By K.F. Hope

2002

I found him, just sitting and staring, all alone at the top of the basement stairs. 

“What are you doing?” I asked. He was nine years old, skinny, denim shorts and socks pulled halfway up his calves. 

“Mom asked me to get something.” He didn’t look at me. “I don’t want to go down by myself.”

I didn’t know big brothers got scared. I sat down next to him, studying the stairs that led down, down, down to where the lights didn’t reach the corners, where the laundry machines growled like monsters. 

I wish I could remember exactly what was said. 

“I could go with you,” I must have offered, thinking he’d turn me away, tell me he didn’t need his little sister to help him conquer the basement. He must have agreed, because I remember clearly that we crept down the steep and squeaky steps together. I remember that I held his hand, and he didn’t pull away. He let me be brave where he was weak. He completed his mission just as the washing machine buzzed loudly, suddenly, and we both scrambled back up the stairs with screaming laughter. 

~

2014

I didn’t want to come home, but there was nowhere else to go for Winter Break but back to wherever you came from, or had run from. Finals had sucked, I was anxious about my grades, my boyfriend, my life, and how I felt disconnected from my family even when in the same house. But no one cared about me right then, because he’d fucked it all up again. Dad yelled, yelled, and yelled while he lay withdrawing on the couch. I was nosey, working on my laptop in the kitchen just to watch it all go down. Dad eventually went upstairs, and it was just the two of us: me typing away at the kitchen counter, pretending not to care, and him sweating and shaking under a woven blanket on the sofa in the den. 

He called my name twice before I answered. I was afraid to hear what he’d say, or ask, or want. We hadn’t spoken much in the few years prior. 

“Do you need something?” I asked, thinking of water, food, another blanket, but he caught me off guard in the way only he could.

“Could—could you hold my hand?” It was a whimper, like a child who feared the dark or the unknown of life while they slept through the night. 

I remember thinking of him at the top of the stairs. I remembered that he could get scared.

“Yeah, sure.”

I talked about school, my boyfriend, the weather. He talked of demons, regrets, needles. I didn’t leave until he fell asleep, but then I went to his room to reclaim some money he said he’d stolen from me earlier. When I went to bed, I wanted to scream.

~

2022

The doctor said they’d try dialysis to filter the sepsis from his blood. I was there, without Mom and Dad, who’d been phoned in through a receiver on the waiting room wall.

“He’s very weak,” the doctor was saying. “He’s done a lot of damage to his body, but he’s still so young, and if the dialysis is successful, then maybe he’ll pull through.”

Maybe, maybe, maybe, I thought. What a lovely little lie.

“Is he in any pain?” I blurted. It’s not what I meant to ask. The doctor had said he’d been seizing for hours, that they had no way of measuring his brain activity. They believed there was none, but couldn’t be sure. I hoped that he didn’t feel afraid, or better yet, that he felt nothing at all.

My question was repeated to our parents before it was explained that if there was anything left of his mind, then the pain he might feel was suppressed by the drugs they had him on. We agreed to the dialysis, and they said it would take hours. 

I stayed. 

I didn’t know if he was aware, if he knew what was happening, or if he’d been scared. Just in case, I held his hand and tried to ignore all the tubes coming out of him, and the beeping of the machines, and how cold and blue his skin was.

“I’m here,” I said. It was all I could do. It was all I was ever able to do.

The dialysis filter clogged. I didn’t know that could happen. The doctor said they’d done what they could, that he was too weak, the infection too advanced. It was time to let him go, and we did. And I did the only thing I could as he was unhooked from all the things keeping his body alive. 

I sat holding his hand at the top of the stairs.