"So how are you doing today?" Archie asked Bae. "Are you still having nightmares?"
Bae was sitting across from the therapist on the sofa (which still felt a little warm from one of his parents being there earlier and made him feel a little bit more safe) while he fiddled with a little knitting loom. Archie had a lot of little things like this in a box in the corner and you were always allowed to pick one if you wanted something to do with your hands. There were sliding puzzles and little logic toys where you had to unhook two nails that were stuck together or get a ring off of some horseshoes and there was a Rubik's cube and hand held water games where you pushed buttons to try to shoot hooks onto sticks...things like that, like mom would buy for road trips when they'd be in the car for a really long time when he was younger. Bae liked the loom, though. It was just a little circle with a bunch of pegs that you could loop yarn around to make a tube of fabric. You had to ask for it special, because the yarn would get tangled if he left it in the box and Bae liked to see how long of a tube he could make during a session. It was a little challenge with himself, and someday maybe he'd have mom sew all the pieces together into a scarf for him.
"Sometimes," Bae replied finally. "But I can go back to sleep after them most of the time now."
"Have you talked to your parents about it?" Archie asked him gently. This has been something they'd talked about last time, that Bae needed to tell his parents if he was scared.
Bae shook his head, not wanting to admit out loud he hadn't done his assignment.
"Would you like me to let them come in so we can tell them together?"
"No," Bae said. "I'll talk to mom next time I wake up."
"Your parents both love you," Archie said as though Bae needed a reminder. "And they're both worried about you, but they can't help you unless you let them know what's wrong."
"I know," Bae replied. "I just don't like talking about it. Talking about it makes it feel more real. I just want to forget."
"Are the nightmares the same as they have been?"
"Yeah," Bae said, staring hard at the little loops of yarn he was making as he wrapped it around the first post and then the second and third and fourth on and on until the end and he was right back where he started. It was time to flip the yarn over the pegs.
"Bae?" Archie interrupted and Bae's eyes shot up to him. "I asked if you'd tried taking control of the dream like we had talked about."
"Oh," Bae tried to think about the question. "Yeah, a little. After I wake up I try to think about how to make it end happy."
"And has that been helping?"
Bae shrugged before answering.
"I can go back to sleep now."
"But it hasn't decreased the frequency of the nightmares?"
Bae wasn't really sure how to make the dreams end happily. He tried, but he couldn't ever really make it end well. In his sleep, he was with his mom and his dad someplace – it didn't matter where – and his birth mom and Killian would show up and try to take him away. No place was really safe, because in his dreams they came for him everywhere. And he was always so scared, but there was a part of him that wanted to go, too. He didn't know why, because he'd never been happy there. He'd never liked going once he was old enough to know the difference. He had always preferred his mother and the safety of their warm clean house where there was always plenty of food and never anybody that he had to be afraid of.
"No," Bae admitted finally as he began flipping the little loops over the pegs one after the other to make a whole new row of fabric. "I still have them most nights."
"Do you miss your birth mom?" Archie asked him as Bae kept wrapping loops of yarn around the pegs.
"I didn't know her," Bae said. "You can't miss someone if you don't know them, can you?"
"You can miss getting to know them," Archie replied. "And you can be sad you didn't get that opportunity."
"I wasn't ever happy with her," Bae said softly, trying to keep from crying. "She wasn't really my mom."
"Bae, you do know that you're not a bad person, right?" Archie said out of nowhere. "I've known you a long time and I've known a lot of bad people. You're not bad, Bae."
Bae shrugged, feeling a little bit like he was being stretched too thin. He put his yarn down. He couldn't see the pegs right now anyway.
"It's okay to wish your birth mom had been different," Archie explained. "And it's okay to be sad that she wasn't what you wanted from her."
"She wanted me back," Bae said after a little while. "I always used to wonder why she didn't want me, and then she wanted me."
"Did you want to know her?"
"I don't know," Bae admitted. "I never liked to be with her when I was younger."
"Yeah?"
"I didn't like her house," Bae replied. "Mom's house was a lot nicer. And Mom was nicer, too."
"That's an okay thing to think," Archie said as he wrote something down on his notepad. "You love your mother, and it's alright for you to still love your birth mom even if she hurt you."
"She hurt my mom and dad," Bae said finally – it was the thing he'd never put into words because the words were too big and the reason he was halfway afraid his parents would hate him for still feeling sad sometimes. "She tried to take me away."
"She did," Archie replied evenly. "But your parents are grown-ups and they both know you have a different relationship with her than they did."
"She lied to Dad," Bae said. "She lied to him and she hit my mom."
Bae didn't know why he was arguing with Archie. It was like a part of him wanted Archie to hate him because he deserved it. His parents loved him and it was like he didn't think they were good enough or something.
"She did," Archie replied. "But she also gave your mom the best gift in the world when she gave you away."
Bae shrugged sadly and picked his loom back up. For some reason the yarn and pegs made him feel better, like he could control this so maybe he could control other things.
"I want you to try something for me, Bae," Archie said. "Next time you're worried about your mom being upset with you, I want you to ask her for her happiest memories, okay? Think you can do that?"
