooms.”
That makes her laugh, tilt her head in consideration, before she says, “Buy me a drink?”
“You’ve got it.”
Thirty minutes later, he’s still nursing his first beer and she’s on the dregs of the gin and tonic he bought her. Her name’s Rosie and she’s flirting with him heavily, her mascara-caked eyes fluttering at him. Conversation with her is pleasant enough; she has this braying laugh that’s a little annoying but also a little charming. She’s a fitness instructor and purrs compliments about his muscular physique, and her hand is stroking over his arm to emphasize the praise. He’s thinking about what a pleasant night this could become when there’s a flash of something in the corner of his eye.
He doesn’t know why he looks, but he does, and it’s a visceral shock to his system when he sees Marta, staring at him wide-eyed.
Ransom doesn’t believe his eyes, initially. But it’s Marta, just as shocked at the sight of him as he is by her. At first, all he can do is catalogue the differences—her hair is longer, she’s wearing a soft blue sweater he’s never seen before, she’s wearing boots instead of sneakers. All reminders of life passing without him seeing her, and that, above everything, makes something twist within him.
Rosie’s smile takes on a quizzical tilt. “Everything all right?” she says, and twists around to see where he’s looking. At her movement, the moment breaks and Marta, abruptly, turns on her heel, heads for the door.
“Shit,” says Ransom. “Rosie—sorry—I have to—”
“What?” says Rosie, the slightest amount of affront in her voice, but Ransom is already halfway to the door by then, is catching it as it swings close from where Marta is outside, where Marta is blinking at the sheeting rain pummeling the ground outside the bar’s overhang. At the sound of the door opening once more, she turns to face Ransom with a resigned look on her face.
“Jesus, Marta,” Ransom says. “You—you didn’t have to run.”
“I know,” she says, sounding confused, as if perplexed by her own choices as well. “I mean. I didn’t run very far.” She gestures to the rain, to her own lack of umbrella—she must’ve left her coat inside, her bag, her everything. It means she’s here and not alone and Ransom hates the festering knot of jealousy such a thought sparks in him.
For a moment, they just stare at each other. Her eyes flick over him, and he wonders if she’s seeing the same differences in him that he saw in her, or maybe she’s thinking about how he hasn’t changed at all.
“Congratulations on the new home,” he says, finally. “Mom told me all about it.”
“Thanks,” she says. “She really helped out. I know nothing about real estate.”
“Well, it’s just her entire job, that’s all.”
“Yeah.” Marta has this sort of wild quality to her voice, of someone desperately grasping for straws of conversation. “Still. It was kind of her.”
Awkward silence, again, broken only by the pitter patter of rain falling. Finally, Ransom sighs, running a hand through his hair, and says, “Look, I don’t mean to ruin your night out, Marta. Just—go back in, okay? I’ll head out.”
“What—no,” says Marta, jutting her chin out, an obdurate look in her eyes. “If anything, you should be the one staying, you clearly had something already going for you, and I don’t want to interrupt that for you—”
“I don’t have something going for me—”
“Oh, so it means nothing, then, to flirt with women in bars and have them touch your arm and—”
“What,” says Ransom, amusement warring with disbelief, “are you jealous?”
She hoists herself to her fullest height, eyes flashing indignantly. “What is there to be jealous of?”
It stings, but he might as well have invited it. “Fair enough.” And then, because he can’t help but say it, he adds on, “You look good, by the way,” and is taken aback when she winces at the compliment.
“God, Ransom,” says Marta, voice brittle, holding a hand to her forehead. “You can’t just say—”
“What, the truth?” She does look good. She looks better than good. She looks like everything he’s been trying to forget, to move past, for the past six months, and it’s humbling to have her in front of him now, and to realize that he hasn’t been able to move very far.
“Is it the truth?” she snaps. “What’s the truth to you, these days?”
“You want some more truth?” Ransom snarls, feeling dizzy and drunk from having her so close in proximity, her mouth lush, her eyes so hard. “It’s been a year since the first time we fucked and I still can't forget the taste of you.”
Marta flushes scarlet, almost instantly. He doesn’t get to enjoy the sight of it for long, though, because then she’s tugging him down into a kiss and it’s like his hearing blows out, like all he can feel is the crush of her mouth against his, the pinprick pains of her fingernails in the back of his neck, so familiar and so good that it almost sears. He nips at her lower lip, feels her moan low in her throat more than he hears it, and then his back is hitting the brick wall of Harley’s from where she pushed him up against it. She kisses him angrily, possessively, and something satisfied curls within him at the idea that Marta, who would probably give a stranger the sweater off her own back if she saw them shiver, is possessive, maybe even a little bit jealous, over someone like him.
Marta pushes herself up onto her tiptoes for a better angle, his hand slips down from her back to her waist, and then somehow the kiss is melting into something sweeter, less desperate, but equally hungry. He can’t believe he forgot how good it was. Not just the fucking, though of course that was good, but this too, the kissing, the feeling of her in his arms, the smell of her skin underneath the soap-scrubbed topnote.
