Shelter (29 page)

“We received an anonymous call that he was in breach of his suspended sentence terms.”

“Anonymous?” Caden laughed, “You mean the mayor?”

“I didn’t take the call,” the officer had a ‘
I’m just doing my job
’ look on his face.

“What are these terms?”

“I can’t discuss them with you.”

Caden reluctantly stepped aside to let the officer inside. He was Officer Burton, who he quickly learned was a familiar face to Elias. They weren’t friends but they seemed friendly with each other. Caden guessed this was thanks to Elias’ frequent arrests.

“We received an anonymous call,” he repeated again, “that you bought and used an illegal substance. You’ll know this is breach of your suspended sentence terms and could result in you being called in for arrest. I don’t have a search warrant but it’ll make things easier if you come down to the station for a voluntary drug test.”

“I had one sip of vodka and a bottle of beer last night,” Elias said as he buttoned a pair of skinny jeans around his waist, “but I’ve been clean for over two months now.”

Officer Burton looked skeptical, just like most people did when Elias told them he had changed. Caden wondered how long he would have to wear the ‘
addict
’ label before people gave him the fresh start he clearly craved.

“He did a drug test yesterday,” Caden remembered what Elias had told him in the early hours, “can’t you just use that?”

“Can I see it?”

“I don’t have it,” Elias stuffed his hands into his pockets, “I ripped it up. Can’t you just call the rehab place?”

Officer Burton pulled out a pad, checking over the details he had been given before knocking on Elias’ door.

“The call was made early this morning, so we’ll need a fresh sample.”

“Is that all it takes for you to drag him in? An early morning tip off?”

“It’s a voluntary visit,” the officer assured Caden, “but if he doesn’t come, we might have to put a warrant out for his arrest to take a sample. This is a serious case and Elias is facing prison time if he’s found to be using again. When he was last arrested, he had enough drugs on him to make him a suspected dealer and the judge takes dealing really seriously.”

Elias shook his head at Caden as though telling him not to worry and that it was going to be fine. Caden wasn’t so sure. He felt the authority of what the officer was saying, he just hoped that Elias was telling the truth about not using any of the coke that Rigsy had tried to force on him.

“Let me grab my jacket,” Caden said as Elias headed for the door.

“Stay here,” Elias said.

“No chance,” Caden ran into the bedroom and quickly dressed in his own clothes, pulling on dirty underwear, two odd socks and ramming his feet into two different pairs of shoes, “I’m not letting you go to the station on your own.”

“It’s just a formality,” Burton said, “honestly, if you’re as clean as you say, you’ll be in and out in no time.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t ‘
in no time
’. When they got to the station, they spent nearly two hours sitting in reception with the other criminals who needed processing. When Elias was finally called, Caden had to stay behind, staring at a poster about an upcoming unregistered gun amnesty that was being held in the state. When Elias didn’t return for another hour, he found the number for the doctor’s office and asked to speak with the doctor.

“Hello?” a hurried voice said.

“Ellie? It’s Caden. I’m at the station with your brother.”

“The station? What? Why?”

He told her all about the anonymous tip that had been called into the precinct and she was still reluctant to want to believe that it was their mother. Even though she was reluctant, Caden got her to admit that it didn’t look good.

“But why would she do this after she’s paid for him to go to rehab so many times? She’s even paying rent on his apartment. He would be homeless without her. I don’t get why she’d try to get him in trouble.”

“As a lesson? To get him out of the way? Why does anybody do anything? Because she wants something. She ruined my life with the snap of her fingers because I said something she didn’t want to hear. She’s been on the warpath since she found out about us. Think about it, if she gets Elias into prison, or at least back into forced rehab, he’s out of the way again.”

“But why? I still don’t understand why she’d want to do that.”

“Because he’s a problem and he needs fixing.”

There was a long silence and Caden would have thought the line had gone dead but he could hear Ellie softly typing in the background.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I have an idea,” Caden said, “I wasn’t sure it would work but she’s just handed me the biggest weapon to bring her down.”

“What weapon?”

“Elias.”

“Elias? How is he a weapon? I gotta go Caden, there’s a patient at the door.
Hello Mr. Rodgers, I’ll be with you in just a - no this isn’t about your prescription, please, just take a seat
– Caden, I’ll call you back.”

She hung up and at that moment, Elias reappeared, unaccompanied.

“It’ll take 24 hours,” Elias shrugged casually, “they told me not to leave town. They think I’m going to fail.”

Caden stood, pulling Elias into a hug, garnering strange looks from the middle aged desk clerk who was sporting an eighties perm. She raised both her brows and looked down at her desk.

“C’mon, let’s go to the town hall,” Caden said as they walked out into the late-afternoon haze, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do on the way back.”

“Can it wait one more day?” Elias zipped his leather jacket up to under his chin, “I want her to think she’s won. I want to rub that clean result in her face.”

