Fixing Lia

by Jamie Bennett

  I stumbled on the treadmill. “I didn’t know that. No one told me that!”

  Amy glanced at me curiously. “Who would have told you? Anyway, he’s fine now,” she assured me.

  I looked around the gym for Connor to make sure of that, and found him already watching me. He tilted his head, like he was asking if I was ok too, and I nodded at him. His heart had stopped. He had been dead. It made me want to throw up and cry as I stood on this treadmill.

  I changed the subject with Amy so that I didn’t do either of those things and a little shakily asked her for advice about clothes, because she was wearing all black gym stuff and had her hair in a ponytail and still looked better-dressed than I had in my work outfit. She loved this topic. “What you were wearing today, all it needed was some accessorizing, like a necklace? And if you opened the collar a little,” she suggested. “I never used to have much money before, but I always loved fashion. I could go through your wardrobe!” she suggested eagerly, and I almost laughed.

  “My wardrobe is on five hangers in a closet I share with my brother, and two drawers of t-shirts, jeans, and shorts. I’ve never accumulated too much,” I explained. I thought of the beaded necklace that the babysitter had stolen. “But I like pretty stuff,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind having it.”

  “I’ll look through your wardrobe,” Amy told me confidently. “And I’ll take you to some places I know.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure! It would be fun.” She looked over at me. “I know people here in Michigan, women I met through Steve’s company or his family or friends, but I don’t have anyone that I really like to hang out with.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “I don’t really have a lot of friends.” Or any.

  “Besides your brother,” she prompted. “You must be too busy to have much of a social life.” She very obviously pointed at Connor, whose eyebrows went up when he saw both of us staring at him. “But there’s always time for looo-ve,” she told me, drawing out the word, and she wiggled her eyebrows. When she looked again at my face, she laughed so hard she had to slow down her treadmill. I laughed too, because she was funny, and because I’d certainly never had a boss like her.

  Also, I laughed because I liked her, and I was enjoying myself in a way that I barely remembered doing. It was fun to have someone like this, someone who would maybe become a friend.

  Chapter 6

  “Hail the house,” I heard a voice calling. I stuck my head out of the hole where I had removed a piece of plywood, where the window glass was soon going to go.

  “Hi!” I called back to Connor. He had come, and I had been right not to doubt him. He was wearing his old jeans and his Michigan hat with his brown hair curling out a little from underneath, just like he used to when I’d known him before. He also had a toolbelt slung around his lean hips, and he looked good enough to eat.

  What? I swallowed, shocked at myself. Where had that come from?

  “Connor?” Jared asked, and removed himself from the lawn chair covered in blankets that he had been occupying since we arrived at the house an hour before. He left the dreaded little hell-device, the gaming console, behind him as he hurried to see our visitor. I hated that piece of plastic and microprocessors.

  “Careful! Watch where you step!” Connor yelled at my brother, as Jared pelted down the stairs to greet him. “I’m serious, man. I don’t want you to get hurt. Test before you put your foot down, ok?”

  Jared nodded, as if he had paid attention, but after they had talked for a moment, he ran back up onto the porch without noticing at all what he was doing. I wondered if he listened to me just as well when I had told him to stay out of the bad business in our neighborhood. I had been watching him like a hawk, though, and I didn’t see how he’d have the time to get into trouble. Especially since I was pulling the couch to block the door each night and then sleeping on it.

  “I wanted to give you plenty of warning that I was coming,” Connor told me as he came in, and grinned as he gingerly rubbed his stomach. “I feel like I’m still healing from your earlier blow when I startled you on the street.”

  “My dad would have called you a candy-ass for complaining about that punch,” I told him. “He used to do amateur boxing when he was a teenager and in his twenties.”

  “That’s where you learned to hit?”

  I nodded. “He had a bag hanging in our garage and he used to make me spar, too.” I remembered him sliding the big gloves onto my hands.

  “I didn’t know that,” Jared said. I hadn’t realized that he was listening. “He was a boxer?”

  “Yeah,” I said. My brother hadn’t talked much to me since I had screamed about his extra-curricular activities in the neighborhood, and I was eager to keep this going. “He was good, but then he broke his hand pretty badly and had to quit.”

  “What about our mom? Did she like boxing?” He paused. “What was her name, again?”

  “Sona. That was her name.” I heard my voice quaver and cleared my throat. “No, she didn’t. Not at all. She was happy when he stopped because she didn’t like seeing him bruised up.”

  “How did they meet?” Connor asked.

  “Her family moved in across the street from our dad’s parents when she was fifteen. He thought she was just some little neighbor kid,” I said. Now I smiled a little, remembering my mom telling the story. “They didn’t start dating until she was twenty-two.”

  “Like you,” Jared said.

  “Like me,” I agreed. “She had watched and waited for him to fall for her for seven years, and finally she said, ‘It’s now or never, Justin Bisset!’ And he said, ‘It’s now.’”

  Both Jared and Connor were smiling at me. “That’s a great story,” Connor said, and Jared mumbled something.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You never talk about them,” he said more clearly. “I don’t know anything about them.”