The door to Harley’s opens, and he barely pays any attention to it—why would he care about some random stranger when he’s kissing Marta Cabrera open-mouthed—but then the newcomer clears her throat and says, “Er, Marta?”
Marta gasps, breaks free, and they both turn to acknowledge the voice. The new person blinks at them; she’s Asian, with long black hair, and she gives Ransom a cursory, inspecting look, sizing him up as if she already knows exactly who he is.
“Quỳnh,” says Marta, hands a flurry of movement smoothing down her hair, wiping her mouth, plucking at the disarrayed edges of her clothing. “Is everything okay?”
“Well, when you didn’t come back, we thought someone should go looking for you,” says this Quỳnh. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” She doesn’t sound very sorry, actually, and she’s still giving Ransom that hard stare.
“Right,” says Marta. “I’ll be back in a second, we should just—” She stares up at Ransom, that crease forming between her eyebrows.
“Well, your friend can join us,” Quỳnh says laconically, arms folding across her chest. “If he’d like to, of course.”
Marta makes a half-sound of skeptic disbelief, cut off when she whips her head around upon Ransom’s response of: “Sure, I’d love to.”
They go back in the bar, where he, with some embarrassment, buys Rosie another drink as an apology for abandoning her so suddenly. Then he gets himself another beer and sits down at Marta’s table, where her friends have shuffled to make room for him next to Marta, who is still affecting a stare of disbelief as he settles down next to her.
“So,” he says. “I’m Ransom. Who are all of you?”
He gets introduced to them, one by one. They’re not the type of people he’d think Marta to be good friends with at first—hell, they seem more like the anti-establishment cool queer folk that Meg surrounds herself with, people that Oliver would probably get along with—but it becomes quickly clear to Ransom that she likes them because they all have the same, sincere way of speaking to each other. There’s no hidden daggers, no air of waiting for someone to slip. Just honest, open camaraderie.
They include Ransom in this, asking him congenially about his life, which he answers honestly, unhesitating to reveal the wealth of his family, the insanity that was his upbringing, what it was like to be the grandson of one of the bestselling authors of all time. One of them says, “Oh yes, I loved Knives Out,” and then falters, eyes flitting guiltily to Marta, who sits there and pretends not to notice.
Only Quỳnh asks him questions with the slightest amount of edge. Probing questions, poking at the tender spots she picks up on. “Must’ve been so difficult,” she says, “having, what, only two nursemaids?” And then she grunts a little and her girlfriend subtly retracts her elbow.
“Really difficult,” he says. “I always say, if I had a third, that would’ve really changed the trajectory of my life.”
Time passes. He loses to Brandon at darts, declines another beer, shows Anita the foxtrot, in which she whispers to him, “You know, I’m jealous, Marta’s a really good kisser,” and laughs at the look on his face. Quỳnh doesn’t warm up to him, fully, but she does soften at the edges, and even laughs when he recounts a recent story of taking a taxi to Jersey when he meant to say Chelsea (“Chelsea, please.” “Jersey…Jersey City?” “Sure, Chelsea’s in the city.”) All the while, Marta watches him with a furrow in her eyebrows, as if working through some complicated formula, or perhaps sifting through the index cards of what she knows about Ransom and comparing it to the person she’s found in front of her, now.
“I gotta head out,” says Ransom eventually. “Got an early morning meeting, tomorrow.”
There’s a chorus of goodbyes from the table. Marta stands, says, “I’ll walk you out.”
The rain has faded, leaving behind a world washed clean. Ransom’s BMW has remained unscathed this whole night and they’re silent as they walk toward it, Marta’s pace rapid-quick next to Ransom’s longer-legged amble.
“Did you mean it?” Marta says finally.
“Mean what?”
“What you said—before.”
He can tell from the pinkness of her ears that she’s not talking about anything he said to her friends, but instead, what he’d said to her, in private. I can’t get the taste of you out of my mouth.
“Every single word,” he says.
They’re at the BMW, now. Marta turns her face up to him, eyes searching his, and for a moment, he thinks she might kiss him again. But instead, she says, “Stay here for a second,” and retreats back to the bar.
Ransom stays and waits and tries to force down the bubble of hope rising in his chest.
After a few minutes, Marta comes back out, this time wearing her jacket, her hair caught in the strap of her bag. “I told them you’re giving me a ride home.”
“All right,” says Ransom. But Marta doesn’t give him an address, and honestly, he didn’t expect one. The look she gives him, searing right through him, is enough. Ransom gets in the car.
He drives to his place, thankful that at least the cleaners came a few days ago, so while it’s still a little rank, it’s nowhere near as bad as it has been in the past. Marta glides in quietly, toes off her shoes, and then just stands there in the doorway, fingers flexing uncertainly on the cuffs of her sleeves, her chest rising and falling.
Ransom doesn’t know what she’s thinking. But he does know what he wants to do, so he crosses over to in front of her, and then, giving her plenty of time to dodge away, tilts up her chin and kisses her.
