Chapter Five
Five
The Autumn Ramble, it turned out, was a gift that kept on giving.
Not only did it fill Wesley’s journal with plants and mushrooms, not only did it reset Olive’s career aspirations from Pet Store Owner/Milton Scholar to Land Conservancy Director, not only did it provide fodder for a rich family discussion of fact and opinion, information and misinformation, but it also revitalized Miles’s nightly storytelling with the new and seemingly inexhaustible adventures of Whiskey.
This is not to say that either Olive or Wesley had shown any signs of disappointment with his recent stories, which had ranged, since their arrival, from the adventures of a third-grade turtle in a new pond; to Olive’s old favorite, “The Baby Is Missing, and the Dog Is Twice Its Size”; to a rehash of the classic “Fastest I Have Ever Gone,” an autobiographical account from Miles’s English-as-a-second-language teaching years, when he had hitched a midnight truck ride from Vientiane to Bangkok.
Every night, Miles waited for Wesley to excuse himself to disappear into the books that towered at his bedside.
But, to no small amount of pride, that day had yet to come.
He could recall the moment, that past March in California, when he’d overheard a friend of Wesley’s say, “You still sleep with your stuffed animals?” and, with it, the first sounds of childhood fluttering off.
The dolls, that night, had migrated into the closet, in silence, without fanfare.
But Miles could still go toe to toe with Child Rebellion #47: The Revenge of Azal?n.
Once, he would have talked to them in their shared room; now, each night, he alternated, one child tucked into bed, the other curled up with him on a beanbag.
And, though never completely at a loss, Miles, like any storyteller, suffered the occasional dry spell, as he had that very week when Whiskey leapt into his lap.
Not surprisingly, the story of a dog and a cave that leads into a hidden world, though of questionable historic or scientific validity, made for ripping bedtime content.
“Whiskey and the Enchanted River.” “Whiskey and the Mysterious Oak.” “Whiskey and the Magic Mushroom.”
In a certain kingdom, in a certain land.
When Olive came home from school bruised by the sophisticated emotional cruelties of which only nine-year-old girls were capable, Whiskey met a pack of wild dingoes (granted, these weren’t native to New England, but, then again, neither were Carly, Harper, and Tucker) who ended up turning on one another viciously, returning to seek her friendship with their tails between their legs.
When Whiskey spoke rudely to the Wise Old Owl, this Owl was reluctant to take Whiskey to Enchanted Walmart.
When Whiskey didn’t clean her den, she got parasites.
Even poor Giuseppe began to lose his fluffy luster, as the kids’ affections shifted to the fanciful pooch.
It wasn’t long before Olive began to repeat these stories at school, and Olive’s friends began to repeat these stories at home, and Kate got a call from Carly’s mom about why the girls were talking about alcohol.
Would it hurt the narrative to change the dog’s name? Kate asked. Miles protested—it was the closest yet that he had come to going viral. And he was not a fan of censorship, but then his sensible wife reminded him of the story of the Humbaba.
—
This had happened back when Wesley was nine and Olive was six.
Whereas the current Wesley was a sage and quiet boy, this had not always been so.
He had been born, this first child of theirs, some five weeks early, sent home after an uneventful score of fluorescent nights in the NICU, only to turn blue the moment they crossed the threshold of their apartment.
He’d pinkened again, but no one was taking any chances, and he was six weeks further in the world before the doctors let him leave the hospital for good.
By then, both Kate and Miles were nervous wrecks.
Kate had been warned of MS symptoms surging after childbirth, and so, in addition to the normal stress of early parenthood, she feared the specter of a relapse with every cramp and headache.
And what were they supposed to do? Watch Wesley breathing day and night?
Of course not, said, with unflappable assurance, the NICU Fellow, who, we might add, would change her tune some eight months later, when she had a baby of her own.
And she cited some statistics, reminded them that Isaac Newton was a preemie, and assured them that women around the world, few of whom had the benefits of modern neonatal care, had babies all the time, most of whom survived.
In other words, they watched his breathing.
