I wonder if I’ll find her dead inside. This is something I worry about. I don’t want to find her dead, I don’t want to be the one that finds her—would it be gruesome? How would she do it? I think probably pills, but maybe a razor blade, and I don’t want her PTSD to give me PTSD and then I feel selfish for even having that thought but—I wonder if I’ll find her dead inside. This is something I worry about.
I’m sitting in my car, parked in the narrow lot outside our building. It’s raining, the New England autumn chill is seeping steadily in, and my windshield wipers are still on even though I’m not driving anymore. Each soft thump of the wipers sends the water gushing across my vision, makes the house undulate and waver like it’s sinking. I can’t go in yet because right now in my head the bathroom tiles are clean, and if I go inside I might find them splashed a violent red. Or maybe she’ll be hanging—why do I always picture this happening in the bathroom? Why can’t I stop?
My thoughts drift to the chocolate cake she bought me when we first moved into 15 Whipple Avenue together, after her brother and I got back from Paris at the end of the summer, when I finally realized that he was never going to marry me and maybe it was a mistake to agree—to offer—to look after his little sister during her first year in Boston. Because she did need looking after, she still needs looking after, and I thought—I thought—who better than me, who will one day be her family? Who better than me, when I spend my days taking care of young people at work? I can do this, I had thought. I love her brother, and so she’s my sister, and I’m trained for this.
But I was so stupid, before, so arrogant even though I hadn’t meant to be. I just wanted to help, but I didn’t know then what it had done to her. What it’s still doing to her. It still keeps her up at night, and because she’s up I’m up, listening to the creaking of the kitchen floorboards beneath her feet as she paces back and forth, and they whisper to her Go to sleep, Sarah, sleep softly. Or sometimes instead I wonder about why she stays with her long-distance boyfriend even though she screams at him—a bottle of wine in—from our basement every other night. She thinks I can’t hear her, when she yells in the basement, but the vents carry her voice to me, beg me to step in, and I don’t know how. I’m not trained for this.
A door slams nearby and I realize I’m still in the car. I reach out and turn the windshield wipers off, turn the car off. Remove the keys from the ignition. This is progress. Slowly, slowly. What if she dies, while I’m moving slowly? What if my time in the parking lot is what kills her? I don’t want to leave her in there alone, but I spend more time in the parking lot every day.
It hadn’t always been like this. First there was cake, and a therapist, and perfume in my purse that she could spray on her scarf to block the smell of cigarettes while we walked outside. The men were smoking, she said, when it happened. While they did it. And now—now she can’t smell smoke without remembering, and the first time I saw her remember I understood, suddenly and vividly, what it meant to have a thousand-yard stare.
But her move to Boston wasn’t as bad as we feared it would be, and we figured out that the perfume in the purse worked and that therapy worked and that we could do this. Before now, there were trips to the grocery store together, and to my friend’s house in a rented pickup truck to buy a used sofa that made us feel grown up. There were snow days that we spent killing bottles of red wine, watching the Marvel movies in order because I was obsessed with Captain America being gay for Bucky and I wanted her to experience their epic love and really, when better to do that than on snow days with red wine? Our first year in our apartment passed like that, with us together, watching movies, facing her demons, and even though I wasn’t with her brother anymore I was still with her. Her friend.
And then the season changed, morphed into spring, and sometime over the summer she decided she didn’t have PTSD anymore. Fall came around again and she told me she didn’t need a therapist anymore, either, because she was cured, but I wasn’t sure so I kept the perfume in my purse anyway. Just in case.
And now I’m sitting in my car, homeless, wondering if I’ll find her dead inside.
Caitlin O’Brien received her Bachelor of Arts with a focus in Creative Writing from the University of Rochester in 2011. She then earned her Master’s degree at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in 2019. Her favorite genre to read is fantasy, although most of her own work is creative non-fiction or poetry. She is currently a literature teacher and resides in Naples, Florida, USA.