by Lis Wiehl
“Gabe?” It came out more like a grunt.
“Yeah.” Gabe hoped his own voice didn’t sound shaky.
Tyler nodded, but didn’t offer his own name. “Did you come alone?”
“Yeah.”
The guy kept his eyes on Gabe’s face until Gabe grew uncomfortable, then slowly slid the bag across the table.
As he had been instructed, Gabe reached across the table and shook Tyler’s hand. In his palm were ten twenty-dollar bills, folded in half. Birthday and chore money he had been saving for a mountain bike. Without counting them or acknowledging them in any way, Tyler pocketed them and then left with another nod.
Gabe made himself wait a few minutes before he put the white paper bag in his backpack. Then a few more minutes before he picked up his skateboard and left. He didn’t even look inside the bag until he got back to his room.
Then Eldon had walked in, surprising him. After having his own room all his life, Gabe kept forgetting that he could no longer be sure of having any privacy. When Eldon came in, Gabe was still examining the bag’s contents—a few syringes, a vial of clear liquid, and a bottle of pills. A two-week supply of two anabolic steroids.
Eldon stared. It was too late to hide everything or try to think of a cover story.
“Gabe, dude?” he said. “Is that what I think it is?”
Eldon and Kali, his mom, had moved in after Kali had been diagnosed with breast cancer, lost her job, and fallen behind on her rent. Before they came here, they had been living in their friend Danny’s unheated garage. They were Samoan, both built like squares. If Gabe was downstairs and Eldon was upstairs, he could feel the whole house shake when Eldon walked down the hall. And even though Kali had lost a lot of weight because of the chemo, she was still a sagging mountain of a woman.
Eldon lowered his voice. “Are those steroids?”
The heat climbed Gabe’s face all the way up to his hairline. “You can’t tell anyone.”
With a sigh, Eldon shook his head. “You know I won’t. But I don’t know, Gabe. Is it right?”
Eldon clearly didn’t have an imbalance. He had no idea what it was like. “It’s not like I’m going to be smoking dope or using heroin,” Gabe said. “This is only so I can improve myself.”
“Then why not do it, like, the natural way?” Eldon’s voice was mild, but Gabe still felt irritated.
“Where have you been?” he said. “I have been doing nothing but lifting at school or going down to the basement to use my dad’s old weights. I’m drinking protein or weight-gainer shakes three or four times a day. But it’s not working. It’s easy for you to say I should do things the natural way. You’re built like a bulldozer. And I’m a toothpick.”
Even after he got the steroids, it still took Gabe a week to work up the courage to push a needle into his skin. He found step-by-step advice on the Internet and read it over and over until he had it memorized. On Netflix he watched a really old football movie, The Program, to see how the players injected steroids.
Still, the first time he used a syringe to pull fluid from the vial, tilted it up, and squeezed out a drop to get rid of any air bubbles, and then jammed the needle into his hip, Gabe had been so afraid that he might die. His heart was racing, his palms were wet, and his head felt light. Would you even know you were dying? Or would you just suddenly wink out?
The next time it was a little easier. Same for the time after that. So every Tuesday and Friday for the past five weeks, Gabe had gone into his room and locked the door. He didn’t need to hear any more comments from Eldon. And there, alone in his room, surrounded by Little League trophies, his homework, and posters of his favorite bands, Gabe jabbed a needle into his hip.
The steroids changed everything. He got bigger. He got faster. He got stronger. And girls noticed him now. They had never noticed before. Every day before he went to school, he rolled his shirt sleeves to precisely the right level to show off his new biceps. He brushed his teeth and even his tongue, gargled with mouthwash so minty it burned his mouth. He made sure his hair was perfectly mussed before he walked out the door.
He still had to work hard, of course he did, but the steroids had given him the base that had been lacking.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. “I need to go, Gabe.” It was his little sister, Brooke.
Gabe gritted his teeth. The house was really too small for five people. Lately it just felt like he was never alone. Not even in the bathroom.
