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Up From Here	By : aliciakristine Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Eminem/Marshall Mathers Views: 3454 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know Eminem (Marshall Mathers). I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
14.

Tara was hospitalized for ten days after she was
taken off the ventilator, and each day proved the surgery a bigger success. Not
only was she able to eat solid foods without throwing up, she was able to use
the bathroom normally. On top of that, food stayed in her body much longer, and
her iron levels went up almost immediately, which the doctors told her meant
that her body was absorbing nutrients and minerals again. Her spirits were up
impossibly high; not only was her body strengthening (her white blood cell
count was almost as high as a person's without cancer - or a history of it -
might be), but she was actually doing something about getting Cameron back.

On the day she was released, Marshall drove her
straight to his office building, where they met with the three lawyers and
their aides for a status report. A court date had been set for March 23rd, 2005
at 9:30am. It was a Wednesday a little more than a month in advance, but
Marshall cleared his schedule for the entire week. They began forming their
case against Robert by interviewing Tara, and finally decided that it would be
better to approach as two parents claiming rightful custody of their son as
opposed to proving Robert an unfit parent.

Tara's hopes were high despite the lawyers�
somber warnings that this case would be extremely complicated, and it was
impossible to tell which way the judge would rule. But, as far as Tara could
see, Marshall's lawyers were very professional, intelligent people who seemed more
than capable of winning anything they set their minds to. Bill Tolbert was
intimidating even to her in their semiformal meeting - she could only imagine
how he came across in a courtroom.

On the way to the house, they shared a blunt, and
Marshall filled her in on everything that she'd missed while she was
unconscious and in the hospital. The girls traded bedrooms so that Laney could
have the window seat and Hailie could have the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall;
he hired a live-in maid, who hated to be referred to as a maid and instead
called herself a "helping hand," to help Tara and the girls out
around the house; he had an OnStar system installed
in Tara's BMW, and her Thunderbird was repaired "just in case she wanted
to take it for a spin every now and then."

"Why didn't you tell me all this in the
hospital?" she asked, wide-eyed.

"You had to concentrate on getting better,
not being in a rush to get out," he said, shrugging. "If I reminded
you what you were missing out on, you wouldn't have been happy to sit in that
bed and heal."

She was touched by his thoughtfulness, but she
said nothing. Instead, she reached over to take his hand. "I'm glad I came
home to you," she said softly.

He looked at her askance, eyes twinkling. "So
am I. And I'm glad you're coming home to me now, too. I ain't hit that pussy in
a minute, I'm eager."

They had sex almost feverishly, and afterwards,
while she lay there high and completely satisfied, he told her he'd be right
back and went downstairs. She laid back in the pillows, naked with the sheet
pulled to her armpits, listening to the silence of the house around her. She
didn't think of the house as hers, as she knew she had no claim to it
whatsoever - but she felt more comfortable here, in this bed, surrounded by
mountains of soft pillows and thick blankets, than she had ever felt anywhere
else in her entire life.

She thought of Cameron almost constantly now. At
any given moment, he would spring to mind and she'd wonder what he was doing,
what he was thinking, what he was wearing, if he was hungry or tired or happy.
Her breasts literally ached for him. It had been eight years since his tiny
mouth had latched on for milk, but she doubted she would ever forget that
physical pull that drew them together when his eyes glazed with hunger, and
now, so many years later, she felt that pull again. But this time it was Tara
that was hungry, Tara that wanted to latch on - she wanted to wrap her
arms around her son and never let go.

The girls were at their dance classes. Both of
them had taken a very sudden interest in modern dance after a dancer had come
to their school for music class, and Marshall found them a studio uptown near
his offices. The house was silent as a tomb, and the silence was deafening. It
buzzed in her ears, a thick, seemingly impenetrateable
noise. She didn't mind it. After the constant bustle of the hospital - nurses
coming in and out every hour on the hour, doctors coming in and babbling
incomprehensible medical garbage at her, Marshall and the girls coming in, and
all the activity in the hallway outside - she was glad for the quiet.

