Fixing Lia

by Jamie Bennett

  “Hi, puppy!” Jared dove on the dog when we came in, leaving Connor to unpack the rest of the food. There seemed to be an ungodly amount of it.

  “Hi,” Connor told me. He gestured to the giant outlay of groceries. “When we got to the store, everything looked good.”

  “Oh, great,” I answered. “Ok, see you around,” and then I sped down the hall to the guest bedroom to hide. About a second later someone knocked, and although there were only two possibilities, I still asked, “Who is it?”

  Connor laughed through the door. “Really? Whose apartment is it? Can I come in?’

  I ran my fingers through my hair, straightening the wind-whipped tangles. “Sure. As you said, it is your apartment.”

  “It’s a little tight in here, now,” he mentioned, and joined me in sitting on the bed after maneuvering around the garbage bags of our stuff on the floor. “I can help you straighten up and put things away.”

  “I…we won’t need to put things away. We need a permanent place to live, for the courts and for our own security. I’ve been thinking about it, and you were right. You were right about my house. I’m going to rent a new apartment for me and Jared, hopefully somewhere a little nicer, and sell the property for land value. If there is any value, since half of it is under water now.”

  “Before you do that, I have a suggestion. I was thinking that you were right, too.”

  “Really?” I was genuinely flabbergasted. When had I been right about anything lately?

  “What you said about me loving my old business, renovating houses—I really did. I enjoyed getting up each day and going to work. I don’t mind being at Whitaker Enterprises. It’s fine, but it’s not the same.” He picked up my hand and held it. “So I decided that I’m going to invest in your house. I’ll help you renovate it and do it right, not this piecemeal, strange crap you’ve been—”

  “Thank you!”

  He grinned. “I mean an actual planned, funded renovation.”

  “Funded by you? You know from what I’ve told you that I barely have any money.” Less, after the furnace purchase and the stolen pipes. My face burned at my own stupidity.

  “Funded by me, and then you can pay me back.”

  “I’ll never be able to do that,” I disagreed.

  “You will. We’ll set it up so that you can.” Connor held my hand up, like we were shaking on a deal.

  “No, hold on. I mean, thank you for saying this, but I think it’s better to do what you said before. Sell it, move on. This project is beyond me.”

  “But it’s not beyond us. The two of us, together. I think your problem is that you’ve been going it alone,” he explained. He put his other hand against my cheek. “It’s hard to be alone.”

  And that started me crying. Not just crying, but bawling. I tried to pull my fingers away from his to cover my face but Connor tugged me to him, so that I was crying onto his shoulder.

  “Lia? What’s the matter?” my brother asked from the doorway. He sounded panicked, and after everything that had happened lately, I didn’t blame him.

  I tried to catch my breath and tell him that I was ok, but that seemed to be beyond me. I held out my hand to Jared and he came over, and sat on my other side.

  “I think these may be partially happy tears?” Connor questioned. “Lia and I were talking about me helping with your house. It’s a great place, good neighborhood, beautiful trees,” he said to me. “You had a good eye when you picked it. And we’re going to hire people to get the work done,” he explained to Jared. “It’s going to take some time—”

  “And we could stay here, until it’s finished,” Jared interjected. “With you.”

  “No.” I picked up my head, but Connor’s arm stayed around me. “No, we—”

  “Sure,” Connor said easily. “You guys can stay here.”

  I just stared at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You just explained that it’s going to take some time. It could be months, right? We’d be staying here for months?”

  “Jared, what is the dog up to right now? It seems too quiet,” Connor said, and my brother took off for the living room.

  I had to be crazy to turn down an offer like this. Staying in his sweet apartment, and if I knew him at all, he meant it to be rent-free. Yeah, I would have to be nuts to turn this down. “We can’t,” I said. “No.”

  “Think about it a little.” And then he said probably the only things that could have made me change my mind: “This would be great for Jared. It would be good for me, too.”

  “It would? Really?”

