The Insomniacs

1

Night One

Sybil

October 11th

When Sybil Foster rolled over, the other side of the king-sized bed was empty. Of course it was. She blinked several times and allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness and chastised herself. She didn't know why she expected otherwise: that Mark would be here.

When would she stop expecting otherwise?

Sometimes, he surprised her, true. He'd slip in after a long night in the OR and fall asleep without disturbing her, which was different from not waking her. Because Sybil was nearly always awake these days, even when her husband would flop on the custom-made mattress and be out in less time than it took Sybil to count five sheep. She had to hand it to him: He really did not disturb her, which at this stage in their marriage was no small thing. Still, on those nights when he made it home, she'd lie there on the right side of their bed, unmoving, frozen, as if greeting him after a sixteen-hour hospital shift violated some unspoken agreement between them.

To be fair, nearly everything between them was unspoken these days.

In the blackness of their suburban bedroom, Sybil pushed up to her elbows and flung their white duvet to Mark's side of the bed, her feet swiveling to the floor. She tiptoed to the bathroom, until she remembered that her children were no longer home, either-an adjustment that five weeks into their freshman year at college she still hadn't made peace with. Empty-nesting. Everyone rattled on about how this was the chance for her to reclaim her life. To get a grip back on her own time. Was she traveling? Had she taken up pickleball? What about a part-time job? Like Sybil was interested in opening up an Etsy store or exploring the wine pairings for the lunch specials in town.

Sybil sighed and flipped on the bathroom lights, then took a glimpse at herself in the mirror on her side of the marbled vanity and recoiled. She quickly dimmed the lights to something softer, something more suitable for two a.m. and the back half of her forties. How was she only four years away from fifty? She pulled her hair into a bun and stared at the fine lines that were etching themselves around every millimeter of her eye sockets. Her fingers tugged the skin tighter, then released it, then tugged it again. Maybe she should do that eye lift that a few of her friends had whispered about. Maybe she should just blast off the entire layer of her face, actually. Not that Mark would notice, but wasn't this the time to do things for herself? That's the other thing that everyone kept saying: The kids are gone, isn't this a wonderful time for yourself?

Sybil turned sideways and raised her chin, considering if she should vacuum off the double chin that had planted itself on her jawline about a year ago. Not a double chin exactly. Jowls? Excess skin with a little fat? Her own mother had remained beautiful right up until the day she dropped dead six years ago at seventy-two in her desk chair in her corner office, so Sybil couldn't call her now and ask if she had any family secrets to pass down, inquire about just what she was doing wrong. If her mother were here, she suspected her list of grievances about Sybil's choices would have been long anyway. Better not to consider it.

Sybil flipped the lights back off and padded over to her side of the bed, yanking her phone from the charger on her nightstand and reaching for her reading glasses but discovering she must have left them in the kitchen. She'd abandoned them alongside her laptop on the island earlier in the evening having read multiple articles that implored her to get off her goddamn electronics a few hours before bedtime. Then, these articles promised, she would sleep like a newborn.

As if newborns didn't wake up shrieking every ninety minutes.

Now, of course, she couldn't see anything on her phone because her body was betraying her, but since she was wide-awake, she plodded down the upholstered steps to the open kitchen and living room, where her dog, Pluto, named by the twins back when they were obsessed with astronomy, snored so loudly, slept so deeply, that Sybil took it as a personal affront to her own sleeplessness.

"Pluto," she whispered, then louder, "Pluto!"

The dog, an oversized mutt of undetermined ancestry, jolted his snout up and leapt off the custom couch that Sybil had paid too much for because she had nothing else to do than spend weeks working with an interior design shop in town that took a hefty commission. Sybil was once the top of her class at Harvard Medical School. Harvard. Now she roamed her empty house in the bleak hours of the night while her twins were at college and her husband scrubbed into the OR but more likely was scrubbing into one of the on-call anesthesiologists. Sybil had known about it for at least a year. She simply hadn't decided what she was going to do about it. What she cared to do about it.

Pluto parked himself at her feet and panted.

"No, it's not time for breakfast, buddy," Sybil sighed, opening her laptop and waiting for it to power on. He swatted her with a paw, hard enough that it hurt, but Sybil barely flinched. Maybe she deserved it. She'd be pissed if someone decided to wake her just for a little company too.

"Okay, no, you're right," she said, pushing back the counter stool and moving toward the ceramic treats container that she'd bought some other night off a fancy pet site when she couldn't sleep. Pluto raced around the corner of the island, his feet sliding on the wood floors, the stain of which she'd spent at least six days fretting over but that she probably couldn't pick out of a lineup anymore.

He sat obediently, his eyes wide, a smidgen of drool foaming on the right side of his bottom lip. She tossed the salmon square in a beautiful arc, and he opened his mouth and caught it with immaculate timing. Sybil smiled. At least some things could still be counted on.

Pluto waddled back to the couch and settled in, so she grabbed her laptop and plopped next to him, her feet resting on the coffee table, a habit that Mark hated, but well, Mark wasn't here, was he? Mark was still at the hospital. What couldn't Sybil do when left all alone? Sleep.

