Praying for Sleep

above the clouds, there’s a full moon.
    Maybe it’s . . .
    The water lapped with the rhythm of the blues.
    . . . the cowboy boots.
    She glanced at the yellow windows of the house—windows from which she was now fully, if dimly, visible. Had Portia seen?
    And if she had? Lis wondered. Well, so be it. He’s my husband, after all.
    She closed her eyes and was astonished to find herself drowsy—despite the adrenaline that still coursed in her bloodstream, despite the urgency to finish the sandbagging. Well, here’s the miracle of the evening. Oh, my God, forget about floods, forget about orgasms out of doors. . . . I think I’m falling asleep.
    Lis Atcheson suffered from insomnia. She might go twenty-four hours without sleep. Sometimes thirty, thirty-six hours, spent wholly alert, completely awake. The malady had been with her for years but had grown severe not long after the Indian Leap incident last May. The nightmares would start fifteen or twenty minutes after she’d slipped under—dreams filled with black caverns, blood, eyes that were dead, eyes that begged for mercy, eyes that were cruelly alive. . . .
    Like a whipcrack, she’d be awake.
    Eventually her heart would slow, the sweat on her temples and neck would evaporate. And she’d lie in bed, a prisoner of consciousness, growing ill with fatigue and teased by hallucinations. Hour after hour after hour. Gazing at the blue-green digital numerals that flicked ever onward. These numbers took on crazy meanings—1:39 seemed snide, the shape of 2:58 was comforting, 4:45 was a barricade; if she didn’t cross it asleep she knew she’d lost the battle for that night.
    She could recite all sorts of facts about sleep. Einstein needed ten hours a day, Napoleon only five. The record holder for not sleeping is a Californian who was awake for 453 hours. The average person sleeps between seven and a half and eight hours, a tomcat sixteen. There was a fatal type of insomnia, a type of prion disease that destroyed the thalamus region of the brain. Lis owned exactly twenty-two books on sleep disorders and insomnia; sometimes she recited their titles in lieu of counting sheep.
    “It’s just a way to avoid the nightmares,” Lis’s doctor had told her. “You have to tell yourself they’re just dreams. Try repeating that. ‘They’re just dreams; they can’t hurt me. They’re just dreams; they can’t hurt me.’ ”
    She did as instructed but the awkwardness of this tongue-twisting mantra tended to waken her even further.
    Yet tonight, Lis Atcheson—lying outside, bare-breasted and skirt to her thigh—felt sleep closing in fast. She grew more and more relaxed as she gazed at the greenhouse, the lights glowing ultramarine blue. She heard Owen slam the shovel onto a sandbag with a ring. She saw Portia’s shadow in an upstairs bedroom.
    Odd images began to dance in her mind. She recognized this as lucid dreaming. She saw faces melting, people becoming dark shapes, vaporous forms, flowers mutating.
    Lis pictured a dark-red, a blood -red Victorian John Armstrong rose and that was the last image in her mind before she slipped under.
    It was perhaps no more than ten seconds later that a branch snapped, loud as a gunshot. Lis, her ruddy hands folded scrupulously on her chest like the effigy of a long-dead saint, sat up, instantly and irrevocably awake, drawing closed her blouse and pulling down her skirt, as she stared at the dark form of the man who appeared from a row of hemlocks and trod forward.
     
    Easing the ’79 Chevy pickup off the back road onto Route 236 he goosed the lazy ticking engine until the truck climbed to seventy. He heard what he diagnosed as an ornery bearing and chose not to think about it further.
    Trenton Heck sat nearly reclining, his left foot on the accelerator and his right straight out, resting on the bench under the saggy flesh of a four-year-old male dog, whose face was full of lamentation. This was the way Heck drove—with his leg stretched out, not necessarily with a hound atop it—and he’d bought a vehicle with an automatic transmission and bench seat solely because of this practice.
    Exactly thirty-two years older than the dog, Trenton Heck was sometimes referred to as “that skinny guy from Hammond Creek” though if people saw him with his shirt off, revealing muscles formed from a life of hunting, fishing, and odd jobs in rural towns, they’d decide that he wasn’t skinny at all. He was lean, he was sinewy. Only in the