She inhales sharply, then sighs into the kiss. They don’t speak, but they don’t have to; while there is the shiver of unfamiliarity of months gone past without touching one another, these are paths easily navigable once more. And there are some things that he thinks he will never be able to forget, like the particular spot right under her ear that makes her melt, the way she gasps when his hand skims the lower curve of her belly, the tilt of her head when he nips at the lobe of her ear. He takes off her sweater, she takes off his coat. It is like a dance, navigating to the bedroom, feet tangling with each other, articles of clothing getting in the way, until she is in his bed and she is naked. Ransom gets this dizzying sensation of being in a dreamlike situation, for he has dreamed of this, shamefully so, many a time since their last, terrible kiss. But then Marta pulls him down onto her and the sharp scrape of her fingernails is a reminder that it isn’t a dream, thank God.
They kiss, sloppy and half-desperate. She gets a hand on him and he gasps, arches up into her grip. “Shit,” he says, feeling heat flood his face, “Let me—hold on, Marta—”
There’s a smile in her voice when she says, “You can come, Ransom, it’s okay.”
He’s never wanted to be on this side of sex before Marta, would’ve laughed and ended it with anyone who tried to boss him around in bed. But there’s something so natural about the way she tells him to do things, not with any faux approximation of dominance, but with true want behind it, hot desire that comes out only in these little demands and it has him straining to obey her, approaching the precipice with some terror as she works him up and down, thumb gliding over his tip.
He comes like a teenager, groaning and spilling all over her clever hands, and then she’s pushing him down her body, saying, “My turn now, Ransom,” and he, still fuzzy from the last pulses of orgasm, clumsily mouths at her clit, mind sharpening at the moan she makes, at the taste of her.
He’s semi-hard when she comes on his mouth, fully hard by the time she comes a second time riding his face, her breasts pressed against the headboard, the sounds she’s making seared into his brain. She’s wet enough that his latex-wrapped cock glides into her easily, and then they’re fucking, fucking so hard that at some point Marta yelps and they fall off the bed from having moved all the way across it. Then they fuck on the floor, Marta riding him, the light from the bedside lamp illuminating the gloss of sweat over her chest, over her tits, down her belly, and Ransom stares, and stares, and stares.
They take a break, eat some frozen pizza, and then they fuck over the kitchen island, the tight clench of her the closest approximation to heaven that Ransom thinks he’ll ever experience. He marks up her breasts that round, sucks hickeys into the undersides, tongues the nipples until Marta is red-faced and twisting down on his cock, her feet kicking at his back. Then they eat more pizza.
At midnight, Marta’s phone rings. Marta grapples for it, gasps and says, “Shit, shit, Ransom, stop, I have to get this—”
Ransom allows him to be pushed off of her, gives himself some consolatory strokes as Marta presses a hand to her heaving chest and answers the phone. Her voice is only a little bit breathless when she says, “Mama?”
Some unintelligible words, tinny to Ransom’s ears.
“Sorry. Yes. I’m staying over—at a friend’s.” Ransom stares, tries not to listen. “I’ll be back home tomorrow.”
He should say something. He should protest, should comment on her word choices. But then she straddles him once more and Ransom thinks, Just this once. Just this night. And then she sinks down on him and he forgets anything other than the tiny noises she makes, the half-gasps. They’re so exhausted, so sensitive, orgasm seems almost out of reach, but he knows it’s there. He just has to chase for it, and he does, flipping them over, moving in deep, small circles, paying attention to the minute gestures she makes: the flutter of her eyelashes, the flex of her toes, the clench of her hands in his disarrayed, destroyed sheets. “Marta, Jesus,” he says, helpless to form anything more articulate, and bends to kiss her, picking up speed now, hearing those sounds bleat into full moans, throaty moans.
“Yes, Ransom,” she’s saying, clutching at him now, “Yes, yes, right there, don’t stop—”
“I won’t,” he gasps into her throat, gritting his teeth against the strain of it, the burn of his abdomen; anything to keep her sounding like this, like he’s not a mistake but instead the best choice she ever made. He’s got a thumb on her, not moving, just pressing, aware of how sensitive she must be, not wanting to tip her over from pleasure to pain. Between one thrust and another Marta comes, almost soundlessly, wrenching down on him, wet gushing between them, her entire body one long line of pleasure that he drinks in the sight of.
He fucks her through it, gently, and prepares to pull out, but Marta’s legs lock around him and she says, “Don’t you dare.”
“Fuck,” says Ransom. He’s so close, he can taste it in the back of his mouth, white and piquant. His hips speed up, desperate. He must be hurting her, surely, but she doesn’t let it on, just lets out these tight, high moans and stares at him with those brilliant, beautiful eyes.
“Ransom,” says Marta, like a sigh, and draws him down into a kiss. Just like that, he comes, moaning in her mouth, grabbing onto her hips so hard that it might bruise. It feels, unerringly, like salvation, or veneration, or something even worse, like love.
