by Courtney Weill

My heart skips, then thunderous beating. Tense muscles tighten past pain into rock. The covers slide from my body, and my eyes widen. I am trapped in a loft, easy loot for an unknown shadow. Downstairs, a doorway creaks, something rumbles and warm air fills the room. Worried, relieved, warmed, I recognize the furnace and fall back into cool sheets and pillows.

I wonder what happened to her, what frightened her so much, what instilled the deep distrust and an opaque but thin strength in my mother. Recently, I’ve realized that this body-shaking fear is her legacy.

At least our walls crumble only in the solitude of night. Five states away, she awakes early and sleeps early. My sleep is intermittent – bold disruptions in an otherwise quiet life. In my heart, I believe that we simultaneously watch windows and clocks, spirits supporting each other until the sky lightens to rich silver blue.

From the floors of my elevated room, I pick up coffee-stained clothes, coins, a single shoe, a half-eaten apple and other scatterbrained remains. They sparkle like treasures on the dark green carpet, eye-catching and beautiful in their disarray. When my feet can walk safely across the room, I collapse on the stairs. I never rest long in this darkened crevice between one set of distractions and another. It is where my mind learns new tricks – how to create sounds, images, shadows, and fears so frightening that they have no form. My wild imagination creates unnamable horrors so large that there is nothing but myself to fear.

So I rush through a series of half-hearted distractions, never attempting to sleep. I pick through textbooks, looking for answers to overdue assignments. I tackle laundry, watch old movies and contract my stomach into a tight crunch until it shudders and sways. And I try to avoid reliving too fresh memories of phone calls and fights. It never works. They become bigger than life in this nonexistent time.

"Why haven’t you returned my phone calls?" she asked in a tone that implied ownership, not motherhood.

"I don’t know."

"Well, how are classes?"

"Fine, I guess," I lied again. "I’m only taking two classes. It just seems like a waste of time. I’m never going to finish."

"Go full time then," she said, insistent and annoyed.

"It’s too expensive. I can’t afford that on a coffee shop salary."

"Money is not an issue."

"Not for you. For me, it is."

"Your future is an issue," she began. "You need to face reality, get that business degree and get a good job."

"And be a good girl?" I ask.

"Come on, Amanda. I raised you better than that," she said. "You need to get yourself together. This is unacceptable. You need to finish up and get out of there. It’s the safe thing to do."

"I don’t want safe," I said. "It’s what you want. You don’t know about what I want. You were never around."

I hung up too late. She told the truth, and I twisted it to my advantage.

Sometimes, I rehearse telling her everything. Maybe then she’d understand. Maybe she already does. She probably suffers, too, from these swirling blue, purple and black moods, interrupted briefly with yellowy-white hope. I wish I could widen her tunnel vision. But talking with my mother is worse than facing the morning, droopy-eyed from only a few hours of sleep.

When I do awake to sunlight, I am ushered quickly, abruptly into reality. I spend most of these hours trying to be someone else. I often daydream about rural towns and a clannish family although I’ve never fully experienced them. That was my mother’s life. I grew up alone among strip malls and highways in empty houses waiting for her to return late from work. I am still searching for my natural path, trying to find those things that come easily and bring pleasure. I am good at greeting and laughing and losing my way in tasks and aspirations. My specialty is entrenching myself in awkward situations, like insisting that all ex-boyfriends remain friends. I invite them to parties, believing that they’ll never come. They always do. They gather in one corner of the room, trading stories punctuated with tenor laughs, sending me cowering into a corner.

I tend to waver between lovers, conversations, situations, jobs. I float around, over, among things; and just as solid ground appears, the wind returns raging. The constant, stable force is fear: fear of pain, intrusion, darkness, love intimacy, reality. These lamp-lit nights are my release – the time where true thoughts, feelings emerge in the turbulence of night.

