Heart's False Start (3b/5)
Pairing: Quinntana
Rating: NC-17
Description: It begins as most things do: with a kiss.
Word Count: 20,816 / 3,017 (this part)
Spoilers: None
Notes: For my wife, her long-awaited Quinntana army fic. Merry Christmas, Faye.
Quinn lasts two months alone in the apartment before she gives up. Two months of staring at the scuff and the scorch and the dip and that stupid empty beer bottle before she realizes that even though Santana is gone, she’s still surrounded by her, and it’s making her question the decision to stop whatever it was they were doing in the first place.
She sends her landlord her notice and starts packing her life into boxes. Santana was the one that liked the electronics, so she sells the television and surround sound system on Craigslist for cheap enough that they disappear quickly. The furniture in the unused bedroom takes a little longer, but by the end of the week it’s gone.
She still has nightmares, even though she knows she’s leaving. She dreams that she’s falling down an endless cavern, and when she wakes she finds she’s sleeping on Santana’s side of the bed, in the dip. So she wraps the mattress up in plastic and asks the Super to cart it to the trash for her. She’ll buy a new one when she gets a new place. A new one that isn’t quite so haunted.
She doesn’t have a job, and she’s got no reason to focus on studying for the Bar when it’s four months away, so she spends her mornings and afternoons wandering through her neighborhood. It’s heavily Dominican, and the men-short and squat with round, tan faces and thick accents-call out to her as she passes. She smiles politely, but doesn’t engage.
The farther north she walks, the closer she gets to Yeshiva, and the tan men who call out to her fade into the stiff-backed Rabbinical students at the College. There are few women attending this branch of the Jewish school, where the classes are mostly related to religious and theological studies. Sometimes she likes to sit on the benches in the median near the courtyard to see how they react to her. Most ignore her completely. Some smile shyly and then move quickly on their way. One or two will cast her warning look, as though saying, “You don’t belong here.” That’s when she takes her leave.
It’s up here, at the quiet corner of 192nd and Audubon, that she sees the sign. A literal one, although she might argue it was metaphysical as well. “For Rent: One Room. See Rivke” and then a phone number. Underneath each line is a translation in Yiddish, and she looks up at the building it’s attached to. It’s shorter than all the others-just three floors-and narrow alleyways run along both sides. A stand-alone building in an area run by large, connected apartment complexes is rare, so she’s intrigued. She dials the number, careful not to read that “1” as a “7”, and waits. An older-than-dirt Hasidic woman answers the phone and Quinn is inside in minutes. It’s a clean, if a little small, one bedroom apartment on the second floor. The stove is ancient but the fridge is new and there are big windows facing west. She can’t really ask for much more than that, given the price, and her landlady isn’t much for haggling anyway.
Rivke Wanzenknicker wears a silk scarf over her head and walks bent over, her spine curled with age. She’s a widow, Quinn learns, with grown children and grandchildren who maintain the building that her husband had bought in the 1950s. She runs a tight ship, and is intimidating despite being a woman in a culture dominated by men. Quinn says, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” to questions about responsibility and drugs. Rivke doesn’t so much care about background information as long as the check clears every month, so they come to a quick arrangement. Quinn writes her a check for first, last and security and Rivke hands over the key.
“If it bounce,” she says, a gnarled finger waving a warning under Quinn’s nose. “I call police.”
It doesn’t bounce, because Quinn’s still living on the leftover Bar Exam Loan money that Sallie Mae had so generously given her to quit work and study for the test full time. Fat lot of good it did, though. She’d have been better off avoiding the additional ten thousand dollars in student loan debt and just working 20 hours a week. Now, it seems, she’ll have to.
She spends two more days walking and packing before there’s nothing left to do but recycle that beer bottle on the table. It’s been there so long that Quinn has gotten used to it, or ignores it completely. She’s waiting for the movers to arrive, sitting on the couch and staring at it like it’s going to get up and walk to the bin on its own.
“You couldn’t have gotten rid of this yourself?” she asks, half-expecting the thing to answer on Santana’s behalf. “You just had to have the last word, didn’t you?”
Quinn huffs and snatches the bottle from the table. It sends the note card that had been used as a coaster skittering across the wood floor, and she stomps after it. She picks it up and goes to crumple it in frustration, but stops when she catches the words on the back, haloed in a perfect circle of water damage. The ink had begun to run and then dried over time, smearing them just enough to make them more disquieting than they already were.
I know you’re scared, it says, directly in the center of the card and in Santana’s rounded penmanship. Above that, in the upper right corner, is a circled number three. In the upper left, highlighted in pink, is an instruction. Hold her hand.
