monroeslittle (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} monroeslittle) wrote,@ 2009-07-01 00:27:00 |
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Fic: Truth Be Told, part 3
Title: Truth Be Told
Author: monroeslittle
Genre: Veronica Mars
Rating: Teen (for later implications and such)
Summary: Marlie Echolls has as many doubts as any other sixteen-year-old girl. One thing she never doubted, however, was who her parents were. At least she didn't until a woman knocked on her grandfather's door and dropped the bombshell. Logan/Veronica; future fic.
Keith had never felt so very old.
Veronica had been a moment from tears when she'd told him, her voice clipped, of Lianne's unexpected arrival. Keith was glad that Alicia had been there at the time. He was too dumbfounded to be any comfort to Veronica. He had honestly thought Lianne would never return.
Was that crazy of him?
The woman hadn't just become an alcoholic who walked out on her husband and daughter when the going got tough, who stole from them and broke their hearts. She'd become the sort of woman who abandoned her small, innocent baby and disappeared into thin air. Ever since their marriage fell apart after Lilly Kane's murder, Keith had felt anger, resentment, pity and annoyance towards his wife.
But truth be told, he didn't really hate her until she left that baby behind. The woman he had once loved would never abandon her child. There was nothing left of that woman, nothing but a shell of a person, and Keith hated that shell. He truly, utterly, completely hated it.
Veronica had relayed everything to them that night before then calling Mac and Wallace and locating Marlie, all the while letting Alicia try and sooth her. But eventually his hardened daughter had left, and he had known she would go to Logan as her greatest source of comfort. Keith had long ago acknowledged that Logan was good for his daughter. It hadn't been easy, but the kid had redeemed himself; nothing was better proof of that than how he had acted when everything had happened with Marlie all those years ago. . . .
It seemed unreal to Keith. It was all a bad dream. He loved Marlie as if she really were his granddaughter. He adored her. He would do anything for her. And it had been so easy to pretend over the years that she really was Veronica's biological daughter. But she wasn't. Veronica was still her mother, though. He was as sure of that as he had been that he was Veronica's father, even before he had ordered a test.
And what did Lianne want? Had she come simply to invade their lives, shatter their armor and break their hearts before leaving yet again, the same way she always did? Because, damn it, if that was the case, then Keith would strangle that woman to death. For too long she had hurt him and Veronica and he had been too in love with who she once was to stop it. But he was disillusioned of that final rose colored ideal, and he wouldn't let her hurt Marlie.
That little girl deserved better than that. Veronica had, too; Veronica had deserved the world on a silver platter, and all she had gotten were the crumbled remains of a life gone wrong on a battered, rusted, chipped plate instead. A part of Keith would never forgive himself for that. But Veronica had made a wonderful life for herself despite it all and had determined when she was only twenty years old that she would make a wonderful life for Marlie, too, no matter what it would cost her.
Keith would make sure that was exactly what happened.
How would he do it?
He would start by getting rid of Lianne. She was nothing but trouble. A tiny voice in his head told him that Marlie was really just like Veronica and that she would want to meet Lianne, would want to know her, and it was wrong of him to keep her from that. . . . But he ignored that little voice. He wouldn't let Marlie be hurt the way Veronica was, not even by her own mother. He wouldn't. He wouldn't.
And with that in mind, Keith cleared his schedule for that day and began his search for Lianne Mars.
“I wondered when you'd come to see me,” her aunt Mac greeted as Marlie pulled into the driveway. Marlie almost pulled right out again. Aunt Mac would probably just call Veronica, who would come and. . . . But no, Veronica was too busy pretending nothing was wrong to be bothered coming across town to fetch her.
Marlie's stomach was swirling with anger as she stepped out of the car and slammed the door shut. When she finally met her aunt Mac's gaze, it was to see the brunette staring at her with utmost sympathy and understanding. “Did you hate your parents for not telling you that they weren't your parents?” Marlie asked her, not beating around the bush.
Aunt Mac didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” she answered. "I could barely stand to look at them. And I even sought out my real parents. It was obvious my real mom wanted to know me as much as I did her." Marlie knew she had come to the right place. Aunt Mac gave her a small smile. "You want to come in and talk? Maybe have something to eat?" Marlie nodded gratefully and followed her aunt into the house.
Aunt Mac's house was huge, probably the biggest house Marlie had ever even seen. Her uncle Dick was just as wealthy as her dad, but the difference was that while her mom and dad liked being subtle about their wealth, Uncle Dick enjoyed flaunting it and Aunt Mac didn't seem to mind too much. It meant they lived in huge house full of expensive things, and if Marlie hadn't known her aunt and uncle her entire life, she would have felt awkward in the grandiose place.
"Where's Uncle Dick?" Marlie asked as she slipped into a couch in the living room and accepted the orange juice Aunt Mac handed her.
"On a business trip," Aunt Mac answered. "And Chris left for school, so we have the house to ourselves." She sat across from Marlie, a mug of coffee in her own hand. Aunt Mac hadn't simply married a wealthy man; rather, years before she married Uncle Dick when they were both passing thirty years old, she had made her own fortune online. She was probably the most intelligent person Marlie knew, and her entire life had always fascinated Marlie.
Except, she had never really pressed for details concerning . . . the switch; whenever the subject had come up in the past, Aunt Mac had always said something simple — “I like my parents, even if they named me Cindy,” — and that was that. End of discussion.
"Can you tell me about . . . everything with your parents and stuff?" Marlie asked, unable to hold back.
"It was Veronica who figured it out," Aunt Mac answered. "But that shouldn't surprise you." She gave a small, affectionate grin. Marlie couldn't help but wonder bitterly to herself why so many amazing, cool people like Uncle Wallace and Aunt Mac so adored her mother.
“Remind me again why I tried to get away from my parents and ended up at with one of their best friends for the second time in a row?” Marlie asked sullenly.
“You’re stupid?” Aunt Mac suggested.
“Thanks, Aunt Mac, that really puts me in a better mood,” Marlie replied.
Aunt Mac gave a small, sympathetic smile. "She found out about the switch because I asked her to find out some information on my parents,” she said, carrying on with her story, “and she was really hesitant to tell me. I think she realized that in some ways it would be easier for me not to know."
"But she did tell you?"
"She told me, yes, because I asked her to. It — it blew me away, Marlie, just as I'm sure the truth blew you away. You hear about this sort of thing on the news and in TV and stuff, but . . . you never imagine it could happen to you. I didn't know how to react. I just, I guess I had this overwhelming urge to meet my real parents because I had always felt so out of place in my family of blonde meataterians."
"Did you meet your real parents? What were they like? Did you get to talk to them?"
Aunt Mac smiled at Marlie's eagerness. "It turned out that I had been switched with a girl who went to Neptune named Madison Sinclair. I hated her almost as much as your mother did. She was spoiled rotten and was a complete and utter bitc. . . well, she was a bad person." Marlie smiled slightly at her aunt Mac.
"Anyway, I went to a party at her house and got to meet her little sister, who was really my little sister, and I saw all these pictures of Madison in amazing places and . . . and I was angry at my parents. Because I should have had that great little sister and been to all those great places and grown up in a house that loved reading and traveling and . . . and I was so angry. Because it looked as if I could belong in that house.
"I got to meet my birth mother and it was obvious just by the way she looked at me that she wanted to get to know me," Aunt Mac went on. "But . . . ."
"But what?"
"But I realized I didn't need to know her. As much as I might resent my parents, they raised me. They loved me enough not to want give me up when it came out that Madison and I had been switched as babies. And my little brother . . . I mean, I know Jason and Ben can annoy you, but you still love them, don't you?" Marlie had to admit, however grudgingly, that she probably did. But she didn't say that aloud.
