The Innocent Sleep

by Karen Perry

  “I don’t think Robin will be into it,” I said to Coz.

  “Okay, so we’ll do it when she is out.”

  After work, Robin often liked to walk at night. I’m not saying it was safe or that I approved, but she took in the sights, cleared her head, and very often went to an Internet café or somewhere she could make or receive a phone call. She liked to stay in regular contact with her parents, and when I say “regular,” I mean every second day. I did not have that problem. Even if my parents had been alive, I don’t think I would have been in touch that often. But it was Robin’s business. In any case, that and her work at the bar allowed me to join in with the séances. I remembered something about Yeats getting involved in séances, way back when, and I thought Cozimo’s flighty idea might generate some ideas for my own work, my painting, and that it might be some fun. Yes, I was curious. And I was high.

  The thing was, before that first séance, Dillon had fallen asleep on the dinner table at the apartment. I know it sounds strange, but things were free and easy and often out of kilter. The large oak table we ate at also had a dip at the end of it, where Dillon sometimes climbed. I often put a cushion up there, and late at night he would climb up and fall asleep. I think he was about two when we had this first séance. Two Spanish sisters I had never met before and a local couple Cozimo had befriended the previous week were there, too. “What about Dillon?” Cozimo asked. “Can you put him to bed?”

  “I’d hate to wake him,” I said.

  Dillon was a bad sleeper. Straight and simple. In the past it had had nothing to do with teething or growth spurts or the noise from outside, the hawkers or touts, the music from across the street, the heaving mass of the city, none of it; he was like his father, pure and simple, a bad sleeper. No, wait a minute; he was worse. Probably, if we had gone to check it out, we would have been told it was some kind of condition. But we didn’t. We struggled on. It was like this; he could stay awake for hours. I’m talking all night. Now, Robin and I had been night owls, back in our college days, but in Tangier we were super conscious of the light, the daylight. We had to have as much of it as possible. That’s what we had come for. That’s what made the paintings possible. The strange and beautiful light of Tangier, its radiant and dusty history.

  But we became exhausted. Missing the morning light because of lack of sleep made me sick. I started taking pills to either keep me going when I woke or to get me to sleep at night so I could be up to catch that fiery dawn light I wanted in my paintings. Cozimo had a cabinet full of pills. In one pencil case, he kept the pills he needed for a week; a generous soul, he offered me pretty much what I wanted or what he thought I needed. Of course, I didn’t tell Robin about taking these pills. But to paint, to be ready for the canvas, I needed to be there; I couldn’t afford to be exhausted from lack of sleep.

  The first pill I tried was a sleeping pill. I took it at half eleven at night and slept till seven A.M. Robin wasn’t suspicious. She was happy I had gotten some rest. “If only I could sleep like that,” she said. “Dillon was awake half the night.”

  When the lack of sleep started to take something of a toll and Robin lost weight and dark rings formed about her eyes, I thought that, rather than offering her a pill, I would get the little man to sleep with a quarter of a pill. Then maybe she could rest. I crushed the pill up in the kitchen and poured it into a glass of warm milk. It dissolved, and Dillon never noticed. I know I should never have done that. But it felt almost as if someone else was doing it. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice was saying, Bad idea, very bad idea, stop, but the other Harry, the one who moved and spoke and did things, he carried on regardless, and after that first night when our Dillon slept properly, heavily even, and woke up with a satisfying yelp and smile, I thought, Well, lucky, good, no harm done.

  Then our séances became a monthly thing. Cozimo managed to contact his great-uncle and a childhood friend named Albert who he had not saved when he could have. It sounds perplexing now, but at the time it all made sense—either that or I didn’t think so much about it and went along with it. I mean, why weren’t we doing these dodgy séances in his more private, more spacious and comfortable house? But then, that first night there was an element of spontaneity about it. Anyway, one of the beings Cozimo wanted most to contact—and I am not joking when I say this—was his childhood pet beagle. That’s how our monthly meetings became known as the Order of the Golden Beagle. It sounds ludicrous now, and even then the ridiculous title and name—well, it was all a bit of fun, another excuse for a late-night party. Robin never participated, and I did not discuss the details of those supernatural evenings with her, even if she suspected something.

