I wanted to flop back into bed in exasperation, but I made myself get up and follow her, just to ensure she wasn’t sick again, that there would be no repeats of the previous week’s disaster.

And there wasn’t. Kelli peed. She emerged. She announced, in her way of announcing these things, that she was going back to bed.

“Good stuff,” I said, as if sarcasm would ever get me anywhere with Kelli. “Thanks for keeping me in the loop there, Kell.”

“No one up,” Kelli remarked as she shuffled back into her room.

Instead of feeling annoyed, I knew I should be grateful. This seemed like it could be just a blip — it hadn’t been anything like when we were teenagers. There had been no getting Kelli back to bed in those days. She wanted something to eat, wanted to linger interminably, humming and whispering, on the second step of the foyer, she wanted to sit on her threadbare stool and gaze out the window as if she could see anything out there but her own reflection. It struck my mother and me that she simply wanted the night to be as day during those strange periods — she wanted to defy the natural order of things and she wanted us to keep her company on this obstinate ride.

It kept happening, though. Not the way it used to, in endless stretches between midnight and dawn, but quick, random dabbings at my forehead followed by Karie sleepin? and the insistence I get up. I started to acclimate to this new pattern, eventually understanding that all I had to do was basically open my eyes and say hi, and Kelli would shuffle around, ask a few questions about who was up, and whether or not we were up, then hit the bathroom before heading back to bed.

Still, it was infuriating to be woken from a deep sleep with such regularity. It made me tense and moody because it brought me back to the end-times of my marriage, the beginning of the end, when he wanted to leave but could not bring himself to say it, when neither of us could really bring ourselves to say much of anything. So instead he would stay up drinking, feeling resentful of my oblivious slumber in the next room — even though I was far from oblivious, I was merely escaping into unconsciousness at the first possible opportunity — until at last he roused himself to fling open the bedroom door and poke me awake with incoherent, hostile questions and demands. Once, when I wouldn’t wake up, he slipped one of his earbuds into my ear and started blasting a band we’d both been listening to a lot around that time — a gleeful, screamy band with a name like Total Annihilation or Massive Carnage or something.

There’s something about knowing you are not safe in sleep that gives a person bad dreams. The expectation of being woken every night — that feeling of insecurity and dread I remembered carrying around with me as my marriage was drawing to a close, like a rotting smell I couldn’t find the source of, shit I didn’t know I’d stepped in. The subconscious starts sending messages: Be vigilant. Don’t relax. Here’s a boogeyman or two to keep your nerves on edge.