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Waking up in the middle of the night was hardly anything new. Bad dreams kept her company more nights than not. Now that she had been in the home made of wood, El sometimes slept better but also sometimes worse. Tonight was not a wake up screaming night or a wake up from walls shaking night or a wake up to Hopper calling her name night. Tonight was just a hot, sweaty panic sort of night. Her breaths are gasping when she first regains consciousness, and the dream leaves her feeling strangled and stuck, so she throws all her blankets off of her to the very end of her bed.
It’s a relief at once, and she lets the cool winter air chill the newly exposed, damp skin of her body. Her eyes close and her breathing settles. It was so much not that bad of a dream that she was back asleep without much more of a thought.
//
In the morning, she wakes to the sun peering through her window and Hopper’s coffee pot spewing out what he calls the, “Most important part of the morning.”
She pushes the blankets off her body and flinches for only a second when her feet hit the cool hardwood floor. She stumbles out into the kitchen and finds her seat at the table without a word.
“Wash your hands.”
Hopper had gotten good at knowing when she had appeared in the morning even though before, she used to scare him by accident a lot.
Once she’s done as she’s told, a combo of Eggos and two wedged orange things are delivered to her on a plate. She points silently at the wedge and waits for it to be explained.
“This one’s easy,” Hopper says, pointing a finger to the fork that still sat on the table in front of her as a reminder. “It’s called an orange. They’re good for you. Try it.”
Doing as she told, El takes her fork and stabs it into the orange. Juice comes squirting out of it and splatters on her forearm. She takes a big bite in hopes this will be one of the things she likes. Hopper often gives her things she does not like at all, but sometimes, he gives her new things to love, like ice cream and a Snickers bar and french fries.
This is none of those things. El spits the half-chewed, now mushed food back onto her plate. “Tastes…loud,” she says after rinsing her mouth out with apple juice.
“Loud, huh.” Hopper doesn’t insist she eats it; he just reaches over and plucks the other slice off her plate. “Eat your waffles, then,” is all he says.
El wonders if all of the colors have foods but isn’t sure how to ask the question. Instead, she eats her breakfast and tries harder than usual to not let sticky syrup run down her chin. (When it does anyway, she makes a point to use a napkin instead of her shirt sleeve to wipe it off. Hopper did not like when she used shirt sleeves for wiping.)
“Sleep well?” he asks halfway through the meal.
El nods before remembering to speak without being prompted. “Sleep well.”
“Slept,” Hopper corrects. “I walked by your room and all your blankets were in a pile on the floor. Bad dream?”
Except, El doesn’t think about Hopper’s question because he has reminded her that she fell back to sleep with all of her blankets off of her, desperate to get out of the chokehold they had on her body. She takes a minute to figure out how to ask her question before starting. “Blankets…on. In morning.”
“Well yeah,” Hopper says around a bite of his own waffles. “You looked like you were freezing when I walked by, so I covered you back up.”
That does something to El on the inside. She does not have words to express her feelings or a way to understand them. All she knows is that there is a warmth right in the middle of her that spreads all the way down to her toes and fingertips. The feeling makes her give Hopper a small smile. “Not freezing.”
“Good,” he smiles back at her. “That’s good.”
//
Nighttimes have routine. Most of her days kind of have a routine, but the night is when they do not break away from it.
She climbs into her bed, props a pillow against the wooden slats of her bed frame, and listens to the creak behind her. She feels the mattress dip beneath her. Hopper pulls a chair right up next to her bed, and he reads two chapters from their book. A lot of the words El does not know, but she doesn’t mind. She likes to listen to how they all fit together. She likes the way she knows more each time they do this.
When he’s done, Hopper pushes the chair back up against the wall, lays the book on the seat of it, and reaches over to turn her lamp off. She slept with the lamp off now, most of the time. Hopper had brought home a Night Light and it was plugged in right next to her bed. They kept the curtains pulled back at night too, so the moonlight could come in. One night Hopper said there was a “New Moon” so it would be darker and that night she kept the light on, but Hopper did not make her feel bad about it.
