Surreal Estate

by Jesi Lea Ryan

  I sighed. “Still keep your cash in the same place?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, honey. I appreciate it.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “I think five hundred will get me out of here tomorrow. My lawyer said the rest can go on a payment plan.”

  “Fine.” I hung up and barely resisted throwing the phone against the wall. Knew I shouldn’t’ve answered it.

  I changed into clean clothes and tied my wet hair into a knot at the back of my head. I could catch a bus down on National Avenue. Then, assuming Mommy Dearest had an extra few bills in her stash, I’d let her buy me a cab back.

  The street was nice and quiet in the dark. It was one of those working-class neighborhoods typical of Milwaukee, shabby but not ghetto. A decent place to live if you couldn’t afford the burbs.

  When I got to the bus stop, I took a seat on the bench and lit a cigarette, settling in for what might be a long wait. I didn’t smoke much, mostly because I couldn’t afford seven bucks a pack, but I’d bummed a couple off a girl at work today after I’d done her the favor of waiting on her ex-boyfriend so she could hide in the back until he was gone.

  Turns out I didn’t have to wait long. Before I was half done with my cigarette, a familiar truck pulled up beside the curb in front of me.

  The passenger-side window rolled down to reveal Nick. “Waiting for a ride?”

  I nodded.

  “Get in.”

  “That’s okay, man. I have to go to Oak Creek tonight. I’m sure that’s well out of your way.”

  “I got time. Get in.” The lock clicked open.

  My pride wanted to refuse, but hell, I didn’t want to have to sit on the bus all night. I knocked the cherry off and stuck the rest of the extinguished cigarette in my shirt pocket before climbing in.

  Nick turned down the rock station he’d been listening to. “What’s in Oak Creek?”

  “Have to pick something up at my mom’s house.”

  I didn’t miss the surprise on his face. No doubt he figured a homeless guy wouldn’t have family in the area. I was glad when he didn’t ask for details.

  “Thanks for the ride. Were you just lurking around the neighborhood?” I asked, smiling to take the bite out of the question.

  “My brother Damien lives over here. We were watching the Brewers game, but they’re getting their asses handed to them, so I left early.”

  I knew next to nothing about baseball, so I didn’t have anything to add. Instead I stared out the window for several minutes of uncomfortable silence.

  “So you went to Marquette? What did you study?”

  I suppressed a sigh. I wasn’t good with the whole get-to-know-you small talk thing on a good day. Now, I was tired and more than a little frustrated to be called away from my bed. But the guy was giving me a place to stay and some honest work, so I needed to play nice.

  “Secondary education with a minor in music. Dropped out after my third year when I ran out of money.”

  “A music teacher. That’s cool. I only went to tech school.”

  “At least with tech school you can get a job that pays enough to support yourself.”

  “Gonna go back? To school?”

  My laugh came out as a derisive snort. “My current lifestyle doesn’t really allow me to spend thousands of dollars on tuition.”

  He was quiet for a minute before changing the subject. “I’ve been broke too, man. My company used to be a lot bigger. I did new construction as well as house flipping. But when the housing bubble burst, it took me with it. Had to declare bankruptcy and everything.”

  “But you weren’t homeless.” My tone came out a little harsher than I’d meant it, but if comparing war stories was how this guy wanted to bond, I didn’t want any part of it.

  “No, I wasn’t. But only because my brother Steven and his boyfriend let me sack out in their guest room for a year while I worked to get my shit together.”

  Well, if he had lived with a couple of gay guys, I could be reasonably certain that my new boss wasn’t a homophobe. That was a bonus. “Another brother?” I asked. “How many of those do you have?”

  “Just the two. Steven’s a year older than me. He’s a realtor, and is currently pissed at me for buying that house without waiting for his sage advice. Damien is a few years younger. He owns a bar not too far from the house.”

  When we got to Oak Creek, I directed Nick to my old neighborhood. We pulled up in front of the ranch house; the only light coming from inside was the glow of the TV. At least this Jerry guy was still awake. I just hoped he wouldn’t be an asshole about me coming over. Nick got out of the truck with me, and I wanted to protest, but it might actually be good to have some backup.