She rolled over onto her side and curled around a
pillow, wondering what Marshall was doing. Thinking of him filled her with a
happiness she'd only known once before, and that had been when she had Cameron.
He'd come and visited her faithfully at the hospital, sometimes with his laptop
and a stack of papers and his cell phone. But even when he'd been in the corner
of the room at the tiny table, hunched over his work, talking on his phone to
everyone in the world but Tara, she hadn't felt lonely. Just having him around
made her feel better.

After a few minutes, she sighed and sat up. The
incision in her stomach was already healing, but she still checked it almost
compulsively to make sure it didn't open up or start bleeding. It itched more
than it hurt, but the doctors gave her cream to rub on it and gauze pads to
tape on while she slept or wore tight clothing. For now, she kept it bare and
padded into the bathroom to wash herself and get
dressed in a pair of Marshall's sweats and a big t-shirt.

She went downstairs to find him afterwards and
found him in his office, still shirtless, looking through his filing cabinet
with the phone jammed between his head and shoulder. She paused in the doorway.
"Marshall?"

He looked up and nodded at her. "Hang on
just a second, Ray. Hang on, I fucking said, that means stop running your
fucking cock holster, faggot." He grinned at Tara. "Hey,
sexy. Sorry, Ray's trying to talk my fucking ear off."

"Who's Ray?"

"Shut up," he said into the phone, and
then waved a manila file folder at Tara. "One of the bitches I'm about to
cut from my label, that's who. He wants me to look something up for him and
then I'll be done. Go find the maid-"

"Marshall, you know she hates to be called
that."

"With as much as I'm paying the fuckin' hag,
I'll call her what I want. Go find her and make her cook food or
something."

"You're awful, Marshall. You're absolutely
awful." She said it with a smile, and his grin relaxed into something
softer, something almost intimate.

"I wasn't awful a minute ago, was I?"

"Well, since you asked..."

He swatted at her and she giggled, stuck her
tongue out at him, and went to find Helen, the live-in "helping
hand." She found her in the den, watching the news, sitting primly on the
edge of her seat as though she'd have to jump off at any given time. Sure
enough, as soon as Tara started to say something, the woman snapped to her
feet.

"You can sit down and watch the news,"
Tara said, grinning at her. "Nobody will be upset."

Helen's shoulders sagged a bit in relief. "Thank you, ma'am."

"Um.. sure," Tara said awkwardly. This is a new kind of
rich, she thought, but didn't voice her incredulousness. "Mr. Ma...
Marshall? Um, he was wondering if..." She trailed off. How did people find
it so easy to boss other people around, even if they were getting paid for it?
She felt like an ass, asking someone else to do something she was perfectly
capable of. "Well, if there was anything for supper?"

"Yes, ma'am, there's chicken in the oven
right now. I wasn't sure what the lot of you liked, so I thought I couldn't go
wrong with roasted chicken. It should be ready in about thirty minutes or so. I
was just resting my feet while the water for pasta boiled."

"Oh. Well, thank you."

"I'll let you know when it's ready over the
intercom. Mr. Mathers showed me how to use it when I was hired."

"Oh. Okay." Tara turned and aimlessly
walked back towards Marshall's office, but he was bent over an open file, still
talking to whoever Ray was on the phone, so she went to the library and looked
through the books. There were a few recent best-sellers, and she wondered
vaguely who bought them. She couldn't imagine Marshall in a bookstore, head
bent over the inside cover of a novel. She grinned wryly, picking up a copy of Angels
and Demons by Dan Brown. She couldn't really imagine Marshall as the
corporate executive and founder of a highly successful record label, either,
and that was reality. Maybe he did like to read, now.

