The sound that woke me up that night was horrendous. It wasn’t just one noise, but a collection of them, all ringing in my ear. They were piercing, so high-pitched I thought it might make me deaf. I was completely asleep, not even dreaming, when I heard it. My eyes popped open and, almost immediately, I started yelling. I placed my hands over my ears and rolled onto one side. I felt the shape of my cell phone roll under my chest and the blankets around me were thrown into disarray.

Like a hundred violins, all out of tune, the sound was a conglomeration of sharp squeaks. Longer than clicks; shorter than screeches. They seemed to bounce around my head, from one chamber of consciousness to another. There would be a scream, which would echo until it faded away. Then another would respond. But always more than one at a time. A symphony of them; a cacophony, all at the highest volume as if pressed directly against my eardrum.

My vision faded in the pain, but I don’t remember closing my eyes. I know my mouth was open, though my yells warbled away into nothingness. Tears ran down the sides of my nose. My spine arched and my skin pulled back against my bones.

Suddenly, there was just one. A single call. Fading echoes. Silence. Then the sound again. It wasn’t until then that I realized something that terrified me, but also somehow amazed me: the sound was organic. It was coming from a living source. Don’t ask me how I know that, because I can’t explain it. It’s like when annoying people use that barking dog ringtone on their phones. How do you know the difference between the ringtone and a real dog? You just know. It sounds different. Well, this sound wasn’t coming from some instrument or scraping metal. It was alive, guttural. The more I listened (though that implies I had a choice in the whole thing, which I didn’t), the more I realized that this single sound was different than the others. It was at a different pitch; a lower one. And its call seemed to fade out in a slur rather than in brisk silence.

It sounded sad, like the cries of a whale pod deep in the black ocean.

I didn’t move. I just knelt there with my head pressed into a pillow and my hands over my ears. After a few moments, the sound stopped. Once I was sure that it wasn’t coming back, I looked around my room. It was empty. I was alone.

Light under the bedroom door caught my attention. I watched with a racing heart as a shadow cut across the yellow beams. The floorboards in the hallway creaked. And for some unknown reason, I got to my feet.

When I poked my head out of the doorway, all I saw was a quick wisp of pink at the end of the hallway. Whatever walked passed my room was going down the stairs, almost silently. I took a step. The floorboard under my foot creaked so loudly that I almost darted back into my room. Maybe it wasn’t really as loud as it seemed. The house was so quiet, though. From there, I could actually hear the grandfather clock downstairs ticking. I told myself that I was being stupid; that the floorboard wasn’t loud enough to wake a mouse. But I stepped quicker the next time, hoping that passing over the floor without actually setting my foot down on it would make me stealthier.

I got to the staircase and it seemed like somebody built a few extra steps into it. It seemed longer than usual is what I mean. A light came on from the kitchen, the slanted, glowing silhouette of the doorway lighting up the bottom few steps. Something rattled. I ran for it, darting down the steps so fast that I missed every other one. The skin on the bottom of my bare feet barely touched the stairs. Before I could let the shadows of the huge, empty living room frighten me, I went for the kitchen.

My mom screamed. She raised her hands up in the air, a cigarette hanging from between her middle and pointer fingers. The coffee machine next to her started to gurgle. Some people laugh after being startled; not my mom.

She said the same thing she always says, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I let out a long sigh and put my hand on my chest. I told her she scared me; she said, with more conviction, that I scared her. She put her hand up to her forehead. I sat down at the end of the table.

I asked her what she was doing up this late. She snapped at me, told me I should mind my own business. Then she softened up and sighed.

“Couldn’t sleep,” was all she said. I asked her why. Apparently she couldn’t get comfortable. Which sounded like a lie to me, but I didn’t push it on account of the fact that I’d already given her a heart attack. So I just kind of sat there really quiet. You know how I said I don’t mind being alone with my dad in the truck? Well, that isn’t the case with my mom. When it’s just the two of us, it’s like magnetic repulsion. Something just pushes the two of us apart. But that night, I felt like I should stay. Mostly because I was afraid to go back to sleep and hear that sound again.

