jane visits roisa pt. 2
They stood there for a few minutes, just like that, Jane covering Mateo’s eyes and Luisa standing there, half nude, staring at them without blinking. Maybe it wasn’t a few minutes, maybe it was only a few seconds, but it certainly felt longer, certainly not helped by Mateo struggling against Jane’s hands and trying to see what she still really did not want him to see.
“Are you going to put a shirt on?” Jane asked. “Or get a towel? Or some sort of covering?”
Luisa blinked, finally, and before she could say anything, Rose intervened. “What, do you think it’s inappropriate for Mateo to see a woman—”
“Yes,” Jane said through gritted teeth. “Yes, I think it’s incredibly inappropriate.” She waved one hand in Luisa’s direction. “That’s extremely sexual and extremely inappropriate and I don’t want my son—”
“Breast-feeding isn’t sexual,” Luisa said, finally, interrupting her. In fact, Luisa wasn’t even looking at Jane anymore, instead glancing down with extreme love on the child still in her arms. “Breasts aren’t sexual either. This is what they were made for. Just because society has taken and twisted their meaning into something they weren’t intended for—”
“So you admit society has—”
“And didn’t you breast feed Mateo, Jane?” Rose interrupted. By now, she’d moved to leaning against the wall, her arms crossed, and she yawned as though bored. “Or bathe him with you? I’m sure you wouldn’t think those are—”
“That’s different.” Jane glared at her. “He was my child. I wasn’t forcing myself on anyone else or anyone else’s kids—”
“Really,” Rose continued, as though Jane hadn’t said anything at all, “we should be normalizing this sort of thing so that women can feed their infants in public without any sort of social stigma.” She met Jane’s eyes and did not smile. “I’m sure you would want to get rid of social stigma against women. Isn’t that sort of your thing? Defending women?”
“No, I—”
“So you’re not a defender of women and you’re totally fine with this stigma continuing despite the fact that it is nothing more than that and is extremely inconveniencing for—”
“Luisa, can you just put a shirt on?” Jane turned her glare back to Luisa, not wanting to deal with Rose’s foolishness anymore. This was why she didn’t want to see her. Or, it wasn’t, because Jane hadn’t really dealt with this side of Rose before, but it certainly reinforced her previous reasons for not wanting to see her. She was a tongue twister. She was evil. She didn’t really care what Jane thought or believed or wanted but just wanted to turn her words against her to win. The worst sort of person, really. Of course a former crime lord would be like that. Of course. Why would she think otherwise?
Luisa looked up from the child in her arms and met Jane’s eyes. “No,” she said, very softly but no less firmly for it. “My daughter is more important to me than what you think is or isn’t appropriate when you are the one who came to our home without telling us beforehand.” Her lips pressed together, and her gaze flicked over to Rose, who gave her a little nod. “If you want,” she continued, “you and I can move to another room and Mateo can stay in here with Rose—”
“Rose kidnapped him. I’m not leaving him here alone with—”
“Then both of you can stay in here with Rose.” Luisa met Rose’s eyes again. “It’s...rude for you to treat me this way, in my own home,” she continued, her words now becoming more hesitant, “but it’s my home – our home – and we live here the best way we know how.” She nodded once, more to herself than to Jane, and then her eyes drifted down to the child in her arms. “Next time, she should call first, shouldn’t she, Mia?” She smiled as though it was the easiest thing in the world – warm and soft and happier than Jane had ever seen Luisa (although, admittedly, Jane hadn’t seen Luisa very often, and when she had, it hadn’t been the happiest of circumstances) – and then looked up, nodding once to Rose, before turning and walking back the way she came.
“She’s been taking lessons on assertiveness from Petra, not from me,” Rose said with another yawn. This one she covered with the back of one hand.
“No, I’m sure if she was taking them from you, I would be dead by now,” Jane snapped.
“I’m sorry, did I actually kill anyone you care about?” Rose moved to the couch and collapsed onto it. “And don’t say Emilio because you never met the man, and if Lu can forgive me, then you have no right—”
“Mama, can I see now?” Mateo had finally stopped clawing at her hands and let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t see anything anyway I don’t know why I can’t—”
Rose laughed, and it wasn’t that high-pitched sort of villainous laugh that Jane expected, but something much more real and much more human and not at all reminiscent of characters in the cartoons Mateo had been watching recently.
Not that it helped. Jane didn’t like being laughed at, and she certainly didn’t like being laughed at by Rose. She stepped back, moving her hands from Mateo’s eyes. He blinked at the sudden light as he grew accustomed to it again. Then he turned back to Rose. “It didn’t work. I could see through her fingers anyway.”
