“You should try to get some sleep,” Connor said. His voice sounded flat and odd.
I got up off his bed and stumbled back into mine. I lay on my side to face him, to see his outline in the darkness. He was still for a long, long time, totally unmoving.
I didn’t think that either of us slept that night.
∞
We had a very quiet ride back to Detroit. Even Jared was subdued, dozing for the rest of the short trip. It was easy now that the snow had stopped and the roads had been plowed, but Connor still leaned forward over the wheel the whole way, almost as tense as he had been the night before.
“I’ll drive the truck over later,” he told me when he pulled up at his parents’ house.
“Ok, thanks,” I answered. It was practically the only thing I’d said all day, besides stuff about passing the syrup at breakfast. I hadn’t had much of an appetite then, and the face that had looked back at me early that morning in the motel’s bathroom mirror was haggard and pale from the lack of sleep. Connor didn’t seem to be in a much better state. “Thank you for everything.” I got out my wallet. “I owe—”
“No, put that away.” His hand closed briefly over mine. “I’m glad you guys could come.”
He walked us to my car in the garage. I wanted to say something more to him before I drove away, something important and significant. Something to explain why I had kissed him the night before and also why I had made him stop touching me. I searched my brain for the right thing, the words that would fix what had happened between us.
“Thanks again for loaning me the truck,” I told him. No, that hadn’t been it.
He just nodded and said goodbye to Jared, and we got into my car. I saw movement in the upstairs window as I backed out and assumed it was Margaux, checking up on us. Probably wondering why we had arrived home a day late.
I felt so strange, kind of empty, and confused. Very confused. Jared and I still didn’t have a lot to say on the way home and I wondered if he was dreading going back as much as I was. The streets had already turned to dirty slush when I pulled up in front of our building and pair of men stood on the corner and watched us. I stared back for just a second before looking away. “Let’s go, quickly,” I ordered my brother, and we both hurried up the stairs. I glanced over my shoulder a few times and so did Jared.
The apartment felt even colder than the temperature outside and neither of us took off our coats as I fiddled with the thermostat. Jared took up position by the window and looked down into the street. “Are you going to go change in the bathroom?” he asked me.
I immediately got suspicious. “No,” I lied. “I don’t feel like it.”
“Oh, ok.” He didn’t turn away from his spot at the window.
“I want to sit here on the couch for a while.” I wondered if he even heard my words. “I’m planning to sit here all day in front of the door.”
Jared twisted the cord to the broken blinds around his hand, staring down the block toward the corner. “You are? Oh, ok,” he said again absently. He drummed his fingers on the chipped sill for a while and I watched him. “I need to go somewhere,” he burst out.
“No,” I told him. “No, you can’t go down and talk to those guys.”
His eyes got huge. “How did you know that I wanted to do that? Lia, I have to.”
“No.” I shook my head. “What do they want with you, J?”
“Nothing! It’s just, I used to do some stuff for them. Like, carrying messages and stuff. They paid me. I told them that my sister was making me stay inside all the time but they want me to come back. They say I can’t just leave.”
“To come back because you can’t leave,” I repeated. Oh, my God. “No, Jared. You know that’s a bad idea.”
“They were really cool at first.” He stepped away from the window. “They know we live here.”
“Well, we’re going to move to our house soon, and they won’t know where you’ve gone.” I shouldn’t have wasted all this time, going out shopping, going to a football game. I should have been fixing the house, or getting a second job to pay people who could. “We’ll go work on the pipes. I’ve been reading about how to do it and I found this guy online who will come work for really cheap. As soon as we have water, we’ll live there.”
“Really? We can move away?” He looked doubtful. “But there are holes in the walls.”
“I’m going to fix all that,” I told him, with a lot more conviction than I currently felt. “Are those guys still on the corner?”
He cautiously peered out. “Yeah.”
“I’ll get dressed. You change into clean clothes and watch them, but don’t let them see you. When they’re gone, we’ll go over to the house and spend today working. I bet we can get a lot done.” I jumped up but then paused. “Don’t go outside, Jared. Promise?”
He nodded but I didn’t know if I could trust him.
“Do I need to screw down that board in front of the door?” I prodded.
“No! I won’t go,” he told me, then mumbled something else.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m scared,” Jared said more clearly. “I’m scared of them. I thought they were my friends, but now,” he said, and stopped on a big swallow.
He was so young. When I had been eleven, our parents were still alive, and I was studying for spelling tests and hitting the punching bag with our dad. I walked over to my brother and put out my hand, carefully and cautiously touching his shoulder. He jumped a little and I wondered if he was like me, that physical contact with someone felt so strange and foreign. Probably the Samotnys had hugged him a lot. “You have to stay away from them. We’ll move and you’ll grow up, those guys will get locked up or hurt and then they won’t be around to bother you anymore. Ok? I won’t let them do anything to you, Jared.”
He nodded at me but stepped away from my touch. “I won’t go out without you. I promise.”