"And I realized that my mom and dad loved me so much they gave up ever getting to know their real daughter in order to have me. That's a lot of love, considering I never thought I was all that special to my parents."
"So what did you end up doing?"
"Nothing," Aunt Mac answered. "I did nothing. It wasn't worth it."
Marlie couldn't help but be disappointed. That wasn't what she wanted to hear. It just wasn't. She sure as hell didn't want to do nothing. She couldn't do nothing; it would kill her.
"Don't get me wrong," Aunt Mac continued, "I still thought about it a lot. When I got in a fight with my parents or had a bad day, I would wonder what my life would be like if I had never been switched. But . . . at the end of my senior year, things really went wrong for me, and my parents were there for me as they never had been before. They . . . they would have moved heaven and hell for me that summer after it all happened."
Marlie knew something terrible had happened to her aunt Mac on graduation night; she had heard plenty of allusions to it. Somehow Aunt Mac had been related to the boy who jumped off the roof, but that was about all Marlie knew.
"So what should I do?" asked Marlie. "Forget I learned the truth? Because that's kind of hard to do."
"No one's asking you to forget anything. I think they always planned on telling you –"
Marlie snorted meanly. "Are you sure about that?"
"I can't imagine telling your kid something like that is easy," Aunt Mac told her. "How do you say to a girl you raised and loved that she isn't your kid even though as far as you're concerned she is?"
Marlie didn't answer.
"Look, I know you're mad at your mom for lying to you, but . . . she did it for you, so you didn't have to live with the fact that the woman who actually gave birth to you abandoned you. Veronica gave up normal life as a teenager, gave up parties and late nights out and being young so that you could lead a carefree life. Can you really hate her for that?"
Marlie didn't meet her aunt's gaze. So the woman made a good point. But it didn't mean that Marlie didn't want to meet her real mother, didn't want to meet the woman who . . . because Lianne had come back, right? She had left Marlie, but she had come back, too, she had wanted to see Marlie and . . . that meant something, didn't it?
"If you want to meet Lianne," Aunt Mac said, as if reading her thoughts, "then that's your choice. And no one is going to try and stop you. But before you . . . just remember that Veronica is the one who stayed, Veronica is the one who raised you — and Logan, too, even though he wasn't even related to you — and if you seek out Lianne, you're going to hurt them . . . badly. You need to make sure it's worth it."
"That's a lot to expect of me," Marlie said. "I'm the kid here. Shouldn't they be thinking of ways not to hurt me?"
"Their way was not to tell you." Marlie could only stare at her. "I still remember what Veronica told me when it all came out," Aunt Mac went on. "'You had a choice in all of this,' she told me. I did. I chose to learn the truth and it was then my choice to seek our — or not seek out — my biological parents."
"And you chose not to," said Marlie.
"And now you have to choose," Aunt Mac replied, nodding.
"It's not that I . . .," Marlie began hesitantly, looking down at her orange juice. "It's not that I don't love my parents or anything." She looked back up at her aunt Mac. "I just . . . I feel so . . . confused. And I . . . I, oh, I don't know." She sighed.
The phone rang at that moment. Aunt Mac slowly rose to her feet and put down her mug. "It took me over a year to ask my parents about the switch," Aunt Mac told her. "I wish I had done it sooner. You should talk to your parents — your real parents — before you decide anything. You can go to Lianne if that's what you want, but there’s a pretty good chance you’ll hurt your parents if you do that. If that's okay with you, then okay. But just . . . make sure it's worth it, Marlie. Make sure. Your parents will always love you, but that doesn't mean you should ever make them doubt you love them back."
Marlie had no chance to respond before her aunt Mac was in the other room, answering the phone.
Veronica had gotten rather good at the art of ignoring. She ignored that dinner at her father's house meant sitting at a table with Lianne. She ignored that her dad went to every doctor's appointment with her mother. She ignored that Lianne kept trying to talk to her whenever she could, even if Veronica would give clipped answers. She ignored the growing bulge beneath her mother's dress.
She ignored it all.
Sophomore year began and that was that. She was living with Mac like a normal teenager, she was single and she was focused on school. Her infamy from the sex tape had faded. It was college and people got over things like that quickly; there were, after all, new scandals to make everyone gasp. She got to know new professors; she made friends with strangely normal girls who didn't have sordid histories, violent ex-boyfriends or mothers who could win the world's worst mother award.
But everyday, in the back of her mind, was her mother, was desperate blue eyes so terribly similar to her own and a round stomach that cried out for pity and sympathy and forgiveness, and it was killing Veronica. She just didn't understand her mother and how the woman could be so weak. She was nothing like Veronica, and weren't parents and their children supposed to be alike?
But that wasn't necessarily true. After all, Logan was nothing like his father.
Logan.
She didn't talk to him for months after that day at the Grand. She would see him from afar with Dick or walking out of class, but she never approached him. A part of her was ashamed of how she had broken down in front of him. But the larger part of her knew it was simply impossible for Logan Echolls and Veronica Mars to be friends.
It was just impossible.
Because even though they couldn't possibly to be together, every time one saw the other with a member of the opposite sex things went horribly awry. And then there were familiar gestures that had become so automatic when they were together it seemed wrong not to do them now, but it was wrong, because, for example, kissing your friend's neck was inappropriate on multiple levels.
It was simply easier to avoid him, and she was pretty sure he realized that, too, because Hearst wasn't that big of a school and if they hadn't both been making the effort of avoidance, they surely would have run into one another by now.
"Hi, honey," Lianne said hesitantly as Veronica entered Keith's apartment, dropping the groceries she had gotten for dinner on the counter. Veronica didn't reply. "How was your day?" Lianne questioned. Veronica began putting food into the fridge, steadfastly ignoring her mother, as per usual.
"How's Logan?" Lianne asked slowly, hopefully. "Aren't you two . . . ?"
Veronica finally responded. "None of you business." How did her mother even know about Logan? And how dare she presume to have the right to know about Logan?
There was a brief silence in which Veronica got out a pan to begin boiling water for the spaghetti. She was painfully aware of Lianne's presence, but that was the cost of agreeing to her begging father to stop by for dinner that night, and she would put up with it as she always did. She loved her dad too much; it was unnatural, really, the sacrifices she made for him.
"Are you ever going to talk to me, Veronica?" Lianne asked suddenly.
"Sure," Veronica answered. "When I forgive you then I'll talk to you."
"And . . . and when will you forgive me?" Lianne asked, her voice timid.
"When all four of the Beatles get back together," Veronica answered, wishing she hadn't bothered to start speaking to Lianne at all. She decided not to say another word as she made dinner; her dad would be home soon and he could handle the ex-wife he had invited into his home.
Again there was a stretch of silence. But once more Lianne broke it, her voice thick with desperation. "What can I do, Veronica? Please, just tell me what I can do. I'm really trying here."
Veronica couldn't help herself. "How are you trying, again?" Veronica asked her angrily. "You run away without a word to Dad or me. Months later I finally find you in a bar and I use all the money I've saved for college to make you better and bring you home and you waste it all. Then you leave again, stealing thousands of dollars from us and —”
"It's not that simple!" Lianne protested. "I was sober when I came home. I hadn't wasted your money! But it was hard, Veronica! There was no place in this house for me anymore. Your father had moved on; he was in love with someone else, even if he tried to deny it! And you . . . you had turned into a person I didn't recognize anymore, and it just wasn't the same!"
