Eleven Heartbeats Long

It is late summer in Virginia, and the night is full of cicadas—the breeze drifting through the windows as Beth paces in her bedroom, waiting for her son’s screams to start. Her beautiful sun-streaked child, seven years old and stuck between sleep cycles, eyes wide, gasping, words sticky in his throat. It has been happening for months now, these night terrors. And each night as she listens for his cries, she hears an echo buried in the darkness: Go, go, go.  

It starts just before midnight, and she is animal-quick, her feet sprinting across the hardwood, her hands on his chest. He is on fire, lit from the inside, his face blotchy-red and his hair sweat-soaked as he shrieks. He is a spark let loose, a wildfire raging.  

She is never to wake him mid-terror. The websites say waking him will slow the process, that trying to stop it will actually make it worse for Sam, and she reminds herself of this fact as he tosses and turns; his breath a gust of scorching heat as he screeches. When his eyes wildly search the room, when she says, I’m here, baby, it’s me, it’s clear that he is on his own in this. He is too far away to hear her voice. 

She sits with him, begging this thing to let go of her son as his fingernails scratch and carve pink stripes on his naked arms. She has tried cool washcloths, stripping the covers from the bed, touching and not touching him, but she knows there is nothing to do but wait. 

Afterwards, he does not remember. This is a good thing; that’s what everyone says. What a relief, they say. It’s good that he doesn’t know what is happening. But for years she and her husband have encouraged Sam to engage with the world, to be curious and thoughtful and aware. It does not feel like a good thing. Her son’s new not-knowing.

In the morning, she finds bits of grit in her mouth. When she sleeps, she grinds her teeth, which has been happening since her mother died or since her daughter, Maggie, left home, maybe. But lately she hears the crunch of sand when she wakes. The flecks of enamel shaved away in the night while she listens for her son.

In the kitchen, she cracks three eggs then whisks, adds a splash of milk, salt but no pepper because what child likes black specks in his food?

Sam is bed-headed and sour-breathed as he sits at the counter, groggy and crusty-eyed with tremendously large feet and hands already. Hints of a grown-up’s body. 

She is ridiculously in love with this child. 

While she cooks, he tells her about a new Pokémon card, one he’s never seen before, the Loch Ness Monster of the game that beats all the others. A Rainbow Rare that’s a Holo Rare, too. Target, he says gravely. We should definitely go to Target. He spears a grape and forks it into his mouth. Like, today, I mean. There aren’t many out there, he says. 

A unicorn card, she says, and he smiles.  

She lays a piece of bacon in the skillet, grease snapping, and does the math, trying to find an extra hour when they can sneak away in search of this fabled card he has heard about from Dax and Bennett and Charlie at camp, these boys who have bullied Sam all summer but now want to trade cards and crude jokes, the stories in their mouths tumbling and filling Sam’s ears. She wonders if these boys are the ones chasing her son in his sleep.

After pickup, maybe. They could go to Target before dinner, but the evening hours are slower now—bedtime should be earlier and sleep schedules more defined. No screens, she has read. No loud music. Books or puzzles and long baths instead. The websites suggest a consistent quiet routine.

Water flushes through the pipes above them, as Beth listens to Bennie move from the bathroom back to the bedroom, where he will stay until well past lunch. This man she has been married to for 20 years. Bennie works as an EMT, and it is his week on the night shift, so he has spent the last eight hours stabilizing and transporting patients from homes and homeless encampments to the local hospital. The fact of his job, of his work helping others while she struggles to help their son, this fact has planted something small but firm between them. A pebble, soft edged but unmalleable.  

Maybe Maggie knows, Sam says because even though his sister is 11 years older than him and never collected the Pokémon cards, she is 11 years older than him, and he believes she has all the answers. 

This is Beth’s favorite thing about the age difference between her children. 

Let’s call her, Sam suggests. She’ll know about the card. 

