by Chloe Garner
HOOLIGANS
CHLOE GARNER
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Hooligans Copyright © 2019 Chloe Garner. All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission.
Cover design by BetiBup33
Published by A Horse Called Alpha
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HOOLIGANS
Lizzie set the phone down carefully on its receiver, not particularly aware of the sound of her computer beeping at her. The woman in the sales department was demanding answers about one of the products they were supposed to launch in October.
Only six months away.
They were running late.
She stared at her phone, chills of a misery she thought she’d finally gotten past completely occupying her.
When she finally came back to herself, she found her boss looking at her.
“My brother’s wife just died,” she said, distant, mind still stuck in remembering.
“Go,” he said. She stood and he nodded.
That was the last time she saw him.
***
Lizzie had never met Lara’s family, but she understood them to be a somewhat well-to-do family out east who supported both her move to the west coast and her marriage to Robbie. Lizzie had liked Robbie’s wife: tall, well-formed, and blonde, she and Robbie had loved each other in an unflappable way that Lizzie had both completely understood and been completely astonished by, given Robbie’s history.
There would be a funeral, of course. Lizzie wondered what Robbie’s and Lara’s friends were like, how big the event would be. She would plan it, if Robbie wanted her to.
He would be in no state to even think about it.
None.
Just none.
She went home and packed a suitcase, putting it in the back of her little hatchback, and started south.
Two hours.
She would be there in two hours.
How much trouble could he get himself into in that much time?
Lara had saved Robbie. There was no question in anyone’s mind. He had been skinny and in ill health, off his meds and self-treating with street narcotics, trying to deal with the symptoms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and a handful of other clinical diagnoses. Lizzie didn’t know what Lara had seen in him at the time, but within six months, Robbie had been clean. You could see it on his body, the years of drugs, but he’d been clean at the wedding and as far as Lizzie knew, he’d continued to stay off of everything since then. She thought Lara had even talked him back onto some of the meds.
The last time she’d seen him, at Christmas, he’d been as composed as she could ever remember seeing him.
She’d cried on the way home out of relief and disbelief.
It was a story she’d told at work, about the value of the services they were providing to mental health patients, giving them solutions that the medical industry didn’t think of, because they were focused on treating the disease.
Lizzie had seen what having the right person involved could do, when medicine had long since stopped being a source of hope.
And now Lara was dead.
The woman on the phone said that Robbie had asked her to call. She was a counselor at the hospital, and he had just left. Hadn’t given the hospital any information other than Lizzie’s phone number and what they could get off of Lara’s identification.
Lara had died of a brain aneurysm.
Freak occurrence, happened even to the healthiest of people unexpectedly.
Did she need anything?
Was there anything the hospital could do?
No. There was nothing the hospital could do. There was nothing anyone could do, other than Lizzie and Robbie himself.
He would relapse.
Lizzie had no doubt of that. It would be hard and it would be fast, if she knew her brother, but he would remember who he had become, and if she could get there in time to talk him down off the ledge, there might be hope for him to stay on path. To not throw all of it away.
Two hours.
It was so long.
He’d disappeared in minutes, before, once after a fight with their dad, not to reappear for six months. He’d missed his own high school graduation, because of that one. He’d come back broke, beaten, with a black eye and clothes Lizzie didn’t recognize, and so strung out she was surprised he’d found the house.
Her mom had taken him onto the back porch and cleaned him, gotten him to change into clean clothes that didn’t have holes in them, and given him a meal, but when Lizzie’s dad got home, he’d said that Robbie wasn’t allowed to stay unless he was on his meds and in full treatment.
Full treatment was a pair of words that still made Lizzie queasy. There was so little anyone could do for Robbie, at that point, that helped. The effect of all of the medications they prescribed him was approximately equivalent to just giving him a heavy, full-time sedative.
He drooled soup at dinner, and Lizzie’s mom wasn’t willing to give him anything that he had to chew.
He had flashes of sentience that frightened Lizzie as much as the walking coma, because it was always, always clear that nothing was working.
“Careful, Lizzie,” he said one afternoon as she was leaving for work. “They’re going to try to get you today. The car. I think they’re going to try to use the car.”
“Okay,” she said. For years, she’d asked ‘who?’ ‘why?’ and the rest, but she’d long since quit asking questions that she knew he wasn’t going to be able to answer.