They cool down, slowly. The aches and pains of marathon sex start to assert themselves; one of Ransom’s hamstrings is killing him, and there’s a gnarly bruise on Marta’s back from the kitchen counter. They shower, almost innocently so, though Marta bats Ransom’s hands away from her soapy tits, which is extremely rude of her in his opinion.
They dry off and Ransom can’t help it, keeps catching her mouth with his every time the towel passes over their heads. Then they’re making out, but in an intent-less way, kissing just for the sake of it, for the feeling of her body against his, just exhausted mouth slipping against exhausted mouth.
Ransom catches a glimpse of the time out of the corner of his eye and breaks from kissing her, says, with a half-groan, half-laugh, “I do have a meeting at nine, I wasn’t joking about that.”
“Oh,” says Marta. “Sorry. I can go, just let me call a car—”
“Just stay,” says Ransom, hoping that the words come out as airy and unaffected as he wants them to sound, even though saying them makes his chest feel tight with suppressed want. “We can worry about it in the morning.”
A long pause in the night. Finally, Marta says, “All right,” in an unreadable tone. He gives her a pair of boxers and a t-shirt to wear, dons boxers himself, and it’s almost unbearably domestic, the way they change the sheets together, toss the sullied cloth into the hamper. They lie in the fresh bed together, he clicks off the light. Ransom stares up at the ceiling and wonder if she’s still awake.
After ten minutes she says, “Ransom,” and then they’re reaching for each other, his face nestled in her damp hair. Like that, he finally goes to sleep.
Marta wakes at eight. It’s a habit she’s never been able to break, incurred from years of routine. She can wake up earlier, easily, but she can’t stay asleep past eight, can only lay in bed as a sorry excuse for sleeping in. She wakes and at first, she doesn’t know where she’s sleeping, only that it is both familiar and unfamiliar all at once. There is a heavy weight draped across her; someone’s arm. Ransom’s arm.
Ransom’s arm, which leads to Ransom’s face, slack with sleep. She stares at the familiar lines and slopes, feeling her pitiful heart wrench, and then gently disengages. Takes off the clothes she borrowed, folds them neatly, quietly slides on her own. Outside, she calls a car and shivers as she waits for it to arrive, and once it does, she is leaving, going back to her home, back to her life.
She gets home, where Mama is making breakfast and looks upon Marta with a gimlet eye. Suddenly, she feels like one of those stereotypical sixteen year olds, except she has none of the practice of dodging her mother’s questions, which come fast and furious. Marta holds up her hands and says, “I just stayed over, sorry to worry you,” with increasing desperation.
“What friend?” presses Mama.
She feels her gorge rising, but it quells when she says, in a rush of inspiration, “You haven’t met him.”
But then, her mother’s eyes narrow. “Him?”
Shit. “Mama—”
“Is this the same asshole who broke your heart last year?”
Marta gapes at her. “What do you mean—nobody—”
“Oh, I recognized the signs,” says her mother, folding her arms. She bangs down some toast and fresh-cut fruit, starts pouring Marta a cup of strong coffee. “You think I haven’t seen it before? You and Alice mope the same exact way. Is it him?”
There’s no way around it, this time. Marta, meekly, nods.
She’s unprepared for the frown that crosses her mother’s face, confused. “Why are you seeing him again?”
It’s such a practical question. Of course her mother would be confused why Marta, her sensible eldest daughter, would engage in such ridiculous behavior as a dalliance with someone who “broke her heart.” Marta stares down at the toast and finds herself tearing up, unable to articulate why, only able to think, I broke his heart more, I think.
At the sight, her mother clucks, comes around the bar to hug her. “Ay, sometimes I forget that you can be younger than Alice in some ways.”
“Hey,” protests Marta.
“I mean, Alice and I would fight and fight over some of her boyfriends, the same way my mama and I would fight over some of my boyfriends. We can be silly sometimes, you know. But you, mi corazon, are too good to be made unhappy by a man—”
“That’s the problem,” says Marta, and tears do start trickling down her face, “I’m not—Mama, I’m so happy when I’m with him.”
It’s a truth that she hasn’t dared to say out loud, dared to even think. Because she can’t be happy with someone like Ransom, as insufferable as Ransom, as horribly brought up as Ransom. People like her and Ransom don’t work out, can’t work out, and so it feels like a betrayal of all of Marta’s values that she finds herself so happy to be making fun of his tv show taste, so happy to be eating takeout with him, so happy to be sleeping in the same bed as him.
Her mother hugs her as she cries it out. Then, feeds her pineapple, saying, “You can’t cry when you’re eating pineapple,” which does make her laugh. When Marta has wiped at her face and gathered herself, her mother kisses her on the temple and says, “Your father made me happy. Now, he’s gone, and I’m still happy.”
Marta winces, without thinking. She had been young when her father passed, but not young enough to not remember, like Alice. It was seared into her brain, the moment when Tía Aleja had called with the news, the raw screams her mother had let out. “I know, I don’t need a man to be happy. I like my life, I like my friends—”
She quiets when her mother places a hand over her mouth. “Let me finish. Yes, I lost your father a long time ago. Yes, I’ve still been happy, after. But I would not have been happier not knowing. Would you rather have not befriended Harlan, knowing that he would die only six years later?”
