It's a clear, cloudless day when your doctor gives you some unexpected news: you're going to have a baby! You share the news with your partner later over dinner, who is just as excited as you are. Together, you make all of the preparations. You go shopping for the baby's nursery, choose a color to paint it, get a little too excited about educational toys and buy an entire chest full. Your partner goes with you to every doctor's appointment, every ultrasound, and everything looks normal. When the doctor asks if you want the sex of the baby, neither of you can wait. She tells you you're having a boy. You buy clothes for the baby, wondering why stores only carry dinosaur clothing. The pregnancy progresses as normal and you feel surprisingly good. In fact, there aren't many pains at all except for the last trimester when you can barely walk without having to sit down. You look through family trees with your partner, trying to get ideas for a name. You have fun laughing at names like Silvio Astolfi before settling on Aiden. The pregnancy comes to term and everything goes well.
For a while.
You are up after a night of maybe 3-4 hours of sleep with constant interruptions. Your partner is at work and you are alone with your 4-month-old son. You put him in his playpen for just a few minutes to get some coffee. When you come back, you see Aiden reaching for a toy. Suddenly, the toy is in his hand. You blink, rub your eyes, drink a sip of coffee, and shake your head. Must be just sleep deprivation. When your partner gets home, you tell them everything was fine, the day perfectly normal.
A few months later, you hear a bump in the middle of the night. You listen. Silence. You check the baby monitor. Aiden is gone from his crib. Quickly, you rush to his room, heart in your throat. Did he fall out of his crib? Why isn't he crying? Is he ok? You open the door and see Aiden, happily rolling on the floor and playing with a toy. He sees you and pulls himself up on his crib, smiling. You and your partner lower the crib the next day, but you still feel anxious. You have a feeling you can't explain.
As Aiden grows up, you see more things. Little things, all while your partner is gone. Aiden suddenly being across the house from where you left him just a minute ago. Trying to take his first steps, but floating above the ground when he falls. Having things in his hand that were in a cupboard.
Your partner notices you becoming increasingly anxious and tries to comfort you. But how can you explain what you've seen? If it's even happening at all. It never seems to happen when your partner is home. They know your history of mental illness, that time you stayed in a hospital because you saw things that couldn't have been real. There were doctors in white coats and pills. Nothing helped until one came in with a special type of therapy. You were told later that a man in a strange robe pulled out a wooden stick and put it to your temple. He told you to think only of calming thoughts, focus on what you could observe with your senses, and he whispered something. It had worked and you don't remember anything of what you had supposedly seen. The nightmares had stopped. Now it seems it's starting all over again. You worry about getting locked away again, leaving your partner to care for Aiden all alone, so you tell them everything is fine.
When Aiden is 2, you put him in preschool so you can focus on hobbies and getting back to work. Secretly, you hope that the waking nightmares will stop now that he's in daycare. All is quiet for a little while. You don't see anything else out of the ordinary and start thinking that maybe it was sleep deprivation after all. You even start smiling again, enjoying being back at work and doing something fulfilling. You miss Aiden during the day and look forward to picking him up from daycare.
All is seemingly quiet for a little while. You sign up for one of the bi-annual conferences after Aiden's turned 3, eager to hear how much progress he's made. The teacher shares that he's doing well with counting, recognizing shapes, and colors. He makes friends very easily. He's very good at asking for what he wants and the children are eager to make friends with him. You wonder if there are any concerns. The teacher's face darkens for a moment, as if thinking, then shakes her head. No, she says, nothing that you need to be concerned with. You brush off a nagging and familiar feeling. Probably nothing.
When Aiden is in his pre-kindergarten class, you get a call. Aiden, normally a very sweet boy, started a fire and is being sent home. They're not able to give you details about what happened, but they give you a stern lecture about letting him bring matches to school. Embarrassed, you ask him what happened on the way home. He tells you he got mad that someone wouldn't give him the toy he wanted. His brain felt hot and the toy was on fire. You remind him to use his words next time as fleeting memories of strange things from his infancy flash through your brain.
From then on, things get worse. You get calls of his tantrums seemingly every week when he doesn't get what he wants. You and your partner experience these at home, yells loud enough to rattle the windows and break dishes.
And there are incidents you don't want to talk about because they can't be. You give Aiden cereal for breakfast, only to find when you look back a minute later that he now has chocolate cake. The cat yowls at him when Aiden accidentally steps on his tail, then loses his voice for the rest of the day. There are more fires that are thankfully easy to put out. Your partner still does not seem to see these, but then they've frequently been working late. You stop sleeping on your own, resorting to pills to put you out.
You decide, for your own sanity, to just give Aiden what he wants. Maybe he'll grow out of the tantrums, you reason.
But it only gets worse as he gets older. His tantrums at school and at home have stopped for the most part. In fact, they say they've seen a change come over him and he's a favorite of the teachers.
It's his eyes. He has a way of looking at you that carries an unspoken threat. Your partner sees just a sweet and happy little boy, but you've experienced more of his tantrums firsthand. Every word he says is weighted, every movement starts to make you jump. He says what he wants so sweetly that you can't help but give in. If you ever say no, his face goes from sunny to stormcloud and you can feel the ground shake. But that's rare these days. He says he just wants everyone to be happy and has a natural gift for getting what he wants. As he eats hamburgers and candy for dinner, you look around the table at the smiling faces of Aiden and your partner. You smile, too, holding back the fear of making the slightest misstep. Everything is fine, you say to yourself. We love each other, everyone is happy. The incidents have mostly stopped now, or maybe you just learned to ignore them.
You live like this for a while, relying on psychiatrists and pills to help you manage your anxiety. Pills to help you sleep, pills to help you feel awake, until you don't know where you end and the pills begin. Aiden is quietly worse than he ever was, somehow always getting his way. Your partner, tired of trying in vain to help you, leaves with promises to return if you get better. Aiden chooses to stay with you, which your partner accepts without question. As they leave, two men in strange robes arrive. You don't see a car and you don't think they were there on the sidewalk. No, because you watched your partner walk away. You accept this numbly as the men knock on the door. You open it and they ask to see Aiden. Confused, you let them in. They ask you and Aiden to sit down. They ask if you have ever seen Aiden do anything odd or unexplainable. You feel like laughing, but it changes to a sob midway and comes out as a strange hiccup. You mumble your apologies, remember the hospital, and tell them no.
But Aiden jumps in. He tells them he can get things without touching them sometimes. He tells them about the fires he started without meaning to, of his head feeling hot. He talks about being able to get his way when he says things a certain way. of making things happen when he's upset. You look at him, dumbfounded. You feel angry and guilty all at the same time. You realize you never once took the time to ask your son how he felt about things, you simply dismissed them out of hand as being figments of your imagination. Your world comes crashing down as you realize it was all real. The noises fade into the background, the world dims, and you find yourself waking up with a start, a wooden stick pointed at your head. You ask them what they did to you and they reassure you that they're not trying to hurt you. They tell you they're representatives from a place called Ilvermorny, a special school for people who can do what Aiden does. You ask if he's in trouble and they assure you he's not. They say he'll receive the best education and learn to control his ability, what they call magic. As you sit in silence, they hand you a card and tell you to phone them when you decide. As they leave, you look at Aiden.
Then you laugh and laugh and laugh.