Nočný Tieň

The first time I pulled her, it was an accident. I didn't know what I was doing. I was nine years old and angry because she’d thrown away my comic books, said they were trash, said I needed to focus on school, said I was wasting my goddamn time.

I lay in my bed and I squeezed my eyes shut and I wished she would just disappear.

When I opened them, she was gone.

I found her in the kitchen twenty minutes later, holding a half-empty glass of water, staring at the wall like she'd forgotten how she got there. Her hair was wet. She was still in her nightgown. The clock said three in the morning.

“Mom?”

She turned slow. Her eyes were empty, like someone had reached in and scooped out the light. “I had a dream,” she said. “I was somewhere else. A field. There was a river.”

I didn't sleep that night. I lay awake and watched the crack in my bedroom door and listened to her moving through the house, opening cabinets, closing them, opening them again. She didn't remember anything the next morning. She made me eggs. She told me to stop drawing in class.

I was nine. I didn't know what I'd done.

Now I'm seventeen and I know exactly what I'm doing.

It's 2:47 AM. The house is quiet. My mother is asleep in her room, the door cracked just enough for me to see the shape of her under the blanket, the rise and fall of her chest. I stand in the hallway and I breathe slow and I think about what I want tonight.

Not a field. Not a river. Something worse.

She's been drinking again. I can smell it from here, that sour sweetness that leaks out of her pores, that clings to the pillows and the carpets and the couch where she passes out before dinner. She's been drinking since I was twelve, since the accident, since my father stopped calling, since she realized the life she built was made of paper and she was the only one who didn't know.

I close my eyes.

I think about the basement of the old house. The one we lost. The one where she used to lock me when I was bad. The concrete floor. The single bulb that buzzed. The spiders. The dark that was so thick you could taste it.

I think about that.

I push.

When I open my eyes, she's still in bed. But her breathing has changed. It's faster now. Shallow. Her fingers twitch against the blanket. Her lips move but no sound comes out.

I step into her room. The floor creaks but she doesn't stir. She's not dreaming anymore. She's not anywhere. I pulled her into the basement. The real one. The one that doesn't exist anymore except in her memory and mine.

I sit on the edge of her bed and I watch her face.

She's forty-three. She looks sixty. The lines around her mouth are deep as scars. Her hair is thin and gray at the temples. She used to be beautiful. People told me that all the time. Your mother, so beautiful. Now they just look at her and look away.

Her hand grabs the air. A low sound comes from her throat.

I could leave her there. I could let her wander that basement for hours, feeling the walls, feeling the cold, feeling the dark that never ends. She did it to me. She can take a taste of her own medicine.

But I'm not her.

I pull her back.

Her eyes snap open. She gasps, loud and ugly, like someone who just broke the surface of deep water. She sees me and her face twists.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't lie to me.” She's sitting up now, pushing herself against the headboard, her hands shaking. “I was there. I was in that house. I felt it.”

I stand up. “You were dreaming.”

“That wasn't a dream.” Her voice cracks. “You did something. You've always done something. Ever since you were a child. I knew it. I knew you were wrong.”

That word hits me in the chest. Wrong. She's said it before. She'll say it again. It's the word she uses when she can't explain something, when she's scared, when she's drunk and mean and looking for someone to blame.

“You should stop drinking,” I say.

“You should stop being a freak.”

We stare at each other. The wall clock ticks. The refrigerator hums downstairs. Somewhere a dog barks and then stops.

I turn and walk out of her room.

“Where are you going?”

“To bed.”

“Don't you walk away from me.”

I keep walking. Her voice follows me down the hall, thin and desperate and full of the same anger she's been feeding for years. She says my name. She says it three times. I close my door and the sound cuts off.

I sit on my bed and I look at my hands.

They're just hands. Five fingers each. Nails bitten down. A scar on my thumb from a knife I dropped when I was seven. Normal hands. But they do things that aren't normal. They pull people into dreams. They make the real world bend.

I didn't ask for this. I didn't choose it.

But I have it.

And I'm starting to think I can use it.

Not to hurt her. That's too easy. That's what she expects. No. I want something else. I want to know where she goes when she's drunk. I want to see the place inside her head where she keeps all the things she won't say. I want to find the version of her that existed before me, before the accident, before she decided that love was a weakness and I was the proof.

Tomorrow night, I'll try again.

But I won't pull her into a basement.

I'll pull her into the past.