They were all looking at me. The room seemed to be getting hotter, the other bodies closer to mine. It even seemed like Misiu was staring me down.
Oh, here it came. I wasn’t going to be able to keep it in. “Jared, can you take the dog for a walk?” I asked, my voice high and shaking a little.
“Now? I’m pretty hungry. I only had those two bowls of cereal, the fruit, and the eggs.”
“Now, please.” And he listened to me, picking up the puppy and the leash, and belatedly, his coat so I didn’t have to yell after him. I waited until the door closed behind them before I turned to Connor, but then the words balled up and clumped in my mouth.
“Lia, what? Why do you look like you’re going to puke?” he asked.
I might. “Connor, I have to talk to you about something. Before you quit your job, and move into that house with us, I have to tell you something. We can’t go any farther, not until you know.”
“Lia—” Margaux said, but I held up my hand.
“No, I’m sorry, but I have to.” I swallowed down bile. “It’s about the guys who shot you.”
“What about them?” he asked me.
“I know you’ve been worried about them, but you don’t have to be. They’re all dead now—well, a few of them are dead and a few of them are in prison for life here in Michigan. One moved to Florida and he’s locked up there. None of them are walking the streets anymore. I’ve been keeping track.”
His mouth hung slack, and then he shook himself. “Wait a minute, how do you know this? The police didn’t have any suspects—”
“I know, because I recognized them in the parking lot that night. I know, because they followed me after, they threatened me, Jared, and my uncle, and they set fire to the party store. With us inside it.”
There was dead silence. Connor’s face turned pale, almost as white as the cushion we were sitting on. “What?”
“I didn’t tell you. I’ve been afraid to tell you, because you’d hate me, but I have to. It’s not fair to you.” I wanted to reach out and hold his hand, but instead I dove into the story, the same one I had told Amy about the destroyed video tape, lying to the police, my uncle’s gun, the threats against us. I told it right up to the part when I walked into the hospital where Connor was healing, determined that I would see him, determined that I would speak to his family to warn them that he could be in danger, and determined that also, I would ask them for help.
“I waited outside your room, and I did talk to someone,” I said. I looked at Margaux. This was her chance to explain the other side of the story.
“I had no idea about the seriousness of the threats,” she interjected quickly. “All Lia said was that she needed help and was scared. She kept saying that she needed to talk to you but of course, I couldn’t allow that, not with where you were in your recovery. I didn’t believe that she really knew who had done that to you, or she would have told the police. We thought it was a scam she was running.”
“She came to you when she was fifteen, the girl who had just saved my life. She told you that she needed our help, and what did you do?” Connor asked quietly.
“I—” His mother stopped, and looked at him. “Connor, you have no idea. You had been shot by criminals. You had been dead!” Her cold face un-froze for a moment; tears pooled up in the eyes that were the same color as her son’s. “I had to protect you. I had security ask Lia to leave.”
Or, she had told me to get out, that I would be arrested, and then had the security guard take me by the arms. That line about asking me to leave sounded good, though, and I got it. “I understand that,” I said, and again, everyone stared at me. “That makes sense to me. She wanted to protect her child, and she couldn’t have known how it was going to turn out, that I would be injured in the fire.”
“You’re defending her,” Connor said, and I nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked. His voice sounded hollow.
“Because I thought you’d hate me!” My own voice broke. “For seven years, I’ve carried the guilt that I never spoke up. If I had, maybe they wouldn’t have started the fire. Jared wouldn’t have been sent to the Samotnys, my uncle would still have his store. And you wouldn’t have gone for all this time living in fear. It’s my fault. Maybe you’d have your old business, still, and a house in Detroit with no holes, and a family with your beautiful blonde girlfriend. It’s all my fault,” I repeated.
