Sure, I was upset about that. But it was also—no, I wasn’t let myself think like this. There wasn’t any use in getting wrapped up in a bunch of emotions about a guy who I had barely known seven years before, and who now was a stranger to me. There wasn’t any use, but I felt a terrible tightness in my chest anyway, knowing that I would never see him again.
Except…that grey car had been behind me for a while, not always right behind, but there, in my rearview mirror. And when I turned off Livernois, the grey car followed, and I identified Connor in the driver’s seat. He nodded when he saw me looking and I gasped a little; the tight knot of emotion inside me seemed to loosen. Every time I glanced back, he was still there, driving behind me.
I turned down my street and there was a police car stopped in front of my wretched little apartment building. That wasn’t unusual, because a lot of things happened in our neighborhood that involved the police. But there was another figure standing on the curb with the two officers, a dark head and a smallish body in a sweatshirt I recognized from having picked it up off the bedroom floor the night before. Jared.
I jumped out of my car so fast that I forgot to turn it off or shut the door and I ran to them. “Jared!” I threw my arms around my brother. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he told me, his voice muted by my coat. He pushed himself away. “I’m fine. They didn’t have to pick me up.” I took his face between my gloved hands and looked closely at him, and even though he was acting tough and defiant, I saw the marks of tears on his cheeks. He jerked away from my grasp.
“What happened?” I asked the police instead. Vaguely, I heard my car turn off and the door close somewhere in the background, but my eyes were fixed on my brother’s face.
“Lia Bissett?” I nodded at the cop. “This is your brother?” I nodded again, reaching for Jared, but he stepped back. “This was the fifth or sixth time that we’ve seen him wandering around here by himself,” one of the officers continued. “We’ve talked to him but we keep seeing him again. Last week we spotted him out around eleven PM.”
At night? I stared at Jared. He had left the apartment when I was at work at Atelier Anson, when the sitter was supposed to be watching him.
“Today he started running, so we wanted to talk to you. He says he lives with you?”
I put out my hand to Jared but he shied away from me again. “I’m his legal guardian,” I said. I stared at them, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Instead, a hand fell onto my shoulder and stayed, squeezing gently. It didn’t make me turn around and hit him this time. “Thank you, officers, for bringing him home. We really appreciate it,” Connor said to them. “She’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again. Lia, let’s go upstairs. Thank you,” he repeated, and nodded, and the one nodded back.
“We don’t want to see him out by himself anymore,” the other cop told me sternly.
“No, absolutely not,” Connor agreed, and sort of shepherded Jared and me to the rusty concrete staircase that led to our second-floor apartment.
My hands shook as I tried to let us in but I finally got all of the locks open. As usual, I went inside first to check around before Jared was allowed to enter. Not knowing our routine, Connor came in right behind me, so Jared followed him and pushed me out of his way to go back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind himself.
I stood for a moment looking after him. Connor was already opening the kitchen cabinets, checking inside. “We forgot to have lunch,” he announced, “and everyone will feel better after we eat. What do you have in here?”
Not too much, that was the answer, and my stomach was in such a knot, there was no way I was going to be able to get anything into it. I locked the doors and stood with my hand against the cold metal, trying to catch my breath. I had thought they were going to take him away from me. They still could.
“Lia?”
I turned to Connor.
“You don’t have a ton of food here.” He held up his phone. “I just ordered in, a late lunch, early dinner thing. Ok?”
“No, I—” Was I crazy, refusing a free meal? “Ok. Thank you,” I added belatedly, and made myself smile at him. “I’ll tell Jared. I need to talk to him about…this. We’re really working hard on our communication.” That was a good line. I smiled again and threw up my hands a little, like, “Kids!” Connor just watched me as I crossed the small room to the bedroom door.
“Jared. Jared, I’m coming in,” I told him in a low voice, and opened it. I had jimmied the doorknob so that he couldn’t lock me out anymore. He sat on his bed, hunched over the little gaming console.
“Can you not make a big deal of this?” he asked flatly, without looking up. “Why are you bothering me?”
“Don’t give me attitude!” My voice rose. “Jesus, you’re eleven years old and getting brought home by the cops! That isn’t a big deal? And you’ve been going out at night, sneaking out?”
“That dumb babysitter you hired knew I was going. It wasn’t sneaking, she told me to pay her and she wouldn’t say anything to you about what I was doing.”
My mouth fell open. “You paid her? With what money?” Oh, no. “Jared, how are you getting money?”
“Leave me alone.”
I walked to the bed and held out my hand. “Give me that. You don’t get to sit in here playing your stupid games after you just rode home in a police car.” I snapped my fingers. “Give that here!”
Jared looked up at me. “No.”
“Right now!”
“No. Fuck you!”
My mouth dropped open. What was I supposed to do? What would a real parent have done? I had no idea.
“You can’t talk to me like that!” I snapped. “Like it or not, you live with me now! That’s how it is, so you better clean it up. I’m not dealing with your bullshit.” I stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind myself, only then remembering that Connor was in my apartment. He had made himself at home on the couch, except that, like me, he hadn’t removed his coat. “He’ll come out when the food gets here,” I explained. I pushed back my hair, trying to calm myself down. What was Jared doing? What was I going to do about it?