Marta, mouth still covered by her mother’s hand, shakes her head.
“Life’s happiness is salted by loss,” says her mother. “Now, if both Alice and I hate this man, maybe you shouldn’t date him. But hiding him from everyone else, from yourself, isn’t going to help, no?”
She lowers her hand from Marta’s mouth. Marta, dumbly, eats some more pineapple, and then quietly says, “No.”
Her mother starts to speak once more, but is interrupted by the doorbell ringing.
It’s 9:20 in the morning. Both Marta and her mother blink at each other, and her mother goes, “A package?” and Marta says, “No, not that I know of.”
Since Marta’s face is still a little bit of a mess, her mother goes to investigate, opens the door a crack and says suspiciously, “Can I help you?”
“Hi,” says Ransom’s voice. “Is Marta here?”
Marta freezes. She is half-debating running, or hiding, when her mother says, awareness dawning in her voice, “She’s here. Marta!”
Marta’s feet, unwillingly, move her to the door. In front of her is Ransom, disheveled and unshaved, wearing a shirt on backwards and sandals inappropriate for the weather. He looks like he rolled out of bed and went straight to the BMW, which is haphazardly parked in her driveway.
“Ransom,” she says. “How did you get—how did you get this address?”
“I asked my mom—thanks for that by the way.” His eyes scan over her. “Have you been crying?”
Her mother looks between the two of them, the palpable tension between them, and says brightly, “I’m going to take a walk.”
“Mama, no, you don’t—”
Marta is quelled by her mother’s pointed look. Both she and Ransom remain completely silent as her mother gathers her things, dons a hat, and then calmly exits the house. The door clicks behind her.
Marta rubs at her eyes, feeling about eighty years old. “Ransom, I thought you had a meeting.”
“Yeah, well, I cancelled it when I realized that you cut and ran like a coward.”
“I couldn’t just lounge at your home all day!”
“Bullshit. You didn’t even say goodbye.”
“Because I knew that if I woke you up, you would try your hardest to get me to stay and I—”
“Yeah, and?” Ransom’s face puckers in confusion and outrage. “What’s so bad with that?”
“Do you think this is a good idea?” she says. “Us, starting this up again? We were so close to a clean break.”
He huffs. “I hadn’t realized a clean break was what we were aiming for, actually. Remind me of this in six months, when we try for another clean break.”
“I’m serious, Ransom.”
“And I’m serious too,” he says. “Jesus, Marta. I’m trying to understand, I really am, but you need to talk to me. You can’t just keep running away when it suits you!”
“I have to, because I can’t think,” she cries, “when I’m around you. I can’t—you make me crazy, Ransom, you take all of my logical notions and you toss them out the door, until suddenly I’m doing things I’ve never done before, should not be doing in the first place, and it’s only once I’m away from you and my head is clear that I think to myself, Is this what I want, truly? And finally, when I realize that the answer is no, that we’re too different to ever be compatible in the long run, when I finally have clarity, you come and you muddy it all up again. But nothing has changed, Ransom!”
Ransom looks at her, half-laughs, and says, “Nothing has changed?”
“Yes,” she says, suddenly muted by the look on his face, which goes beyond hurt into some, intangible territory of harm.
“I see,” says Ransom, with that cool look on his face still, “Sure. Maybe nothing has changed, after all. You still don’t want me to meet your friends, or your family, right?”
Marta falters. “Don’t turn this on me.”
“Does it still disgust you, that you’re attracted to me?” he asks. “Don’t try to deny it, I know that’s how you felt, when we first started seeing each other. But yesterday, I thought—” He huffs, rubs a hand over his face. “After we spent the night with your friends, who I liked, by the way, and who I think liked me, I thought, maybe Marta feels differently, now. And then you fuck me for six hours and then you leave and now I have no idea what’s going on in your brain. None!”
“I liked seeing you with my friends,” she says, sighs, suddenly muted by the truth of it, how heavy the truth feels. “I liked it a lot. I like the idea of you getting along with them, Ransom. I like the idea of my mother and my sister liking you—Alice already likes you. I just—can’t trust it to last, don’t you see?”
“Can’t trust what? Us? You? Or me?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, Marta!” The words come out explosive, startling her. “Yes—it does! Because if you don’t trust your feelings for me, then fine, I’ll deal with that. But if you don’t trust in my feelings, that’s not fucking fair, as far as I’m concerned. I know it’s so supposedly unbelievable, but when it comes to you, I want all of those things. More than that, I just want a fucking chance to prove to you what I know is true: that I’m nuts about you!”
It’s the most frazzled, irritated she’s ever seen Ransom. There’s not an ounce of poise in the man before her, and it has her blinking, trying to rally her thoughts, until she says pathetically, “Sure, that’s how you feel now, but what happens in ten years, when we’re older and you’ve still got hot twenty-year-olds hitting on you because you’re a bestselling novelist and I’m just—the nag who hates your family’s wealth and wants to retire quietly. What then, Ransom?”
