Fixing Lia

by Jamie Bennett

  Connor looked back at me. “What’s going on here?”

  I had no desire to return to my apartment, no matter what I had just said to Jared about putting his butt there. I wanted to run away and bring my brother with me, but then I made myself take a breath. We lived here, there was no escaping it. And my hand went up to my hair, feeling the shampoo drying in it, and down to my feet, because I was wearing my brother’s shoes. “It’s fine. We got a little worked up and startled, but we should go to our apartment. I’ll get dressed and then we’ll head to Connor’s,” I told my brother.

  Jared took one more look behind us and ran up the stairs, and I moved the car to the side of the street to park.

  “Did he take off again?” Connor asked me quietly as we followed my brother.

  I thought about how much I should say. Just like with my new boss Amy, if anything happened in our lives, I might need him. Like if Jared got hauled off by those cops who had it in for us, then it would be great to have Connor in our corner—someone important, and someone from a powerful family, as I had learned today from Amy about the rich people helping each other.

  Connor was also someone who was just a nice guy, and I felt a strange tremor as I calculated how useful he would be. “Jared did leave, but he was already coming home,” I said, deciding not to drag Connor any farther into it. And this way, he would be a great character witness. “I freaked out for no reason, because everything is fine.” I nodded confidently. “It’s all fine. Kids sometimes act out, but I took a lot of parenting classes and read so many books about how to deal with problems like these. I’ve got it totally handled.” I nodded again and added a smile, but it didn’t look like Connor was buying what I was selling. Whatever. “I’m going to get dressed,” I told him.

  It didn’t take me that long to get ready, but I didn’t achieve the spectacular results I’d had in mind when I had studied myself in the mirror earlier. I was even paler than before, and when I dug out some blush and applied it, it looked like I had put stripes of clown makeup on my face and I had to wipe it off. I tried to blow dry my hair after rinsing out the shampoo, but the longer I stayed in the bathroom, not watching Jared, the more anxious I got. I gave up and came out with it still dripping down my back. “I’m ready, let’s go,” I told them, and my brother looked so relieved.

  “I’ll drive us,” Connor said as we trooped back down. “You seem a little tense.”

  “You’re just saying that because I almost killed you,” I answered, but that wasn’t funny at all. I almost tripped and had to grab the stair rail. Connor put out his hand to steady me. “I’m really sorry. I could have…”

  “I’m fine,” he told me again, his voice very calm, and we got into his car.

  We were all quiet as we drove toward the expressway heading north. I ran my fingers over the smooth leather of the seat, thinking. “Do you miss your truck?” I asked suddenly.

  “I can visit it, if I want,” he said, and smiled a little for the first time since I nearly ran him down. “It’s up at my parents’ summer place in Leelanau County.” He held up his right hand from the wheel to demonstrate where that was in our mitten-shaped state, tapping on the tip of his pinky. “The seat was too high, it was too hard for me to get into after the accident.” He made a little face after he said that word. “After you asked me about calling it that, I’ve been trying to think of a better way to explain it.”

  “What accident? What happened?” Jared piped up from the back seat.

  “I got really hurt and your sister saved me,” Connor told him. “When she was only fifteen, she saved my life.”

  “No,” I started to protest. “No.”

  “Yes, exactly. She saved me,” he said again, and glanced at Jared in the rearview mirror. “If Lia hadn’t been there, I would have died.”

  I turned to see my brother’s face in the flashes of streetlights. I still felt shaken from everything that had happened this evening, but Jared looked worse, huge-eyed and white-lipped. “Let’s talk about something else. Jared, I never asked you if you had homework to do.” It always made him angry when I “pried” so we fought about that for a while until he lapsed into pissed-off silence. That was better than him being so frightened that he could hardly speak.

  Connor had me order some food on his phone and eventually we pulled off the freeway. We got our take-out, and then he directed his clean, new car into a parking lot at an apartment building, also brand-new and sleek. “Here we are.”

  I looked out the window. “Here? You live here?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. It wasn’t at all what I had expected.

  Jared was already out of the car. “What’s this town called? Are we near where we played lacrosse? Is this where you grew up, where you said your brother broke three windows throwing his football?” The more miles we had put between ourselves and our neighborhood, the more he had calmed down. They chatted as we went up the elevator about where Connor had lived, more about his life when he was Jared’s age. It seemed to be full of sports and fun with his younger brother, trips, family. It sounded wonderful and Jared relaxed even more and got caught up in the stories.

  The interior of Connor’s apartment was nothing like I had imagined, either. It was all modern-ish, floor-to-ceiling windows and white furniture, chrome and glass. He caught me looking around. “It’s nice,” I told him, and it was, but just so different from how I had imagined his life. But this made more sense with the new car, the spiffy clothes, the VP job at Whitaker Enterprises.

  The two of them talked all through our dinner, too, and slowly, Connor managed to coax out some information from my brother. Stuff about his teacher that I didn’t know, like that she missed at least one day a week because she was always sick or one of her kids was, and when the sub was there, how they watched movies instead of doing schoolwork. How he really liked math, just like I had. How he’d been a football fan, hugely into the United Football Confederation.

