by Chloe Garner
Someone touched her hair.
“Stop it,” Robbie said, rather explosively. “No one touches her.”
“I’m okay,” Lizzie said, standing. “It’s okay, Robbie.”
“No one touches her,” Robbie said again, deflated.
“I’m okay,” Lizzie said. “Who are they?”
“We’re not going to do drugs, okay?” Robbie asked like a puppy who had to pee.
She looked around the room.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” Robbie said. “There are no drugs in the house. These are… our friends.”
“Then why don’t you want me to be here?” Lizzie asked. “They’re just here to support you, the same as me.”
“They killed the angel,” someone whispered, and the room started again with that strange fidgeting.
“I’m embarrassed,” Robbie said. “Okay? Please. Go. You shouldn’t be here.”
Lizzie was torn. There was the man she’d seen so often with Lara, there in her brother’s eyes, sentient, aware, emotional. She wanted to encourage that. She wanted to trust that. But she’d never done well, trusting her brother, when he wasn’t in control. When he wasn’t with Lara.
This was about building bridges. Just right now. If she decided it was a mistake, she wouldn’t do it again.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll finished getting unpacked. But then we talk.”
She said it with meaning, and Robbie nodded exaggeratedly, and motioned her out of the room.
“They killed the angel,” someone whispered as she left.
***
She went back to her room and put her things away in drawers, checked the mirror, then got out her laptop and logged in to work to answer the questions from the woman from sales. They weren’t bad questions; Lizzie just wasn’t in the mood to answer any. She wanted to be in the other room, watching Robbie, making sure that he wasn’t getting himself into trouble. She wanted to know who those people were, why they came in the door without knocking, why they all seemed to have keys.
The more she sat and tried to work, the more convinced she became that Robbie and Lara were actually running a drug house, and Lara had just been civilized enough to know how to hide it. The condition of the house, the way Robbie had acted, the fact that he’d gotten his hands on drugs that quickly after Lara had died… that he’d just left her at the hospital… It seemed inescapable.
And the longer she sat, the angrier she grew at herself that she’d left him out there with those people.
He needed to be in rehab.
Again.
Rehab didn’t always know what to do with people like Robbie. He wasn’t violent, hadn’t been since his late teens, but he didn’t recognize who you were, always, and he wasn’t always there. Trying to figure out when he was sober was tricky, because the normal symptoms of coherence and lucidity were sometimes lacking for other reasons. He didn’t cooperate, and normal therapy wasn’t trained for his soup of conditions. Sometimes Lizzie felt bad because she was so deep-down grateful that she wasn’t like Robbie.
He hadn’t done anything to end up like this. The drugs had only started after his first psychosis. Sometimes he’d talked to her, there at the very beginning, about the world where he was, as if it was different from the world where she was. Different things happened, there, and the rules were different. She’d thought that he was just being creative. Obtuse, perhaps, but pretending a different existence than his own was hardly an abnormal pre-teen behavior.
And then there had been the screaming.
Trying to stop things that weren’t actually happening.
Walking into walls and furniture, sometimes at a run.
They’d rearranged the house, at first, then they’d moved to a single-story house to make sure he didn’t go down the stairs. She’d gotten grounded the first time she’d forgotten to deadbolt the door behind her, because sometimes he could work doorknobs in the midst of the worst of the episodes, and he got out into the street before one of the neighbors had noticed and walked him home.
He’d been terrified.
The drugs helped because at least they made the abnormal seem less abnormal, Lizzie thought. The world was supposed to be full of hourglass-shaped purple elephants when you did enough LSD, and he tended to stop running around trying to fix things. His mother had found his box of pills at sixteen, all of the things he tried to use to bring him up, bring him down, make him feel calm, and she’d freaked out. Lizzie completely understood. They were good kids, growing up, and while maybe no one would have been surprised if one or both of them had experimented with a few things, maybe at parties, finding a lunchbox full of dozens of kinds of pills and powders had been more than Lizzie’s mom had been prepared for.
That was the first time they’d sent him away.
He’d come back hollow, recessed into himself, and he’d stopped talking about the things he saw and the things he knew. She could see that it was still there, the panic attacks, the need to try to do something to stop something bad from happening, but when he caught her noticing, he’d just fall back into himself, hide away deeper.
It wasn’t real.
How many times had they told him that?
It had been a while before a professional told them that they weren’t doing themselves any favors, arguing with him. Robbie believed that he was the one who was right, and all they were doing was alienating him in arguing otherwise.
But it was hard not to.
It wasn’t real.
None of the things in his head were real.
And then Lara.
And everything had been okay.
For a stretch of years, now.
She hadn’t gotten a call from law enforcement because her name was in his wallet and he was in the middle of an intersection screaming at aliens that they didn’t deserve it, whoever they were.
