The O'Brien Thing

I

Megan O'Brien woke up at seven on a Tuesday in Cleveland and made coffee in a pot that had been making coffee since 1998 and smelled faintly of it, even when it was clean. She drank it standing in her kitchen in a small apartment in Ohio City, looking out the window at the apartment building across the street where a woman was hanging laundry on a balcony that should not have been there and probably was not up to code.

She was twenty-five years old. She worked part-time at a pharmacy in Lakewood. She delivered food in the evenings for an app that paid per delivery and did not care whether she was happy or cold or tired. She had been doing all of these things for two years, since she moved to Cleveland from a small town in eastern Ohio where she had grown up and nobody had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up because nobody thought she would grow up and leave.

Her car made a sound when it went above thirty miles per hour. She ignored the sound. The sound ignored her. This was their relationship.

She got dressed in clothes that were clean but not new -- a blue sweater with a hole in the sleeve she had not mended, jeans that fit well enough, shoes that had been resoled once and would need it again. She looked in the mirror above the sink and saw a face that was plain in the way that plain is not an insult but a description. She had brown hair and brown eyes and a mouth that could smile if she tried.

She left the apartment at eight. She drove to the pharmacy in Lakewood. She stocked shelves and counted pills and smiled at the old man who came in every Tuesday to buy the same medication and ask the same question: Is it working? I don't know, Megan says. But it's something.

II

Derek Walsh lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Ohio City that smelled of old books and old decisions. He was thirty-one, a former criminal defense lawyer who had lost his license after a combination of poor judgment and worse timing. He lived on occasional freelance writing jobs that paid poorly and a check from his mother that he did not ask for but did not refuse.

He met Megan when she delivered food to his apartment at 11 PM on a Tuesday. She was carrying a bag from a Chinese place in Gordon Square, and he opened the door and said thank you and noticed that she was looking at the books stacked against every wall in his apartment and that her expression was not judgmental but curious, which was rarer in his experience.

"You read?" he asked.

"I read sometimes."

"Sometimes?"

"When I can find something worth reading."

He looked at her. She looked back. The door was open. The hallway light was flickering. Somewhere below them, a television was on.

"Come in," he said.

She came in. She looked at the books. He looked at her looking at the books.

"What do you read?" she asked.

"Sometimes Carver. Sometimes the law review articles I used to write and now pretend I never did."

"Carver is good."

"He is. He writes about people who are trying to figure out the difference between unhappy and not happy. It's a important distinction. Most people never make it."

She nodded. She had made it. Or she was making it. She was not sure which.

"Can I -- " She gestured at the books on the table. "Can I read one?"

He pulled a book from the stack -- something by Raymond Carver, she could not tell which one -- and handed it to her. She sat on the edge of the sofa -- the cushions were worn but the fabric was clean -- and opened the book and read.

He made coffee. They drank it. She read more. It was 1 AM when she left, and he walked her to the door, and she said thank you again, and this time it meant something different than the delivery.

III

They began a quiet relationship. She delivered food to his apartment on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he recommended books, and she read them, and she brought them back to him when she was finished with notes written in the margins in a handwriting that was neat but not fussy.

He taught her how to read differently -- not just the words but the space between them, the things the author left out, the silences that were as important as the speech. She taught him how to leave his apartment without a reason -- for walks along the lakefront, for breakfast at a diner that had been open since 1952, for parking lots where they sat in his old Honda and talked about nothing.

Sean, her older brother, noticed she seemed different. He was a food delivery rider, like her, driving the same routes for a different app. He was loud in a way that was meant to cover something. He drank too much on weekends. He had a talent for making jokes that were only half funny.

"You've been different lately," he said one evening, sitting on her sofa in the apartment she shared with him -- not romantically, just practically, because Cleveland rent was high and two people could share a place cheaper than one.

"I've been reading more," she said.

"That's it? You've been different because you're reading?"

"I think so."

He looked at her for a long time. He did not ask what she was reading. He knew better than to ask things that had to do with the changes he could sense but not name.

"Okay," he said. "Just don't read so much you forget to eat."

