Cure for Insomnia

by Laina Villeneuve

  “May I?”

  Rosa nodded vigorously, as tongue-tied as I was. She nudged the chair toward the visitor.

  The judge, because surely she was a judge, tucked her perfect legs to the side, a picture of elegance. “Tell me how you chose this particular project.” She had an accent that I couldn’t quite place. The cadence and pronunciation suggested that English was not her first language.

  By now, I had heard Rosa’s answer many times and was accustomed to nodding politely when Rosa pointed me out as the research subject. This time when the questioner’s eyes turned to me, my body reacted again. I cursed the person who had decided that judges would not wear name tags and myself for not removing the elastic I typically used to keep my hair out of my face. My thick black curls would have covered the blush creeping up my neck.

  “Not being able to sleep sounds terrible,” the woman said. “What did you find?”

  Though her question was directed at Rosa, her eyes stayed on me. She frowned sympathetically as Rosa explained that the suggested remedies of melatonin and meditation grew less effective. Next was the question about what Rosa might have done differently, but instead of giving the answer she had for the whole afternoon, Rosa went a completely different route.

  “If I did this as a project in the future, I’d try to find more people who have trouble sleeping and compare how the treatments work, but for my aunt, I just have to find someone to sleep with her.”

  Chapter Two

  I gasped because my niece was speaking the literal truth.

  Three weeks earlier, after a very frustrating day, I had just succumbed to gravity, sinking into the soft couch right inside my door. The way the cushions embraced my exhausted body, I knew I’d made a big mistake. I never should have stopped moving. Sitting felt too good, the quiet too much of a blessing. I released my hair from the elastic and tilted my head side to side. The pressure in my shoulders and scalp eased slightly. Petri leapt to the couch and kneaded my thigh when I stroked her slick black coat.

  My phone rang. I was late. I groaned as I reached for it.

  “Karla!” My mother’s voice boomed the moment I swiped the screen.

  “Ma.”

  “You’ve had time to pee or do whatever you need to do. Your family is waiting.”

  I should have known my mother would be watching the street. Her voice got me to my feet and to the door. When I opened it, Rosa was already there. I couldn’t help but return her smile. She smelled like home.

  “Beef cocido tonight?” I asked my mother, still on the phone.

  “Ah! Rosa made it. Be a good example. Do not make that child late.”

  I clicked off without saying goodbye, pocketed my phone and held my arms out. “You smell good enough to eat.” I buried my nose in Rosa’s hoodie, eliciting a laugh.

  “I was helping Abuela in the kitchen.”

  “Before you went out to spy on my driveway?”

  “I wasn’t spying. Abuela saw you drive by and sent me.”

  “It’s my lucky day to have an escort.” I locked my door and followed Rosa to the sidewalk for the two-block walk down the street to my parents’ house which they shared with my sister’s family.

  “My mom said you could help me with my science project.”

  “Me? I suck at science.”

  Rosa pushed into me with her shoulder. “No, you don’t.”

  We passed my condo complex and crossed the street entering an older neighborhood with single-story homes. Rosa did not set the pace of a kid sent to retrieve the last member of the family. Her feet and mouth were set at opposite speeds as she attempted to fill me in on her project. Once we arrived, it would be hard to complete a thought without being interrupted. I could see Rosa’s agitation when we reached the olive-green stucco house my parents owned. “Let me say hi to Abuela.”

  She nodded wordlessly as we entered through the side kitchen door. I kissed my mom on the cheek and reached past her to stir the soup simmering on the stove. The rich aroma eased some of the tension in my shoulders.

  My mother stood a full head shorter than me and had twisted her dark hair up off her neck for her kitchen work. She patted my shoulder in greeting and took the spoon from me. “Go help your niece. She has been moping around the house all day waiting for you.”

