Nothing to Lose (10 page)

“Yeah, well, my day hasn't been much better. Nick and I went downtown—”

“You're spending the day with Nick and you're complaining?” Morgan said.

“I'm not exactly complaining. But he invited me to spend the day with him, and tomorrow we were supposed to go to the Santa Claus parade—”

“Oh,” Morgan gasped. “I
love
parades! Do you think if I asked Billy, he'd ditch his meeting tomorrow and take me there?”

“Good luck,” I said. To Billy, Santa was just a way to condition kids to think that happiness derived from material possessions—a concept that Billy rejected. Billy was flatly opposed to the rampant consumerism of the holiday season. He said the emphasis on acquiring more and more things contributed to a deteriorating environment. He felt the same way about the fashion industry, the fast-food industry, agribusiness, and the suburbs. It's hard to believe someone could have such strong opinions and still be such a nice guy.

“Maybe if I tell him that you and Nick are going?” Morgan said.

“We're not.”

“But you just said—”

“Nick's in the hospital, Morgan. He got hit by a car.”

“
What?
Is he okay?”

I told her what the doctor had said.

“Most people who get hit by cars aren't nearly that lucky,” she said.

“There was a lot of traffic,” I said, “so the car that hit him wasn't moving as fast as it could have been.”

“Still, he'll probably have to kiss his job goodbye,” Morgan said. “You know what those minimum-wage fast-food jobs are like. If you get sick or hurt, that's just too bad.”

I hadn't thought about that. I wondered if Nick had. Unlike a lot of kids I knew, Nick didn't work because he wanted more spending money, or even because he was saving up for college. Nick worked to eat, keep a roof over his head, and buy the necessities. He
needed
a job.

“You want me to come down there and keep you company?” Morgan said. “I'm sure Billy would understand.”

“Nice try,” I said. “But didn't you promise Billy?” I spotted a bus lumbering toward me. “Gotta go, talk to you later.” I tucked my phone back into my pocket and gulped the last of my coffee. As I dug in my purse for some money for bus fare, I thought again about my stolen backpack—with my bus pass inside of it.

 

 

All six of the apartments on the second floor of my father's building are more or less the same—living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, all with high ceilings and plenty of windows. Nick had one of the apartments at the back of the building. He had been living there for a little over a month, but I had never been inside the place, so I was kind of curious when I unlocked the door.

The first thing that struck me when I stepped inside was how bare Nick's apartment was. My father had given him some old furniture he'd had stored in the basement—stuff from the apartment he'd lived in while the renovations were being done on the old carpet factory he'd inherited—but it looked like Nick hadn't added anything.

The second thing that struck me was how neat the place was. Which maybe wasn't that surprising, considering how few possessions Nick had. But the dishes had been washed and were sitting in a dish rack beside the sink. The table had been wiped clean. There was a stack of textbooks sitting in the middle of it and a stack of binders beside that. A planner lay open nearby. I glanced at it—Nick's homework assignments were all neatly recorded. I opened one of the binders. History. There was an essay inside. Nick had got a B-plus on it. I smiled.

Through the bedroom door I could see that he had made his bed and smoothed down the blankets. Maybe he'd gotten in the habit when he was at the group home. He had told me that they were pretty strict about neatness there. Everyone had chores too. Nick always complained that he pulled bathroom detail twice as often as anyone else. I peeked into his bathroom. Spotless. I smiled again, imagining him scrubbing every surface.

I went into the bedroom and opened the closet. Everything, including his jeans, was neatly hung up. I grabbed the pair with the widest legs so that he wouldn't have to cut the seam to get them to fit over his cast. While I was folding them, I glanced at a pile of papers on his bedside table. I moved a little closer. There were printed-out Craigslist job postings, a Help Wanted page torn from a local newspaper. Nick was looking for a job. Maybe a better one than he already had, one that paid more. Or maybe a second job.

I went back into the kitchen and got the plastic bag from the counter. I peeked inside—it contained a folded-up paper shopping bag with carrier handles and a pink woman's hat that I couldn't imagine Nick wearing. What did he want this stuff for? I put the jeans into the bag and headed back to the hospital.

 

 

The bed closest to the door in Nick's room was empty when I returned, and the curtain that divided the two beds was drawn all the way. I heard voices. Nick wasn't alone.

“I'll take care of it,” he was saying. “Don't worry.” There was a pause before he added, “You shouldn't even be here. What if someone saw you?”

“Mr. Chieu saw the accident,” someone else said. A female voice. “He saw them take you in an ambulance. Someone had to come.”

“What if you were followed?”

“I was careful. Besides, I'm just a clerk. I'm not anyone they would worry about.”