I stood under the lukewarm water quickly washing and rinsing shampoo from my hair. It wouldn’t take much for Jared to get into more trouble than both of us could handle and I thought we might already be at that point. I considered renting another apartment, running out on our current lease and moving, but the courts liked stability, permanence, and I was sure that they were watching us because of Richie and Jill Samotny forcing the issue all the time. But if I moved my brother into an unfinished house, that was going to be a problem of its own. The contractor who Connor had set me up with could start in the spring, and was willing to work very gradually so that I could keep paying him. But I needed to make it happen now. There wasn’t going to be time to wait for months until the house was habitable.
Thinking about the contractor and working on the house returned Connor to my mind, and I had been diligently keeping him out of it. I had been brushing aside the fact that I had kissed him the night before and he had kissed me back. I had ignored the shivery sensations that had coursed through my body when I remembered the feeling of him on top of me, with us pressed together so…intimately. I slid my hand up my wet skin to my own breast, rubbing gently, and I imagined that it was his fingers teasing me there. But he had touched me the night before, and I had stopped it.
“No,” I repeated out loud. “No.” That wasn’t going to happen. I turned off the water and got out, and when I opened the bathroom door to peek into the living room, Jared looked back at me.
We did go over to the house as soon as the corner was clear and he helped me seal up every place we thought a rodent could enter, and to map out where pipes had been and where I thought they were going to have to go. I put Jared back in the folding chair with blankets on him and had him search online for a cheap furnace while I worked on cleaning out the chimney so we could have fires in the old fireplace. We cleared off the snow from my scrap pile and carried in the front door to start fixing that.
The whole time we were there, neither of us had a lot to say to each other, but Jared let me put my hand on his shoulder without yanking away after we naile
d up the plywood and walked out to the car. Both of us stopped when we saw what was parked in the snowy driveway.
“That’s Connor’s truck,” Jared said. “He brought it? It wasn’t here when went to dig out the front door. Why didn’t he come in and talk to us?” He turned to look at me, confused. Hurt.
“He was probably in a hurry to get home. Or he didn’t notice that we were here, or he thought we were really busy and didn’t want to disturb us,” I lied. Clearly, Connor had ignored us because I had kissed him and then pushed him away. “Come on, we’ll go to the building supply store and look at those pipes. Let’s figure out how many feet we need, ok?” I had a number in my mind that seemed colossal, but also correct. I put my hand back on Jared’s shoulder and we walked together to my car. “Wait, want to take the truck?”
He nodded vigorously so I dug out the key that Connor had given me the day before and handed it to my brother. “There’s a note on the seat!” he called when he opened the door. “It says he’ll talk to us soon. He had to get to a family dinner.” His face cleared of the unhappiness, but I remained unconvinced that a “family dinner” was the reason Connor had avoided us. I backed out the old truck, feeling tall and powerful in the high seat, and parked my little car in the driveway. “We’ll see him soon,” Jared told me with assurance. I still didn’t feel it.
What I did feel was scared about Jared, overwhelmed by my house, and confused about Connor. It made an uncomfortable night of tossing around on the couch and trying to sleep, afraid of every noise in our old apartment building and every car that went by. And when I did finally fall asleep, I had the same kind of dreams that Connor had in the motel, and I woke up terrified and more confused than ever.
I realized the next morning at work that I had no idea how long Amy Whitaker had been standing in my office door, or how many times she had said my name. “Lia. Hey, Lia?”
“Sorry, what?” I asked.
She came in to the little room and sat in the chair facing my desk. “Everything ok?”
“I’m trying to sort out our orders for the office supplies,” I lied. I had been looking at that, but really for the last fifteen or so minutes I had been slack-jawed and lost in thought about other things. “Yeah, the office supplies,” I reiterated, and pointed at my screen. “I’m surprised at the amount of paper you guys buy. Is that normal for a two- or three-person office?”
Amy walked around and looked also. “What? That many reams? I had no idea we were using so much per month! I hardly ever print, but maybe Dayana was. But how many pages per day would that be?” Both of us thought.
“About two-fifty,” we said together.
“That can’t be right,” Amy frowned. “I’ll call her again.” Dayana hadn’t come in that morning, but this time, she hadn’t let Amy know that she was taking the day off. Since her paycheck had been deposited in her account last Friday, I thought we could safely assume we’d seen the last of Dayana.
“You’re good with numbers.”
“Huh?” I had gone off in my head again. “Oh, numbers. Yeah, I like math a lot.”
She nodded. “Are you sure everything’s ok?”
“Oh, yes. Sure.” I changed the subject. “How was your visit with your mother-in-law this weekend?”
“As bad as could be expected,” she said, and made a face. “But thankfully, short. And now she’s determined that she wants to move to southern California, so Steve is going to buy her a house there, and maybe she’ll stay put a few thousand miles away.” She played with the engagement ring on her finger, making the diamond flash in the weak sunlight that filtered through my window.
“Steve is going to buy her a house there,” I repeated slowly. Just buy a house, like it was nothing. That woman who they hated would be able to move and start over, do anything she wanted. I felt a burning jealousy rise in my chest.
“I wish she had said she wanted to move to Fiji. Or Antarctica, whichever is farther,” Amy commented. “How about your weekend? How was the game? Did you have fun?”