  In the bright living room, my brother, Luis, popped his chin in my direction, absorbed in the video game his son was playing. Though he dwarfed his six-year-old son, Beto, the two otherwise looked like twins in their white shirts and black jeans. Luis’s girlfriend, Giselle, waved before returning her attention to her phone.

  “Why aren’t you punks helping Rosa with her project?” I sat next to Rosa on the brick hearth of a fireplace they never used. The mantel was lined with wedding photos: my parents, Antonia and her husband, Gustavo, and both my maternal and paternal grandparents.

  “You’re the brains,” Luis said.

  “What did you do to cure diabetes today?” Antonia said, entering the room carrying a toddler already leaning in my direction.

  “What’s your mama doing carrying you, big girl?” I asked. The second Olivia was in my arms, she wiggled down and across the room. “When did you get so fast!”

  “That’s why I carry her. Keeps her out of trouble,” Antonia said, plucking her up before the toddler pulled herself up on her cousin Beto’s pants.

  “You know I’m not curing diabetes,” I said, returning to my sister’s jab. The baby of the family, I had almost thirty years of their pretending they didn’t understand what I was talking about. You’d think I’d know whether she was teasing me or testing whether I could let an inaccurate statement slide. I couldn’t. “The drug we’re creating to prevent retinal damage will…” Rosa interrupted me with a pat on my shoulder.

  “They don’t listen, Tía. I tried to explain how your lab is making a pill to reduce blindness for people with diabetes, but they just pretend to sleep. See?”

  As she said, both my siblings had closed their eyes. Olivia delighted in the game, patting her mother’s cheeks, and Luis quietly snored.

  “At least one person in my family listens.”

  “Two!” my mother shouted from the kitchen.

  “Three,” my father added from the bedroom where he was watching TV.

  “The important ones.” I winked. “Have you brainstormed ideas for your project yet?”

  “Tío says I shouldn’t be wasting my time on science projects, and Mom says I should Google a project.”

  “Google isn’t a bad place to start.”

  “But none of it’s relevant. I want to do something that could help people, like what you do.”

  “You sure she’s your kid, Antonia?” Luis asked.

  “I know, right? You think she wants to talk about makeup? Boys? Curfews? Any of the stuff I cared about in the fifth grade?” She shook her head. “Only reason I don’t think they switched her at birth with some other baby in the hospital is that she sounds exactly like Karla when she was this age. Remember how we used to think she was messed up somehow?”

  “Hey,” I squawked, “look at how I turned out. Still think science is a waste of time?” My brother refused to take his eyes off Beto’s tablet. When Rosa mirrored my exasperation, I stage-whispered, “He’ll be the first one claiming that the cure for diabetic retinopathy was all his idea.”

  “The way I remember it, that first science project was all my genius,” he said smugly.

  “Oh, yeah! The fart project! That was a winner,” Antonia laughed.

  “Farts?” Rosa’s shoulders drooped.

  “It was actually your uncle’s idea. He had the worst smelling farts.”

  “Had?” Antonia interrupted.

  “Has,” I conceded. “So I decided to test whether what he ate affected how bad his farts smelled.”

  “You smelled his farts?”

  The room filled with familiar laughter. They were always laughing at me. I’d always been an outsider to them, an oddity. Sometimes it rubbed
more than others. “You pay a high price for science.”

  Rosa crossed her hands over her chest. “Well I want to do something important. Something that could help people.”

  “You want to do something to help, help your mamá get some sleep.” Antonia nodded at Olivia. “This one still gets me up at least once a night. I don’t get how Rosa sleeps through her screaming her head off.”

  “At least you know why you’re not sleeping,” I said. “I have no excuse. I just can’t find the off-switch for my brain.”

  Rosa jumped up and ran to the computer on the desk across from the fireplace. I caught Antonia’s eye, but she shrugged and gave me the look that said since my niece was more like me, I was the one who should get her. “Like I said, she’s no mini-me. She’s a mini-you.” She dropped her voice. “Still waiting to see if she digs chicks. You knew when you started crushing on your seventh-grade math teacher, right?”