"Did you expect it to be?" Veronica snarled. "Did you really think you could abandon us for an entire year and everything would be picture perfect when you returned? My life was HELL that year, Mom. I could have used you! Even if it was only the fact that you stayed and stood by us! That would have been enough.” She paused, breathing heavily, before adding bitterly, “But it was too much for you."
"I'm not as strong as you and your father!" cried Lianne. "You can't hate me for that, you can't. Not everyone can face the world the way you can. I'm sorry I can't, Veronica, I really am, but I can't be any more than who I am!"
"Yes, you can," Veronica replied. "People can change. They can become tougher. I did. I was a teenager, my best friend was murdered and my entire school hated me . . . but I got tougher. I learned to deal with it. And do you know why I did? Because I loved Dad enough not to abandon him. You should have loved us enough to do the same."
Lianne was crying now, was shaking her head and crying, but she said nothing more than a mumbled, "I'm sorry, Veronica, I really am. . . ." Veronica didn't reply. She turned away from her mother and put her entire attention into stirring the sauce.
Time seemed to pass slowly, and with each passing minute Veronica grew more and more annoyed with her father. How could he leave her here with her mother? It was past six; he should be home. Where was he?
"I'm going to get a job as soon as the baby's born," Lianne told her. "I'm not going to keep living off your father. I used to be a bank teller, you know. I could probably get a job doing that."
Veronica didn't care. She didn't want to hear this.
"Veronica?"
"Good for you. Is there any chance you could do that sooner than later so I don't have to see you every time I want to see my dad?" Lianne said nothing at first in response to Veronica's bitter reply.
But finally, her voice softer than it had been in a long time, Lianne told her, "I'm going to do right by this baby, Veronica. I really am. I'm never going to hurt her; I'm never going to abandon her." The doctors had told them the baby was a girl. That fact made Veronica even angrier for reasons she couldn’t fathom.
"I wouldn't tell the kid that," Veronica said. "That would just be setting the baby up for disappointment." And even as the door finally opened and Keith stepped into the apartment, Veronica met eyes with Lianne for the first time and told her mother, "That baby deserves better than you."
"Hey hon!" Keith greeted Veronica, smiling brightly at the sight of her.
"I've started dinner, Dad, but you'll have to finish it," Veronica replied, "I have to go."
Keith frowned. "I thought you were going to stay for dinner. . . ."
"I have a paper," Veronica replied tightly. She gave him the smallest of smiles, pressing a kiss to his cheek and passing him by. She didn't look him right in the face. She couldn't handle the sad, disappointed expression she was sure was there. And she certainly didn't glance at Lianne as she left the apartment.
But she couldn't stop herself from hearing her mother as the older woman whispered, her voice broken, "I know she deserves better."
There were a thousand pictures of her as a baby, a toddler, a little kid. Plenty of them were framed and scattered across her house and her grandpa's house, but plenty more were in box after box, all stacked in her parents' bedroom closet.
Veronica had been on the phone that Aunt Mac had answered, as Marlie had known she would be. But just as she hadn’t the night before, her mother did not demand Marlie come home or go to school or do anything at all. Aunt Mac told Marlie she'd be working from home that day and Marlie was welcome to spend the day there.
But as soon as her aunt Mac settled down in her study, Marlie left. And she found herself back at her house, one that was empty now that everyone was gone at school or work, and in her parents' bedroom, looking through the boxes in the closet. She wasn't sure what she was searching for, but she had nothing better to do.
It wasn't as if she didn't fit into her family. She would have never imagined she wasn't her parents' child. She was a carbon copy of her mother as far as looks went; she had the same explosive temper both her parents possessed. She had always felt herself a part of the family; she didn't feel the way Aunt Mac had described feeling about her parents.
But she couldn't stop herself from feeling suddenly as if her whole life had been a lie. For so long she had believed that her mother hadn't wanted a child, hadn't wanted her, but had learned to love her anyway because she was her kid. But now she wasn't. Did that suddenly mean that all those times Veronica got angry at her, yelled at her or at her father, telling him when she didn't think Marlie could hear that she never should have become a mother . . . did that mean all those times Veronica really, truly, disliked her?
That couldn’t be possible, not really; Marlie knew her mother loved her, she knew it . . . but what if Veronica resented her? What if Veronica lay awake at night wondering what her life would have been like if Lianne had never left Marlie with her?
Sitting there thinking about it, Marlie felt her anger towards her mother rise. She hadn't forced her mother to take care of her or claim her as her own. That had been Veronica's choice. Why should Marlie suffer for it? And, really, was it so wrong to want to know her real mother? Among all the pictures of a baby Marlie, pictures that also held her grandparents, Veronica, Logan, Uncle Wallace, and Aunt Mac, there wasn't a single picture of Lianne. Why was that?
Marlie tried to imagine what Lianne must have been thinking when she had left Marlie behind. Had she wanted to leave her? How long after she had been born did her mother leave? Was her mother afraid? Had she regretted it and tried to come back and Veronica hadn't let her? Had Veronica made her leave in the first place?
There was no way to know. After all, how could she understand what Lianne was thinking and feeling if she didn't even know the woman? It wasn't wrong, then, to want to know her real mother. It was her right, just as she had told Lianne before the woman drove away.
It took Marlie a few minutes to formulate her plan. According to the clock on her mother's bedside table, it was eleven thirty-seven in the morning. Hopefully Grandpa Keith wouldn't be at the office; hopefully he would be out working on a case. . . . She called the office. It went to the machine. Praying that no one would show up at Mars Investigations between the call and her arrival, Marlie drove to the small building.
Luck was with her: no one was there.
She started up the computer, and her mind flashed back to the times she had gone into the office with her mother when Veronica was helping Keith out on a Saturday. She could remember sitting in Veronica's lap, comfortable and carefree, believing herself to be the happiest girl alive. Once upon a time she had thought the world began and ended with Veronica Echolls, that perfect woman who tucked her bed into night with twenty-five kisses and woke her up the next morning with eggs and bacon that smiled at her.
But things changed.
As she grew older, though, she still spent time with her mom at Mars Investigations, and her mother would tell her about the search sites, about the life of an F.B.I. agent and of a P.I. Of course, Veronica would never tell her very much, but Marlie had never cared very much. She wasn't interested in saving the world and especially not in taking pictures of cheating spouses. Still, Marlie knew enough to know how to root out a little information.
She searched for Lianne Mars and found exactly what she wanted.
Spouse: Keith Mars. Born 1/15/1960. Divorced.
Children: Veronica Mars Echolls. Born 8/17/1987. Married 10/3/2012 to Logan Echolls.
Marlene Mars Echolls. Born 11/27/2007. Adopted 5/31/2008 by Veronica Mars Echolls. Adopted 10/1/2012 by Logan Echolls.
Right there, for anyone to find, for herself to have found years ago, was proof that she did not really belong to the parents who had raised her. She was the child of Lianne Mars. There was more information; more dates. There were lists of parking tickets, alcohol violations, and other public records; there was even a mention of her time spent in a rehabilitation clinic. That was the only mention of Marlene, though.
Marlene Echolls. Born 11/27/2007. Adopted 5/31/2008 by Veronica Mars Echolls. Adopted 10/1/2012 by Logan Echolls.
But that wasn't what she needed. What she needed was an address, a current address. And that was there, too. In plain English there was a location of her mother. Marlie grabbed a pink sticky note from the desk and copied it down. If Veronica wasn't going to let her meet her mother, then Marlie would take it out of her mother's hands and put it into her other mother's grasp.
Marlie wasn't as brave as she imagined herself to be, however. She drove the hour ride all the way out to Lianne's house and then couldn't even make herself step out of the car. She knew it was the right house. The truck was parked right there in the driveway. Marlie stayed for nearly half an hour, her mind buzzing, before starting the drive back home.
