“It really is you,” he said.
I nodded. “It really is.”
Connor Hayes shook his head slightly. “When I saw you last night at the restaurant, I didn’t quite believe it. I had to know…” He stopped. “Can I come in?”
“I guess.” I opened the door a little more, and when he went past me, I refastened the locks. Then I hurried back to the table to close the notebook, before he saw that the writing in it was all about him. I also got myself a big glass of water, because my throat had gone completely dry. “Want some?” I offered when I saw him watching me closely.
“Uh, yes, please.” He drank his down in one long swallow and then stared at me again. “Sorry. I’m a little, I don’t know, in shock. It’s been a long time.”
“Seven years,” I agreed. It felt more like seven hundred. He took a seat at my kitchen table and I did too, rubbing my hands together in my lap to warm them up. “Did you want something else from me?”
“No. Well, yes. I wanted to see you.” I saw his hand go to his leg, to the outside of his thigh where I had pressed my own palm down hard to stop the blood, seven years before. “I don’t remember much about that night and I guess I wanted to ask you about it. I never saw you afterwards, I didn’t know if you were hurt, too.”
“No.” Not then, no. “What happened was that you went into the parking lot and got shot. The ambulance came and got you. That’s all I know.”
“You didn’t see who did it?” he asked. “They said there were no witnesses. The police never caught the guy.”
My heart beat even harder and I felt hot in the cold apartment. “I didn’t see anybody,” I said, the same lie I had told since the police had questioned me that night. “It was too dark. I couldn’t recognize anyone.”
We sat in silence for a moment. “I remember your face.” Connor said suddenly, and leaned forward a little. “I dream about your face.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“I have dreams about that night and I see you, but I don’t know if any of it really happened, or if I’m just filling in details with my imagination.” He shook his head. “I wake up in a cold sweat.”
I nodded carefully, reminded that I was part of his nightmares. “I’ll tell you what I know.” To some extent.
“Did you pull me somewhere? I remember moving.”
“Yeah. You were at the front in the parking lot, and I pulled you around the side of the building into the alley. Next to a dumpster.”
“You put things over us. To hide us.”
I nodded, twisting my fingers together under the tabletop.
“I remember you talking to me, telling me to be quiet,” he said.
“They were looking for you. The guys from the white car who started it.” I shook my head. “I mean, I don’t know who started it. I didn’t see.”
“The white car,” he repeated. “I remember that, I remember it pulling into the lot and then noise.” He stopped and breathed. “You told me that I was going to be all right.”
“That’s about it, then,” I said. I stood up and went back to the sink. “You remember everything that I do.”
“Your sweatshirt was with my clothes, all covered in blood. It had a high school logo so I’m assuming it was yours. The ER doctor told my parents that the paramedics cut it off my thigh,” Connor said.
I nodded, my eyes on the cupboard door but really seeing back into the past. “I pushed on your leg with my hand to try to stop the bleeding. It wouldn’t stop so I used my sweatshirt.” I shook myself. “But now you’re fine, right? You’re out and about, going to fancy restaurants to berate the waitress.”
“That wasn’t me.” But he sounded embarrassed. “I’m sorry Rome acted that way. Are you—”
“It’s fine,” I dismissed him. “It didn’t matter.” I tried to fill the glass again but gave up because I couldn’t control my hands and kept spilling it. “Is that it, then? That’s all you wanted to talk about?”
I turned, and saw him eying my apartment. “Do you live alone?” Connor asked. His gaze ran over the bags from the home improvement store and the pile of dirty clothes I had to take to the laundromat. “Are you married? Or, uh, do you have kids?”
“I live with my brother.”
His face lit up, and he smiled suddenly, just like I remembered. The sight of it—
“Jared, right? Is that his name? You used to talk about him a lot.”
“Yeah, Jared. He’s eleven now.”
Connor looked around again. “Didn’t you guys live with your uncle back then?”
“We don’t anymore, and I’m Jared’s guardian now. Do you want anything else? I’m pretty busy today.”
He startled. “No, nothing else.” He stood up. “I don’t know if anyone ever said thank you. Thank you, Lia. Thank you for what you did for me.”
“You would have done it too. Anyone would have. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“It was a very big deal,” he corrected me. “You saved my life. Everything I remembered about you protecting me was true. You were so young, and you were so courageous. No,” he continued, because I had shaken my head, “you were. You dragged me to safety, hid me, stopped me from bleeding out. I would have, that was what the doctors told my family.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“All these years I wondered about you. I went down to the store when I was able, but there had been a fire, right? No one seemed to know what had happened to you or your uncle. I thought I found him, but it had to have been a different man. That guy was single and living alone in Tennessee.”
“You looked?”
He nodded at me. “There was no record of you, not anywhere.”
“I was here—I’ve never left Detroit. I guess you should have looked harder.” I walked to the door, checked the peephole for safety, then opened it. “Bye.”
Connor slowly walked out, but he stopped in the dirty hallway. “Are you angry at me? Because of what happened at Atelier Anson? Because I didn’t come to say thank you before now?” He was flushed, a little more color on the cheeks that were the tan I remembered. Then my mind seemed to snag on another memory, an image of his face from that night, when it was pale and lifeless in the alley. Suddenly, I was right back there again too, terrified and screaming.