“No,” Margaux said. “No, you’re not entirely to blame. I could have acted differently, as well. I wish I had, now,” she told her son. “When I saw the two of you together for the first time a few weeks ago, I told Lia that she had ruined your life by not speaking up seven years ago. Actually, I was afraid of how you’d feel about me and what I had done.” Her chin tilted up, features frozen again. “I didn’t ever want you to know. I thought it would hurt you, and that’s the last thing I want.”
Connor looked at all of us. “Did you know about this too?” he asked his father.
Blaine nodded. “Your mother had told me years ago that Lia came to the hospital asking for help. We thought it was a money grab, and that she was exaggerating—lying,” he admitted. “We didn’t know about the fire until you and your brother came back from visiting where the store used to be and said it had been burned down. We assumed…we understood that it was retaliation, that Lia had been correct when she’d said she was in danger.”
“She said she was in danger,” Connor repeated.
“I said that the guys who had shot you were going to try something else. I’m assuming that’s why your parents had you moved out of Detroit to a different hospital,” I said, and Margaux nodded slightly.
“Just in case,” she said. “And to remove you from any…bad elements.” She was looking at me when she said it.
“When I came back from seeing the burned building, you told me to stop looking for Lia,” Connor answered. “And that was why you told me to stop. You realized that she had been right, and that you had failed to act, and now she was—”
“We didn’t know that she’d been injured, and we wanted you to be safe,” Margaux said. “We didn’t want you mixed up with her, getting hurt again. Yes, we convinced you to stop looking for her.”
Connor’s eyes swept over us. He looked appalled by what he saw. “I have to go,” he said.
“Wait!” I wobbled to my feet. “Where are you going? Connor, we can fix this. Everything can be fixed, right?”
He didn’t look at me again and the front door closed quietly behind him.
Chapter 15
“Just do it.” Amy waved the plastic stick at me. “What’s a little bit of pee?”
“I’m not pregnant!” I told her. “I’m just constantly queasy. Amy, I swear. I’m not pregnant.”
She put it down, frowning. “If you aren’t, then you have to go to the doctor, because you’re sick. You haven’t eaten anything in my presence all week. But what if you are pregnant?” Her hand covered the small bump below her sweater. “You have to find out.”
I already knew what was wrong with me, and it wasn’t a lot of extra baby chemicals racing around my body to make me ill. I rolled my eyes and picked up the pregnancy test, and my hands jerked uncontrollably like they had been doing all week. It had been a long, terrible five days. “Fine, I’ll go pee on this and show you.”
“Good!” She clapped her hands. “I can sing you the song that we do with Luke to get him to use the potty.”
“I’m good right now to go on my own, but thanks. Maybe later.”
I held the white plastic more gingerly when I came out of the bathroom a few moments later, not entirely happy to deal with urine. “Here you go. You’ll see, I’m not pregnant, and I’m not sick. I’m just…I just need to calm down a little.” And have Connor love me again, that was all.
“Are you guys still not talking?” she asked.
“We’re talking, like, ‘I’ll be home late,’ or, ‘Do you want pasta tonight?’ But beyond that, no.” I sighed. C
onnor hadn’t said anything of substance to me since he had walked out of the apartment over the weekend. I had sat with his parents, the three of us staring at each other in a stunned silence, until Jared and the dog had come back upstairs, starving, and I had made the crepes. I had cried over the stove and burned most of them, but no one besides Jared had felt like eating, anyway.
Connor hadn’t come back until after dinner, at which point he told me that he didn’t want to talk about it, not one word about any of it. “Do you want us to leave?” I’d asked him, and he just shook his head, without another word.
But now we were living in his apartment with him hating me. And no, I hadn’t been able to eat very much since Sunday, exactly because of that.
“Oh, here it comes!” Amy exclaimed, staring intently at the pregnancy test.
My stomach flipped. What if I were pregnant? Then Connor wouldn’t leave me. I closed my eyes. No, I couldn’t keep him like that, and if he wanted to go, I was going to accept it. Then I would miss him for the rest of my life.
“One line,” she announced. I looked, and yes, it was negative. “Then you need to go to the doctor.”
“No. I need to work this out between us. If he would just talk to me…”
“Like how you talked to him? You kept silent for seven years!” she reminded me.
“Thank you for your support,” I told her.
Amy shrugged. “You said that before, he told you he has to take time to process things. Let him do that now and he’ll come to understand why you acted the way you did. You were just a teenager.”
“It was how I acted in the present day that’s the problem,” I said. “I ruined everything and was wrong from start to finish. I’m terrible.” My stomach roiled.
“Lia, honestly, if I had gone through everything that you did, I have no idea how I would have behaved, either. You haven’t had anyone to trust or love for a long time. You’ve been on your own, struggling, scrapping.” She picked up a tissue. “God, here I go.”
“I don’t want to go back to that,” I said, and started to cry, too. “I want what we had before, and I ruined it. I shouldn’t have told him. We could have gone on and I would have been able to hide it.”
“Stuff comes eventually.” Amy passed me the box of tissue. “Were you going to stay in some devil’s bargain with his mean mom? Give yourself a little credit for doing the best you could. I know that Connor will see it in the end.”
But just in case, I needed to plan for the future, because I had more than just myself to worry about now. “I found another apartment, pretty close to here, and it allows pets. On the days that Jared has lacrosse practice, can I come in an hour early so that I can leave early to take him there? Would that be ok? The other days I can stay and work late to make up more.”
“Connor hasn’t told you that you need to move out, right?” she asked. “Why don’t you give it a little time before you sign a lease?”
I nodded. “Amy, thank you. Thank you for being so nice to me, when I know I don’t deserve it.”
“You’re doing the best you can, and so am I. I would be pretty hard-hearted not feel sorry for you. I thought a lot about it, and I decided that I’d rather be a person with compassion, even if it means I get scammed sometimes. I was thinking that I needed to toughen up, trust less, but I realized that it’s better to be the way I am.”
“You shouldn’t change at all, because you’re awesome,” I told her.
She laughed, making one last pass under her eyes with the tissue. “Remind me to tell Steve that after he has to eat the beet burgers I’m going to make for dinner tonight.” The horrified look on my face probably also reflected Steve’s feelings about burgers made out of mashed beets. “They’re much healthier than the ones made out of beef!” she assured me. “They just don’t taste as good. And the red color does remind him of eating a big, juicy patty of raw meat, which is a little off-putting.”
I was going to throw up again. “Please stop talking about beet burgers. Please.”
She threw up her hands. “Someday, you’ll be eating for two, and I’ll give you the recipe.”
That day seemed very far off, or never attainable. Amy and I went back to work until lunch time, when I went upstairs to bring Connor the sandwich I’d made, and the homemade soup, and the mixed green salad with chopped vegetables.
“Uh, thanks. I don’t really have time to eat,” he said, only glancing briefly at me before looking back at his computer screens. “I’m heading out to a meeting with Arschloch.”
“Ok. Maybe when you get back,” I suggested.
“I’m very busy.”
“Oh, sure.” But I didn’t want to leave quite yet, so I took some time unpacking the bag, putting out the food, just in case it might tempt him. And in case my food would be so tasty, he’d fall back in love with me.
Connor finally looked up, surveying the spread. “Thank you again. This all looks good.”
“You’re welcome. I can make whatever you want for dinner. You can text me if there’s anything specific, otherwise, I know you liked—”
“You don’t have to do this, Lia. Ok? You don’t have to keep trying so hard. You ironed my t-shirts yesterday and made Jared help you wash my car. I’m not going to make you guys leave my apartment, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“We’re just trying to help you,” I muttered. My voice was nearly inaudible as I continued, “I want to make it up to you.”
He took his hands away from the keyboard, leaned back, and sighed. “I need time to think about all this. You’ve been living with it for seven years, but I just found out that my parents and my girlfriend conspired to keep critical information from me about the men who almost killed me.”
