You sleep six hours on the guest-room bed and you wake at three-eleven without knowing why. The window faces the back yard and there is no streetlight to the back; only the neighbor's porch-light is on across the fence, and the porch-light is yellow, and the yellow crosses the back hedge and comes to nothing in the middle of your ceiling.
The house is silent in the way new houses are silent — not quiet, silent, no settling-noise, no floor-creak, no pipes. Your body is awake before you are, and this is the first thing you notice: you are on your side and one of your hands is flat against the wall above the bed, pressed there, and you did not put it there. You do not remember deciding to lift your hand.
A dog in the fourth or fifth house down the block starts to bark.
It barks five times and stops. Then a car door, closer than the dog, no farther than the driveway across the street from your father's house. Then the dog barks again, three times this time, four, and stops. A car engine starts. A car pulls away. The engine sound thins down the block and turns left onto a larger road.
Through the shared wall between the guest room and Charlotte's bedroom next door you can hear Charlotte breathing. You have not heard her breathing before tonight; you have not slept in a room adjacent to her before tonight. Her breath is eight-year-old breath, steady, the exhale slightly longer than the inhale. The rhythm is the rhythm of a child who is not dreaming of anything in particular. She is sleeping the way a child sleeps when the child is safe.
The dog barks one more time down the block. You count the beats between the car-door and the dog's bark and Charlotte's next exhale and they are not synchronized with each other in any pattern you can read. I am holding a hand against a wall at three-eleven in the morning in a house I have not slept in before, and my hand has done this on its own, and I do not know what it thinks it is protecting.
You do not get up.
You bring your hand down off the wall and lay it flat against your sternum. Your chest is moving. Charlotte's breath continues through the wall. The dog does not bark again.
Somewhere two houses over someone is playing a piano piece low enough that you can only hear it as shape — two notes rising, two notes answering, a long rest. You do not know which piece it is. You know it is Arvo Pärt. It plays for a minute. Then it is gone or you are asleep.
The house-heater clicks on and the warm air begins to come into the vent at the window. Your father and your stepmother are asleep in the master bedroom at the far end of the house. Your half-brother Jack — whom you have not seen in four years, who lives in Boulder, who has his own life — is not in this house tonight. The house is your father and your stepmother and Charlotte and you, and one of those four people has a hand that wakes before she does and finds a wall to press against, and the child on the other side of the wall is breathing the breath of someone who does not know she is being guarded.
You think, in the unmoored half-minute before sleep, that tomorrow the week ahead will have a specific shape you can hold. It won't. It will have the shape of the week it has.
You sleep again, eventually. You do not remember falling asleep. You wake once more at five-forty-four when a delivery van parks under the bedroom window, the engine runs for ninety seconds while someone carries three packages to the door of the house next door, and drives off. You sleep from then until seven-twenty without dreaming.
Your stepmother is at the kitchen counter in a robe with a coffee in her hand when you come down. Her name is Karen. She is fifty-one. She has been in this house for nine years. She nods at you with the exact nod she has given you since you were fifteen and first met her — the nod that is not cold and not warm and not denying anything and not offering anything. You nod back. She pours you coffee in a Cherry Creek Arts Festival 2024 mug and slides it across the counter. You take it.
Sleep all right?
Some.
Charlotte was up at six with a book. She's in her room.
OK.
Karen nods and goes upstairs. You stand at the counter with the coffee in both hands and you look out the window into the back yard where last night the dog you did not see was five or six houses away, and where this morning the hedge is the hedge, and the neighbor's porch-light has turned off in the daylight, and the sky is Colorado-blue at the top of its register, and somewhere above the back fence the mountains are where they were yesterday. You have not been here long enough to know if the mountains help.