The First Sleepless Night

Mark had a nasty fall at work that day. 

Nothing too out of the ordinary- the man simply tripped going down the stairs to his car, rolling his ankle and plummeting down a flight of stairs before his skull broke his fall on the final bottom step. His wife, Maria, had texted him an update from her latest doctor’s appointment. 

It’s a girl. 

When Mark pulled into the driveway forty minutes later, he felt a bit foggy, like he’d driven with an anchor tied to his brain, dragging it down into the murky waters of his subconscious. He either had a concussion, or was still reeling from Maria’s news. 

When he got out of the car and started up the darkening driveway to his front door, he heard a scream cleave the evening in two.  

The difference between a shout and a scream can be felt in one’s bones. He froze in place and cocked his head with animal instinct, knowing he’d heard a scream because his bones told him so. 

The street was silent and deserted as the suburbs usually are during dinner hour- except, there, under the streetlight closest to his own house, he saw a figure with their back to him. Their silhouette was small, childlike even. They were either very short, very young, or very much both. The figure turned, revealing itself to be a little girl in knee-length yellow rain boots, despite the hot arid evening light beading Mark’s forehead with sweat. Her hair appeared glistening wet under the light above her. She looked back at Mark with an exaggerated quirk of her head, alone under the pale orb of light. She blinked at him once, twice. She didn’t appear endangered, or even hurt. 

Mark stood about fifteen feet from her, staring back at her open face.  

“Are you… alright?” Mark called tentatively. 

The girl shook her head once, twice. 

Mark looked up and down his gloomy, quiet street. No one else had come out of their homes. 

“Can I… help you, somehow?” 

The girl nodded. He couldn’t hear her, but he saw her mouth the words, “Come here.” 

The man stopped a couple feet short of the girl. He had to bend his neck at an uncomfortable angle to meet her eye. 

The little girl whispered something to him that he couldn’t quite hear. “What’s that?” he asked. She repeated herself, even quieter than before. The man bent down to a squat and put his ear close to her mouth. 

“Someone is in trouble.”  

“Who is?” He glanced up and down the street again, seeing no one else around.  

The little girl lit a cigarette. Now that he looked closely at her, he realized she could be in her teens, maybe even older. She inhaled deeply and exhaled a heavy gray cloud of smoke before speaking again. This time, her voice was at least three octaves deeper. 

“You.” She pointed at him sharply, ash flying from the tip. Some landed on his wrist, and he flinched. 

“Okay. I’m going to go back inside now, unless you need… something.” The girl nodded and waved him off, indicating that he was annoying her at this point and could move right along.  

When he got back upstairs, Maria was sleeping soundly on the couch. Ever since she became pregnant, she slept like the dead every chance she got. He shook her shoulder gently to wake her, and told her what had happened out under the streetlamp. 

He told her about the cigarette, and how he’d hit his head at work. Maria chuckled. “You and your imagination.” She said this with her eyes already closed. Three minutes later, she was snoring again. 

Mark set his briefcase on the floor, trying to slow his painful heartbeat. He hoped some Ibuprofen and an early night would prove this all to be some sordid daydream. 

The next night, he heard another scream.  

It was different this time; it hadn’t come from a human mouth.  

Downstairs in the kitchen, a kettle was whistling, strident and shrill. Maria wouldn’t stir. When he went downstairs to the kitchen, Wendy sat at the breakfast nook, steeping a cup of chamomile tea. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked. “Good. I can’t find the honey.” 

The man stood dumbfounded in only his boxers. They were patterned with Betty Boop’s face and tiny red hearts. He let the girl get up and rifle through his cabinets herself until she came across a bottle of honey. She squirted some loudly into her mug before sticking in her finger and stirring vigorously. Steam rose from the cup. 

“Sit down, Mark.” Her voice sounded exactly like his mother’s. Mark sat. “Let’s discuss the consequences.” 

“The consequences?” Mark felt like he had in Spanish class in eleventh grade. The teacher would say one thing, and Mark would hear something else entirely. His teacher would say abrazar, which means “to hug.” Mark would hear abrasar, which means “to burn.”  

“Yes, the potential consequences of you being the worst father on earth. That’s what you’re worried about, right?” Wendy blew lightly on the mug before bringing it to her lips, taking a small sip, then hastily putting it back down. “Oh, my. Far too hot still.” 

“I don’t understand.” It never once occurred to him to call upstairs to Maria. There was an illusory quality to the whole scene, from the muted glow of the microwave and the faint smell of chamomile tea to the clouded shock sitting in his sternum, that made doing so seem futile. And something about this little girl, whose name and wispy blonde hair seemed already etched into his subconscious, made him wonder if she was even truly in the room with him. 