“Light off or on?” he asks again tonight. He asks every night. He no longer asks about the door. El always answers open to the door question.
“Old moon?” she asks even though he corrects her every single night that calling the moon “old” is technically wrong.
“Waning crescent,” he says in a dry tone tonight.
“Off.” But he waits because sometimes now he is stubborn about El using “Sentences” whatever that was supposed to be. “Light off…I want.”
“I want the light off,” he corrects this one more gently.
“I want the light off.”
The room goes dark for a second before the night light flickers on. “Goodnight, kid.”
“Good. Night.”
But El does not let herself fall to sleep quite yet. She listens to Hopper’s getting ready for bed sounds, toilet flushing and teeth brushing and cot springs squeaking. Then she decides to test a theory, wanting to be awake to experience that warm little rush again. She did not know what it was, but she wanted more of it. So she kicks all of her blankets completely off the bed, going as far as to pull them out from where they were trapped between the footboard and the mattress. They covered the floor and left her bed and her body completely exposed.
At night there is no fire to keep the cabin warm. It is what Hopper calls February now, which is a very cold month with lots of snow and sometimes sleet and always, always, wind. So it does not take long for El to regret this experiment she has decided to test. She wishes that she’d worn socks to bed. She wishes for Hopper’s oversized flannels that she sometimes bundles up in when she gets chilly. She wishes she did not crave to be warm on the inside so that she could skip ahead to being warm on the outside.
But El has a lot of skills. She has been cold before. She has laid quietly in the dark before. And she has definitely waited before.
So she curls onto her side, knees to her chest, and does her best to even out her breaths like she is sleeping, and she waits.
At some point, she must have fallen halfway asleep because she is startled by the creaking of a floorboard. Her breath pauses for a minute before she forces it back to being deep and even to seem like she is asleep.
The creaking sounds stop right outside her room. She fights the urge to roll over and watch Hopper in her doorway. Why does he stand outside her room anyway? Is he making sure she is not being bad?
She stops wondering about these things when he comes into the room and the rustle of fabric causes her to go extra still. First, the thin sheet is laid over her, followed by the soft, pink quilt, and lastly, the extra blanket Hopper had brought home a few weeks ago. They weigh across her body, holding her softly to the mattress. Hands come up and hug the blankets all the way up to her chin, a big hand resting on her small back for just a few seconds before the floorboards creak their way out of her room.
The warmth swallows her up all the way to the crown of her head.
//
After the first time, El gets smarter about it. She wears her socks to bed and makes sure she has her warmest pajamas each night. She throws the blankets off of her every single night. She tries to stay awake until Hopper comes in to re-cover her, but some nights she fell asleep too soon. Every morning, she woke up warm and nestled beneath the blankets.
“Are you…” Hopper starts one evening during the After Dinner time when they did puzzles or played games while the record player fuzzed and popped with music in the background. “Are you not sleeping okay, kid?”
El places a card down on the table. Today was a game called Crazy 8’s, and she did not know what made the 8’s “crazy” except that they had lots of points. She also does not know what points mean, just that some games you want the most and others the least. “Sleep well.”
Hopper has to pick three up from the pile before putting one down. That means El is closer to winning. She likes to win. “Are you hot at night? It’s just, well, your blankets are always on the floor. Is there something wrong with them?”
Oh, shit. Hopper did not like when El said that word, but he did not know when she was just thinking it. He was on to her. He would not cover her in the middle of the night anymore. How would she feel warm now? “I…” She thinks about lying but swallows that down because friends don’t lie. “I like it,” she whispers.
“The blankets? You like the blankets okay? They’re not itchy or anything?”
Most times, Hopper had gotten pretty good at figuring out what El was saying, even when she could not find her words. Sometimes, though, he still struggled to put it together. El lays down another card, not even gloating that she only had one card left. “No.”