“Then,” he says, “then we have the kind of fantastic sex that people past their prime have and you hate my novels and you vengefully donate all my money and hell, maybe you hate me, and that’s okay! I hate a lot of me too! I’m working on it. All I’m asking for, Jesus Christ, is if you feel the same way as I do, if you feel that there’s a single chance you want to give it a shot—then I’m asking that you tell me. Because if I haven’t stopped thinking about you for three years, then what the fuck else am I going to do for the rest of my life?”
Marta, in two swift movements, crosses to the nearest bookshelf and pulls out her battered copy of Knives Out, which she practically throws at him. He catches it, clutches it to his chest, wild-eyed, looking between it and her.
“Of course I like your novels,” she says, almost hysterically. “And you. Of course I do, Ransom, I can’t believe it’s not obvious.”
She can see him cataloging its dogears, its torn jacket, the creased spine. And then he tosses it onto the couch and pulls her into a kiss.
That’s how her mother finds them, macking away on the couch fifteen minutes later, when she opens the door and hastily closes it. Marta disentangles herself from the kiss, yelps out, “Mama, no, it’s okay, you can come back,” but Ransom tugs her back down, says, “Oh come on, if she’s willing to give us a few more minutes, let her.”
Marta lets herself be kissed and then, curling her fingers into his collar, says, “Stay for lunch?”
The flush of joy that she gets from the immediate lightening in his eyes is worth the embarrassment she just suffered from Mama walking in on them. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
IV. CODA
Three weeks later, Ransom tells Oliver about this new development, when Oliver just casually mentions, “You seem happier, these days.”
“Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “Well. My—” Girlfriend feels too flippant, partner feels too serious. “—the person that I was, uh, seeing, before I started seeing you—in a different way, obviously—well. She took me back.”
Oliver, who had been following this convoluted sentence with a scrunched-face focus, nods and doodles some more. It is fairly clear at this point, to Ransom at least, that Oliver does not actually take notes, or that his doodles are some shorthand for notes. “I see. And you feel happier, because of this?”
“I do,” says Ransom, thinking of the way Marta had curled, catlike, in his sheets that very morning, as he sent off the last edits of Glass Onion to his editor, who had loved the new and revised ending. Marta, too, had praised it when he sent the most recent draft to her a week ago, had devoured it and spent an hour happily pointing out her favorite sections. He’d asked her for criticism and she’d blinked at him and said, uncertainly, “Ransom, I just said I loved it,” which was so unbearably Marta of her that he’d put a thumb in her chin dimple and kissed her for it.
“That’s good,” says Oliver, with a hum.
“But I think,” Ransom says, after a long second, hands flexing and straightening in his jeans, “I think that I was doing a pretty good job, even before, of making my way there anyway.”
When he looks up, Oliver is smiling at him. “I’d agree.”
It’s not that Marta didn’t think that Ransom would get along fine with her friends; it’s that she didn’t expect him to immediately establish a rapport with Ella that borders on a sibling rivalry. This turn on their relationship only becomes apparent when the whole crew goes out bowling, and Ella and Ransom are revealed to be both exceptionally skilled and exceptionally competitive.
Both she and Quỳnh watch with wide eyes as Ella and Ransom casually shit-talk each other while hitting perfect strikes or spares. Meanwhile, the rest of them are lucky to get four, five pins. Marta hits three gutter balls in a row and Ransom tries to help her, but then she gets distracted by the feeling of him, warm up against her, and Anita shouts, “COOL IT, LOVEBIRDS,” and Ransom is summarily banned from helping Marta. Ella helps instead, sticking her tongue out at Ransom as she guides Marta into the proper position. But it works, because Marta promptly gets six pins down, before returning to her gutter strategy. Eventually, those who are bad at bowling (Marta, Anita) give up their turns to Ella and Ransom, just so the two of them can have more fodder for their battle.
Quỳnh, who just successfully hit her first spare in the whole game, sits next to Anita as Ella and Ransom face off once more. “I wasn’t expecting this. Were you expecting this?”
Ransom hits only eight pins. Ella gets a strike and shouts, “Eat that, motherfucker!”
Ransom knocks over his remaining two pins and says, “You’re still down, O’Sullivan, I wouldn’t be too cocky if I were you.”
“No,” Marta replies to Quỳnh. “I really did not expect this.”
She waves Ransom to take her turn; Anita does the same for Ella. Quỳnh and Marta sit back as their significant others act like children over what is, essentially, a big heavy ball and some pins.
“It’s kinda hot though, right?” says Quỳnh abruptly. “Am I wrong?”
Marta is surprised into laughing, claps a hand over her mouth to muffle it. “No, you’re right,” she says. “But God, don’t tell them right now.”