“It’s quite common, really. Everyone worries about being a bad baker only once the bun is already in the oven, eh?” Wendy winked. “Although I think it would be worthwhile to dissect how you, specifically, are in trouble. Tell me- are you frightened, Mark?” 

Her words from the night before echoed in Mark’s ears. It just occurred to him how very perilous his newfound position truly was. 

The truth was, Maria’s pregnancy did frighten Mark.  

Mark’s life revolved entirely around the analog clock on his bedside table. It was set for 6:30 a.m., even on Sundays. His body knew exactly what motions to perform as soon as he got out of bed. He took a shower each morning, knowing that he needed to wash the bottoms of his feet and under his arms. He dressed himself in tailored black dress pants and tied his own tie. He brewed coffee and never ate breakfast. He simply knew he had a job to get to, because it was what paid for his ability to live in a house and eat theoretical food. It had always been this way. He wasn’t particularly interesting in the sense that he could teach a boy how to throw and catch a ball, and he had no interest in entertaining a little girl by playing with dolls or attending fake tea parties with only stuffed animals for company.  

In fact, Mark should be scared. Before he met Maria two years ago, he was a thirty-six year old bachelor who lived on bare mattresses because he “didn’t understand the point of putting sheets on the bed.” He ate boxed mac and cheese most nights, and still was not certain what a Roth IRA was or whether or not he should have one. What business did he have raising a child? 

The realization dawned on Mark- who really had been rather overjoyed to be a parent- that more likely than not, he would be an inadequate one. 

Mark’s own parents were a fine enough example, by some standards. He was always clothed and fed, and had someone to pick him up from school and make him soup when he felt sick. Like any family, they had their fair share of slammed doors and cars careening out of driveways and threats of never returning back. Didn’t every child become disillusioned and soured by their parents by the time they became adults? It’s an age-old adage: nothing in the world is more jarring than realizing that your parents don’t know what the hell they are doing, and never have. Mark now saw that he was bringing a whole new being into life simply to love it and have it resent him. 

Wendy watched the five stages of grief pass over Mark’s features before speaking again. “It’s a lot of work, fucking up as little as possible. You fuck up all the same, though.” A grin passed across her delicate features. For a moment, Mark wondered how many teeth little girls were supposed to have. 

“Shall I show you the consequences?” 

Stark sunlight blazed overhead. Mark automatically shut his eyes against the glare. Sounds of splashing water, chirping birds and squealing laughter met his ears. Chlorine, a tinge of ammonia, and wet pavement made him open his eyes against the dazzling brightness. 

It looked like any other public swimming pool in summer, but Mark recognized it instantly as the one from his childhood. His head swiveled around, discerning the disturbingly familiar landscape, but only saw Wendy sitting on the edge of the deep end of the pool, her ankles in the water. She sat next to a little boy, who didn’t seem to notice she was there. Wendy beckoned him impatiently to join her.  

Mark walked over to her tentatively, his mind trying to catch up to his body. He didn’t know how he got there with this strange little girl, but he did know why. Mark stood over Wendy and the little boy. Even with his back to him, Mark knew who he was. 

As a child, he had watched his friend drown. She was five, and he was four. Mark watched himself sit calmly at the edge of the public pool, families screeching in delight all around him and adults lounging in pool chairs just a few feet away. He watched her head sink lower and lower, water thrashing from her flailing arms below the surface, until the frantic bubbles of her breath finally stopped.  

Both Marks were perfectly still. Both pairs of eyes were glazed over, absent and unresponsive.  

Young Mark finally stood and sprinted across the pool, to where a woman in a large sun hat sat reading a small paperback novel. His tiny body seemed to vibrate with energy as he tugged on her hand, pointing to the other side of the pool. 

“What is it, Mark? What?” The little boy did not have the words to explain what had happened. He didn’t understand it himself. Mark could remember the opening in his chest, the panic filling his lungs, unable to describe what he knew was horribly wrong.  

Eventually, his mom saw the figure starting to float to the surface. “Oh my God-” A flurry of activity as figures dove into the deep end, dragging her out by her wet blonde hair. She wasn’t moving. “Oh my god, Mark- why didn’t you say something sooner?!” The little boy sobbed, confused and frightened.  

A hand held his. Wendy’s hand was impossibly small and infinite in his palm. It was soft and sopping wet, the hand of someone reaching out of water for aid. 