  “My brother still plays football,” Connor told him. “Even after breaking all those windows in our house. He played in college and he’s trying to make it into the pros. He’s with the Junior Woodsmen, in the development league.” Jared got all excited and started asking if Connor’s brother knew some people I had never heard of, Davis someone, Knox someone. Connor laughed. “No, because Teddy’s in the development league,” he repeated. “He doesn’t get to play with the big guys, not yet. But maybe.” He showed us pictures of his brother on his phone, and they looked a lot alike, both tall and handsome. He showed us another one with their mom and dad.

  I remembered both of Connor’s parents from a long time ago, when I had tried to get into his hospital room to see him. Oddly, I had a very strong memory of his mother’s perfume because she had stood close enough to me that I had been able to smell it. I swiped with my finger, looking at more pictures. There was one of Connor with his arm around a very pretty, blonde woman. I wondered who she was, because he didn’t have a sister.

  “Are you a football fan, Lia?” Connor asked.

  “No. No, not at all.”

  “I used to watch with my dad,” Jared said, and then looked quickly at me. “I mean, I used to watch with Richie Samotny.”

  I didn’t want to hear about them. I stood up to start to clear the table, but Connor motioned me back down. “I have it. Relax.”

  “You can watch football at our apartment,” I told my brother as Connor put the dishes into the sink. “We must get games on our TV.” But it would have involved him coming out of his room, so I wasn’t sure that would happen.

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” But to my shock, he kept talking to me. “The pro season’s over but maybe I could see Connor’s brother. The development league is playing now.”

  “Sure,” Connor said. “They have a game coming up in Toledo and we could drive down and go.” He glanced at me. “All of us. It’s not that far.”

  “Yeah, we can do that!” Jared said. “That would be so cool! One time, I went to Ohio to a b
ig amusement park with my—with the Samotnys. The drive was boring but it was so fun once we got there.” He looked at me. “We could go, right?”

  It wasn’t a good idea to get his hopes up for a future trip with Connor. We had no idea what would happen, but Jared was waiting for me to speak. “You’ll have to teach me the rules of football,” I said, which sounded like an answer but without me really having to commit to some hypothetical trip.

  “You don’t even know the rules?” Jared scoffed. He started talking about yards and penalties, a bunch of stuff that I found so uninteresting that I thought I might pass out. But my brother was talking to me, and I was going to listen as long as he kept it up.

  Connor eventually noticed my eyes glazing over and laughed quietly under his breath. “Jared, why don’t you see if there’s a development league game on now?” he suggested. “I have a lot of sports channels.” There wasn’t, but Connor had a lot of channels in general, and Jared found some very bad cartoons. It didn’t take too long, however, before he fell asleep on Connor’s couch. Despite its stark whiteness, Jared looked comfortable there, and the apartment was so warm. It was making me feel a little sleepy and lazy myself, that and the good dinner, and finally coming off the shock and horror of my brother being missing and almost killing Connor with my car. I ran my eyes over him, just to make sure he was really all right.

  It was nice to be here, the three of us, safe and full of take-out. As I looked at Connor, I thought I could get used to this, and I wondered what I could do to make it happen more for Jared and me.

  Chapter 5

  “What?” Connor asked me. He had caught me staring.

  “Nothing.” I looked around the apartment instead. “This place doesn’t seem like you. I mean, it doesn’t seem like the guy from seven years ago who liked all the old stuff.”

  He looked around too. “It’s different,” he agreed. “After the acc…after I got shot, a lot changed. I changed, I guess. I had a new job, a new direction. No more driving around to cruddy salvage yards across the Midwest every weekend, no more all-nighters trying to remove every last nail from a wood floor so we could refinish it. Now I work just as hard, but I’m a lot cleaner.” He smiled a little. “After I got out of the hospital, I was living with my parents, and I got pretty tired of being their child again. I had to have a place of my own. I wasn’t going to be able to renovate something, not with where I was at that point in the recovery. I bought this apartment and my mom decorated it. She likes neutrals.”

  I noticed. The only color in the place was from the bright sweatshirt Jared had put back on as he napped on the couch.

  “Are you happy with how things turned out?” I asked. “This is all really nice, but not what you used to talk about.” I remembered him wanting to restore a house of his own in the city, not the suburbs, to restore all the houses on a street. He had loved that truck, too, and he had loved driving to the salvage yards he was joking about now.

  Connor thought for a moment before he answered. “Generally. I guess.”

  “Yeah.” I thought too. “I wish—” I started to say. I wished that it had never happened to him. I wished I could go back to make him talk to me for just a minute more over the counter in the store, or that I could take a little more time getting his change. I wished that I hadn’t had his cigarettes all ready for him when he walked in and he would have spent a moment or two waiting while I looked for them. If any of those things had happened, Connor wouldn’t have walked out into the crossfire and been hurt. I wished a lot of things.

  “Why didn’t you finish high school?” he asked me suddenly. “You said you had to get your GED before you could have Jared come live with you. I remember that every time I went into your uncle’s store, you had a book open and were working or studying. I thought you liked school.”