IV

The city was a presence in their lives. Cleveland was not a romantic place. It was a collection of neighborhoods strung together by cracked highways and Lake Erie's indifferent shoreline. The factories had closed. The population had declined. The opioid crisis had taken people and left their families sitting in living rooms that looked exactly the same as they had a year before but felt like they belonged to a different world.

People stayed anyway. Megan's brother stayed. Derek stayed. The old man at the pharmacy stayed. The woman hanging laundry on the illegal balcony stayed. This stubbornness was its own kind of courage, or its own kind of despair. Megan had not decided which.

She started keeping a list of things she wanted, writing it on the back of pharmacy receipts. The list was short:

A car that doesn't make a sound. A book I haven't read yet. Something to eat that isn't from a diner.

She added to it when she could. Derek saw the list once, on the back of a receipt for medicine the old man at the pharmacy bought every Tuesday. He read it and said nothing and then said, "You should add more."

"Like what?"

"Like the color of the lake in winter. Like the sound of your brother laughing at his own joke. Like -- " He stopped. "Like things you notice. Not things you want. Things you notice."

She added them to the list.

V

Derek's past caught up with him in October. A man came to his apartment -- old client, old debt, old allegiance -- and asked for something Derek could not give. Megan was in the kitchen making coffee. She could hear the voices in the living room but not the words, and the sound of voices without words was the sound of danger, and she had learned that much in twenty-five years of life: when you cannot hear the words but you can hear the voices, something is wrong.

Derek saw her. He mouthed one word: Stay.

She did not stay. She went to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and called Sean.

Sean drove to Derek's apartment in a rage. He was twenty-eight years old and he drove too fast and he parked too hard and he kicked Derek's front door and Derek opened it and said, "Sean, what -- "

"What are you doing?" Sean said. "What are you involved in? What is -- "

"Sean, go home."

"This is my sister. She delivers food for you. She reads your books. She sits in your apartment and drinks your coffee and I can tell she's happy, not happy, trying to figure out the difference, and you're -- "

"Sean." Derek's voice was calm. It was the calm of a man who has been here before and knows how this ends. "Go home. Tell Megan you visited. Don't tell her about this."

Sean looked at him. He looked at the space behind Derek, where Megan was standing in the kitchen, holding a phone she had already put down, holding a question she would never ask.

"I'm her brother," Sean said.

"I know."

"Then protect her."

"I'm trying."

Sean left. Derek closed the door. Megan stood in the kitchen with a cup of coffee she would not drink.

"Stay away from me, Derek," she said.

"Eleanor -- " He started to say her name wrong. He had been calling her Megan. He had been calling her Megan and she had let him. "Megan. Stay away."

"Then stay away yourself."

VI

He left Cleveland in November. He did not say goodbye. He left his books on the shelves. He left his coffee in the cupboard. He left a small object on Megan's passenger seat one morning when she delivered food to his empty apartment -- a dragonfly, made from a twist tie, yellow from the bag it had been twisted from.

She put it on the dashboard and drove. The car made its sound above thirty miles per hour. She drove below thirty.

Sean stopped asking about him. He continued delivering food. He continued working at the pharmacy. He continued writing on the back of receipts.

The list of things she wanted was unfinished. She was okay with that. The things she had noticed were enough, most of the time. The lake in winter was grey and still. Her brother laughed at his own jokes and she laughed too, which was not the same as laughing at a joke but was its own thing. The coffee from the diner was bad but it was bad together.

She drove through Cleveland on a Thursday in December. The sky was the colour of the pharmacy shelves. The highway was cracked. The bridge to Canada was empty. The lake was steel.

She stopped at a red light and looked at the dragonfly on her dashboard. It was made from a twist tie. It was held together by twist and intention. It was fragile in the way that all things made by hand are fragile.

She thought about Derek. She thought about Sean. She thought about the man at the pharmacy and his question that was not a question: Is it working?

I don't know, she wanted to say. But it's something.

The light turned green. She drove. The car did not make its sound. The dragonfly did not fall off. The list of things she wanted remained unfinished, and the things she had noticed remained noted, and this was not a happy ending and it was not a sad ending and it was not an ending at all.

It was a Tuesday in Cleveland. It was a life. It was enough.

Author Note & Copyright: