People like me, because I had visited that soup kitchen for help several times when I had come out of the system at age eighteen and was trying to make it on my own. When Amy had told me what wonderful cause they were supporting with their big night out, I hadn’t mentioned to her that I had been a hungry client there. She and her husband had purchased a table to attend the dinner with eight of their equally generous friends. I had looked it up this morning: that “grand benefactor” table for ten had set them back $50,000. Yeah, all those zeros.
I thought about her going to a party in her beautiful dress, when I had stood in line at that place, my stomach twisting in hunger and so humiliated at my failure to take care of myself that I hadn’t been able to look anyone in the face. I thought of Amy and her husband dancing in each other’s arms, having laughs with friends, when I had spent the night before sleepless and crying in the uncomfortable motel bed with Jared and the dog, which we had smuggled in under my shirt.
Suddenly, I had the urge to tell her what I thought about her fake, rich-bitch problems. I wanted to tell her to fuck off. “Yeah, that must have been fun, though, to get dressed-up and dance with your husband and hang out with all your friends,” I managed to say evenly. “Did you have a good time?”
“It was really fun,” she agreed. “I just wish I wasn’t so tired today, but I think it’s because of the pregnancy, too. And my feet are killing me! I shouldn’t have worn brand-new shoes.”
New shoes. I was barely keeping it together. This spoiled, entitled, lucky woman was sitting across from me and complaining about a blister after attending a $50,000 dinner. She was whining about being tired when she got to have two kids with a husband who loved her. I tried to make a murmur of agreement and forced myself to look at my screen instead of her face so that I wouldn’t reach across her desk and slap her. “Yeah, it sounds really tough.”
That must have come out wrong, showing too much, because she was giving me a funny look when I met her eyes. I forced a friendly smile. “Pregnancy can be rough! I remember my mom when she was pregnant with Jared. She had this weird craving for coleslaw all the time and my dad drove all over the city buying different kinds to find just the right one for her. My parents were so in love.”
Amy’s face relaxed. “That’s sweet! I haven’t had any cravings except…maybe I shouldn’t say this.” She blushed a little. “I’m after Steve, like all the time, if you know what I mean. He’s actually getting a little tired, but I don’t think he minds!” She covered her face. “I’m sorry, that was so inappropriate. I can’t believe I told you that!”
I realized that I was blushing, too. “No, that’s ok. That’s great, good for you guys.” She started to look speculative, and I realized that her next question was going to be about me and Connor. He had called and texted me to ask if everything was ok, and to say that he was out of the office all day in meetings in Lansing. In fact, they were probably going so late, he thought he might just spend the night there rather than driving home, but he wanted me to get in touch. “I’m going to go check on my brother,” I said quickly, to head off Amy’s questions.
“Ok, I’ll head out, then. See you Monday.” She stretched a little and then waved as we went in opposite directions down the hall. I watched her walk out in her jeans and boots, flowing scarf tied in some kind of arrangement that looked easy and casual but that I could never achieve. She would go home to her little boy who would never have to worry about running away from a gang and to a loving husband waiting to bang her into constant extasy. Jealousy made me feel almost lightheaded. At that moment, I hated Amy, and then I shook my head at myself. She wasn’t trying to rub my face in how great her life was and it wasn’t her fault that she had everything and I was pretty close to sleeping in a car again. In any case, I had to deal with my stuff and not worry about hers.
“No, we’re ok,” I heard Jared saying, as I got to the conference room. I stopped just outside the door. Who was he talking to? “No,” he said again, then announced, “Lia is taking care of me.” My heart warmed. He trusted me. He knew I would make this better, and I would. I walked into the room, just as he said, “I’ll be ok, don’t worry about me, Mommy.”
I froze and so did Jared. “Who are you talking to?” I asked. It emerged much louder than I had meant it to.
“I have to go,” Jared said into the phone. “I love you, too.” He put it down, his eyes huge.