The intercom by the door buzzes angrily, and she shoves the card in her pocket. She never lets go of the neck of the bottle. As the movers come in and begin to excise her life from the apartment like a tumor, she clings to it, and feels the card burn her side. But she has other ghosts to purge today, and Santana’s words will have to wait.
//
She and Bobby clear out the den and replace the couch with a single bed. The desk is moved into the living room along the wall, and the sofa placed over the creaky floorboard. It actually makes a lot of sense, once they’re done. After five months of sleeping on a couch, a bed only makes sense, because it’s pretty clear that she isn’t going to leave any time soon.
It’s The Baby’s first birthday over the Memorial Day weekend, and The Baby becomes The Toddler, who really deserves to be called by her name now. She’s more than a flaily ball of pudge and shit. She has a personality now, and Santana is moderately afraid that she’s rubbed off on her. She’s a diva who likes to get her way. Pretty much the opposite of Georgia and Bobby. She’s not a crier, really, but she’ll scream just the same. Santana calls her Baby Snix when one of those fits happen. She trembles and shakes and waves her fat little arms in the air until her face turns blue, she gets her way, or she’s ignored long enough to calm herself down.
She toddles now, like a true toddler. She pulls herself up on coffee tables and couches and here, in the park, on the picnic table where her parents have gathered some relatives and local friends for a barbeque overlooking New York Harbor. Santana watches dutifully as she grasps at the bench and gets shakily to her feet, and then, with such incredible faith and no fear at all of falling, lets go.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Santana says, her hands outstretched and a bigger smile on her face than she’s felt in a very long time. “Come on, Ana. You can do it.”
Bobby and Georgia didn’t name her after Santana. Not entirely, she thinks, but she knows there was something to it. It’s the reason Georgia pulled her in so quickly the night she’d shown up on their doorstep, why she hasn’t been asked to leave. She can’t for the life of her imagine why, because Santana is the farthest thing from a role model any kid could want, and so she doesn’t ask. Nor do Bobby or Georgia talk about it. Bobby’d brought a picture of the new recruit to base for training two weeks after she’d been born, and handed it around to all the people in the unit along with a box of the cheapest cigars she’d ever smoked in her life.
“That’s my Ana,” he’d said, giving her a knowing look and lighting her cigar. “That’s my girl.”
His girl, with Santana’s name. Or part of it. Maybe. She’d never wanted to make any assumptions, so she’d just puffed on the cigar and then blanched at the staleness of the tobacco and chided Bobby for his poor taste for the rest of the weekend.
It was just easier, really, calling her The Baby instead of Ana. Well, The Toddler now. Or maybe The Kid, because Toddler’s a mouthful.
Bottle rockets are set off at the opposite end of the park. Santana scoops The Toddler up and holds her close, in case one might divert its course this way. Georgia sits with Bobby’s cousin, the only close family either of them have, who came in from Philadelphia for the event. Williams’ girlfriend, Jenny, sits nearby but she’s a mousey thing and doesn’t say much. Bobby is at the grill flipping burgers while a couple of guys from the unit hang around him, all with beers in their hands.
She’d never really bonded with the other guys in the unit they way she’d bonded with Bobby and Williams. They were the only ones, even six years after they’d gotten rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, that didn’t care that she had a girlfriend-or a roommate, or whatever she was calling it-or that she was a woman. They were the only ones who’d run with her on the course, watched her keep pace just like the rest of the guys, climb the walls and lift a full-grown man up behind her. It had been a tough choice, really, trying to decide which one of them she’d run to when she’d left Quinn. Williams-Sean, but everyone just called him Williams-was living up in Yonkers with Jenny and she’d listened to him talking about how they never fought. But it was Yonkers, which is probably further both geographically and culturally from New York than Jersey is. Then there’d been Bobby and Georgia, with their weekly fights and the new baby, his girl Ana, and somehow she’d just jumped on a train to Jersey before her head wrapped around why.
Santana is holding a squirming baby in her arms when her pocket begins to buzz. She shuffles around, readjusting to reach deep into the cargo pocket on her thigh to grab for it when she notices that the other guys in the unit are reaching for theirs as well. Georgia notices it, too, and immediately gets to her feet. She reaches for her daughter and Santana gladly hands her over. Bobby and Williams come over, phones pressed to their ears.
“Sir,” they say, together but talking to separate people. “Yes sir, of course sir.”
She listens to the voice on her phone, giving her instruction, but she fails to really comprehend it. After all this time, six months of quiet and the once-a-month training, and then this.
“Pack your bags, boys,” Williams says as he flips his phone shut with a little more glee than she expects from him. “We got shit to do!”
