by Aimee Bender
I watched her closely. She pulled covers to my chin.
“Sleep well, little Francie,” she said. “Bear will be with you all night long.”
She began to move about the room. This was about a week or so before she smashed her hand, and at that moment, for the last phase while I lived with her, her medication was largely in a phase of elegant titration, and despite the tape recorders in every room hidden beneath their white paper tents, we’d had a very good stretch of months. We’d been playing lots of card games. The living room walls were covered in drawings of castles we’d made together. She was enthusiastic and happy about almost every single thing I did. That night, she was wearing a new calico dress from Goodwill that suited her, with a long and floaty peasant skirt, her hair piled high upon her head like a woman from another era, secured in place by a kabob skewer. As I watched, she took her time reaching down and picking up all the various animals strewn on the floor, settling them into place on the rocking chair in the corner. She set the stuffed bear in the lap of the stuffed spaniel. She hung the stuffed monkey over the back of the chair rungs, linked by Velcro hands. She nestled the stuffed lions into a heap. It was such a comfort to see her attend to a category.
“Night-light, Francie?” she asked at the door, by the light switch.
“No, thank you.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
“Do you want any more animals with you in bed?”
“No.”
“You have your special blanket?”
“I can’t find it.”
“Really? Where was it last?”
“I think I maybe left it somewhere.”
“Oh no! Do you know where?”
“Esther’s.”
“Should I call her? I can easily call her—”
“No. I’ll tell her at school tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. If you’re sure. I’d be happy to call. Just come get me if you can’t sleep and you want me to, okay? Or anything else at all. You promise?”
“I promise.”
“I tell you, I’ve never even heard of a child who liked the dark. You really like it?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t scare you? You don’t see monsters and things in it, in the shapes of things?”
“No.”
“Did I just ruin it for you?”
“No.”
“You hug Bear tight if you need to, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Nothing’s going to hurt you, honey.”
“Okay.”
“Good night, darling. I love you.”
“Good night.”
Her face, at the light switch, shrunk into itself for a second, like an anemone poked by a finger.
When the overhead light went out and the door closed, she left me in darkness, lines of light drawn by the outside lampposts forming squares around the window shades. There were three important steps I needed to do. First, I moved my arms and legs up and down until Bear rolled off the pillow and returned to the carpet. Then, slipping out of bed softly, so soft on my toes, I reached the rocking chair in the dark, where it took only a few pushes for all those animals to tumble back to the floor, too. Finally, over to the door, where I very, very quietly turned the knob lock to horizontal.
It was a highly specific and memorable sensation, that turn. You might even say I waited all day for it. Testing the doorknob, and finding it tight. Jiggling it just to be sure. As the bolt slid into place inside the wall, everything else seemed to melt a little, and the room began to open and flow around me. The darkness lithe, even liquidy. Every day, this was the one time when I could feel myself loosen inside, not need to account for and check on my own clear outline in the world so many times over and over again. When the walls could become my delineation instead. A night-light would’ve only punctured things; even Bear was an irritant, when I preferred just my arms and legs to flap through the vast planes of sheets.
Far away, in the planet of the living room, I could hear my mother pressing buttons on the phone.
“Hey,” she said, “it’s me. Do you have a minute?”
The grays in my room began to sort into a color scale and I tiptoed back to the hulking storm-colored bed and climbed inside. It had been a good day at school. We had started working on color wheels.
“Thanks,” said Mom.
She lowered her voice, but the darkness worked as an amplifier and I could hear her well. She spoke first about her day, with a few cursory words toward her ever-present search for work, and a minute or two asking my aunt about herself.
“Good, good,” she said.
Then, a weighty silence.
“I know it’s small,” she said, “but it’s just she has no special animal she sleeps with, no blanket or anything. She left her beloved blanket at a friend’s house but she doesn’t even seem to care. Don’t you think that’s strange? Even just a little? Shouldn’t I worry?”
I paused, in the bed. Stopped stretching around so that I could hear her better. It wasn’t that I particularly cared about the blanket issue; I did, a little, but what I was noticing right then, what unsettled me much more, was that her voice was starting to cut a slight edge. It was barely anything, so subtle most people would only find it to be animated, but containing the millimeter of tonal difference that I was recognizing right then as a gateway.
“There’s something cold in her, don’t you think?” Mom said. “Is there?”
Was Minn hearing it too? Minn, on the other line, the only other person in the world equally attuned to these changes?
“Okay,” said my mother, after a minute. “You’re right. Okay.”
The medications, as they always did for her, would begin to tip out of their working order, the same way a top will ride so smoothly on its point and spin and spin like it could spin forever. My mother’s wobbling began slowly too, with daily room rearranging, and constantly fidgety hands, and then she’d start writing long urgent lists in notebooks of words I could no longer decipher, or she’d check the tape recorders repeatedly, making sure they were running, or after meals she’d ask to look in my mouth: “Open up,” a firm hand under my chin, like I was hoarding the food, like I had tucked a jewel under my tongue, a computer chip. She’d call me over and ask if I was real. She’d hand to me, as had so impressed Vicky, half-empty jars of pickles or mustard to give to my friends for their birthday parties.