Ella wins, and Ransom takes the loss on the chin, with only slightly bitter humor and handing her the golden bowling ball as a trophy (that the nearby attendant promptly takes out of Ella’s hands, as it’s property of the bowling alley). That night, as Marta attempts to climb Ransom like a tree, Ransom, who has been surprised by her ardor since they came back to his, stops kissing her stomach and says, “Wait, is this because of bowling?”
“Oh my god, shut up,” says Marta, but her little retch of an avoidant lie is too revealing. Ransom lights up and repeats, “You like it when I bowl?” and after that, there’s really only one way to shut him up, in a way that pleases them both.
The first Thrombey family gathering is for the Fourth of July, which is only a big thing because Linda really wants to show off the updated Thrombey mansion. The dogs only lightly mutilate Ransom when he comes early to take a tour. She’s really cracked the whip on some of the renovations, but Ransom is pleasantly surprised to see how much character she’s kept on the mansion. He knows his mother prefers light and more modernity, but while she’s imposed that art design on some of the more archaic and ill-used rooms, she’s kept Harlan’s gothic sensibilities for the rooms that matter—the living room, the secret staircase room, the study.
Ransom stands in the study for a long second. She’s even kept his chair where it’d last been—maybe she hadn’t remembered that it hadn’t always been there. Or maybe, in the way moms did, she knew how much that chair had meant to Ransom. Whatever it was, the rest of the study had been largely untouched. Cleaned, sorted through, and ready for Linda as its next owner, but still with the spirit of Harlan laying over it. But not in a haunting, spectral way. More as a benevolent presence, identifiable in the grotesque little statues in the bookcases, in the dramatic pen and quill on the desk, in the calligraphed Edgar Allen Poe flaneur quote on the wall.
He startles when someone touches his shoulder but it’s only Linda, having come looking for him. “You’re missing everyone else arriving,” she says, and though he doesn’t really care about that, he understands what she’s saying. This study will still be here. So he follows her.
There’s a grill set up outside, which a professional chef is already manning. Donna has her characteristic cup of wine and is trying to ignore Jodi, talking her ear off. Jodi’s got her latest boytoy there, a rippled thirty-year-old wannabe influencer who’s into the sort of naturopath bullshit that she’s always spouting off about, and Meg is trying to avoid the both of them, it looks like. Richard’s not here, of course; Linda refuses to acknowledge him ever since she found out he was expecting a child (she found out from Ransom, laughed herself silly, until suddenly she was crying, and he found himself consoling an armful of crying mother). It’s probably for the best—his mistress is almost ready to give birth. Ransom knows that, because Richard asked him if he wants to be there, when the baby is born. He doesn’t think so, but after talking with Marta, he thinks, maybe he can visit afterward. Maybe.
Ransom grabs two beers from the cooler, hands one to Meg as he sits down on the wicker chair next to her. It looks like she got a tattoo since the last time he saw her, a ring of flowers surrounding her upper arm.
“You should know,” he says casually, “that Jacob’s probably gonna bring his girlfriend, president of the UPenn Republican club, here.”
Meg’s beer goes up her nose. She coughs, wipes at her streaming nose, and says, “Are you fucking kidding me?” When she assesses that he is, in fact, not joking, she says, “This fucking family.”
But Jacob comes alone, looking pale and exhausted. He took an early train, he says, from New York, where he’s doing a repeat of his winternship with J.P. Morgan and is a fully-fledged summer internship. Donna says, “My darling, you look so tired,” and Jacob says sharply, “They have me working long hours, okay?”
They all eat gourmet hot dogs and hamburgers made from wagyu meat, and at some point, Ransom finds himself next to Jacob and he says, “How’s it going?”
Jacob starts prattling off about how he’s so lucky to be a part of J.P. Morgan, how they rarely accept sophomores, and they had been so impressed by him in the winter that they’d even hinted at wanting him to come back next year, blah blah blah. Ransom listens, nods, hums appreciatively at some cases, and when Jacob finishes, says, “Weren’t you going to bring that girlfriend of yours?”
Jacob hollows out again, says nastily, “She broke up with me.”
Ransom winces. “Sorry.”
“Why should you be?” spits Jacob, who’s drinking a glass-bottle soda and is now shredding the paper sticker between his fingers. He looks like he hasn’t seen the sun in weeks, despite it being an extremely hot summer; he looks like he hasn’t slept in maybe days. “It’s not your fault that—females are so empowered by our current society that they have a hyper-inflated value of their own attraction comparative to their actual worth.”
Ransom takes this for Jacob-speak for she dumped me for a more attractive guy. All he says is, mildly, “Well, you yourself called her a hot blonde.”
“In fact,” says Jacob, ignoring him completely, “it’s probably for the better, because in the end, her being president of any club was already a sign that she doesn’t subscribe to true domestic values, no? And—”
“Hold that thought,” says Ransom, because the door is opening and Marta is coming in, looking exhausted but still happy, her hair loosely curling around her face. Somehow she still found time to change out of her scrubs and she’s wearing an ill-fitting blue dress that Mrs. Cabrera probably bought her ten years ago, because that’s exactly how Marta approaches fashion. He’s never seen anything better in his life.
