by Chloe Garner
She had.
She felt bad, at that. It was possible she’d deceived him, as she thought about it, and she felt worse.
He liked her.
He’d been very kind to her, all things considered, when Robbie had just shut her out.
Had she betrayed a confidence?
She washed her hair and shaved her legs and wrapped herself into her towel, going back into her room to get a different shirt.
Robbie was sitting on the bed.
She grabbed her towel against her chest.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“They all left,” he said.
“Okay.”
She wrapped the towel a bit tighter.
“Where did Trevor go?”
“We got in a fight and he left.”
Robbie dipped his head.
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Lizzie said. “He wasn’t really in the mood to tell me when he left.”
“What did you fight about?” Robbie asked.
She shook her head.
“I think he thought I believed you, and then I didn’t. And he thought he was winning me over.”
“But he isn’t,” Robbie said, almost as if to reassure himself. Lizzie sat down on the bed next to him.
“I want to help,” she said. “I want to understand. That’s the truth. But he takes on this huge guilt load because he thinks he can save people from random accidents, and you’ve always thought that you could prevent all of these bad things, and… Bad things aren’t your fault.”
“They are his fault,” Robbie said darkly.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Lizzie said. “You know he won’t walk across a busy street because he has a superstition that he’s going to cause an accident?”
“He is,” Robbie said, then shook his head. “It’s time to go home, Lizzie. You can’t help any more.”
“I have a few more days of bereavement leave,” she said, “and I’m stretching them out, working from here when I get some time. I want to make sure you’re going to be okay.”
“I wouldn’t mind having my pills back,” he said. “They do help.”
She shook her head.
“You should be taking medications that a doctor prescribes,” she said. “Not just whatever you feel like right now.”
Nothing is made to help me,” he said. “And they don’t know what’s wrong with me. So why should I go to someone to get them to tell me what to do, when I can figure it out for myself?”
“You don’t know the side effects,” Lizzie said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
He shrugged.
“No worse than not having them.”
She frowned, then shook her head.
“I need to get dressed.”
“I’m glad you had a fight,” Robbie said. “He’s dangerous, and he’s going to get you into trouble, if you hang out with him. But you should go.”
“Why do you hang out with him, if he’s dangerous?” Lizzie asked. Robbie shook his head, folding his hands and rubbing his thumbs over each other, then twisted away.
“Not now,” he said, putting his hands up to his face. “Not now.”
“What’s wrong?” Lizzie asked, standing to face him. “Robbie?”
He twisted his head to the other side, then stood, pushing her out of the way as if she weren’t there. She moved out of the way, surprised, and followed him as he went through the door and down the hallway. He sat down on the floor in the kitchen and leaned against a cabinet, tapping the back of his head against the cabinet door.
“Robbie?” she asked.
She got no answer. She went to lock the front door and the garage door, peeking at him once more, then sighed and went to get dressed.
This, she’d seen before.
It twisted her stomach and made her immeasurably sad, but she knew how to cope with his episodes. So long as he didn’t start trying to get away or start shouting, it was just a question of outlasting him.
She got dressed and then brushed her hair out and put it up in a ponytail, brushed her teeth and was pulling on socks when Robbie moaned and screamed.
She took another deep breath, steeling herself, then went down the hallway again to find him thrashing on the floor.
He twitched his head to the side and she grabbed his wrists, pulling him up shoulders-over-hips again and sat down toes to toes with him.
“I’m here, Robbie,” she said. “I’m here.”
His arms jerked, but not hard enough to pull his hands away. She clenched her jaw, feeling sick.
She knew what to do.
She’d done this a hundred times before.
Keep him from running. Keep him from injuring himself. Don’t worry about anything he said. Nothing he was seeing right now was real.
His head tipped forward and slammed into his knees, and she held firm to his hands.
“I’m here,” he said, sounding exhausted.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m not leaving,” she said. “You’re not okay.”
“I’m fine,” he said, pulling his hands away. She let them go.
“You’re fine right now,” she said. “But the next time you have an episode?”
“I didn’t have an episode,” he said. “I flipped.”
Trevor’s word.
“You could hurt yourself,” she said. “How often has it been happening?”
He shook his head, putting one palm to his temple.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yes you do,” Lizzie said, moving her head to the side to try to catch his eye.
He shook his head.
“Did she help with them?” she asked. He turned his face away and she reached out to touch his arm. “Robbie?”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
She sighed.
“Do the meds help?”
He turned his face to look at her, pained, sarcastic. She shrugged.
“Some day, Robbie, we’re going to do something, and it’s going to help.”
How many times had she told him that? How long since either of them had believed it?
He stood.
