Page 21 of Street of Dreams
Ben nodded, and they cheered as he took several more bites.
The alarm upstairs started blaring, which meant it was time for their mother to wake up and take care of Ben so that Jake and the twins could get to school. The three of them stared in the direction of the staircase at the annoying buzz of the alarm. She usually hit the snooze button a few times, but this morning, it just kept blaring. Jake wondered how the heck she slept through it. It was so loud that it bothered Ben, and he put his hands over his ears and let out a wail of displeasure.
Annoyed, Jake stood from the table and put his plate in the sink. “It’s OK, Ben. I’ll make it stop.” He brushed his hand over the crown of his little brother’s head as he passed through the kitchen.
“Get up!” he shouted when he got to the top of the stairs. Why wasn’t she up yet? That alarm’s been blaring for almost five minutes. “Hey, Mom.” He knocked on her door and waited but heard nothing. “I’m coming in. Wake up.” He pushed the door open. “It’s time to get—” Panic rushed through him when he saw her. She was in the middle of the bed, surrounded by a puddle of puke. “Mom!” Her face and lips were blue, and her eyes . . . her eyes were blank, unfocussed, lifeless orbs. She wasn’t breathing, so he began to perform chest compressions, mimicking what he’d seen on TV. “Henry! Danny!” he shouted, frantically. “Call 911!”
Her body bounced off the bed with each shove of his palms into her chest, but her arms and legs remained taut, as if they had no joints. “Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!” he chanted over and over as that damn alarm kept blaring in the background.
There was puke in her hair, on her face and coming out of her mouth. He stopped the compressions and swiped his fingers through her open mouth to clear it. Chunks and foam spilled onto the bed, but there was still stuff in her mouth blocking her throat. That’s when he realized she had choked to death. She was dead and had been for a long time. Still, he turned her over and whacked her on the back several times to dislodge whatever was in her throat, then tried to perform the Heimlich maneuver. None of it was working. He had no idea what else to do. He was alone and scared out of his mind.
Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his whole body shook while his heart pulsed like a rapid-fire machine gun. Where the hell were his brothers? Or his father? He screamed for the twins. This time, the panic in his voice turned to a whimper and then a sob. “Breathe! Fucking breathe!” he yelled, as tears filled his eyes and ran down his cheeks.
“What happened?” Henry asked, bursting into the room with the phone in his hand. Danny followed, with Ben in his arms.
“Get Ben out of here!” Jake yelled, as he resumed chest compressions. “Find Dad!”
Everything that happened after that was a blur. Police showed up. Ambulances. Strangers filled the house. They walked up and down the stairs and in and out of the house. Some talked in hushed conversations, others shouted orders, and a few wrote things down on a pad. Jake sat with his brothers in the living room, watching the flurry of activity around him as if it were happening on a TV screen instead of right in front of him.
With no adult in the home, and their father nowhere to be found, child services was called. A social worker waited in the house with them for hours, but Bruce never showed up. He never answered his phone. Jake called all the local bars but didn’t know where else to look.
“I’m sorry,” the social worker said. “I can’t stall any longer. Your father will have to contact us when he returns.” She picked up Ben from the playpen, who shied away from her, and then started to cry.
“Put him down!” Terror ripped through Jake. He’d never let them take his baby brother away. He lunged for Ben. “Give him to me!” But a police officer stepped in and restrained him. Ben began to scream, louder than Jake ever heard before, and it sparked rage inside of him. He fought as if his life depended on it and screamed at the social worker, “THAT’S MY BROTHER! I CAN TAKE CARE OF HIM! LET HIM GO! DON’T TOUCH HIM!” Tears came as helplessness engulfed him, but he still fought as if he had the strength of ten men, even though he was just a boy. “GIVE HIM TO ME! BEN! BEN!” It took two officers to hold Jake back while the lady from child services took Ben away screaming at the top of his lungs . . .
The flashback filled Jake with so much rage he wanted to punch something. Fucking Bruce. It was all his fault. After that day, Jake never referred to his old man as his father again. Bruce wasn’t a dad or a father and didn’t deserve the title. He was a piece of fucking shit. They had all ended up in foster care, but after several weeks, somehow, the judge declared Bruce a competent father and all four boys returned to a clean house with a refrigerator full of food and daycare for Ben. But nothing changed. When Jake was home, he took care of Ben. He still came home at lunchtime to check on the kid, and even installed a nanny cam, because he didn’t trust anyone when it came to Ben.