But lately it seems like all Maggie knows about is Derrida and deconstruction, which she has spent the last months studying during her college’s summer session. Literary theory and her boyfriend Jackson. Maggie recently cut her hair short; she pierced her septum that spring. Beth’s daughter, now 18 years old. Maggie, who developed into a full-grown human when Beth turned her head for an instant. 

Let’s call Maggie, Sam says again, but they have to clean the dishes then pack his backpack with a water bottle, two snacks, a towel and change of clothes. 

He wants to get to the trailhead on time, so that he and Dax and Bennett and Charlie can swap Pokémon cards before they shrug on their packs and follow the counselors down the dirt path toward the river where they will spend the day burning off the heat of summertime restlessness, of being seven and heavy with the longing for independence. Her child, now pressing through the world without her.

This is a new thing—summer camp. It is something Beth’s father gifted Sam for his birthday, but she wonders if it is a good thing. This tribe of wealthy children Sam now spends so much time with. These boys who pushed him into the mud bog the first day of camp, the stains on his clothes still lingering after three washes. These children who jabbed him between the shoulder blades while they waited in line for the bathroom. 

We’ll call her tonight, Beth says. Go wash up. We’re leaving in five. 

After she drops him at camp, Beth spends the morning updating a client’s website and folding and putting away laundry while Bennie sleeps. Eventually, she texts Maggie to let her know they plan to call this evening. 

There is an ache when she thinks of her daughter, but there is pride, too. It has been a long time since Maggie was a child, and Beth’s heart has adjusted as she learned to trust Maggie to navigate the world on her own. This is something she feels equally guilty and satisfied by, this acceptance of a shift in ratio—the hours she is with her child versus the hours she is without. 

And that is the one great betrayal of parenthood: there is no way to escape abandonment, the organic inevitable part of being left behind. 

Beth researches night terrors as she stands at the kitchen island. Night terrors then child therapists. She Googles craniosacral therapy and wonders if they could afford this treatment that claims to flush the central nervous system of harbored trauma. She spins the numbers in her head, multiplying one fee and subtracting another while she slices vegetables, prepping dinner. 

She has begun cooking meals from scratch, using her mother’s old recipes, the notecards stained and splattered with cooking grease from earlier decades. No more cans or boxes or drive-through dinners, not since the night terrors began. Instead, they eat butternut squash soup and roasted red potatoes. Hand-snapped beans and peas. Omelets bloated with broccoli and cheese. Sam springs between grogginess and frenzied agitation now, and Beth knows he is desperate for rest, the thick sludgy kind children need to thrive. She wants to give him balance. She wants to fill her son with fresh vegetables and homemade broths, swell him with nutrients and vitamins, food ripe with memories from her own childhood. Food that will send him into a dreamless sleep.

Children aged 6 to 12 need 9 to 12 hours of sleep. 

And then she is back in the car line, picking Sam up from camp. 

He is exhausted and starving, his skin is sunburned pink and his eyes bloodshot and bleary. His day has been full of speed and the open space of fresh air; it is threaded into his body. He’s practically vibrating, bright lights buzzing through his blood. She hands him Ziplocks of sliced apples and grapes, a wedge of cheese. 

Adrenaline snaps through his limbs as he tells her about the boy who was stung by a yellow jacket, the welts popping on the child’s legs, the way the boy screamed while he waited for his parents to pick him up. Sam wants to call his sister to ask if the counselor was right, if yellow jackets can smell danger, if they can sting more than once. He wants to call Maggie and then he wants to play video games, and he needs to reorganize his Pokémon binder, he says. He needs to add the new cards he traded that morning.

She thinks of all the eggs she was born with, all of them there inside her since the start, and she wonders how this child is different from the child who would have come to be 3 years earlier, the egg that was shed 12 weeks before the egg that eventually became Sam. She’s not sure if she believes in fate, but when she imagines all those other eggs, she thinks she might. Their hearts, hers and Sam’s, simple collections of fibers and tissues that once nested inside each other’s bodies.

We have to go to Target, he says, suddenly remembering. TODAY. 

