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I walked down the leaf-covered sidewalk toward the train station. I didn’t know why I was walking to the train station, or rather, I knew why, but I didn’t know why I agreed to it. The pavement was wet from an all-day drizzle, and reds and yellows and browns stuck to my boots as I walked. I trudged past houses with little picket fences and big front porches and swing sets in the backyard, beneath branches that overhung like umbrellas colored brilliant red or pale yellow.
The air was silent and cool. I pulled my beige wool cap down lower over my ears and wiped the drizzle from my glasses before plunging my hands back into my pockets. I made the cap on my own. It was when I was in college and one my friends was good at that sort of thing, so one weekend he taught me how to knit. At home over Christmas break I knitted the stocking cap between mind-numbing conversations about my future with my great uncle Dwight and watching A Charlie Brown Christmas with a dozen little cousins climbing all over me. That’s what college was like – constant tension between breaking free and getting pulled back in. At least I came out of it with a stocking cap. That’s more than I could say I got from the fifteen years I’d known Erin. I thought I should turn and run back the other direction, back to my house and lock the doors and never worry about her again. I told her I’d see her, though, and for some reason my feet didn’t listen to my brain and I continued toward the train station.
I remember the day Erin came to stay with us. My parents had been fighting more around that time, and my dad had stopped going to church. I don’t know if that’s what started the fighting or merely resulted from it. Either way, he stopped going so I got to stay home with him on Sundays and sleep in, which was much better than putting on a collared shirt and wanting to drill a hole in my head for an hour and a half. I was in seventh grade. My biggest worries were whether I would make the basketball team, whether or not Jessica liked me, and whether I should pop the giant pimple on my forehead or let it go a while longer. Seventh graders shouldn’t worry about their parents fighting or about little girls taking their room. Sometimes a pimple is enough to shake things up. Yet, Erin crashed into my world fifteen years ago and in a way has been there ever since.
I moved most of my belongings out of my bedroom and into our unfinished basement early on a Saturday morning. Mom and Dad asked me the night before if it was okay that my cousin stayed in my room for a few months, since her parents were getting a divorce. I said no. They said she was coming. I wanted to tell them she wouldn’t get away from any fighting here. I wanted to tell them she wouldn’t fix their problems. I wanted to ask them if they were going to get a divorce. I packed my clothes into my dad’s leather suitcase and set them in the corner next to the sump pump. My bed was a cot my mother had bought the day before at Kmart. My lone basketball trophy rested on the concrete floor next to my bed. An extensive baseball card collection spread out over a tattered rug that no one wanted to buy at our last neighborhood garage sale. A bare light bulb illuminated my collection pretty well. Mom carried down a candle to add “ambience.” I never even brought matches down to light it. On the far end of our basement sat a various assortment of household objects – an old set of dishes, a lamp that didn’t work, my baby clothes, and our freezer. My mom told me I was lucky that I got to have a little sister and share my life with her. I wanted my room back.
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