He does not move to take his turn. Just stares. Waits.
She plays with the corner of her card, shame flooding through her at what she was about to admit. “I like being covered up.”
Hopper’s eyebrows draw together, but he lays down his next card. It does not match the one in El’s hand at all, and she has to pick up two more. “Is it the nightmares? Is that why you’re kicking them off?”
The questioning is starting to make her frustrated. She both wants to just explain and bury the truth deep. Why were words so hard? Heaving a big sigh, El drops her cards to the table. “I like when you cover me up.”
There’s a beat, a moment. El worries Hopper will be angry or disappointed (word of the day when she eats more Eggos than she’s supposed to), but instead, he kind of just looks sad. “You’re sleeping without your blankets in the middle of February, so I put them back on you?”
She does not know what February has to do with it or why it’s taking him so long to get this. “Yes.” She twists her fingers together, wishing she hadn’t thrown her cards down and stopped playing so that there was a reason to look down besides embarrassment. “Feels nice. Makes me warm inside too.”
A nervous glance up. Hopper definitely looks sad now. What did she say?
“You gonna take your turn?” he asks, so she knows the conversation is over. When she shoots him one final look, though, he’s wiping under his eyes.
//
That night, Hopper reads three chapters. So even if she made him sad, at least he must not be mad. When he finishes, the chair is against the wall, book on the seat. Instead of going for her lamp, he stands over her. She wiggles under the covers, still trying to decide if she could kick all her blankets off again or not now that Hopper knows.
He crouches down beside her bed, his hands reaching out and beginning to wrap her nice and tight in the blankets around her.
“What…do you do?”
Hopper clears his throat and brings the blankets all the way up to just beneath her chin. “I’m tucking you in.”
“Tuck in?”
“It’s something p-it’s a thing adults do for kids.” He does that sometimes, cuts himself off halfway through a sentence. El just blinks up at him, letting her silent “why?” do the asking for her. “So that kids feel safe and warm.”
The thought makes her brighten. “Warm inside?” she asks, and she’s wrapped up all tight now, just her face poking out. She likes how it feels. She likes when Hopper lays his hand on her shoulder. She likes when he looks at her like there was something he wasn’t saying, just like how she did some of her looks.
“Yeah, kid. I don’t…” he exhales and runs the hand that’s not curled around her shoulder down his face. “I don’t want you laying here freezing cold until I come back by to check on you, okay?”
“Check on me?”
In response, she gets one of his big sighs. Sometimes he does those before he gets Little Mad at her, but sometimes he just does them before he says something nice. “Yes, El. I come and check on you before I go to bed for the night.”
“Even when blankets on?”
“Yes.”
That was nice. She liked how that made her feel. She liked knowing she did not have to be cold just to feel warm. “Why?”
“To make sure you’re okay.”
Nodding, a little frown. “No nightmares?”
“Yes, to make sure there are no nightmares,” he agrees, nodding. “To make sure you don’t need anything. Helps me sleep better too.”
That doesn’t make any sense to El, but maybe Hopper knew ways to sleep well that she did not. She would ask him some other time. “Tuck in tomorrow?”
His hand reaches up and smooths back the hair on her head. A part of her wants to break out of her blanket straitjacket and wrap her arms around him. A part of her begins to understand that the feeling she was getting had less to do with being covered with blankets and more with being taken care of.
“I’ll tuck ya in every night, kid. How ‘bout that?”
The thought makes her smile, and she reaches beside her to grab her teddy bear, curling onto her side. Her eyes were getting heavy. And she was happy to fall asleep, already cozy and snug every night now. “Okay.”
The light turns off. Night Light flickers on. Moon streams through the window.
She falls asleep but stirs some time later to the floorboards creaking. Still more asleep than awake, El isn’t sure, but she thinks she feels a kiss pressed to the top of her head and the blankets tucked just a little tighter against her. She falls all the way asleep with a smile on her face and a warmth trickling through with each and every beat of her heart.