“Ok, but you dropped off the truck without telling us that you were there,” I reminded him. “Like you were trying to disappear.”
“I did have to get to a dinner with my mom.” He sighed. “But mostly, I was worried about kissing you. I mean, how we had kissed.”
“Which we’re no longer discussing, so no need to worry about it. Subject closed,” I reminded him.
“Right.” We drove for another few blocks. “Sometimes it takes me a while to process through stuff, and I need some quiet, I guess. I was thinking, not disappearing. I’m not doing that to either one of you, Lia.”
“Good.” I felt relief all the way to my fingertips. Connor wasn’t going anywhere. “Good, I’m glad. For Jared’s sake, I’m really glad.”
We kept driving in silence, hurrying up I-94 with some mid-day traffic. I got more and more nervous the closer we got.
Connor sat up straight when I made the turn off Gratiot. “Wait a minute. Where are we going? What are you doing?”
“It’s ok,” I told him. “I come back here sometimes, just to see.” I pulled to the stop at the curb, across the street from where my uncle’s store had been. “Come on.”
I hopped down from the truck and waited for Connor, and slowly, he got out too. He turned to look at me. “It’s like it never existed.”
We stood on the sidewalk next to each other, looking across the street at the empty building. It was squat and ugly, tagged a few places, the windows boarded over. But as bad as it looked, it was new, built on the lot where my uncle’s party store had burned down. Practically nothing on the block looked the same as it had seven years before.
I nodded at him. “After the fire, it just sat for a while. My uncle left and I think he got rid of the property somehow, or maybe he lost it to the bank. For more than a year it was just a broken, smokey scar on this street.”
“That was when I saw it,” Connor said. “I asked my brother to drive me down here to look, and I saw what had been left after the fire.”
“People looted everything that was worth anything and the city put up a fence because it was dangerous.” The first time I had come back, the fence had been up, but the remains of the building had been still there, black, charred hulks. “Come on.” I ran between cars to cross the street and Connor came with me.
We walked to the place where the entrance to the store had been. “This is where it happened, right about here is where you fell. I ran out and you were slumped down, then I pulled you here.” I walked around the side of the new building. The alley was still there, with a new dumpster. I looked back at him until he followed me. “That was where the EMTs started working on you. I waited here with the police and I could hear the sirens going down Gratiot to take you to the hospital.”
He stared at the spot, then closed his eyes and shook his head, hard. “Why would you come here? Why would you want me to?” he asked angrily. “Why are you trying to make me remember?”
“You do remember,” I told him. “You were dreaming about it.” Calling it an ‘accident’ and letting his mother hover over him hadn’t really worked to help him to forget. “I don’t know if this method is any better,” I admitted. “I used to come down here all the time but I made myself stop. Too much, and it’s like I’m cutting open a wound that’s trying to heal.” I sighed, my eyes fixed on the place on the pavement where I had huddled with him under the wet cardboard and shaken in fear. “I thought that maybe seeing where it had happened, that it mostly doesn’t even exist anymore, maybe that would help you. I want to try to help you, because I’m so sorry.”
“That was why you kissed me. Because you felt sorry for me.”
I looked up. “I don’t know why I did that. I’ve never acted like that before, but in the dark, and you…I just wanted to do something to make you better. And everything can be fixed,” I told him. “That was what you used to say.” The guilt that I had carried around for the last seven years felt like a lead weights tied around my body. I needed to help him again, to fix him.
Connor stepped toward me. Very cautiously, he put his hand out on my shoulder, just like I had done with my brother. “Then, thank you. You did make it better.”
“Hey!” A man stuck his head around the corner of the building. “What are you two doing down there?” He surveyed us, and probably decided that Connor was way too well-dressed to be causing trouble and that maybe I was just a waitress with nice earrings. “Are you with the real estate company?”
“Is this property for sale?” Connor asked him.