  “So this is where you grew up?” he asked as we crossed the street.

  “Yeah. It was my grandfather’s house. He raised me. My mom got it when he died, and we don’t get along so well.”

  I knocked on the screen door and waited. Some cursing came from inside, and a moment later a thin guy in a wifebeater answered.

  “What?”

  “I’m Rina’s son. I need to get something from my room.”

  “Rina ain’t here.”

  “I know. She’s in jail. She sent me here to get some paperwork for her.”

  He seemed like he wanted to slam the door in my face, but a glance at the big guy behind me apparently made him think better of it. “Whatever.” He turned and walked back to his seat on the couch where he took a hit off a joint and stared blankly at the television.

  Nick surveyed the room. Embarrassment warmed my neck seeing how dingy the place had gotten. Clutter overflowed every available surface, and the carpet had that flattened food-crumb look that came from months of not being vacuumed. If I let my eyes unfocus, I could see faint traces of the home I grew up in. I blinked them away. It hadn’t been like this when my zayde had been alive. Now the place smelled like weed and dirty laundry. Well, it wasn’t the rotten-egg smell of meth cooking, so that was something.

  To Nick, I said. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He nodded and crossed his arms menacingly, and I was thankful he was on my side.

  I hurried down to my old bedroom in the basement, and my breath caught. Okay, technically most of my things were there, but the room was trashed. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that my mother had ransacked it at some point searching for drugs or money or anything she could sell. My stereo was gone, as was the small tube TV that had been on top of my dresser.

  I placed a hand on the wall and let the emotions of the home tell me their story. My eyes drifted closed for a moment. When I opened then again, the room was overlaid by a vision of the past. The bed was in the same spot, but was made up with Simpsons bedding. A pile of Legos littered the floor beside my toy box. It was obvious the house missed the time when I was a little boy. Unlike the vibe I’d gotten from Nick’s house, this one hadn’t ever been happier than when we’d had the neighborhood kids running in and out, filling the place with gleeful noise.

  As much as I hated the way I’d been kicked out of this home, I knew I’d never be able to give it the family and kids it longed for.

  Part of me hoped my mother would get sick of living in the burbs and sell it. As a family home in a good school district, it had to be worth enough to support her for a long time. Okay, so it was the house I’d been raised in, but really, nostalgia only took me so far. I’d rather see it in the hands of a new owner than watch her let it slowly deteriorate. Selling would be a win-win for both her and the house.

  Then something shifted in the house’s mood. The nostalgic vision of my childhood faded away, and negative energy rolled into my body. Tension set my teeth on edge and caused my shoulders to stiffen. I wanted to lash out at someone. Kick those deadbeats out and change the locks so that fucking meth whore couldn’t come back.

  I dropped my hand from the wall, shocked that my old home could be filled with so much rage. If I didn’t get what I came for and
leave soon, I was afraid I’d lose it and toss Jerry out on his ass, and I didn’t feel like ending up in the slammer with my mom tonight. It was one of the reasons I liked staying in Nick’s house so much. She might be a lonely old thing, but she was happy I was there, and she let me be.

  “Sorry, House,” I whispered. “I’d help if I could.”

  I righted an overturned chair and dragged it to the closet, where I pushed one of the tiles of the drop ceiling out of the way and felt around until my fingers brushed against an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box with its handle missing. I pulled it out and sat on the bed. When I was a little kid, my mom started hiding things in the ceiling of my closet. It was an idea she got from my zayde. He hadn’t talked much about his life in the Soviet Union under Stalin, but presumably things had been pretty bad, because he’d passed down a heathy dose of fear and mistrust to both of us. He used to have hidey-holes all over the house where he’d secreted away cash, important papers, and anything else he’d thought was too important to leave unprotected. When I was a teen, I used to make a game out of trying to find all his stashes. Likely, the first thing Mom did after the funeral was comb the house from top to bottom searching for her inheritance. Anyway, her hiding spot in the top of my closet was the one place she’d known my zayde wouldn’t think to look for drugs. The lunch box was our secret, and I’d been so proud that she trusted me with it that I’d never told on her.

