Picture Us In The Light(41)

“This works, right?” Allison says, holding up a gray sweater, and I look at her, startled.

“Yeah,” I say. “Perfect.”

I get stuck in a dream sequence that night. I’m in first period again and Ms. Lee is reading the letter about Sandra, and I’m feeling again that very beginning of what it means to lose someone forever. But then—this is the part where I get trapped—Ms. Lee reads it again and this time it’s Harry, and then again, and this time it’s Regina. I’m trying to get up to run, to find them before it’s too late, but my legs won’t move.

I wake up panicked and suffocating, a feeling like a boot on my chest. I gulp down air and wait for the night to settle over me. Outside my window the plum tree is rustling in the wind, the leaves brushing against my window. I try to root myself back in the world, the real one, where Harry and Regina are both still here, both fine. I reach for my phone. It’s 4:43, and as I’m still looking at the screen the numbers blink to 4:44, and my stomach folds in on itself. I’ve never been one for any of the things my mom thinks are lucky or unlucky and I’m never superstitious except, apparently, in the middle of the night when the whole rest of the world is shuttered away out of reach and it’s just me and my phone blinking three numbers that in Chinese sound almost exactly like the word for death.

I should call them. They would understand. Isn’t it better to wake someone up in the middle of the night than to be left wishing you had? I have my finger on their speed dials a dozen times, maybe more, and my heart never quite settles down. But I don’t do it; I can’t tell Regina I was worried it would be you this time if she picked up. Your fears at night aren’t something you can carry out past the walls of your mind.

I can’t go back to sleep. Finally I get up and slip out of bed. I’m too old for this—I’ve been too old for this for like a decade—but I slip quietly down the hall to my parents’ room. Their door is open, like I’d hoped it would be, and I sit down cross-legged outside it.

I used to get nightmares a lot when we first moved here, and my mom would always come rushing into my room. That sound, her footsteps flying down the hall toward me, would hold the night at bay. She would lie down next to me and stroke my back until all those dark worlds looming in the shadows had retreated and I could sink back into sleep, and I’d wake up in the morning and find the blankets pulled tightly over me, my pillow straightened and my pajamas buttoned up. (When I drew the portrait of my mom I submitted in my portfolio I drew those blankets as part of her forehead, the lines taut from being tucked in.) My dad’s always been a noisy sleeper—he has mild sleep apnea—and I’m grateful for it tonight. I sit silently, the wall cold against my back, scrolling aimlessly through the internet on my phone and wishing it were dawn.

I’ve been sitting there almost twenty minutes, the dream still clinging, when I drop my phone. It clatters onto the hardwood, the noise exploding against the quiet of the house. In the near dark I see my mom bolt upright in bed, her hand flying to her chest. I scramble up.

“Sorry,” I whisper loudly. “Sorry. That was just me.”

“Daniel? What are you doing out there?”

“Um—” Their bedroom is all the way at the end of the hall, and I can’t think of a good answer. “I was just—”

“Are you sick?” My mom pulls a blanket around herself and swings her legs down to the floor and then comes padding toward me, peering into the dark. “I’ll make you—”

“No, I’m not sick,” I say, before she can tell me she’ll boil herbs for me to take. “Just—just up.”

“Aiya, Daniel, it’s so late. You should be sleeping.”

“I know.”

Already I can feel the total, swallowing loneliness of her going back to sleep. She squints at me in the dim hallway, and something almost imperceptible shifts in her expression. “You should eat something. It’s not good for your stomach to be so full of acid all night. Come.”

She heads down the hallway toward the kitchen, and I follow, weak with relief: she’ll turn on a light and for as long as she’s in there with me, I won’t be alone in the dark.

“Why are you awake still?” she says, flicking on the kitchen light.

I shrug. I’ve never talked to them about Sandra. It felt too distant from their own lives, a chasm I couldn’t bridge just through repeating the facts—I could feel how they’d get mangled and shrunken in my telling. When they asked about her I’d lied and said I’d barely known her and that we had never been friends. I don’t know why. My mom probably remembered me going to Sandra’s house as a kid, and maybe they knew I was lying, but they left it alone, even though—I saw them read it—there’d been tears in my mom’s eyes when they read the letter the superintendent sent home.

I sit down at the kitchen table. I have that vaguely nauseous ache in my stomach you get when it’s the middle of the night and you’re awake. I didn’t notice it earlier, underneath the dream hangover—like when you clean a dirty dish and then it’s broken anyway. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

She makes a tsking noise. She pulls out the leftover pot of pork and lotus root soup from dinner and ladles some into a bowl to microwave, then puts the bowl in front of me.

What am I going to do next year when they’re on the other side of the country? I imagine a roommate watching me struggling to pretend everything’s cool after a nightmare or when I have the flu or something. I imagine my parents coming back from their weekend Costco runs to a quiet, empty house. Maybe it’ll be different in the daylight, but right now I hope they’re the kind of parents who call a lot. Probably they will, probably for things like reminding me to register for classes or demanding to know whether I’m eating enough vegetables. “Thanks, Ma.”