When Winter Blooms

I've always been a light sleeper.

My mum used to say it was because I spent so many years listening for my brother at night, listening for the particular sound of him getting up for water, or having a bad dream, or just being five years old and scared of something he couldn't name. 

You train yourself after a while. 

Your ears learn to stay half-open even when the rest of you is gone.

So when I heard Lily at 12:43 am, I was already sitting up before I was fully awake.

It wasn't a big sound. 

it wasn't a scream, the way you'd expect. 

It was small. A small, thin sound, the kind that comes from a child who's been crying long enough to run out of volume. 

Like she'd been at it for a while before I heard her.

I was down the hall in seconds.

Her nightlight was on, a little cloud-shaped thing that threw soft blue light across the ceiling and she was sitting up in bed with Gerald crushed against her chest, face wet, breathing in that hiccuping, ragged way that meant she'd been crying hard and was winding down now. 

She looked at me when I came in and her face just crumpled. Fresh tears, because someone had finally shown up.

"Hey," I said, crossing to her. 

I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her into my lap without asking. 

"Hey, I'm here. I've got you."

She grabbed my shirt with both fists and pressed her face into my shoulder and just cried. I held her and rubbed her back in slow circles and didn't say anything for a while, just let her get it out. You can't rush that part. 

Anyone who's ever sat with a crying child knows you just have to be the still thing they cry against until the storm passes.

After a while the shaking slowed down.

"Bad dream?" I asked, against her hair.

She nodded. Didn't say what it was about and I didn't push.

"It's gone now," I told her. 

"Dreams can't follow you out. Did you know that?"

She pulled back enough to look at me, skeptical like she wanted to believe me but she wasn't born yesterday. 

"How do you know?"

"Because I've had a lot of bad dreams," I said. "And none of them ever followed me."

She thought about that. "What do you dream about?"

"Sometimes my mum," I said. 

"She's not here anymore either. So sometimes I dream about her and wake up sad."

Lily was quiet for a moment. 

Then she said, very softly, "Like me and my mummy."

"Yeah," I said. "Just like that."

She looked at me for a long time, the way kids look at you when they're deciding whether to trust you with something. 

Then she leaned her head back against my shoulder, and I felt her breathe out. A whole body exhale.

"Will you stay until I fall asleep?" she asked.

"Of course I will."

I started to sing, low and quiet, nothing in particular, just something soft my mother used to hum when I was small and the nights felt too big. 

Lily's grip on my shirt loosened slowly. Gerald was wedged between us, his stuffed ear pressed against my ribs. 

I sang until her breathing went deep and even and her hands went slack.

I stayed a little longer anyway. Just to be sure.

That's when I noticed him.

I don't know how long he'd been there. The door was ajar, I'd pushed it open when I came in but hadn't closed it behind me, and in the gap, in the thin strip of hallway light, I could see him.

He wasn't in a suit. 

I'd only ever seen him in a suit. But he was in a grey t-shirt and he looked different. 

Younger, maybe, or just less armored. 

His hair wasn't combed and he was holding the doorframe with one hand like he needed something to hold onto.

He was watching Lily sleep.

I didn't say anything. I don't know why, maybe because I could see from where I was sitting that he'd been crying. 

Not obviously. 

Just the particular redness around a man's eyes when he's been trying very hard not to and mostly succeeded. And something about calling attention to that felt cruel.

So I just looked at him, and he looked at his daughter, and neither of us said a word.

Then he looked at me.

It was brief, just a second, maybe two. 

His eyes met mine across the dim room and I don't know what either of us was supposed to do with that. 

I gave him the smallest nod I could manage. Something that said: she's okay, I've got her. 

He looked at Lily one more time.

Then he stepped back from the doorway.

I carefully laid Lily back against her pillow, tucked the blanket up around her and Gerald, and crept to the door.

He was sitting on the floor.

Back against the hallway wall, knees bent, head tipped back. He looked up at me when I came out and I looked down at him, and for a moment I thought he might say something, explain himself, or tell me to go back to bed, or be cold about it the way he was cold about everything.

He didn't say anything.

I didn't either.

I pulled the door mostly closed behind me, leaving just enough of a gap for the nightlight to spill through, and I went back to my room, I lay down. Stared at the ceiling.

I could hear him out there, not moving. Just sitting.

I don't know how long he stayed. I fell asleep before he left, and when I got up at six the next morning the hallway was empty and he was already in his suit at the kitchen counter with his coffee and his phone and all his armor back on, perfectly assembled, like nothing had ever happened.

"Good morning," he said, without looking up.

"Morning," I said.

I made my coffee. He left for work. 

Lily woke up twenty minutes later in a completely fine mood, already over it the way kids are, resilient in ways that make adults look embarrassing.

And that was that.

We didn't talk about the night before. I didn't mention it and neither did he and I understood instinctively that this was how things worked here, things happened, and then they went into the pile of things no one mentioned, and the day kept going.

But I thought about it all morning.

The man in the grey t-shirt, standing in a strip of light, holding a doorframe. 

Not able to go in, not able to go away.

I didn't know what to do with that yet. So I tucked it away with everything else and taught Lily how to make shadow animals on the wall, and she laughed so hard she gave herself the hiccups, and I told myself that was enough for one day.

It was.

But the other thing stayed anyway. Somewhere at the back of my chest, quiet and inconvenient.

It had a way of doing that.