Oh Brother

• Sarah Cahalan, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2008

Flowers and sympathy cards strewed around our house. Every time the doorbell rang I shuddered, knowing it was more people to “express their sorrow”.
Mum would open the door; smile and thank the visitor, all the while hoping they wouldn’t want to stay and talk. When they did she would endure their kind words with a hard patience. Once they left, she would retreat to the bathroom, not emerging for a couple of hours.

“Hey Dad!” Aaron yelled from the front garden.
“Yeah?” Dad asked him.
“Can I hitch the trailer up to the four wheel drive?” Aaron asked sweetly.
Dad laughed. “You ask me this every time we go away!”
He looked at Aaron’s puppy dog eyes, and became sombre.
“Son, look at our driveway,” he said.
Aaron and I both looked at it. We lived in the hills and it was a steeply angled driveway. Our double garage lay at the foot of it.
“Your point?” Aaron replied aggressively, stung at being rejected again.
“My point is that if you didn’t hook the trailer up right, the damned thing could go straight through those garage doors!” Dad exploded. “Meaning hundreds of dollars in repairs!”
Aaron glared at Dad and stalked up to his room, slamming every door on his way.

I lay in my bed, staring at his side of my room. It hadn’t been packed up yet. None of us could do it. It meant forgetting about him, and we weren’t ready to forget.
I could hear the half-whispered conversation of my parents in the next room.
“I just can’t help wondering,” Dad said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Mum said meekly.
“But if I hadn’t let him do it, he wouldn’t have…”
“Don’t say that,” Mum chided.
I’ve heard them have this conversation before.
It runs along the same lines every time.
Mum says she doesn’t blame Dad, but sometimes when I see her looking at him, I catch a glimmer of hate behind her eyes.

That day the air was still and oppressive. I watched as Dad and Mum packed the trailer. Dad was checking the wheels while Aaron looked over the connection between the trailer and the car.
“Alright, I’m taking the car and trailer up the drive now,” Dad said. Aaron beamed.
He’d been happy for days. Dad had finally decided to give him the responsibility of hooking the trailer up to the car.

It’s hard to remember what happened next clearly.
I remember Aaron running towards the trailer as he saw it unhitch.
The crunch of his body under the wheels.
The scraping of the garage doors as the trailer hit them.
Then the horrible screaming of my Mum. The wretched sobbing of my Dad. Noises I had never heard them make before.

Moving vans and packed boxes.
Two years on we realised we couldn’t live in our house anymore. Seeing the driveway and reliving that memory everyday.
So we did the easiest thing to do; we ran from it.