Leanne's Life in a Box

When we rolled up the storage unit door, several dozen boxes fell out. And then some more and some more until we felt as though we were standing in front of a cardboard avalanche. We both took a big sigh and began to stack the fallen boxes outside the door.

What mostly fell out of the boxes were household objects: candle holders, wine stoppers, Tupperware, and the odd stuffed animal. Once we cleared the boxes, it became more obvious. Our sister had lived here for years.

The fallen boxes revealed a small foam mattress in the center of the unit and a pillow with no case and one grimy bedsheet. Surrounding the bed were some of her clothes and empty food containers and soda bottles and newspapers and some mail and food wrappers that had been chewed on by rats.

We also found dozens of bottles of various sizes with yellow and brown liquid in them, which we determined must be urine.

We were here to clean out her things; neither of us knew where to start. Start at the beginning, I guess, said our brother David.

But the beginning would soon prove to be hard to find. We moved aside all we could to make a path into the unit. Two mice hightailed it past us to get out of there, thinking they were being attacked. They had full run of the place until now, and we were evicting them.

Leanne had a mental illness, undiagnosed, unmedicated, and left to run wild.

Until they found her body in the alleyway behind the storage unit and notified us of her passing, we didn't know where she was living. Prior to here, it was under the viaduct, and when they tore that down, she moved to West Seattle and lived in a tent, in the brush with her so-called boyfriend Marvin, who had HIV and Hepatitis and probably a whole host of other things from years of living in the urban wilderness.

It seems Leanne moved in here when Marvin was killed by a train, a train she had planned to hop with him but never made it.

Our sister had been estranged from us since our mid-teens. She was the oldest. She dropped out of high school in her senior year when she said the voices in her head told her she needed to leave. Our parents tried to dissuade her.

She targeted the janitor in particular, who she said stole her clothes every day, even though she never once came home naked.

The last time I met with her was three years ago. I saw her on the street panhandling during rush hour traffic. I slowed down and pulled my car over and handed her two twenty-dollar bills out the window. She looked right into my eyes but made no sign that she recognized me until I said her name.

Then she turned away, picked up her cardboard sign, and ran across oncoming traffic to get away. She came perilously close to getting hit and didn't seem to mind. She disappeared then into the thicket of homeless tents and vehicles which I was not going to venture into.

After that, my husband Terry told me to just wash my hands of her, which I was unwilling to do for quite a while, but after the panhandling incident, I thought he was probably right.

And now here we are, my brother and I, standing amongst the detritus of her life. I reach down and pick up a piece of paper that has writing on it. The papers are all stained and are mostly made up of torn pieces out of magazines and other pieces of paper she found on the streets.

I recognized her handwriting. Most of what she wrote involved the voices in her head, things about the CIA and the FBI, and how they were coming to get her.

She seemed to have days or periods where she focused on words beginning with certain letters. One series had words that mostly began with the letter P: pentagon, politics, penis, president, and psychiatrist. Then the next series of writings all started with the letter S: Soviet, spy, sex, satellite, and Satan. And then one with D words: devil, democracy, disgrace, diplomat, and disease.

Then there were things that I could not find a pattern to and which made no sense, like this one: "Surrogate lovers for every soldier and a chicken in every pot. All special ops soldiers must have surrogate lovers. Who is responsible for SCORPION funding and training? Who in DC approved funding for Nazi police brutality training?"

As we dug around the unit, we found hundreds of pages, just like the first one I found. They all had the same themes. She also wrote how the storage unit was the only place that she could get away from constant cyber surveillance, how it was the only place she was safe from being raped by the cybers, which were constantly on the lookout for her.

Once when she was in jail  - for threatening to kill her neighbor – she asked the guard if she was buzzing her vagina when he pushed the button on his walkie-talkie to speak to another officer.

We tried, in the early years, to get her some psychiatric help, but she refused to go and said, "Don't you know, rape is right there in the middle of the word therapist. The word literally means, 'the rapist.'" She said this to me as though I were the idiot who couldn't figure things out. There just didn't seem to be a way to convince her that there was something wrong. It was always someone else's fault.

The man who managed the storage unit dropped by as we were clearing things out. His name is Abdul. He is a shy, pleasant man in his forties. He said he knew our sister, talked to her every time she came or went, and he was around. He had no clue she was living on the premises, which was strictly against the rules.

We apologized on her behalf, and then he sheepishly asked for the rent she hadn't paid, just over three months' worth. I got his card and told him I would put a check in the mail the following day.

We kept digging and sorting. Most of what we found was not salvageable. We threw out all the trash and most of her clothes which were soiled and torn. We also threw out her bedding and any other item not worthy of going to second-hand stores.

I opened a box that initially seemed to be full of books. I remember how she used to love to read as a child and one day wanted to be an author. Inside the box of books, I found a whole host of photos of our family when we were young. Most of the photos were of us, kids. Leanne would have been eleven or twelve, David a year younger, and me a year younger still. In any of the photos of our stepfather, he was scratched out, replaced by angry jagged white marks, an attempt to remove him from the shot. Why she hadn't just cut him out, I'll never know.

I show David the pictures. He shakes his head and continues sorting and taping. I end up taking one of the photos, one without our stepfather. It's just the three of us camping at Redwoods State Park. We are wearing swimsuits and eating ice cream out of cones, and Leanne has the sweetest smile on her face. It may be one of the last times I saw her smile like that.

Once the unit is empty, and her stuff is packed in the moving van, I take one last look at the place she used to call home. I almost start to cry. The unit is empty and awaits its next owner's stuff. I pull down the door and walk to my car.

I place the photo on the seat next to me on the ride home. I roll down the windows to let the heat out and the wind flies in just right and picks up the photo and pulls it out of the car. In my rearview, I see it land next to the freeway on top of a load of trash. The irony of it hits me as the tears begin to fall.