Her aunt Mac let her back into the house without protest. "Another hour and I would have sounded the police," Aunt Mac said. Marlie was grateful that her aunt Mac wasn't the sort to freak out the moment she went missing. She made herself a sandwich and ate in silence while Aunt Mac worked on the computer, a laptop she'd brought into the kitchen as if to keep an eye on Marlie.
She went home that night. Maybe her parents would be ready to talk.
Dinner was awkward. Jason and Ben knew something was wrong, but no one was offering any explanations. Veronica finally took them aside while Marlie sat in silence with her father, and she must have explained it to them. Marlie didn't care. She had bigger fish to fry. She wanted to ask her dad what it had been like to become her father, why he had done it, what had he felt towards her. . . .
She didn't say a word, though.
When Veronica came back into the room and began clearing the dishes, Jason and Ben weren't with her. Marlie watched her for a moment. Her mother was five months pregnant now. The baby was a girl. In four months, Veronica would have her own daughter, a real daughter.
"What did you do today?" her father finally asked, his eyes burning into her.
"Stayed with Aunt Mac," she answered quietly.
"What did you two talk about?" asked Veronica, her back turned to Marlie as she washed dishes in the sink. Logan got up and began helping her. Marlie felt herself ignored once more. This wasn't how it was supposed to work.
"Do you really care?" she snarled. Veronica's back stiffened.
Logan turned to her. "What do you want to know?" he asked.
"I want to know my mother."
"She's an alcoholic who abandoned you," Veronica said, still not facing Marlie. "What more is there?"
"That's not being fair to her or me," Marlie replied. "I deserve to know the woman who gave birth to me. I deserve it. If you were in my place, you'd demand the same thing, Mom. You know it. You know it."
Logan put a hand on Veronica’s shoulder as if to calm the storm. He turned to her again. “Do you want to know what happened? How it happened?” His voice was calm, his eyes bright.
“Yes,” she said, “of course.”
He glanced at his wife. “Veronica, do you want to —?”
“What’s the story?” Veronica said, still facing away from Marlie. “She came, she had a baby, she left, and I raised that baby. That’s it. That’s the story.”
“Why?” Marlie asked.
“Why what?” Veronica asked.
Marlie stood. “Why did you raise me? Why didn’t Grandpa Keith? Or why didn’t you give me up for adoption? Why did you raise me?” She knew exactly what she wanted her mother to say in answer the moment the questions left her lips: I raised you because I wanted to raise you, Marlie. I raised you because I loved you, Marlie.
“Your grandpa wasn’t considered a good candidate for raising a kid by the California government and since he wasn’t a blood relative, there was nothing he could do to change their minds,” Veronica answered, scrubbing furiously at a dinner plate as she spoke into the sink. “And we weren’t going to give you up for adoption; that would have been wrong. So I raised you. What other choice was there?”
What other choice was there? The words echoed in Marlie’s head.
“Marlie,” her father began, stepping towards her with a look of understanding on his face, as if he knew that Veronica had said the wrong thing, “what you have to understand is that —”
“I want to meet Lianne. I want a chance to know her.”
Her father sighed. “Marlie,” he said, the word coming out sounding so very tired.
“No. You can’t talk me out of this. I want to meet her. It’s my right.”
“Fine,” Veronica snapped abruptly, a dish clanking to the bottom of the sink as she spoke. She grabbed a dishtowel and dried her hands before pulling open the kitchen desk drawers and beginning to search through them.
"Veronica . . .," said Logan hesitantly.
"Damn it!" Veronica exclaimed. She turned to Logan, demanding, "Hand me the phone."
"Veronica, I think —”
"Hand me the damned phone, Logan," Veronica said, her face pinched. Marlie didn't know what was going on, but it seemed at last she had gotten an actual emotional reaction out of her mother, and that was something at least. Her father did as her mother requested and a moment later Veronica had called the operator.
"I need the number for a Lianne Mars," Veronica said. She was silent for a moment, listening to something, before replying, "Yeah, yeah, that's her." She grabbed a piece of paper then and wrote down a number. She clicked off the phone and shoved both it and the scrap of paper at Marlie.
"You want to talk to her," she said. "There you go. There's the phone and her number." And with that she stormed from the room. Marlie was a little surprised. Her mother wasn't usually the sort to walk out in the middle of a fight, if that's what they'd been having. Marlie looked at the phone number, wondering if she could call her mother when she hadn't been able to see her even after driving all the way out there.
"Take it from someone who's mom might have loved him but who didn't care enough to stick around," her father said suddenly, drawing her attention away from the phone. "It's only worth so much pain." She wasn't sure what that was supposed to be mean, but she said nothing as he leaned down towards her and pressed a lingering kiss to her head. “Don't forget, though,” he whispered, his breath warm on her ear, “I'm always gonna be your dad, kid. No matter what.”
He left the room after that, probably to talk to her mother.
Alicia hated Lianne Mars with every fiber of her being. It wasn't really right of her, she knew, and she tried to think charitably of the woman, to think of all that she herself had in comparison to what little Lianne had, but still the hatred remained.
Usually it was easy to forget about Lianne, about the times she had come and torn apart the relationships Alicia and Keith would build. She had been married to Keith for years and she loved him so much she couldn't imagine what her life would have become if they had never gotten back together that summer. She adored both her sons, her greatest sources of pride, and she even got along with her daughter-in-law Penny. But the idea of life without Keith. . . .
Not to mention the fact that she thought of Veronica as her own daughter.
That tiny girl was a force to be reckoned with and at times it seemed as if she were completely beyond Alicia's understanding. But most of the time, it wasn't hard at all for Alicia to understand Veronica. After all, Alicia too had felt herself alone in the world before, and she could admire how strong Veronica was. She liked being a kind of mother to the small blonde, and she considered Veronica's children — Marlie included — her grandchildren as much as she did Wallace's two daughters.
It was easy, really, to forget that Lianne was ever a part of the mix. But she was. And now she was back. Was she here for good? Alicia had faith that her relationship with Keith wouldn't suffer at all from this; the love between them had only grown over the years. But she was worried about Logan, Veronica, and Marlene. They were her family. And no matter what at least one of them, maybe even Keith, too, was going to be hurt by whatever happened next.
It had been two weeks since she and Keith had come home from an amazing date of dinner and dancing to find a shell-shocked and pale Veronica explaining that Lianne had finally come back and Marlie knew everything. It seemed as if things had returned to a kind of tense normalcy since then.
Marlie was back in school and was no longer running away at any moment. No one had heard from Lianne since that first night, and when the Echolls had come for dinner three days ago, no one in the family had even come close to mentioning her name. So what did that all mean? Were they all going to pretend it didn't happen?
Alicia recognized it wasn't that simple. Sometime, sooner or later, things would come to a head. Marlene might not be Veronica's daughter, but they were more alike than either realized. Marlie wouldn't be able to go long without something happening. And Alicia knew that Lianne would be involved in whatever happened. They weren't going to get rid of her easily.
Alicia knew Keith had gone to talk to Lianne. He had said he was going to talk to his ex-wife to ask her intentions. He hadn't said much afterwards, though. He simply told her, his voice tired, that Lianne claimed she wouldn't invade their lives again and she knew it was a mistake to do it that one night.
"Do you believe her?" Alicia had asked.
"All I believe," Keith had replied, sighing, "is that I need a beer and a night of baseball."
It was only a matter of time.
And Alicia was right.
She got the news via Keith via Logan: Marlene had called Lianne, asking to meet her.