  Connor nodded. “But I have to tell you something first.” He stopped, lips pressed together. “I said before that I looked for you after the accid—after the shooting, when I got out of the hospital. I did. I found your uncle, even. But then I stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “I talked about it with my family, and they convinced me that it was best to leave the past alone. To leave you alone.” He shook his head. “I’m so ashamed of myself now, knowing what you were going through, and I just let that happen.”

  So the offer to help with the house and for us to live with him was some kind of atonement thing. “You weren’t under any obligation to me.”

  “Wasn’t I?”

  “No,” I said. “No, not at all.” And I understood perfectly well why his “family,” which was almost certainly code for “mother,” had gotten him to stop. When I had told her in the hospital—

  “I’m so sorry, Lia. It was easier for me to leave you in my past but it was terrible for you. You needed someone and I could have been there.” His grip on my hand tightened. “But I’m here now.”

  I looked down at our fingers, how tightly we held on to each other. I didn’t know what to say. I should have been jumping all over this, taking what I could get for me and Jared.

  “I’m not just asking you to stay here out of a sense of obligation,” Connor continued. “I like having you here. I liked waking up with you. You know how I asked you about having friends to lean on? I don’t have too many anymore.”

  I remembered him talking about his friends, the fun they’d had, the trips together, the parties. That had been a long time ago. “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been keeping to myself, I guess. I’m glad to have you here, you and Jared, and even that dog. I could use the company.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I could use a friend. I feel like you could, too.” Connor gently wiped off my cheeks with the edge of the sheet. “Will you think about it? For Jared, and for me?”

  I heard the doorbell ring and Connor looked down at his watch. “Of course, she’s early,” he sighed.

  I stood up. “She? Who?”

  “My parents usually come over on weekends,” he told me. “They were supposed to be here for lunch today, but my mom is jumping the gun.”

  “Your parents are here?” I turned to look at myself in the mirror, my tangled hair and tearstained face. “Right now?”

  Jared came pounding down the hall, holding Misiu. “There’s someone at the door!” he said, frightened.

  “It’s just my parents,” Connor soothed him. “It’s ok.”

  “Jared, come here. You must have a nicer shirt than that. Let me brush your hair.” Both of them stared at me like I was crazy, but why hadn’t I ever taken him to get it cut? I started to dig through a garbage bag for different clothes for him.

  “I’ll get the door,” Connor told us, and edged out.

  “Listen, J, you have to be on your best, most polite behavior in front of his parents, ok? Like, perfect manners.” I had learned a lot about snootiness being in the fine-dining restaurants, and this was the time to pull it out. Speaking of, I pulled my black work pants from my bag and shook out the fabric. Hardly any wrinkles. This poly-blend, as Amy had called it, was great.

  Amy. Every time I thought about her, my heart raced like I was running on the track at Connor’s old high school. Feeling even mor
e anxious than before, I attacked my hair with the brush and then turned on Jared, but he took off. As he scurried into the living room, I heard Connor’s mother say, “They’re staying here? Here?” I brushed harder, changed my clothes, added makeup, and checked my new earrings in the mirror. This wasn’t going to be good.

  “Here you are,” Connor said as I finally forced myself to come out. He smiled at me but I looked instead at his mother.

  “Lia,” Margaux announced me. “Yes, here you are, in my son’s apartment.”

  “Hello, Margaux,” I said. I bent and picked up the puppy to steady my hands, and because with the way she was looking at me, I might have needed the protection. No one would kill a woman holding a cute puppy. I moved over toward my shaggy-haired brother in his grubby shirt.

  “I’ve been watching game footage at school. My teacher is absent a lot and when we have subs, I can mess around on my phone,” Jared was telling Connor’s father. Blaine’s eyebrows raised toward his grey hair.

  Great. “What game footage?” I asked.

  “Lacrosse. Mr. Hayes played in college,” Jared told me.

  “I went to school in Boston,” Blaine said modestly, which was clearly supposed to mean something, but I had no idea what.

  “He went to Harvard,” Margaux put in. She had moved too, to stand close to me. “We both attended for our undergraduate work. What about you, Lia? Where did you attend college?”