“I guess it still is, but someone stole the realtor’s sign. No one’s been wanting to buy it. I’ve been chasing squatters away since they closed the bail bonds place three years ago.” He pointed to the small sandwich shop next door. “That’s my store and I don’t want any more problems over here.”
“We’re definitely not making any problems,” Connor told him, and then asked me, “Are you hungry? How about a sandwich?” He kept his hand on my shoulder and we walked down the alley. The last time that the two of us had been there, I had left alone. Now I put my hand over his and held on, because it was much better that we were walking away together.
Chapter 9
I was at my desk packing up to leave for the gym when I picked up one last phone call. Amy had already left to go to a party, but I had amazed myself by staying even when my boss was gone because I needed to finish a few more things. I had knocked Dayana for her stealing, but it had turned out that the woman had also done a lot of work and without her there, crap was piling up.
Picking up all the calls and then responding to all the dumb questions behind them was maybe the reason Dayana had lost it a little and turned to crime. But now, since I had to do it myself, I was learning even more about how the whole accounting business worked, how to find information for people, and how to solve some of their problems. That part I didn’t mind so much. “Amy Whitaker and Associates, this is Lia,” I said again, for the fiftieth time that day.
This call I minded. “This is to inform you that your student…” The pre-recorded voice paused while another person plugged in, “Jared, um, Bissett,” then the monotone returned to tell me that Jared was absent from his after-school program today—he had never shown up at all. My heart fell down into my comfortable waitress shoes and I ran out, forgetting my coat on the back of my office door and dropping the keys to the truck twice in the hall outside because my hands were shaking so badly. I ran to the elevator, hitting the button repeatedly to try to make it come faster, then ditched it and bolted down the stairs, two and three at a time until I was almost falling.
Jared. Oh, my God. The whole week he had been on edge, both of us had been. But I had thought we had it under control because of the progress we had made on the house. I had bought all the pipes, miles of them. I had broken off the rest of the plaster on the ground floor and carted it away in the truck, the plumber-ish guy was working there today, and I was ready with bales of insulation to stuff into the walls. I had even bought a furnace (also with my credit card, a purchase which meant that I wouldn’t be paying off my balance for the next few years.) “See?” I had told my brother the night before. “We’re getting close! We’ll be moving in soon,” and he had nodded, like he agreed and was ok with it.
And now he had taken off. Where was he? Where had he gone? He had to be back around our apartment. He had run back to the guys he had said he was afraid of, the ones he was supposed to stay away from. I went through a light, totally by mistake, not even noticing until another car blared its horn and we almost had an accident as I skidded to a stop on the wet pavement. City traffic held me up and I swore at the other drivers, yelling at them to hurry, not to stop, just to go, go, go.
When I got to my neighborhood, I steered up and down the streets looking for him, uselessly yelling his name out the window as I did. I attracted a lot of attention, but I didn’t find my brother and it was already starting to get dark. I was about to give up and go to the apartment to cal
l the police, when I finally saw Jared.
He was sprinting down the sidewalk again, looking like the devil himself was right behind him. Maybe in our circumstances, the devil actually was. I leaned over with the car still running and opened the door, and I slowed enough for Jared to get in. He moved really strangely, his hands clutched over his stomach.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” He had been shot. He got shot!
“Lia, I’m fine! Stop screaming! You’re scaring him.”
“What are you talking about? Who?” My foot pushed down hard on the gas pedal without my mind noticing and the car sped forward, almost through another intersection. I made a left with the tires screeching.
Jared unzipped his coat and a black nose popped out of it, then a velvety, brindle-furred head. “I took him out of the house. They were going to make him fight or be bait or something.” My brother started to cry. “He was going to get hurt!”
Dog fighting? I yanked the car over to stop before I had an accident. “Jared, are you ok? What house? Why did you leave the after-school program? What happened?”
He held out the puppy and I reached for both of them, needing to touch to make sure everyone was ok. “They saw me with the police before. That first day when you brought Connor to our apartment, they saw me and they thought I was talking. I’m supposed to prove I wasn’t. That I wouldn’t.” He started to sob and the puppy yelped because he was holding it so tightly.
