by Amy Lane
“V, you need to eat.”
“There’s nothing in the fridge.”
“There’s spaghetti. And I fried up a big batch of bacon for you yesterday. And hot dogs. And carrots.” He’d made a list of things she would eat, so when he reminded her, she could come down and have meals. He couldn’t always be there for them—he had work, and working out, and Jesus God getting the fuck out of the house and hanging with his friends—but she always had food.
“You made the bacon wrong. It’s poisoned.”
Reg took a deep breath, reached into the fridge, and pulled out the Rubbermaid container. “See? Not poisoned.” He ate the whole piece and reached in for another, but she snatched the container out of his hands.
“I’ll have carrots and potatoes too,” she snapped, and he pulled out a bag of carrots and walked to the sink to make her some potatoes. Her eating extra carbs was a worrying thing—the balance of meds she had right now usually limited her appetite. If she was skipping them, she might want extra potatoes.
“So,” he said casually, scrubbing potatoes the way she’d taught him to when they’d been kids, “you take your meds today?”
She crossed her arms and glared at him, her ratty pink cardigan falling loosely around her shoulders and sloppily down over her faded teddy bear pajama pants. She was wearing one of his high school gym shirts under the cardigan, and it screamed a garish green and black under the faded pink. She hadn’t brushed her hair in a few days, and the brown mess draggled down from a clip at her crown, a few of the strands a bright, corkscrewed gray.
“Yes,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “All of them. You want to count?”
He looked at her sideways, wondering how big a thing it would be if he counted them. He kept track in his phone after every count, and the date. He knew how many of each pill she should have, but letting her know he didn’t trust her could make things difficult.
“No,” he said. “But bring them out so I can see if we need a refill.”
“I can tell you,” she said, arms crossed defensively.
“I need to see,” he said, keeping his eyes open wide. “You know I can’t remember good if I hear. But if I see, I’ll figure it out and remember.” He was not, in fact, that bad—he’d know if she told him she only had five of the one and ten of the other. But she was trying to hide from him, and she knew how expensive the pills were, so she wouldn’t flush them down the toilet.
If she was going to be cunning, he could pretend to be stupid. It was a terrible game but one he’d been playing for eleven years, and the price he’d pay for losing would be dire.
“Fine. I’ll bring them down.” She glared at him, blue eyes that could be wide and ingenuous or narrow and plotting—it all depended on what the chemicals were doing in her brain. “But it’s not right. You’re just taking money from the doctors. Everything I’ve done for you, and you’re getting money from the doctors to give me pills. You know the doctors. They don’t like how smart I am. You’re taking their money to keep me in a fog. I hate the fog.”
“I’m not,” he said, more afraid of her paranoia than of the argument. “See? I put my schedule on the fridge. I’m working extra, so you’ll know when I’ll be gone. My friends are doing things—I’ll tell you then.”
“You bringing any home?” she asked suspiciously, and he thought Well, not now! When the medication was working and V was all copacetic, she’d stay in her upstairs bedroom and bathroom, and he’d use the one downstairs. He’d had girls over and boys too—just told them to stay out of the upstairs. It worked better if his girlfriend or hookup had a place of their own, but he could make it work with V most days.
Unless she was like this.
“Not right now,” he said easily. “You know I don’t like to upset you.”
“I’m not a fuckin’ baby!” She screamed it, spittle coming out of her mouth and everything, and his stomach dropped and twisted at the same time.
“V, go get your medication, okay? I’m going to call your doc and make sure you got the same stuff.”
“I don’t need that goddamned poison,” she snarled, and he took a deep breath against tears. Oh Jesus, this was worse than he thought.
“V, honey, just do it for me, okay? I haven’t signed the papers in a while. I might not be able to sign them next time they show up, not if you’re like this.”
“You fucking asshole! You’d send me to one of those places? The places that stink of pee and have rapists in every corner? You’re my fuckin’ brother! I took care of you!”
