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For a long time Wendy waited in the doorway to Danny’s room, leaning against the door-frame for support and listening to his breath as he slept – and yes, waiting. She didn’t want to hear anything from Danny. She wanted to turn away from the door and walk back to her room – slowly now, because her back was still healing, but still quicker than she’d been able to walk while her spine was still broken and in a brace – and then she wanted to turn off the lights and leave it, and sleep.
Or, more likely, she would wait in her room and listen for Danny through the walls, so she could be there if he needed her. She’d fall asleep eventually, like she did most nights, and if Danny called out for her, or for anyone,
(for Jack)
she’d run to him, her weakly-mended back be damned. She didn’t need to stand in the doorway to watch. It wasn’t like she’d be far.
It still came as a relief when something finally happened. Danny’s breaths quickened, Wendy could feel them in her own chest at the same time as she heard them. She stood tense in the doorway, her hand curled around the wooden frame while she waited for Danny to wake up and call out to her so she could cross the room and hold him, but there was none of that. Almost as quickly as Danny began to stir he fell quiet again. Wendy felt herself settle, too.
She closed her eyes. Good. It was about time Danny started sleeping through the night again. She found the thought bitter this time around, nothing near the glowing pride and relief she’d felt when he’d first slept through the night alone the first time, as a baby.
(You’ve really done a number on him, Jack.)
But that wasn’t fair, was it? And as sour as the thought tasted when it came to her, it was only a sudden, sharper shade of what she found herself thinking any other time of the day – and if not thinking, feeling. Something dead was caught in the back of her mouth and she kept tasting it every time she might have thought she’d found something sweet.
Wendy stepped away from Danny’s doorway, sliding her foot out behind her to balance on the freezing linoleum floor. The change in temperature was only marginal compared to how her bare feet felt on Danny’s carpeted room, but every cold surface she touched ate through her. She might never be warm again.
She was about to turn down the hallway and go back to her room when something stopped her. No sooner was the door to Danny’s bedroom closed than his breath picked up, Wendy again feeling it as a hurried gasp of her own. She waited, though, to see if he’d settle, but she’d only just braced herself against the urge to run back to him when he cried out, so painfully loud in the silence.
Wendy pushed the door open and stumbled back in, kicking her way across the floor so she could reach Danny. Once she’d have perched herself on the bed beside him and drawn him up into her arms, but at six he was too big to scoop up in a single motion, and Wendy’s back wouldn’t have let her, anyway. She crouched beside the bed, kneeling against the carpeted floor and wrapping her hand around Danny’s shoulders.
He was silent now, but awake. She felt it in his shoulders, the tension their moving through her hands and into her arms.
“Danny,” Wendy said. “Danny, please. Wake up now. It was a bad dream, just a dream.”
He still didn’t move, and so Wendy pushed herself next to him on the bed. Her hands didn’t move away from his shoulders. Gently, she rubbed circles over where the bones of his shoulder pushed out through the fabric of his shirt – he was just growing, it had to just be that.
A moment passed, and then abruptly Danny tensed, arching his back and twisting away from her. Wendy held on for a moment longer, reluctant to let go but eventually having no choice as her son rolled over onto his side, away from her.
“Danny,” she murmured. “It’s okay now, Danny. You’re awake.”
Her hand found its way to his shoulder, where he lay trembling. As much as her sore back would let her, Wendy leaned closer to him, whispering softly whatever sweet things she could think of in the hope that it would help, although she wasn’t expecting miracles. Eventually he stilled again, and under her touch Wendy felt Danny wake again, this time completely.
“Danny,” she started to say, at the same time as Danny asked, “Daddy?”
Wendy stilled. For only a moment something surged against her, and she was overcome by a horrible blackness. It wasn’t Jack who made the long journey back to Sidewinder with his broken back and leg, and it wasn’t Jack who was there to hold Danny when he cried now, or sat with him through his nightmares. Jack hadn’t been there for a year now, except as a dark shadow hovering over them both and choking them, but it was Jack who Danny called out for. Even in death Danny belonged to him, leaving Wendy as alone as ever.
Danny whimpered, and a wave of guilt washed over her. How dare she think like that now, when Danny was here and needed her? What would Jack make of that?
(Oh, Jack. What would you have me do?)
She wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled Danny closer. He sagged in her arms, and she felt a fresh stab of pain shoot through her, deeper than the ache that made itself at home in her spine and heavier than the throbbing she still woke up with, long after her body put itself back together.
“I’m here,” Wendy said. “I’m here with you, Danny.”
One of his hands found its way to hers and she wrapped her fingers around his smaller ones.
Wendy began, “You were dreaming again.”
“It wasn’t real.”
She nodded, hesitant. She had no idea what Danny dreamt, and thinking back on her own dreams she could scarcely imagine.
“Sometimes what I dream about is,” Danny continued, his voice worryingly flat. “Or was.” His head rested against her, and she gently stroked his hair.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Wendy asked.
She felt him shake his head against her, no, and then bury his face against her. He wasn’t crying, which was good, but that, too, worried her. What was she supposed to hope for?
“That’s fine,” Wendy said. “You don’t have to, but I’m here. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“I know.”
“And I still love Daddy,” Danny said. He looked up at her, and from the light in the hallway Wendy saw his eyes, so fearfully large staring up at her, waiting for an answer to this, too.
“I know,” Wendy said at last. “I love him, too.”
Danny nestled deeper in her arms and Wendy invited him closer, wrapping her arms around him like another blanket and trying to pull him onto her lap as best as she could. There was barely any room left, with Wendy’s frame always having been slight and Danny now in the long, slow process of out-growing her.
“I didn’t think you did,” he said, his voice quiet.
“You know that I did,” she said. “That I do.”
“Even now?”
“Yes,” Wendy insisted. “Even now. You still love him, don’t you?”
Danny nodded.
“Well what’s so hard about thinking that I still can, too?”
He looked at her as though to remind her again that she would always be at least somewhat exposed to him. How could she explain this to Danny, though, that it wasn’t possible for her to love the man who hurt her child? Not completely, anyway. She’d always loathe him for that, just the same as she’d always love him for loving Danny like he did, and for how Danny missed him and still thought the world of him.
(Please come back, I miss you, I need you, I love you.)
Danny wrapped his thin arms around Wendy’s waist, being gentle with her back when he hugged her as tight as he could.