Wendy pulled him down with shocking strength. His teeth knocked against the cement edge of the pool before his body crashed into the water. Mark knew how to swim- his mother enrolled him in lessons after his friend’s untimely death- but the hand of some imperceptible force held him down, preventing him from breaking the surface for air. In the warbled world above his head, he saw Wendy’s figure standing over the edge, watching him squirm and flounder. The water filled his ears with deadly quiet, squeezing his lungs in a vice like grip.  

This was his first consequence. 

“Sorry about that back there, Mark. I would’ve helped you, but I didn’t know how.”  

Mark came to, spluttering and shaking. If it weren’t for the drops of water clinging to the ends of his hair and the dampness of his clothes, Mark would’ve thought he’d just awoken from a nightmare of the worst degree. 

“You can still consider this a nightmare if you’d like, Mark. A surprising number of new parents do, actually.”  

Mark laid in a bathtub. It was small, and his legs spilled over the edge, unable to contain his adult frame. The bathroom itself was also tiny; faded teal tiles covering the walls, a beige sink with just enough counter space to hold a bottle of Softsoap, a beige towel rack and beige toilet paper holder. Three toothbrushes sat in a plastic cup on the top of the toilet: one yellow, one green, one small one that looked like a blue Crayola pencil with a suction bottom. Dread blanched Mark’s face a ghastly pale color.  

Wendy sat on the toilet, pants at her ankles, flipping through a copy of Zillions. She wouldn’t acknowledge Mark, no matter how many times he tried to get her attention. 

Voices rose from a lower floor, ricocheting off the sickeningly pastel walls. Even in the dark, the individual tiles resembled Chiclets. Instinctually, Mark curled into a fetal position. He could now fit fully into the bathtub, with room to spare; he was only four feet tall, wearing Buzz Lightyear printed pajama pants. Outside the bathroom door, the voices raised, clear enough now to discern. 

“You fucking did it now, James, your family is fucked now,” he could hear his mother shrieking. The Law and Order theme played loudly in the background.  

“You think I don’t know how inadequate I am? You think I don’t hear you reminding me of it EVERY DAMN DAY?!” 

“That’s it! I’m taking Mark and we’re leaving!”  

Footsteps pounded on the carpeted staircase. Mark shriveled in on himself. He didn’t want to be in that house, but he also didn’t want to go.  

A flushing sound distracted Mark for a moment. Wendy peered at him cowering in the bathtub, looking oddly similar to when she stood over him in the swimming pool.  

“You used to hide in the bathtub a lot growing up, huh?” Her voice was a toothache, saccharinely sweet to the point of sounding sarcastic. Mark felt that she was much, much older than him at this moment, anachronistically cruel. “Poor little boy. I wonder where your child will hide?” 

Mark opened his mouth to scream, his mouth unavailingly gagged by the same grip that held him underwater. 

“I’m sorry, Mark,” Wendy said. “Only I get to scream.” 

Mark and Maria met at work. He remembered the first moment he saw her vividly. The elevator doors paused three floors above where he was getting off, and she strode towards the opening doors. In Mark’s memory, she moved towards him in slow motion, her hair cascading over her shoulders in satiny copper coils. Maria strutted back then more often than she simply walked; her tall, lithe figure and the signature black kitten heels she wore gave her three inches on Mark, so he had to glance up a bit to make eye contact with her. Mark swore he never saw someone walk with their chin so high, their stride so measured.  

The doors shuddered closed. The pair stood in staticky silence as they descended steadily, floor by floor.  

“You’re staring.” Maria did not look at him when she said this. She said it not unkindly, just as a fact. The shadow of a smirk twisted her small pink mouth.  

Mark was, indeed, staring. It hadn’t even occurred to Mark that she could see him, or belonged in the same plane of consciousness as him. She seemed to him like a fictional character, to be unknowingly watched from afar as an admiring observer.  

“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” Mark spluttered. His cheeks were hot with embarrassment. “I’m- of course I’m staring, but that doesn’t give me the right to, necessarily- like walking into a museum and not paying the entry fee, totally uncouth-”  

Maria laughed. It tore out of her mouth like a steam engine, loud and sudden and alarming. It was the most endearing sound Mark had ever heard come out of a human being.  

Mark doesn’t feel particularly good at anything. He got good enough grades in school, was good enough at any sport he tried, and did everything his parents expected of him. When asked to describe himself, Mark would choose the word “unexceptional.” If he was feeling confident, he might even swing for “average.” 

Meeting Maria gave him one special, precious purpose. He could make a beautiful woman laugh. She was the shining exception to his dedication to mediocrity.  