There was so much about him that she knew, and so many things that she didn't. She knew
that he was always Toad when they played MarioKart at
her mom's house in east Detroit, but she didn't know
what the inside of his office at Aftermath looked like. She knew that he liked
to drive with one hand on the center of the steering wheel, resting comfortably
on the soft plastic above the air bag, but she didn't know what he did in his
studios. She knew that people idolized Marshall because he was a very real,
attainable sort of idol - but she didn't know why so many young men flocked to
his studios by the hundreds.

She took the copy of Angels and Demons
across the room with her, where she turned on the gas fireplace and then
settled onto the white rug before it. It was almost an hour before the intercom
buzzed and Helen announced supper, and she was so engrossed in the novel that
it was hard to put it down.

The girls burst into the house just as Marshall
and Tara were sitting down to eat, and they took off their shoes and dropped
their tote bags against the wall before climbing onto their own chairs. It
amazed Tara that even at the ages they were now, the girls were still
absolutely inseparable, but Laney grinned at Hailie affectionately as she told
them about their first class. "I was much better at it than she was,"
Hailie said, and Laney only made a face at her. "The teacher - her name is
Elle, isn't that pretty, Daddy? Elle told me that I had the build of a
dancer."

"Is that a nice way of saying you're scrawny?"

Now Hailie made a face. "Daddy, be
happy for me!"

He smiled. "I am happy for you, baby. Did
you have fun, too, Laney?"

Laney shrugged. "Elle kept calling me Alaina,
it made me feel like a rich snob."

"You are a rich snob," Hailie
said.

"Don't get an attitude like that,"
Marshall said mildly, putting butter on his baked potato. "You might be
rich, but you girls aren't fucking snobs, and if I catch you acting like one,
we're moving right back into a dirty old trailer. I don't care how much money
you think I have."

"Well, everyone thinks we're rich
snobs."

"Who gives a shit? It doesn't matter what
anyone else thinks, it matters what you are. Eat your chicken, Hai-Hai, and let Laney talk for a minute."

Hailie pouted, but she started to eat.

"I don't like being called Alaina," Laney said. "And I told her that, but
she said I shouldn't be ashamed of having such a beautiful name." She said
the last seven words in a lilting, high-pitched voice, and Hailie errupted into a fit of giggles. Laney grinned at her, then looked at Tara. "I don't think I'm cut out for the
whole dance thing, but Hailie doesn't want me to quit."

"I don't want to go there alone,"
Hailie said, sobering instantly.

"You guys can't always be together,"
Marshall said. He took a drink of the wine Helen had poured into crystal flutes
for he and Tara, then looked at the glass in his hand
and wrinkled his nose. "And while I'm talking about not acting like a
snob, look what I'm fuckin' drinking out of. I'd rather drink out of a fuckin'
bucket than this shit."

Hailie picked up her own crystal flute, this one filled with some sort of juice, and held it
up to the light so that the cut crystal glittered like diamonds. "I like
it, Daddy."

"You're a girl."

"And why can't we always be together,
anyways? Me and Laney are best friends. You and Tara
are best friends, and you're always together."

"Not always," Tara said, and the girls
looked surprised.

"Every time we see you, you're
together," Laney said. "Are you getting married?"

Marshall choked on his wine, and Tara felt her
face flush. "No," she said at the same time Marshall said,
"Aren't you too young to be thinking about marriage?"

Hailie took a bite of her green beans, grinning
around her fork. "Daddy, you and my mom were married, and you didn't spend
half as much time together. That's why you should marry Tara."

"Hailie and I decided-"

Marshall looked at Laney, amused. "You decided
what?"

"That we would like it if you married Tara.
We think she'd be a good mom for us, and a good wife for you."

"You two have discussed this?"

They both nodded. "What else do we have to
talk about, Daddy?" Hailie asked innocently.

Tara couldn't help but laugh. "Your dad has
said a hundred times that he's never getting married again." But something akin to hope started to twirl in her stomach. If the girls voiced their approval...?

"I have said that," Marshall said.

