Jamie Fletcher woke to the sound of the top bunk creaking. He opened his eyes. The moon hung bright against an ink black sky. Mom had forgotten to say goodnight and close the curtains, so he saw straight out the window.
Normally, the moon wasn’t so bright, but ever since Dad stormed outside with his .357 a few months earlier and shot out the streetlight (said it kept him awake), that part of the street was so dark you couldn’t even see the sidewalk.
Dust particles floated through streaks of blue light as Eric’s silhouette came climbing down the ladder, and the whole bed swayed a little with his weight.
When they first moved in, Jamie had wanted the top bunk, but Eric got to pick since he was two years older.
He knew better than to say or do anything that might startle his brother. It had been a couple months since his brother last sleepwalked, but Jamie remembered what Mom told him.
Follow him, make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid or get himself hurt. If you can, guide him back to bed. Gently, though.
Eric’s bare feet hit the floor, and for one brief moment Jamie saw his brother’s face. His eyes stared, wide open, refusing to blink - stark against his skin -so pale in that moonlight - like he was dead.
Eric turned his head and looked at Jamie, sitting up, huddled in his blanket, and Jamie hated the feeling of being looked at but not seen. His heartrate jumped and he suddenly jolted from still half-asleep to fully awake.
Jamie told his friend at school about Eric’s sleepwalking. Explained it like there was another person inside his brother, one who only came out at night, and wanted to do things that Awake Eric would never do. Like, make a piece of toast with Mom’s marmalade. Eric didn’t like marmalade. He always had strawberry jam on his toast.
Sleep Eric once arranged all the shoes by the front door in pairs, from biggest to smallest. Dad’s left behind shoes, his own, Mom’s, and Jamie’s.
Sleep Eric sat at the dining room table and put together a 500-piece puzzle of the Giza Pyramids. And he did it fast.
Awake Eric hated puzzles.
Sleep Eric made an entire beef casserole with mashed potatoes one night. Stood cooking in the kitchen, stirring sauce, peeling potatoes.
Awake Eric had never cooked a meal in his life.
Once, Sleep Eric took Dad’s rifle out of the hallway closet and stood in the living room, holding it like a soldier at attention, waiting for
orders. Eventually, he put the gun back, but Jamie spent the next several weeks checking the rifle before bed to make sure it was unloaded. Like it would have mattered. If Sleep Eric could make a full dinner, he’d have no trouble finding bullets and loading the gun.
Jamie told his friend it was like watching a zombie if zombies weren’t mean. Sleep Eric controlled the hands and feet, controlled the head, used the eyes, but he couldn’t seem to make the mouth work. Sleep Eric never spoke. Three of those nights he grabbed a pencil and made weird pictures that weren’t really pictures. Just hundreds of dots scribbled onto the paper in a random pattern. Some of the dots were bigger than others, but Jamie never could make sense of them, and of course, in the morning, Awake Eric would have no memory of what he’d done.
Sleep Eric only appeared every few weeks, so it took almost two months for Jamie to realize that every picture contained the same number of black dots, in exactly the same pattern.
He asked Awake Eric what the pictures meant, and his brother just shrugged and said, “I have no idea.”
Eric always got sick after a night of sleepwalking. The very next day he’d spike a fever and be laid up in bed, sweating, muttering things that didn’t make sense. He’d rub at a spot on his neck and whisper in a hoarse voice that it was sore. That it ached. Jamie slept on the couch on those nights, because he couldn’t get any rest the way his brother thrashed around. The sickness usually only lasted a day or two and Eric would be back to his normal self. Only his “normal” changed after he began sleepwalking.
And when did it start?
It took Jamie a while to make the connection, and it happened by accident. He started keeping track of his brother’s sleeping episodes up until they disappeared when Eric was sixteen. Jamie drew a little plus sign in the corner of the day. In his journal, which he hid under his
pillow, he would write down the specifics of what Eric did, trying to look for a pattern, or a clue as to why he would undertake so many unusual tasks. And when Jamie looked back at the calendar, he saw another notation he made on the day of Eric’s first sleepwalking episode.
“DG”
Dad Gone
Their father got into a screaming match with Mom. A bad one. The worst Jamie had seen. He knew it was bad because they were both screaming louder than the TV in the living room where the boys sat. Jamie heard every word coming from upstairs. And there was the heavy wood on wood sound of dresser drawers crashing open and slamming shut. One drawer ended up broken. Then the closet door, same thing. Even Dad’s footsteps were so much harder than they needed to be. Like he was trying to bust a hole through the floor with each step.
This wasn’t the first time Dad had left, but it felt different because he’d never packed anything before. Like, maybe he actually meant it this time.
When he came downstairs, dragging a suitcase that clunked against each step, he walked past the living room, then stopped, all out of breath, and said, “You boys keep an eye on her. Make sure she don’t burn down the place.” When he reached the front door, he walked outside and said, “I’ll be seeing ya.”
The door slammed shut and a few seconds later Jamie heard the familiar growl of Dad’s truck. He watched through the window as the taillights faded down the street, like two shrinking red eyes.
That night, Sleep Eric made his first appearance.
Jamie followed his brother downstairs, trailing his fingertips along the wall, feeling the frayed edges of a hole in the drywall the size and shape of Mom’s head from when she tried to crawl away from Dad during a fight, up the steps on all fours like a dog.
Jamie wondered why Eric wouldn’t respond to him whispering his name, whispering, “What are you doing?”
Eventually, the boys learned how to patch the drywall and erase the damage Dad had made with their bodies—heads, elbows, knees—hiding the holes in the walls that bled white powder.
Sleep Eric made his way through the kitchen to the living room. The couch and chairs were black silhouettes against black. Jamie cracked his shin against the edge of the coffee table and stifled a curse. He couldn’t understand how Eric didn’t bump into things. He brushed past countertops and furniture like he could see in the dark.
And Eric’s walk, it wasn’t a shuffle, and it wasn’t uncertain. He moved with confidence from one room to the other, as if he woke up with a specific purpose and he couldn’t see or hear anything unrelated.
The chain latch on the front door clicked aside and Sleep Eric shuffled out of the house into the cold night air. Barefoot. Jamie stopped to slip on a pair of shoes then hurried after his brother.
Whatever tasks those deep parts of Eric’s brain thought he needed to do, ...
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