A financial manager, my mother works in endless suits in a corner office. She is a negotiator and builder. She has the final say. She never speaks of love or lets her eyes linger on the tan, chiseled arm of the yardman. I wonder why she is still scared, still adding height to the towering wall between her spirit and the rest of the world. I wonder how the person who carried my body around inside, who molded my mind, who is irrevocably linked to my every action, could dream and feel and think such different thoughts.

But I am frightened, too. Most nights, my heart pumps blood faster and faster, making the world vivid and life short. Delirium – that thought jumbling eye-slanting, and world slurring mechanism – sheds a pure light. Insomnia breeds improbable thoughts, leading a worn mind down overgrown paths. It opens up an inner landscape that one is forced to explore when no one else is around or awake.

I think of how I am selfish, how my mother is selfless, how she gave me everything so I could linger in innocence. She is mistaken.

I think about children who have never been drenched in sparkling sunshine. I saw a story about them on Dateline one night. Their skin is ultra-sensitive to ultra-violet rays. They live an extraordinary existence inside homes with tight shades and no shadows – just dim, artificial, filtered, doctor-approved light. They will never know the childhood pleasure of lying in a bed of freshly mowed grass, green blades tickling your ears, as you look upwards, finding shapes, animals, new friends in cotton ball clouds. Instead they emerge in their own neighborhoods during my nightly interruptions. In a leaking bottle of ink, they ride tricycles and fumble for fluorescent footballs. They race against the time when this navy subsistence will drain, allowing sunshine to filter into their fragile existence. They are not scared of dark attics or thick forest shade. They delight in my horrors, and I wish to be enlightened.

The red lines peak and plummet endlessly to the beat of my eager heart. Slowly the shrill beeps and a nurse’s touch transport me from a state of dreams to a dream-like state. The room is dark; the hallways dim; and the 24-hour-world of medicine slumbers.

"Go back to sleep," she whispers, arranging her loose white uniform to align with her wiry body.

"Impossible," I reply, fingering the ring on my finger, searching for the familiar.

The nurse pauses, watches my minute movements. I read her name badge "Patty Brown, R.N."

"Lonely?" Patty asks as she places a folded blanket on the bed.

I nod, swallowing hard as she spreads out the blue cotton throw. I am overwhelmed by the weight of multiple blankets, filling in the gaps of space between my thighs, arms, and newly deflated body.

My husband, Micah, can barely sleep with a light quilt. Over the years, I learned to feed off the warmth of his body, his thick muscular back and protruding stomach. I would sleep so close that I almost hid underneath him. Despite his comforting arms, I never slept through the night. I found solace on the window seat in our room, where I would wait for exhaustion to return. A few tears escape when I glance at the institutional sliver of glass on the far wall. Special blinds cover the narrow window to ensure that the outside remains a distant memory.

"Are you going to be all right?" Patty asks, seemingly interested, since I am the only one awake on the ward.

"I just want to see my family," I whisper. "I want home."

"Soon," she says, disappearing into the quiet hall.

In this hospital, I begin another passage. A shocking start recorded by digital eyes hidden in door jams and hallways.

I wonder why photographers call it "shooting" when they capture a millisecond of time, energy, action. They don’t stop the world or harm the landscape with their unintrusive permanence. However, their records are often misused as substitutes for actual adventures – for standing on the bridge in front of Multnomah Falls, taking deep breaths of fresh air still moist from the ever-flowing water. Or for kissing a loved one in the rain under a black oversized umbrella, one leg curled up with excitement.

My mother never intruded either, but it still hurt. She documented every action without words, always accepting and never questioning. She lined the shelves of our empty homes with photo albums; memories of our childhoods were preserved to prevent the need for further action. We replaced storytelling with silent surveys through pages of yellowed photographs. Then, closed doors interrupted all conversations. And when I left home, sporadic phone calls replaced letters and yearly visits. My marriage – the discovery of a new caretaker – fully decomposed the swinging bridge from her stable world to my shaky existence.

