Fool Me Once

She carried Lily and gently set her down on Joe’s side of the bed. She laid out pillows along the edge of the bed in a makeshift rail and then, to be on the safe side, threw a bunch more on the floor in case Lily somehow rolled through this tenuous barricade. Maya pulled the covers up and tucked them under Lily’s chin, and as she did, Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is?

Lily closed her eyes and fell asleep. Maya stayed there, unmoving, watching her daughter’s little face, making sure the breaths were deep and even. She stayed that way until mercifully her mobile phone rang and broke the spell.

She hoped that it might be Shane with an answer on Tom Douglass, though he’d told her that he wouldn’t be able to look into the man’s military records until the morning. She grabbed the phone and saw her niece Alexa’s name pop up. In a small panic-here too was another person she could never lose-Maya quickly hit the green button.

“Everything okay?”

“Umm, yeah,” Alexa said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“No reason.” Man, Maya needed to calm the hell down. “What’s up, kiddo? You need help with your homework?”

“Right, and if I did, you think I’d call you?”

Maya laughed. “Good point.”

“Tomorrow is Soccer Day.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s the lame thing we do in our town where all the grades have a game and they sell booster stuff and there’s a moon bounce and a carnival and all that. I mean, it’s fun for the little kids.”

“Okay.”

“I know you said you were busy, but I was hoping you and Lily could come.”

“Oh.”

“Dad and Daniel will be there too. His game is at ten, mine’s at eleven. We can take Lily around, get her a balloon animal-Mr. Ronkowitz, my English teacher, makes them for all the little kids-take her on the rides. I thought it might be fun. We miss her.”

Maya looked over at Lily sleeping next to her. The overwhelmed feeling returned in force.

“Aunt Maya?”

Alexa and Daniel were Lily’s cousins. Lily adored them. Maya wanted them-needed them-to be a big part of Lily’s life. “I’m glad Lily’s already asleep,” Maya said to Alexa.

“Huh?”

“Because if I told her she was going to see her cousins tomorrow, she would be too excited to go anywhere near her bed.”

Alexa laughed. “Great, see you in the morning? It’s at the town circle.”

“Right.”

“Oh, and just FYI. My stupid coach will be there.”

“No worries. I think the two of us get each other now.”

“Good night, Aunt Maya.”

“Good night, Alexa.”

* * *

The night was bad.

The sounds began their assault when Maya was in that gentle cusp between consciousness and sleep. The clamoring, the screams, the rotors, and the gunfire were relentless. They would not pause. They would not let up. They grew louder and stayed. Maya wasn’t in her bed. She wasn’t back there either. She was in this in-between world, suspended, lost. All was darkness and noise, unceasing, endless noise, the type of noise that seemed to come from within her, as though some small creature had climbed inside her head and started screeching and scratching from within.

There was no escape, no rational thought. There was no here or now, no yesterday or tomorrow. That would all come later. Right now there was nothing but the agony of the sounds shredding through her brain like a reaper’s scythe. Maya put her hands on either side of her head and pushed hard as though trying to crush her own skull.

It was that bad.

It was the type of bad that made you want to do anything to please-

– oh God please-

– make it stop. It made you think about picking up a gun and silencing the sounds, if you knew where you were, if you knew that you were so close to your bedside table where you kept a gun in that small safe…

Maya didn’t know if it lasted minutes or hours. It seemed endless. Time had no meaning when the sounds suffocated you. You just rode it out and tried to stay afloat.

But at some point, a new sound, a more “regular” sound, penetrated her auditory hell. The sound seemed to come from a great distance. The sound seemed to take a long time to reach her and register. It had to fight through the other deafening sounds-one of which, Maya realized as she started to float up toward consciousness, was her own self screaming.

A doorbell. Then a voice:

“Maya? Maya?”

Shane. He started banging against the door.

“Maya?”

She opened her eyes. The sounds didn’t flee so much as mockingly fade away, reminding her that they might grow quiet but they were always there, always with her. Maya again thought about that theory that no sound dies, that if you scream in the woods and you hear an echo, that echo just grows fainter and fainter but never completely goes away. Her sounds did the same.