The Insomniacs

by Marit Weisenberg

  I found my voice. “I came by to say thanks—for helping find my mom last week. And for trying to get on the deck.” Oh god, why had I mentioned that? It wasn’t like I’d seen it. I’d just heard many reports from the other girls on the team about his arguing to get down to the restricted swim deck post-accident.

  Van gave me the smile I’d watched other girls receive over the past few years. “I can’t believe those assholes wouldn’t let me down there.”

  Oh. It was actually true.

  My eyes rested on his for a long, quiet moment.

  Caroline swung out of the bedroom to join us. Side by side, it was insane what a striking couple they made. My mom once said Caroline looked exactly like a young Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show and pulled up an image. She was correct down to their shared honey-blond hair and slightly, perfectly upturned nose. My mom had called Caroline heartbreakingly beautiful.

  “Hey! You walking out?” Caroline asked me. Not waiting for my answer, she added, “I gotta go.”

  “I’ll walk you home,” Van offered.

  “No, no. I got it. I want to talk to Ingrid.”

  Van was about to say something to me when Caroline reached up and grasped his face in both of her hands, commanding his undivided attention. Then she very slowly kissed him. I realized I was staring.

  I started for the stairs, my face beet-red again. Then I heard Caroline fall in line behind me.

  Thankfully, the downstairs had emptied of the Moore clan. Stella, now abandoned, licked the kitchen floor. I realized what was behind Van’s stepdad’s smile. He’d known I’d walk in on Van and Caroline. He was teasing Van, who probably thought he was getting away with having his girlfriend upstairs. Nice. Kevin had always loved to rib Van. It seemed to be his way of subtly and not-so-subtly reminding Van that he was boss.

  Caroline and I let ourselves out and walked single file down the pathway to the sidewalk. It wasn’t yet twilight, but dim light shone from the cul-de-sac’s two streetlamps. I wanted to hit the rewind button a million times over.

  Caroline halted on the sidewalk and faced me. “How are you doing?”

  She moved closer and boldly reached out to touch the back of my head, somehow instinctively knowing exactly where my staples were, her fingers on the matted ridge. I was tall and willowy like my mom and she was short and petite. I felt gawky next to her.

  “I’m good. I’ll be back sooner than a month, I’m sure,” I lied. I hoped I sounded calm. Caroline dropped her hand. I took a half step back.

  “God, I hope so.” She made this sound like a remote possibility, like I had a long haul in front of me. “I hate practice without you.” When a senior like her said that to a junior like me, it was hard not to feel special. Caroline stretched long like a cat, her graceful arms extended up and out, unafraid to take up space, chin tilted to the sky. She was so California-beautiful it wasn’t even funny. She was also nice, so it was impossible to hate her.

  Why him? She could have had anyone she wanted.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, and pointed loosely in the direction of Van’s room.

  “Why would I mind?” I asked. Izzie had once said that I was hard to read. I hoped she was right.

  “Oh, I don’t know. That was a dumb thing to say! It’s not like you want a boyfriend anyway.”

  Caroline must have felt me stiffen. “What I mean is you don’t have the time. That’s what it takes if you want to go to Nationals. I remember with gymnastics,” she said, wistful. Back in San Diego, Caroline had been a gymnastics superstar. She was one of the very few people I knew who understood what was asked of you if you wanted to perform at a higher level.

  A lone police car swept onto the cul-de-sac on its sporadic patrol since the break-ins, its lights temporarily illuminating us as it looped the street.

  “I didn’t know you and Van lived so close to each other. He’s the boy next door,” Caroline said.

  “The boy across the street.” I acted like it was a joke, not a big deal at all.

  Just before spring break, a teammate had asked me who the best male soccer player was at our school and I’d named Van. I hadn’t known Caroline, the only other diver who went to my high school, was seated right behind me. That was all I had said but it was as though I had flagged Van and put him on Caroline’s radar, because the next thing I knew, I heard the rumors about them at school and then I saw him in the stands at the meet, just moments before I messed up.