I wonder what she would think now, as I sit in a hospital room with pale green walls, begging the nurse for the freedom to reach out. We haven’t spoken since I eloped with Micah five years ago. I didn’t want a family affair. She did.

Until now, I gained strength from our divide. I was proud of my independence, my separation from this unmeasured force. But now, I am ashamed. She should be here with me. She should know about these changes. She should hold my hand and its miniature in hers.

I dial her number. After four rings, she answers. She is already awake. I cannot say hello. It is too simple. So I whisper goodbye and lay the receiver back in its cradle.

Patty passes outside my doorway. She retraces her steps and peeks inside my luminous room.

"Please let me go to her," I ask.

"You need to sleep," Patty insists.

"I’m still awake," I say a half hour later.

"We’ll see," Patty sighs.

It is maddening, being separate but close, being hooked to machines and clear lines that prevent pacing to pass the time until light. Finally, the navy slivers between the blinds turn to sweet tangerine. Patty succumbs to my demands and brings pure comfort: a little girl of my own to document, to touch, to love.

My mother told me that once you truly love someone, whether a child or a spouse, you will never sleep soundly again. She is right, but I haven’t slept in years. I worried about her long before my husband and daughter.

When I was a child, I would cry in the darkness, thinking about her death, her final absence. Airplanes, cars, angry employees, blind corners, even the boogie monster – all were probable causes in my small mind for a lonely, desolate future.

I would pray to a God that I didn’t think existed to keep her safe on midnight excursions and shallow swims. She never showed fear, but I felt it. Shaky nerves revealed discretely in her darting eyes, her careful strides, her constant warnings. Unplug the hair dryer and turn off the coffeepot. Lock the door when we get inside. Always leave the porch light on.

These were normal routines. It wasn’t until I held my own child this morning that I recognized the strange confines of her rules. How can one grow and learn with blinds shut, guard up and eyes scanning, never stopping long enough to discover one delicious detail?

I want to allow mistakes, accidents, pain, even horror. Fear is much scarier when ambiguous and nameless. Experience gives meaning and breeds courage, knowing that one can survive even the most humiliating, revolting, painful intrusions.

I want to teach this to my daughter, to let her know that life is not fair, that monsters do exist, that nightmares occur under sunny skies too. But she needs to know that fear is no reason to stop living, trying, risking. How do we lose this oblivious wonder? I wish that I, that they, remained infantile, teetering, falling, but still undeterred from the prize on the other side of the room.

My mother and I sit in the garden at midnight, pondering dreams on a night when neither of us plans to sleep. Our wine glasses glimmer like diamonds in citronella light. We are talking, sharing, filling the void that almost engulfed "we" forever.

I squeeze the spotted, slightly wrinkled hand, flinching at her fragility, her inability to bounce back. This would have never happened before, before we changed roles – when she became grandmother and I became mother, before we swapped roles again, regressing and I was forced to mother her and she gracefully accepted her dependence.

As the night progresses, we divulge individual perceptions of our blended history. We tackle the enormous question: "What was I thinking?" and answers must surface before the sun.

This would have never happened before – before memories of past aggressions resurfaced, before screaming fits revealed truth, before two pink lines appeared on a tiny white stick, before her hair fell in clumps onto a thin, blue hospital bed.

I lay my head on her bony shoulder and sleep through the wee hours for the first time in years. She strokes my hair, like she did when I was still young and completely hers. As I slumber, she instills the knowledge of her 68 years.

A buttercream haze creeps under my eyelids, forcing my body to register morning. My mind is still spinning from a series of black and white images so vivid they must be real and so distant they must be dreams. The wet blades of grass startle my toes and I feel where the wood slats of the swing have left imprints in my back. My pulse slows. I am calm and rested.

And then I become aware of her cool, stiff hand on my shoulder, protecting me and pushing me forward.

Courtney Cleary Weill is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a brief stint as a city hall reporter, she explored many jobs including teaching assistant, bank teller, housing advocate, and hostess. Now, she writes grant proposals and reports for money and fiction for fun.