Cold Hands

Sleepless

There was only one motel in town, one of the dingy one story types with dirty sheets and springs poking out of the beds. I knew this arrangement was not going to work for long. My mother was a class-A germaphobe, the type to carry Clorox wipes in her purse and refuse to let anybody else use her straw. She wasn't about to let any trace of a bad attitude show, however, so she plastered a grin on her face that appeared to give her physical pain all the way from the check-in to the grimy two-bed suite. She was out cold within minutes.

I took a little longer. I was still getting used to the humidity, and I was grossed out that the sheets were sticking to my sweat. There was a bedspring poking right between my shoulder blades and the pillow might as well have been a slab of concrete. I could be a real diva about my bedding.

Or maybe I just had a lot on my mind.

Getting up and leaving to come here had been easy. It wasn't like completely committing to a move, because we would be back someday—supposedly—so all the big stuff like furniture could just go into storage for a while. As for the rest of the packing, we had never had a lot so there wasn't much fuss. My dad was a teacher, and between the two of them our family used to have a little more money, but since he was gone, my mom and I got by on what we needed. We had brought two suitcases each and not much else. This arrangement was just fine with me. I had never really been a material kinda guy. When I was little, I never asked for toys or electronics or video games like other kids. I had always been perfectly content with a pad of paper and some crayons.

It started out as scribbles, but as I started going to school I started making stories. I had a big imagination. I scrawled out fantastic adventures of talking animals and dragons and cowboys, with big chunky handwriting and lots of spelling errors. I would illustrate them myself and cut out construction paper covers and assemble my manuscripts with glue-sticks and glitter. When I was a little older, talking animals and dragons gave way to cops and robbers, and I started reading about them too. I was crazy about Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. Needless to say, I wasn't the coolest kid in the school even before I was in the chair, but that never bothered me. I was always content in my own little world in my head.

I had it all figured out that I was going to be an investigative journalist when I grew up, going on wild car chases and poring over secret documents with magnifying glasses and solving mysteries, and then writing about my adventures for the world to know. I think maybe my ten-year-old perception of investigative journalism may have been a little glamorized, but even as I grew up my enthusiasm for journalism remained. My mom got me a camera for my birthday and I took pictures of everything. In Junior High I was student president of the school newspaper and I thought that just made me thebomb.com. I even started a blog. Granted, nobody read it except my mom, but I was published now for the world to see and I let everybody know about it who would listen to me yap.

I won't say being paralyzed from the waist down killed my passion because it's not like being in a wheelchair is something that changes your whole personality. I was still me after the crash, but in some ways I was different. I got a lot older a lot faster than I should have, I guess. You don't watch your dad get thrown through a windshield and die on the spot and stay the same person afterward. Lots of things that used to interest me weren't as exciting anymore. Writing stories got boring to me. I had enough going on in the real world to worry about that I suppose I just didn't have time to worry about anything on paper. It wasn't like I completely lost interest in my hobbies. I still had that old camera my mom had gotten me, and I still liked taking pictures of cool stuff.

Sometimes, I felt bad, because I knew I worried my mom. I could tell that she thought I had lost myself or something. She liked to pester me about picking up writing again. Just last Christmas, she had gotten me a fat leather-bound journal that so far I hadn't filled with anything except crappy doodles. I had that with me now in one of my suitcases; I debated getting out of bed to grab it. This was a new town, a new chapter, a new start, and that was probably as good an opportunity as any to start keeping a journal. Then I remembered getting out of bed required moving, and I decided against the idea.

The motel room's annoyingly loud fan in the corner clicked off, and in the sudden oppressive silence I realized I could hear my mom sniffling. Was she crying? I peered over in the dark at the other bed, but her back was to me. I couldn't tell if she was awake or asleep.

It was hard to say when I finally dozed off, because I was in and out of it all night. The times I was asleep, it was weird, but I was asleep in my dreams too, just in a bigger bed, in a creepy dusty old room, and there was somebody else there too. I could only catch quick glimpses of him, like he was dodging me in the corners of my mind, skirting around my thoughts, but it was definitely a he, a tall guy, dark or in shadow, wearing weird baggy clothes, and he was watching me sleep. Not in a scary way, not smiling like a psycho or moving toward me or anything, just watching, curious, his head cocked to one side.