And then there was that laugh again and Rose’s startlingly brilliant and harmful grin and Jane felt mad. Mad at herself for listening to Petra and JR, mad at herself for having come in the first place, mad at herself for placing them in a position where the woman who kidnapped her son and shot her first husband had the power to mock her this way.
“Michael,” she said, finally. “You killed Michael.”
“You’ll find that I didn’t,” Rose said, suddenly serious. She leaned back against the couch and yawned a third time. “If I wanted him dead, I would have…what is the term the kids use? Headshot.” She glanced over to Jane. “I liked Michael. He was fun. I didn’t mean for him to die.”
“He still did,” Jane said, standing and wiping her hands against her jeans.
“He should have had better doctors.” Rose shrugged. “You can’t legally accuse me of murdering Michael. Shooting him, yes. But murder due to health complications that happened months later – even if they were due to the shot – wouldn’t stick. Not in a court of law.”
“This isn’t a court of law, Rose.” Jane’s teeth gritted together so hard she could feel her jaw ache with the pressure. “You don’t get to talk your way out of this one. You killed—”
“You shot Michael?” Mateo asked, staring blankly at Rose, as though he hadn’t decided whether he was interested or not. “Why?”
Rose stared at him. She pressed her lips together, seeming to consider it. “Your daddy—”
“Michael’s not my dad,” Mateo corrected, his eyes growing a little dark. “Daddy’s my dad.”
“Rafael,” Rose said and leaned forward with a little nod. “Which is why Luisa is your aunt. Because she’s your daddy’s sister. And why I’m your aunt. Because I’m her wife.”
Mateo’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you were my other abuela because you were married to my daddy’s daddy.”
This time, Jane had to bite back a laugh. She stifled it and covered her mouth with one hand, hiding it as Rose’s stunned, unhappy look passed from Jane back to Mateo.
Rose took a deep breath, her jaw working, and then said, very calmly, “I guess I’m both.”
“And you shot Michael because you liked Daddy better.”
Jane’s eyes widened.
Rose looked briefly over to Jane as though to ask Did you tell him this shit? and then glanced back to Mateo. “No, I shot Michael because he figured out who I was under my Halloween mask.” She drummed her fingers along her leg. “It’s a really bad thing, when you’re wearing a mask and say you’re someone else and someone tries to tell you otherwise. So if one of your friends at school tries to say you’re someone else on Halloween—”
“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Mateo said, his brow furrowing. “Mommy wouldn’t like that.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t,” Rose said, glancing over to Jane again. Then she shrugged and slumped back against the couch again. “I shot Michael because I didn’t want the police to get me before I could make sure your Aunt Luisa would be okay. She’d had a really bad year—”
“—because you killed her father.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed. “Because her father died, her girlfriend dumped her, she got kidnapped and no one but Michael would believe her, she was fucked over by a journalist pretending to be her friend just so he could get exclusive information to fuck over your family – which he learned he could do from your mother, by the way—”
“Rose,” Jane hissed, “that was not my fault and watch your language—”
“Your daddy wanted to pretend she didn’t exist, she thought I’d died and started drinking again and your mommy found out and abandoned her as soon as she could pass her off to someone else, she found out her mother was alive and then was dead, and it seemed like no matter what she did or what she tried no one wanted anything to do with her. Except for me.”
Mateo’s brow furrowed. “Auntie Luisa thought you were dead?”
Rose nodded once, solemnly, but her eyes were on Jane. “I was playing hide and seek with a crime lord who was so desperate for information that she injected your daddy with a not so nice little drug—”
“That’s more than he needs to hear, Rose.”
Rose waved one hand. “I was playing a long game with my evil stepmother so that I didn’t have to be a crime lord anymore.” She nodded toward Jane. “I helped Michael catch her. And for all of that, he would have thrown me in jail.” She shook her head with a tsking sound. “I didn’t feel like going to jail, and then your aunt really would have been alone—”
“She wouldn’t have been alone,” Jane said, but she knew as soon as she said it that she was lying. “She would have been with us.”
“Don’t lie, Jane. It doesn’t look good on you.” Rose met her eyes. “Leave the lying to the crime lords and businessmen and gaslighters. We’re better at it. We’ve had practice.”
But, beyond that, she didn’t try to correct Jane – not because Jane wasn’t lying, but perhaps, perhaps, to save Jane a little face. The problem was that Jane knew Rose was right. And the worst thing was that Rose, being evil, couldn’t be right, and yet here she was. Jane liked to think that she would have accepted Luisa back into their family with open arms if Rose weren’t part of the scenario – liked to think that Rafael would have done the same – but when it came to Susanna, the only one who had really accepted her, even begrudgingly, was Michael.
“Of course, I didn’t want to kill Michael,” Rose said, finally, staring at Jane. “He was the only one of you who even seemed to care.”