Good Night

“I need help! I neeeeed heeeeelp!” I’d wanted my voice to reverberate down the hall, but instead I sounded like a croaking duck.

“What is wrong with you?” my mother asked from my doorway a few seconds later. I attempted to look up from where I was face down on my bed under a mass of blankets. The effort was pointless though—the room was dark, only silhouetted by a single streetlamp across the street and on the corner.

“I need help. Look at my sheet!” The yellow and blue plaid cotton sheet was twisted around my calves and ankles, providing a makeshift straitjacket for my legs. “I can’t move and I’m sooo tired!”

“Okay, I’m turning on the light so prepare yourself. This is what happens when you only get four hours of sleep and then work all day.” She untangled the sheet and tucked it expertly under my mattress at the end of the bed while I lay comatose, made inert by exhaustion and frustration. Her movements were quick suggesting years of experience.

“There you go.” As she pulled the comforter up over my shoulder, I immediately felt better even though the July weather was much too hot for comforters. I heard her begin to move out. I snuggled down under the protective cover of darkness, then began to wail.

“Wait! Waaait! Now my pajama leg is all funny, and I can’t fix it.”

She didn’t even complain as she pushed the blankets out of the way, grabbed the green and white squared fabric bunched around my knee and gave it a yank down. “That’s why I have to wear socks pulled up over my pajamas bottoms in the winter.”

I wanted to ask ‘why only in the winter?’ but she was fixing the covers around me once again and I was distracted by familiar stirrings of childhood. My eyes wouldn’t open and it was too much effort to use my vocal cords.

“Good night,” came the almost-businesslike adieu from my childhood. I half-smiled as I turned my face back into the pillow, a favored position I had long ago outgrown. The light went out, and cozy in bed with the comforter weighing just the perfect amount, I picked my head up to listen to her sandals flip-flopping all the way down the hall until they were too far away to hear. Then, satisfied, I burrowed into my pillow and snuggled deeper in the memory.