Sleep, Child

Rusty Yates: “Is anyone hurt?”

Andrea Yates: “Yes. The children. All of them.”

Tonight my son falls asleep on my arm and it goes numb under his head.  I can’t feel the down of his hair, which is growing wiry and curly now that the strands are coming through his bald scalp.  Getting older on me already.  One day the hair will turn gray, like the one I noticed on my husband’s temple today.

The television buzzes with white snow.  I can’t reach the remote, the small movement would disturb my son and, oh, it took forever to get him to sleep.  It’s ten o’clock and my breasts are sore and all I want is to reach over, grab the remote, turn off the damn, buzzing T.V. and go to bed where I can black out in peace and quiet.  But if I move, just one inch for the remote, he’ll wake up.

Then the crying will start again. 

The other three boys went to sleep over two hours ago.  I hear the silence one room over.  Strange, the boys are all generally loud—snoring and breathing, like my husband. 

The quiet is deafening, making my ears burn.  Maybe the noise isn’t all from the T.V.  Maybe it’s in my head, beating right next to my eardrums.  Maybe it’s just my imagination.  My husband says I overreact.  But he doesn’t understand the way the baby wails in the afternoons.  For something so small, the noise bleats at me until all that’s left is this ringing, like the hum of the television.  Even the silence is no longer relaxing.

My arm is completely numb, my shoulder—the only part I can feel—is sore from being crammed into the couch cushion.  The baby doesn’t stir and I sigh, giving up the wish for the remote and letting the buzz sound out around the living room.  I freeze, was the sigh too loud?

I look down and the soft lips are parted, breathing steady and even.

The air could stop in those lungs.  He could breathe in, and then out, and then never breathe in again.  I hold my own breath, watching.  But the breathing does not stop—it goes on, a soundless cycle, like his brothers.  It would be easy to stop the lungs that bellow so loud during my daylight hours.  He could roll over in his sleep, into a pillow, into water.

My arm is cold.  I can’t feel his head, or his warmth.  The muffled beating in my ears makes the sound of his breathing distant—just like the remote.  Something so simple, yet I cannot do it.  If I reach out my hand for something other than him, even one inch away, he’ll protest.  The outside world collapses into a thirteen-pound sphere that lies on my arm.

He rolls over, so sudden and unexpected I almost jump.  But I hold still and he presses his face into my chest, searching even in his sleep.  I’ve read that babies can tell their mother’s heartbeat, that the beat comforts them.  He rolls right against my heart and I feel the blood rush back into my arm, into my head.  It hurts.  There is no use for it, I will have to risk waking him.  I can’t take staying still on that couch any longer.            

Rather than move slow and deliberate, I jerk up—telling myself that I can handle it if he wakes.  But he doesn’t.  He curls deeper into the bend of my arm, expecting me to support his weight.  I do.  And when I place him in his bassinette, tucking the blue blanket around him, I feel his heartbeat, feel his breath, and wonder at the tears sliding down my cheeks.