The Bed
The light creeps in through the window. A small voice falls across her face, little fingers trace her cheek-- fluttering. There’s a brush of hair against her arm, a slice of a light falling in her eyes that she had hoped would somehow stay off. Her son climbs into the bed, his body bouncing onto the mattress beside her, and then, he’s on top of her, so heavy and solid. He’s saying good morning, but she doesn’t want to wake up, doesn’t want to open her eyes, doesn’t want the sweet dark of night to be over.
Her husband turns on the TV, the tinny sounds of a cartoon theme song filling the bedroom. Next to her, her son squeals as he adjusts his body on the bed, finding a comfortable spot the same way their dog does: scratching and rooting and positioning everything just right. He lays his head down on the pillow next to hers, his weight pulling their heads together like the two of them might be swapping secrets. She keeps the blankets pulled up to her chin, her eyes still sticky with the residue of sleep and unwilling to open.
She hears sounds around the room: the thump-thump of drawers opening and closing, a zipper being pulled up, the rustle of a shirt over a head, soft swears of a tie being knotted into its intricate loop. Then: footsteps, a refrigerator door being opened, a cup on the counter, the smell and sound of hot coffee sloshing into a mug. All the familiar sounds of her husband getting ready for work.
She nestles against the heat of her son. How warm his small body always seems to be. His hair is long and soft and smells like sleep and lavender shampoo. Crumbs fall against her face and she tries to guess what he’s found in the pantry. Goldfish or a granola bar or Ritz crackers. She opens her eyes, and he’s holding a double stuffed Oreo, a cookie so thick he uses two hands to grasp it. His mouth is chalky black with rings of cookie around his teeth. There’s a piece of cookie smashed across her pillow, finger swipes of icing on top of the sheets. She can picture him rummaging through the pantry in the dark while she and her husband slept, stuffing his little mouth full of Oreos.
She feels a kiss across her forehead, her husband telling her he’s leaving. He reaches over to hug their son, who complains that he can’t see the TV and wiggles free from his grasp. A moment later, his car starts outside the roar of the engine bone-deep. Their son loves his car, loves the chug chug of the engine, loves the tires as tall as he is, loves the sleek, shiny paint. Whenever they go anywhere he wants to take Daddy’s car. Every morning, he’s disappointed when the car leaves to go to work and the two of them are stuck with Mommy’s car.
He asks for more shows, so she gropes around the bed for the remote until the thing materializes in her hand. She squashes the buttons at random, hoping to land on the one that will make the cartoons continue to play so that she can close her eyes for just a little longer, as she tells her son. She can feel him twist his body off the mattress, hear him in the kitchen. He comes back with his hands full of cookies. She knows that she should stop him, remind him that Oreos are not breakfast, but instead she keeps her eyes closed. She’s not asleep, but her body feels too heavy to move. Every muscle is warm and loose and perfectly mashed against the mattress beneath her.
She insisted on buying this bed after their son was born. A congrats on the new baby present to themselves. Her husband told her that it was too big, that even when the two of them were lying in it, it felt so empty. It’s so wide that it spans almost the entire width of their bedroom, only a small strip of floor left on either side. When their son was nursing, she would tumble out of the bed at the sound of his cry, bumping into the wall with a hip or an elbow, or one time, the bridge of her nose. She would wake up with bruises she could never remember. Now that their son is older, he can crawl up into the bed with her and she can stretch the morning into the afternoon. So, the two of them stay there: her pretending to sleep and him eating Oreos and watching cartoons as the day creeps slowly forward, neither of them ready to greet it.