“Lia?”
“I’m not angry about anything,” I finally answered. “I’ve been too busy with my own life to give too much thought to you. I didn’t expect anything from you or your family.”
“My family? What?”
“Whatever,” I said, just like Jared did. “Listen, I really am glad you healed up ok. Bye.” I shut the door and leaned back against it. Then I slid down until I was sitting on the floor. I put my arms around my legs, hid my face on my knees, and rocked, in a way I hadn’t done for a long time. I listened, too, for Connor’s footsteps on the stairs outside, but he didn’t walk away immediately. He seemed to stand at the door for a few moments, and when he did leave, it was very slowly.
“Jared,” I called to my brother a few hours later. He didn’t answer from his room. “Jared! Dinner!” This was the third and last time that I was telling him. I was already seated and the food was rapidly getting cold, because we couldn’t keep the temperature up above around fifty-five degrees in our apartment.
I heard his bedroom door open and then a very disgusted sigh. He walked into the room and as always, he reminded me of our mother, with the thick, midnight-black hair, dark, dark eyes, and heart-shaped face. I looked almost just the same—it had helped, I thought, when I had been trying to get guardianship, that we were physically so similar. Presently, he looked more like me than our mother, because I remembered her as happy, always smiling and laughing a lot, but neither Jared or I spent much time doing those things.
He flopped into the chair across from me and his hair spilled down over his eyes. He needed to get it cut. Maybe he would let me—I reached across the table to brush it out of h
is face but he jerked away, so no, he probably wouldn’t let me trim it. Jared picked up a fork, then dug into his dinner like he’d never been fed before. Maybe the babysitter hadn’t been lying about his appetite.
“Do you like it?” I asked. “This is a new way to make chicken that I learned from the chef at Atelier Anson.” He didn’t answer. “I got fired, by the way.”
“Are you going to be home every night, now?” Jared asked.
“Until I get another job, yeah.”
He sighed again, angrily. “Great.”
“What happened at school today?” I asked. Shrug. “Any homework?” This time he didn’t even bother with a noncommittal gesture. “Ok,” I sighed. We ate the rest of the meal in cold silence, both the temperature of the room and the temperature between me and my brother.
“I got ice cream,” I mentioned when he stood up. His plate looked like he had licked it clean and I had given him most of my chicken, too. “Want some?”
“What flavor is it?”
“Chocolate chip,” I said, and crossed my fingers inside my sleeve that he would like it.
He shrugged, said, “No,” and he disappeared back into his room.
I sat at the table after he was gone, thinking. Then I got out the container and took care of the chocolate chip ice cream all by myself, and that made one of the better Friday nights I’d had lately.
∞
The next morning, I woke up earlier than I usually did on a Saturday. I was used to sleeping in on the weekends and making up for the late restaurant nights, but today I sat straight up on the couch, startled out of my dream into queasy wakefulness by a blast of cold air. My brother stood in the open front door, his dark eyes on me.
“Jared?” I asked. He stepped back and the metal slammed behind him. “Jared! Where are you going?” I bolted to my feet and stumbled the two steps across the living room. The icy air slapped me as I threw the door back open and pounded down the stairs to the street. He was already long gone; there was no sign at all of a medium-sized, dark-haired boy anywhere on the sidewalk. I stood straining my eyes, hopping from foot to foot. Balls. I had no idea where he would head because since he wouldn’t talk to me, I hardly knew anything about him.
But this disappearing act was happening more and more often and it scared the crap out of me. I ran upstairs to get my wallet and keys, my phone, and definitely some shoes. I figured I’d have a better chance of finding him on foot, so I went up and down the streets for a while, looking, calling, but no Jared. It wasn’t safe, not by any means, for either of us to wander around our neighborhood like this. One guy even came out of his house and yelled at me to get back inside. I did after a while, got dressed, and waited in our apartment for my brother to come back. I texted the few moms I knew from his old school and his new one, but no one had seen him and he wasn’t answering the cheap phone I’d bought for him.
Shit. I taped a note to the door telling him to call me the second he got in and I went down to my car, struggling to carry the supplies I had collected for the house. I was trying to figure out how to wedge it into my small trunk when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I swung as I turned around, out of instinct, and I connected pretty hard into Connor’s stomach. Yes, Connor, because after seven years of absence, he was back. Again.
Chapter 2
“Uff,” he wheezed out, and took two steps away. He leaned over, hands on his knees.
Balls. “You startled me,” I said. My voice squeaked and my heart pounded. Fear had surged through me when he had touched me, but now my heart also pounded because it was him. I fell right back into being a fifteen-year-old, watching the video feed from the parking lot and waiting for his car, hearing the bell on the door when he walked into the party store each night, feeling that rush of excitement because it was Connor. His presence made my heart leap out of its rhythm, and I furiously told myself to stop it because I wasn’t going to turn into an idiot about him. Not again, I wasn’t.
He held up a hand, then a finger. One minute, it told me.