//
She’s living in Rivke Wanzenknicker’s one bedroom apartment for three weeks before she gets off her ass and starts pulling her life back together. She’s Quinn Fabray, a Columbia Law School graduate, for Christ’s sake, and she won’t let this failing-the-Bar thing kill her career.
She starts by calling her old internships, asking them if they have any positions available. Her former bosses are eager to bring her on as a junior associate, but she can practically hear the corners of their mouths turn down when she tells them about the bar.
“I’m sorry,” they say, one after the other. “We can’t bring you on without admittance to the New York State Bar Association. We’ll keep you in mind next year, okay?”
They do sound genuinely apologetic, and she knows she probably has an ally or two in the offices should she come crawling back next year. But it hurts just the same, getting rejected by people she’d worked so diligently for not that long ago.
She lowers her expectations, then her standards. She stops applying for junior associate positions and instead throws her resume out to anyone looking for a paralegal. Glorified secretaries in the legal industry with only surface-level knowledge of law. The job is more about typing, filing and interviewing clients than getting any real cases. But she needs the money. Rent is due soon, and Rivke has been eyeing her lately every time she steps out of her apartment in her pajamas to go get the Metro from the corner deli. Leave it to the Hasidic landlady to make a lifelong Christian understand what Jewish Guilt feels like.
There are interviews. Many, actually. But she never knows what to tell them when they ask why she failed the Bar. Is it better to have failed because she didn’t have the knowledge she needed to pass, or because she’s a simpering female unable to control her emotions while her relationship is in turmoil? So she deflects the question, which only makes her ethics suspect, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s been inadvertently interviewing exclusively at the ethically responsible law firms in New York City. She hadn’t realized there were so many.
By the beginning of June, she’s flat broke and scarily close to calling her mother to ask for help. She can’t remember the last time she ate anything except ramen noodles, and to top things, off she can’t afford to pay her phone bill anymore. It’s shut off, as is her internet and cable, and she spends ten or twelve hours a day at the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library, applying for jobs and burying her nose in Bar Exam study guides. At least it’s air conditioned and the librarians are kind enough to let her use their phone when she gets a hit two weeks later.
Waters, Young & Associates is a midlevel firm in Chelsea, representing workman’s comp and injury lawsuits that can either make bank or break it. They need a paralegal, and they’re willing to take her on part-time so she can make rent and still study for the Bar next month. And, she figures, if they see her working hard they might make her an offer once she passes the second time around.
The lawyer interviewing her, Gary Young, is a mid-sixties Cape Cod-type with thick white hair and a pressed suit. He looks like what she imagines her father would, if she’d seen him in the last ten years. It’s intimidating, but she sits with her back straight and her ankles crossed, the way her father would have wanted. The interview goes well, and he doesn’t even ask her why she failed the exam. He just takes her references, and tells her they’ll be in touch. But he does it with a smile, and that leaves her reassured.
She spends three days at the library, alternately studying for the Bar and staring at the clock above the circulation desk as the seconds tick away. They don’t call, despite the fact that she’d given them the library number to get ahold of her. So she wanders back to her apartment with her computer tucked up in her satchel. It’s stays light later now, and the humid New York summer has already begun to set in, so her sundress feels light against her skin as she walks up to the front stoop of her building, only to find it blocked by a body and a large suitcase.
“Brittany?” she calls, bending over to try and catch a glimpse of the face buried in its knees. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”
Her friend lifts her head, and in the dying light of the late afternoon, Quinn can see she’s been crying. She sets her bag down on the sidewalk and crouches, her hands finding Brittany’s and squeezing. It’s been years since they’d last seen one another, and somehow Quinn is certain that this isn’t a good circumstance to reunite under.
“You didn’t call her back,” she says, sniffling and swiping the back of her arm over her nose. “She called you, and your phone was off. You didn’t call her back.”
“I’m broke, Britt, I had to cancel my plan. Call who? What’s going on?”
Brittany wraps both hands around Quinn’s and grips them tightly, like she’s trying to keep herself from floating away. Her big blue eyes are red-rimmed and wide and there’s absolute terror swimming there.
“Santana,” she says, murmured so softly that Quinn has to lean in close and press her forehead to Brittany’s to hear her. “She’s been shipped out, Quinn. She’s going to Syria and she tried to call you before she left. I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else. She’s gone, Quinn. She’s gone away to fight a war and…”
There’s a break in her words long enough to drag in a ragged breath and release it in a sob. Quinn is slack-jawed and dumb, because this isn’t how it was supposed to go. The Reserve doesn’t go overseas. It hasn’t since they ended the Afghan war in 2014. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Quinn,” Brittany chokes out her name and launches herself forward, pulling Quinn into a hug she didn’t even know she needed. “I don’t want to be alone if she doesn’t come back.”