“Don’t turn right,” he’d called after her, that day.
She’d taken her normal route to work. Nothing had happened.
He hadn’t said anything to her about it later. She wasn’t sure he remembered.
It didn’t matter. He had gotten better; Lara had gotten him there, and Lizzie wasn’t going to let him fall into that pit again. He wasn’t a teenager any more dealing with all of the life change issues that complicated mental disease. He’d reached adulthood, and he’d found a way to be functionally normal, and she was going to get ther
e in time to help him figure out how to stay that way.
Positivity.
That was what had stood out about Lara to her. Lara was always positive, always optimistic and happy, no matter what.
Lizzie had a sunny personality by nature, and that was what she was bringing with her.
They would get through it.
She would find a way.
***
She pulled into the driveway of the little ranch house that Lara and Robbie lived in, struck as always by the chaotic landscaping. There was more going on in the yard than in the average jungle, and every time Lizzie came to visit, it had crept a little further into the neighboring yards.
Not that it was unlovely. There was a beauty to the unkemptness of it, always in flower, always vibrant. There wasn’t anything there that hadn’t fought its way into existence, and every bit of it was healthy. Lizzie had once asked for a cutting of one of the plants, and Lara had gladly given it to her, but it only took Lizzie six weeks to kill it on the back patio of her apartment. It had looked so easy, here, but it just hadn’t thrived, away from the rest of it.
She took her bag out of the back and put the wheels down, dragging it to the front door and knocking.
And then again.
After the third time there was no answer, she stooped and lifted two planters to find the key and let herself in.
Robbie was in the small kitchen that faced the front door, leaning on the counter on his elbows. He might have already been high.
“Robbie,” she said.
He startled.
“Liz,” he said, standing with a frown. “What are you doing here?”
She listened with a trained ear for the sound of bad consonants, but he was coherent.
“I’m here to help,” she said. “Just tell me what to do.”
He frowned harder, shaking his head.
“Why are you here?”
“What do you need, Robbie?” she asked. “I’m going to stay until I know you’re okay.”
He shook his head.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I am here,” she said. “And I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to go put my bag in the guest room, and then we’re going to sit down and we’re going to make a plan.”
“They’re going to be here,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She sighed.
“It’s going to be okay, Rob. I promise. We’re going to find a way to make it through this.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, but she was already moving. She knew her way back to the guest room, though it looked like Lara had fallen a bit behind on the cleaning compared to what Lizzie usually found, here. The windows were dusty, letting in orange-y light, and the counters looked like they were coated with coffee grounds.
The front room was carpeted, but the hallway and the bedrooms had tile floors, and Lizzie’s suitcase ground across the tile floor on a layer of gritty sand.
“Are you doing a renovation?” she called, pulling her bag up onto the bed and opening it to take clothes out and start hanging them.
“Liz,” Robbie said from the doorway. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“What did you expect me to do?” she answered. “A woman from the hospital who didn’t even know your name called, said that Lara died…” She turned to face him. “Robbie, I’m so sorry.”
She couldn’t read his expression. He looked away, and she couldn’t tell if it was because the eye contact made him uncomfortable or because he didn’t want her to see him upset, or if it was because he couldn’t maintain focus that long. She hugged him, and he hugged her back.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, pulling him away by the shoulders so that she could look into his face, “until I know that you’re going to be okay.”
“It’s never okay,” he muttered. “It’s never okay. You need to go.”
“No,” she said, going back to her clothes and finishing hanging them. “Lara wouldn’t want you to be alone right now, and neither do I. Look, we’re going to talk, okay? You and me. Anything you want to talk about. Okay?”
“They’re going to be here,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He wandered away, though, and she figured she’d gotten past the first wall of resistance. She’d expected something. Anger, violence, passive non-engagement, avoidance, something. He wouldn’t be happy to see her. Point of fact, he might not be happy again for a long, long time. But she wasn’t going to lose him to that hole.
Dammit, she wasn’t going to lose him to that hole again.
She heard the door open, and she figured he’d gone outside to walk. For a moment, there was a stab of panic, and she nearly ran after him, for fear that he would just disappear, but she heard the refrigerator door open and close and a bottle clink against something else. He and Lara had drunk beer at night in front of the television, and Lizzie thought that a beer was probably exactly the right level of dealing with grief for right now. They’d sit at the table, they’d drink a pair of beers, and they’d talk. Maybe about Lara. If he was ready for that.