  “He said you’re named after Ingrid Bergman.”

  My accident had given them a reason to talk about me. Why would he tell her that? Why would he remember?

  At my lack of response, Caroline supplied, “I saw Casablanca once with my mom.” Then, “See you at school?”

  I wanted to get away from her and I wanted her to stay because she made me feel safe in the dark. Bad things didn’t happen to someone like Caroline.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  Caroline began her walk home, strolling leisurely down the center of my street while I crossed to my house. But Caroline had one more thing to say.

  “Don’t worry!” she called over one slim shoulder. “It’s just a little injury. I had one in gymnastics before I moved to Texas.”

  She’d once told me it was her injury that forced her to quit.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SUNDAY, APRIL 3

  For hours already, I’d tried to sleep. Full of optimism that tonight would be the night, I tucked myself in at 9:30 P.M., my body cocooned into the comforting divot in the middle of the bed. But now the start of school was only six hours away. I had to rise in five to shower and get ready. My heart began to pound from the worry and anxiety of not falling asleep.

  I tried not to think about Van. Or the pain. Or about the medication I couldn’t take because I wasn’t supposed to mask the headaches in this first phase of the concussion. The house popped, then settled. Maybe if the lights were on downstairs I could rest more easily. Any prowlers next door would think twice about breaking and entering or walking through my backyard. I kicked off my top sheet and sat very still for a moment to see how the headache would land when I was upright. Every pain was stronger. My mom always said everything seemed worse in the middle of the night.

  When I had wrapped my mind around the full extent of the pain, I made my move downstairs. I started with checking the locks on the windows. My dad had loved windows, maybe left over from his LA canyon-living days. He’d designed this house from Los Angeles, where he’d been living with my mother at the time. In her version of the story, he wouldn’t let her interfere with the planning at all. Even though she had great taste herself, she happily relinquished the job to him because she didn’t give a shit about the details. He had been insane about each and every one.

  My father fell in love with Austin when he came to work on an album. He convinced my mother that it was a great place to raise their kids, away from the pressures of LA. According to my mom, my dad would say he was building my pregnant mom a nest; a beautiful house in an area where they had few friends and she was far away from the action of her career.

  In her early teens, my mom, an only child, had relocated to Santa Barbara from Sweden for my grandfather’s job in oil and gas. When her parents returned to Stockholm a few years later, she stayed behind for college. She’d told me Southern California had felt like the promised land and she never wanted to leave, she was so in love with the Pacific Ocean, the palms, the warmth.

  As a young actress living in LA, she’d met my father through the same clique of fashionable friends—a collection of other artists, most of whom went on to become known. But back then, they had all been getting their start.

  As my mother told it, she was the first to have a big breakthrough; she was cast as one of the leads in a TV show, an elaborate sci-fi fantasy. The only problem—it was a multiyear commitment to film in Ireland. Newly engaged, my mother turned it down. She assumed there would be other offers. And then I was born. The series
went on to have an award-winning seven seasons. Sometimes, when my mom would stare out the kitchen windows at the large, untamed backyard and scrabbled wall of greenbelt, I imagined her thinking, How the hell did I end up in Central Texas?

  I switched on the lights and dimmed them in the sparse living room occupied by two white leather sofas we never sat in. If my dad loved windows, he didn’t like window shades, which was weird because he was the most private guy. But then, my father hadn’t lived here much given that he kept getting called back to LA for work, commuting home to see us on weekends. I backed out of the living room swiftly, before anyone could spy me through the windows. My head briefly swam.

  Down a short hall, I made my way to the quiet kitchen, graced with appliances that were once top-of-the-line trendy but showed their age now. They also no longer worked very well. The floorboard under the dishwasher was pliable and moldy from an unexpected leak. White walls, white subway tile, white marble counters, large windows, no shades, and unused round table with plastic space-age-looking swivel chairs, padded with orange seat cushions. My mom had scrubbed the kitchen clean before she’d left for work even though neither of us cooked. We existed mainly on bars and frozen entrées from Trader Joe’s.