“What did you do?” I could barely get in a breath to ask him. “What did you do, Jared?”
“I ran, I won’t,” he sobbed. “I won’t do it!” He took his sweatshirt off, balling it up and stuffing it under the seat.
“Is that their color? Is that why you’re hiding your sweatshirt?” I demanded. I felt sick. I had bought that for him. Like an idiot, I had bought it for him.
Jared sobbed. “I’m sorry, Lia!”
“Ok, ok,” I gasped. “Let’s go, right now. We’ll get our stuff and go. It’s ok, we’ll be ok.” I just kept repeating it, that we’d be ok, that everyone would be fine. The dog licked the cold window like it was thirsty and Jared put his face on its fur, scrunching his eyes closed.
I ran around our apartment when we got back there, throwing things into garbage bags, rushing up and down the stairs and filling the bed of the pickup truck. We didn’t own very much but it felt like it took me forever to empty out the two rooms. And Jared acted like he was in a trance, walking back and forth out of his bedroom and picking one thing up at a time. “Get the dog some water,” I told him, shoving a bowl into his hands, then I practically threw the rest of our dishes into another bag along with the silverware. Up and down, up and down, until finally I told my brother to come with me to the truck. I’d had to leave the cheap couch and the mattress and bed, the particleboard kitchen table, the two chairs I’d picked up on the street and carefully sanded and painted for our family dinners. Maybe I’d be able to come back for those, but for now, we needed to get out.
“Where are we going?” my brother asked, still holding the dog.
“We’ll go to our house first to check on the plumber. Well, he’s not really a plumber, because he doesn’t have a license, but he really seemed to know his way around pipes,” I said, forcing conviction into my voice. “I met him this morning after I dropped you off at school and he was going to work all day. And the furnace will arrive tomorrow, and as soon as that goes in and we have water, we can live there! But for tonight, I think we’ll have to go to a motel.” I glanced over. One that took pets, because by the way my brother was still gripping the puppy, we now had one.
“A motel, like where we were with Connor.”
“Exactly.” Probably about that same level of quality, because I couldn’t afford this, not any of it. And Jared mentioning his name also made me think about Connor. I hadn’t even considered it when I had run out of the office building, but I was supposed to have met him at the gym. He had been teasing me all week about how strong my left arm was from the years of tray-carrying, and saying that we had to work to even me out. He had been threatening to make me use the scary gym machines that seemed to be reserved only for men and women in specialty workout clothes. I wished that Jared had stayed after school, safe and sound, and I was at the gym right now, laughing with Connor about my biceps. Something clanked loudly in the truck bed as we went over a bump, and both my brother and I turned to look at it. “I’m going to call Connor when we get to the house,” I mentioned casually, and I watched Jared’s face scrunch up.
“Are you going to tell him what I did?”
“J, I don’t even know what you did.” I paused. “Can you tell me?”
“Nothing! I just mean, are you going to tell him how I was getting money and stuff?”
“You mean, how I let my little brother get involved in a gang?” I sighed. “I’m not sure what I’m going to tell him. I can’t even believe this is happening. Do you know the worst thing I did when I was eleven? I talked back in class to the math teacher when she kept writing the wrong answers up on the board. Oh, and I wore our mom’s seed pearl earrings when I wasn’t supposed to, and she caught me.” My hand went to my ear and I wondered what had happened to my mom’s jewelry. It seemed like everything was gone.
“I know I was bad.” Jared said it so softly that I barely caught the words.
“No, I’m not saying…yes, that was bad stuff that you got involved in, but I understand why it happened. It was because you were lonely with that dumb babysitter and I was at work, right? If I had been there with you, you wouldn’t have done it,” I prompted him.
He was quiet until we pulled up at the house. “I miss my mom and dad,” he said, his voice broken, and my heart broke too, because I knew he didn’t mean our real parents.