  I peeled back the crusty duct tape, barely sticky anymore from the years of use, and lifted the lid. On the top were Mom’s important papers—birth certificates, a couple of letters from some long-ago boyfriend. My dad? Who the fuck knew. Beneath, mixed in with my baby teeth and mismatched earrings was the typical paraphernalia, but no drugs. There seldom were any in the box. If Mom had drugs, she’d rather take them than save them.

  I spotted the thick roll of cash wrapped neatly with a rubber band, but my eye was drawn to a faded brochure on the bottom. Woodland Acres Rehab Center. The seams in the paper were worn and brittle from being opened and refolded hundreds of time. I knew. I’d been the one who’d slept with it tucked under my pillow when I was a kid, and I’d pulled it out on my more melancholy nights and dreamed of a time when I might have the money to send my mom. She must have found it while searching my room. Why hadn’t she thrown it out? Had she ever looked at it and dreamed of getting clean? Maybe. The truth was, when she was sober, she was a reasonable person. Too bad the addiction had such a strong hold of her that I rarely got to see that side.

  Leaving the brochure be, I slipped the band off the money roll and counted. Seven hundred and thirty bucks in small denominations. I tried not to think about what my mother had had to do to earn that money as I counted off the five hundred she needed. I also pocketed the thirty bucks so I could offer Nick some gas money and buy myself a sandwich for my trouble.

  I was placing the lunch box back in its hidey-hole when the house sent a vibration down my arms. Just then, I heard a gunshot.

  Nick.

  Sasha had disappeared down the basement steps, leaving me with the stoner who was laughing inappropriately hard at an episode of Family Feud. Seriously, the PG innuendoes just weren’t that funny.

  What in the hell was I doing in Oak Creek? All I’d wanted when I left Damey’s house was to spend some quality time with my pillow. When I’d first driven past Sasha, he’d been walking down the street in his own little world. Did he know that when he walked, he sort of bounced to the music in his head? It had made me wonder what song was going through his mind to make him move that way. I’d gone a couple of blocks past before my curiosity had made me turn around. There was something about the guy that piqued my interest. It was more than just feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t pity at all. Sasha had an inner strength that transcended his lot in life. It shone in those steely gray eyes of his.

  And how the hell did I know what color his eyes were? What’s wrong with me? I was acting like I had a crush on the kid. No way. I mean, sure, I wasn’t blind. He was a good-looking guy. And sure, I’d been a little attracted to guys before . . . like a hundred years ago when I’d been in high school. But other than whacking off to fantasies of the assistant football coach, I’d never acted on it. I bet if people were honest, they’d all admit to considering what it would be like to bat for the other team. I dug chicks, so it wasn’t like I was gay. Maybe I was a little bit bi. Or more likely, it was just the weirdness of having a total stranger living in my construction zone making me curious about him.

  Where was he anyway?

  I didn’t have time to ponder it further, because just then another emaciated guy came stumbling out from the back of the house. His skin glistened with cold sweat, and he was tweaking on something, his movements all jerky and uncontrolled. But that wasn’t what had my heart stuttering into a gallop. It was the black gun he waved out in my general direction.

  “Vince send you? You got my money?”

  I held my hands out as if trying to calm a feral cat. “Hold on, dude. I don’t know any Vince. You can put the gun down.”

  The guy on the couch glanced over. “Put that away, dumbass. He’s a friend of Rina’s kid.”

  Dumbass looked back and forth between me and the guy on the couch, which caused his body to sway unsteadily on his feet. “He’s got my money, Jerry!”

  “He doesn’t have your fucking money. You’re amped up and hallucinating. Chill out and put the gun down.”

  Dumbass didn’t lower his arm, but started crying instead. Big fat tears streaked down his sunken face.