At 14, he had been both mother and father to his youngest brother. The twins were nine at the time, pretty much able to take care of themselves, and helped with Ben whenever they could. That’s when Jake knew he needed to do something in order to get his brothers away from Bruce, but he had no idea how to accomplish that. He still didn’t.
Danny nudged Jake and passed him the book with Ben’s drawings, pulling Jake out of the horrible memory. He looked down at the sketchbook, and his mind went back to the reason he rehashed his childhood – Andrea King. There were less than a handful of good memories when it came to the woman who birthed him, but he remembered her paintings. Bright watercolors and a million renditions of South Side used to hang all over the house. But then the drugs took control of her life and became all she cared about.
Ben had obviously inherited her artistic ability. “This is really beautiful. Can I hang it on the wall in my room?” He knew better than to suggest putting it on the refrigerator. When Ben was four, he’d come home from preschool with a crayon drawing of a cat in a field of flowers, and Jake was blown away by the complexity of it. It was colored perfectly. Everything was true to scale and proportionate. Jake had proudly displayed it on the refrigerator. When Bruce had come home, he laughed at it. “What does the kid think, he’s Picasso now?” Bruce had snickered in a drunken slur, then crumpled the drawing in his hands and tossed it in the garbage. Ben had cried, big fat crocodile tears, and wailed. It broke Jake’s heart, because it was his fault for putting the picture on the refrigerator where it wasn’t safe from their old man. He’d been so angry, angrier than he’d been in his life. He was 17 at the time, and it was the first time he wished his old man was dead. That hatred had festered over the last four years. He didn’t necessarily wish the old man was dead anymore. He just wanted him gone.
He pretended Bruce didn’t live there, and it was just the four of them. They were a family. Happy. No yelling or tension. They just enjoyed each other’s company and pranked one another, like the twins did earlier with the laundry. He wanted to get a real fucking job, like a responsible adult, and be a good example for his brothers, but he had no experience doing anything except running numbers. He’d figure it out, he always told himself. He had to. Until then, he made bank. He had plenty of cash saved, especially since he was skimming off the top. It was risky, but he was smarter than his old man. And, one day, he’d overpower him.
“I want to keep that one in the book.”
“What?”
“The picture.” Ben pointed to the sketchbook in Jake’s hands. “I want to keep it in the book. I’ll make you another one, if you want. You could hang that one on the wall in your room.”
“OK.” Jake gave his little brother a side hug. “I’d like that.” He looked back at the picture and then flipped through the pages. Bright greens and blues, colorful flowers, and shining suns told a story of a kid with a happy life, and it actually made Jake tear up. He’d done something good in his life. He saved his little brother from the horrible childhood he and the twins had endured. He made a difference in this kid’s world, and it felt damn good. “Let’s go upstairs, and I’ll help you with your homework,” he told Ben. “While Henry and Danny make dinner.”
Ben made a face. “Why don’t they help me, and you make dinner?”
“What’s wrong with our cooking?” Danny asked, sounding hurt.
Ben stuck his tongue out. “You put hot dogs in the spaghetti.”
“It was one time! We were out of meatballs!”
“It was gross.”
“No hot dogs in the spaghetti tonight,” Jake reassured. “They’re making chicken parm. You like that, right, Ben?”
Ben nodded. “Yeah.” Then he turned pensive. “Is Bruce gonna be here?”
“Dad,” Jake corrected. Although the man wasn’t much of a father, Ben needed to be respectful. “Call him Dad, not by his name.”
“We can eat upstairs if you want,” Henry told Ben. “In our room. Like a sleepover.”
Jake ran the palm of his hand over the crown of Ben’s head. “That sounds like fun, right? And we’re going to have chocolate pudding for dessert.” He looked at Danny. “No hot dogs in the chocolate pudding.”
Ben laughed as if Jake just told the best joke in the world, then hugged Jake’s arm. “I wish you were my dad.”
Jake’s heart did a flip-flop. He felt as if a baseball were suddenly lodged in his throat, and his eyes grew wet. He kept his head down to hide the emotion in his face and steadied his voice. “Me too, buddy. Me too.”