“Honey, I don’t want to. We just need to make sure you’re taking your pills, okay?”
“I hate my pills, you fucking moron. Why would I take them to make you happy? Can’t you just make sure I have food in the house, or are you too fucking stupid to even do that?”
Reg swallowed against his temper and put the potatoes in the microwave—four of them, because he liked potatoes too, and, well, he had bacon. “V, please—don’t make me go get them myself. We agreed I’d respect your stuff, your space, okay? But if you don’t go get them yourself, I need to—”
“Fine!” On that word, she whirled out of the kitchen and stomped up the stairs. He listened carefully for sounds of the toilet flushing or water being run, but he didn’t hear them. Before he could get suspicious himself and investigate, she came stomping down, four bottles in her hands. She threw them at him, literally pitched them at him from across the room, and the lids burst open and the pills scattered across the floor at his feet.
“Oh fuck.” She was on social security, and that paid for her medicines, but what was left for Reg to pay was still a big chunk of his paycheck. He kept telling himself he’d check those papers he signed every year to see if maybe he’d pay less if he turned her over to the state, but he couldn’t bear the thought of sending her to one of those places.
He’d never been to one himself, but her sheer terror of a state-run health facility made his own hands sweat with fear like he’d caught the disease of it.
“V,” he muttered, sinking to his knees and sorting the pills. “V, just calm down. Let me pick these up, you can take the pink one, and then we’ll talk about the rest.” The pink one was a sedative—very mild—and it was the one pill she usually had no objection to. Once she had the pink one, he could reason with her, remind her of what would happen if she went off the rails, remind her of her fear of institutions and of ending up somewhere unfamiliar. He made sure all the pink pills were rounded up first and was going after the capsules with the red ends that she hated the most when, out of nowhere, her foot swung up and into his jaw.
He wasn’t a little guy, but his sister was solid, and she was fueled by anger and buckets full of crazy. He went toppling backward into the detritus of pill dust, then scrabbled to his hands and knees so he could get her in a three-point restraint.
The ripping pain across his shoulder blade was a surprise.
“Holy Jesus, V!” he shouted, rolling sideways to keep his face and neck protected. “Where’d you find the fuckin’ knife!”
“You think I don’t know where you hide them?” she taunted as he came up dodging backward. Oh God, she’d found the stash. One goddamned cooking knife—one—in the whole house, and he kept it in a shoebox in the top of his closet. Other boys might keep their spank material there, but not Reg. He’d learned how to use his phone, and he hid the kitchen implements in the dark.
“Well, I didn’t until now!” he yelped. She didn’t know how to hold a knife, he thought dimly. He’d seen enough action-adventure movies, where the heroes were jacked and the villains were stupid. She was shorter than he was and stabbing downward, and he just had to wait until the blade was pointed toward her and—
He grabbed her wrist hard and squeezed until the knife clattered onto the ground with all the pill dust. While she was still keening, he pulled her hand around to the small of her back, reached around her shoulder, and pulled her other wrist back too. She thrashed, but he used the pain of th
e wrenched shoulders to wrestle her to the ground into a three-point restraint, thanking God for the self-defense class Dex had made him take a few years back, when incidents like this were a regular occurrence.
“Let me up!” she sobbed, and he kept one hand locked around her thin wrists and used the other to scrabble on the floor. Pink pill, pink pill, pink pill….
He found one and shoved it in her mouth dry. He kept his finger in the back of her mouth, scrubbing the pill on the sides of her molars until it disintegrated. In one smooth motion, he pulled his finger out of her mouth and used the heel of his hand to clamp her jaw shut, holding her still until he felt her swallow.
Then—because she could take two, the doctor had said that—he grabbed another one while she sobbed and swore at him, and repeated the operation. She was down to sobs, her thrashing mostly for form, as he grabbed the red-tipped capsule he knew was the strongest antipsychotic and shoved it into the back of her mouth.