"You always say you don't mean anything to
say on TV or on your stupid CDs," Hailie said.

Marshall looked offended, but his eyes sparkled
with amusement. "You think my CDs are stupid?"

"Don't change the subject, Daddy,"
Hailie scolded.

"Yeah, don't change the subject. We're
having a discussion."

He looked from Laney to Hailie and back again. "Stop! Both of you,
stop!" He was laughing as he said it, and Tara started laughing too.
"We have a lot of shit to take care of before we go spending money on a
wedding," he said, and Tara stopped laughing abruptly.

"What?" she said.

"Well, we can't really get married until
everything is... resolved," he said, shrugging. "Can we?"

"Until?"

"What, you don't want to marry me?"

She gaped at him. "Are you being serious,
Marshall? Are you seriously talking about marrying me?"

"Do you think I'd go see your punk ass in
the hospital every day if I wasn't going to marry you?"

"See?" Hailie said, sticking her tongue
out at Laney. "You owe me five bucks."

Laney groaned. "Dad, couldn't you have
waited two weeks? I always lose stupid bets to Hailie. She can read your mind
or something."

"That's 'cause he's my real
dad," Hailie said, and Tara expected that to upset Laney, but she only rolled
her eyes and gave Hailie five dollars from her pocket.

"Girls," Tara said. "You put bets
on when we would talk about getting married?"

"From the night he brought you home,"
Laney said nonchalantly.

"Why on Earth would you do that?"

"Because he told us about you, silly,"
Hailie said. Tara looked at Marshall, then back at Hailie. "He told us you
were the one girl he wished he'd married when he was younger," she
continued. "He got all moony and said that he let you get away, and if you
ever came back, he wasn't going to let you."

"Your... your dad,
this idiot across from me, said that?"

"I said it," he said gruffly. "Now
can we eat, please?"

Tara felt something balloon
inside of her chest that wanted to escape her throat in a scream, but she
swallowed it and said, very quietly, "Yes, Marshall, you fucking sap. Yes,
we can eat now."

Marshall had business to take care of before bed,
so Tara tucked the girls in. After she said good-night to Hailie and kissed her
on the cheek, she went into Laney's room. Laney was in her bathroom, washing
her face with Noxzema, and Tara waited patiently for her in the doorway.
"You can come in," Laney said, her face white with foamy soap.
"I'm just washing my face."

"Okay," Tara said softly. This had been
Hailie's bedroom before, but there was no trace of the younger girl. Posters of
pop stars hung on the bedroom walls, and the bathroom was decorated with
dolphins, nothing at all like the pink-and-ruffles of Hailie's.

The bathroom was bigger than the living room of
Tara's apartment in Boston, and she looked with envy at the huge jetted tub
sunk into the floor. "You ever take baths in that?" she asked,
pointing at the tub.

"Sometimes," Laney said. "It takes
forever to fill up, and the water turns cold before it's
high enough to reach the jets. Have you taken a bath in Dad's?"

"No, not yet. I
couldn't before because my stomach hurt so bad, and
now I have to wait for my incision to heal."

"Dad said you were getting much
better."

"Your dad seems to talk about me a lot when
I'm not around."

"I've never seen him in love before,"
Laney said, and bent to rinse her face off. After she dried her face with a
hand towel, she smiled at Tara in the mirror. "It's cute."

"You think he's in love with me?" Tara
asked, trying to keep from sounding too hopeful.

"Duh, Tara."

Tara covered Laney up with her blankets and kissed
her on the forehead without pressing the issue. "Goodnight, little
one," she said, something she had told Cameron when he was younger.

"Having you around," Laney said, eyes
already closed, "is kind of like having a mom again. It's nice."

Tara swallowed a lump in her throat. "Having
you around," she softly replied, "is kind of like having a child
again. It's very nice, Laney, sweetheart. Have sweet dreams, okay?"
- 13
- 14
- 15
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