She sat across from me at the table and started drumming her fingers in a line. Her eyes were locked on her hand and occasionally she’d take a puff of her smoke. I watched her. She seemed sad. Thin, too. And distant. Probably that’s because of the cigarettes. Her cheeks were sucked in around her skull and she didn’t so much breathe out the smoke as it just rolled back out of her mouth. Is it strange that I find the smell of cigarettes oddly comforting?

She pulled at the collar of her pink nightgown and ashed in a coffee mug, which makes Dad angry. “Don’t tell your dad,” she said softly. I smiled and said I wouldn’t. Then she looked up at me and actually smiled back, which doesn’t happen much. It’s a complicated thing we have going on, the way we respect each other but would never say it out loud.

I asked her what she was thinking about, because I honestly can’t ever tell with her and sometimes it drives me crazy. With her manner of speaking, it sounds like she’s always angry that you’re interrupting her thoughts. Which I did a lot, honestly. But she just ashed again and let out a long trail of smoke.

“I don’t sleep very well since your dad moved to his new room,” she said. I was shocked by her honesty, but didn’t want to push my luck by gawking at her. Between this and Dad smoking in front of me, they were acknowledging that I was becoming older. That was fine with me.

“You were used to him sleeping in the same bed?” I asked. She nodded.

“You get used to certain things. Even if they drive you up the wall.”

I don’t think my mom ever said anything truer than that.

When she poured herself a cup of coffee, she asked me if I wanted one. I said no, but she poured me one anyway and put whiskey in both of them. More in hers, though. Her hands were shaking slightly until she took her first sip. I tried hard not to recoil from the taste of the mixture.

“Did you and Grandma Maisie get along when you were my age?” I asked her. Before she could answer, I added that they probably never went through anything as crazy as what we did. She almost choked on her drink.

What she told me came as a surprise. When she was in high school, my mom actually used to get drunk with Grandma Maisie. They would do chores around the house while sipping on wine and Mom was even allowed to have hard liquor before bed sometimes. Her friends were allowed to drink at their house, too. It reminded me of Frank’s house. I assumed that meant that they got along. But I guess that wasn’t the case, either.

“There was a lot of screaming in our house,” she told me. “Grandma Maisie wasn’t very patient when I was a kid. She wasn’t abusive or anything, but we went through a few years when we hardly spoke. Then you were born, which changed all that. You saved our relationship.”

She raised her glass into the air in a facetious cheers then drank. After that, there was a long silence. Then she surprised me a third time by bringing up the dream. Said she’d been looking into it, whatever that meant. Knowing her, it probably wasn’t an Internet search or anything. But she read somewhere that having a mutual dream isn’t unheard of. It’s rare, she said, even more rare than lucid dreaming, where you can take control of your own dreams. But it made sense to her. We were all under the same stress. The same things were causing all of us to lose sleep at night. Even Tabitha, whether or not she was conscious of it. Maybe that’s why we had the dream.

And because my mom was being so grounded and so quiet, I bought it. Completely. I had no reason to doubt her. We learned about stress in health class, about how it can affect people in so many different ways. Maybe as we were eating dinner that night and my parents were fighting about money and my sister was crying about some boy at school who pushed her down and I gripped my knife in my hand and focused on anything, anything, else…I don’t know, maybe there was an alien movie on the TV in the living room at the same time. Or even something stupid like a UFO story on the front of the newspaper on the counter. And we all just internalized it and processed it and coupled it with the fear. And dreamed about it. I thought it even explained the noise I heard in my bed: a repetition of chaos and disorder followed by the lone call of a being searching for something in the dark.

And it was all so…disappointing…

My head spinning a little, I told my mom she was probably right. And that I wouldn’t worry about it anymore. And just so she would let me go without saying anything else, I told her that I loved her. She didn’t say anything else.

I didn’t fall asleep for a while. I was too busy staring at the ceiling and realizing that my life wasn’t that extraordinary after all. Eventually, I sat back up and looked across my bed and out the window. Thin wisps of smoke rose from the tops of the cornstalks that were dancing in a breeze. The smoke lifted in corkscrews, twisting across the moonlight.

Next Chapter: Chapter 7