Ten

You are suddenly awake. Deep under the floral quilt, box fan whirring at your head, you are not immediately able to discern what pulled you from dreams of falling water. The creak of the bunk as you shift to your side is familiar and safe, as is the slow, deep breaths of your sisters in the bed below. You reach out and feel the cool metal of the bed rail, installed by your irate dad the 6th or 8th or 10th time you fell with the rushing water and woke up, scraped and crying, on the bedroom floor. You rest your damp forehead against the metal and close bleary eyes. 

It’s stuffy and smells of sleep breath and sweat in the room, and you still don’t know why you are awake. You aren’t usually one to wake in the middle of the night, unless you’ve fallen from your bed or urgently need to pee. You adjust into a more comfortable position to try and fall back into sleep, when you hear it again. You immediately recognize your dad’s voice and go still. Ten years of attuning yourself to every tone shift and decibel change, ruling factors in your life, means that you know at once he is upset. Some self preservation instinct had picked up on that tone, past the hum of the fan and the barrier of unconsciousness, and warned you. You are so often the reason for that tone that you panic a little, wondering if you did something in your sleep to cause it. 

You rise up on your elbow and strain your ears in an attempt to parse the individual words past the tone of his voice. You hear something that sounds like “Oh god” and something else that sounds like “please”, but it is hard to hear over the fan. You reach out to turn it off, and your hand is shaking because there is an edge to your dad’s tone that you’ve never heard before. If you didn’t know better, you would say it sounds like fear. Could adults be afraid? Could your dad, who scares you because he is big and powerful and you are small and willful, be scared?

“He won’t respond!” This second voice jolts you out of your thoughts. You can tell that your mom is trying to be careful of her volume, careful not to wake you and your siblings. But she is also scared. 

You are suddenly and horribly realizing that adults are not invulnerable to the cold hand stomach drop throat closed feeling that you experience often. Fear is so familiar to you at 10, but you weren’t aware it lasted into adulthood. You recognize the hoarseness in your mom’s voice, and your breath starts to come in fast little (quiet) gasps. 

The voices resonate up through the ground from the room below yours. The bedroom where your brother has been sleeping since the stairs became too difficult, the oxygen tank too cumbersome for him. Are they waking him up with their fear and their noise? He needs his sleep. 

“Please hurry!” Dad again. 

Who is he talking to? 

“My address is…” he rattles off the stream of numbers and street name that you have memorized. You needed to memorize it in case you were ever lost.

“He’s not breathing! Hurry!”

More words follow, more panic. You cannot distinguish all of it over the dull buzzing that has started to fill your ears. You don’t know what is happening, but their fear is contagious, and you are sick with it. Your hands are clammy, and you fight down the urge to vomit. Everything in you is screaming to get up, to tiptoe downstairs, to find out. To check on your brother.

You move slowly to the edge of the bed, and then you stop. Dad is upset. You know what can happen when he is upset. Wouldn’t he be even more upset if you sneak out of your room in the middle of the night? But shouldn’t you make sure your brother is okay? Let him know you’re there?

You are frozen.

“They’re on their way.” Dad’s voice is shaky and barely perceptible. You hear mom say something back, hear them both calling to your brother. They should leave him alone, he needs his sleep! Don’t they know he is sick and tired?

Because you are only ten, you don’t fully realize what is happening, and the risk of potential trouble is overwhelming to you. You are on a precipice, and you don’t want to fall again. Mom and Dad know what they are doing, right? They have things under control, and they have someone coming to help. They will be mad if you go downstairs. 

And maybe you don’t actually want to find out what is happening downstairs. 

Ignoring the gnawing feeling in your gut, the ache that is begging you to be brave and go check on your brother, you crawl back to head of the bed. You reach out shakily and turn the fan back on, the whir of it mingling with the persistent buzz in the base of your skull. Slightly warm air hitting your face as it kicks on, you burrow underneath the quilt and shut your eyes tight. You wait for the noise to drown out any sound from downstairs, desperately praying that sleep will come quickly. You don’t even care if any of your bad dreams come back, if you can just get away from this terrible, confusing, ache-filled night. 

Because you are only ten, sleep does come quickly, and you dream about running and hiding and reaching a waterfall and flying, falling, flying. You don’t realize, because you are only ten, that your life will never be the same again. That something in your universe has shifted irrevocably out of place. You don’t realize that you have stepped over the invisible boundary between childhood and adulthood, that your gut had been trying to tell you something vital, that you have fallen out of mere dreams and into a living nightmare.

It hits you hard the next morning when you go downstairs and peek into your brother’s room. The oxygen tank sits idly by the bed, cannula wrapped untidily around the neck. Someone is crying in the other room. The full weight of what you overheard in the night finally sinks onto your shoulders, and you feel your whole world falling out of alignment. 

You will wish for the rest of your life that you had been braver that night.