Title: Truth Be Told
Author: monroeslittle
Genre: Veronica Mars
Rating: Teen (for later implications and such)
Summary: Marlie Echolls has as many doubts as any other sixteen-year-old girl. One thing she never doubted, however, was who her parents were. At least she didn't until a woman knocked on her grandfather's door and dropped the bombshell. Logan/Veronica; future fic.
Keith had never felt so very old.
Veronica had been a moment from tears when she'd told him, her voice clipped, of Lianne's unexpected arrival. Keith was glad that Alicia had been there at the time. He was too dumbfounded to be any comfort to Veronica. He had honestly thought Lianne would never return.
Was that crazy of him?
The woman hadn't just become an alcoholic who walked out on her husband and daughter when the going got tough, who stole from them and broke their hearts. She'd become the sort of woman who abandoned her small, innocent baby and disappeared into thin air. Ever since their marriage fell apart after Lilly Kane's murder, Keith had felt anger, resentment, pity and annoyance towards his wife.
But truth be told, he didn't really hate her until she left that baby behind. The woman he had once loved would never abandon her child. There was nothing left of that woman, nothing but a shell of a person, and Keith hated that shell. He truly, utterly, completely hated it.
Veronica had relayed everything to them that night before then calling Mac and Wallace and locating Marlie, all the while letting Alicia try and sooth her. But eventually his hardened daughter had left, and he had known she would go to Logan as her greatest source of comfort. Keith had long ago acknowledged that Logan was good for his daughter. It hadn't been easy, but the kid had redeemed himself; nothing was better proof of that than how he had acted when everything had happened with Marlie all those years ago. . . .
It seemed unreal to Keith. It was all a bad dream. He loved Marlie as if she really were his granddaughter. He adored her. He would do anything for her. And it had been so easy to pretend over the years that she really was Veronica's biological daughter. But she wasn't. Veronica was still her mother, though. He was as sure of that as he had been that he was Veronica's father, even before he had ordered a test.
And what did Lianne want? Had she come simply to invade their lives, shatter their armor and break their hearts before leaving yet again, the same way she always did? Because, damn it, if that was the case, then Keith would strangle that woman to death. For too long she had hurt him and Veronica and he had been too in love with who she once was to stop it. But he was disillusioned of that final rose colored ideal, and he wouldn't let her hurt Marlie.
That little girl deserved better than that. Veronica had, too; Veronica had deserved the world on a silver platter, and all she had gotten were the crumbled remains of a life gone wrong on a battered, rusted, chipped plate instead. A part of Keith would never forgive himself for that. But Veronica had made a wonderful life for herself despite it all and had determined when she was only twenty years old that she would make a wonderful life for Marlie, too, no matter what it would cost her.
Keith would make sure that was exactly what happened.
How would he do it?
He would start by getting rid of Lianne. She was nothing but trouble. A tiny voice in his head told him that Marlie was really just like Veronica and that she would want to meet Lianne, would want to know her, and it was wrong of him to keep her from that. . . . But he ignored that little voice. He wouldn't let Marlie be hurt the way Veronica was, not even by her own mother. He wouldn't. He wouldn't.
And with that in mind, Keith cleared his schedule for that day and began his search for Lianne Mars.
“I wondered when you'd come to see me,” her aunt Mac greeted as Marlie pulled into the driveway. Marlie almost pulled right out again. Aunt Mac would probably just call Veronica, who would come and. . . . But no, Veronica was too busy pretending nothing was wrong to be bothered coming across town to fetch her.
Marlie's stomach was swirling with anger as she stepped out of the car and slammed the door shut. When she finally met her aunt Mac's gaze, it was to see the brunette staring at her with utmost sympathy and understanding. “Did you hate your parents for not telling you that they weren't your parents?” Marlie asked her, not beating around the bush.
Aunt Mac didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” she answered. "I could barely stand to look at them. And I even sought out my real parents. It was obvious my real mom wanted to know me as much as I did her." Marlie knew she had come to the right place. Aunt Mac gave her a small smile. "You want to come in and talk? Maybe have something to eat?" Marlie nodded gratefully and followed her aunt into the house.
Aunt Mac's house was huge, probably the biggest house Marlie had ever even seen. Her uncle Dick was just as wealthy as her dad, but the difference was that while her mom and dad liked being subtle about their wealth, Uncle Dick enjoyed flaunting it and Aunt Mac didn't seem to mind too much. It meant they lived in huge house full of expensive things, and if Marlie hadn't known her aunt and uncle her entire life, she would have felt awkward in the grandiose place.
"Where's Uncle Dick?" Marlie asked as she slipped into a couch in the living room and accepted the orange juice Aunt Mac handed her.
"On a business trip," Aunt Mac answered. "And Chris left for school, so we have the house to ourselves." She sat across from Marlie, a mug of coffee in her own hand. Aunt Mac hadn't simply married a wealthy man; rather, years before she married Uncle Dick when they were both passing thirty years old, she had made her own fortune online. She was probably the most intelligent person Marlie knew, and her entire life had always fascinated Marlie.
Except, she had never really pressed for details concerning . . . the switch; whenever the subject had come up in the past, Aunt Mac had always said something simple — “I like my parents, even if they named me Cindy,” — and that was that. End of discussion.
"Can you tell me about . . . everything with your parents and stuff?" Marlie asked, unable to hold back.
"It was Veronica who figured it out," Aunt Mac answered. "But that shouldn't surprise you." She gave a small, affectionate grin. Marlie couldn't help but wonder bitterly to herself why so many amazing, cool people like Uncle Wallace and Aunt Mac so adored her mother.
“Remind me again why I tried to get away from my parents and ended up at with one of their best friends for the second time in a row?” Marlie asked sullenly.
“You’re stupid?” Aunt Mac suggested.
“Thanks, Aunt Mac, that really puts me in a better mood,” Marlie replied.
Aunt Mac gave a small, sympathetic smile. "She found out about the switch because I asked her to find out some information on my parents,” she said, carrying on with her story, “and she was really hesitant to tell me. I think she realized that in some ways it would be easier for me not to know."
"But she did tell you?"
"She told me, yes, because I asked her to. It — it blew me away, Marlie, just as I'm sure the truth blew you away. You hear about this sort of thing on the news and in TV and stuff, but . . . you never imagine it could happen to you. I didn't know how to react. I just, I guess I had this overwhelming urge to meet my real parents because I had always felt so out of place in my family of blonde meataterians."
"Did you meet your real parents? What were they like? Did you get to talk to them?"
Aunt Mac smiled at Marlie's eagerness. "It turned out that I had been switched with a girl who went to Neptune named Madison Sinclair. I hated her almost as much as your mother did. She was spoiled rotten and was a complete and utter bitc. . . well, she was a bad person." Marlie smiled slightly at her aunt Mac.
"Anyway, I went to a party at her house and got to meet her little sister, who was really my little sister, and I saw all these pictures of Madison in amazing places and . . . and I was angry at my parents. Because I should have had that great little sister and been to all those great places and grown up in a house that loved reading and traveling and . . . and I was so angry. Because it looked as if I could belong in that house.
"I got to meet my birth mother and it was obvious just by the way she looked at me that she wanted to get to know me," Aunt Mac went on. "But . . . ."
"But what?"
"But I realized I didn't need to know her. As much as I might resent my parents, they raised me. They loved me enough not to want give me up when it came out that Madison and I had been switched as babies. And my little brother . . . I mean, I know Jason and Ben can annoy you, but you still love them, don't you?" Marlie had to admit, however grudgingly, that she probably did. But she didn't say that aloud.
"And I realized that my mom and dad loved me so much they gave up ever getting to know their real daughter in order to have me. That's a lot of love, considering I never thought I was all that special to my parents."
"So what did you end up doing?"