“I have to go.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Lizzie told him and he turned away.
“It’s a war, Liz. You heard that much.”
“I don’t understand why it has to be that way.”
“Because…” he said, then turned to face her, his forehead creased hard. “Do you think he left?”
“I don’t,” she said. He nodded, licking his lips and going to the refrigerator. She thought about reminding him that he’d wanted to go out, but didn’t want to encourage him to leave.
Robbie sat back down on the floor facing her.
“I miss Lara,” he said. “I have so many things I would tell her.”
“I know,” Lizzie said. “I know.”
He put his forehead down on the heels of his hands and sat for a long time.
“He’s the best, you know. That’s what everyone says. That’s what Lara says. Said.”
“Okay,” Lizzie said. Robbie dropped his arms to look at her.
“He knows what he’s doing, and… okay, she said most of them enjoy it, but he doesn’t let things get out of hand. It probably wasn’t even his fault, what happened to her.”
“Did you think it was?” Lizzie asked. Robbie shrugged.
“Some. Yeah.”
She frowned.
“That’s awful,” she said, and Robbie nodded, agreeing to something different than what she’d meant.
“But he’s careful. He keeps it under control, and the bad things that happen, he spreads them out. He works hard to do it. That’s what Lara said. No one works harder than he does.”
“Okay,” Lizzie said, not sure what he was trying to tell her. At least the words he was saying made sense. Mostly.
“He
’s doing what he thinks is best for us.” He shook his head. “But I’m not going to let him take you. I don’t care what he thinks.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean what it sounds like,” Lizzie said.
“What does it sound like?” Robbie asked.
“Like you’re trying to weigh in on my sex life,” she said. He jerked his head back.
“You would sleep with him?”
“Well, no, but isn’t that what you’re worried about?”
“No,” Robbie said. “I don’t want him to turn you into one of us.”
“That’s not possible,” Lizzie said. Mental illness was not contagious. She didn’t say that part because Trevor was right - bringing it up in this kind of context lacked tact.
“It is if you’ve been one all along,” Robbie said softly.
“I’m okay, Rob,” she said. “I’m not worried about anything like that.”
“I know,” he said emphatically. “And that’s why you need to go. You don’t believe us. That’s fine. Okay? I get it. I do. I wouldn’t believe us. I wish I didn’t believe us.”
“You could have hurt yourself,” Lizzie said. “That’s what matters to me. If you want me to try to stop being around him… We can talk about that. I’m willing to talk about that to make sure that you’re okay. But he isn’t a bad guy. And I think you all overestimate how dangerous he is. Especially if he’s as careful as you say he is.”
Robbie looked at the fronts of his hands, almost as if he’d never seen them before.
“I can’t convince you,” he said. “Maybe that means he’s wrong.”
Lizzie waited, and he stood.
“I need to go,” he said. “Maybe I wish you were the angel, but if he can’t convince you, then you aren’t.”
She blinked, and he nodded to himself and just… left.
She stood and watched after him, feeling bewildered and as though she probably should have stopped him. Out there, there was nothing to keep him from getting hit by a car or falling off of something when he had an episode.
Lara had gotten him a job, though. And just a little while ago, she’d been wondering why Trevor couldn’t hold a job, if Robbie could.
He was an adult, and she needed to let him have his life, so long as he could manage it.
She went back to her room and logged into her computer, trying to remember what she’d been working on the last time she was on. A few hours later, she got up and stretched and went to go find something to drink.
Trevor was sitting in the corner.
“I thought you were beginning to believe me,” he said. She held up her wrist.
“There seems to be some proof of that,” she answered, going to the fridge and finding the milk spoiled. Again.
“How does that keep happening?’ she asked, dumping it out in the sink.
“You ask a lot of questions that you don’t want the answers to,” Trevor said, not moving.
“I thought you were going to knock,” Lizzie said.
“I guess we’re even,” he said. She nodded, going for the orange juice. That at least still smelled okay.
“You want any?” she asked.
“Robbie called me,” Trevor said.
“You have a cell phone?” Lizzie asked.
“Lara thought it was important,” Trevor said.
“She was a good person,” Lizzie said, and he nodded. “What did Robbie say?”
“That you aren’t ever going to believe me,” Trevor said. “So he’s going to stop fighting you.”
She swallowed and sat down on the couch, just about as far away from him as she could get.
“Do you want to see what a war looks like?” he asked. She nodded.
“I do. I still want to understand.”
He nodded and stood.
“Let’s go, then,” he said.
He walked out to the car with her and she started it, then stopped it again.
“Robbie was worried you’d left and weren’t coming back,” she said.