“I hope our child has your humor,” Maria told him recently. They were lying in bed on a Sunday morning. Mark always thought she looked ethereal in the mornings, with the milky morning sun stroking her face. She smiled at him the way he’d only ever seen women smile at men in the movies. He could never shake the feeling that her loving gaze was misguided, but he never had the heart to point this out to her himself. He found it selfish of him to deprive her of this pertinent information- I’m tedious, you’re lovely, you’ll leave once you know, how can I stop you from knowing- but what was love if not inherently selfish? 

When she’d said that, Mark thought about telling his child a joke one day. When he tried to imagine his future child, he never could. It was this nebulous idea in his head, like trying to picture a new color. Still, he pictured the most generic child he could and tried to make it laugh. In his own mind, he just ended up staring at it, dumb with inefficacy. He imagined Maria looking upon him staring vacantly at their beloved child, cringing with the revealed knowledge of his inadequacy. Children have the capacity to do that- reveal the limitations of their parents to one another. 

An imperfect human on their own is expected. An imperfect parent is a threat. 

The outdoor air was wetly cold, like the inside of a mouth after having eaten a popsicle. The silver bones of a playground stood skeletally under fluorescent lights, deserted and lifeless in the night. Wetness soaked through Mark’s shoes to his socks from the grass he stood on, although he couldn’t remember it having rained that day.  

Mark was familiar with nightmares, and had made up his mind in that moment to treat this as one. No matter how aware your subconscious, you can’t wake yourself up; you have to simply participate in the terror until morning, or when Maria’s snores mercifully pulled him out of it.  

Instinctually, Mark whipped his head around, searching for Wendy. It was difficult to see more than a few feet in front of him. He recognized his surroundings as the park a few blocks away from his and Maria’s house. He stood stock still in the middle of the large green island that he watched the young neighborhood children cross on their way to school in the mornings, tiny backpacks bumping against their small torsos. This is the field he’d walk across with his daughter to take her to that same school nearly a decade from now.  

Squinting closer at the playground, Mark saw an immobile shape hanging upside-down from the monkey bars. Walking slowly closer, he could make out Wendy’s knobby knees clinging to the monkey bars, her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her chest in a corpse pose. She looked like the hanged man from a tarot deck, contemplative and still.  

“Gaining a new perspective can be so refreshing,” Wendy said, her eyes still closed. She must have sensed him approach the jungle gym. In one swift motion, Wendy arched her torso back to grab the monkey bar directly behind her, contorting her body like a skilled acrobat into a perfect U shape, before releasing her knees and landing squarely on her feet. “We’re almost done here, Mark. This is your final consequence.” 

She grabbed Mark’s hand to lead him on, but he recoiled, clutching his hand to his chest. Her palm was wet and cold, as if it’d been plunged into a pool of ice. “Look,” Mark spluttered. There comes a time in every nightmare where the victim attempts to regain some form of agency. “I don’t know what my subconscious is trying to tell me, or if you’re really the fucked-up child of the neighbors across the street, but regardless- I’m having a baby. It’s kind of too late to change that now.” Mark’s breathing grew rapid, clogging his throat in panic. “Why do you keep trying to scare me?” 

Wendy sighed. Something like true remorse rippled across her childlike features. “I haven’t shown you anything new, Mark. Self-reflection is a bitch.” She said this sweetly, the way a fourth-grade girl might actually say the word “bitch.”  

“I’m not trying to scare you, I just am scaring you. Can you accept that?” 
Somehow, this made a lot of sense to Mark. His fear seemed deserved, if not inevitable.  

“I’m waking up soon and making a doctor’s appointment.” 

“Your head is just fine, Mark. At least, you’re not concussed.” Wendy started off across the green expanse without him, towards a single globe of light illuminating the parking lot a few hundred paces away. He had no choice but to follow her. 

A pick-up truck that looked like it’d driven at least three generations of lifelong cigarette smokers to and from construction sites idled in the otherwise empty lot. From halfway across the field, the skunky smell of marijuana and yeasty tang of beer belches reached his nostrils, reminding him of hangovers and hocked-up mucus.  

Five teenagers sat in the bed of the truck, slugging vodka inside brown paper bags straight out of the bottle the way only teenagers with no concern for their own wellbeings can. Music from the radio played softly from the truck’s interior, just quiet enough not to draw attention from any of the surrounding houses.  

“He’s walking fucking regret, man,” one of the young men said in a ripped glottal scrape. “All he does is come home from work, sit in the same easy chair, and watch television until his face goes all, like, slack. It’s sad, I don’t want to get older and just rot, I don’t know, just fade into oblivion like that.” Mark had been privy to enough smoke sessions in college to see this for what it was: a stoned complaint of everyone’s childhoods, even while they were still children themselves. 

