We woke up every morning around three. We didn't know how long Noah had been sneaking into his parents' room while we were sleeping, but he continued to find his way in the dark each night after we discovered him on the floor. He'd walk dreamily from his bedroom to the master, zigzagging through the forest of boxes, and then he'd try to climb into the tall bed as if he might have grown a few inches since the previous failed attempt. Once he realized Darren was waiting for him every night, asleep high above him, instead of jumping for the mattress he would repeat, "Uncle Ren," with his midnight rasp until it woke Darren. Eventually, their internal alarm clocks synced and Darren no longer had to be called.
Instead of taking Noah back to his room, Darren, tired and half awake, would just scoop up the toddler and let him fall asleep in the bed with him. Every morning, I'd wake up to find Noah's bed empty and after a brief panic, check the master bedroom to discover the two sprawled out, tangled in blankets and pillows, mouths open, two peas in a king-size pod.
"You can't let him sleep with you," I said one morning over coffee and tea in the kitchen. Noah was in his high chair eating banana slices. I sprinkled some granola on the tray and Noah swirled the food around before picking up a handful to eat.
"Why not?" Darren said, his hair still messy from sleep. He was sitting on the counter, swinging his feet into Noah's. They giggled every time their toes touched.
I grabbed the blueberries and yogurt from the refrigerator. I wasn't laughing. "He's not going to be able to sleep on his own if you keep it up. You have to take him back to bed."
The following morning I found Noah cradled against Darren's side in the master bedroom again. I walked right into the morning darkness, picked Noah up, and tucked him into his own bed. Of course, Darren panicked when he woke up to a half-empty bed. But the next night I set an alarm for three in the morning and waited in the hallway until Noah emerged from his room and then carried him back to bed. If Darren wouldn't stop the cycle, I would. So we were all tired from the early wake-up calls and games of musical beds.
"How's the cohabitation experiment going?" Anna asked in the middle of the week, already set up in the living room with Noah in her lap and a ring of toys around her. I was about twenty minutes behind schedule, dragging myself to the kitchen for breakfast.
"Do I look that tired?" I put the kettle on the stove and then stood there for about a minute before I realized I had never lit the burner.
"All three of you do. Darren walked through here like a zombie an hour ago and there hasn't been a nap-time battle with Noah in days."
It was Anna who had warned me that bed-sharing could be difficult to stop down the line if the child got used to it, especially after losing a parent. She offered to send me some articles on the subject, but I politely declined, saying that I believed her. But maybe I should have forwarded them to Darren.
Ever since the wood panel injury at Amelia's and the disastrous Roberts estimate, Darren had been trying to find a place for me at the business. One day he had me submit payroll, but the company later called him about a few discrepancies. Then I ordered materials for the new cottage job and selected the wrong brand, which was more expensive and over budget, not to mention unreturnable. I even tried to update the website since I took one semester of graphic design in art school, but it crashed after a few edits.
Darren asked me to meet him at the hardware store to help him pick out some finishes, the only thing that I had been good at since helping with the Baker Brothers business. I found him in the bathroom accessories aisle. He was covered in dry spackle and dust from sanding wood, on his clothes and in his dark hair, comparing two silver handles for a black vanity. "They look the same," he said when he saw me.
"This one has a dip in the middle," I explained, exaggerating the slight bend with my finger along the handle.
"And that justifies a ten dollar price difference?"
I looked at the labels under each sample. "No, the brand does."
"Who is Bethany Goode anyway?"
"You should really start watching HGTV."
"I don't need to watch people renovate houses. I do enough of that myself." He put the hardware down and pushed the cart forward. Then he looked at the vanity tops displayed high on the shelves at the end of the aisle, faux marble, wood, and tile, each with their own spotlight like the pop divas of bathroom accessories. I pointed to the cream granite top with dark flecks on the top shelf and said it would look good with the black wood of the vanity. He agreed and grabbed the box to put it in the cart.
"Wait. No argument?" I asked. "You're not going to ask me a million questions about how I came to that conclusion or what class I took in art school that would qualify me to make that decision?" I stood back and looked at him suspiciously.
When we had gone back to the antique store to choose the prints for Amelia's laundry room, every frame and image was scrutinized by Darren, following behind me as I placed them in the wicker basket the clerk had given me to shop. Why did you choose that? Isn't that frame too fancy? How does a sketch of fruit fit with the laundry room aesthetic? He always brought it back to art school, which was something my brother had also done whenever he had the chance.
When I had shown up to Phil's June wedding many years before in a teal suit, he wouldn't stop making cracks about me being colorblind. "I said green. Green! Like a tree," he had said. I told him that teal had a green base and then he asked me what they had taught me at that sham of an art school while the entire bridal party was sweating on the church steps. By the end of the night, though, when he was drunk and dancing to a Journey song, I had overheard him telling one of Theresa's family members that I was his brother. "The one in the prettiest suit," he had said, pointing. "Did you know that teal has a green base?"