“You have me. I’m here,” I tried to say, but my voice cracked on the words and I didn’t know if he could understand them. We sat for a moment in the cab of the truck, both of us crying quietly, until the puppy whined a little and I shook myself. This wasn’t helping, not at all, so I opened the door and got out.
Almost immediately, I tripped over something. I bent down to pick up a pipe elbow, lying in the dirt next to the driveway. The almost-a-plumber’s truck was already gone for the day. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and walked onto the porch to see what he had accomplished inside, hoping he had gotten as far as he had said he could with the giant supply of pipes that I had bought and carted over in Connor’s truck.
The other door slammed as Jared also got out. “Let the dog run around a little, ok?” I told him, but he didn’t answer. I watched him nervously and pulled aside the plywood to walk into the house. I stared open-mouthed at the progress.
Because there was nothing. There were no new pipes in the kitchen, and when I risked the stairs to go look at the bathroom on the second floor, there was nothing new there, either. I even made myself go into the basement, and found nothing but more problems. There was no new work done, nothing at all.
But all the supplies I had bought were gone. The only thing that seemed to be left was the one little piece of pipe I had found in the front yard, which he had probably dropped while stealing everything else. I called him, my hand shaking, but of course he didn’t answer.
I was just as naïve as Amy. I had let this guy take from me just like she had with Dayana at the office. I had secretly laughed and thought Amy was so dumb and I was so smart and clever to see what she hadn’t. But then, I had let some unlicensed plumber rob me blind because I had wanted to believe that I could do this for me and Jared, that I could make a home for us together.
And look where we were: broke, on our way to a cheap motel, with all our belongings in the back of a truck that didn’t even belong to me. All because I hadn’t been a good parent to him.
I shook my head at my failures and stupidity, so angry and sad about everything that I could have lain down on the dirty, broken floor to kick, scream, and cry. Instead I walked back out to the porch, and nailed the plywood over the
door hole. I watched for a moment as Jared and the dog played tug-of-war with a stick in our yard, illuminated by the neighbor’s floodlights. “Time to go,” I called. We needed to find a place to sleep for the night. And I was going to have to do something to get some money to buy us out of this hole. At that point, I’d have done just about anything.
∞
“That’s all we’ll need for the Dal Portos,” Amy said, flipping through a file and making a note on one of the pages. “In fact, I think that’s all we need to go over this afternoon. Do you have anything?”
“Just that I talked to, um, sorry.” I checked the laptop screen, not able to find the name I was looking for. I had been a mess today, jittery and unfocused, sick to my stomach and jumping at every noise. “Um, I talked to the guy about his son’s summer camp expenses and let him know what you said about the deduction. That’s taken care of.”
“Great.” She closed her file, nodding. “We got a lot done today. Do you want to take off early with your brother? How is he feeling?” She smiled at me. “What a sweet kid.”
We were meeting in her office and Jared was down the hall in the conference room. I had brought him with me today, telling Amy that he was sick. In fact, I hadn’t wanted to let him out of my sight, not even to go to school, but he had been on his best behavior all day. The puppy was in a box in the truck that we had cut holes in and we were going down as much as possible to play with him and take him out. Jared had been horrified at picking up poop off the sidewalk in front of the building, which had made me smile for the first time in the past twenty-four hours.
“Jared’s feeling better, thanks,” I answered Amy. “I can’t go quite yet. I have some more things to do.” And in fact, I wasn’t sure where we were going to sleep for the night, so I was in no rush to leave the building.
“I may leave early today myself.” She yawned. “Sorry, I’m just tired from last night and I’m not focusing well. That party took it out of me!” Amy and her husband had gone to a benefit dinner and dancing for a Detroit soup kitchen. That meant that she had also left work early the day before, to hurry over to a hair appointment. Then she had spent hours getting into makeup and a dress that probably cost much more than my rent, all in order to give charity to poor people.
Fixing Lia Page 15
