by Lis Wiehl
Clearly, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. In the years before he died, Scott had gotten in the habit of taking shortcuts. From the outside, their life had still looked picture perfect: a big house, a new Suburban, vacations to tropical beaches. After he was gone, Mia had realized their life had actually been an illusion, bought but not paid for.
Scott had always liked to look good, secretly delighted in making people jealous. And now it seemed that Gabe was following in his father’s footsteps.
Or maybe it was Mia’s fault for sticking by Scott for far too long. For letting him expose their children to the wrong lessons. And for not having taught Gabe anything herself that had stayed with him.
The church service began, and along with the rest of the congregation, Mia got to her feet to sing a hymn—barely aware of her dad’s slightly off-key bass and Luciana’s soft soprano—then sat back down for announcements and scripture readings. Obediently, she closed her eyes for the prayers.
But her thoughts continued to spin in tighter and tighter circles.
What would happen to Gabe now? Was this the point where, when Mia looked back, she would realize things had already gone too far? That there would be no turn-around? Could he become a drug addict? A thief? Or just the kind of guy who could aim no higher than a minimum wage job?
Remembering how she had praised Gabe for how his hard work was finally paying off, Mia flushed. She had been a fool. A fool.
How could she have been so blind? Willfully blind, just as she had been with Scott. And like Scott, learning the truth too late. Oh, dear God, she thought, please make it not be too late.
As a prosecutor, Mia accepted no nonsense. But she tried to have a softer side at home. Tried not to cross-examine, not to suspect, not to trick Gabe or Brooke into admitting the truth. Tried to believe they already were being truthful. Because these people were her family, darn it. Not strangers. Not people who did bad things.
Only maybe Gabe was both. Family. Who did bad things.
As the pastor launched into his sermon, Mia barely heard him. Instead, she kept second-guessing how she had handled things yesterday. Should she have hidden her discovery from Gabe until she had more time to research steroids? Had it been a mistake to let Charlie talk to him?
She didn’t know what he had said, just that he had left as soon as he was done. Before he did, Charlie had taken Mia out on the porch and talked to her in a low voice.
“Just because he says he’s quitting doesn’t mean that he is, or that he’s going to stay quit. He knows you’re watching him now, though. So he’ll either stop using or he’ll try to get better at hiding it. You just better hope he keeps feeling guilty. But if I were you, I wouldn’t assume anything.”
“Okay.” Mia wished she could just go into her room and close the door, pull the covers over her head and not get out of bed for a year or two. Maybe not until Gabe was twenty-five. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”
“I can remember what it was like to be a teenage boy.” His mouth twisted, and he looked down at his shoes. “Sort of.” He raised his head, and his eyes met hers. “I think he’ll probably be okay. His brain just needs to catch up with his impulses.”
Did Charlie think she was a terrible mom not to have noticed anything? Did he think she had been hiding her head in the sand? She didn’t really want to know.
“I sure hope so.” Mia sighed. “See you Monday.” Then she took a deep breath and went back inside and up to Gabe’s room, the place to which he had retreated after talking to Charlie. She opened the door without knocking. Gabe was sprawled on his bed, tiny white earbuds screwed into his ears.
“This probably comes as no surprise,” she said in a voice designed to penetrate, “but you’re grounded.”
He yanked out one earpiece and pushed himself up on one elbow. “For how long?”
Mia pinched the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb. “I don’t know for how long. In the interim, I want you to research and write a four-page, double-spaced report on the drawbacks of steroids. A minimum of a thousand words. I want you to cover not only the medical aspects but also people whose lives got messed up. Who lost their sports careers or even their lives.”
Then she had spent the next half hour playing dolls with Brooke, wishing life were as simple for her as it was for a four-year-old.