  I could smell her perfume, the heavy scent filling my nose like it had seven years ago in the hospital waiting room. “Oh, wow, I think I have to take the dog out,” I announced. “We’re trying to train him.”

  “I can go,” Connor said, and the thought of him leaving us alone here…

  “No, no, stay with your parents!” I quickly responded. “I’ll grab my jacket.” And when I came back from the bedroom, Margaux had hers on also, a yellow coat belted tightly at her small waist over her black pants. She reminded me of a wasp.

  “I’ll keep you company,” she told me, and Connor actually smiled, like it was a great idea.

  Holy balls. I could hardly get the door open with my nervous hands. “After you,” I told Margaux.

  We rode the elevator down together and I pretended to be wrapped up in an issue with Misiu’s leash. This avoidance strategy worked until we were out on the street under gathering clouds. “We usually go this way,” I said, turning to the right.

  “‘Usually?’ How long have you and your brother been staying with my son?” She followed me past the pretty boutiques and interesting restaurants that lined the street.

  “Just one night.” I kept my eyes on Misiu as he trotted proudly along, carrying his leash in his mouth. He tripped over his big paws and shook it off.

  “And you’re staying….” Margot trailed off, and lifted one perfectly arched eyebrow at me.

  I returned my gaze the dog. “No, no, Misiu. Don’t chew the leash.” I smiled at Margaux. “It really is a challenge to take on a puppy, but how could anyone say no to a rescue dog?” That had sounded good.

  “How long are you planning to stay with Connor?” she asked me point-blank.

  “We haven’t decided. We’re discussing it,” I answered guardedly.

  She looked at me, measuring. “You’re quite circumspect in what you say. That’s certainly a change from before.”

  My lips shook as I drew in a breath. “I didn’t know if you remembered me. It has been a long time.”

  “I remember everything about Connor’s accident,” Margaux said. “Everything. I remember your visit to the hospital that day.”

  “I was trying to help him.”

  “You were trying to help yourself,” she corrected. “You still are, at my son’s expense.”

  “I was afraid he was in danger. If they had thought that he could identify them, or remembered anything, they could have come after him, too.”

  She stopped on the sidewalk. “It’s a little chilly out here, isn’t it? I’ll go back upstairs. I only wanted to remind you that if you try to manipulate my son again, you will have me to deal with. Again.” Her tone didn’t change a bit when she moved from discussing the weather to threatening me.

  “I wasn’t trying—I was fifteen years old then,” I said. “Fifteen and terrified. I had just seen your son get shot and I needed help.”

  “As you point out, it was a long time ago.” She studied me. “You and I are bound together now. Bound in silence.”

  “You don’t want me to tell him that you knew I was in danger because of the shooting. That I came to you for help, and you had me thrown out of the hospital,” I said. Anger burned in me.

  “No, I won’t tell him that you came to the hospital with a story to try to extort money from us,” she corrected me, “and that I rightly had you removed before you could cause more of a scene and endanger his recovery.”

  The simmering anger became leaping flames in my body. “That’s not what—”

  “And I won’t tell my son that you knew who shot him, but never turned them in,” Margaux continued. “That you’ve let him go all these years in unresolved turmoil and fear because you didn’t do the right thing, that you protected criminals instead of Connor. That’s exactly what you did.”

  The anger in me snuffed out and shame rose up so thick in my throat that I couldn’t swallow it down to answer her. Margaux looked at me for another moment, then turned and left me standing on the sidewalk.

  Chapter 11

  I had done plenty of bad things in my life. I had stolen from grocery stores, stolen from drug stores. I took a bag of clothes out of the front seat of an unlocked car; once, I found a wallet on a snowy January sidewalk and didn’t turn it in. I kept the cash and used the credit card inside it to buy milk and bread and soup, because I had run out of food after spending all my money paying my electric bill to keep the heat on. When you were desperate, and hungry, and frightened, you did a lot of stuff that most people thought was wrong. Things that I knew were wrong. I could generally excuse myself from most of that, but what I had done now was different. There was no excuse.

