From then on until the end, that nightmare repeated itself nearly every night regardless of whether Daniel visited or not, regardless of whether Miles lay asleep in his bed or (as happened more frequently) curled fetus-like on the carpet. As bedtime approached, Miles would shower, dry off, and dress in his long pajamas, brush his teeth, and then-irregularly at first but with an increasing consistency that even he realized bordered on sheer obsessiveness-walk through the kitchen and the living room before going to his bed.
“What’s the matter?” Daniel asked as Miles walked through the living room early in November. Daniel and Elayne were sitting side by side, his arm over her shoulder, reading. Elayne was reading a Harlequin romance. Miles couldn’t see the cover of Daniel’s book but the volume was thick and the open page crowded with print.
Miles ignored him. He saw in Daniel’s darting glance something that might have been an unspoken threat, might have been a burgeoning fear as the bastard looked up into the eyes of his stepson and perhaps saw intimations of the man Miles was rapidly becoming. Miles straightened his shoulders. After all, he was nearly fifteen, and he already had a couple of inches and possibly even a few pounds on Daniel. Maybe after all this time, Daniel was beginning to worry. The thought was pleasantly exciting.
“Yes, honey,” his mother added. “You’ve been wandering around like this every night for a while now. Is something wrong?”
“No,” Miles said. “Just checking. Making sure I turned the stove off after dinner.” It wasn’t a lie. Dinner had been over for three hours already, the dishes washed and dried and stacked away, the counters and cabinets cleared. But Miles knew that he would not be able to sleep (if he slept at all) until he was sure that the four rings of blue flame were safely extinguished. Until he was sure that the house was safe from a sudden fire that might tear through its bowels burning and destroying and consuming.
“But…,” his mother began. Daniel laid his arm on hers and she fell quiet. Miles stared at the two of them for a moment, then left. As he turned the corner into the hallway, he heard Daniel say, in a voice he probably assumed Miles would not be able to hear, “It’s just a phase. You know, teenage jitters. I was just like that, always wandering around when I should have been in bed. Worrying about nothing.”
Miles waited in the hall for a moment to see if he could hear anything more.
“Elayne,” Daniel said suddenly, softly, “you almost forgot your medicine.”
“I don’t think I need to…”
“You know you do. I think that if you ever really did forget to take it, you’d have as much trouble sleeping as Miles does.”
The boy heard Daniel get up. He hurried down the hall, reaching his bedroom only an instant before he heard the click of the bathroom light and then Daniel opening and closing the medicine chest.
Standing in the darkness, his back again his door, he watched and listened until he heard the bathroom light flick off and then the unintelligible rumble of Daniel’s voice from the living room.
That night (and every night thereafter), Miles did not even look at his bed. He walked into his room, careful not to touch the light switch. Feeling his way in the dark, he meticulously unplugged every electrical appliance in the room: stereo, lamp, even the electric clock his mother had given him for Christmas when she decided that the loud tick tick tick of the Big Ben might be keeping him from sleeping. Satisfied that nothing remained that could be a fire hazard-remembering even in waking the intense pain as flames blossomed from his hands-he pulled the cast-off Big Ben from the nightstand drawer, wound it as tightly as he could with fingers that felt corpse-like, cold and stiff and awkward. He wound it so tightly that he could feel the tension in the spring. He sat it on the nightstand and dropped to the floor, curling up on the carpet and hoping not to sleep.
From Daniel’s insistence about the medicine, Miles knew that this would be a hard, difficult night.
The visit was indeed rather longer than usual. And substantially more painful