The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [81]
There was one time, I remember, when I woke up chilled in my sweat in the middle of the night. I ran to Lydia’s bedroom, shaking and crying with fear. She was there. She was awake. Wide awake in the middle of the night. Lydia was half sitting up in the bed, and her face was contorted into a bizarre shape that I had never seen before on a real human being—only in paintings. Lydia was holding a hand to her mouth and her shoulders were shaking. She was crying. I had never seen a human cry before. It was terrifying.
She spooked when she saw me standing in the doorway of her bedroom, and I spooked too when I saw her face, but then she waved at me to come here, come here, Bruno. And I jumped into her bed, and we held on to each other.
She drained herself dry of tears that night. I snuggled against her chest with my arms around her warm body, and I think I both calmed her and was calmed by her. We woke up together the next morning, the sunlight slicing through the blinds, casting bright orange stripes across our bodies in the bed. My head on the pillow next to hers, her bedraggled slept-on hair, her eyes, sleep-custard still gooey in their corners, peeling open to get their first look at the day and seeing me lying next to her, and her smile at seeing me there—words would fail me if I even attempted to communicate to you the importance of that moment in my life.
So my nightmares drove me to the solace of Lydia’s bed night after night, until she finally relented and just let me sleep with her all the time. The comfort of communion with another living creature. Her bed was our bed now.
That was when Lydia dismantled the childlike bedroom that I had slept in for the last two years or so, and we converted it into my studio. With her warm body lying beside me, my nightmares grew less and less frequent, and eventually went away altogether, except for a freak incident now and then.
Also, there was the fun ritual of “Going to Bed”: after Lydia read me our last bedtime story from the books, it was bedtime for Bruno, and for Lydia, too. She went to the bathroom and eventually came out in her pajamas, and then we brushed our teeth together in the mirror and spat out the toothpaste in the sink. She set the alarm clock, and we crawled into the bed, she on her side and me on mine. “Good night,” she would say every night, “sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” And I then repeated this incantation tone for tone, though I had no idea what this singsongy rhyme meant—and then we began to sleep. For awaiting us in the morning was the ritual of “Getting Up”: we took turns in the shower—I had acquired an appreciation for the human custom of near-daily bathing. She showered, and then got dressed while I was taking my shower. Once I was dressed, I helped her make the bed. We dragged the coverlet into place together, and tucked the edges neatly under the mattress. Then, while I watched Francis the Gnome or Sesame Street, Lydia would prepare us a modest breakfast—oatmeal, Wheat Chex, bananas, strawberries, orange juice, things like that. While we ate our breakfast at the table the percolator would gurgle out a few inches of coffee. Lydia would drink a cup and dump the remainder into her portable plastic travel mug, which she would take to the lab. Then we were both buckled into her car and off to work. And when the work was done, we would repair home and begin our domestic life together anew. Dinner, books, and eventually bed. At the close of every day we went to bed together and held each