“No,” she wailed. “No, no, no, no, no….” She said something else—the taste, probably—but his shoulder ached like fire, and he had blood running down the back of his arm and off his elbow. He needed to find someone to stitch that up, and he couldn’t afford to fuck around. He shoved at the pill until it exploded in her mouth and then held her chin again, trying not to let the sound of her whimpering move him inside.
Of course it moved him inside.
“Sh,” he whispered, remembering all the times she’d comforted him in the night. Mom would come home, drunk or high, with a guy or three, and V would hide him in the closet, holding him close, singing softly in his ear. “Take me on,” he hummed. “Take on me….” He didn’t know any other words than that, but the sound of it was bouncy and happy and something she’d heard on the radio when they were kids. Her whimpers faded to hiccups, and he found the other two pills on the ground before standing up and assisting her.
Her eyes had gone to half-mast—the second sedative had been a little heavy-handed—and he helped her into the nearest kitchen chair before turning to pick up the knife. He put it on the highest shelf—the one she couldn’t get to without a chair—and reminded himself harshly to remember it later. He figured it would depend on how many stitches he needed if that worked or not.
He washed the pill residue off his hands—because the doctor had warned about that—poured her some water, and turned around with the cup and the pills, his heart twisting at her crumpling face, the tears just running down, sputtering into space with her little caught breaths.
“Here,” he said gently. “Here, V. Let’s take them right now. I don’t know how many you missed, but I’m going to have to check them morning, noon, and night for a while, okay?”
She nodded numbly. “Sorry, Reggie.”
He pressed the heels of his hands against his stinging eyes and pretended the wetness was from washing up. “I know, V.” She was always sorry—and he always believed her. The doctor told him about chemicals in her brain and how they whispered things to her. Whispering chemicals seemed like a fairy tale, but he’d heard her talking to people who weren’t there, and when they started telling her the pills were poison and Reg was bad, that was usually a sign things were about to go cattywampus.
“The pills are poison. You know they’re poison.”
“No they’re not, sweetheart.” Morning, noon, and night. He was going to have to lock the pills up again and administer them like they were food in a zombie apocalypse. No girls, no Johnnies hookups unless he brought them here.
He looked around the house, depressed. Most of the guys didn’t seem to judge, but the girls did. He’d put up with the judginess, though, if only he could be not alone here, in this rotting house, wondering when his sister was going to kick him in the balls.
“Poison,” she mumbled, still crying. “Reggie, why you gotta feed me poison?”
“So you don’t try to kill me in my sleep, V.” He’d been one choked snore away from being a nighttime television story before he’d hidden the knives. Time to buy a gun safe so he could eat steak again sometime in the future. With a sigh, he grabbed two plastic bags from the cupboard and bent down again to try to salvage pills. He was good about only saving the unbroken ones—and very aware that he shouldn’t let any of the medication get on his skin. The doctor had warned about that, and he’d listened with big eyes.
Something that could seep through his skin scared him to death.
“I wouldn’t hurt you, little brother.” She gazed up at him then, and through the hair and the wrinkles time had wrought, he could see V—Veronica—with round cheeks and warm blue eyes, the same almond shape as his. She’d been beautiful in her twenties, but the last ten years—illness, anger, even the medications she took—all had exacted a price.
“Not on purpose, V.” He squatted in front of her, pulling one of the plastic bags off his hand so he could cup her cheek. “In your heart you’re still my V,” he said softly. “We still sing together, right?”
She nodded and offered a watery, dim smile. What time was it? He looked around the kitchen and realized it was still only about three o’clock in the afternoon. But she was nodding off—probably because of the two sedatives—and it was just time for her to sleep.
“Come on, V,” he said, standing up and offering his arms. She was so small compared to him—and he wasn’t big next to the guys at Johnnies. But he worked out all the time, and swinging her into his arms like a child was a lot easier than putting her into a three-point restraint when she was fighting him. He carried her up the stairs, careful not to bang her head, and took her into her room. When he got there, he looked around and groaned.