Now Mia tuned into the sermon and realized it was about the prodigal son. Either God had a sense of humor or he was taunting her. Gabe had squandered his gifts, come close to throwing them away. Would he ever return to the fold? She couldn’t pray for herself, could barely pray for Gabe. She realized it was because she lacked any certainty that it would turn out okay. But maybe that was what prayers were for, to make you realize you had no control, to make you let go of the notion that you controlled your destiny.
Maybe the future was best approached on your knees.
“Mia?” Her dad touched her arm. “Church is over.”
With a start she realized everyone was getting to their feet and gathering their things.
“Sorry!”
“Would you like to go to lunch with Luciana and me?”
“I would love that.” She was in no hurry to return home. Gabe had still been in bed when she left. Kali was looking after Brooke.
They met at a diner a half mile from the church, the kind that served breakfast all day. The food looked basic, and probably most of it started out frozen in some kind of industrial-size packaging, but how badly could you mess up breakfast? Remembering her vow to eat better, Mia ordered her toast dry.
Her dad leaned forward. “So how are things going with the kids?”
Mia opened her mouth, but no words came out. To buy time, she took a sip of her coffee. It was scalding, burning her tongue. She waved her hand in front of her mouth, hoping her dad would think that the coffee explained the tears that had flooded her eyes. “Let’s just say it’s been . . . interesting.”
“I remember your brother when he was Gabe’s age. You know what they say. When you’re fourteen or fifteen, your parents don’t know anything, but by the time you’re twenty-five, it’s amazing how much they’ve learned.”
“I hope you’re right.” She stopped herself from sighing.
“And work? How’s that going?”
“I’ve been helping a homicide detective with a case. We’re pretty sure that the victim is the same guy who asked for my help outside the Chinese restaurant where he worked. He didn’t speak very much English, so we couldn’t really communicate. He came to America illegally.” She paused while the waitress set down their plates. “I would guess that everyone who works at that restaurant is undocumented. And probably as a result, the people who work there have never even heard of the minimum wage. And they all live in a run-down house where four or five people share a room.”
Her food forgotten, Luciana was listening with interest. “Maybe they are more than just illegal,” she said carefully. “Maybe they are slaves.”
“What?” Clearly, Luciana did not have a good grasp of English. “There aren’t any slaves anymore. Not in America.”
“There are slaves in America,” Luciana insisted. “Even slaves in Seattle.”
Mia remembered a story she had seen on the news, a couple from Indonesia who had brought over a servant and then never let her go outside, never paid her, made her sleep on the floor.
“I guess I’ve heard of maids being treated like slaves.”
“It is not like slaves,” Luciana insisted. “It is. And there are slaves in factories and on farms. In restaurants. Anyplace you need a lot of people and they don’t need to speak much English.”
“The people from the restaurant that we talked to live in a house in a regular neighborhood. They talk to the public every day. They’re free to go wherever they want. They’re not being sold at an auction. I mean, it’s not like they’re chained up or anything.” But as Mia spoke, she wondered. How free were the people they had talked to, really?
“They
don’t need to be chained up.” Luciana’s words were an urgent hiss. “They chain themselves. The bosses take their papers. The bosses say, if you go to the police, you will be beaten, raped, maybe even killed. You will be jailed. You will be deported.” She nodded, agreeing with herself. “That’s what the police do to people in their home countries, so it makes sense. So there’s no point in asking anyone for help. Plus, these people are told they owe money to the smugglers and they have to work to pay it back. Only when you are paid a dollar or two an hour, you will never pay it back. It is called”—she looked up, trying to recall the correct term—“debt bondage. But what it means is that you are a slave.” Her lips pursed. “Even if they aren’t sold at auction.”
“How do you know all this?” Mia asked.
“Because that’s what happened to me.”
Mia looked at her dad. Food forgotten, he was listening to Luciana with one hand across his mouth. She could still make out his expression. Pain, sadness.