“I’d love to tell you I wouldn’t do that, but they all know I would. Lara was the reliable one.”
Lizzie sighed.
“If me going with you to see this… if anything I do is going to make you just disappear on him, I’d rather get out of the car and go back to work.”
She put a wrist on top of the steering wheel and turned to face him.
“As much as I want to understand what’s going on, what changed, and as much as I want to figure out how to keep Robbie where he is, I think he needs you more than me. Because some day I’m going to go back to my own life, and he’s going to need you to still be here.”
“You mean that,” Trevor said, and she nodded.
“I do.”
“Even if I’m psychotic and bipolar and the same list of diagnoses as your brother.”
“Even if,” Lizzie said, keeping to herself that she didn’t see how that was possible, given the disparities between the two of them, but there didn’t seem to be a point.
“How could you sit back and watch what they did to him?” Trevor asked. “Clearly you love him.”
It was a knife-thrust, but one she knew well from self-infliction.
“They were supposed to know better than me,” she said. “I still don’t know that they were wrong. I don’t know what worked. If I had known how to do what Lara did, I would have. But no one did. Trevor, if I could just figure it out…”
“You know what Lara did,” he said, turning away.
“What?” she demanded.
“Start the car,” he said. “There’s nothing else I can say to prove it, and you know everything you need to know.”
She wanted to fight with him, to tell him that he was being obtuse and vague on purpose and he knew how to communicate with her. She knew that he did, because he’d done it before.
Had she shut the door on it by arguing with him about guilt?
He shouldn’t have to carry it.
“He said it wasn’t your fault,” she said as she started the car again.
“What wasn’t?” Trevor asked without looking at her.
“Robbie said that Lara wasn’t your fault.”
Trevor turned his head now.
“Did he?”
She nodded.
“What if it was?” he asked.
“Are you baiting me?” she asked. He shook his head and looked out the window.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said and she almost laughed.
“People keep telling me that.”
***
He had her stop the car in the parking lot of a high school.
She was uncomfortable.
“Trevor, I don’t want to be here. Downtown is one thing, but this is a school.”
“Do you know of any place where the chaos runs more rampant?” he asked, getting out of the car with a grin.
“People kind of take schools seriously,” Lizzie said. “This is going to get everyone arrested.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Trevor said with a wide smile, coming around the car. She frowned at him and he pulled her forward, his hand in the middle of her back. She resisted for just a moment, then went along with him.
Robbie was here.
If Robbie was going to get himself in trouble, she’d rather be here to deal with it, rather than have to deal with the fallout as the police were starting the process to get him temporarily committed because he’d had an episode on the way to the station.
Because it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“Same as before, but different,” Trevor said, a lightness to his steps as he went along.
“Feeling better?” she asked. He grinned at her and winked.
“I always feel better when there’s stuff to do. I spend all my time trying to keep things from happening. Now I get to actually make them happen, and that’s fun.”
He stepped away from her and she looked around.
“At least there aren’t many people here,” she said. Trevor danced away from her on quick feet, still facing her.
“We might be crazy, darling, but we aren’t stupid.”
She smiled despite herself, and he settled a bit.
“You do need to stay close, though. Things can get a bit out of control, with this much going on.”
She frowned at him, and his eyes glittered at her.
“I thought this was a war,” she said. He nodded.
“And I’m the general.”
And then the duality of it snapped into place for her. There were still gaping holes in what she understood, but she caught a big piece.
“Lara was the other one,” she said, and he nodded quickly, almost manic.
“She was good. I was better, but she was good.”
“And you were friends?” Lizzie asked.
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “You have to understand, this stuff is going on everywhere, all the time. We just bring it to one place and do it right, once. It’s better this way.”
Lizzie shook her head, and he went to stand on the cement base of a lamp post, hands over his eyes as he scanned the front of the school.
“There,” he said, pointing. “That’s Sybil. She’s one of my lieutenants, if we had things like that. Good at getting things rolling.”
“Are you trying to draft me, Trevor?” she asked. He tossed his head back and laughed.
“Way to carry a metaphor,” he said. “Yes. I’m trying to draft you. Because I think you can do this. I know you can, and Robbie is convinced you’re just going to get yourself killed by being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She looked around.
She could spot Sybil doing cartwheels down the front hallway on the other side of great glass walls, but that was it.
Something caught her eye, something moving around the far corner of the building, but she wasn’t quick enough to spot which of Robbie’s friends it was.
Sybil came careening into the front window with the sound of a bird hitting glass, and she fell down, rolling and crawling like a deranged thing, and then someone else, moving too fast to be more than a shadow behind the reflective glass, came running up and grabbed her by the wrist.