“You used to love it.”
He concentrates hard on his castle. “No, I didn’t.”
Suppressing a sigh, I watch as he constructs another tower. My room is a disaster area of scattered bricks, but at least he’s calm here. Maybe I can even convince him to sleep in his upstairs room tonight.
“Can I sleep with you tonight, too?”
Blyat’。 Spoke too soon.
“How about we try your room today?”
His eyebrows knit together. “I want my basement.”
“Didn’t you like the fish tank I put in there for you?” I ask, but he only shrugs. “And the wallpaper? You love blue and green. It’s like the ocean. Maybe we’ll take a trip to the ocean one day. What do you think?”
He starts shaking his head feverishly. “No… I don’t want that… I don’t want…”
I grab his shoulder, but he flinches away from me and sidles back as far as the room allows. “I want my basement… my basement… my basement…”
“Hey, it’s okay, Lev. Just breathe.”
My calm voice doesn’t work as well as it did on Alyssa. Lev just seems to get more and more agitated. It’s another painful reminder that, even all these years after the accident, his progress is fluid. It ebbs and flows, and when it ebbs, it ebbs hard.
“Basement… basement… basement…”
What an ironic twist. Alyssa is desperate to get out of there; Lev is desperate to get back in. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both driving me fucking crazy.
“You can sleep in my room, okay? It’s fine.”
Lev’s shaking slows. He peers at me from between his raised knees. “Here?”
“Here.”
That seems to placate him. He eyes me warily before he scoots back over and finishes his tower. I know better than to push him when he’s fragile like this, so I sit quietly and observe until it’s done. Only then do I tell him to go get ready for bed.
I wait until he’s tucked into my bed, then I take a seat on the armchair by the window and wait some more until he falls asleep. Eventually, his tired snores fill the room, leaving me with this stark sense of loss that I can’t quite put my finger on. A boy’s snores in a man’s body. One story twisted and broken into something it was never meant to be by a cruel twist of fate.
It’s happening everywhere I look.
Thankfully, my phone distracts me with an incoming text message from Polly.
POLINA: yo, shithead. you’ve been quiet this week so I thought I’d check in. how’s things?
I gnash my teeth together. I’m usually diligent about my texts to Polly. At least twice a week, I’ll check in to make sure she’s okay at her boarding school. But this week, between the adult child in my bed and the unassuming little siren in my basement, I’d completely forgotten.
I text her back. Forgot to text you. It’s been a terrible fucking week. Are you okay?
POLLY: is it Lev? is he okay?
URI: Lev’s fine.
POLLY: call?
Great. One more crisis to deal with. I’m in fine form this week.
Give me a minute.
I’m slipping out of the room when my phone starts vibrating. Apparently, she doesn’t even trust me to call her. “Evening, printsessa.”
“I hate when you call me that.”
“You didn’t always.”
“I was seven,” she snaps with that irritated laugh in her voice that I’ve always considered one of her best qualities.
“You haven’t grown up as much as you think you have. How’s school?”
“Nuh-uh. I didn’t call to talk about me. We’re talking about you today.”
“There’s nothing to say. Just work stuff. I may have exaggerated slightly in the text.”
“You never exaggerate.”
“No, I don’t.” I sigh. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
Like locking an infuriating little kiska in my basement with a purple dildo and all the time in the world to use it.
She sighs. “You need to take time for yourself, too, you know. You can’t look after all of us all the time. You’ll burn out.”
I grit my teeth. “I’m fine. Tell me about school.”
She answers me with another pointed sigh melodramatic enough to match my own. “School’s fine. We dissected frogs today in biology.”
“Foul.”
She giggles. “Dissecting frogs is gross but dissecting people is fine?”