He is electric with the idea of the unicorn card, so she drives north away from the woods and waterways of camp and onto the highway, the corridor of strip malls and chain restaurants. They snake through traffic and Sam kicks the back of the seat as she drives, his body always in motion. He is everywhere lately: his feet tapping against the floorboard while she cooks; his fingers drumming the end table; he howls in the backyard, racing the wheelbarrow up and down the hill as she weeds the flower beds. He is less focused and easily distracted, and she blames the night terrors.

Or maybe the boys at camp—the things they say under their breath when Sam is near. Crybaby. Loser. 

The parking lot is crowded, and he’s unbuckled and waiting by the back of the car before she turns off the engine. Inside, he beelines down the aisle toward the toy section, his focus fast and relentless. 

Come on, come on, COMEON, he says as she tries to keep up. 

The cards are kept on a shelf, eye height for a child, slick and shiny and sleeved in bright colored wrappings. There are bundles and booster packs and battle decks, and she’s not sure how one set is different from the other, but next to her, Sam gasps. 

WHOAH. He brooms his fingers over a Sword and Shield Evolving Skies Booster Box. 

It has been months since they last shopped for cards, when Beth’s father sent Sam a 100 dollar bill for Easter and he was allowed to pick 20 dollars’ worth. 

Just one pack, she tells Sam, and he sighs.

But Mom.

Just one. Anything else you like we can add to your list for Christmas.

CHRISTMAS? Like Christmas in DECEMBER? 

That’s the one, she tells him and runs her fingers through his hair, crispy from sun and sweat. 

He shrugs her off and begins plucking packs of cards from the display. How do I know which one has it?

Best guess, she says. That’s the whole thing, right? 

Luck, he says and takes another pack down. 

Or fate, maybe, she thinks. Her heart squeezes, and she says, Okay, two. I’ll buy you two, but that’s it.

She hates the way she bends so easily for him lately.

Bennie is frying quesadillas when they get home, the butter popping in the pan and his hair damp from the shower. He is shirtless and wearing pajama pants, and when he turns as they come in the door, his face softens. 

There you two are, he says. I worried you might have run away with the circus.

Sam circles his arms around Bennie’s legs, and for an instant he is three-years-old again, climbing and rubbing his face against Bennie’s body. Tightrope walker, Sam says.

Lion tamer, his father tells him.

Trapeze swinger, Sam says, and then, Look, Dad! He disappears into the mudroom, his voice trailing. Look what we got!

Beth kisses Bennie on the back of his neck and smells the aftershave there. Shift go okay? she asks, and he nods. 

Too long though, he says as he flips the tortilla with a spatula. I missed you, he tells her, and then he asks, Another one last night? A whisper.

She nods. Not bad though. It didn’t last as long, she says, though she’s not sure if that’s true. It seems to last forever when they’re happening.

Any video games before bed? he asks, but she shakes her head. 

She is certain it’s something else, something bigger. Something has happened that Sam hasn’t told them about—the night terrors are the aftermath of an incident at school or camp, in the neighborhood cul-de-sac or a friend’s house, maybe. Or they are leftover battle wounds from years ago. Toddler scars or birth trauma built into his body.

I want to sleep in his room tonight, she tells Bennie, but he’s already shaking his head, the argument stale before it even begins.

Beth, no, he says. We talked about this. It won’t help. It won’t change anything.

You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know how it sounds. Her voice pitches, and Bennie moves his hand to her arm, his fingers on her wrist, thumb pressed against her pulse. 

Shhh, it says. Not while Sam might hear.

And then Sam is standing before them, hands behind his back. Pick a hand, Dad.

Bennie picks the wrong hand first, and then the other one, of course, and Sam pulls the Target bag out and holds it like an offering.

You bought me toothpaste? Bennie says, and Sam shakes his head. Breath mints? 

Sam’s head shake grows more pronounced. 

Toilet bowl cleaner. Foot fungus cream. Butt cream?! Bennie’s eyes are wild. 