“You should leave,” Nick said.“I'll take care of things. Tell Mr. Li I promise.”

“They want to know about what happened,” the female voice said. “They want to know if it really was an accident or if someone saw what they were doing.”

They? Who were they?

“You can tell them it was a stupid accident, that's all. You should really go, Sunny.”

I stepped away from the door and ducked into the little waiting area down the hall. I stayed there for a few moments, out of sight. Finally I heard the same female voice say,“Be careful, Nick.” I counted to ten and peeked out from the waiting area.A girl stood near the elevators. I recognized her immediately. She was the girl from the bakery—the girl that Nick had told me he didn't know. The elevator arrived and she stepped inside. When she turned to press the button for her floor, I ducked back out of sight and counted to ten again. Then I marched back to Nick's room and knocked on the open door.

“It's me,” I called.

“Hey Robyn, come in.”

Someone—Sunny?—had rolled his bed up for him. He still looked pale and I would have bet anything that he was in pain. But he managed a smile for me. He didn't get one in return.

“Guess who I just saw,” I said.

He looked so wide-eyed and innocent, his purple eyes appearing darker than usual against the pallor of his skin.

“Who?”

“That girl from the bakery.”

A surprised look appeared on his face. And a pretty good one. Anyone who didn't know Nick as well as I did might have been fooled by it.

“Here in the hospital?” he said.

I nodded.

“She must have been here visiting someone,” Nick said. “It's a small world, huh?”

“An incredibly small world,” I said. “I saw her at the elevator at the end of the hall just a minute ago.”

Nick didn't say anything.

“And right before that, I saw her coming out of
this
room.”

Still nothing.

“I heard you talking to her, Nick.”

His pale face turned pink, then scarlet. “You were
spying
on me?”

“No. I was doing you a favor, remember? I went back to your place to get your stuff”—I threw the bag at him—“and when I got back here, I heard voices in your room. Yours and hers.”

His eyes narrowed. “What did you hear?”

“Enough to know that you've been lying to me. You told me at the bakery that you didn't know that girl. But you do. What's going on, Nick? Who's Mr. Li? And what were you doing that would make him think that your getting hit by that car wasn't an accident? It has something to do with all that money. Doesn't it?”

He just stared at me.

“Fine,” I said. Except that it wasn't fine at all. “Lie to me. Hide things from me. Pretend that everything is perfectly normal when it isn't. Do whatever you like, Nick. Get yourself into trouble again, if that's what you want. But you can do it alone. I'm out of here.”

And I was. Out the door. Down the hall. Into the elevator. Out onto the street. Then, twenty minutes later, at Henri's place.

“L
emon?” Henri said. “Sure,” I said. “Please.”

She squeezed a wedge of fresh lemon into a couple of mugs of tea and handed one of them to me. Then she sat down opposite me at the solid oak table that dominates the dining room of her old house. Henrietta Saint-Onge lives right in the heart of the city. Her closest neighbors—and they're so close that they're rubbing shoulders with her—are two office towers. They block out almost all of the sunlight that might otherwise travel into the house that has, for decades, miraculously avoided being torn down. Not that people—developers, politicians, the municipal government—haven't tried.

Henri's house stands smack in the middle of the financial district. The land it sits on is worth a small fortune. But Henri has turned down all offers. The house has been in her family for generations. She isn't interested in selling it to some developer who would flatten it and erect an office tower. She came close to losing it once, but she fought back. Henri knows a lot of people, and she mobilized all of them. The result: her house was declared a historic site—protected from demolition forever. She says that if she and Vern don't get around to getting married and having children, she's going to leave the house to the city to be turned into a museum after she dies.

“Mac dropped off your things,” she said. “I put them in the back bedroom.”

At the back of Henri's house, behind the living room, dining room, and kitchen, there are two smaller rooms. One is a guest bedroom that doubles as her office. It has an old-fashioned rolltop desk in it and an ultra-comfortable king-sized bed. It's where I always sleep when I stay at her house. The other is what Henri calls her den, where she keeps her TV. Henri's bedroom is a small room upstairs, just off the studio that occupies the rest of the second floor.

“Mac mentioned that you were spending the day with your boyfriend,” she said. Henri had only met Nick once. She wrapped her hands around her mug and smiled expectantly at me from across the table.

“I don't know if you'd call him my boyfriend,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I like him, and I think he likes me. But we're so different. . .”

“And?”

“And. . .” I stared down into my tea for a moment. “He doesn't tell me things. I always know when something is going on, but he doesn't always tell me what it is. Sometimes he shuts me out.”
And sometimes he lies
, I thought, but I didn't want to admit that to Henri.