  I didn’t administer the crushed pills to Dillon every night; I wasn’t that far gone. But I did start to give them to him more than I might have, more than I should have—I know that now. I take the responsibility, even if it is not something I found the nerve or courage to tell Robin about. I suppose I gave them to him once a month. Cozimo became convinced that the sleeping child on the table—Dillon, in other words—was instrumental to the success of the séances. So as we got bedtime together and after I had read him his storybooks—he liked the tales from Narnia; Aslan was his favorite—I gave him his milk, with the crushed quarter pill, and deposited him on the oak table before the Order of the Golden Beagle met. Cozimo even made him an honorary member of the order and procured a special pillow, embroidered with the order’s name, and that is where Dillon’s head rested on those particular nights.

  And so we got started. It was all more or less nonsense: the joining of hands, the murmuring. One of the Spanish women—Blanca, I think her name was—acted as medium. Is this something she volunteered for or Cozimo suggested? I can’t be sure, but either way she assumed the role. I remember she mumbled and hummed and told us all to close our eyes while Cozimo was relighting the candles, which had been blown out by a dry, swirling wind that had come through town. The noise from outside seemed deafening at times: footsteps, people walking, people talking, car horns blaring, and engines revving. Then something very strange happened. During the séance, the other Spanish woman started wailing. Her name, I can’t remember, but Cozimo joined in. “Don’t break the circle,” Blanca said. “Don’t.” But it was too late and everyone was standing about, shifting from foot to foot, looking for another drink.

  “I felt something,” Cozimo said. “Something powerful.”

  Blanca told him that he should not have broken the circle. But the séance was over, and we started drinking more. Cozimo had a great record collection. He had a wonderful old record player made in the shape of an old gramophone, and that is where you could usually find him after the séances had ended, bent over his old records, both classical and jazz. But he was too moved by this experience, he told us, while pouring more wine into everyone’s glass. Instead, I knelt by the player and changed the record.

  Cozimo looked over. While it was now our place, mine and Robin’s, he still felt possessive about his vinyl. He eyed me suspiciously and made some comment about being careful as to what I chose. Then there was more music, more dancing, more talking. The song I remember from that séance was “Turn Out the Stars.” I remember swaying to its languid rhythms, my eyes closing slowly to its lulling beat. I remember the song for another reason too: it was playing in the apartment the last time I saw Dillon.

  He had been asleep, his head sinking into the embroidered cushion, which he had taken into his bedroom. How still he looked, lying there, eyes closed, long lashes dark against his skin. And vulnerable too, with his hands thrown up above his head, fingers curled. I looked at him and felt the slow burn of love.

  And then there was my foolish dash to Cozimo’s and the devastating earthquake. All the time, the music ghosted through my head; the slow syncopation of jazz played counterpoint to my panic, to the fires, to the hissing gas, to the falling dust and shuddering buildings, to my frantic race back to the apartment.

  The night it happened, Robin
was working late. It’s ironic, but that week, that month, Robin had come round; her doubts and worry had somehow dissipated in the weeks leading up to that fateful night. She was more resolute about staying in Tangier—not forever, that was not the plan, but for a time, the time it took to finish another show, one I was calling The Tangier Manifesto. It was her birthday. On her break, we had spoken briefly on the phone—a casual conversation, no hint of the great drama that was just around the corner for us, a drama that would come to be the central point of our lives. Afterward, she would have returned to the bar and continued serving the scattering of customers there that night; perhaps some of them might have commented upon the strange stillness in the air, the charged atmosphere that lingered in the streets that night. And then she would have felt the tremors, been caught up in the commotion, seen the growing and distressed crowds, the shifting buildings, the smoke, the rising flames. She would have left the bar, run through the streets of our neighborhood, passed the pharmacy, the leather shop, the launderette, raced down the dip to the bakery, and then she would have seen me.

