Henry's Nightmares
Chapter 11 - Henry's Nightmares
Henry's nightmares had settled into a predictable, exhausting pattern by the fifth week, waking most nights just after midnight, crying for water he insisted was in his bed, insisting the sheets were wet even when Charlotte's hands, checking carefully in the dark, found them perfectly dry.
"It's the water," their pediatric therapist, Dr. Naomi Faust, explained during one of their weekly sessions, a warm, patient woman who specialized in trauma recovery for young children. "His body remembers the cold and the disorientation even when his conscious mind can't fully process what happened. This is a very normal response for a child who experienced what he experienced."
"Will it stop," Charlotte asked, the question she asked at nearly every session, needing some timeline to hold onto even though she understood, intellectually, that trauma rarely honored convenient timelines.
"Eventually, with consistency and support, yes," Dr. Faust said. "I want you to understand that his recovery and your own recovery are going to move at different paces. You're also recovering from something enormously frightening, and I don't want you to feel you need to have your own healing fully sorted before you can help him with his."
Charlotte thought of that advice often over the following weeks, sitting beside Henry's bed at midnight, humming softly the way her own father used to hum to her during thunderstorms, a habit she hadn't consciously remembered until grief and fear had somehow resurrected it.
"Is Grandma going to come find us," Henry asked one night, voice small in the dark, a question that stopped Charlotte's humming entirely.
She sat with the question a long moment, weighing exactly how much truth a five-year-old could hold without adding to his fear rather than easing it.
"No, sweetheart," she said finally. "Grandma isn't going to come find us. You're safe. I promise you that."
"But she was on the boat," Henry said. "And then we were in the water."
"I know," Charlotte said. "That was very scary. But we're not on the boat anymore, and we're never going back on a boat with Grandma again. You have my word."
Henry considered that, the specific, careful logic of a child working through something too large for the vocabulary he currently had available to him.
"Did Grandma push us," he asked.
Charlotte felt her chest tighten, the question arriving with a directness she hadn't fully prepared herself for, despite weeks of careful conversations with Dr. Faust about exactly how to handle this eventuality.
"I think Grandma made some very bad choices that night," Charlotte said carefully. "I think grown-ups are working hard right now to understand exactly what happened, so that Grandma has to answer for those choices."
"Is that why you talk to Mr. Owen so much," Henry asked.
"Yes," Charlotte said. "Mr. Owen is helping make sure the truth gets told, and that you and I stay safe, always, no matter what."
May you like
Henry nodded, apparently satisfied for now, though Charlotte understood this particular conversation would return in different forms for years, a five-year-old's understanding of what had happened to him evolving as he grew old enough to hold more of the actual truth.
She stayed beside his bed until his breathing evened into real sleep, and then sat a while longer in the dark, thinking of her own mother, the woman who had once held this same child within an hour of his birth and wept real tears, and wondering, not for the first time, how two such different women could have occupied the same body for so many decades without either one of them, apparently, ever fully winning.