It was a filthy disaster. He should have known—plates had been disappearing left and right, and she’d been losing weight. All the food was up here, in her room, and oh God, she’d been drawing on the walls again.
He didn’t know how to edit what she saw on the internet.
The worst—the very worst—propaganda against minorities, LGBTQ people, God, even against the mentally ill—all of it was filtered through her imperfect mind and found its way onto the walls in Sharpie.
He didn’t even know where she got the Sharpie and had a sudden thought to her amazon.com account. He usually gave her money for books—apparently she’d been buying Sharpies too.
In the pile of dirty dishes and fetid clothes, though, her bed stood pristine. He wasn’t sure how clean her sheets were, but she made it, every goddamned morning.
He had no idea why.
With a heave he pulled back the covers, settled her between the sheets before tucking them up to her chin.
“Sing me a song, little brother,” she commanded.
He looked around the bedroom and thought about all the work ahead, and his shoulder ached—and still bled. But she looked dazed and lost after her outburst, and Oh, V—I owe you so damned much.
His mouth twisted, and he began to sing “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” which was pretty, and he knew all the words to it. He’d heard from kids at school that it was about smoking pot, but that couldn’t take away the purity of the little boy and the imaginary friend Reg had first thought of when his mother sang it to the two of them, or when V had sung it to him.
When he was done, her eyes were closed and she was snoring softly. He stood up and started collecting dishes, thinking he had to have her room and the kitchen clean before he called Dex and asked if he knew anyone who could stitch him up.
IN FACT, Dex knew one of the guys was fucking to get through med school, and within an hour Lance was at Reggie’s house, a tall guy with a square, chiseled jaw, blue eyes, an eight-inch cock, and a little first aid kit of purloined supplies under his arm.
“You’re not going to get into trouble?” Reg asked after Lance had—blissfully—injected the area with some lidocaine and begun irrigating it. “I don’t want you to get into trouble for stealing drugs or anything.”
“No,” Lance said absently, and Reg felt some pressure against his flesh, which told him
Lance was doing things that would ordinarily hurt. “I won’t get in trouble because I have a kit for emergencies, and I’m not giving you anything that’s regulated. But you are going to be in a world of hurt here if you don’t go to a real doctor and get yourself some antibiotics. What happened, and why won’t you tell me?”
“You know what happened,” Reg said, too weary to play with words or do anything fancy. Lance had been here before to hook up. Had met V.
“She went off her meds again,” Lance muttered, sounding mad.
“It happens sometimes, but she got really tricky about it. I’m gonna have to watch her close for a couple of weeks. It’s okay if I’m gone for short bits—to the gym, to film a scene. As long as I can come home for lunch, I can hold the lights for Dex. But until she gets back online—”
“I get it,” Lance grunted, tugging on Reg’s back some more. “Can I just say, you would have made my job a hell of a lot easier if you’d called me about two hours earlier? Why didn’t you do that?”
Reg thought about all the blood he’d had to mop up from the floor when he’d finished recovering the pills. “I had to clean up first,” he said, embarrassed. “I needed to see how many of her pills I could save, and her room was attracting rats.” He glanced around again. The paint was peeling off the doorframes, the walls hadn’t been washed in forever, and the furniture had been tatty ten years ago. “I mean, it’s not pretty now.”
Behind him, Lance sighed, and Reg remembered their one scene together. Reg had made him laugh and feel comfortable. It had been Lance’s first bottom scene, and Reg had taken charge and done the thing. When they were done, they’d gone out to Hometown Buffet to eat, because they’d both starved themselves for the scene. Lance had cracked jokes like a twelve-year-old, and Reg had gazed into his blue eyes and thought I kissed that. I hit that! How lucky am I?
It hurt for him to see Reg like this.
But Lance dropped a kiss on the top of Reg’s head. “I just want you to be okay, Reggie.”