Sam laughs and says, Gross, Dad. That’s disgusting! Then he hops onto the bar stool, dumps the bag out and begins tearing the first pack of cards open with his teeth even though she’s told him a million times not to do it that way. The cards tumble onto the counter, and he fans them, eyes scanning.

Please, she thinks as she watches her son in that in-between space of having and not having.

He sighs. No Holos but one VMAX, he says. That’s good, at least. And there’s still the other one to open. I’ll save it, I think. For bedtime, he tells them.

He organizes the cards by power and then rarity as he moves them between stacks while Bennie returns to the tortillas and Beth begins opening bills. After the cards have been thoroughly examined, they sit on the couch and call Maggie. 

The first thing she says when she answers is, FaceTime, Mom, FACETIME, so they hang up and call again with the video on. Maggie grins, her face jostling as she bumps about her bedroom, cleaning maybe, stashing things out of sight.

Pickle, she says, because that’s what she’s always called Sam.

He tells her about the kid who got stung by the yellow jacket at camp and how they handed out popsicles, but they were all lime flavored and no one ate them because, really, who likes lime flavored popsicles anyways?

No shit, Maggie says. DISGUSTING, which makes Sam laugh.

I can’t talk long, Maggie tells him. I’m meeting Jackson for dinner. But I miss you. 

Beth sees it in her daughter’s eyes—this wanting them near but also wanting a distance. Her daughter who has become an adult.

Sam says, There’s more. About camp, I mean. Then he tells her about the legend card he learned about from Dax and Bennett and Charlie.

Dax and Bennett and . . . Maggie says. Aren’t those the kids who . . . Mom?

Beth is quick to say, They’re his friends now. His friends at camp, because she and Maggie had texted when the boys were bullying Sam earlier that summer. 

Right, Maggie says. Okay. Tell me more about this so-called card.

Sam tells her what it looks like and what it can do, how they bought two packs that afternoon and there’s still one more to open. Maggie plays along, meeting him halfway with follow-up questions laced with skepticism but balanced with enthusiasm. Beth wonders if it is a mistake, letting Sam believe in something that likely doesn’t exist, that likely will break his heart. She imagines the other boys scheming to set him up, planning to create an imaginary card and send her son on a wild goose chase. 

Call back tomorrow and let me know about the last pack, Maggie says. Promise me you’ll call tomorrow, Pickle. 

Sam is waiting to open the second sleeve of cards at bedtime, and Beth’s heart races when she sees the pack lying next to the sink while he showers the sunscreen and dirt from his skin. 

Bennie changes for work while Beth finishes the laundry piled on their bed. She folds a tee shirt of Sam’s, though she first thought it was Bennie’s, their bodies growing closer in size.

He didn’t need any more cards, B, Bennie says from inside the closet as he threads his body into his navy blue cargo canvas pants, his white undershirt, the collared polo. His work clothes are clean and well-pressed, something she does for him weekly. 

You spoil him, he says. He never has to work for the things that he wants. He should have earned those, those cards we keep wasting money on.

He is right, but also, maybe now is not the time to ask Sam for anything extra, not while he’s fighting this thing that happens at night. 

It was only two packs, she says. A onetime thing, she lies. 

But Bennie is shaking his head. You’re too easy on him, he tells her.

She hates that word: easy. Because there has never been anything easy about her relationship with Sam, with either of her children, really. With motherhood in general. 

Breastfeeding and bellyaches, pink eye, and Mama, Mama, Mama, watch, watchWATCH. Finger paints and footprints trailing melting snow, the missing left-hand corner piece of a Star Wars puzzle, a broken vase held together with superglue. A missed deadline at work, the swimmer’s ear in the summertime and strep throat infections each winter, the way Maggie used to say aminal instead of animal, and Sam, banilla instead of vanilla. The raw heartbreaking innocence of that. An ink stain on the new couch, a fight between siblings, a child who teases at school, a teacher who doesn’t give Maggie the part she had hoped for in the play. A rainstorm without warning during an argument over homework, a lost striped sock behind the dresser, a lost soccer game in overtime, a lost stuffed turtle and a collection of crumbs nesting under the kitchen counter. A slammed door and a popped red balloon, the last piece of rainbow-sprinkled birthday cake. The last moments before Sam falls asleep when Beth whispers, Stay close, Baby. 