  “I tried to tell you stuff, but the fu—the Samotnys didn’t want you to have any ties to your past. Like me, right? Remember how I told you that they didn’t want me around at all?”

  His face closed off. “You could tell me about Sona and Justin now.” He went back to the lawn chair, slapped headphones over his ears, and flicked on his stupid game.

  “You mean our mom and dad,” I said, but Jared didn’t respond. Awesome. Why had I brought up the fucking Samotnys again? There was no need to be reminded of his life with those people because now it was over.

  “Jared,” I said, but either he couldn’t hear me, or he was pretty good at pretending. “Jared!” I held my hands up in defeat. “It’s like he’s deaf to any criticism of those people.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t criticize them,” Connor answered. “He knew them as his parents for five years. How would you feel if someone started to badmouth your mom and dad?”

  I knew exactly how that felt. “They weren’t his real…” I stopped. “Ok, I get what you’re saying. But shouldn’t he know how awful they were? What if they come back to try to take him? He should know so that he won’t want to go. Right? They can’t take him.”

  “Lia, calm down. No one is trying to take him, and if they did, you could fight them in court.”

  “Or…” Probably best not to tell him the different ways I had thought of killing the Samotnys, because most likely, it wouldn’t come to that. “Sure. I could get a lawyer and fight them.”

  “I know a few lawyers,” he told me, and I bet that he did. Connor would want to help me fight, I knew it, just like he was going to help me with the windows. “Nobody’s taking Jared,” he continued, “but you’re not helping yourself with your brother when you say things about the people he lived with for so many years. The people he lov—”

  “Right. Sure,” I said. I really would try to stop, but it was going to be hard. Connor didn’t understand the depths of what they had done, but I was too ashamed to tell him everything.

  “Here,” he told me, and handed me a pair of thick gloves. “Wear th
ese so you don’t cut yourself on the glass and let’s get cracking. Get it? Cracking, like we don’t want the panes to break.” He grinned at his dumb pun.

  “Any joke that you have to explain…” I said, and left it at that. “Thank you for the gloves.”

  Connor nodded, still smiling. In fact, he seemed happier than I’d seen him since we’d run into each other again at Atelier Anson. He was as relaxed as he’d been on the lacrosse field and since he said I obviously liked his jokes, he told me more of them. Both of us were laughing a lot as we tried to shore up the wood frames enough to hold the glass I had bought.

  “There!” I said triumphantly, as we looked through my front window. “How many years was it broken out or boarded up? It looks amazing.”

  Connor smiled back at me. “And it only took us an hour to fix. How many windows are in this house, again?” He took off his glove and messed with my hair. “I’m just kidding. We’ll get them all done, except the ones on the second floor.” He had been talking to me about using the stairs, and I agreed (in theory) that they weren’t safe. I wouldn’t let Jared go on them, but I did need to work on the bedroom windows facing the street. At the very least I could repair those and while I was up there, maybe I would get the rest, too.

  Both of us watched through the glass as a pickup truck stopped in front of my house. “We can see everything outside,” I told Connor with satisfaction.

  “It’s a novel thing for a house. Let’s go talk to this guy about the foundation.” He took my hand to pull me up. I kind of wished he would keep holding it, like he had at the gym.

  “That much?” I asked him a while later. I had managed to keep my astonishment in check while the foundation guy was here, but now I couldn’t hold it back. “That’s how much it’s going to cost to fix this?” I kicked at the bottom of the house. “Maybe we could just live with it, as is. Is it really that bad?”

  “I think you knew it was when the contractor mentioned that he didn’t understand how the house was still standing.” Connor frowned. “Lia…”

  “Don’t say it! Please don’t tell me to sell.”

  “I was going to say that in the end, it would probably be a lot less expensive to tear this down and put up a new building.”

  “Not if I do things myself. And look.” I walked him around to the pile of wood that had been the garage and began to remove boards.

  Connor immediately started to help. “What are you doing? Be careful of these nails.”

  I peeled back a tarp. “See?” I asked, displaying the carefully placed and hidden house parts I had collected. “I’ve found them all over the city. I do what you used to do, driving around and finding stuff on the curbs. Won’t this look nice? I already have a medicine cabinet, and a mantle.” I pointed. “I’ll save a ton by reusing.” I pointed again, to a wood corner poking out at the bottom. “This will be our front door.”

  “I did drive around doing that, you’re right,” Connor said slowly. “This is quite a collection, Lia. How long have you been accumulating it?”

  “Ever since I got my own place when I left foster care. When Jared came to live with me, I had to take it all out of my apartment, but then I could hide it here.”

  “How did you transport this big door?” He ran his hand along its edge.

  “I tied it to the roof of my car,” I explained, “then drove really, really slowly and carefully.” I patted it, too. “It’s going to need a few repairs, but I love it. Everything can be fixed. You told me that a lot.”

  “I used to say that,” he agreed, and I saw him staring at my house. “I’m going to call a contractor I know to come out and look around here. Just to look,” he cautioned. “I’m pretty sure he’s going to say the same things that I’ve been saying.” He frowned at the back yard. “We need to figure out where that water is coming from. The pond looks larger to me.”