"Nothing," Aunt Mac answered. "I did nothing. It wasn't worth it."
Marlie couldn't help but be disappointed. That wasn't what she wanted to hear. It just wasn't. She sure as hell didn't want to do nothing. She couldn't do nothing; it would kill her.
"Don't get me wrong," Aunt Mac continued, "I still thought about it a lot. When I got in a fight with my parents or had a bad day, I would wonder what my life would be like if I had never been switched. But . . . at the end of my senior year, things really went wrong for me, and my parents were there for me as they never had been before. They . . . they would have moved heaven and hell for me that summer after it all happened."
Marlie knew something terrible had happened to her aunt Mac on graduation night; she had heard plenty of allusions to it. Somehow Aunt Mac had been related to the boy who jumped off the roof, but that was about all Marlie knew.
"So what should I do?" asked Marlie. "Forget I learned the truth? Because that's kind of hard to do."
"No one's asking you to forget anything. I think they always planned on telling you –"
Marlie snorted meanly. "Are you sure about that?"
"I can't imagine telling your kid something like that is easy," Aunt Mac told her. "How do you say to a girl you raised and loved that she isn't your kid even though as far as you're concerned she is?"
Marlie didn't answer.
"Look, I know you're mad at your mom for lying to you, but . . . she did it for you, so you didn't have to live with the fact that the woman who actually gave birth to you abandoned you. Veronica gave up normal life as a teenager, gave up parties and late nights out and being young so that you could lead a carefree life. Can you really hate her for that?"
Marlie didn't meet her aunt's gaze. So the woman made a good point. But it didn't mean that Marlie didn't want to meet her real mother, didn't want to meet the woman who . . . because Lianne had come back, right? She had left Marlie, but she had come back, too, she had wanted to see Marlie and . . . that meant something, didn't it?
"If you want to meet Lianne," Aunt Mac said, as if reading her thoughts, "then that's your choice. And no one is going to try and stop you. But before you . . . just remember that Veronica is the one who stayed, Veronica is the one who raised you — and Logan, too, even though he wasn't even related to you — and if you seek out Lianne, you're going to hurt them . . . badly. You need to make sure it's worth it."
"That's a lot to expect of me," Marlie said. "I'm the kid here. Shouldn't they be thinking of ways not to hurt me?"
"Their way was not to tell you." Marlie could only stare at her. "I still remember what Veronica told me when it all came out," Aunt Mac went on. "'You had a choice in all of this,' she told me. I did. I chose to learn the truth and it was then my choice to seek our — or not seek out — my biological parents."
"And you chose not to," said Marlie.
"And now you have to choose," Aunt Mac replied, nodding.
"It's not that I . . .," Marlie began hesitantly, looking down at her orange juice. "It's not that I don't love my parents or anything." She looked back up at her aunt Mac. "I just . . . I feel so . . . confused. And I . . . I, oh, I don't know." She sighed.
The phone rang at that moment. Aunt Mac slowly rose to her feet and put down her mug. "It took me over a year to ask my parents about the switch," Aunt Mac told her. "I wish I had done it sooner. You should talk to your parents — your real parents — before you decide anything. You can go to Lianne if that's what you want, but there’s a pretty good chance you’ll hurt your parents if you do that. If that's okay with you, then okay. But just . . . make sure it's worth it, Marlie. Make sure. Your parents will always love you, but that doesn't mean you should ever make them doubt you love them back."
Marlie had no chance to respond before her aunt Mac was in the other room, answering the phone.
Veronica had gotten rather good at the art of ignoring. She ignored that dinner at her father's house meant sitting at a table with Lianne. She ignored that her dad went to every doctor's appointment with her mother. She ignored that Lianne kept trying to talk to her whenever she could, even if Veronica would give clipped answers. She ignored the growing bulge beneath her mother's dress.
She ignored it all.
Sophomore year began and that was that. She was living with Mac like a normal teenager, she was single and she was focused on school. Her infamy from the sex tape had faded. It was college and people got over things like that quickly; there were, after all, new scandals to make everyone gasp. She got to know new professors; she made friends with strangely normal girls who didn't have sordid histories, violent ex-boyfriends or mothers who could win the world's worst mother award.
But everyday, in the back of her mind, was her mother, was desperate blue eyes so terribly similar to her own and a round stomach that cried out for pity and sympathy and forgiveness, and it was killing Veronica. She just didn't understand her mother and how the woman could be so weak. She was nothing like Veronica, and weren't parents and their children supposed to be alike?
But that wasn't necessarily true. After all, Logan was nothing like his father.
Logan.
She didn't talk to him for months after that day at the Grand. She would see him from afar with Dick or walking out of class, but she never approached him. A part of her was ashamed of how she had broken down in front of him. But the larger part of her knew it was simply impossible for Logan Echolls and Veronica Mars to be friends.
It was just impossible.
Because even though they couldn't possibly to be together, every time one saw the other with a member of the opposite sex things went horribly awry. And then there were familiar gestures that had become so automatic when they were together it seemed wrong not to do them now, but it was wrong, because, for example, kissing your friend's neck was inappropriate on multiple levels.
It was simply easier to avoid him, and she was pretty sure he realized that, too, because Hearst wasn't that big of a school and if they hadn't both been making the effort of avoidance, they surely would have run into one another by now.
"Hi, honey," Lianne said hesitantly as Veronica entered Keith's apartment, dropping the groceries she had gotten for dinner on the counter. Veronica didn't reply. "How was your day?" Lianne questioned. Veronica began putting food into the fridge, steadfastly ignoring her mother, as per usual.
"How's Logan?" Lianne asked slowly, hopefully. "Aren't you two . . . ?"
Veronica finally responded. "None of you business." How did her mother even know about Logan? And how dare she presume to have the right to know about Logan?
There was a brief silence in which Veronica got out a pan to begin boiling water for the spaghetti. She was painfully aware of Lianne's presence, but that was the cost of agreeing to her begging father to stop by for dinner that night, and she would put up with it as she always did. She loved her dad too much; it was unnatural, really, the sacrifices she made for him.
"Are you ever going to talk to me, Veronica?" Lianne asked suddenly.
"Sure," Veronica answered. "When I forgive you then I'll talk to you."
"And . . . and when will you forgive me?" Lianne asked, her voice timid.
"When all four of the Beatles get back together," Veronica answered, wishing she hadn't bothered to start speaking to Lianne at all. She decided not to say another word as she made dinner; her dad would be home soon and he could handle the ex-wife he had invited into his home.
Again there was a stretch of silence. But once more Lianne broke it, her voice thick with desperation. "What can I do, Veronica? Please, just tell me what I can do. I'm really trying here."
Veronica couldn't help herself. "How are you trying, again?" Veronica asked her angrily. "You run away without a word to Dad or me. Months later I finally find you in a bar and I use all the money I've saved for college to make you better and bring you home and you waste it all. Then you leave again, stealing thousands of dollars from us and —”
"It's not that simple!" Lianne protested. "I was sober when I came home. I hadn't wasted your money! But it was hard, Veronica! There was no place in this house for me anymore. Your father had moved on; he was in love with someone else, even if he tried to deny it! And you . . . you had turned into a person I didn't recognize anymore, and it just wasn't the same!"
"Did you expect it to be?" Veronica snarled. "Did you really think you could abandon us for an entire year and everything would be picture perfect when you returned? My life was HELL that year, Mom. I could have used you! Even if it was only the fact that you stayed and stood by us! That would have been enough.” She paused, breathing heavily, before adding bitterly, “But it was too much for you."