She heard a voice in the living room, and then another. He’d turned on the TV.
So that was how he was going to avoid her.
She could cope with that.
They didn’t have to talk right away. Not if he wasn’t ready. So long as he wasn’t trying to get away from her or lose himself, she could wait.
She changed out of her work clothes into something more appropriate for watching TV and drinking beer, and closed the door to the guest room behind her.
The hall was dark, with all of the doors closed. There was a light overhead somewhere, but she didn’t know where the switch was, and it didn’t matter.
There was a quick little noise behind her and she shuddered.
She wouldn’t have expected Lara to tolerate rats or mice, but if they were here, she would deal with them. Maybe it was just a lizard. Sometimes they got in by mistake and had a hard time finding their way back out.
The floors seriously needed to be swept. Maybe Lara wasn’t the homemaker Lizzie had thought she was; it took a long time for a floor to get this dirty, and Lizzie had never seen it like this before. It must have been a herculean task to get the house ready for her at holidays. Lizzie felt a little guilty at this, but also very flattered.
Robbie and Lara had cared what she thought.
She made it to the front room and stopped short as the door opened again.
There were people there.
Robbie was in the kitchen, wandering aimlessly from one appliance to the next like he knew he was supposed to be doing something but couldn’t remember what, and there was a shirtless man on the couch and a man in a leather jacket in the chair in the far corner. Coming through the door was another pair of men, one in a wifebeater and mohawk and the other in a bright red t-shirt with a band logo on it that Lizzie didn’t recognize.
The room went quiet as she came into view, and she heard Robbie mutter, ‘shouldn’t be here’ from the kitchen. She plucked up her positivity and went to sit on the side couch next to the shirtless man. He wasn’t one of the sleeved-out tattooed men that she’d occasionally seen around and that she recognized from television, but he had a generous distribution of tattoos everywhere she could see, including the skin of his shaved head. A trail of fishhook tattoos went from his temple to his jaw under his ear, and what looked like broken glass trailed from his shoulder to his elbow. The marks on his head were patterns of swirls that crossed his hairline and nearly touched his dark eyebrows.
“Hello,” Lizzie said.
He stuck his tongue out at her, curling the split tips out and away from each other; his tongue was forked almost as far as he could get it beyond his teeth.
“That looks like it hurt,” she said. “Does it make eating hard?”
He watched her with dead eyes for a moment, then grinned and sat ba
ck against the couch, putting an arm across the back so that it would have been across her shoulders, if she tried to sit back.
The door opened again, and three more men arrived, perching around the room where there was space, all of them pointedly aware of Lizzie being there. There was no conversation at all, no sound save Robbie opening and closing doors.
“Shouldn’t be here,” he muttered again.
She cast a look at him, but didn’t really want to turn her back on the room.
A skinny man in jeans that were marked with stains and smelled like motor oil sat on the arm of the couch next to her, and a pair of young women, so skinny Lizzie could see the furrows between the bones of their arms, came in and just leaned against the wall beside the corner chair. Everyone was twitchy, on edge, unwilling to look at Lizzie.
It was a drug house.
Lizzie was looking around the room, coming to the stone-cold realization that her brother had never left the life, Lara had just helped him cover it, when she realized that the man in the leather jacket sitting in the corner chair was watching her back.
He had his hands folded in his lap and one leg crossed at the knee, and he was watching her with a completely un-agitated curiosity. She watched him back for a moment and the corner of his mouth went up. She felt a chill.
“Are all of you friends of Lara’s?” she asked.
“They killed the angel,” she heard someone whisper, and then the room broke into a bigger flurry of agitation, nail biting and foot twitching, resettling in seats and casting glances around the room aimlessly.
The man in the corner was still.
It was uncanny.
“Lizzie?” Robbie asked. “Will you wait in your room?”
“Not if it’s because all of you want to get high while I’m gone,” she said. “No offense.”
“None taken,” the man in the corner said, and one of the girls giggled like a little bird, turning to face the wall.
“Lizzie,” the lizard-tongued man said, next to her. “Lizzie, Lizzie.”