It nearly broke them. Shifts of twelve hours, of eight hours, of six hours, waking on the floor next to his crib.
Being bookish people, they hadn’t thought there might be a technological solution, but, fortunately, their email was spying, and one morning, instead of hawking Miles the usual mix of video games and early-hair-loss supplements that targeted the diverse thirty-to-thirty-five male demographic, it recommended a sound-and-movement sensor of such perfectly Orwellian conception that even the briefest pause was met by sirens worthy of an air assault.
This, amazingly, allowed them to get some rest.
Ages six months to two years were uneventful. Milestones met. Onto elbows when on tummy. Supported self with hands when sitting. Peekaboo elicited laughs. Pulled self to stand. “Ka” for “cat” and “ba” for “bird.” Ran. Walked up stairs and learned to kick.
But then, for reasons ever mysterious, shortly after his third birthday, Wesley began to wake in the middle of the night wailing.
Before that, they’d had their fair share of midnight awakenings, but what happened that August night was something of a different magnitude.
Neither believed in the phenomenon of possession, but when they stumbled in to find their screaming child, standing in the crib where he still slept, it was hard to understand it as anything but.
It wasn’t a scream, or at least not a scream they had ever heard, but something one might imagine from a harpy—rhythmic, scaling, slowed only by the gasping of his breath.
He couldn’t be calmed; he wasn’t even present.
It was like something had come and stolen the essence of their son.
The fit had lasted nearly half an hour, by the end of which both felt they had aged decisively into another stage of life.
Wesley, for his part, seemed not to remember it.
Damp with tears, with sweat, he was delivered back into himself as mysteriously as he’d departed, and, exhausted, curled back to sleep.
Which Kate and Miles, shaken, could not.
And then, the next night, the same thing happened. Again the cries, again the empty eyes, the sense of being tortured deep within.
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage.
This, according to the pediatrician, was a “night terror,” and nothing to be afraid of.
Said the good man, the kind man, who slept so peacefully each night while across the city Kate and Miles, some 312 pounds net, struggled to contain the thrashings of their tiny son.
Recalling her final days of high school, the numbness in her hand dismissed as stress, the chest pain dismissed as a pulled muscle, Kate sought another opinion. But the second doctor said the same thing. Nothing to be afraid of. And, no, it was not their fault.
Grim cave, diseases dire, ghastly spasm, racking torture, qualms of heart-sick agony.
For not the first time in her life, Kate felt Milton had equipped her with a vocabulary that might describe those convulsions in a way the lexicon of medicine could not.
What demon had obtained her son? What monstrous crew hauled up before his empty eyes?
Common, said the doctor. But how had they walked so many years on earth and not yet met a single soul who spoke of such black nights?
The terrors lasted four excruciating weeks.
Occasionally, a night would spare them, tease them with the hope that relief had come, only to return with fury.
Wesley began to try to climb out of his crib.
“Sleepwalking” wasn’t the word—this was a disordered, scratching frenzy, like someone trapped within another world, seeking a passage.
This news seemed to wake the doctor from his complacency—occasionally, terrors could be so bad a child could get hurt.
During his residency, he had seen a boy who had smashed a window.
And he didn’t think it was a seizure, but…
So Wesley spent a night beneath a cap of multicolored wires, with a camera trained upon his flailings. The answer confirmed: There was nothing to be afraid of. No epilepsy. As the first doctor had said.
Shortly after Wesley was born, during a month of fussy colic, Miles’s mother had said something along the lines that in parenthood, just when you thought you couldn’t bear something any longer, it got better.
Kate knew and Miles knew that this was not true, not true at all—a classmate in grad school had lost his little girl to cancer.
But sometimes even pabulum, in the right moments, can attain the power of an adage.
Some days Kate reminded Miles of this, and some days Miles reminded Kate, and then, one September night as unremarkable as when they’d started, the terrors stopped.
—
This is the first bit of developmental background that Kate and Miles provided to Dr. Barnaby, the psychologist they’d seen during the episode of the Humbaba.
The second was the story of King Damij.
—