by Aleena Deerwater
I wake hot, hot, hot. Three layers of comforters and blankets cocoon my formerly freezing body. Now I sweat.
Damn hormones.
The night is dark here on the Mendocino coast. The moon hasn't risen yet.
Jon, my sweetie, dreams beside me. A dilemma. If I banish the extra covers to the foot of the bed like I want, I’ll uncover Jon. He hates the removal of even a smidge of nighttime swaddling. So I pile the belligerent bedding to my side, between us. A third body now hogs the middle of our sleeping pallet. I begin to growl and mutter. Jon grumbles back at me over the long lump of down and wool. Probably talking in his sleep. I take a deep breath through gritted teeth and let it out slowly. I invoke the master of Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hahn. I force myself to continue breathing pseudo-mindfully.
Exhales slowly become sighs.
Giving over to my dark sleeplessness, I curl my head onto Jon’s stomach. The body of bedclothes lying between our resting forms conforms to my curving waist, supports my heavy breasts. Jon caresses my back on his way into a sounder sleep. My head rises and falls to the rhythms of his slender Buddha belly. An occasional gurgle surfaces from his depths to my ear; I can hear the ice cream he ate before bed sliding round and round and down his long lean gullet. I smile.
A dog barks. Must be the neighbor's.
A loud scraping sound startles my slowing psyche. Raina, my youngest daughter, must be opening her screechy drawer built into the wall that divides our bedrooms. Wait. She’s with her father, Dan, this week. Over ten miles away. And her sister Lilly is off at college on the East Coast. So who's making the noise?
I prop myself up on one elbow. Listening.
The entire bedroom is cast in a different quality of lightlessness; the shadows have a eerie hue.
Dan, their father, sits up in the bed beside me like a ghost rising from my past. We are back in Normal. Living on the bad side of town. Together again. There is an intruder in the house, rummaging through Raina's dresser. Now we hear his tall black boots step . . . step . . . step across the hardwood floors toward our bedroom. We stare down the foot of the bed toward the closed door, petrified. Our ears heat and prickle, thrumming under the focus of our listening.
Step . . . step . . . step.
For the first time in my life there is an actual intruder in my home in the middle of the night. I am not just imagining it. Why did we move back to Normal? Why are we here? I don't want to be here. I don't want to live in Normal again. Not Normal. Anywhere but Normal. Anything but Normal.
I demand to live back in Mendocino.
Now!
My eyes open wide. The room is swallowed in blackness, and I can see nothing except for light coming in through the slats of the wooden blinds. Street lights? Moonlight? Dawn? I thought I'd been sitting up, staring at the bedroom door. How can I now be lying down on my side, facing a window?
I hear nothing except the pound . . . pound . . . pounding of my heart in rhythm with the steps of the black-booted intruder. But the house seems quiet now. Empty. Suddenly safe. Jon sleeps beside me. The soft hushing outside must be the ocean rising and falling under the now-risen full moon.
A sharp inhale wakes my astonished mouth.
Asleep, I finally grasp, I was asleep, dreaming of Normal.
* * *
I lived in Normal, Illinois beginning in the late summer of 1992 and ending abruptly, miraculously, in December of 1995, when I set out with my then husband and two daughters like pioneers in covered wagons heading west for the coast of Northern California.
Writing about my journey from Normal is like opening Pandora’s box, but purposefully. Mindfully. With full awareness of what I am letting loose. Not that I know all of what is contained in the box, but I do know it is full of dis-ease, toxicity, betrayal, lunacy, and at least one near-death experience. Yet there is also birth in it. And Joy.
Where did I read that at the bottom of Pandora’s box, after all the sickness flew out, Hope was revealed and freed to enter our world too? A Sharon Creech novel I think. The girls and I read her books over and over and over again . First aloud together at bedtime, then again each separately, silently, in our own imaginations.
But I am avoiding my topic, the essence of my personal terror, my private dis-ease. What makes me puke (literally, I get migraines and puke): Normal.
It is not the town of Normal that makes me throw-up, but some inner essence that wafts into my consciousness, poisoning my lungs and my guts, silencing my voice, and slowly, subtly, collapsing my soul.