Bullying me was always a competition between Darren and Phil when we were growing up––I was an easy target. But in a way, it made me feel like a celebrity. I liked being the center of their attention, that they were thinking of me at all, even if that meant hearing a cacophony of childish insults as we recorded our secret histories on cassettes or scoped out the woods or built a fort in the living room or even, when we were older, had girls in the car.
So when I was finally fed up with Darren's questioning and art school jokes in the antique store––his "You're not even a photographer!" the final straw––I put the basket of frames down and picked up a camera instead. For the next few days I had carried it everywhere: to job sites, running errands around town, playing with Noah. I was determined to capture the Pennsylvania landscape I saw for Amelia's laundry room, not the one behind the lens of the stock photos in the antique store. It had been so long since I had been behind a camera, I had forgotten about the intensity of waiting for the light and exhilaration of the click when everything was perfect in the frame. It felt good to be an artist again, rediscovering my old love for photography that was, in some ways, my first love.
Darren quickly confessed why there was no art school insult or question of my taste in the bathroom accessories aisle. "To be honest," he said, the vanity top box already in the cart, "I'm kind of in a rush. The guys invited me out tonight."
It looked like he had more to say, but instead of saying it, he pushed the cart into the next aisle, even though we didn't need anything from the gardening section, almost roaming around aimlessly. "Where are you going?" I asked, surrounded by ceramic pots and shovels.
He hesitated, stroking a long vine hanging from the top shelf to test if it was real or fake. "We're going to tailgate and probably head over to the bonfire after the game. They said I looked like I could use a good time, you know, after everything. We haven't done anything since..." He stopped.
"Well, you don't have to ask my permission, if that's what you're worried about."
"I'm not asking for permission. But..."
"But what?"
We made it to the next aisle where there were rows and rows of doors. "Where the fuck are tubs?" he asked, frustrated and distracted, stopping in the middle of the store.
I put my hand on the cart so he couldn't make any sudden movements. "But what, Darren?" We moved out of another customer's way, but I kept my hand on the cart.
"Noah."
I didn't see where he was going with this. "What about Noah?"
"The sleep walking..."
Then it hit me. If Darren didn't return to the house that night, no one would be in the master bedroom waiting for Noah. Without thinking, I said, "It's fine. I'll sleep there."
"Are you sure?" He almost crashed the cart into a leaning stack of doors. "The whole reason I'm staying in the house is because you don't want to sleep in there."
"Yes," I paused. "You deserve a night out. But only one."
He lit up like a kid on Christmas morning.
The rest of the shopping trip he didn't stop me from picking out the tile and the light fixtures or question any of my quirky choices like the rose gold shower and towel rods. I almost picked out a round window, just to test him.
Back at the house, after dropping off the materials and another full day of shadowing Darren at work, still unsure what to let me do, he showered and got ready for his night out. I told Noah we would be having our own night in with ice cream and cartoons. I even poured myself a glass of wine. If Darren could have fun, so could I.
I tucked Noah in around eight and told him to stay in his bed, that Uncle Darren wouldn't be home that night, hoping this fact alone would convince him to stop bed-hopping. With Noah tucked in, I settled into the king-size bed, but it felt claustrophobic to be surrounded by boxes on all sides, so I rearranged them and pushed some against the walls. I had another glass of wine on the end table for nerves and a book about modern art on my lap to distract me. Eventually, I fell asleep, wondering what Darren was up to. I imagined him chugging iced tea like it's beer, talking about girls, and throwing things into the fire with his buddies, all things I had seen him do countless times before when they would drag me to their social gatherings in high school.
Around six in the morning, the sky preparing to change color and about to illuminate the bedroom, I woke up with an incredibly dry mouth. I looked at the end table, the alarm clock and the empty wine glass, but there was no water in sight. That's when I realized that I had slept through the entire night for the first time in days. There was no sign of Noah on the floor next to the bed, so I ran into his room. His bed was also empty. Then I heard a long, slick zipping sound coming from the master bedroom.
When I returned, I glimpsed a bit of Noah's blonde hair from behind one of the tall stacks of boxes. I jumped back onto the bed to get a better view. From my crouched position at the foot of the mattress, I could see Noah below sitting with his legs wide open on the beige carpet, untangling something. One of the boxes had turned over, probably during his midnight journey to the bed, and a few of the objects had spilled out. Then I realized what he was doing. Noah had found the cassette tapes I had retrieved from below the floorboards of my childhood bedroom closet, the ones Phil and I had recorded as children. Noah was wrapped in neverending strands of jumbled brown tape that had been pulled from the cassettes, our unheard voices and memories completely unraveled and destroyed in the toddler's tiny hands.
Author's Note: Thanks for reading! I've been waiting for this moment since Chapter 6 (#killyourdarlings). When I hear the word "unraveling" I always think of the song below. So I imagine it playing in the movie version when Ryan realizes what Noah has done.
How do you think Ryan and Darren are going to react?