"I'm not as strong as you and your father!" cried Lianne. "You can't hate me for that, you can't. Not everyone can face the world the way you can. I'm sorry I can't, Veronica, I really am, but I can't be any more than who I am!"
"Yes, you can," Veronica replied. "People can change. They can become tougher. I did. I was a teenager, my best friend was murdered and my entire school hated me . . . but I got tougher. I learned to deal with it. And do you know why I did? Because I loved Dad enough not to abandon him. You should have loved us enough to do the same."
Lianne was crying now, was shaking her head and crying, but she said nothing more than a mumbled, "I'm sorry, Veronica, I really am. . . ." Veronica didn't reply. She turned away from her mother and put her entire attention into stirring the sauce.
Time seemed to pass slowly, and with each passing minute Veronica grew more and more annoyed with her father. How could he leave her here with her mother? It was past six; he should be home. Where was he?
"I'm going to get a job as soon as the baby's born," Lianne told her. "I'm not going to keep living off your father. I used to be a bank teller, you know. I could probably get a job doing that."
Veronica didn't care. She didn't want to hear this.
"Veronica?"
"Good for you. Is there any chance you could do that sooner than later so I don't have to see you every time I want to see my dad?" Lianne said nothing at first in response to Veronica's bitter reply.
But finally, her voice softer than it had been in a long time, Lianne told her, "I'm going to do right by this baby, Veronica. I really am. I'm never going to hurt her; I'm never going to abandon her." The doctors had told them the baby was a girl. That fact made Veronica even angrier for reasons she couldn’t fathom.
"I wouldn't tell the kid that," Veronica said. "That would just be setting the baby up for disappointment." And even as the door finally opened and Keith stepped into the apartment, Veronica met eyes with Lianne for the first time and told her mother, "That baby deserves better than you."
"Hey hon!" Keith greeted Veronica, smiling brightly at the sight of her.
"I've started dinner, Dad, but you'll have to finish it," Veronica replied, "I have to go."
Keith frowned. "I thought you were going to stay for dinner. . . ."
"I have a paper," Veronica replied tightly. She gave him the smallest of smiles, pressing a kiss to his cheek and passing him by. She didn't look him right in the face. She couldn't handle the sad, disappointed expression she was sure was there. And she certainly didn't glance at Lianne as she left the apartment.
But she couldn't stop herself from hearing her mother as the older woman whispered, her voice broken, "I know she deserves better."
There were a thousand pictures of her as a baby, a toddler, a little kid. Plenty of them were framed and scattered across her house and her grandpa's house, but plenty more were in box after box, all stacked in her parents' bedroom closet.
Veronica had been on the phone that Aunt Mac had answered, as Marlie had known she would be. But just as she hadn’t the night before, her mother did not demand Marlie come home or go to school or do anything at all. Aunt Mac told Marlie she'd be working from home that day and Marlie was welcome to spend the day there.
But as soon as her aunt Mac settled down in her study, Marlie left. And she found herself back at her house, one that was empty now that everyone was gone at school or work, and in her parents' bedroom, looking through the boxes in the closet. She wasn't sure what she was searching for, but she had nothing better to do.
It wasn't as if she didn't fit into her family. She would have never imagined she wasn't her parents' child. She was a carbon copy of her mother as far as looks went; she had the same explosive temper both her parents possessed. She had always felt herself a part of the family; she didn't feel the way Aunt Mac had described feeling about her parents.
But she couldn't stop herself from feeling suddenly as if her whole life had been a lie. For so long she had believed that her mother hadn't wanted a child, hadn't wanted her, but had learned to love her anyway because she was her kid. But now she wasn't. Did that suddenly mean that all those times Veronica got angry at her, yelled at her or at her father, telling him when she didn't think Marlie could hear that she never should have become a mother . . . did that mean all those times Veronica really, truly, disliked her?
That couldn’t be possible, not really; Marlie knew her mother loved her, she knew it . . . but what if Veronica resented her? What if Veronica lay awake at night wondering what her life would have been like if Lianne had never left Marlie with her?
Sitting there thinking about it, Marlie felt her anger towards her mother rise. She hadn't forced her mother to take care of her or claim her as her own. That had been Veronica's choice. Why should Marlie suffer for it? And, really, was it so wrong to want to know her real mother? Among all the pictures of a baby Marlie, pictures that also held her grandparents, Veronica, Logan, Uncle Wallace, and Aunt Mac, there wasn't a single picture of Lianne. Why was that?
Marlie tried to imagine what Lianne must have been thinking when she had left Marlie behind. Had she wanted to leave her? How long after she had been born did her mother leave? Was her mother afraid? Had she regretted it and tried to come back and Veronica hadn't let her? Had Veronica made her leave in the first place?
There was no way to know. After all, how could she understand what Lianne was thinking and feeling if she didn't even know the woman? It wasn't wrong, then, to want to know her real mother. It was her right, just as she had told Lianne before the woman drove away.
It took Marlie a few minutes to formulate her plan. According to the clock on her mother's bedside table, it was eleven thirty-seven in the morning. Hopefully Grandpa Keith wouldn't be at the office; hopefully he would be out working on a case. . . . She called the office. It went to the machine. Praying that no one would show up at Mars Investigations between the call and her arrival, Marlie drove to the small building.
Luck was with her: no one was there.
She started up the computer, and her mind flashed back to the times she had gone into the office with her mother when Veronica was helping Keith out on a Saturday. She could remember sitting in Veronica's lap, comfortable and carefree, believing herself to be the happiest girl alive. Once upon a time she had thought the world began and ended with Veronica Echolls, that perfect woman who tucked her bed into night with twenty-five kisses and woke her up the next morning with eggs and bacon that smiled at her.
But things changed.
As she grew older, though, she still spent time with her mom at Mars Investigations, and her mother would tell her about the search sites, about the life of an F.B.I. agent and of a P.I. Of course, Veronica would never tell her very much, but Marlie had never cared very much. She wasn't interested in saving the world and especially not in taking pictures of cheating spouses. Still, Marlie knew enough to know how to root out a little information.
She searched for Lianne Mars and found exactly what she wanted.
Spouse: Keith Mars. Born 1/15/1960. Divorced.
Children: Veronica Mars Echolls. Born 8/17/1987. Married 10/3/2012 to Logan Echolls.
Marlene Mars Echolls. Born 11/27/2007. Adopted 5/31/2008 by Veronica Mars Echolls. Adopted 10/1/2012 by Logan Echolls.
Right there, for anyone to find, for herself to have found years ago, was proof that she did not really belong to the parents who had raised her. She was the child of Lianne Mars. There was more information; more dates. There were lists of parking tickets, alcohol violations, and other public records; there was even a mention of her time spent in a rehabilitation clinic. That was the only mention of Marlene, though.
Marlene Echolls. Born 11/27/2007. Adopted 5/31/2008 by Veronica Mars Echolls. Adopted 10/1/2012 by Logan Echolls.
But that wasn't what she needed. What she needed was an address, a current address. And that was there, too. In plain English there was a location of her mother. Marlie grabbed a pink sticky note from the desk and copied it down. If Veronica wasn't going to let her meet her mother, then Marlie would take it out of her mother's hands and put it into her other mother's grasp.
Marlie wasn't as brave as she imagined herself to be, however. She drove the hour ride all the way out to Lianne's house and then couldn't even make herself step out of the car. She knew it was the right house. The truck was parked right there in the driveway. Marlie stayed for nearly half an hour, her mind buzzing, before starting the drive back home.
Her aunt Mac let her back into the house without protest. "Another hour and I would have sounded the police," Aunt Mac said. Marlie was grateful that her aunt Mac wasn't the sort to freak out the moment she went missing. She made herself a sandwich and ate in silence while Aunt Mac worked on the computer, a laptop she'd brought into the kitchen as if to keep an eye on Marlie.
