At night, as children, we each need someone, in the half-light slanting from the hall lamp, slicing in our inched open door. We each need someone whose presence we barely track from somewhere in the slight crevasse we have made turning circles our beds. We each need someone that hovers at our edges, while we are seemingly deeply asleep, but not quite.
When ill, we need someone. Skimming the high side of a fever and dizzy, I remember the sound of my mother coming up the stairs with 7-Up fizzing in a cup, the glass thermometer tinkling slightly in a jar filled with alcohol, the weight and lean of her over my bed, her cool hand on my forehead.
I didn’t answer if she spoke. I stayed, instead, in the soft spot between wake and sleep, the haze of hunker-down sick, the sun far past morning light, in the got-lucky and woozy space of missing school. In this place just shy of awake, your auditory sense are keen, your eyes closed, your head full of nothing quite – just lapping like a dull wave, without will, or flare, or desire. Someone safe moves about the room. The sheets are pulled over your neck and bent back neatly at the hem.
When overwhelmed, we need someone. Another memory – my grandmother. She says “You’re tired. You’re tuckered out. Crawl in my bed and I’ll cover you up.” I go. I ease down on her side of the bed, slip my hand under the pillow, feel the hard worn beads of her rosary. On the side table a Catholic radio show is playing, barely audible, and I settle into the odd repetition of “Hail Mary, full of Grace” spoken in a voice I’ve never heard.
She thuds the heavy door open; her purse, hanging on the knob, bangs. She tucks an afghan around my still clothed body. “There, there,” she says, because some people really say that. And as I almost sleep, I hear her purse bang again, the water run in the kitchen sink, the back porch radio snap on – this time to the incendiary talk shows she likes to argue with under her breath. I know the next sounds will be her “tskk, tskk-ing” the arrogant intolerance she hears, and then her chair scraping back, the click of paint brushes at her easel, the smell of oils on canvas.
There is a time in our lives, sometimes before consciousness – and with luck, long after – where we feel someone just at the outskirts of our awareness, folded around us in time and place so that we feel tucked in, covered up.
It is 35 years later. My house is dark and I make the rounds, closing windows, checking boys. I push open the door of my son’s room, take his sweatshirt from a blossom-like heap off the floor, press it to my face. I check for the smell of him, then fold it as I hear his breath, from the bunk-bed, ease deeper into sleep. If I move too quickly or loudly he will shoulder himself upright and charmingly start with requests and stalls, so I move stealthily. I close the closet soundlessly to keep the monsters he may wake to in tight, slide his drawer open and sweep socks in, put the sweatshirt away. It is not lost on me that I have now become the one who putters and that when I go to bed, all will be utterly still around me.
They are each out for the night – my husband, my sons, even the dog sighs and stretches out in a single swim stroke of length and fur and sigh.
No one moves but me. There is no puttering.
My head frays and flits and I wonder at what I need. Then the words come back, in some sort of hush, a quote from St. Augustine: “Our hearts are restless until we find rest in You.”
It matters not what color-of-God you wonder of, or hope for, or know. What matters is the yearn, almost childlike, for something sure moving near you. What matters is entering the expectant night hearing, leaning into, some sort of peace, like the kind we remember from far off and long away, the kind that will hold us watched over, safe, tucked in and covered nightlong and in all ways.
