Sybil is fifty and a caregiver. She’s exhausted, worn out from always putting her stepmother’s needs before her own. Most nights, she can’t sleep. She helps her stepmother get dressed, counts her pills, and tries to decide what to cook. No matter what she does, her stepmother always finds something to complain about—too little, too much, never quite right.
She remembers holding her father’s loving hand. Sybil never wanted to let go, afraid of being left alone with her stepmother. After her father died, her world shrank a little more each day until she felt like she was nothing but arms lifting and feet pacing the same hallway she had once walked with him.
She dreams of escaping to a beach on the Pacific Coast, floating in the ocean, wrapped in soft green seaweed. She imagines the sting of salt on her skin giving way to a soothing warmth.
That’s exactly what she plans to do—escape. She thinks about it day and night.
She has made all the arrangements. There’s no turning back now. No one will know for certain.
Her plans are underway. She needs to get rid of the problem, so she starts by swapping her stepmother’s heart medication for vitamins, taking care to hide what she’s doing.
Is this desperation, or her path to freedom?
Heat presses against Sybil’s skin, and the air shimmers darkly around her stepmother like a mirage. She closes her eyes as sweat trickles down her back.
Time passes. Her plans are working. Her stepmother has begun complaining of chest pain. Soon, it will all be over—the house will be quiet.
And it was. Not a whisper could be heard. Not a sound.
Until the swish of sweeping the floor and the closing of a door.
Sybil steps outside and gets into the back seat of a black limousine parked at the curb.
However, the trip isn’t going as planned. Traffic has stalled. Horns blare, and people shout in the streets. Little boys in worn T-shirts and patched jeans dart between cars. Little girls clutch Barbie dolls and cry.
Sybil’s breathing tightens. She tells herself to stay calm.
Terrible thoughts keep coming to Sybil: distorted faces, walkers rolling on their own, and empty wheelchairs bumping into walls like drunks.
Overwhelmed, Sybil leans forward. Her neck muscles tighten. Like an animal in pain, she cries out to the driver, “Take me home.”
“Sorry, no turning back,” the driver says.
Her phone lights up in her lap, right on cue. A message she hadn’t opened before sits at the top of the screen: BLACK CAR CONFIRMED. Destination on file. Changes not permitted after pickup.
She stares at the words until they blur on the screen.
Then the driver slowly meets her gaze in the mirror. For a moment, his face looks strange yet familiar, as if her mind were superimposing an old photograph of her father onto the man.
Fear surges, burning in her chest. Her hands claw at the seatbelt. She can’t tell whether the car is moving. “I changed my mind. Take me home,” she says, her voice rising from a whisper to a shout. Then she thinks, home? Home isn’t home. It’s the run-down house where cruelty lived. She remembers the sting of her stepmother’s cackle, the sour tang of her breath, and eyes brimming with contempt. She tells the driver, “Keep driving. Stick to the plan.”
Sybil blinks away the image of the house and her stepmother’s corpse.
•••
The next day, Sybil lies peacefully, wrapped in seaweed. Her arms rest in the cool tide, slender fingers curled gently in the wet sand. The ocean laps around her as sunlight filters down. In the tide, seaweed cooled her skin. Wet sand slid through her fingers. The ocean asked nothing. The kelp at her wrists drifted away.