“When I was offered a job in America,” she continued in her soft voice, “I felt like I had won the lottery. I was living in a little town in Mexico with my family, but there was no work. When a woman said she had a job for me, I thought, I can earn money and send it back to my family. I can help my parents. Everyone knows you make good money in America. I felt so lucky. This lady told me, ‘You help me, and I will help you.’ She said I was like a daughter to her. But then when I was brought here, she told me I owed her twelve thousand dollars for passage. And she charged me for every bit of food I put in my mouth, the bed I slept on. Everything.”
Luciana sighed and was quiet for a long moment. Neither Mia nor her dad moved.
“To pay her back, I had to be with men. Man after man after man. The people who ran the whole thing were from Mexico, like me. So were the other girls. The only Americans I met were my clients. You are told you have to earn back the money you owe before you can leave. Not that you know where you are. Even if you’ve been there for months. Maybe you know the area code. Or the state. But not the city. And you get passed around, you get traded. Like a slave. You can still be bought and sold. Even in 2015. Even in America.” Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “One time I tried to tell a man who seemed nice what was happening. But he told the madam. I was beaten until I almost died. Then they put me in a locked closet for eleven days. And then I was put back to work. If a neighbor hadn’t eventually called the police, I think I would have died. One way or the other.”
Luciana blinked and a single tear ran from her eye.
Mia’s dad reached out his thumb and wiped it away.
CHAPTER 35
Gabe’s fist throbbed, the pain flashing red with every beat of his heart. Crimson blood seeped from his knuckles. A fist-shaped dent cratered the wall right next to where he was lying on his back on the upper bunk.
Staring at the hole, Gabe put his knuckles to his mouth and licked them. His mom hardly ever came in here anymore, not since Eldon had moved in. With luck, it would be a long time before she even noticed it. Still, that had been pretty stupid, punching the wall. He hadn’t even decided to do it. He had just done it.
It felt like there was a pit inside his chest, and it was getting wider and deeper. Or maybe he was already inside the pit, having fallen in.
Eldon had gone down a little earlier to fix himself breakfast, so for once Gabe was alone in the room. The room that was supposed to be his. Now the only thing in this room that was his and his alone was this upper bunk. A three-by-six-foot piece of real estate.
The rest of his room was now shared with Eldon. Eldon who had fifty pounds on him, easy. Even now, even after the steroids had given Gabe the body he always wanted. Pretty soon it would disappear, and it would be back to being more like an eighty-pound difference between them.
Once that happened, how would it look when they walked down the halls at school? Probably like Gabe was some little dwarf capering in a giant’s shadow.
People had remarked on his weight gain, his new muscles. They would surely comment when he dwindled back to nothing. Back to being the boy who wasn’t much bigger than a sixth grader. Girls would roll their eyes when he tried to talk to him, the way they had before.
But that’s what his mom and Charlie were dooming him to. They wanted him to go back to looking like the little kid they treated him like. His thoughts circled and looped the way they had all morning.
Five minutes ago, when Gabe thought about what had happened yesterday, about how his mom had snooped through his things, hot anger had surged up in him. Before he realized what he was doing, he had hit the wall with his fist. Now he flexed his hand, hoping he hadn’t broken anything. The way his mom had looked at him, her mouth twisted as if he had just betrayed her. He had wanted to curl up so tight that he would just disappear.
Last night she had told him that she loved him, that she would always love him, but the words had sounded rote. Stripped of all pride, of all joy. It was pretty clear she figured that she had to love him. Love as a burden. Love as shame.
He blinked away the sudden spark of tears and tried to find the anger again. His mom was always after him, saying that he was the man of the house. But now that he looked like a man, she wasn’t happy. But wasn’t that what she had wanted? Wasn’t it?
And what did Charlie think about him now? Did he think he was a loser? An idiot? A jerk? A few weeks back, Charlie had been talking about the two of them taking in a Seahawks game. Clearly, that would no longer be part of the picture.