She hadn’t gotten a call from a nurse at a clinic that her brother had overdosed and ended up there unconscious, dumped out of a car outside barely breathing, coming around and Lizzie needed to come and do something about it, because, while they were happy to help when things happened like this, they didn’t have the long-term beds someone like Robbie needed.
The door opened, and Lizzie jumped, unable to remember how long it had been since she’d last hit a key on her computer.
Robbie came in and sat on the bed, looking at the floor.
Nothing worked.
Nothing helped.
Except Lara.
She’d pulled him out of it, and Lizzie was going to keep him out of it.
She hoped.
“Those are your friends?” she asked.
“C’mon Lizzie,” Robbie said. “Gimme a break.”
“I didn’t say anything,” she said, closing her laptop and pulling her feet under her as she turned to face him.
“But you were thinking it,” he said, looking up at her.
There he was.
Her brother.
The one she’d lost when he was young and hadn’t gotten back until he’d met Lara.
“Robbie,” she said. “You’ve got to keep it together. It’s what Lara would want.”
He put his face in his hands and sobbed. Once.
Lizzie’s heart broke.
He wiped his face hard and put his hands back down in his lap, looking around the room.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “You don’t understand.”
“I want to,” she said. “I want to understand.”
“You never believe me,” he said.
“I thought you were…” she started, then cut herself off. That wasn’t helpful. Positive. Positive. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want to understand.”
He licked his lips, then dropped his head.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” he said.
“I know,” she said, scooting forward to hug him. “I know.”
He shook his head, resting his forehead on her shoulder.
; “You don’t understand,” he said. “She made it better.”
“Explain it to me,” she said.
“I can’t,” he told her, standing. “I can’t. You shouldn’t be here. You should go.”
“No,” she said, sitting back slightly. “I’m not going until I know you’re okay.”
“I’m not going to be okay, Lizzie. Not the way you want me to be.”
“You were,” Lizzie said. “I know you were. And that means you can be. You just have to… You have to want it, and you have to stay off the drugs.”
He looked away.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“What, that you use drugs when you think you can’t cope?”
He looked sharply at her, gratifyingly, and she shrugged.
“You’ve got a history, Robbie. That’s all I’ve got to go on right now.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“We?”
“They took her, Liz. They took her, and some of them want to go after them and punish them for it. They aren’t allowed to take her.”
Lizzie blinked.
“She died of an aneurysm,” she said. “It’s very sad, Robbie, but it isn’t anyone’s fault.”
“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” he said.
She counted to three, trying to come up with something more constructive to say, but she couldn’t do it.
“This is your mysterious villains, again?”
“They aren’t mysterious and they aren’t villains,” Robbie said flatly. “That’s what Lara showed me.”
Lizzie raised an eyebrow.
That’s how Lara did it? She played the game?
It took her a long time to get there; it was the foundational rule of every diagnosis dealing with delusion: you don’t deal with it like it’s real. But Robbie had gotten so much better.
Even if their house was a drug den and a lot of it was a facade they’d put on for her, he had clearly been happier, healthier than he’d been in a long time.
“Let’s say I agreed to try to believe you,” she said. “Would you tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t want you here,” Robbie said and stood. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not leaving,” she said again. “I mean it.”
He shrugged and turned away.
“She’s dead. She’s gone. You can’t fix that.”
“I’m not leaving,” Lizzie said to herself, then forced herself to turn back to her computer and finish the e-mail to the sales woman.
She’d known the moment she put down the phone that this wasn’t going to be easy.
There was no reason to act surprised now.
***
They sat on the couch that night, drinking beer and not talking. She’d spent the entire evening wondering what the people had been here for, and what they’d done while she was gone, but she didn’t ask.
Robbie would come around when he was ready, or at least when he finally believed that she wasn’t going to give up that easily.
She never had.
She told herself that a lot.
The difference between giving up on him and making space for her own life would be pretty subtle, from where he was, but she’d never given up on him.
***
She got up early the next day and cleaned the kitchen. She sent an e-mail to her boss to let him know that she wasn’t going to be online at all today - call it a personal day or a vacation day or whatever he liked, but she needed to focus on her brother - and then she’d gotten to work.
Half the food in the refrigerator was spoiled, the floor was gritty with sand and dirt, and the countertops were worse than she’d speculated the day before. The cleaning products, paradoxically, underneath the sink, were top-notch and seemed well-used. None of them had the line of debris around the top that indicated someone had bought them with the best of intentions and stashed them away.
These were potent, industrial cleaners, and some of them were mostly empty.
She scrubbed, she swept, she mopped, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed some more. She went through the fridge and trashed everything that smelled like funky death, and then she started on the pantry, which was worse. By the time Robbie got up, she had a clean pan on the stove and was cautiously cracking eggs into a bowl and adding them to the pan one at a time. So far, she’d had two that were bad.