  “I never should have told you that.”

  “Jackpot!” Rosa shouted. “Have you tried taking melatonin?”

  “I tried valerian root once, but it didn’t do anything. Plus it tasted nasty.”

  My niece’s fingers flew on the keys. “Tea or pill?”

  “Tea.”

  “We could try the pill form.”

  “What’s this we?”

  “For my science project. Since you didn’t like the tea, we’ll try the pill form. Web MD says to take four hundred to nine hundred milligrams. You’re not pregnant, right? It says that you can’t take it if you’re pregnant.”

  “No worries there,” I deadpanned.

  “How about lavender?” Rosa said, unfazed. “This site says you can try rubbing it on your feet.”

  “Sign me up for that,” Giselle said.

  “You have trouble sleeping, too?” Excitement flashed on Rosa’s voice.

  “Could be your uncle snores too much.”

  Rosa’s brow creased as she considered Giselle’s idea. She blinked and shook her head. “Snoring would be a different study. I could search up remedies for snoring that we could try.”

  “Give her the valium root,” Luis said, never taking his eyes off the video game. “I’m not takin’ anything.”

  “It’s not valium, idiot,” Giselle said. “It’s…” She pointed at Rosa.

  “Valerian root,” Rosa supplied.

  “Yeah. I don’t need valerian root. I sleep fine until you fall asleep.” Giselle tucked her phone away and directed raised eyebrows and pursed lips at my brother. Although they weren’t married, Luis had lived with her ever since Beto was born.

  I waited for Luis to react, not surprised when the silence after Giselle’s remark lengthened. “So far, it sounds like babies and boyfriends ruin sleep. There’s your research angle. I can see your paper title: ‘Studies show that sleeping alone improves your sleep.’”

  Rosa frowned at me. “But you sleep alone, and you said you don’t sleep.”

  “Giselle doesn’t sleep alone,” Luis said, clueless.

  “She will if she doesn’t get a lavender foot rub,” Giselle answered.

  “Pshaw,” Luis said. “None of you ladies askin’ how I sleep. I’ll be a lot safer sleeping by myself.”

  “Oh, no. You’re not blamin’ that on me,” Giselle said.

  “She didn’t tell you, did she? How she pushed me outta bed?”

  Rosa’s eyes widened. “You pushed him out of bed?”

  “He sleeps on his back. Look at him. He’s a big guy. I was trying to push him onto his side. I couldn’t budge him. I’d push. He’d rock back. I pushed again and got him further. Then I thought one big push would do it. How did I know he was going to turn over on his own?”

  “Freakin’ launched my ass onto the floor.”

  “You didn’t hurt nothing. You’re such a baby. Karla, you got it wrong. Antonia and me, we both sleep with babies. You’re the only smart one sleeping alone.”

  “Work hours are unforgiving,” I said. My grad school commitments had strained my previous relationships, but they were nothing compared to the hours Judy expected of me as a research scientist.

  “Did you ever try sleeping with someone, Aunt Karla?”

  Luis doubled over laughing, and Antonia turned to hide her smile. I tried as hard as I could to clear my brain, to picture my parents chastely lying side by side in their own bed. Instead, a vivid memory of my ex, naked and very much not sleeping, flooded my mind and my senses. I turned a deep shade of red.

  “What?” Rosa demanded.

  “Your mom and uncle are crass, that’s what,” I said, wishing it wasn’t so hot in the room. “You are a way better big sister than some of us had.”

  “Mom says I’m the best.”

  “Must be you have a good role model,” I said from the side of my mouth.

  Antonia pushed her lips out like she did when she got defensive. “Okay, you be the role model. You explain.”

  That hadn’t redirected the conversation as I’d hoped it would. How to put this? Rosa crossed her arms, waiting. “Okay. In your head, when you ask ‘have you slept with anyone,’ you’re asking with the idea of a slumber party?”