  Continuing through the downstairs, I opened the door to my mother’s room—the master suite—and bent at the side of her low, Danish modern platform bed to switch on a lamp. Clothes had been thrown on the end of the bed—a navy-blue bra, a pair of sweats—half the bed unslept in. The same paperback copy of The Girl on the Train had sat on her bedside table for months. The room smelled like her lavender shampoo and I wanted to call her, a pang in my stomach at wishing she was here. If I called, what was she supposed to say, though? Being afraid was my problem. I never, ever called her at work and I knew she barely had time to look at her phone during her shift.

  There were a few more rooms to check downstairs but I decided to bypass the ones with the closed doors: the two guest rooms with their own bathrooms. We kept the doors shut to save on heating and cooling. I didn’t know if my mom ever went in to clean or if she ignored those rooms—one my dad’s old studio and the other a bedroom for nonexistent guests. The last time I’d entered, the unused rooms were beginning to take on the musty smell of an unoccupied house—ready to deteriorate as soon as you stopped living in it.

  Midway up the staircase, I looked below and surveyed my work. I held the stair rail as a precaution. I had a flash of a scenario where my life easily spiraled out of control: a fall that led to a worse injury, which led to sitting out longer from diving, which led to never going back. For a second, I saw just how easy it would be to disappear.

  Upstairs, the house didn’t feel as huge. There was my large bedroom, my Jack and Jill bathroom connecting to another bedroom for an additional child who’d never arrived. The upstairs was more intimate, with a cozy den over the garage where my mom and I watched TV and ate together on the nights we found ourselves home at the same time. It completed the five-bedroom, four-bathroom, large, empty house filled with the two of us, just keeping our heads above water and pretending that was anything but the case.

  Now that lights were on in almost every room, the house surely glowed from the outside. Back in my room, I stood at the window and lifted the taped shade very gently, just a few inches out. If my room was dark, no one could see in. But I could see out.

  Van’s stepdad, Kevin, smoked a cigarette outside in their front yard, a sign that the old battle between Lisa and Kevin waged on. Other than Kevin, the street was quiet; balls and bikes put away, doors locked, everyone sleeping peacefully. The portable basketball hoop in the Loves’ driveway loomed like a dinosaur over two matching Lexus SUVs. The greenbelt made a beautiful halo, arcing against the line of homes. Kevin stubbed out his cigarette and walked back inside.

  From my large street-facing window, there were three houses I could see well: the Moore-Tagawas’, the Loves’, and the Kaplans’. From the smaller window on my right, I had a side view of the Smiths’, or what I now thought of as the abandoned house, partially obscured by a cluster of live oaks. When all the strings had finally broken on my Roman shades, my mom hadn’t bothered with a temporary paper shade for that window. The side of the house was much more private. But for all I knew, the family that had lived there could have been as attuned to my habits as I was to Van’s.

  It had become part of my bedtime routine to check if Van’s bedroom light was on. Then, I’d think about him—what he’d worn that day, if he’d glanced my way in class—for about five whole seconds before I fell asleep. It was the one dumb thing I did. Everything else in my life had a purpose.

  I turned to my beat-up leather backpack that lay on my desk, folders and books perfectly organized, homework complete even though the teachers had said I could turn everything in late. As I sifted through some of the work, I realized I didn’t remember doing it. It was like a monster had taken over my body. That’s exactly what it felt like in those moments over the past few days when I’d swayed on my feet because I was so incredibly tired. I could see why sleep deprivation was used as torture.

  Seated at my desk, I swiveled back and forth, back and forth, avoiding my bed and the stress I was beginning to associate with it. The doctor had said to take naps, to set a fixed bedtime schedule because, most of all, I needed rest to heal. I stared up at the peeling stars I’d once stuck to my ceiling and wondered what to do next.