  “I did,” I said. “I really did. I was in a magnet program that was hard, but fun. But the fire changed a lot for us. When the store burned down,” I explained. That had been the end. “For one thing, my uncle didn’t have the right insurance, or not enough, or something. Anyway, he lost everything. He hadn’t wanted to take us in after our parents died, and after that happened to his store, he decided to move to Tennessee. He also decided not to take us with him and we stayed in Detroit.”

  “He just left you?” Connor sounded disgusted.

  “There was a lot going on. I don’t blame him, not that much. It was hard and chaotic,” I concluded, not wanting to say any more about it. “I ended up dropping out of school after a while so I could work more. But I did go back for my GED and maybe one day I could go to college.” I remembered what Amy had said about that. “I would like to, eventually, when things calm down with Jared. I had always hoped to go. My parents saved for it.” I shrugged. “You weren’t the only one whose life went in another direction. Things changed a lot for both of us after the shooting.”

  “How did it change for you? Or do you mean, what happened to you guys after the fire when your uncle left you?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” I looked over at my sleeping brother. “If I go to college, I could get a really good job and save for him, for his future. We’re so hand to mouth right now and that’s not what I want for Jared.”

  “He’s mentioned his family a few times. The Sam-somethings,” Connor said.

  “The Samotnys. They’re not his family,” I quickly informed him.

  “He lived with them for five years, right? That’s a long time, almost half his life. When we were playing lacrosse, he told me that he doesn’t see them anymore.”

  “What are you trying to say?” I asked, bristling. “Of course he doesn’t see them anymore. They kept him from his only sister! They fought me in court because they knew I was young and didn’t have any money and they thought they could beat me that way. They called the police on me when I tried to see him, they were awful.”

  Connor frowned and shook his head. “Does Jared know this?”

  “I’ve told him, but he doesn’t believe me. You heard how he was talking—he thinks they were so wonderful because they took him on trips and gave him stuff that I’ll never be able to. And you can see how he acts toward me! That’s because of them. After the last hearing when I finally won, Jill Samotny had to be pulled off him, sobbing and wailing. It was awful how she acted, how they both acted, and all the lies they told him about me and our family.” I realized that my voice had gone up, and I slowed down and remembered my lines. “I mean, I’m very grateful for how they took care of him when I was too young to do it myself, but I’m his real sister,” I recited. “And it’s so important to keep families together.”

  “You sound like you’re reading from a book,” Connor told me.

  I snorted. “I am, actually. I wrote all that down so I would remember what to say to the judge and all the other the official people when they asked me about the fucking Samotnys. You have to tell people what they want to hear,” I said, before I remembered who I was talking to. I needed to tell Connor what he wanted to hear, also. I changed my tone again, not back to the angel-woman, but not so bitter, either. “I’m best for Jared. Us living together is best for him, and also keeping him away from the Samotnys, who lied to him and manipulated him because they were sad that they couldn’t have kids of their own.”

  “It is really terrible to lie to a kid about his family.” He hesitated. “Besides that, it does sound like they treated him pretty well. He was saying—”

  “I really don’t want to talk about them anymore. Ok? Let’s change the subject. Tell me what else you do when you’re not working in your corner office or hanging out in your fancy apartment.”

  He smiled. “Is it fancy? I put away the solid gold trashcan to try to tone it down.”

  “Ha. Really, what else?”

  “I guess I do what a lot of single guys do. I work long hours,” he said. “I go to the gym, I watch hockey. I spend a lot of time with my parents, still, which is a little unusual, but they tend to cling some after w
hat happened to me. I go out with a friend now and then.”

  “To Atelier Anson for dinner,” I suggested.

  “That was business, not pleasure. Until I saw you.”

  I flushed. “That was shock, not pleasure.”

  “It was luck. What are the odds that we would see each other at that restaurant after seven years? I did look, Lia. But I was looking under your uncle’s name, not Bissett. The first time I heard your real last name was when the police officer said it when he brought your brother home the other day. I was looking, but it was like there wasn’t any trace of you.” He tilted his head. “You seemed pretty angry when I first went to your apartment. Was it because of that? Because I never found you?”

  “I’m not angry at you,” I said, shaking my head. “But seeing you again brought up a lot of memories and I try not to think about everything that happened then. You getting shot, then the fire, the hospital, going into foster care and losing Jared. Looking back, it all just seems black and confused in my mind. There was nothing good. Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. I’m not angry with you, I never was.” More like disappointed and hurt that he had forgotten me. “I tried to find you, too,” I told him. “I went to the hospital to visit you after you got shot.”

  He frowned. “I don’t remember seeing you.”

  “They wouldn’t let me into your room. Then you disappeared.”

  “I got transferred to Ann Arbor for more treatment,” he said. “No one told me that you had been there.”

  “A few times. A lot of times,” I admitted. “But then everything else happened and I tried to forget. I could have found you, too, afterwards, and I’m sorry I never did. Maybe I could have put your mind to rest a little bit.”

  “How?”

  My heart started to beat hard. “Did you ever worry about them? The people who shot you? Like that they would come after you again or something?”