Elizabeth Basque - Medium Mysteries 01 - Echo Park (9 page)

I nodded for Michael to continue.

“Just crossing the street. That’s all we were doing. It was a normal day. She walked with me and my two little sisters to the grocery store. It all happened really fast.” He paused. “Just before the car hit her in the crosswalk, she shoved us three kids out of the way in front of her. Up onto the sidewalk. And then
…bam!
She was dead, about two feet away. Just that fast. Just that close.”

“
I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“
Thank you,” he said softly.

I gave him a moment. “Who took care of you and your sisters after that?” I asked.

“We had Dad, but I cooked and stuff like that.”

“
You did?”

“
Yeah. Dad worked swing shift. He never got home from work until we were all asleep and then we would leave for school before he woke up. I mainly made hot dogs and boxed macaroni and cheese in the beginning. Anything that had directions on the package.”

His voice faded out for a moment so he took a power boost and continued, “I did laundry and put my sisters to bed after their little homework papers and baths each night.”

“How old were they?”

“
First and second grade. Six and seven.”

“
Why didn’t you have a babysitter?” I asked, incredulous.

“
The money. And because my dad trusted me with them.”

“
So, he treated you like an adult?” I asked.

“
No. Dad called me
‘lost boy.’ From the day of Mom’s funeral, he called me that.”

“
Why?” Carla asked, her eyes sad. “Why did he call you that?”

“
Because I was lost without Mom. We all were. Even him.
Especially
him.” Michael paused. “He was this tough guy who would never cry in front of us or admit he was missing her. He had this mean sense of humor that he would try and make us laugh when we were crying, but not in a nice way. It was kind of like he was shutting down our emotions and his, too, with his hazing of our grief. None of us were supposed to be babies about her death. We were supposed to just wait.”

“
For what?” I asked.

“
He said he would find us a new mom.” He paused. “That was not what we needed. We lost her and then, we lost him. I tried to be a good big brother, and my sisters and I got really close.”

“
Not your dad?”

“
No. For a few years, Dad tried to find his way, despite being lost, same as we were. He started working two jobs, to replace Mom’s income, and spent a lot of time down at the local pool hall when he wasn’t working. He never even ate at home anymore. He just put thirty dollars on the kitchen counter every Friday and then we fed ourselves, as best we could. We never shopped at that grocery store again. We went to one further away, so we didn’t have to cross at that intersection, ya know?”

I nodded encouragingly.

“
Dad.
He did everything not to have to see the girls because they looked just like her, you know? They were like mini-Moms. He couldn’t hardly look at them without saying something gruff that would send them into tears. He pushed them away when they needed their daddy to hold them. Even more than how he treated me, what hurt the most was what he did to the girls: shut them out, rejected them.”

“
Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Mack, taken aback. His face was stricken with compassion.

“
Shh
,” I said gently, looking in Mack’s direction for a moment, then turned back to Michael. “What about school, Michael?”

“
We did our best. Our mom used to check our homework, but as we got older, homework got harder. I had to help my sisters and sometimes, I didn’t get
my
homework done. But theirs was always complete. If we had time, at night, they wanted me to sing them to sleep, like Mom used to. It was as if I sang the song that she used to sing to us before bed, then that was a piece of her that would never die.”

Tears were in Michael’s eyes.

“What song?” I asked.

“
Mr. Sandman
. Do you know it?”

“
Sure. Great old song.”

“
That was Mom’s theme song, I don’t know why. She said everyone had a theme song, something that meant the world to them. And that was hers.”

I nodded. “I believe in personal theme songs, too.”

“What’s yours?” Carla asked me.

“
Me?
What a Feeling
by Irene Cara. Don’t laugh,” I said to Mack when I sensed his silent amusement. I turned back to Michael. “Sorry. Continue, please.”

“
I sang it for my sisters, Lily and Rose. Night after night. It was keeping a piece of Mom in our lives, a piece nobody could take away. A damn…
song
became this anthem of our family, this glue between me and my sisters. That’s all we had left of her. We clung to it like a prayer.” He gulped and cleared his throat.

“
Fast forward a couple of years,” I said.

“
That’s when the trouble started. I mean, not as bad as losing Mom, but sort of where I fell from grace, even in Dad’s eyes and he was barely around. Things started to get worse between us. He worked hard and my grades were crap. I didn’t do any homework at that point. I was mowing lawns after school to make money for batons and costumes for the girls because twirling made them so happy and they were
so
cute and good at it. I paid for the lessons. Dance lessons were too expensive, so they twirled. You can’t outgrow a baton like you can shoes. So I mowed lawns.”

I smiled. “But you started getting in trouble?”

“Oh, yeah. I was twelve, like Carla is now.” He nodded at her. “Hey, kid.”

“
Hey,” she said back, ever so softly. “Why did you do bad things, Michael?”

He grimaced. “It was easy, that’s why. I hooked up with some questionable kids after school at a friend’s house, a friend I met in detention for not turning in my homework. Him, for smoking pot in the boy’s room.”

“Oh, no,” Julie said, as if she saw the turn his life was taking in front of her eyes.

“
I…got high for the first time. At twelve, I felt like an old man, already. Weed helped me relax from my responsibilities, and I could laugh with the other kids. The stoner kids were nice, not like any other kids I had ever met. I hadn’t laughed in years, you know? These kids were fun, they lived dangerously, and they didn’t worry about consequences.”