  I say “would,” because to be honest, I can’t truly or completely remember that night. So much of it is a blank. Shock, rage, panic, fear, grief, disbelief—they all swelled together to numb my mind and blacken out the last parts of the night as if the stars themselves were extinguished.

  What I do remember is her calm and even voice asking me, “Where is Dillon? Harry, where is he? Where is Dillon? Where is our son?”

  That’s it. How the night ended? I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.

  But let me tell you this, let me tell you something I do know: I have the same dream again and again. I am asking Dillon to close his eyes. He is not sleeping. I am trying to get him to sleep. His warm body is next to mine. We are lying together in his little bed. It is Tangier. His arm is cradled about my neck. A feather has escaped his pillow and is resting in his hair. I turn the bedside lamp on. Close your eyes, I say to him, and in the dim blur of the light, I see that his eyes are closed and that he is sleeping after all.

  And then I wake.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ROBIN

  Two days later, I stood in the kitchen of my oldest friend, Liz, and listened as she pulled apart two screaming six-year-olds who were trying to maul each other to death in the next room. On the floor by my feet, four-month-old Charlotte cooed to herself and sucked her fingers, a wide necklace of drool soaking into her bib. She gazed up at me with a curious stare as I made tea and listened to her mother shrieking at her brother.

  “For Christ’s sake, Isaac! If I have to come in here one more time to sort you boys out, I will take those light sabers and bin them! Do you understand?”

  Sounds of muted disgruntlement followed in her wake as Liz returned to the kitchen, a look of weary exasperation on her face.

  “Give me strength,” she said dramatically, approaching the table and throwing herself into the chair opposite mine. “I don’t know what possessed me when I bought those light sabers.”

  “Sleep deprivation does strange things to a person.”

  The lull in the next room exploded as the two pint-sized Jedis resumed their brawl, but this time, Liz made no effort to move.

  “Let them kill each other,” she said with an air of surrender.

  “Boys,” I said sympathetically, pouring tea into her cup.

  “They always play at killing each other. At least my boys do.”

  Liz and I went way back. We had been at school together, our friendship enduring the teenage years, when she was a Goth and I was a boho bookish sort, and then through college, when I studied art and she read history. The years I spent in Tangier, she spent getting married to Andrew, buying a large house in Mount Merrion, and filling it with a succession of boys before finally having Charlotte, a chubby, wide-eyed baby who smiled and gurgled, oblivious to the clamor and chaos that whirled around her brothers.

  “Biscuit?” I said, offering Liz the open packet of Rich Tea I had found.

  “Sod that. There’s a Toblerone on top of the fridge.”

  I reached for the giant-sized bar and whistled.

  “The size of this thing. You could club a small child to death with this.”

  “Don’t put ideas in my head!” Liz laughed, before adding, “Andrew gave it to me as a peace offering.”

  “A peace offering?”

  “Oh, we had this massive argument on Tuesday evening. He accused me of being more interested in drinking a glass of wine while watching Grey’s Anatomy than in having sex with him.”

  “Is he right?”

  “Of course he’s bloody right, but I’m hardly going to admit to it. And besides, that’s not the point.”

  “The point being…?”

  “I have four children under the age of eight! Two of them I seriously suspect have ADHD or Asperger’s or some bloody thing. And one of them is waking up twice in the night for a feed. What does he expect? That I sit around daydreaming about jumping his bones? Please. All I want to do is sleep.”

  “Or eat chocolate,” I said, snapping off another triangle.

  “It’s depressing,” she said. “One time he would have come home with Chanel. Now I get a bloody Toblerone.”

  “At least you get something.”

  “That’s true. And how is Harry?”

  I felt the barb in her comment, and chose to let it go.

  “He’s fine.”