“I don’t know the last time I saw my dad happy.” Mark’s eye snagged on the girl with her legs tucked under her sweatshirt in the truck bed, holding a lit cigarette. He recognized the hoodie; it looked like it had been through many more loads of laundry, but it looked identical to his favorite Denver Broncos sweatshirt from the year they won the Super Bowl. The girl seemed to tuck herself into it for warmth, although the night was muggy with noisy summer heat. “My father was bright the entirety of my childhood. Or, I mean, the man literally glowed golden. I always noticed how other people gravitated to him and his big, easy smile. That’s what I remember most vividly about my father: his big grin. He didn’t smother you with his charm, though. He was just- jovial seems like the best word for it, but that reminds me too much of Santa Claus.”  

Even in the dark, Mark noticed the girl’s burnished hair, the slightly hooked nose, the crease between her brows that he already fervently adored. His palms urged to cup her face, to hold her to him tightly and not let go.  

He didn’t need to look down at Wendy’s gloating face to know who she was showing him. She resembled Marie too much for there to be any mistake.  

“I love my parents, but damn if they aren’t so controlling. Like, just the other day…”  

Mark couldn’t stop staring at her. The way she moved her arms around when she talked, like she could conjure the image of what she was describing with her hands, the perfect configuration of her features, the way she sometimes dug her nose into the collar of his sweatshirt and sighed deeply, raptured him. He’d never felt this way before, like he would set himself on fire if it meant keeping her warm. He supposed that’s why he’d let her have his sweatshirt.  

“Shit, my dad is totally gonna smell smoke on this later,” the girl mumbled to her friends. 

“Chill, Lauren, I have perfume in my bag.” 

Lauren. Mark envisaged blue chlorinated water, a pink outline sunk just below the surface. 

He looked at Lauren, older than he was that day at the pool, yet still making so many silly little mistakes. She, Mark saw now, was his second chance to rectify, to protect, what he’d allowed to be lost. He was older now, smarter. Smart enough to know when someone is drowning, and strong enough to help. 

Lauren, with all her teenage angst and late night delinquencies, was clearly not drowning. She was beautiful like her mother, and made her friends laugh. She spoke confidently, and seemed so real, so alive, already a force unto herself.  

Mark released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.  

When he looked down, Wendy was already many paces away, standing on the sidewalk across the field from him. Her yellow rain boots glistened wetly under the streetlight she now stood under.  

“Wendy,” he called out. She cocked her head to indicate she could hear him. “Am I still in trouble?” 

Her whisper reached his ear all the way from across the park. “Are you still frightened?” 

“Yes,” Mark spoke softly. “But not of you. Not of this.” Lauren and her group of friends were silent now, gazes turned upwards to the starlit sky. It actually was a truly beautiful night.  

Mark looked up at the stars too. He could immediately identify the Big Dipper, Casseopeia. He had fond memories of his father teaching him how to find the constellations in the night sky when he was just a kid.  

“That one is the Big Dipper,” Lauren murmured, pointing up. He already knew who had taught her that without having to wonder.  

Refracted sunlight glinted off the surface of the water, broken only by the splashes of children playing, bodies rocketing off the edge and reemerging wet and new. The smell of sunscreen oozing out of plastic bottles, chlorine and ammonia mingling indelicately in the shallow end of the pool, compounded one another in the solar beat-down of the mid-August afternoon.  

Mark watched his daughter lollygag in the kiddie pool. At one and a half feet deep, the water only came up to her knobby toddler knees, yet two inflatable armbands held her in an impermanent strongman pose. She was still too young to begrudge her father his excessive caution. Her mouth blew raspberries as her toy boat puttered across the superficial sea. 

He never took his eyes off of her. He worried about her around public pools, but he worried about her everywhere now: crossing the street, at daycare, asleep in her unimaginably small bed.  

This is not an indictment of Mark. Quite the contrary. 

Watching Lauren so closely, Mark didn’t notice the small blonde head poking out of the deep end of the other pool. The head stared across the water at him for a long time, unmoving and unblinking. Around her, swimmers splashed and floated, but none paid any heed to her.  

It was only when Mark wrapped his daughter in a small pink towel, her face flushed with a day in the sun and smiling up at her father, that Wendy’s mouth quirked in a smile, just ever so slightly. Deep lines creased the edges of her girlish mouth.  

Still smiling, she sank back down to the bottom.