  Rosa nodded, all innocence.

  “And I have.” I struggled to continue the thought. I tried to keep the idea of a slumber party in my head to push away my blush by telling myself that whether we’d had sex or not, I’d always slept better with Ann in my bed. Just thinking the words sex and Ann restarted the tape in my head, embarrassingly heating other parts of my body.

  Antonia cackled as if she could tell what was happening in my pants. “The kind of sleeping together your aunt’s thinking about now gets you one of these.” She tipped her head toward Olivia. “Well, it gets me one, but your auntie is lucky. Doing the nighttime tango doesn’t get her knocked up.”

  “Oh,” Rosa said, flushing as red as me.

  Luis, not blushing at all, pointed out the deepening red on both of our faces. “I swear that kid is really Karla’s.”

  “I don’t think finding a girlfriend qualifies as a science project,” said Rosa.

  Thankful we were finally back on the subject at hand, I said, “You don’t have to find me a girlfriend. There are lots of other things we can try.”

  “None of which will be as fun,” Antonia tsked.

  Chapter Three

  Thus, when my niece said that all she needed was to find someone to sleep with me, my mind went directly to picturing the beautiful judge naked and in my bed.

  My gasp carried a tiny bit of saliva to my windpipe. I tried to disguise the cough as merely clearing my throat, but that made my lungs panic more. Antonia thwacked me on the back and shoved a bottled water at me. Her big smile told me she was remembering exactly what she’d said three weeks ago. Her eyes danced as her eyes drifted from me to the judge. “You okay, hermana?”

  “Fine. Sorry. I’m fine,” I sputtered.

  “You sound certain that you solved your subject’s sleeping problem,” the woman said with a twinkle in her eye.

  “When we were working on the poster, I stayed at her house. She slept so well, she had me stay over again.”

  “So your aunt wasn’t simply your subject? She helped with the project as well?”

  “She’s a research scientist at The Miracle Center. She showed me some of her posters to give me ideas about how to present my research.”

  “I logged my sleeping data onto a spreadsheet, so I printed that out for her.” I hesitated, realizing I probably sounded like the parents at the poster next door. “The rest is all her.”

  “Sounds like she has a good role model.” The soft edges of the woman’s professional voice melted into something much more intimate.

  “She is!” Rosa agreed. “She’s a real scientist. She studies diabetes. I’ve been to her lab. She showed me her dark room, her hood, and…”

  I wanted to die right on the spot. Rosa’s unintentionally suggestive description pushed the judge’s sculpted eyebrows higher and higher on her lovely f
orehead. I interrupted her before it got worse. “You keep your focus, and you’ll be a research scientist yourself someday.”

  Rosa beamed at me.

  “She certainly has a good start,” the judge agreed.

  “A pleasure to meet you.” She grasped Rosa’s hand and then looked at me. “Both of you.”

  With a smile, she was gone. I was certain that under different circumstances, I would have received a handshake as well or maybe even something more. I could see myself intertwining my fingers with hers to pull her into a private conversation. Though I did my best to stay present for Rosa, the woman had thoroughly captured my attention, and I found myself searching for her repeatedly.

  “What’s with you?” Antonia bumped me after I’d been caught distracted.

  “I promised my boss I’d check out who is representing The Miracle Center.”

  Antonia shook her head and sucked air through her teeth. “Thought you were here with your family. But you’re always working, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Go.”

  “No. I’ll do it later.”

  “Did you hear me ask you? Go do your thing, and then you can come back and be here.”

  I heard the sister-mom Antonia had been when our mother was at work and she was in charge. “I’ll be right back.”

  Guilt wove through the crowd with me as my thoughts remained on the judge instead of my brief from Judy. What was I doing? I came to an abrupt halt realizing my foolishness. As it was, I had to flake on my family to get back to work. I didn’t have time for distractions. I turned an about-face to head toward the check-in table to talk to an official and nearly collided with the judge.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said.