The Empty Room by Lauren B. Davis

Author:Lauren B. Davis [Davis, Lauren B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781443418317
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

JUST KEEP WALKING

Liam, Colleen’s cousin, was five years younger than she. A long, gawky kid with a shy smile and a floppy mop of brown hair he either hid under or blew out of his eyes, he was the black sheep of the family, the one they all tut-tutted about, starting as far back as when he was fourteen and he dropped acid, then spent the night sitting in a farmer’s field with a shotgun under his chin. He’d spent a year in the mental institution after that, where he drew thousands of pictures of fantastical birds and beasts of his own imagining. Everyone said he could have a career as an illustrator if he wanted. Maybe he did want, but he wanted to get high more.

He was what they called a “garbage head,” meaning he’d take anything to get high, from booze to pot to pills to crack to meth. When he was around thirty he told the story of how he found a red capsule on the sidewalk and popped it into his mouth, delighted at the mystery.

“But it could have been anything!” Colleen had shrieked.

“That’s the fun part,” he replied.

He couldn’t hold a job. He mowed the lawn at a golf course for a while, and worked as an orderly on the palliative care wing of a hospital, which, Colleen thought, was a spectacularly bad place for a drug addict to work. Sure enough, he was fired for pilfering opiates. He did day-labour and delivered pizzas and worked for a lawn service and a dry cleaner and a variety of fast-food joints. He got fired from or quit them all. For a while he lived with a woman, fifteen years older than he, who had four kids. If nothing else, they shared a love of the pipe. His parents, Colleen’s paternal aunt and her husband, made sure he had groceries, and when he wasn’t living in their basement transferred twenty dollars a day into a bank account they’d set up for him.

He got clean when he was in his early thirties, and it seemed as though he might just be all right after all. He visited Colleen now and again. They went out for lunch, and although he said he didn’t mind if she had a glass of wine, she didn’t drink around him. Once she let him sleep on her couch for a week when he was between places. The second night he was there, just after they’d shared a dinner of lasagna and salad, he said he’d like to go to a meeting, and did she want to come.

“A meeting? What, for addicts?”

He grinned at her over his coffee cup. “Addicts and alcoholics, yeah. There are some really nice people there. You might even meet someone, you know?”

“I don’t think so.” Looking for a date at a meeting of alcoholics and addicts seemed akin to looking for one in a mental institution.

“Okay, forget romance. Aren’t you curious?”

She considered this. She was a bit. Liam had been such a horrible mess six months ago.

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