But life, I find, is often more about the storms than the peace they seek to overwhelm. They lurk, ready, any minute now, to shake things up and take your breath away.
(Wikiquote In_Plain_Sight 5/31/12)
Holy shit, she had accumulated a lot of crap. Maybe there was something to be said for diligent organization after all…
She had really thought that an hour-and-a-half should be plenty of time for her to come in, swoop up her stuff, and be outta there before Marshall showed his prying, know-it-all face. So she really hadn't been watching the clock…
"Eeeurgh…" Mary peeled the flattened paper cup that had once housed a Reese's peanut butter cup off of the two documents that it was currently gluing together. She flung the ancient candy wrapper into her wastepaper bin, only to curse when she realized that she had already pitched the liner and its contents, and the Reese's cup would now have to be manually removed from the naked brown plastic pit of the bin.
She glanced back at her file cabinet. It was at last gloriously empty, save for a handful of fossilized French fries.
She picked up one of the French fries and tapped it on the surface of her desk. Judging by its relative hardness, she dated it to at least the mid Cretaceous period. Christ, she was glad Marshall couldn't see her doing this…
"You gonna eat that?"
"Shit!" Mary screamed as she half-whirled, half-fell out of her chair. The French fry clattered to the floor. Striding toward her was Marshall, looking as composed and fresh-faced as ever. "Jesus, you're in early!"
"No…" he said slowly, "but you are." His keen eyes instantly took in every detail of Mary and her surroundings. "Doing a little surreptitious spring cleaning? Didn't want the rest of us to get the idea that you do have the ability to be tidy?"
He was fishing for annoyance, but the unusually high level of fear circulating in Mary's bloodstream kept the other emotions at bay.
"Well, you know what they say, there's a first time for everything", said Mary, clutching at some sense of normalcy. Approaching too close for comfort, Marshall began to rifle through the heaps of paper topping Mary's desk. "No, no, no! Don't mess with the piling system!"
"I remember this case!" Marshall's trademark boyish smile lit up his face as he lifted one of the staple-bound hunks of dead tree.
"Please, for once, can we skip the stroll down Memory Lane?" It was taking every ounce of sarcasm Mary was capable of mustering to mask the panic that threatened to hijack her voice. Marshall replaced the papers.
"Alright, then, if history doesn't take your fancy this fine morning, how about a little archaeology?" He was in way too good of a mood. It was probably fucking Abigail's fault. Couldn't he just have stayed in bed half an hour longer for a little morning nookie…?
Marshall's face disappeared as he lifted Mary's wastepaper bin to gaze into the bottom of it.
"Eeewww… What is that?" The bin lowered and Marshall's face reappeared, nose wrinkled and features contorted.
"Damned if I know… I just want it gone…" grumbled Mary.
"Your wish is my command!" Marshall whisked up the bin and headed for the break room. Mary thought sure he was going to skip.
"Hey, Genie of the Garbage Can, no one said I wanted your help!" she shouted after him.
"I don't favor the odds of you ever finding your way out of The Cave of Wonders over there by yourself!" he shouted back.
"Hey hey hey – no literary references before lunch…!" yelled Mary.
"I believe it was you who supplied said reference in the first place", Marshall answered.
She heard the faucet running in the break room as he washed, and then dried, her wastepaper bin for her. Damn him.
All of a sudden, one by one, the rest of the office's staff began to trickle in.
Marshall brought back Mary's wastepaper bin and exchanged it for the drawer of her file cabinet, which he also carried to the break room to wipe out – fastidious twerp.
By the time he returned and reassembled her file cabinet, the office was full of people and the smell of coffee. Phones rang – but not Mary's.
"What will be m'lady's pleasure? Dewy Decimal, or Library of Congress?" Marshall was starting to go through Mary's papers again.
"I don't need a filing lesson, Marshall", said Mary, alarmed that though she'd been going for sharp, her voice instead came out fatigued.
"I wouldn't dream of trying to teach an old dog new tricks. I was going to do it for you. It'll only take a minute this way…" His arms were already full of files.
"Marshall, put the papers down…"
"You're all cleaned out and ready to go…"
"Put the Goddamn papers down! Or if you have to put them somewhere, stick them in those cardboard file boxes…!" Mary kicked to indicate the office moving boxes strewn around her desk.