She went home that night. Maybe her parents would be ready to talk.
Dinner was awkward. Jason and Ben knew something was wrong, but no one was offering any explanations. Veronica finally took them aside while Marlie sat in silence with her father, and she must have explained it to them. Marlie didn't care. She had bigger fish to fry. She wanted to ask her dad what it had been like to become her father, why he had done it, what had he felt towards her. . . .
She didn't say a word, though.
When Veronica came back into the room and began clearing the dishes, Jason and Ben weren't with her. Marlie watched her for a moment. Her mother was five months pregnant now. The baby was a girl. In four months, Veronica would have her own daughter, a real daughter.
"What did you do today?" her father finally asked, his eyes burning into her.
"Stayed with Aunt Mac," she answered quietly.
"What did you two talk about?" asked Veronica, her back turned to Marlie as she washed dishes in the sink. Logan got up and began helping her. Marlie felt herself ignored once more. This wasn't how it was supposed to work.
"Do you really care?" she snarled. Veronica's back stiffened.
Logan turned to her. "What do you want to know?" he asked.
"I want to know my mother."
"She's an alcoholic who abandoned you," Veronica said, still not facing Marlie. "What more is there?"
"That's not being fair to her or me," Marlie replied. "I deserve to know the woman who gave birth to me. I deserve it. If you were in my place, you'd demand the same thing, Mom. You know it. You know it."
Logan put a hand on Veronica’s shoulder as if to calm the storm. He turned to her again. “Do you want to know what happened? How it happened?” His voice was calm, his eyes bright.
“Yes,” she said, “of course.”
He glanced at his wife. “Veronica, do you want to —?”
“What’s the story?” Veronica said, still facing away from Marlie. “She came, she had a baby, she left, and I raised that baby. That’s it. That’s the story.”
“Why?” Marlie asked.
“Why what?” Veronica asked.
Marlie stood. “Why did you raise me? Why didn’t Grandpa Keith? Or why didn’t you give me up for adoption? Why did you raise me?” She knew exactly what she wanted her mother to say in answer the moment the questions left her lips: I raised you because I wanted to raise you, Marlie. I raised you because I loved you, Marlie.
“Your grandpa wasn’t considered a good candidate for raising a kid by the California government and since he wasn’t a blood relative, there was nothing he could do to change their minds,” Veronica answered, scrubbing furiously at a dinner plate as she spoke into the sink. “And we weren’t going to give you up for adoption; that would have been wrong. So I raised you. What other choice was there?”
What other choice was there? The words echoed in Marlie’s head.
“Marlie,” her father began, stepping towards her with a look of understanding on his face, as if he knew that Veronica had said the wrong thing, “what you have to understand is that —”
“I want to meet Lianne. I want a chance to know her.”
Her father sighed. “Marlie,” he said, the word coming out sounding so very tired.
“No. You can’t talk me out of this. I want to meet her. It’s my right.”
“Fine,” Veronica snapped abruptly, a dish clanking to the bottom of the sink as she spoke. She grabbed a dishtowel and dried her hands before pulling open the kitchen desk drawers and beginning to search through them.
"Veronica . . .," said Logan hesitantly.
"Damn it!" Veronica exclaimed. She turned to Logan, demanding, "Hand me the phone."
"Veronica, I think —”
"Hand me the damned phone, Logan," Veronica said, her face pinched. Marlie didn't know what was going on, but it seemed at last she had gotten an actual emotional reaction out of her mother, and that was something at least. Her father did as her mother requested and a moment later Veronica had called the operator.
"I need the number for a Lianne Mars," Veronica said. She was silent for a moment, listening to something, before replying, "Yeah, yeah, that's her." She grabbed a piece of paper then and wrote down a number. She clicked off the phone and shoved both it and the scrap of paper at Marlie.
"You want to talk to her," she said. "There you go. There's the phone and her number." And with that she stormed from the room. Marlie was a little surprised. Her mother wasn't usually the sort to walk out in the middle of a fight, if that's what they'd been having. Marlie looked at the phone number, wondering if she could call her mother when she hadn't been able to see her even after driving all the way out there.
"Take it from someone who's mom might have loved him but who didn't care enough to stick around," her father said suddenly, drawing her attention away from the phone. "It's only worth so much pain." She wasn't sure what that was supposed to be mean, but she said nothing as he leaned down towards her and pressed a lingering kiss to her head. “Don't forget, though,” he whispered, his breath warm on her ear, “I'm always gonna be your dad, kid. No matter what.”
He left the room after that, probably to talk to her mother.
Alicia hated Lianne Mars with every fiber of her being. It wasn't really right of her, she knew, and she tried to think charitably of the woman, to think of all that she herself had in comparison to what little Lianne had, but still the hatred remained.
Usually it was easy to forget about Lianne, about the times she had come and torn apart the relationships Alicia and Keith would build. She had been married to Keith for years and she loved him so much she couldn't imagine what her life would have become if they had never gotten back together that summer. She adored both her sons, her greatest sources of pride, and she even got along with her daughter-in-law Penny. But the idea of life without Keith. . . .
Not to mention the fact that she thought of Veronica as her own daughter.
That tiny girl was a force to be reckoned with and at times it seemed as if she were completely beyond Alicia's understanding. But most of the time, it wasn't hard at all for Alicia to understand Veronica. After all, Alicia too had felt herself alone in the world before, and she could admire how strong Veronica was. She liked being a kind of mother to the small blonde, and she considered Veronica's children — Marlie included — her grandchildren as much as she did Wallace's two daughters.
It was easy, really, to forget that Lianne was ever a part of the mix. But she was. And now she was back. Was she here for good? Alicia had faith that her relationship with Keith wouldn't suffer at all from this; the love between them had only grown over the years. But she was worried about Logan, Veronica, and Marlene. They were her family. And no matter what at least one of them, maybe even Keith, too, was going to be hurt by whatever happened next.
It had been two weeks since she and Keith had come home from an amazing date of dinner and dancing to find a shell-shocked and pale Veronica explaining that Lianne had finally come back and Marlie knew everything. It seemed as if things had returned to a kind of tense normalcy since then.
Marlie was back in school and was no longer running away at any moment. No one had heard from Lianne since that first night, and when the Echolls had come for dinner three days ago, no one in the family had even come close to mentioning her name. So what did that all mean? Were they all going to pretend it didn't happen?
Alicia recognized it wasn't that simple. Sometime, sooner or later, things would come to a head. Marlene might not be Veronica's daughter, but they were more alike than either realized. Marlie wouldn't be able to go long without something happening. And Alicia knew that Lianne would be involved in whatever happened. They weren't going to get rid of her easily.
Alicia knew Keith had gone to talk to Lianne. He had said he was going to talk to his ex-wife to ask her intentions. He hadn't said much afterwards, though. He simply told her, his voice tired, that Lianne claimed she wouldn't invade their lives again and she knew it was a mistake to do it that one night.
"Do you believe her?" Alicia had asked.
"All I believe," Keith had replied, sighing, "is that I need a beer and a night of baseball."
It was only a matter of time.
And Alicia was right.
She got the news via Keith via Logan: Marlene had called Lianne, asking to meet her.
A/N: This chapter didn't include the most interesting flashback, in my opinion, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. I know Marlie is and has been acting rather bratty, but it'll get better -- I promise! The dates of birth I chose for Keith, Veronica, and Logan were my best guess according to the information on Mars Investigations net; if anyone knows any better, please tell me! The next chapter should be posted soon. Thanks to all who have reviewed so far; I really appreciate it!