Was Charlie right about what steroids could do to you? His mom could be counted on to get freaked out, to go all worst-case-scenario, but Charlie not so much. So if Charlie had said those things, maybe they were true. Or true-ish. Rolling over, Gabe slid off the bunk and headed into the bathroom, hoping that for once he would be left in peace for a few minutes. His mom had a bathroom all to herself, but between him, Eldon, and Brooke, it felt like someone was always waiting.
In the bathroom, he locked the door, then took off his shirt. His pecs were so much bigger now. But could some of it be because he was actually developing breasts? He poked at them, and they seemed firm. But did that mean anything?
He picked up a hand mirror and tried to see the back of his head. It took a lot of contorting and working the angles to get it right. Did he have less hair? Maybe? Yes? No? Between spiky brown strands, he could see tiny spots of white skin, but it was hard to know if that was new, since he couldn’t remember ever looking at the back of his head before.
Still, even if his body was changing in a few hardly noticeable ways, it was a small price to pay, wasn’t it? Not when he could see the respect in people’s eyes when he walked down the halls at school. Not when he could challenge himself to do nearly anything physically, and his body would respond like a machine, only one made of muscles and tendons.
He slid his T-shirt back on. When his head popped out of the hole, for a disorienting second Gabe thought he saw his dad staring back at him from the mirror. Like he was back from the dead.
Was it wrong that a big part of him still loved his dad, given that he had been such a jerk? Gabe wasn’t supposed to know what his dad had done, but he did anyway. How many of the commandments had his dad broken? Nearly every one except for “Thou shalt not kill.”
Instead, his father was the one who had been killed.
When he was little, Gabe had wanted to be his dad. His mom had an old scrapbook, and in it was a photo of Gabe wearing nothing but a diaper, his dad’s big shoes, and a grin.
He had his own memories from when he was a little older. His dad showing him how to build a birdhouse. Teaching him how to play guitar. Playing catch with baseballs and footballs and Frisbees. Pride had flooded his chest when his dad nodded or smiled at some achievement or accomplishment. His mom was all about words, while his dad hadn’t been big on talking. Still, you could tell when he approved.
The last year before his dad died, his parents had fought a lot. Even though Gabe hadn’t really known
what it was about, he had been angry at his mom. She was such a nag.
Now he realized she had been desperately trying to turn his dad around before he crashed. And it hadn’t worked.
Was that what she was trying to do with Gabe? Turn him around before he crashed?
With a sigh, he unlocked the bathroom door. When he opened the door, he started back. Eldon was hanging out in the hall, clearly waiting for him to leave, although he hadn’t made a sound to let Gabe know he was there.
Gabe just hoped he hadn’t been muttering to himself. He went back to their room and sat at the desk. He wasn’t planning on doing any homework until this evening, not until the last possible minute, but he still didn’t want Eldon taking up one more spot that was actually supposed to be his.
When Eldon came into the room, Gabe blurted out, “My mom found my supplies yesterday.”
Eldon’s eyes went wide and he swore under his breath. “What happened? How did she find them?”
“She was going through my stuff and she found my kit. She threw away the needles and flushed the drugs down the drain.”
“Are you serious, man?” Eldon winced. “Does she think I was taking them too?”
Gabe’s face got hot. Guilt by association. The idea made him feel even lower. “No worries. She knows you’re just naturally a big dude.”
“You must be in a lot of trouble.”
“She even had that cop she works with, Charlie Carlson, yell at me.”
Eldon’s eyes got even bigger. “Did he arrest you?”
“No. I wouldn’t be sitting here if he had.” Gabe’s sarcastic tone covered up a sudden jab of fear. He hadn’t even thought about that, about how Charlie was a cop. Taking steroids had never seemed illegal, exactly. More like a secret.
“So what are you going to do?”
Gabe started to say that he had promised his mom that he wouldn’t take them, but then he realized that didn’t mean much. After all, he had been using them before, knowing full well that his mother wouldn’t approve.