Usually, Minn would hear the shift, too, even on the phone, and it would cue her to call up the doctors and get my mother in, and at first Mom’s medication adjustments would be too extreme and she would come home and sleep all the time, and I would go stare at her in her room sleeping, this captured thing, her body changing with weight and fluid retention, the clothes from Goodwill no longer fitting, back to Goodwill for a new round of larger sizes, Aunt Minn flying up to chaperone and buying me a scone at the coffee shop to distract me and explain things to me while my mother wept in front of the mirrors at the stretched new shape of her body. At the last round of this, well over a year ago, my aunt had just had another miscarriage, and had arrived pale, shoulders drawn, sad, and my mother had tried to soothe her but her thinking was muddy and she could not figure out what to say. “For the baby,” she had said, putting her hand on her sister’s shoulder, her eyes hunting, dredging for context. We were back at Goodwill then, after visits to the doctor, shopping the racks. “I’ll be your kid,” I remember telling Aunt Minn, when my mother went off to the dressing rooms with piles of clothing folded on her arm. My aunt didn’t shift her gaze. “Just kidding!” I said.
Inside my bedroom, in the pour of darkness, I kept my ears as alert as I could, but my mother was quiet as Minn spoke on the other side of the line. She was so quiet, in fact, that it was my picture of her that cla
rified, as if I was right there in the room, and I could vividly see my mother sitting on the stool, her skirt draping, the heel of her hand pressing into her forehead, the other hand perhaps beginning to draw lines in the telephone notebook nearby. One foot wrapped around the stool leg. The phone pressed to her ear with her shoulder. For a second, I could hold it all in my mind, but just as quickly the clarity began to fuzz, the image of her body beginning to crackle away, her and the things around her dispersing and evaporating, everything except the sharp metal skewer in her hair. Stuck in her hair, that remarkable hair, auburn and thick with waves, she a woman who was stopped on the street not irregularly and asked if she would be willing to donate a wig. Until that moment, I had seen it but not seen it. It was the minuscule shift in her voice that led me to recognize the skewer as something more than just a witty hairpin.
I got out of bed and unlocked the door.
“Mommy?” I said.
“She’s here, hang on—” She turned to me. Her eyes were wet, and even bigger than usual. I could see it in her face now, too, the beginning of the turn, the slight lack of focus in her features, as if they no longer had a uniting principle of face.
We’d had a long run, I remember thinking.
“I’m scared, Mommy.”
“I have to go, Minn. Francie’s scared. What’s wrong, honey? Did you see something? Do you want me to call about Blanket?”
“No. Put your hair down,” I said.
“My hair?”
“I want it down,” I said. “Please. Will you brush it on my face?”
She blinked at me, and then pulled out the skewer and there it was, tumbling, radiant, the healthiest part of her.
“Wash my face with it like you do sometimes,” I said.
She laughed with relief. Me, just a needy little kid. She lifted her hair up and let it fall over my face, and it smelled of citrus and sweat and I let it mother me, that hair, all the while acutely, even coldly, aware of her hand as she let the skewer roll out of it and onto the kitchen counter next to a crusty sandwich plate left over from lunch. Our faces touched.
“Under the hair curtain,” she whispered.
“Mommy,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I don’t like it when you put your hair high up,” I said.
“You don’t?”
“It scares me.”
“It does? I don’t have to do it. I’ll never do it again.”
“Don’t do it,” I said. “Then I can go to sleep.”
“Do you want the light on? I have that nice purple and silver Saturn night-light—”
“No.”
She rarely did the dishes before bed, so whatever was on the counter would likely stay on the counter until some other later unknown moment of cleaning energy, giving me enough time to pocket it in the morning and put it high in the closet, as I had done already with some of the sharper knives, wrapping them in T-shirts I had outgrown. It wasn’t ever clear that she would do something with the knives, but she talked about it sometimes, how things took on a glow to her, a kind of aura, and on this day, the change in her voice was enough to spur me to action. I did not hide the hammer, which she would use to smash her hand less than a week later; I didn’t think of it, and I could not put every single dangerous thing away. I could not rip out the electrical outlets and pull the wires from the walls and undo the garbage disposal. I had, one day, on a whim, brought the screwdriver to school and buried it in the recess garden, where a kindergartner had dug it up by accident and injured his thumb.
“I’ll tuck you back in. It’s late now, sweetie.”
She walked me over, and the door to my bedroom opened onto the cave of grays but she still saw the animals right away.
“Oh, goodness! How did they all get on the floor?”
“I don’t know.”
“All of them? Here, let me turn on the light for a second.”