  Liz sat and watched with an impassive expression as I explained how he had moved out of his studio and set up in the garage. There was no love lost between my husband and my best friend. Liz had always been protective of me, suspicious of any man I showed an interest in. “Where men are concerned, you have terrible taste and rotten judgment,” she told me once by way of explanation. Harry provoked a kind of wary curiosity in her. That is, until Tangier, which she thought was madness. I still recall that heated phone call between us when she called him a selfish sod and told me that I was a fool to allow myself to be dragged to some seedy shithole for the sake of our art and I accused her of selling out, with her big house in the suburbs and her middle-class snobbery. It took some months before I was able to speak to her again. And yet, after Dillon she was one of the few people I could really talk to. Over the years, I had sat in her kitchen more nights than I can remember, drinking wine and reminiscing about him, crying about him, opening up to her about my deepest wound. And yes, I had told her things about Harry that perhaps I shouldn’t have. But there was no one else I might have turned to. And when I thought about all the things I had said in this kitchen—about Harry, about his behavior, about my suspicions, about how sometimes he frightened me—a wave of regret came over me, so strong that I felt physically weakened by it.

  “Steady on,” Liz said, taking the Toblerone from my hands. “The way you’re working through that, anyone would think you were pregnant.”

  I blinked with surprise and stared at her, and she stared back, her eyes widening.

  “You are? You bloody are pregnant! I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh God. Is it that obvious?”

  “Only to a trained eye. How far gone are you?”

  “About five minutes. Shit, Liz, you can’t tell anyone. I haven’t even told my mother yet.”

  “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe.”

  Her eyes, ringed with tiredness, were suddenly lively, and her voice dropped to a whisper as she leaned over the table and drew me into a conspiratorial hush.

  “So, tell me all. Come on, I want details.”

  “There’s really nothing to tell.”

  “Oh bollocks to that! Planned or accident?”

  “Accident.”

  “Yikes! I bet Harry was pissed.”

  “Not really. Actually, he seems really happy about it. Elated, in fact.”

  “Really?” She raised an eyebrow, and I felt the scrutiny of her gaze and shrank from it.

  “Okay, I admit it—he was surprised.”

  “In a
good way?”

  “Yes, in a good way.”

  “What did he say when you told him?”

  I remembered again his blank expression, his voice as he said, I can’t believe it.

  “He’d had a crappy day and my news came out of left field, so he was taken aback. For a minute he couldn’t speak.”

  “And when he found his voice?” Liz prompted, her tone acidic.

  “He was thrilled. And ever since he’s been so excited about the baby, about the pregnancy. He can’t stop talking about it. Can’t do enough for me.”

  “Well, good. So he should.”

  “Please, Liz,” I said then, suddenly tired of this. “Don’t be like that, okay? He’s changed. Whatever you may think, I know this baby is going to make all the difference. I don’t know why, but I feel like we’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a very long time.”

  “I just want him to realize what he’s got,” Liz replied, her tone lightening. “I don’t want him retreating into that artistic solipsism of his “Oh, woe is me” and all that. Not now. Not after all that’s happened.”

  “He won’t,” I said firmly. “I know he won’t.”

  Her eyes flared briefly with concern, then softened.

  “Good.” She reached out and put her hand over mine. “I’m happy for you, Rob. Really I am.”

  “Thanks, Liz. I am, too.”

  I felt her eyes on me, her lingering concern, and experienced a little stab of guilt over what I’d said about Harry, his enthusiasm for the baby, his elation.

  “Now tell me you’re not about to run off into the desert to have this baby, are you?”

  “No!” I laughed, and she grinned back. “No, not this time.”

  * * *

  When I got home, I could hear Harry at work in the garage. I had decided, on the drive home from Liz’s, that I would not tell him that I had shared our news. Somehow, I knew that it would bother him, get under his skin. Besides, I had the sense that he needed a little more time himself to digest this development, and I was more than willing to grant him that.