“I didn’t know eggs even went bad,” she said as he came in and sat down on the couch. “How long have you had them?”
“Week and a half,” Robbie said.
“Funny,” Lizzie answered.
“Thanks for cleaning,” Robbie said. “Lara always liked it when the house was clean.”
Lizzie thought that the woman had a funny way of prioritizing, if cleanliness was that valuable to her, but she kept her thoughts to herself.
“What are we doing today?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Robbie answered without looking at her. He turned on the TV.
“We should go make arrangements for Lara,” Lizzie said. She couldn’t see if Robbie reacted or not.
“I don’t care,” he said.
“You do, too,” Lizzie said. “You loved her, and you aren’t just going to abandon her there at the hospital. You don’t do that.”
He turned on the couch to look at her, a touch of frenzy to him.
“You think she’s still in there?” he asked. “It’s just her meat. You want to go out to the freezer and make arrangements for that, too?”
As a matter of fact, yes, she would go check the meat in the freezer, given the state of what she’d found in the fridge, but she didn’t point that out.
“She was your wife, Robbie,” Lizzie said. “You can’t pretend that doesn’t matter.”
“It’s the only thing that ever did,” he said, broken. “The bits and pieces that are left at the morgue don’t have anything to do with it.”
“What about her parents?” Lizzie asked. “Have you called them?”
His face fell.
“No,” he said. “Someone should tell them. They were good parents.”
Which would be as a contrast to their parents, Lizzie knew, but she kept the insult unsaid. Her parents had done the best they could for as long as they could. That Dad had hit the end of his rope as early as he had maybe hadn’t been the best anyone could do, but there had never even been a glimmer of hope that someone could fix Robbie. You had to understand what her parents had been up against.
“Do you want to call them?” Lizzie asked.
“No,” Robbie said, turning back to the television. It was a heart-rending noise, that word.
“Then I will,” Lizzie said. “It would be better, coming from you, but someone has to tell them. They can tell us what they want us to do with Lara, if you don’t care.”
“Cremate her,” Robbie said, suddenly emphatic. “Don’t let them take her body away.”
“Cremation is a fine option,” Lizzie said, hoping Lara’s parents would be okay with it. “But you could bury her here, and they wouldn’t take her away, then, either. Would you want to be able to go see her?”
“Cremate her,” Robbie said again, his voice dead now.
“Okay,” Lizzie said. “I’ll talk to her parents and let them know that’s what you’d like to do. Do you want to think about a funeral, or is it too quick?”
“No funeral,” Robbie said. Lizzie felt like shaking him.
“It’s about remembering, Robbie. And not just for you. It’s about celebrating who she was and appreciating it.”
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m not going.”
“Why the hell not?” Lizzie asked.
“Because I don’t want to see the kind of people who would go to her funeral,” he said.
“Your friends wouldn’t go?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “None of them would want to go stand in front of a box of her m
eat.”
“I’ll send flowers for you, then.”
He laughed like it cost him his soul to do it.
“Death for death,” he said. “At least it’s appropriate.”
She felt her face crease with an angry frown that she couldn’t keep under control, but at least he wasn’t looking.
“Take a day,” she said. “Maybe you’ll feel different, tomorrow.”
“You think she’s the first one I’ve lost?” he asked, his voice the strange, uncontrolled kind of hysterical she hadn’t heard in a long time.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“They come for us,” he said. “Any time we’re out of line, they come for us.”
Lizzie tread lightly here.
“Is that why they… came for Lara?”
“I don’t know,” Robbie said, settling deeper into the couch. She portioned the eggs into a pair of bowls and came to sit next to him.
“I’m going shopping,” she said. “Most of what was in the fridge was bad, and you need a lot of basics. After that, I’m going to call Lara’s family and tell them what happened, and then I’m going to start planning a funeral. If you change your mind, the first thing you’ll need to pick is a day. This weekend is probably fine, or we can wait another day or two. No more than that. Okay?”
“Right,” he said, eating his eggs without looking at her.
***
When she got back from the hospital, he was gone.
She ransacked the house and finally found Lara’s address book, where her parents’ phone number was listed in her neat script.
“Hello?” a woman answered. It was like Lara had just gone home. Lizzie swallowed.
“Mrs. Young?” Lizzie asked.
“What happened?” the woman asked, and Lizzie sat down on the couch.
“Mrs. Young, my name is Lizzie. Robbie’s sister. I…” The words failed her. She steeled herself, swallowing hard and holding on to the arm of the couch. “Lara died yesterday.”
There was a long silence, and then a cough that might have been a sob with the phone covered.
“What happened?” the woman asked.
“She had a brain aneurysm rupture,” Lizzie said. “They told me that it happened fast. She might not have even felt it.”
“How is Robbie?” the woman asked. Lizzie tipped her head to the side. Bless her. Lara got her love for people from her mother.