“Too bright!”
“I’ll be quick—”
“I was just walking around in the dark a little bit and I guess they fell off.”
“Walking around, Francie? Really?”
“A little.”
“You have to be careful, honey. You might bump into things. See, a night-light would really help this—”
“No night-light.”
“Well. Let me settle them back, okay? Why is that shirt on your head?”
“It’s too bright. Sometimes they’re just on the floor when I wake up.”
She paused in the middle of the room, bending to pick up the animals. Her pretty feet, her chipped red toenails. “My father sleepwalked, you know. Maybe you do too. Oh, look at this—and Bear’s over here too!”
“I’ll take Bear.”
In my mind: bear.
“Now, okay. All better. Lights off. We’ll call Esther tomorrow, okay? Will you take the shirt off your head now, please?”
“Good night, Mommy. Thank you.”
“Good night, my sweet darling.”
“I love you, Mommy.”
She fell into herself. “Thank you, thank you. I love you too. I love you so much.”
“I can sleep now.”
“You go to sleep, little person. Sweet dreams.”
* * *
—
I dozed off shortly after, once the door was relocked, and the animals were back on the floor.
* * *
—
I don’t know when I dozed off in the loft apartment, but it was late, much later, into the early hours of morning.
* * *
—
At six o’clock, an alarm sent its pellets of beeps into the darkness. Every beep pelting the warm cove of blankets like a BB gun.
“Sorry! Sorry,” said a voice, “I forgot to turn it off.”
The heater had clicked off hours before. The room to which I awoke looked cold and entirely new. Some kind of blobby corner chair, wooden frames around unseeable pictures, higher walls, thin gray sunlight pearling behind floral curtains. A heavy brindled animal stretched its legs down a ladder and hopped onto my blankets.
“That’s Hattie,” said the voice, laughing, from above. “He’s friendly. It’s early. Do you want to keep sleeping?”
“No. Thank you.”
The voice, a voice I knew well enough from several years of visits, worked on me like a map, and I could almost track the shift as my brain reorganized the information in the room into familiarity, pinning down the TV with the fringy scarf, the green schoolbag that I’d seen earlier leaning against a far corner, the ball bearing that was the day of the week circling through a ring of wooden time grooves into its slot: Saturday. And then there was the babysitter herself, stepping off the bottom rung of her ladder, sitting down at the edge of my bed, where Hattie traversed the bumps to settle on her leg, purring. How odd to see her up close, in her pajamas, floral pink and green, hair mussed, smiling at me, face washed clear of lipstick and daytime.
“He sleeps up in the loft; sorry, I forgot to tell you. You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you feel stuffy?”
“No.”
“How did you sleep?”
“He was here the whole time?”
“Asleep. He’s old. He sleeps a lot. Watch, he’ll have his breakfast and then climb right back up.”
She scratched behind his ears.
“You look a little tired,” she said, gently. “You’re sure you don’t want to go back to sleep?”
“No, thank you.”
She stood and put a pot of coffee on in the kitchenette. Hattie jumped to the floor to rub his side against the couch edge.
“Then we are up,” she said. “Hey, your uncle called,” looking at her phone, clicking on some buttons and listening and smil
ing. “They had the baby!” then playing it back to me, his excited, trembly voice: “She’s here, little Victoria, she’s so beautiful! Five pounds, eleven ounces. Tons of hair.”
“May I have some coffee, too?”
“No, sweetie,” she said, clicking it off. “It’s not for kids.”
“My mom gives it to me all the time,” which was not true.
“Really?”
“With cream and sugar.”
“You can have a sip.”
Bitter, bitter.
Still, it was so much better than drowning in nighttime, this sitting with her at a kitchen table, her preparing oatmeal for me in a yellow bowl with green leaves twining around the rim, her leaning back on the counter with her hands wrapped around the warmth of a coffee mug. Hattie found his food bowl and began nosing around the kibble.
The babysitter sipped her coffee. I could feel the monster there with us, though I did not know yet what it was. I could feel it in her apartment.
“You okay?” she asked.
“The oatmeal is good.”
“I’m glad. But save room, okay? We’ll go to the brunch place together soon.”
“Okay.”
“They open at nine. We can walk. There’ll be a line so it’s good to get there early, but we still have tons of time and I have to shower and stuff. Do you mind if I do?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll go to your place and get what you need and get you packed. The train isn’t until tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I have to check what time. I think ten or eleven? Something like that. Do you want to watch the lion show again while I get ready?”
“Sure.”
She washed my bowl, and rinsed my bowl, and set my bowl in the drying rack. Then she washed her mug, and rinsed her mug, and set her mug in the drying rack. She saw my spoon on the table, picked up my spoon, and soaped and rinsed it, too. These actions were like manna to me, and while she showered I went to the drying rack and looked at the things in there, dripping, and the clean white bottom of her kitchen sink.
