Free Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel Page B

own, we would resemble the families I’d observed, as they’d—at least from a distance—resembled one another.
    And there were moments when I thought we did resemble them. The weekend before, in fact, we’d driven down to Shark Valley and biked the trails, gawking at alligators and stopping every hour to reapply sunscreen. Graham had secured Frankie in a child seat mounted just behind his own, and spent a long time fitting Frankie’s helmet before starting out. Though Graham tended to bike fast, Frankie had only to tap his shoulder two times to convey that he wanted to see something—a gator or iguana or turtle—up close, and Graham would brake, prop the kickstand, and pull Frankie from his seat. I’d pedaled behind, studying them as they studied the wildlife.
    Graham’s head hit the back of his chair. I brought two pills from the stash above the sink and forced a cup of water between his lips. I coaxed him to stand and supported his weight through the salon, then eased him onto our mattress. His head thumped the wall and he moaned, then settled again. His eyes were almost closed but not quite. They never closed fully, even when he made it through the night. I pulled off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt and pants. The cuff dangled from a bolt he’d drilled into the wall, the leash about two feet long, enough to allow some movement but not to get tangled around his neck or mine. The first one he’d brought home had secured with a nylon strap that was easy enough, we soon learned, for a sleeping Graham to unfasten himself. Now he wore a heavy leather version with an embedded lock. At the cottage, the key had gone in my nightstand. On the Lullaby , I put it on a high shelf in the kitchen, inside a Tupperware container. Graham could get himself into the cuff without help, but I’d gotten into the habit of doing it for him, of kissing the inside of his wrist before tightening the strap. I doubted I’d ever be entirely comfortable forcing him into captivity, but I didn’t like him doing it alone.
    The thing about pharmaceutical sleep, at my dosage but much more so at Graham’s, was that waking up was no minor matter. Before Frankie was born, I’d woken to the loud clanging of a twin-bell alarm clock Graham had ordered from a catalog. After Frankie, my insomnia disappeared and didn’t return for ten months. When it marched back arm in arm with my menstrual cycle just after Frankie weaned, it devastated me all over again. Frankie was big for his age and walked early, and by that time he was already climbing out of his crib, landing on his feet, and coming into my room to pull on my arm until I woke. He was running and jumping before his first birthday. After we moved him to a twin bed at the cottage, he figured out that the plastic pyramid-shaped object on his nightstand carried sounds from his room into mine, and stopped getting up to wake me. Instead, he would rap his knuckles against the monitor, which transmitted a series of jarring gongs to the speaker beside my head, and launched me from sleep with the force of a cannon. The first several times this happened, I shot up before my eyes opened, then asked myself where I was. My brain had to work to reorder itself, as if after a fainting episode or a stroke.
    Graham always claimed to know hours before bedtime whether the pills might work and he would be able to sleep. He’d fought the feeling for years, but it was never wrong. He said the foreknowledge felt like the taut vibration of a tuning fork inside him; there was no use trying to still it. Early in our relationship, I gave up even asking whether he planned to come to bed. It was an act of love, my letting go. Not only of trying to share a bed more than once in a while, but of the whole notion of the marriage bed. I knew he was grateful to me.
    Now, in the Lullaby ’s cramped main berth, where Graham hovered in fragile presleep, one wrist leashed