excerpt
From 31 Hours: A Novel by Masha Hamilton
A wolf’s howl. But more shrill, more prolonged. Carol sat fully upright, an inhale caught in her chest, before she realized there was, of course, no rabid wolf dodging Manhattan traffic. It was only winter’s wind slicing past her eleventh-floor apartment window with enough ferocity to rouse her. Then she grasped, in quick succession, that she’d been half-awake before the noise began, that her stomach hurt, and that her mind was filled with Jonas. Her son. Her wild-haired precious. When he was tiny, on a frenzied night like this, he would have snuggled with her in this very bed, bare toes pressing against her leg. Now he extended over six feet, and though he hugged, he didn’t snuggle. God, where had those days gone?
More important: Where was he now?
She lay back down, reached to pull a pillow close, and smoothed her forehead with a hand as if wiping dust from a table. She wondered if she could will herself back to sleep but doubted it. Her most successful years of slumber stretched from Jonas’s birth through his toddlerhood, when the basics felt simple and pure and her arms had been full of husband and baby, potter’s clay and homemade bread. Through the remaining, darker days of marriage, divorce, and the occasional lover, erratic sleep became the status quo. Still, whenever she awakened in the wee hours, she wanted nothing more than to breathe in time with another human body—a desire that pointed to a primitive quality in her, she thought, one not suited to this modern life.
At age forty-eight, she still wasn’t used to sleeping alone.
When Jake was already gone and Jonas still a boy, she would sometimes crawl into her young son’s bed, rest a hand on his tummy, and match her breath to his. Often, if her presence woke him—she hadn’t thought of this in years—he would lull himself back to sleep by twirling her hair with his fingers, as if they were joined. He was so small then that air passed through his body at a pace more urgent than soothing. But the rise and fall of his stomach connected her to nothing less than the universe itself. Jonas saved her from facing her own mortality during those long nights. Next to him, imagining herself a kite finally cut free of its string, she slept. That perfect boy with his drowsy warm scent and hair falling on the pillow like a piece of art. Why hadn’t he returned her calls?