There is nothing easy about the unbearable way she knows that her love for her children is doomed and limited by time, by their growth. She thinks often of the word unrequited.

I still do sometimes, she says. 

You still do what? Bennie asks.

Sleep in his room. Sometimes when you’re working. More often lately. Not last night, but when I want to, I sleep on his floor, she says, which is true but is something she had promised not to do. 

The admission feels like a threat even though it is already done. It feels like a dare. 

She’d done it when Sam was younger, an easy way to settle him when he moved out of his crib. A month or two while she waited for him to develop the skill of sleeping in his new bed. And then she suggested it when the night terrors began. 

She and Bennie had argued: It’s the opposite of autonomy, Bennie said. Which is what we want for our kids, isn’t it? 

She told him it was a way for her to help Sam, to remind him that he was safe. It won’t be forever, she said. But it’s something at least. Something I can do for him.

But Bennie said, No. It’s too much. And these nightmares. They’ll pass, Beth, he said. He’ll grow out of it and it’ll just be one of those things. A small tricky thing that happens to kids.

But Bennie wasn’t the one who was there to see this invisible thing gnawing at their son as he slept.

But it helps him now. And it helps me, too, she had told him. 

There was a back-and-forth, the two of them arguing, each certain that what they thought was the right thing. There were truths in both sides, and eventually she relented and agreed not to do it—this particular form of coddling and regression. She promised not to sleep in Sam’s room. 

But then she began doing it anyway, when Bennie worked the night shift.

Now she stands on one side of the bed with Bennie on the other. Eyes locked. A sock or pair of underwear bunched in her fist.

I know I said that I wouldn’t, but I don’t think it’s right, she tells Bennie. Leaving him alone when we know how bad it gets. When we know what’s coming.

But we agreed, his words overcut her words. And then I asked, B. Just last week. I asked, and you said, No. That you weren’t sleeping in his room.

She drops the clothing, whatever it is, so that it’s lost again in the pile of laundry that still needs to be folded and put away in dresser drawers. But I am, she tells him, suddenly aware of the profound difference between saying something accurate and saying nothing at all.

So, you lied to me. 

His words are low-slung and full of surprise, and she is struck by the idea that there might also be a profound difference between lying and keeping a secret.

Shouting, she thinks. Shouting would be better than this slow hum of humiliation.

I’m not sure, she says.

You’re not sure?

Sometimes, I do.

Sometimes you sleep in his room, or sometimes you lie?

Let me think for a minute.

That’s not how you fix a problem, he says, his voice rising. By hiding things. By keeping secrets. That’s never the answer.

You’re not letting me think, she tells him.

But he keeps going: That’s not what a good parent does, B. 

Careful, she says because she knows that some words can’t be undone.

No, Beth. That’s not what a good person does, he tells her. A good partner. Good partners like us. We don’t lie to one another.

But years ago she decided, with certainty, that she and Bennie did not need to know everything about one another. There have been countless times, really, small decisions she made for Sam but never mentioned to Bennie, little lies she easily dismissed. A failed math test that she signed but never spoke of. Extra Pokémon card packs, extra desserts, extra days off from school when they spent the day watching Marvel movies. 

So sometimes you lie, he says. It is not a question.

She meets his eyes again and is overwhelmingly aware that they might never find their way back to one another now. In that moment, she has become as unpredictable as the weather. It will be there under everything now, this knowing wedged between them: she cannot be trusted. 

Teeth, she says once Sam is in his pajamas. 

He brushes them while Bennie finds the book he and Sam will read together for a half hour while she cleans up the dinner dishes. They are making their way through an encyclopedia of history for children, a giant beautifully illustrated hardback they gave Sam for Christmas the year before. They’ve learned about the Big Bang and the first fossils at Woodbury Creek; they’ve studied the Ice Age and Prehistory, Ancient History and the Middle Ages. They’ve read about the invention of coal-powered factories and railroads during the first Industrial Revolution, and they’ve made their way through the development of cheap energy after the opening of the Texas and Persian oil fields. They have talked of fossil fuels and global warming, of all the ways the climate is changing. 