The sun rose early the next day and Elias rose with it, restless and ready. He spent a couple of minutes watching Caden, hoping that he would never see a day where he wasn’t the first thing he saw in a morning. Mouth slightly ajar and eyelids flickering from his dreams, he looked the picture of perfection and it made Elias feel an emotion he had rarely felt before; he felt lucky.

The noise of the shower woke Caden and he was quickly joined for an early morning example of why he felt so lucky. When they were both out of the shower and clothed, Elias couldn’t hold off anymore. He packed his clothes and gathered what little belongings he had and they headed to the precinct. Everything he owned fit into one bag no bigger than that a high schooler would take to school but it didn’t matter to him. Possessions were temporary and he was searching for something a little more permanent recently.

“They’re not ready,” the clerk slurped her coffee without even needing to look up to see that it was him, “take a seat and I’ll call your name.”

Tapping his foot on the slightly dirty tiles, he chewed down on his nails waiting for the results to come back. He knew they’d be clean but it didn’t stop him wondering.

“You’ll be fine,” Caden gently stopped his leg tapping with his hand, “are you sure you want to do this?”

Elias nodded, unable to speak. They’d spent the night going over everything, rehearsing what he was going to say, over and over. It felt like he was preparing for a test and the precision of his words would determine if he would pass or fail.

After a couple of hours nervously waiting and passing back and forth, the clerk finally called him over with one finger and an irritated purse to her lips.

“Sign this,” she dumped a clipboard in front of him with a pen already attached, “must have been another crank call.”

“Get them a lot for addicts, do you?” Caden seemed angry.

The clerk didn’t reply. Snatching the clipboard from him, she told them they were free to leave but Elias wasn’t going away empty handed.

“Framing it?” she sighed when he asked for a copy of the results.

She seemed reluctant to get out of her seat and she let them know it with the heavy grunt that left her lips when she eased herself out of the chair. It let out a creaky plastic sigh of relief, leaving her to disappear, getting another of the officers to cover for her.

When she returned with a small white slip of paper, he snatched it out of her hand and practically ran out of the door, jumping into one of the taxis parked in a neat row in the corner.

“Clarince Road, please,” Elias snapped the safety belt across his chest.

“Not the town hall?” Caden asked.

“We need to see Ellie first. This plan affects her too.”

Caden didn’t object, instead pulling a ten dollar bill from his wallet to pay the driver. Havenmoore usually had quiet roads but today, every possible car was pulling out in front of them and crawling at a snail’s pace. When Elias’ knee started tapping again, Caden gave it a reaffirming squeeze and reminded him that the mayor wasn’t expecting them so she wasn’t going to be waiting.

Once at Ellie’s, he relayed every detail of the plan over to her, asking her if she would play her part.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked softly.

“She set me up, Ellie,” he showed her the results, “she hoped I’d fail this.”

Ellie read over the paper a couple of times, soaking in the medical lingo that Elias hadn’t been able to get his head around. All he saw was the big red ‘
Negative
’ stamp next to every tested substance.

“Maybe you’re right,” she mused.

“You know I am.”

When Ellie agreed to her part of the deal, they quickly walked across town towards the town hall. Caden suggested calling for another taxi but Elias felt sick from the anticipation. He hoped the walk in the late September breeze would calm his stomach but it didn’t. When they were standing at the foot of the town hall, he took a second to compose his thoughts.

The rehearsed speech had vanished.

“Do you remember everything you want to say?”

“Yes,” he lied, “let’s just get this over with and then we can move on with the rest of our lives.”

Side by side, they jogged up the half a dozen stone steps to the large dark oak doors. Acting like they belonged, they walked past the various security guards and they were soon standing in front of the receptionist’s desk.

It wasn’t the same girl Elias had seen before. Probably fired.

“Hi, um, one second,” the young boy, who couldn’t have been any older than nineteen, mumbled as he squinted at the screen, his tongue poking out in frustration, “oh, shoot. Erm – hi. How can I help?”

“We need to see the mayor,” Elias straightened up, faking authority, “is she in today?”

“Do you have an appointment,” he scratched the back of his head, “oh, where did it go. Sorry, it’s only my second day. I keep losing the damn thing.”

Elias noticed the appointment book poking out on the corner, buried under scattered pieces of discarded paper. Sensing an opportunity to do this a different way, he reached out and grabbed it.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” he handed it over with the biggest smile he could muster.

“Ugh, thank you,” he accepted it with an even bigger smile that spread across his smooth, unmarked skin, “I have a feeling she’d kill me if I lost something.”

There was already a jaded tone of bitterness in his voice, as though he had already seen the real side of the mayor she fought so hard to hide.

“We have an appointment at one,” Elias glanced at Caden who was furrowing his brow in confusion, “under the name Charles.”

“Charles, Charles – hmm, I don’t see it,” he was sweating heavily from his thick, dark hairline, “I – just give me a second.”

The receptionist reached out for the phone but before he could call the mayor and foil their plan, Caden jumped in, quicker thinking on his feet than Elias.

“Y’know, I bet it was that old girl. What was her name? Stacy? Claire?”

“Emily,” the new guy said.