He crosses the room, gets to her first, before Linda can snap out of her puzzled confusion. Says, “Thanks for making it,” and kisses her, light and quick, an appropriate sort of kiss for a family gathering. It clearly startles Marta, though, but when he draws back, she’s flushed and smiling.
The Thrombey family is all staring at them, even Jodi’s new paramour who’s almost certainly never met Marta. But Linda sweeps in, then, says, “Marta, kiddo, what a delight to see you,” as if it hadn’t also struck her by surprise to see Ransom kiss her deceased father’s longtime nurse. “Can I get you a hot dog?”
“Oh,” says Marta, allowing herself to be guided away. “Sure.” Over her shoulder, Linda shoots a mean glare at Ransom, which says, How could you not warn me about this, and he stifles a smile.
Meg drags him aside before he can follow Linda and Marta, hissing, “You’re shacking up with Marta?”
“I’m not shacking up with Marta,” he says, calmly. “We’re dating.”
“You’re dating,” she says, with disbelief. “As in, she has agreed to date you. What, did you roofie her?”
“Yes,” he says. “With my pe—”
Meg jams a hand over his mouth, but she’s laughing. Her birthday was last month. Ransom had sent some like, collection of gayass Keith Haring paintings her way and she’d called him to thank him. He licks her hand when she refuses to remove it, and Meg yelps, grimacing and wiping her hand on his—very nice and new Ralph Lauren—shirt, and thusly freed, Ransom pushes past her to join Marta.
Marta’s laden down with two hot dogs and is looking a little overwhelmed. Linda is talking her ear off a mile a minute, asking her about the new home—“It’s lovely,” says Marta. “You should come and see it sometime, since you helped us find it.”
Linda says, “Oh that would be wonderful,” then pauses and looks at Ransom with a clear, paralytic confusion in her eyes.
Ransom sighs. “We’ve been properly dating for four months. Yes, it’s serious. Yes, you can meet her family.”
“Oh Ransom,” scoffs Linda. “I don’t need to—”
“You can come to dinner next week, if you’d like,” says Marta, as sweet and earnest as one can be when holding two hot dogs. “My sister’s coming to visit.”
“Oh well. I’ll have to check my schedule,” says Linda, and then, seconds later, “But I’m almost positive that I’m free, so—let’s put it in the books, shall we?”
Ransom takes one of Marta’s hot dogs, eats half of it in one bite. “Diet Coke?” he asks her, because after one of her shifts, she never likes drinking, but probably needs something to get through this family event, and she gives him a thankful nod. She sits down next to Meg and Fran, who are frantically beckoning her over, and they immediately start quizzing her. It is very clear that they are asking her about Ransom.
He doesn’t want to immediately interrupt, so Ransom endures five minutes of Walt being politely disdainful about the fact that Ransom has started dating a nurse (and who also refuses to ask about Ransom’s upcoming book), is surprised when Donna seems genuinely excited about him and Marta, only to understand, moments later when she says, “It’s nice to see you finally thinking about being a family man—it’s about time there are new babies in the family!” Then he determines that’s perhaps enough family socialization for now and he joins Marta once more.
She leans back into him instantly, accepts the Diet Coke with a smile. “They were just asking how we got together,” she says.
“Did you tell them the long version or the short version?”
“Uh, there’s two versions?” says Fran in disbelief. When Marta flushes, he realizes that she almost definitely told them the short version.
“Well, we bumped into a bar—”
“Yes, she told us that,” says Meg, waving a hand. “In March.”
“Yes,” he says. “In March of last year.”
Meg and Fran both gasp and then clamor to know more. Marta laughs, blushes, and turns into Ransom, all at once, and he loops an arm around her back with a grin. When he takes a long sip of beer, he sees Jacob watching them, the look in his eyes not disdainful, for once, but hungry and sad. Ransom knows the feeling all too well, waves at him to join, but Jacob turns away, back to his phone.
Never mind him, thinks Ransom. There would be time.
They’re watching a lame documentary on Marta’s television that Ransom claimed to need for inspiration, but which Marta is pretty sure he only put on so that he could distract her throughout, when he pulls off her neck and says, “You know, this place is really coming together.”
She blinks and looks around. There’s new art up, some that she got at local markets, one beautiful painting that Anita gifted as a housewarming present. A new lamp that Quỳnh and Ella helped her thrift a few weeks ago. And she just got new bookshelves, enormous ones, far too large for her current collection. But she wanted them as a promise for what was to come.
“I need more books is what it looks like,” she says.
There’s a long moment before Ransom says, almost tentatively, “Don’t know if you heard, but I recently came into a windfall of a lot of books. They could use a place to be seen, and read.”
She thinks of Harlan’s books, now Ransom’s books, living alongside hers on the shelves, and it makes her heart ache sharply, but with both grief and joy. “Yeah,” she says, pressing her cheek against his, breathing in the familiar scent of him. “That sounds good.”
Outside, the roses are blooming.