NIC

Nic wakes to pitch-black and silence, terror squeezing her throat closed. A few seconds until she remembers where she is, what’s happened. Not silence, really: water is dripping somewhere, the building creaking, someone snoring aggressively. Not pitch-black, either: she can see the cracked open door to her room, the bulky dresser against the wall, the lighter blanks of the windows. She can see all the nothingness in between. She listens. How long since she’s heard someone sleeping in her home? Ah, not so hard to remember. These same world-busting children, back when they were all easy hugs and ear-splitting squeals. When they fought to sit on her lap or next to her at the table, and wanted nothing more than to listen to her tell them stories until their determined little eyelids gave up, fluttered closed. When she could tell which was which from the night sounds of them: Lena’s fast, short little breaths, as though she were jumping up and down on the spot even in her dreams; and Will’s breaths so slow and deep that Nic sometimes held her own breath waiting to hear the next one kick in. It always did, just when you thought it really wouldn’t this time, that something catastrophic had happened, that you’d lost the most precious of treasures even as you stood there sending every bit of love you ever had and then some. The certainty and horror and then—ahhhhhhh—there it was, slow, soft miracle breath. It always came.

Tonight there is only the drone of his snoring, loud enough that you’d think it was on purpose just to piss you off. If he would stop for a minute, turn down the sound at least, she could listen harder, find Lena. She strains, willing it. Like old times, except now she can’t tiptoe light as a pixie and lean weightlessly over the sleeping child. Now she is heavier than the world and just as stuck.

A wave of nausea and she rolls to her side and dry-retches onto the floor. How can throwing up nothing hurt so badly, like all her insides are being scraped raw by the same razor wire squeezing her ribs and digging deep into her spine?

‘Arnienic?’ Will’s voice, sleep-slurred and young. ‘Youkayarnienic?’ His outline in the doorway, bare-chested and with a bed-hair halo. A memory like a punch in the heart: the full trusting weight of his head in her left hand as she scooped warm water over his sudsy, baby-soft hair. My beautiful little Will, she wants to say to him, there’s nothing harder than loving a child who is not your own. Nothing.

She can’t speak, is racked with failed vomiting.