“No wonder she was fired,” he leaned across the desk, winking at Elias out of the corner of his eye, “useless thing she was. Always losing things, forgetting to write appointments in the book. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did. I’m sure you’re a much better receptionist – I didn’t get your name.”

“Jo,” his voice was shaking, making Elias wonder if he was even younger than he had suspected, “short for José Luis. My parents are Mexican but they moved here in the eighties. You don’t think – you don’t think she’ll
fire
me do you? I promised my mom I’d get a job to help out around the house. My dad, he died and,
oh, God
, she’s going to fire me, isn’t she?”

The words poured out of his tiny mouth at lightning speed, the sweat trickling quickly down the sides of his face. It hadn’t taken much to fluster him and Elias felt guilty because what they were about to do could result in Jo getting fired. He almost took a step back, admitting that he had gotten the day wrong and he would call back to make another appointment.
This can’t wait and he’ll be better off not working for her. She’ll break him.

“It’s really important,” Elias leaned in and joined Caden, doubling the pressure, “we’ll just go right through and we won’t mention anything about the book.”

“She’s not in,” he stared desperately into Elias’ eyes, “If she comes back and you’re here, what will she do?”

Caden and Elias looked to each other and Elias could see the same look of doubtful sympathy in his eyes.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Caden smiled.

“I should call her.”

“No!” Elias called out, “She hates being called on the cell when she’s out.”

“She does?”

“Emily did that all the time,” Caden added.

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Elias nodded, “if you know where she is, we can swing by and talk to her. She’ll really want to see us today.”

Elias thought there’d be a couple of minutes of soul searching and deliberation but Jo blurted out her whereabouts instantly. When they knew she was cutting the ribbon at a new park near Havenmoore Elementary, Elias thanked him and Caden told him that there were always jobs going in McTuckey’s if he wanted to get out before he was pushed. Jo nodded gratefully and Elias wondered if he was already considering the job that had made him crack under the pressure in a couple short minutes.

“Poor kid,” Elias mumbled, “that’s what she does to people.”

“He kept checking you out,” Caden laughed.

“He did not!”

“He so did. Don’t worry, it’s only because you’re the cutest guy in this town.”

That little compliment was the pick me up Elias needed to find his inner strength as they walked towards the elementary school. When they reached the gates and he could see a small group gathered on a patch of grass with a new climbing frame, he felt ready.

Before they walked over, he clung to the metal bars, looking in at the school as though he was looking in at a prison. Elementary school had been the happiest part of his childhood and even that gave him an uneasy feeling. Even then, as a small child, he had been able to sense that his mom was different to other kids in his class. He wasn’t allowed to call her mommy and he didn’t have any stories to share about her. She was there in the morning before school and she was there at the end of the night. Their first nanny, Leticia, had been a caring woman in her late thirties and for the first years of his life, he looked at her like she was his mother. The mayor sacked her when she suspected that she was stealing from her but looking back, Elias was sure it was because she didn’t like how loving and caring she was towards her children. A string of less caring, stricter or lazier nannies followed, constantly changing faces every couple of months when the mayor would come up with a reason to get rid of them.

“Did you come here too?” Elias asked Caden.

“Yeah. Me and Bruce both did. We would have been here at the same time.”

Elias didn’t remember him. They were a couple of years apart and he could barely remember the names and faces from the people in his class. He wondered if that was down to the drugs or down to wanting to forget everything that had happened during his childhood. Staring at the building reminded him of all of the disappointments he had felt when him and Ellie would be the only kids in their class not to have their parents at their recitals and plays. His report card went ignored while Ellie’s was poured over in obsessive detail. Even back then, she had been the one with potential.

“Was it a good school?”

“I loved it here,” a fond smile filled Caden’s lips as though he was remembering a really good time, “it was awesome when Bruce was there too.”

Elias wondered what it was like to have somebody to share it with. Ellie had her group of friends she was the leader of and Elias was the outcast who nobody wanted to eat their lunch with because he was the disruptive one.

As they left the gates and headed towards the new park that he was sure used to be the teachers’ parking lot, he tried to shake away those bitter and deeply buried feelings but they rose to the surface with each step. It was fueling him and a new script was being written in his head, re-writing the one Caden had helped him come up with.

They lingered at the back of the crowd for a couple of minutes, watching the mayor socialize and network in the growing crowd of people. She was so deep in her conversations, the carefree smiles and laughter were almost believable.
Maybe she’s laughing because she thinks I’m locked up and out of her way.

“Look at her,” Elias whispered to Caden, “she’s convincing, isn’t she?”

“That’s what makes her so scary.”

Elias ducked his head every time she looked in his direction but she didn’t seem to see him. He was probably the last person she expected to see. After a couple more minutes, she walked to the front of the crowd and a hush fell as they waited for their leader to address them. Standing in front of the red-ribbon blocked gate in a long, shocking red trench coat, nipped in tightly at the waist she smiled through her red lips, thinking of what to say about a new children’s park next to the elementary school. Elias knew she was about to create a stunning piece of fiction.