Museum of Stones. Lynn Lurie
would wake with the sensation I was not alone, that someone had settled into the dark corner or the other side of the half-opened closet door.
Not remembering the chair that was always in the same place, its rattan seat frayed, I saw it as a man and the shirt draped over the frame as his tangled hair. Too paralyzed to turn on the light, I gripped the sheet and waited.
Lightning struck the house across the street. The family huddled near the fire truck wrapped in blankets. Rain was turning the smoke an eerie orange.
White and red lights flashed through the window at a dizzying speed and danced across the wall. I didn’t know how my sister slept through it.
What had they lost in the fire, the two turtles their daughters named, Barbie dolls, and glittering hair ties? Now that their things were wet or burned I asked Mother where would they sleep. My parents didn’t invite them in or bring them dry blankets.
Blue velvet lined the inside of the box and an oval mirror was glued to the top lid. The mirror reflected the image of a ballerina in her white crinoline and pink ballet shoes. She turned to the repeating melody of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Her arms, face and legs were sculpted in white porcelain. I played the song so many times my mother threatened to take the box away.
My son prefers tiny boxes that stack, an antique dresser with many drawers, a ribbon cabinet and great-grandmother’s button container. He spends hours rearranging the contents, and if I interrupt he bangs his head on the table. When the head banging is over he starts again, but only after returning to the very first step in his memorized sequence.
I ask the first of many neurologists what is wrong with a baby that does not sleep. Doctors, he says, are trained to see horses, not zebras. Does he mean the former are ordinary and the latter are anomalies? I am so sure my son is a zebra I beg him to look again.
The doctor traces his index finger along my son’s cheek. What is it? I jump up. What do you see?
A child in his waiting room cannot sit still. Every limb is in motion. With the precision of a perfectly calibrated machine, the boy moves colored building blocks around the room. When there are no more blocks in the bin he gathers what he has distributed and begins again. None of the other children approach him. It is as if they know. His mother is the nervous one, chewing her fingernails, her eyes fixed on the illuminated EXIT sign. She stands and reaches for her jacket and pocketbook, checking her surroundings as she carefully folds her newspaper. Looking left then right before quietly walking in the direction of the door. Something causes her to reassess, and she slinks back to her seat.
The nurse whispers to the nurse-in-training, it is a fatal insomnia. When she tries to reason with the boy he becomes so enraged three adults are required to pin him down.
I close my son’s bedroom door. I imagine leaving him alone in the house, imprisoned by the four sides of his crib, each locked in position, his diaper overflowing, the wet running down his leg. I do not intend to return.
Other times I am fastening him into his car seat as I prepare to drive over the side of the bridge at the center point where the distance to the water is the greatest.
Did great-grandmother trekking the Carpathian Mountains with her sick son strapped across her back, in search of a doctor, finding no one who would help, her desperation heightened by her son’s trust, consider plunging headfirst into the valley?
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