  “Hi, Lia,” Amy told me, resting her purse on the chair across from my desk when she came in on Monday morning. “You’re here early today.”

  Connor and I had driven in together and he started sooner than I usually did. “Is this ok? I’m planning to stay to my usual time.”

  “Are you asking if I’m going to get mad at you for working extra?” She smiled at me but it quickly faded. “I came early too, to hunt around again. Steve and I scoured the office on Saturday but I keep thinking we just overlooked it.”

  She was talking about her ring. She had texted, asking me if I had seen it. Every word from her felt like an accusation.

  “He says not to worry, it was insured and we can get another one,” she said.

  See? I asked myself. If Steve didn’t care, then there was no reason to worry about it. It was nothing to Amy and her husband, because they could just buy a hundred more if they wanted to. It meant nothing to them, but for me, it could be life-changing. It could change Jared’s life too, I told myself, and then felt dirty for dragging my brother into this.

  “But that ring was what Steve gave me when he asked me to marry him. When he told me how much he loved me and how his life…” She trailed off before continuing. “I can’t believe I was so careless with something so important. I remember losing my new lunchbox in elementary school and my mom saying that I had to take care of my stuff. She made me carry my cousin’s old, nasty superhero lunchbox instead of getting another fairy one, because she said she wanted to be sure I understood that things had value, and I had to be careful with them.” She held up her hand with the beautiful wedding band on it, but no engagement ring. “I don’t deserve to have a ring like that, if I lost it so easily. I’m so ashamed.” She sighed. “Steve keeps telling me to stop beating myself up, but I think I have it coming.”

  I sat frozen. I could have stood up and said I would help her look, then I could have
dropped the ring somewhere and “found” it for her. It would have given me more brownie points as the savior of the ring and I would have come out the winner in the situation. I would be Lia, the wonderful, sharp-eyed assistant, instead of Lia, the heartless, lying thief. Instead, I just stayed behind my desk, nodding, unable to do anything but feel guilty.

  “Oh, I meant to show you this.” Amy moved over her bag to sit down in the chair, then rummaged through it. “I made a fashion lookbook for you,” she explained, and opened her thin laptop. “I used to do these for my friends in high school. I know you like more simple, clean-lined things and I picked clothes and accessories that fit that profile.”

  I cleared my throat. “That’s what you got about my style from my empty apartment?”

  She smiled a little. “From the stuff you picked out at the jewelry store, too. Nothing fancy and ornate, more clean lines and kind of minimalist. Like the necklace you loved there, the silver disc on that delicate chain.” She tapped the screen. “Here. What do you think of these outfits? These are a few pieces you can mix around for work with accessories to set them off.”

  I stared at the clothes. “I mean, if I could wear stuff like that…yeah, I love this.” I scrolled to see more. “You even included websites where I could find these things? I can’t believe that you did so much work on my wardrobe.”

  “You like it? Oh, good! I was so unhappy this weekend about my ring, doing this was actually very therapeutic. It took my mind off it, anyway. Here, I’ll send you the file.”

  The phone started to ring on my desk, which meant that Amy left me alone so I could answer it. Then I sat and stared at the lookbook she had sent. I imagined myself as the stylish woman in these clothes, going back to school, doing a kick-ass job at work, living in a great house. That was what that ring could do for me, and Amy could get a new one. As she said, she didn’t deserve to have something that nice, since she didn’t even take care of it. Right?

  I stood and picked up my purse from where I had hidden it. It was behind the cabinet where I couldn’t see it, because I couldn’t stand to look at it. I walked quickly to the bathroom, holding the purse slightly away from my body. I took the ring from the pocket where it had sat all weekend next to my brother’s phone, and I admired again how beautiful it was. Then I knelt and wedged the slim band between the wall and the sink. If Amy didn’t find it today, I would get it before the cleaners came through tonight, but she was in the bathroom constantly because of all the ultra-purified, ionized water she drank from a special metal bottle. I washed my hands, then washed them again, not looking at myself in the mirror. Problem solved, I tried to tell myself, but I didn’t feel it.