  “Jesus,” Jerry groaned, reluctantly getting up off the couch. “Relax, would ya? Give me the gun.” He reached for his hand, and Dumbass snapped around to aim directly in Jerry’s face.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Jerry stepped back, hands up. “Sorry, man. Just trying to help. Why don’t you put the gun down, and we can talk about it?”

  Shit was getting too fucking real in here for my comfort. I scanned the situation, searching for an opening to get the gun away. I glanced back toward the kitchen where Sasha had gone through a door down to the basement. What if the guy went after Sasha? The hair on the back of my neck rose, and my protective instincts kicked in. I had to get that gun away before Sasha got hurt.

  I needed Dumbass to get distracted with something else. I could overpower him, if only he weren’t pointing at Jerry. A moment later, I had an idea. It was a bit childish, but the guy was high enough that it might work. Here goes nothing.

  “What’s that?” I called out, pointing toward the darkened kitchen.

  Dumbass swung the gun and pulled the trigger, shattering the window over the kitchen sink.

  I lunged forward, tackling the guy to the ground. He smelled of sweat and something acidic, and it did queasy things to my stomach. In a half-hearted attempt to keep the gun from me, he stretched his arms above his head, but I dug my fingers in the soft underside of his wrist and used my other hand to strip the weapon away. He writhed on the floor under me, wild like a caged animal. I didn’t want to hurt him, but couldn’t reason with him in his inebriated state. I flipped him over, reared back, and punched him square in the jaw twice, knocking him out.

  “What the fuck?” Jerry yelled. “Why’d ya have to butt in like that? I had it under control.”

  I ignored Jerry’s ranting and sat back on my heels, panting with adrenaline coursing through my veins. What the hell had I been thinking? Thank fucking god Sasha hadn’t come up those basement steps at the wrong moment and stepped right into the path of that bullet.

  “Nick!” Sasha called out as he ran upstairs. His face went white as he spotted me kneeling over the unconscious man with the gun in my hand.

  “It’s okay.” I popped the magazine out of the gun and gave everything a quick rub with my shirt to get my prints off. Somewhere outside a dog was losing its shit from the noise. “No one got hurt, but we better go before one of the neighbors calls 911.”

  Sasha was at my side in an instant,
dragging me to my feet. I dropped the gun, and we ran to the truck with Jerry swearing behind us.

  The shakes overcame my hands as I tried to shift and buckle my seat belt at the same time, failing miserably at both.

  “I got it,” Sasha said, buckling me in. “What the hell happened back there?”

  I didn’t answer, just drove off, heart pounding, intent on putting some distance between us and that gun before my breakdown set in fully. When I spotted a crowded Target parking lot ahead a few minutes later, I swung into a space at the back, slammed the stick into neutral, and stomped on the e-brake. Then I folded my arms over the steering wheel and dropped my head with a shuddering exhale.

  We sat listening to the engine idle for a few minutes while my heart slowed to a normal rhythm.

  Almost too soft to hear, Sasha whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” I muttered.

  “Whatever happened back there, I shouldn’t have brought you into it.”

  I rotated my head to the side. Sasha was clearly freaking out. He gnawed on his thumbnail and his eyes were bright with agitation. I reached over to pat his arm, and he stiffened. Rather than pull back, I grasped his forearm.

  “Don’t you apologize for those pieces of shit. That wasn’t you.”

  “You could’ve been hurt!”

  “But I wasn’t. Look at me.” I turned his chin so he had no choice but to meet my gaze. In the shadows of the parking lot, his gray eyes appeared black, full of fear and concern, and I felt a sudden tug in my chest. My hand drifted back to my side, the ghostly feel of his soft beard still on my fingertips, and my mouth went dry.

  I cleared my throat. “You didn’t know those guys, did you?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Did you suspect there were going to be psychotic tweakers in there waving guns?”

  “Not the guns, but with my mother and her friends, the psychotic tweakers were a definite possibility. I didn’t think anyone would mess with you though. You look like a guy who can take care of himself.”