  Detroit had experienced a little bit of a winter thaw and then some rain. It looked larger to me, also.

  “If it freezes all the way, we can ice skate,” I told him. Because both of us were saying “we” to talk about the house now. “Jared can…oh, I have to go check on Jared!” I exclaimed, and rushed back toward the house.

  With his long legs, Connor easily kept pace with me. “Is everything ok with him?” he asked.

  I ran up the porch steps and looked with relief through the newly-paned window at my brother, still absorbed in his game. “He’s fine, of course. Just the usual adolescent stuff, you know. Uh, thanks for asking the guy to come out and look around. And for your help today.”

  “We’re not done yet.” He held out his hand for me to walk first through the opening where I would soon hang my front door. “How many more windows was it?”

  “Only seven hundred,” I told him.

  “Fewer if your brother helps,” Connor said. “Hey, Jared!” My brother’s head snapped up. “Come give us a hand so we can bang out a few more before we break for lunch.” He paused. “Get it? Banging and breaking? The glass?” he asked, and then ruffled Jared’s hair as they both laughed. When he saw me rolling my eyes, he messed with mine, too.

  ∞

  This was just not the best way to start the day. The umbrella blew over my head, again, turning inside out and allowing the freezing rain to pelt me. I wasn’t trusting the bus anymore—since I wasn’t trusting my brother anymore—and I was driving Jared to school every day. Today, just as we arrived, he realized he had forgotten his backpack, which also held his lunch.

  “It’s fine,” he had said stormily.

  “No, I can go home and get it. I’ll drop it at the principal’s office for you.”

  “Really?” He had actually smiled at me. “You don’t have to, Lia.”

  “I want to help you, J. I’ll do whatever I can for you,” I had told him. He had looked over and smiled a little more, which made it well worth it for me to return to our apartment, flying over potholes and with my tires skidding a little on the slick roads. Now, I was rushing back to the school, but I was probably going to be late for work anyway. And I just had dropped my keys into a dirty puddle. Balls!

  “Lia?”

  Oh, my God. I turned, forgetting about the frigid rain and the keys. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

  Jill Samotny, Jared’s former foster mother, got out of a lime green car parked behind me. “Lia, hello.” She smiled shakily. “How are you?”

  “I’m asking you again, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m not trying to bother you.” She stepped closer. “I wanted to talk to you about Jared.” Now Jill looked hopefully at the backpack in my hand. “Is he here? Can I see him?”

  “He’s at school, of course!” I told her, and retrieved my wet keys. I threw the backpack into the car. “And you can’t see him anyway. If you try to go there…”

  “I won’t do that. I only wanted to know how he is.”

  “Jared is wonderful. He’s never been happier. He tells me all the time how glad he is that we’re finally together after all the years of people keeping us apart.”

  She had the nerve to flush and get teary. “We weren’t trying…I know we made mistakes, Lia. We’ve apologized to you. We didn’t feel we could take a teenager and you had the health problems, and then, you were so angry—but yes, we could have done more.”

  “I see you still have your excuses all ready, so that you can keep feeling good about preventing an orphaned little boy from being with from his only sister, his last relation in the world! Just admit that you wanted to erase his past. You wanted him to be yours, screw everyone who had come before you. Like how you got rid of our mom’s picture when I gave it to him?”

  She couldn’t even meet my eyes. “That was…I’m sorry about that. I apologize to you again. I admit that I was jealous and hiding that picture wasn’t something I did rationally. It was very poor judgement.”

  I snorted. “Sure, cut yourself a big break and call it that. I might say it was cruel and vicious, but of course, go with �
��poor judgment.’”

  She flushed again. “I love him. Both Richie and love him so much.” She glanced at my car and then at our apartment building. “Is he getting enough to eat?”

  I got so angry, I could barely see. “You think I’m starving him? You think I’m mistreating him? Is that what you’re reporting on me?”

  “No! No, it’s just, where you live is so…” she said, gesturing to my building. She took another step closer and held out her hand. “Lia, please. We want to help.”

  “If you touch me, I’m calling the police and reporting an assault,” I said flatly.

  That made her step back. “Richie and I can acknowledge we made mistakes. We shouldn’t have fought you to the bitter end that way, we should have made it easier for you to visit—”

  I snorted again, because they had made it nearly impossible for me to see my brother for five years. “Right. Again, ‘mistakes,’ rather than willful acts of malice.”

  She plowed ahead. “I know it made you angry when he found out the truth about your parents. We shouldn’t have let him know those things.”

  “The truth? You mean how you lied and told him that the reason that they’re dead was because of my dad? Is that what you mean?”

  “We never said that!” Jill protested. “But I did let him read the newspaper articles when he had questions, and they mentioned Justin Bissett’s blood alcohol, and I explained—”

  “They were T-boned in an intersection!” I exploded. “It didn’t make any difference if my dad had drunk a beer or two!”

  “His blood alcohol was so high—and the previous DUIs?” She held up her hands. “Your mother allowed Jared in the car with your father—”

  “Shut up. You can’t even stop yourself now from trying to defame them! Isn’t it enough punishment that she died? That he lay dying in the hospital knowing that his wife had been killed, believing that his son would die, too?”