Connor watched me closely. “That was scary,” he commented, “seeing your brother with the police.”
I shrugged. “Just a kid doing dumb kid stuff, not a big deal. I remember you saying that you got in trouble in high school.”
“Do you remember that?” he asked, surprised. “Yeah, I guess I did. But your brother is a lot younger than I was, and I don’t think I ever got brought home in the back of a squad car.”
“Maybe they just never caught you,” I said, and smiled like it was all a funny joke. But my hands still shook and I felt sick as I messed with the thermostat, which told me that it was fifty-three degrees inside the apartment. That felt about right based on the numbness that was creeping into my toes because I had kicked off my work boots. I added another pair of socks from the stash of warm clothes that I kept next to the couch.
“How did you end up with guardianship of Jared?” Connor asked.
“He is my brother, right? He belongs with me!”
That had come out way, way too loudly, too fierce and too angry.
“Ok,” Connor answered, his eyebrows up.
“He belongs with me,” I repeated. No matter what he was doing, Jared was mine, my brother, and no one was going to take him. Not the police, not the Samotnys, not anyone. I was going to make this work for both of us.
Chapter 3
“Why are you here?” I swept my arm around the apartment, but I was also asking more. What did Connor think he was doing in my life again, if he was already giving up on my house? “Why were you behind me on the road?”
“I wanted to follow you to make sure you got home all right,” Connor said easily. “Then when I saw you running toward the police car, I was afraid something was wrong, something really bad had happened. I get pretty squirrely about lights and sirens since t
he accident.”
That made two of us. “Just so you know, Jared’s not a bad kid.” I felt the urge to defend him. “It was just a hard transition. But we’ll work it out.”
“Transition?”
“When he came to live with me,” I explained. “It hasn’t been that long, just about a year now.”
“Before, he lived with your uncle?” Connor asked.
“No…no, he was in foster care. He moved around a little and then he was with one couple for a while.” That was fucking Richie and Jill Samotny, who stuck around in our lives like the worst possible campers in a restaurant, the terrible customers who wouldn’t leave and give up their tables even when they had been done for an hour. I hated campers, and I hated the Samotnys.
“But then you were able to get guardianship.”
“Yeah, but it took much too long. I had to turn eighteen, and get my GED, and then the couple that had him, the Samotnys, they fought me because they were trying to adopt him.” To keep him away from his real family, more like. “They were horrible about everything but the family court judge finally agreed that it would be best for Jared to grow up with his actual relatives, not some aging, sorry sacks of shit who couldn’t even manage to procreate on their own and had to steal somebody else’s kid.”
My voice had risen again, strident and harsh, and Connor was staring at me.
I modulated. “I mean, they did a great job taking care of him, and I’m really grateful to them. It’s wonderful that they open their hearts to foster kids. But it’s also so important for families to stay together.” That was my standard line, what I had said to every social worker, every person from the Friend of the Court office, every judge. It made me seem big-hearted and rational, when actually, I had wanted to slit their throats for trying to keep my brother from me.
“How long did he live with them?”
“Five years,” I said briefly.
“Does he still see them?” Connor asked.
I didn’t want to talk about Jared and the Samotnys anymore, so I smiled at him. “This isn’t a very fun Saturday for you. You must have better things to do than hang out in my apartment,” I told him.
“Not really. But I wouldn’t mind if it were warmer in here.” He rubbed his hands together. “Are you trying to save on the power bill?”
“No. I mean, yes, but there’s something wrong with the heat in all the units. They won’t fix anything,” I shrugged. “It’s one of the reasons the rent is so cheap.”
Connor pulled himself up from the couch, wincing. He pointed at his stomach. “That’s from you.”
“I’m sorry.” I really was.
He laughed. “Next time I’ll know not to startle you. What else is broken in here?” he asked.
Oh, there was quite a list. He went down to my car and got the tool belt off my back seat, which I had stupidly left and would almost certainly have been stolen. While we waited for the food he had ordered to arrive, he went through my apartment and started fixing things. The dripping faucet in the bathroom, the kitchen cabinet that stuck, the window that rattled in the frame when the wind blew hard, and more, and more. I watched and learned.
“Anything else?” he asked finally, wiping his hands.
“Uh, the bedroom door won’t stay open. It swings closed,” I said.
“Let’s take a look.” He smiled at me. “I feel like I’m on a roll.”
“Jared?” I knocked, but he didn’t answer. “Jared, we’re coming in.”
“Can’t you leave me alone?” he asked as I opened the door.
I ignored that. “Jared, this is Connor. He’s…I used to know him a long time ago.”
“I used to come into your uncle’s party store when your sister worked there,” Connor told him, and started messing with the hinge of the door.
Jared’s head snapped up. We didn’t ever talk about that. “You did?” he asked, interested. “You went there?”
Connor glanced at him. “Sure. I used to buy, uh, gum.” He looked over at me and shrugged sheepishly, but I was looking at my brother.
“I remember going there,” Jared said. “I remember going in the back with all the stuff. There were a lot of toys.”