“Okay. Just a sec.” He wrapped a towel around his waist. As he turned away from the mirror, he caught a glimpse of ugly, red acne speckling the tops of his shoulders. He had heard it was a side effect of steroids, but he had never thought it would affect him. He draped a second towel across his shoulders, hoping it would hide it.
“Gabe!” His little sister’s voice was like a mosquito’s, an annoying whine. “Now!”
“All right!” he shouted. “Can’t you just give me a second?” He wrenched back the door. Brooke must have been leaning against it, because suddenly she tumbled in, her face scrunching up and her mouth opening as she gathered her breath to cry.
“Shut it!” he roared in her face, startling her so much she went completely silent.
Gabe stalked past her, his teeth still clenched.
CHAPTER 8
Gabe!” Mia yelled up the stairs when she heard her son bellowing at her daughter. She set down her purse and keys, then put her fisted hands on her hips. She hadn’t even been home for a minute, and this was how it had to begin?
A beat. And then, “What?” Sullen, but not so sullen she could call him on it.
Realizing she was about to yell at Gabe that he shouldn’t yell at his sister, Mia forced herself up the stairs. She barely had the energy to climb them, let alone lecture.
When had he gotten so big, she wondered as she took the last two steps to where he stood on the landing. Where had her little boy gone? Or her skinny teenager, for that matter? Now his shoulders were powerful, his chest broad. He had a towel around his waist and another across his shoulders. He looked like a man, not a boy. He looked, in a way that made her feel like someone had just slipped a knife in between her ribs and given it a good twist, so much like Scott.
Brooke’s door was closed, and from behind it came the rhythmic sound of crying. There was an edge of theatricality about it, but a big part of it sounded real to Mia.
“What did you say to your sister?” she demanded.
“She wanted in the bathroom, and she wouldn’t listen when I said she had to wait a sec. So I told her she had to give me a chance to get out.”
“When you’re Brooke’s age, sometimes your body doesn’t give you too much warning.”
Gabe rolled his eyes. “But she obviously didn’t have to go to the bathroom that bad or that’s where she would be right now, not off in her room having a pity party.”
Should Mia call him on the disrespect of the eye roll? But he would just deny it, and then the matter of how he had treated Brooke—which had clearly been inappropriate—would get lost. She worried, not for the first time, just how much, in addition to his looks, Gabe had inherited from his father.
“I need you to go in and apologize to your sister right now.”
“She’s making too big a deal out of it. She yelled at me, so I yelled at her just a little bit.”
“You’re ten years older than she is—and three times her size!”
He didn’t answer, just stuck out his lower lip, making a face she had seen all too often from Brooke.
“Go apologize to her right now, Gabe. And I don’t want any more arguing or eye rolling. If you don’t stop right now, there will be consequences.”
She hoped for both their sakes that he’d listen and she wouldn’t have to choose a consequence. No matter what she chose, it wouldn’t be simple. If she took away his phone, he would argue that he might need to call her in an emergency. If she took away his computer, he would surely need it for homework. If she grounded him, there would probably be a
birthday party he had already promised to go to.
“Okay. I’ll go apologize.”
When he turned, she glimpsed an ugly rash of acne across his back. Next time she was at the store she would have to look for some kind of wash he could use in the shower. Stick it in the kid’s bathroom without saying anything. He got embarrassed so easily.
She stood in the hall for a moment, but she couldn’t really hear what he said to Brooke. At least it sounded gentle and more or less sincere. Lately, Gabe’s mood could change so quickly. Hormones were no fun.
When he came out, she said quietly, “Thank you, Gabe.”
He nodded, not making eye contact.
“Your working out is really paying off.” He lifted weights every day after school and then came home and did more down in the basement with Scott’s old set. “Good for you for sticking with it.”
He flushed with pleasure, then shifted his grip on the towel to free one arm, which he flexed to show off his biceps. “Want to buy tickets to the gun show?”
Now it was Mia who rolled her eyes. Still smiling, she went back downstairs and past the family room, where Eldon was watching TV.