"Yeah," Bae replied. "I can do that."
"Then I want you to really listen to her and I want to see how many of those memories involve you, okay?"
Bae nodded and then started flipping the yarn over the little pegs.
"I'd also like you to try telling your parents about your nightmares again," Archie continued. "Do you think you'd be more comfortable talking to your dad about it? You guys went to your birth mom's funeral together, right?"
"I don't know," Bae said. "Maybe."
"I think you should ask him about her," Archie said after awhile. "Even if it's not to tell him about the nightmares yet. Your dad loved your birth mom a lot, and he might be hurting, too. Maybe he'd like to talk about it."
"Okay," Bae replied. "I'll try."
It was almost midnight when Bae woke up from the nightmare. It was the same as it always was, his mom getting hurt and him wanting to help her but he couldn't move. Then Killian had him and he was being pulled away from his parents and then he was awake in his bed and it was dark but he knew he was safe because this pillow smelled like his and the sound of the old water heater that mom kept saying she should have replaced sounded like being at home.
He burrowed into his pillow and started thinking about pulling his arm free and running back to his parents, back to where he was safe and loved just like Archie had told him to do. He could imagine darting and weaving and running through streets. He was so fast, the fastest boy in his grade and he'd be able to get away if he wanted to.
But he didn't want to sleep yet, he'd promised Archie he'd try to talk to his parents about it and Mom was still here. He flipped his blankets back and shivered a little as the warmth of the covers left him. He made his way down the hall to his mom's room quietly and knocked on her door. She didn't answer right away, so he knocked louder. There was a sleepy sounding voice and he cracked the door.
"Mom?" he whispered into the blackness.
"Yeah, sweetie?" she said, and he heard the sound of a lamp clicking on so he opened the door a little more. "Are you okay?"
"I had a bad dream," he said before he could lose his nerve.
"Oh," she sat up in bed, squinting from the light. "Do you wanna come in?"
He nodded, even though he knew he was getting too old for this. He was eleven, he shouldn't need to share a bed with his mom just because he was scared but he still felt so much safer in there, like she could fix anything if he just trusted her enough.
"C'mere," she said when he didn't come over right away, and she flipped the blankets back invitingly.
Bae couldn't help but come in and let her pull her into the warm cocoon of blankets and love and let her wrap an arm around him and hold him against her shoulder.
"Do you wanna talk about your dream?" she asked him, brushing some of his hair off of his face and kissing the top of his head a little.
"No," he replied, hating that he wasn't brave enough to risk losing her, too.
"That's okay," she said, squeezing him a little. "You can stay here as long as you need."
She didn't say it was just a dream. She used to, but she'd stopped this last year when they'd had to move in with Dad and he'd started spending every night in her room. They both knew it wasn't just a dream then.
"Can I ask you a question?" he said, because if he couldn't do the big thing Archie had asked for maybe he could do the other one.
"Anything," she replied.
"What's your happiest memory?"
She made a little humming noise that she always made when she was thinking and just this little bit of familiarity was enough to have him relaxing a little.
"Did I ever tell you about the very first day I met you?"
He nodded and she smiled at him.
"You were three months old," she began the familiar story. "And your Aunt Ruby called me in a panic because she had a baby she didn't have a place for and she just needed somewhere for you to spend the night. I couldn't say no to her, because I didn't like the idea of you having to be all alone in a police station all night so I said okay and next thing I knew there you were. You cried all night, and then I started crying because I just had no idea what to do and it was awful. I couldn't believe someone so small could make so much noise. Finally at around three in the morning you just...stopped. I was worried something had happened to you because I had no idea about babies, so I was so scared and you were in my arms and you just smiled at me. And it was the biggest cheesiest grin I've ever seen and right then I knew that I loved you more than I was ever going to love anyone ever again even if I'd only known you for a few hours. That's my very best memory."
He knew the story by heart, but he never got sick of hearing it. The idea of being loved that much when nobody else had wanted him had always made him happy. When he was littler and couldn't figure out why his birth mom hadn't loved him, he'd always known that his mom had. He clung to that feeling as he felt himself start to get tired again.
"What's your second best memory?" he asked her sleepily.
"Well," she began. "When you were about seven or eight months old you called me 'mama.' I hadn't been trying to get you to say it, because I wasn't sure I'd get to keep you yet, but you had other ideas. You were such a loud baby, too. Always chattering away to everyone and I was so nervous because you weren't making any real words yet and all the books said you should start putting sounds together into words around six months old and you were still on gibberish. I was convinced I'd done something wrong and you were broken. You don't even know how many things I tried to get you to say any words at all, and then one day you looked at me and went 'mama' and I was so relieved I almost didn't realize what you'd said. But that's the day I think it really hit me that I was going to be your mother for a long, long time. It was just this total sense of relief because I felt like you'd decided where you wanted to be. Of course, after that the problem was getting you to shut up..."
She kept talking, narrating his baby milestones and how happy she'd been when he took his first steps and the day he started preschool and how proud she was of him. He let her talking lull him into sleep, and his last conscious memory that night was the feel of his mother kissing the top of his head again right before she flipped off the light.