“You thought everything in the stockroom was a toy. I had to keep you out of the beer bottles and the cans of dip,” I said, smiling a little at the memory. “You always wanted to eat the candy and chips. I only let you have one little bag.”
He actually smiled some, too. “Did you see the fire? Were you there for the fire?” he asked Connor. “The store burned down.”
“No, I wasn’t there.” Connor shook his head. “I was away for a while, but I saw the damage when I got back. It must have been huge. What happened?” he asked me.
“Wiring,” I managed to say, and there was a knock on the front door. “That’s probably the food.” I checked carefully anyway before I opened it.
Jared came out of his room to eat, to eat like a maniac. Connor watched him, bemused, and I kept putting more on his plate. “Looks like you’re growing,” Connor noted. “That’s what my brother and I used to do before we shot up. I ate us out of house and home and Teddy was worse when he sprouted.”
“How tall are you?” Jared asked, interested. It was probably the first time he had ever voluntarily spoken over a meal with me.
“I’m about six-three. My brother is a little taller. He’s younger, too, so that sucks.” He laughed and Jared smiled again.
“How tall was our dad?” my brother asked me.
I schooled my face to indifference so he wouldn’t know how important it was that we were having a conversation. “He wasn’t as big as Connor. Maybe five-ten.”
“And you’re short,” Jared said glumly. “I won’t be tall.”
“I’m not short, I’m medium, and you never know,” I told him. “Our Uncle Berj was really tall. Do you remember him at all? Maybe you’ll take after that side of the family.”
“Do you play sports?” Connor asked. “Is that why you’re worried?”
“It’s better to be bigger than other guys,” Jared answered, and sunk down in his chair. Connor looked over at me but I had no idea what was wrong. Great. Was he getting pushed around? At school, in the neighborhood?
“I played baseball when I was your age,” Connor said off-handedly. “Hockey when I was little, and some tennis. But my main sport was lacrosse. That’s a great game. What you need for lacrosse is to be fast and quick, and you don’t have to be tall. You need good hand-eye coordination and stick skills.”
Jared looked interested. “I never played that.”
“I could probably find some of our old sticks in my parents’ basement. Want to go throw a ball tomorrow?”
Jared’s whole face lit up like the fourth of July. “Yeah. Yeah!” He looked at the window. “Not around here, though. In my old neighborhood, there was a really nice park.”
“The Samotnys used to take you to play in the parks in Grosse Pointe. They didn’t really live there,” I dismissed this.
He glared at me and I wished I hadn’t said it. What did I care where those losers had taken him? They wouldn’t be doing it again.
Connor looked at the window. “My old high school has a synthetic field that they keep cleared of snow. We could go there.”
“Where is it?” Jared asked, and without thinking, I answered.
“Lamb’s Academy in the suburbs,” I told him.
“Did I tell you that, too?” Connor asked me. “Jesus Christ, I must have talked my head off. How do you remember all this?”
I was blushing, I could feel it. “I retain a lot of useless information,” I said. “It made me a good waitress, how I could recite the daily specials.” I started to pick up the plates and take-out containers from the table. He had ordered at least three times what we could eat, even with Jared and his huge appetite. “I’ll box this up for you to take home,” I mentioned, back in server mode.
“No, I don’t want it,” he told me. “You guys keep it.
Jared, what time tomorrow?”
“You’re really want him to come and play lacrosse with you?” I questioned doubtfully.
“Yes,” Connor said. He sounded surprised that I was asking. “Don’t you want him to?”
That made Jared push away from the table and stomp back into his bedroom, where I knew he would hole up again with the game player that I hadn’t been able to take away.
We watched him go. “I meant both of you could come,” Connor explained. “Would that make you more comfortable?”
“I’m perfectly comfortable,” I told him. I wasn’t at all, not with Connor sitting in my apartment, not with driving someplace I didn’t know, to play a game that I had barely heard of. “And sure, that would be nice for him. When?”
We settled on a time and he told me how to get to the field, which was apparently hard to find due to the extensive “grounds” that the school had, and I walked Connor to the door. “If Jared sleeps in the bedroom, do you get the couch?” he asked me.
“Yeah. But I don’t mind it, and he should have his own room,” I said quickly.
Connor nodded slightly. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
I nodded back and did up the locks, listening. Once again, he lingered outside the door for a bit before I heard his feet slapping down the cold concrete steps. Then I ran to the window to watch to make sure that he made it safely to his car and drove away.
I curled up on the couch where he had been sitting before he’d started running around my apartment and fixing everything. Connor Hayes, showing up again, had made it a much better day for me, despite what he thought of my plans for my house. I had the feeling that things with the police might have gone a whole lot worse if he hadn’t stepped in, thanking them and getting me out of there. I had never done great with the authorities, not since they first questioned me after what Connor had called his accident. I remembered that they all seemed so big, their voices were so deep. What had I seen? they had asked me, repeatedly. Did I know any of their names? Could I identify them in a line-up? Where was the ancient video tape that was supposed to be in the machine above the TV, recording the feed from the parking lot? What did I mean that I didn’t know where it had gone?
Fixing Lia Page 5