At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks [110]
“Again?”
“What can I say?” Jeremy replied. “It happens.”
“Don’t you think it’s been happening a little too often lately? Even Mom is worried about you. She thinks that if this keeps up, you’re going to get seriously sick.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, stretching.
“You don’t sound fine. You sound like you’re half-dead.”
“But I look like a million bucks.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you do. Listen, Mom told me to tell you to get more sleep, and I’m going to second that motion. Now that I woke you up, I mean. So go back to bed.”
Despite his exhaustion, Jeremy laughed. “I can’t. Not now, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t do any good. I’d just end up lying here all night long.”
“Not all night,” he said.
“Yes,” Jeremy said, correcting him, “all night. That’s what insomnia means.”
He heard his brother hesitate on the other end. “I still don’t get it,” he said in a baffled voice. “Why can’t you sleep?”
Jeremy glanced out the window. The sky was impenetrable, silver fog everywhere, and he found himself thinking of Lexie.
“Nightmares,” he said.
The nightmares had begun a month ago, just after Christmas, for no apparent reason.
The day had started out ordinary enough; Claire had helped Jeremy make scrambled eggs, and they’d eaten together at the table. Afterward, Jeremy brought Claire to the grocery store and then dropped her off with Doris for a couple of hours in the afternoon. She watched Beauty and the Beast, a movie she’d already seen dozens of times. They had turkey and macaroni and cheese for dinner, and after her bath, they read the same stories they always did. She was neither feverish nor upset when she went to bed, and when Jeremy checked on her twenty minutes later, she was sound asleep.
But just after midnight, Claire woke up screaming.
Jeremy raced into her bedroom and comforted her as she cried. Eventually she calmed, and he pulled up the covers before kissing her on the forehead.
An hour later, she woke up screaming again.
Then again.
It went on like this most of the night, but in the morning she seemed to have no memory of what had happened. Jeremy, glassy-eyed and exhausted, was just thankful it was over. Or so he thought. However, the same thing happened that night. And the next. And the night after that.
After a week, he brought Claire to the doctor and was assured there was nothing physically wrong with her, but that night terrors were, if not common, not completely out of the ordinary, either. They would pass in time, the doctor said.
But they didn’t. If anything, they seemed to be getting worse. Where once she would wake two or three times a night, now it was four or five, as if she were having a nightmare in every dream cycle, and the only thing that seemed to calm her were the soft words Jeremy would whisper as he rocked her afterward. He’d tried moving her to his bed, as well as sleeping in hers, and he held her for hours as she slept in his lap. He tried music, adding and removing night-lights, and changing her diet, adding warm milk before bedtime. He’d called his mother, he’d called Doris; when Claire had spent the night at her grandmother’s, Claire woke up screaming there, too. Nothing seemed to help.
If the lack of sleep made him tense and anxious, Claire was tense and anxious as well. There had been more temper tantrums than usual, more unexpected tears, more sassiness. At four, she was unable to control her outbursts, but when Jeremy found himself snapping back, he couldn’t use immaturity as an excuse. Exhaustion left him frustrated, always on edge. And the anxiety. That’s what really got to him. The fear that something was wrong, that if she didn’t start sleeping regularly again, something terrible would happen to her. He would survive, he could take care of himself, but Claire? He was responsible for her. She needed him, and somehow he was failing her.
He remembered how his father had been the day his older brother David had been in an auto accident. Later that night, eight-year-old Jeremy had found his father sitting in the easy chair, staring ahead vacantly. Jeremy remembered