“Were you just talking to Jill Samotny? She’s calling you?” I got my voice down to a lower volume but the anger still pulsed through it.
“I called her,” he told me defiantly. “I wanted to talk to her.”
“Did you tell her what’s happening with us?” I stared into his eyes. “Did you?” My voice had gone up again.
“No!” He swallowed. “But I should. She could help, she always wants to help me!”
“She wants to take you away from me! She wants us to be apart! Is that what you want, too?” This wasn’t fair; I knew that I wasn’t being fair to him. “Jared,” I said, and then stopped and swallowed, not knowing how to explain it. Of course, he wanted to call the woman he considered his mother. She had wormed her way into his life and pushed me out of it, made herself this perfect ideal of a parent, and I was the one who let him steal dogs and get questioned by the police. “How often do you call her?”
He lowered his eyes, not looking at me now. “Not too much.”
“You can’t—”
“No, I’m not going to stop! Fuck you, Lia!”
I had his phone in my hand before I knew what I was doing. “You won’t be calling her, and you won’t be talking to me like that anymore. You don’t get to decide! I’m the adult! The courts said that you should live with me, and do you know why? Because I’m better than the Samotnys! I’m your sister, and we have to be together!” I stopped, gulping down the words.
“Give me back my phone!” Jared shouted.
“No. Get your stuff together, we’re leaving in five minutes.” I dropped his phone into my bag and walked out into the hallway, where I had to lean against the wall so that I didn’t fall down.
They were going to try to get Jared away, I was sure of it. Jill Samotny was probably recording their conversations, baiting him into saying terrible things…she wouldn’t have to bait him. So many terrible things were currently going on, every time he opened his mouth, we were at risk. He hadn’t sworn at me in a little while, and I was sure that it was her doing. She was back to poisoning him against me so that she could drag us into court and he would say that he wanted to live with them, then tell everyone all of the awful stuff I had let happen to him. That I was allowing him to be a criminal, to run with a gang, to skip school. I realized I was crying when a tear dripped off my lip, and I went into the bathroom to wipe off my face and calm down.
And there it was again, sparkling on the shelf under the mirror: Amy’s engagement ring. She had so much that she could leave diamonds lying around like they were nothing, worthless. I picked up the ring and stared at it. I rolled the band in my fingers, picturing Amy wearing this ring and a beautiful dress at the “grand benefactor” table the night before at her ball. I imagined her eating a delicious meal to support the hungry people who took what they could get at the food kitchen.
This ring could change our lives. It could mean me fighting off the Samotnys; it could mean a vacation like he’d had with them, or Jared joining a lacrosse team. I could give him things he wanted and things he needed. We could move, we could fix the house, we could get ahead and stay there. This ring could mean safety for Jared.
That was what I was thinking when I dropped it into my purse next to my brother’s phone.
I felt lightheaded again, dizzy and afraid, and I stumbled to the end of the hallway. “Let’s go, Jared. Now!” I called back to him, and he stomped out of the conference room, glowering and furious. He pushed past me and my back hit the wall hard. I breathed for a moment before I followed him to the elevator and we went down to the garage. I felt
like the pleather of my purse had turned transparent, that everyone in the building could see that I had a giant diamond ring that didn’t belong to me.
Jared turned when we got to the garage and held out his hand for the keys. He ran ahead and I could hear him already cooing to the dog when I got close to the truck. “Me-shoe, you’re such a good dog. Good boy, good boy.”
“What did you call him?”
“That’s his name. Me-shoe,” he said grudgingly. “It means teddy bear.”
“In Polish?” Richie and Jill had spoken that language. They had taught him some, too.
“I don’t care what you say, that’s his name!” he bit out, scowling.
I drove out of the garage and then randomly turned left. I didn’t have a plan for where we should go. “J, I’m sorry I yelled like that upstairs.”
Jared didn’t answer me and he scowled harder.