“Hey, Mrs. Q.” He flopped one large hand at her in greeting. Eldon had always been a big kid, built like a tree trunk, but now Gabe didn’t seem that much smaller. It had been good for him to have another male in the house, even if it was a boy, not a man.
“Where’s your mom?”
Eldon’s mouth twisted. “Sleeping. She’s not feeling so good.”
Some days it seemed like this latest round of chemo would kill Kali before it saved her. She had once been built like Eldon, but now her skin looked oddly loose, like she could push it all down to her ankles and step out of it.
“I’m sorry. Hopefully a nap will make her feel better.”
Mia started to walk past the dining room, the one room that saw little use and thus the only room that was sort of clean. On impulse she went in and looked at the framed photo on the sideboard. It showed what had once been her family, the four of them on a beach in Kauai. Two weeks after that photo was taken, Scott had died in a single-car accident.
Mia had thought to compare Gabe’s face to Scott’s, but she had forgotten that in the photo Scott had been wearing sunglasses. If he hadn’t, would she now be able to look at his expression and read all the secrets he had been keeping from her?
Scott kept smiling at her from the photo as if saying, You’ll never know, will you? He had one arm around her waist and the other resting on Brooke’s shoulder. Even back then, Gabe stood a bit to one side, as if already anxious to flee the family unit.
Mia just hoped she could make it through her kids’ growing up with her sanity intact. Sometimes she looked around at her life and wondered what had happened. A year ago, it had been simple. She had been a stay-at-home mom. Scott had worked long hours, running his own accounting firm, trying to keep it afloat after the economy tanked.
After he died she eventually learned more than she had wanted to know about how Scott had failed. To keep his business going and his family fed during the lean years, he had run up thousands in credit card debt. Debt Mia was slowly chipping away at. Eventually he had decided that there was more money to be made as a dishonest accountant than as an honest one. And finally he had fallen in love with a twenty-two-year-old college student he had hired as an intern.
Then Scott had died, and Mia had gone back to work at King County. Tried to fit into the power suits she had left behind four years earlier when she had been pregnant with Brooke. Tried to be both mother and father to a preschooler and a teenager.
Even though ten years separated Brooke from Gabe, there were a lot of parallels. Both of them acted out. Both of them were determined to be independent while walking right into danger.
Mia gave herself a mental shake. She didn’t have time to be reminiscing. Some days she didn’t feel like she had time to think, period. She just had to act. She needed to start getting Brooke ready for bed, but first she needed to eat. Kali should have already fed the kids. Was there anything in the freezer worth nuking, or should she just make do with a bowl of cereal?
When she saw the state of the kitchen, she forgot all about dinner. The big blue mixing bowl sat on the white-powdered counter next to a bag of flour, a bag of sugar, an egg carton surrounded by scattered broken shells, and a half stick of butter that had been sitting out on the counter long enough that the edges were blurred.
The bowl was half full of chocolate chip cookie dough. And no baked cookies in sight. It wasn’t too hard to guess where the rest of the dough had gone.
On the nights Mia wasn’t home, the plan called for Kali to make dinner for the kids. And even Gabe knew how to take a blue box of mac and cheese off the shelf and pour the noodles into some boiling water. With all the effort they had put into making cookies, they could have made a halfway decent dinner.
The anxiety Mia had been feeling since the jury deliberations began now found an outlet. She grabbed the mixing bowl and opened the compost jar that sat on the kitchen counter. Scraping the dough into the coffee grounds and table scraps, she smashed the eggshells on top. There. Now none of them would be tempted to pick at it.
She went back into the hall. “Gabe, Eldon, Brooke! I need you down here.”
When they lined up in front of her, it was clear they had totally forgotten about the evidence they had left behind.
“What is this?” she demanded, pointing into the kitchen.
After a pause, Eldon said, “Sorry about the mess. We forgot to clean up.”
“We made cookies,” Brooke said. “And I helped.”
“And what about dinner?”
