The next days and weeks proved that things were indeed not fine.
Catherine figured that things would settle down. But by the beginning of April, she admitted to herself that she was becoming concerned.
First, Sams seemed to end up sleeping on the floor every night, almost in the middle of the room. She would go in first thing in the morning to get the older boys up for school, and there he would be, nose pressed to the carpet, blanket resting on his cheek, with no covers over him at all, fast asleep.
Then both Will, Jr., and Burt began having bouts of sleeplessness. Initially, it was only Burt. Catherine would wake suddenly, frequently from unusually vivid dreams that, while they seemed to carry over for a few moments into the waking world, she could never recall. Her eyes would abruptly open, she would undergo a few seconds of utter confusion as to who she was and where she was, then she would roll over, her back to Willard, to face the wall.
And see Burt standing there, silent, eyes wide and fearful.
“I woke up,” he would say.
When she checked the clock on the night stand, it would read 2:00, or 3: 23, or 4:05-never quite the same time but always in the deepest, darkest part of the night.
“Go back to bed, honey, and you’ll go back to sleep.”
“Can’t.”
“Can’t get to sleep?”
“Can’t go back to bed.”
When Burt said this the first time, so softly that she had trouble hearing him, she sat up and half-lifted him up to the bed with her. “What’s the matter?”
“I been trying to sleep for a long, long time. But I can’t. Now I can’t go back to bed either.”
“Why not?”
But already his eyes were fluttering, his head nodding. And before she could say anything else, he was asleep.
She carried him to his bed and tucked him in, conscious of how heavy and how tall he was becoming. His feet thumped lightly against her shins as she walked, and she could barely manage to lean over and lay him on the lower bunk.
The next time she woke to see him standing beside her-it was only a day or two later-she didn’t invite him up. She let him talk for a couple of minutes, mostly repetitions of “I can’t sleep” or “I can’t go to bed,” then she would gently say, “All right, Burt. Everything is all right. You can go to bed now.”
And-amazingly, considering how adamant he had seemed the first night-he would toddle off. She followed him once or twice to make sure he got in bed all right. Then she would pick Sams up off the floor and settle him into his bed as well, and return to her own.
Sometimes, she went right to sleep herself. Sometimes she was still awake when the alarm jangled and Willard stumbled up at 5:00 to get ready for work.
After a week or so of that, she woke up in the middle of the night, rolled onto her side and saw…Will, Jr.
“Can’t you sleep, either?” she whispered.
He shook his head solemnly.
She let him sit on the edge of the bed for a few moments, stroking her hand up and down his arm, soothing him in the way that had worked so well when he was younger.
Then he stood, leaned over and kissed her, and went on his own back to bed.
That continued for a few more days, with Burt and Will alternating their deep night visits. They never came at the same time or on the same night.