“I’m really sorry. I’m pretty scared right now,” I admitted.
“You are?” He turned to look at me.
“Couldn’t you tell? I didn’t want you to know, though.”
“I’m scared too. Where are we going to go?” he asked me.
“I guess another motel. I spent all day trying to figure out some brilliant plan and I can’t. I don’t have any good ideas. I don’t know what to do,” I admitted, my voice shaking. “But I know I’ll always take care of you. Ok? Always. I know we should be together and I love you more than anything in the world.”
Jared nodded and looked out the window. “We could go to the house, where we’re going to live. We could stay there.”
“We’ll go there now and check to see if the furnace really got delivered. But we can’t stay permanently without heat and water.” The night before, Jared had asked me about the water, and I had told him that no, it wasn’t fixed and that the plumber had taken our stuff and run off. It didn’t mean as much to him because he just thought I could call someone else, get more pipes. I hadn’t told him about our money situation, and now I was glad. It was one less thing for Jill Samotny to nail me with.
“There!” I exclaimed as we pulled up to the house. Finally, something had gone right. “They delivered the furnace.” It sat behind my old car in the driveway, safe and sound. I wondered how I was going to get it down into the basement, or first, how I was going to pump out the water I had seen when I went down there looking for the stolen pipes.
“What’s wrong with the windows?” my brother asked, and I turned my attention to the front of the house.
What was wrong was that the windows were broken. All of them, every pane of glass that we had put in. My mouth opened but I couldn’t answer at first.
“Lia?” Jared picked up the dog. “Did someone shoot out the windows? All the windows we fixed?”
I got out of the truck and stared at the house. All that work. All the time, the money, the effort. The one thing that I had completed on the house, the one thing that had actually been right. I had been so proud.
“Lia?” Jared said again, his voice quavering now.
“It’s ok,” I said. It sounded choked, strange, and I tried again, “It’s ok.”
“What are we going to do?”
I cleared my throat so he could understand me. “You can’t come in until I clean up. You and, uh…”
“Me-shoe,” Jared told me, then spelled it. Misiu.
“Yeah, you guys stay out here until I call you.” I pulled out the nails from the plywood and went inside the house, turning in a circle to look at the damage. Broken glass littered the floors, and they were wet, too, since it had rained today. Now what?
I slowly sank down, to sit amidst the shards. I wrapped my arms around my legs and rocked for a while, grinding my eyes into my knees to stop the tears like I used to do when I was a teenager. I had done this the first night I had been on my own when I turned eighteen, sitting on the bed in the one of the many dirty motel rooms I would end up sleeping in, wondering how I was going to make it through the night and all the rest of the nights that were to follow.
I sat that way on the floor of my house, losing track of time, but then I heard Misiu yip outside in the yard. There were two little beings out there who needed me to keep it together. So I got up and got the broom, and I started to sweep, and I called to Jared to come inside but to carry the dog.
An hour later, I had boarded up the windows again so that the wind wasn’t whistling through. Both Jared and the puppy had made use of the area behind the former garage as a bathroom, and he ate some peanut butter sandwiches out of the food from our apartment that I was dragging with us in the bed of the truck. The glass was gone, the floor as clean as I could get it, but both of us had carefully watched the puppy so his big, floppy paws didn’t get hurt.
Jared’s eyes were closing. It wasn’t very late, but we’d been through enough that I understood his exhaustion. He and Misiu had been playing together on a tarp but were now curled up in a pile of blankets so that only their noses were showing. I blew out a breath that was white steam in the dim glow from the battery lantern and the street light outside. That also illuminated the pile of gear in the bed of the truck, all our stuff which I would carry in and out of the next motel room to keep it safe. “I’ll go deal with the furnace, and then we’ll head out. Ok, J?”