From the guilty looks they exchanged, it was clear there hadn’t been any other than cookie dough. Mia stamped her foot, all her tiredness forgotten. “That’s it. We’re not doing this anymore. Things are going to change around here. No more junk food.”
“But that’s not junk food,” Gabe protested. “It’s homemade.”
“It’s still junk food, especially if you eat it for dinner.” She walked over to the fridge, yanked off the menu from Pagliacci’s, and stuck it in the recycling bag under the sink. “That’s it. No more takeout pizza. No more fast food. From now on, we’re going to eat salads! And if we want to have dessert, we’ll have fruit.”
“But I don’t want fruit.” Brooke pushed out her lower lip. “I want cookies.”
Paying her no mind, Mia handed grocery bags to Gabe and Eldon. She began opening cupboards and looking for things to get rid of. Sugary cereals, a bag of chips, crackers made from white flour. The contents went into the compost, the containers into recycling. Still-sealed containers went, with a few misgivings, into the grocery bags the boy held. She would take them to the food bank.
With each jar, box, or bag, Gabe’s face got redder. Eldon looked like he wished his mom had never said yes when Mia had offered them a place to live. And Brooke was on the verge of tears.
“Okay,” Mia finally said over her shoulder. “You guys can put your bags down and go upstairs. I’ll finish up here.”
“Do you need any more help?” Gabe asked.
She had seen his face when she put the new jar of Nutella into the bag. Maybe he was hoping to sneak it back to his room.
“No. I think you’ve done enough in here for one day.”
At 1:12 a.m., Mia woke up to a growling stomach and realized she had completely forgotten to eat dinner. In her dreams she had been standing behind the prosecution table, waiting for the jury to announce their verdict. But something kept happening to delay it: an earthquake, a fire drill, a microphone that didn’t work.
She lay in the dark, looking up at the ceiling. She had done the best she could. But was it good enough? Wheeler had done an excellent job. And Sindy was flown to the wind.
Finally she got up and went downstairs to make herself a bowl of cereal—one of the kinds she had deemed healthy enough to keep. But as she was opening the cupboard door, sh
e remembered the secret stash of Kettle Brand chips she kept in one of the basement’s Rubbermaid cabinets, hidden behind a twenty-five-pound bag of basmati rice from Costco. Those chips definitely had to go into the compost bin.
But when she opened the first package, and the smell of spice and grease hit her nose, Mia found herself sitting on the back step in her pajamas, barefoot in thirty-eight-degree weather, shoveling in the chips one handful after another.
CHAPTER 9
WEDNESDAY
When the blare of Mia’s alarm woke her, her mouth tasted terrible.
This must be comparable to how Scott had felt on the mornings when he’d had a hangover. Feeling low and ashamed, his mouth tasting like something had died in it. Only in Mia’s case, what had died in her mouth was an entire bag of Kettle Brand Buffalo Bleu potato chips.
Eating all those chips hadn’t done a darn thing to erase her anxiety about the jury deliberations. How many times must she learn the lesson that food didn’t solve anything—and then promptly forget it? Plus, what kind of example was she setting? Thank goodness she had eaten the chips long after the kids were in bed.
With a groan Mia got up, pulled on a bathrobe, and padded into Brooke’s room. “Brooke, honey, time to get up.”
Brooke pulled the pillow over her head. “Go away. Brooke isn’t here.”
“Uh-oh. If you’re not Brooke, then who am I talking to?”
Enchanted by this idea, Brooke threw off the pillow and sat up. “My name is . . . Break.”
“Break? What kind of a name is Break?”
“It’s because I break things.” She jumped out of bed and started walking stiff-legged toward a pile of toys, her arms outstretched.
What was she picturing herself as—a giant rampaging lizard? A zombie? At four, you could almost convince yourself that you could be anything you wanted to be. Thirty or so years older than four, Mia sometimes felt she was barely capable of being herself.
She swept up her daughter just as an outstretched foot was about to crush a half-dressed Barbie. “Well, just for today, I think you have to be Brooke again. So let’s go have breakfast.”