I nodded. “You liked getting high, then.”

“Oh yeah. I never forgot that feeling, of my initial high, though I never felt that way again. Not that I didn’t chase it, time after time. I couldn’t
get
it, though. Couldn’t find my way back to that ultimate
mellowness
. Sometimes, I thought it was because the Mexican pot on the street was such crap, but the truth was, when you do a drug for the first time, that’s as good as it’s gonna get.
Ever
.”

I nodded. “Take me to age fifteen, Michael.”

He took a power boost and continued.

“
By then, alcohol and I were best buddies, but that didn’t really help much, either. I’d mix hard liquor with pot and end up getting sick. I was trying to find a happy medium between getting a buzz and puking in the gutter. I no longer sang
Mr. Sandman
to the girls. They knew that I was a stoner. I was fifteen and they were twelve and eleven and in the DARE program. They got the T-shirts and everything. They were
Good girls.
I detached myself from them a bit. Maybe to protect them from my bad influence.”

He closed his eyes, thinking, and opened them again. “One evening, after I made chicken nuggets and frozen corn for our dinner, I decided to go to a party. There was nothing else to do. Homework was a joke and Lily and Rose knew to stay home and wait for Dad. Rose was like a little mom to Lily by then and they didn’t need me as much. They had each other. I had booze and pot. But I was lonesome.”

“I know that feeling,” I said, and Mack looked stricken. “Sorry, please continue,” I said to Michael and shot Mack an apology with my eyes. I felt like an idiot for saying that. His companionship was sometimes my only saving grace.

Michael continued, “It was at this party that I met the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. Not only was she beautiful, she was funny. I mean, if a girl could make me laugh, that was shocking, because I was really depressed.” He paused. “You all don’t really want to hear this, do you?”

“Yes, we do,” Carla insisted.

“
Okay. So, Renee was the life of the party, cracking jokes and daring others to match the shots of tequila she drank. I watched her from across a smoke-filled room and I knew she was going to be my girl. She was absolutely stunning, like a young Renee Zellweger, actually, and she had crazy social skills that I didn’t. She eyed me from across the room with interest, you know, that look that says ‘I’m interested.’ There was just one problem. Girlfriends cost money and I was poor.
Dirt poor
.”

He took a power hit and continued. “I couldn’t get a legal job until I was sixteen, so except for delivering dope once in a while for a few bucks, or mowing lawns, I was perpetually broke. Hell, I had never even bought weed. It was always fronted to me, a blunt here and there, or shared at parties. I had friends, though, and so, my friends saw me looking at Renee and saw I was smitten and broke. I remember I was really embarrassed when they told her I was available. They kind of pushed us together. The next thing I knew, I was outside, kissing her under the moon. I sang a few bars of
Just
Walk Away Renee
, and she giggled and said she wasn’t going anywhere.”

“
That sounds so sweet,” Julie said. I could tell she was shocked at his story. It was so…human.

“
It would have been sweet, but I had asked her out to Disneyland because that was all I could think of to impress her, and that was going to be expensive. My friends, heck, nobody made decent money on delivering pot because in Los Angeles you can get a marijuana card and get it legally when you’re eighteen. So, my friend hooked me up with this one trial run as a heroin dealer. It turned into a regular thing.”

Carla looked sad. “Everyone thinks they are only going to do it that one time and score all this money and not ever touch the heroin. My mom thought that, too.”

“I didn’t use, at first, Carla.”

“
Nobody does. It’s too scary.”

“
Yeah. I had anxiety about it. After a while, I knew friends who had been to jail, prison even, and the thought of doing time would have killed any shreds of love left from my sisters. But I kept dealing heroin. It was risky, but also a lot of money and so easy. I could take my girlfriend anywhere, and I mean
anywhere
. I blew tons of money on her, on our dates, and we lived for the weekends, where we went all sorts of places, even hiring limos to take us to concerts and amusement parks, upscale restaurants. I was still too young to drive.”

I pressed my lips together, not judging, but knew the story was going to take a bad turn.

“I was going to quit dealing
H
when people I knew started getting busted left and right. Nobody snitched on me, though. Then, this unexpected thing happened. Renee came home with me one day and she just fell in love with my sisters. And they with her. Since Mom died, she was the only girl to
ever
set foot in our house. My dad, he had been through plenty of women but he never brought them home. When he met Renee, though, she redeemed me in his eyes, like I wasn’t this big loser if I could get a girl who looked like a movie star and was super sweet, too. She came over and cooked for all of us and helped the girls sew competition twirler costumes on Mom’s old sewing machine that she dusted off and fired up. Hell, Renee was like our…savior. Dad’s, too. He started making me feel better about myself, like I was finally
somebody
.”

“
He didn’t ask where you got the money to go all those places?” I asked.

“
I told him Renee’s family had money, but in truth, she didn’t have any money either. We connected because we both hated being poor so much and we wanted to live big. Both of us.”

Mack sighed softly.

Michael continued, “I started using. And it made me secretly feel so bad, but out of every delivery, I tested a bit, I sampled it with customers…hell, I
did
heroin. There, I said it.”

Michael looked at Carla. “You know where this is going, don’t you, Carla?”

“Yup. That nice girl, Renee, found your stash of heroin and used.”

“
You got it in one.”

Chapter Fifteen