Mirena squeezed her arms around him. His body was shaking, his head was hot, and his face was wet with a combination of perspiration and tears. He tried to wriggle out of her grasp, but she held him tightly, repeating softly over and over, “It’s okay. It was just a dream. You’re all right. I’ve got you.” Within a few minutes he stopped the squirming, and a few minutes later the crying had all but stopped as well. She held him quietly then, listening as he gulped in deep drafts of air. Finally his body seemed to melt into hers and his breathing became more steady. She kept him pressed up against her for a few more minutes until, convinced he was asleep, she rolled away from him and back onto her own pillow.
It was then that he spoke. “Mother, have you ever fallen?”
“Yes,” she answered softly, unsure whether he was awake or if he was talking in his sleep.
“Not just fallen down. Fallen a long way.”
She smiled to herself at the question, the care with which he worded it. Would she ever figure this boy out? “Once,” she said, her voice just barely more than a whisper in the night. “I was a little girl, maybe about your age. I had been climbing up a net that was hanging off a wall. It was probably only about three or four meters at the top. Somehow I lost my balance and fell.”
He didn’t answer her for so long that once again she thought he had fallen asleep. “What was it like?” he finally asked.
She rolled over to look at him. His eyes were large and inky in the darkness of the room. He was looking at her intently. “I don’t remember,” she told him. “I hit my head when I landed, and I passed out. It seemed to me that I must have passed out for a long time, but one of my friends later told me that I got up almost immediately. I don’t remember how I lost hold of the net, and I don’t remember anything on the way down, either. I was holding on one minute, and then I was on the ground.”
“I’m afraid to fall,” he whispered.
“Of course you are. You weren’t made for falling. You were made for climbing. Your direction is up. Always up.”
“But what if I have to fall?”
“Why should you ever have to?”
“I had another dream,” he said. She saw his lip start to quiver. He closed his eyes and turned his head into the pillow. She rubbed his back gently as once more the sobs filled his chest.