“We did. Yeah, it was fun.”
“But? And? Why am I feeling like there’s more here?” she prodded.
“We left things on kind of a weird note. Like, unfinished. And yesterday, Connor skipped out on an opportunity to see us. And my brother is already attached to him.” I sighed. “Really attached. He needs stability and continuity and I don’t know if Connor understands how important that is. I don’t know if he totally got that when he started a relationship with Jared, he had to follow through.” I knew I was oversharing, but I couldn’t seem to close my mouth and stop with her looking so interested and sympathetic.
She shook her head. “Connor doesn’t seem like the flakey type.”
He would be if I had ruined everything by kissing him and then shoving him away, but that part I definitely wasn’t going to get into. “Yeah, maybe.”
“You should go talk to him and find out. Hear his side, like if maybe he had a really good excuse for how he’s acting.” Amy now nodded earnestly.
Maybe he would have an excuse like her former boyfriend had told her, that some giant Australian moths had prevented him from calling me. How dumb did you have to be? “Maybe,” I said again, but then I felt like I had to give her a push in the right direction about life. “You never know about people. Know what I mean?”
Her eyebrows went up. “I guess that’s true. I know I haven’t always been the best judge of character.”
Yeah, no kidding. Not only had she stuck with the moth guy, she had hired both Dayana and me. “I wanted to talk to you about Dayana,” I said carefully. “What she’s been up to.”
“What about her?” Amy looked confused, expectant. “What do you mean?”
I was going to have to spell it out. “I think that Dayana isn’t coming back to work,” I told her baldly. “Like, maybe she didn’t tell you, but she quit.”
“What?” She now looked shocked. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, she’s been stealing from you, right? She’s been over-ordering and probably selling the excess? And she realized that she was going to get caught, and you said that her desk is empty, so I just put two and two together.” There were those math skills that Amy had been congratulating me on.
“Stealing from me?” she asked blankly.
“The paper? The coffee?” I prompted. I thought that the more we looked, the more we’d find about what Dayana had been up to. “I don’t think she was ordering enormous quantities by mistake. Or maybe once by mistake, but weren’t these monthly deliveries? I worked in a lot of restaurants with people selling things out the back door. She was doing the same thing here. To you.”
Amy stared at me. “Oh, my God!” She jumped up and I heard her go into Dayana’s office. “You’re right!” she called to me and ran back to my door. “The only things left in there are dead bugs and a thing of staples. And I just called her, and the number doesn’t work! She really is gone!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. It almost would have been funny, how surprised Amy was, except that I felt a little bad because she was also so upset.
“I can’t do all this on my own. We just got another new client,” she started to tell me, and so I helped her for a while to think through what needed to be done. Together we mapped out a plan for both of us to take over Dayana’s tasks and also went over what Amy would need to look for in the next person she hired, like qualities that would hopefully ensure that the new employee was not a thief. I decided that I would try to sit in on the interviews.
I thought a lot about what Amy had said about talking to Connor, and I knew that I needed to. For his sake, as well as mine and Jared’s. So when it got to be time for lunch, I took the elevator up to the Whitaker Enterprises floor that I had visited before. This time, there was a receptionist at the desk behind the glass walls. “May I help you?” she asked me, and I told her I was looking for Connor Hayes and gave her my name. “Just a moment,” she said, and picked up her phone.
This
was when he could have hidden back in his office and not come out, but only a few moments later, he walked down the hall toward me. “Hey, Lia.” He sounded friendly, but also guarded.
“Hi,” I said. “Do have a minute? Or a few? Could you maybe break for lunch? I had something to tell you. Or, to show you.” And I was mindlessly talking, my hands and stomach spasming from nerves.
“Uh, sure. Let me grab my keys.”
“No, I’ll drive.” I wasn’t sure he would direct his car to where I wanted us to go, if he was behind the wheel.
“I’ll just get my coat,” he told me, and then we went down to the garage. “You drove the truck to work?” he asked when he saw it.
“Do you mind? I never know when I might see something to pick up.” And also, I kind of loved the truck. It was old and it rattled and smelled some, but it was pretty awesome.
“No, I don’t mind at all. I meant for you to use it. It feels a little strange sitting on the passenger side,” he admitted, as we got in. “Where are we headed?”
“I have something to show you,” I said again. And then we drove for a while in silence because even though I had been practicing and thinking about it all day, I still couldn’t seem to find the words to express what I needed to say to him. I wasn’t even sure what that would be.
Connor spoke first. “Lia, about what happened in the motel room. I’m very sorry.”
“You said that before, too. Why? Why are you sorry?” I asked.
“You told me to stop.”
“And you did,” I said. “I also kissed you, first. I don’t think we need to worry about it anymore. Or talk about it.”
I looked over and he was just nodding. “Ok,” he told me. “Subject closed.”
“Great,” I answered. “Because of my brother. He thinks that you’re friends, and he needs a friend like you. I don’t want him to lose you just because of some dumb thing that happened between the two of us.”
“I wouldn’t do that to Jared,” he told me. “I know he’s had a lot of loss in his life, and I won’t be another person who disappears.”
Fixing Lia Page 14