She often wonders if it’s too much, this great big history of the world. If it’s too much for him so late at night, but Sam says that he likes it, that he wants to know what makes the Earth spin and why wars happen. He wants to know why Greenland is melting. But still. She can’t stand seeing the photos of the penguins hunting for krill under the shrinking ice sheets.

Once, Bennie told her there was a difference between taking care of your children and taking over for them.

Once, Bennie told her that she needed to finish raising herself before they would be ready to raise a child. 

It was a joke, he said later. I was joking, B.

They have never fought in a gloves-off kind of way. There have always been safeguards in place, though she can’t remember where or how those safeguards were established. She can’t remember who made the rules. 

Once, Bennie told her that her indecisiveness and insecurities made her a more difficult woman to love.

But I do, he said. Fuck, Beth, I do. There’s nothing that could ever stop me from loving you. And then they laughed. Loud belly laughs, the roar of air bursting from their mouths. 

Don’t you forget it, she said, and they laughed again and then kissed. 

That’s how she remembered it, at least. But that was years ago.

Beth dries the dishes. The countertop is wiped clean; the bits of crumbs of tortilla are swept away. Bennie and Sam finish reading about renewable energy sources, and then the three of them climb onto his bed before Bennie leaves for work, the last pack of cards set between them. 

It’s fine if it’s not in there, Sam says. This boy who breaks their hearts wide open with a simple sentence sometimes, their son who carries such joy and dread in the same breath. Sam stares at the pack intensely, and the universe opens up a little. 

Please, she thinks, though she knows, of course, there will be no unicorn card. That’s not how this works.

Sam peels the shrink-wrap off, fans the cards on the bed, and Beth feels, with great clarity, what it is like to see the world with her son’s eyes. This contradictory truth: his life, full of promise, but also, such vulnerability.  

Later that night, when Sam cries out, she is there, bedside, in an instant. She has been dreading this all day: his limbs, trembling; his mind, at odds with his body. A startling free fall. 

She touches his face, wet with heat, and this time she counts to 11. Eleven heartbeats long as his mind sprints from something that won’t let up. And that is exactly how she feels lately, too. Not always, but some days. These invisible risks and worries haunting them at every turn.

There is just so much to lose now.

I’m here, she tells him, and, You’re safe, she says as she thinks of Sam’s infant screams after his circumcision, the inconsolable wails after a biking accident the summer he turned five, his panting gasps for breath, poolside, when he tried mango from the snack-shack before they knew he was allergic. She thinks of the Daxes and Bennetts and Charlies of the world and all the hours of time Sam will spend away from her and with people like them instead.  

Stay close, she tells Sam. Stay close.

She wants to climb into the scrambled spaces of his mind, to meet him halfway and find him between sleep stages, to guide him back to her. Eleven heartbeats long, his cries slip-sliding together, running wild as he gasps.

Breathe, she says. You’re safe, though she knows she can’t be sure.

Eleven heartbeats long while she traces circles between his shoulder blades and watches the rise and fall of his breath. Counting until Sam is at rest again.

Maybe next time, he had said after he finished scanning the cards in that last pack. If it’s true, I mean. If it even exists. 

She and Bennie nodded, eyes landing on their son. The compassion and cruelty of parenthood equal in their vastness.

That night, she sleeps on Sam’s floor while Bennie works until dawn: the extra pillow, too thin even when she folds it in half; the carpet, not as soft as she’d like. Curled and bean-shaped at the foot of his bed—his red Converse high-tops near the door, the scent of uncapped Sharpie markers on his desk, his sleep-stained breath when he rolls over. This is the choice she will make over and over again, this decision between what is best for her child and what her husband wants, this exchange of permission for land mines laid by secrets.