“You shouldn’t grab someone like that.” I hesitated. “But anyway, sorry.”
He held up the finger again, then after a moment more, he slowly straightened up. “That’s quite a jab.”
“You didn’t puke,” I noted. “That’s usually the standard for a good punch to the gut. What are you doing here? For the second time?”
“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d stop by,” he told me.
I glanced around at the dirty streets, the mattresses piled on the sidewalk, the empty lots where houses had once stood. “Really? What were you doing in this neighborhood?”
“Well, I work downtown.”
We were nowhere near downtown, and anyway, it was Saturday. “What do you need?” I asked. Somebody started yelling, a bunch of people, not too far away. I looked around nervously and thought of Jared on his own out here. “I have to go.”
Connor pointed to the stuff I had jammed into my trunk, the lumber and a few PVC pipes I had found, boxes of nails from the home improvement store, my toolbelt. “Are you building something?”
“I’m working on a project,” I said warily, and when the yelling started again down the street, I slammed the lid of the trunk. There was an ominous crack from inside it and the lid bobbed back up. Shit! I’d just drive with it open. “See you.”
He followed me to the driver’s side and put his hand on the top of the door so that I couldn’t close that, either. “Are you working on a construction project?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m very busy.” I pulled on the door and he finally moved his fingers so I could close it.
“Can I help you with it?” he asked through the glass.
I shook my head. “I don’t need help, no. Thank you,” I added. But Connor just stood there, and I couldn’t drive away unless I wanted to run over his foot. I cranked down the window. “We can’t stand here talking. I don’t know if you’ve looked around yourself, but it isn’t exactly a safe place to stop and chat.”
“I’ll get your supplies,” Connor told me. “They don’t fit in your trunk. We’ll throw them into my car and I’ll follow you over to whatever you’re working on.”
“What? No—”
He was already at the back and unloading the stuff that I had just wedged in there. “One of the pipes broke when you shut the trunk on it,” he called cheerfully. “Ok, where are we headed?”
I told him, even though I was pissed that he hadn’t listened to me, that he was butting in. But as I drove, I rethought my position. I did need help, and Connor had known how to fix up houses. That had been his business when I’d known him before, although the nice car, the fancy clothes he’d sported at Atelier Anson, and the crowd he had been there with didn’t seem to match up with that career anymore. But I decided that Connor showing up this morning could have been a good thing, because I was in over my head with the project I had mentioned to him.
I had been saving for a while to buy a place of my own, and the city had practically given away some of the deserted houses that dotted the neighborhoods if you would to fix them up. So I was sinking almost every penny I earned into a bungalow on the West Side and I was making a home for me and Jared where we could be safe and happy. I could see it perfectly in my mind: the remodeled house, Jared riding a bike we would get, me with a good job during the day and the two of us hanging out at night on the front porch and in the back yard on weekends, cooking, laughing, having fun together.
I wanted to make that happen, but it was going so slowly. Just way, way too slowly. Every step was taking me forever, was harder than I expected, and led to more things that needed to be done. Like when I had decided to cut down some bushes in the front, but it ended up that there was a nest of something underneath—something rodential—and then the roots had been wrapped around one of the supports for the front step, and the day after I’d started to dig, there was a horrible snow storm and everything froze…that kind of luck.
&nb
sp; So maybe Connor could help. He obviously felt guilty or needy or something about what had happened when he’d been shot and maybe I could work those angles and get something out of it, some labor and some ideas. Maybe even money. Then he’d feel better and leave me alone, and I’d have a fixed-up house. Perfect. I checked the mirror and saw his fancy car behind me. Yeah, perfect. I ignored the slightly queasy feeling this line of thinking gave me.
My new house—new to me, but built more like a hundred years before—wasn’t too far from where we currently lived in our shitty apartment, but it was kind of like driving into another world. In this world, people cared about their landscaping, and had block parties, and joined a neighborhood association to replant the medians. Kids played on the sidewalks in warm weather and trick or treated together, stuff like that. That was what I wanted for my brother: this world, not the one we currently inhabited.
But my house was the ugliest, worst one on the street. I pulled up to the curb and sighed, because even after I had worked for hours yesterday, and the day before, and for weeks, it didn’t seem to look much better than when I had bought it. I slowly got out and Connor joined me at the curb.
“What’s this place?” he asked me.
“My house. I own it, it’s mine and I’m fixing it up. Jared and I are going to live here.”
Connor nodded. “Who’s your contractor?”
“Me. I just said I’m fixing it.”
He stared at me, then at the house again. “This is a big project. How many in your crew?”
I took my toolbelt out of my back seat. “Me. What’s so hard to understand?” Then I remembered that I was going to get him to help me. “I’m doing it on my own, and it is a really big project. Like, overwhelming. Come on, I’ll show you.” I smiled, even, and Connor immediately smiled back. I turned away quickly and walked up the porch and he followed me, stepping a lot more carefully on the creaking boards. I started to remove the nails from the plywood that covered the front entrance, and he took another hammer from my belt and started on the other side. He did his about ten times faster and leaned above me to get my last few.
Fixing Lia Page 3