  A movement, a flash of light in my peripheral vision caught my attention. I turned my head slowly. Then I froze.

  Through the tree branches, I caught a glimpse of a light on in the house next door.

  I blinked.

  Then it was gone.

  I second-guessed myself. My eyes were so sandy and dry from not sleeping, scraping against my lids. But there had been a light on in that window. I wasn’t hallucinating. I hadn’t been awake that long.

  Very carefully I rose to my feet. I flipped on my small desk lamp. I wanted to get a closer look from the window.

  As I made my way across the room, I trailed my hand on the wall to steady myself and inadvertently caught the flimsy paper shade I had hastily taped up when I’d returned from Van’s. Now it fell to the ground and, like the big reveal in a magic show, Van’s window appeared.

  My eyesight adjusted.

  Van stood framed in his bedroom window, every light turned on in his room. He was staring out, a shoulder leaning against the window frame, his arms loosely crossed.

  It took me a second to realize I was just as visible in my room, backlit by lamplight.

  I leapt out of the way.

  I squinted to see what he was watching. What was it? I allowed myself to sway into view, and then I realized what Van was looking at.

  He was looking directly at me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MONDAY, APRIL 4

  Rain poured from the eaves in sheets. I kept my gaze trained on the fogged-up windows that looked out on the crowded school common while Izzie, her body twisted in her desk chair to face me, used both thumbs to quickly blend concealer beneath my eyes. Even with the door open between periods, the classroom air was humid and close with the smells of BO, hair, and snacks from the previous class.

  “Don’t move.”

  “Hurry,” I said to Izzie.

  Behind me, I heard the sounds of students filing into the classroom. This was my last class of my first day back at school since the accident. The entire day, I’d been self-conscious that people had heard about it and were whispering about me. I knew I looked like shit. Izzie was trying to help with the dark half circles that ringed my eyes. She couldn’t do anything about the fact that because of the staples, I hadn’t been able to wash my hair for days.

  I was feeling less human every moment. At my appointment on Friday, the neurologist said to return to school gradually. My mom and I had agreed that my first day would be a half day, but I wanted everything to go back to normal as soon as possible. Or, at the very least, to appear normal. So I’d staye
d for the entire school day. I didn’t want to give in to the headache that seemed to worsen and settle over one eye as the day went on. I would have killed for about three ibuprofen.

  Iz leaned back to observe her work. “Much better. You don’t look as tired. Here, use this, too. I promise, I don’t have herpes.”

  I took the gloss from her, smeared it on, and handed it back.

  Izzie, a true theater girl, squeezed the tube, flipped back her long, black hair and slowly dragged it across her mouth, beckoning people to look at her. The opposite of me. I hated nothing more than drawing attention. Except in diving. But that felt like a separate world. Spectators seemed to fade.

  More eyes had been on me since we’d returned from winter break. I was suddenly as tall as my mom, close to five-nine. I’d noticed them noticing my very late growth spurt—probably training so hard had delayed it—and, maybe it had to do with suddenly having what Izzie referred to as a “great rack.” I now had boobs. Something I had doubted would ever happen. I liked it but I wasn’t used to it. I was finding it harder to recede into the background.

  In ninth grade, I’d been lucky enough to find Izzie Aaron—or she’d found me, extroverting my introvert. For some reason, she’d decided we were going to be the best of friends. Izzie was also part of a group of five other girls, all of them extremely into theater and dance. I hung out with them but I was on the fringe since I was away so often, either at practice or traveling to a meet. When I was with the group at lunch or on texts, most of the time I was in catch-up mode, trying to piece together what I had missed.

  “Why don’t you keep the lip gloss for tonight? Just reapply before your awards thing and, voilà! The rest of your makeup is already done.”

  Although I felt like death, I was looking forward to seeing Coach Mike at his awards dinner tonight. It might make everything feel normal.