What they don’t say is that, sometimes God will call you to the wilderness, gesture toward the trees, and then, hang back and wave you on alone.
—“Prayer for the Wretched Among Us” from The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded
At night, only at night, her mind grows timber-thick—so dense and brambled there’s no way to find her, let alone bring her back to bed. Gone, then, is the tumbleweed-haired, half-feral kid who rode her goat every morning to the preschool up the hill. The kid who by fourth grade volunteered at the local vet clinic, where she sat with the grieving while their pets died. More than once I’ve been approached at the post office or market by people who say that Ruby has a gift—something beyond bedside manners. “It was like she could see what was on the other side,” an elderly woman told me after euthanizing a beloved dachshund. “Like she knew exactly where that dog was going.”
By going, the woman means going out of the body, going beyond. In Ruby’s case, it means going to bed with nocturnal epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures while she sleeps. This gerund has governed our lives for the decade and a half since my daughter was born: going to go to sleepovers at friends’ homes, or to a summer camp where she’d share a cabin with other girls. She’s going to have another one, I’d worry.
Once a seizure starts, I cannot wake her. She doesn’t breathe during or even sometimes after. By after I mean the postictal phase, during which the part of the epileptic that was absent during the seizure returns to the body but comes in sideways and scrambled. If she doesn’t start to breathe, I rub my knuckles on her sternum—hard and primal, like flint to steel.
Her brain changes as the day passes. Her bright sheen fades to glower. We try to get through evening basics—putting on pajamas, brushing teeth—without strife. At least bedtime stories still appeal, as long as we skip the fluff.
Think morbidly here, like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” or Brothers Grimm originals—stories on frozen tundra, or deep in the dark woods. Where miners moil for precious metal and set flame to their dead companions. Where witches trap, fatten, and roast little girls.
I’ve come to suspect that these dark tales prepare Ruby for her own nighttime wander in a way the waking world cannot. I have no idea what it’s like for her—but based on her dreams (which, come morning, she describes in rich detail), I imagine the wildest of places. An arctic still iced with permafrost. A primordial forest not yet clearcut or beetle-killed or burned. Which are, now that I think of it, examples of stories ending well. Whatever the case, before we finish reading, there’s a look in her eyes—a gaze trained far beyond anything I can see. It’s as if she’s inside the story. She could be Sam, warm at last in the barge’s roaring furnace. Or Gretel, bracing against the hot oven.