I saw a slight head movement to indicate yes, but he was almost asleep. So was I, and it felt like my limbs were made of lead as I walked out to the gravel driveway. Ok, time to move this giant thing. I pushed the furnace, my feet slipping and sliding on the wet rocks; I pulled it, trying to get a grip with my fingers and falling on my butt; I put my back against it and threw my weight so that it started to tip, and I stopped immediately. If I broke it, I was really over. I attempted to hold up the edge to slide a piece of plywood under it; remembering how the Egyptians had built the pyramids, I tried to push a broken PVC pipe under it to roll it. Finally, I sat down and leaned against the crate and closed my eyes. It wasn’t going anywhere, and really, I felt like I wasn’t, either. I leaned my face on my knees again and tried really, really hard not to cry. This immovable object in my driveway wasn’t just a furnace, it was like a giant metal symbol of everything that I had done wrong.
Headlights swept over me as someone pulled into my driveway and my head jerked up. I recognized that car. “Lia?” Connor asked as he got out. “Are you ok? What are you doing out here?”
I used the stupid furnace to pull myself up off the wet gravel. “What are you doing here?” I asked back. I tried to figure out what was happening. “I thought you had meetings. I thought you were in Lansing.”
“Jared left me a message a couple of hours ago. He said you guys can’t live in your apartment because he did bad things? That you had nowhere to go, you have a dog, someone broke out the windows to the house…I couldn’t understand everything he was saying but he kept repeating that I should come.”
Jared must have called him while I had been zoned out amongst the broken glass. I must have scared him to death. I closed my eyes for a moment but that seemed to make me dizzy. “Yeah, we’ve been having some problems, but Jared’s ok. I just need to move this, and then we’re going to go, and I can figure the rest out. I can fix it.” I stared at him. “You really came because he needed you?”
“I…yes, I really came because he needed me. He sounded panicked.” Connor stepped forward and put his hand on the big box behind me. “What is this?”
I couldn’t really stop myself. I leaned forward just a little and rested my forehead against his body. “It’s a furnace. It’s a long story.” I could go ahead and skip right to the last page, which said that I sucked. The end. I sighed, still pretty close to tears.
Connor put his arm loosely around my waist. “Did you guys actually have to leave your apartment?”
I nodded, rubbing my nose against the starched fabric of his shirt. “Jared did get involved in some bad stuff.” I gave him an extremely pared-down explanation of us having to get out of there.
“Lia,
that’s terrible. He’s so young!” His arm tightened and he added the other, pulling me to his chest. “How long has this been going on?”
“Way too long.” I clutched his blazer in my hands, anchoring him to me. “I should have known about it and put a stop to it immediately. You’re right, I know this is my fault.”
“I didn’t say that,” Connor told me. “And rather than worry about fault, I think we need to figure out what to do about it. Where are you planning to go?”
I stood up, away. It was much too tempting to stay on his chest, safe inside the circle of his arms, and I couldn’t do that. I didn’t even deserve it. “I’ll take us to another motel. I have to get my money situation figured out.” I thought of the ring in my purse and my stomach twisted. I put my hand over my mouth as I gagged and I turned away from him, leaning on the box and breathing shallowly to control the sudden nausea.
“Jesus, Lia…where is Jared right now?” He rubbed my back and I pulled away. I didn’t like anyone to touch me there too much.
“Inside with the dog. That part is true also, we now have a rescue dog,” I explained.
“It’s a ways to my apartment and you can tell me as we drive.”
“To your apartment?” I asked. My mind seemed to be moving sluggishly.
“Yes, my apartment. Let’s go. We’ll come back with a dolly tomorrow for the furnace and leave my car in front of it tonight. Is that all your stuff in the truck?” Connor confirmed, pointing.
After the time I’d spent obsessing over what I was going to do, how I was going to solve our problems, it felt nice just to go along with what he was saying. “Um, yes. Wait, what?”
“You’re coming with me,” he said. “You and Jared, and I guess a dog. You’re coming with me and we’ll take the weekend to sort all this out.”
Fixing Lia Page 16