"Okay… But Mary, some of these are active cases. This paperwork needs to stay where you can access it in the office…"
"No, it doesn't…"
"Um, I think it does…" Marshall had taken on his testy edge.
"Look, if you want the files to go with me, then they need to go in the boxes, because the boxes are going with me, and the desk is staying here. I'm pretty sure they have a desk all cleared out for me in Denver – best of all, a desk that your skinny ass has never sat on. Got it, genius?" Mary's voice had gotten too loud, the rest of the office too quiet.
Marshall was frozen, the color gone from his face. Several moments passed in deadly stillness before the soft thuds of the files falling out of Marshall's grip back onto the desk could be heard.
Mary's heart was pounding like she'd just been shot at. God, stop it…
When her ex-partner finally spoke, his voice was quiet and cold.
"How can you do this to me?"
Mary's blood boiled.
"You? How can I do this to you?" Mary jumped out of her skin when Marshall slammed his fists down on her desk and shouted – actually shouted – at her. Jesus, angry Marshall was scary. He made Stan look like a pussy cat.
"Explain to me in what universe it is fair or friendly to punish me like this?" he yelled. The rest of the office had entirely frozen now. Mary and Marshall had center ring, and no one dared take their eyes off of them for fear of life or limb, neither could anyone put a stop to the unfolding horror movie, because no one was about to tell the brand new branch chief that he was out of line, not at the height of the new-boss-ass-kissing phase.
"I guess life just isn't fair!" Stressed to the max, Mary fell back on a favorite mantra.
"Damn it, Mary!" Marshall's capacity to blithely weather Mary's self-destructive storms was suddenly shot to hell and hanging in ribbons. "I thought we were okay!"
Mary retaliated.
"You're okay! But I'm not! And you know what I've realized, Marshall?" Mary's loud voice oozed anger and venom, "Maybe I'm never going to be okay! Maybe I don't want to be okay! But you want to be okay and you are okay except the only thing stopping you from being okay is me being not okay but I can't be okay so the only way for you to be okay is for me to go be not okay somewhere else where you won't be able to know or be affected by how not okay I am!"
"Fuck, Mary! If you're five hundred miles away how will I even know if you're okay or not?" Marshall was gripping the edge of the desk now, knuckles white.
"THAT'S the beauty of the plan! You won't even BE ABLE to know! What Marshall doesn't know can't hurt him…!"
"Bullshit!" snarled Marshall. "If anything ever happened to you…"
"It wouldn't be on your watch anymore! Mary Shannon is officially no longer Marshall Mann's problem. Signed, sealed, and delivered!"
"How the fuck do you think that would make me care any less, Mary?" Marshall looked at her like she'd just run him over with a semi. "This was never professional, it's always been personal from the very beginning!" Even Mary and Marshall themselves were startled by that admission. "And to think I'd thought that at the most important moment in my life, the one person I care about most might actually find it within herself to be happy for me!" That one was an even bigger shocker. The startling gravity of unconscious honesty shut the both of them up for several long seconds. But then, both eager to pretend away the ramifications of what Marshall had just accidentally said, they plowed back into the shit.
"Forget about me for a minute", Marshall broke the crushing silence. "What about Brandi? I thought you promised to help her. Now you're just going to run off to Denver? Mary, I've never seen you run from anything, as long as I've known you…"
"I run from everything, Marshall. Run from the past, run from the truth, run from myself… But most of all, I run from you. Always have. I'm a Shannon. It's what we do. You said it yourself, Marshall, we do a lot of talking without words… I don't even have to dial your phone number to fuck up your life. So why don't you just stand back and get the hell out of my way before I fuck up your perfect life…"
Mary had already slammed the pile of active case files into one of the file boxes. And when push came to shove, as it most certainly had, that was all she really needed. She had made a mess of this office in more ways than one. Now her parting gift to Marshall was this office-scene morale nightmare. It might take him weeks to repair his troops' faith in what they wanted to believe was their unshakable leader. What was a disaster-area desk, compared to the non-corporeal mess she was leaving behind? I'm sorry, Marshall, for the billionth and hopefully last time, I am so fucking sorry…
She seized the one critical file box, marched past the furious and crumpled figure of the only man she'd ever trusted, and escaped into the stifling freedom of the Albuquerque heat…