“We didn’t conspire!” I said quickly. “Or, yes, we did, but not until recently.” That made it worse. “Please let me explain.”
“I’ve heard enough. My mom has been leaving hours-long messages.”
I thought about what Amy had said to me earlier that morning. “Can you try to put yourself in our shoes?”
“I have. You were a teenager, you were being terrorized, then you were on your own. I don’t blame you in the least for anything you did back then. Then I burst back into your life, taking over your house, taking over your brother—”
“You didn’t do that. You helped me with everything, and I appreciate it so much,” I told him, my voice cracking.
“I’m trying to say that I understand how things got out of hand now, and you felt like you couldn’t be honest with me,” he said. “I just need to figure out how to deal with all this.”
“Connor, I haven’t been honest with anyone, not for a long time, and not even with myself. But I will, if you could give me another chance, please. Please.”
We looked at each other, until there was a knock on the glass door of his office and Stephen Whitaker came in. “Hi, Lia. Connor, are you ready to go?”
Connor stood. “Yes. Lia, we can talk…we’ll see each other later.” He picked up his bag and walked out, and Steve followed. I stayed behind to put away the lunch he hadn’t touched, carefully repacking the containers and trying to pack away my feelings, too.
∞
The truck lurched over yet another bump on 11 Mile Road and my cast thumped heavily on the floor of the front seat, making Misiu jump. Driving with this thing on my leg wasn’t fun or easy, or pain-free.
“It’s ok, Misiu,” Jared soothed. “Are you ok?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I told him. “I’m fine.”
Man, things were not fine, but I was holding steady for my brother. I had decided against moving us out immediately, to minimize the disruption for him, but I couldn’t imagine staying in Connor’s apartment for the months left of the construction schedule. If the past week was any indication, I was going to have a nervous breakdown before we ever filled up our garbage bags to go to the completed house.
The chill between Connor and me had thawed a little, with us talking a
bit more about dumb, inconsequential things. But we hadn’t tackled the big issues, and I was still bedding down on the couch, settling myself there after Jared went to sleep and getting up early so he didn’t know about the change in the sleeping arrangements. I thought Connor needed a break from me, and I couldn’t lie next to him, pining and crying each night.
“I talked to Connor on the way to lacrosse practice yesterday. Like, a man-to-man thing,” Jared announced suddenly.
“Really. Man-to-man.”
“He explained what happened,” Jared told me. “Like, how you were trying to handle everything when he got shot.”
“He told you all that? It’s pretty hard to hear,” I said. I looked over at my little brother, to make sure he wasn’t too upset by it.
“Connor said it was a long time ago, but that you guys are both still dealing with it. He said that you had saved him by pulling him down an alley, and then you tried to warn his parents that he might be in danger.”
“That’s true,” I answered. “And I thought you were in danger, and I was trying to protect you, too.”
“You weren’t much older than I am. Right?”
“A few years, but I think you can get it. It’s pretty easy to get yourself in a bad situation,” I said. “You did, too, right? But we both got out of it. I’m all good, now.”
“But you didn’t have a big sister like I do, to help you with everything. Connor said you carried me through of the fire and you got burned. That’s why you have scars on your back.” He looked at me, his eyes wide. “I saw, when I first came to live with you. When you wore a towel because you got out of the shower when I set a grilled cheese on fire on the stove,” he explained. “I saw your back, but I was too mad at you to ask what happened.”
“It’s ok,” I told him. “I’m fine, now. I didn’t want you to know all that.”
“Why? You’re my sister and I should know, because, like, I should say thank you.” He waited a beat. “Thanks, Lia.”
“You’re welcome.”
Jared nodded. “Connor said you never told me because you were trying to protect me, still. I see that’s what you do. But he thought I should know that you had saved both of us.”
Fixing Lia Page 25