Sleepless

Abstract

Sleepless Andrew Porter (bio) Sometimes I wake at night to the sound of my son wandering around the house. He doesn’t sleep anymore, and we’ve tried everything. We’ve tried reading to him, giving him a long warm bath before bedtime, letting him listen to music, watch tv. He’s six years old this spring and full of all sorts of complex emotions. My wife and I live in a small Mission-style home on the south side of San Antonio, and I often hear my son wandering out to the courtyard in the middle of the night, standing at the stone fountain and staring at it pensively, or other times, sitting down on one of the benches in the middle of the garden, looking at the bougainvillea along the wall, the Mexican bush sage and hibiscus. Once last week I caught him standing at the parapet on the second-floor balcony, overlooking the courtyard, and I thought for a moment he might jump. I don’t know why I thought such a thing. I don’t see him as a particularly despondent child, just mysterious. He’s not what I imagined when I imagined having a son. He’s nothing at all like my daughter. He’s exactly like you, my wife once told me, and I wondered what she could possibly mean. He’s restless, she said, sensitive, lost. You see me as lost? More than you realize. Later that night, after my wife had fallen asleep, I followed my son out to the moonlit courtyard and sat next to him, as he sat there quietly, staring out at the yucca plants, the old wrought iron table and chairs where we often had dinner. I knew in a couple years we’d be gone from this place. It was a wonderful house for parties, and it was perfect for an unmarried couple, or maybe even a married couple with one child, but it wasn’t a place to raise a family. It was too old, and there were too many problems with it. It was beautiful, yes, but not in a practical way. That evening, though, I wasn’t thinking about this. I was thinking about what my wife had said. [End Page 116] He’s just like you, she said, restless, sensitive, lost. I took my son’s hand and I squeezed it, hoping he wouldn’t hate me too much when he was older, hoping he wouldn’t resent me for all of the things I hadn’t given him, hoping that within those long silences, there were positive things, hopeful things, hoping he was just saving these thoughts up for a time when he might need them, hoping these long nights would pass, these sleepless nights when he sat there so quietly, stoic in the moonlight, waiting for something, or someone, to release him. [End Page 117] Andrew Porter Andrew Porter is the author of three books, including the forthcoming short story collection The Disappeared (Alfred A. Knopf); the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Penguin Random House), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and the novel In Between Days (Alfred A. Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Currently, Porter directs the creative writing program and teaches fiction writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press