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Goodnight

Cassia Gaden Gilmartin

    I pull his window closed until I hear it click shut, and then I pull it just a little tighter. I shiver. I’d fooled myself that by shutting the windows I had stopped the cold from reaching him, but I was wrong. The cold is inside already.
    “Do you want a hot water bottle?”
    My son doesn’t answer. He stares at me, the duvet pulled up to his chin, his eyes the blue-grey of the sea in winter. Like the colour of the ocean when we drove to the beach last week, that day when we found dead things by the water. Starfish turned bone-dry, the same dirty brown as the sand around them, splayed out inches from the rising tide. Jellyfish streaked with purple, torn into shapeless blobs by the waves. A fish tail and a severed head – they didn’t match. One was thin and grey, the other green and bloated. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pretend they came from the same fish.
    “Aidan?”
    He says nothing. I open the wardrobe. I try not to hear the creak of its hinges, like the sound of something breaking in slow motion. The hot water bottle sits on the highest shelf, the one that only I can reach. I pull it out.
    “I don’t want it.” His voice is low, like the sound of a wave gathering, and I want to cry out in protest. He’s only eight years old. When he speaks, he has always sounded excited, his voice high like a girl’s, the words spilling out so fast I can barely hear them.
    “You’ll be cold. I’m going to get you an extra blanket.”
    I have always kept the pile of blankets in my room, and I can’t remember why. I wonder if he ever wakes up cold while I sleep, if he wishes for the warmth I have kept from him.
    “Stay.” His fist grips the duvet until his knuckles turn white. “Just for a little while.”
    I sit on the edge of his bed – not so much because I want to as because the strength has fallen out of me. “You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”
    “I don’t.”
    I reach out and flick the switch on the lamp beside him. As a little boy, he always wanted it turned on. He thought monsters were hiding in the dark. Now, I know he doesn’t need it. But he says nothing as its light surrounds us.
    I look into his eyes and think of Nadia. Her sad smile, the faded pink of her shirt. The graze where her cheek hit the wall, a deeper pink streaked with red, and her eyes the same blue as his. The way, when I asked him last night what had made him want to hurt her, he couldn’t remember her name.
    I dreamed last night that I was Nadia and I was falling. The world seemed to flip upside down as he shoved me, as my hands reached out in the wrong direction in an attempt to save myself. When my face hit the wall I felt the wound open, felt the rough pattern of the bricks pierce through my skin. The bricks of a wall we had leaned against for years, at the edge of our school playground. I’d never expected him to hit me. He had called me fat and ugly, he’d called me a nerd and a loser, but now I felt uglier than ever before.
    “It’s five past ten. You need to get some sleep.” We should both be sleeping, but I can’t. I’m wide awake and already I can’t stop dreaming. Tonight the colours will be brighter, the pain sharper than yesterday. I know I will relive the same nightmare. We have to talk to the principal tomorrow. She is twice my age, and wears her hair scraped back in a bun, so tight it looks like it must hurt her. She’ll expect me to be angry. I’m not angry. I don’t have the energy for that.
    Last week at the beach he kept tossing stones at a starfish. I told him it was already dead, but he wouldn’t listen. The noise of the pebbles hitting its body was like stone against stone – the pebbles rebounded, as if they’d hit something harder than they were. I had no idea death could turn a creature so hard. All I could do was stare up at the clouds above me. They flew past as if racing towards some unseen destination. I imagined they could take me with them.
    But we’re not floating in the clouds or on the ocean; we’re not listening to the crash of waves breaking or breathing in the scent of saltwater. We’re here, in his dark bedroom, and the air stinks of dust.
    “You have to sleep.” I know I’ve said it already, but that feels like an age ago.
    “You, too.”
    I watch his eyes bore into mine. I see him take in my matted hair, the shadows beneath my eyes. A shadow crosses his face, as if it has passed from me to him. Sympathy deepens the frown lines etched into his skin. I almost reach out to touch him, to smooth them away, but I don’t. I know he would hate me for it.
    “Is Dad still coming on Saturday?”
    “Of course he is.” This time, he’ll come. I have to believe he will. It was Aidan’s birthday last week, and he promised he’d bring a present. Something like the train set he brought last year, with its grey foldaway tracks, which he said had been his own as a kid even though the box was still covered in plastic. It made Aidan’s face light up.
    When Aidan speaks again, his voice has shrunken. “You’re going to tell him, aren’t you?”
    “Not if you don’t want me to.” The words surprise me, but since I’ve spoken them, they are the truth. Tonight, I won’t lie to him.
    “Okay. We can go to sleep now.”
    As if he were the parent and I the child, I stand to obey. On my way to the door, I think of the blanket I have yet to fetch for him. He doesn’t need it. I will leave it in my wardrobe, let it gather one more layer of dust.
    “Goodnight.” Don’t let the bed bugs bite, I used to tell him, but they will. They’ll eat him alive, disfigure him, as they have these last few weeks, and I’ll try to love the new boy who greets me in the morning. I’ll try harder than ever before.
    At the beach last week I saw seaweed drifting by the water’s edge. It had caught on a rock and clung on for hours, tugged back and forth by the waves. But as we turned to go home, it finally came away.
    I breathe in and turn away. I shiver. And I close the door behind me.

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