She used to listen to true crime podcasts when she was up all night. Incessantly. She'd joined message boards for unsolved murders; she read old news articles and watched Dateline reruns. Indeed, she'd thought she was pretty close to solving a dead-wife case in Ohio before she realized, as an unlicensed medical professional, that maybe her fascination with the macabre was part of what was keeping her up at night. So she googled and googled, looking for cures or suggestions, and frankly, had spent too much money trying all of them to no avail, and now, here she was. There were sixty-seven people online in the forum. All Sybil needed was one, it didn't even matter who. Just one person to keep her company until dawn broke through her kitchen windows.

The group, the link, was called the insomniacs.

Her laptop dinged with a notification nearly instantaneously.

Beartown: Mama2Twins, hey, you awake?

Sybil cracked her knuckles, dopamine coursing through her cerebral folds. A friend. A conspirer. Someone who understood exactly just how bleak life could be when your body refused to give itself the one thing it needed: rest.

Mama2Twins: Totally. Wide awake. Just like always.

Sybil always used to tell the twins that nothing good ever happened after midnight. It was a shame, she'd think later, that she didn't heed her own advice.

2

Night One

Zeke

Zeke Rodriguez knew the pain in his elbow was going to rouse him even before the pain shot up his arm and through his shoulder and straight down his side, so what was the point of sleeping? He had physical therapy tomorrow, and he'd have to put in a half-ass effort if he pulled an all-nighter, but what choice did he have? Sleep for five minutes before his fucking pitching arm rebelled on him? Pop another Percocet and risk becoming a cautionary tale in the tabloids? What he did instead, instead of sleep, instead of the pain pill, was replay over and over again the moments that his major league career went out the fucking window, as if his mind were caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine.

Why had he thrown that pitch fast and low to Brian Schmidt's sweet spot? When he saw the ball ricochet off Schmidt's bat, why hadn't he moved quicker, higher, lower, anything to prevent the hundred-mile-an-hour line drive from careening right into his elbow, shattering just about every bone nearby, destroying his pitching arm, landing him on the IL right at the peak of the season, just when his team needed him? Possibly ending his career.

Zeke had watched the actual replay enough to know that he could have moved. He had time to move. But he froze. He stood there like some motherfucking third grader who was about to pee his pants in dodgeball. Now he didn't need to watch the tape. He could simply mentally rewind the moment again and again until it was all he could think about. It was on all the time, the highlight reel in his brain. It kept him from sleeping; it nearly kept him from breathing.

The lights of Manhattan twinkled thirty stories below his bedroom window. When he landed his twenty-seven-million-a-year contract, everyone told him not to buy a place in the city. Get a compound in the suburbs, dude, his teammates had advised, as had his financial guy. You'll be hassled everywhere you go. But they hadn't grown up in the middle of bumfuck Oklahoma. They didn't know that the silence of the suburbs would kill him, that pleasantries while squeezing cantaloupes at the grocery store or filling up the gas tank would bore him to the point of near oblivion. Even now, with his arm plastered and bandaged and sutured, the electric pulse of the city below made Zeke, well, happy. He pressed his forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window and stared down. That ridiculous interior designer his Realtor had hooked him up with begged him to get blinds-The primary bedroom faces east, so you'll be woken up at the crack of down every day! she'd said-like Zeke wasn't up anyway. Even before the injury and the two surgeries with one more to go, and the pain and the instant replay running through his memory, he'd been an early riser. He trained every morning before dawn, or at least he used to. Why would he install window treatments and miss out on the very reason he'd spent seven million on this apartment in the first place?

He'd bought a big-screen TV and an oversized couch, an extra firm mattress and called it a day. He hadn't expected to spend all that much time here anyway, what with eighty-one games a year on the road, spring training in Arizona, the occasional visit back home to his parents and his younger sister, who still lived in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

His sister, Lani, told him that he needed a girlfriend. Like really really needed one. Tell him something he didn't already know, he'd texted her back a few days ago. The problem was that the girls who hung around the team bus weren't the type of girls he was interested in, and he was too famous to date someone normal. He couldn't just, like, go on Bumble and swipe right. A celebrity, Lani had suggested then. But he wasn't interested in a celebrity either. That shit is stupid, he'd texted her back.

So no one normal and no one not normal, she'd replied. Cool. I'm sure it will work out for you.

Zeke started to respond that he hadn't asked her for any dating advice so why was she getting testy, but he realized he didn't really want to fight with one of the few people outside of his physical therapist he actually had contact with these days.

Tonight, he checked the time on his phone. It was almost two a.m. There wasn't much point in getting back to bed now. He'd try to nap this afternoon because he had nothing better to do after physical therapy. The team had wound down the season a few weeks ago when they went out in the NL wild card round, and technically, they were mandated to stay in shape starting now through spring training in March, but Zeke couldn't do much. Swim some boring one-armed laps with a kickboard like a toddler, do some stupid excruciating exercises that pushed his pain tolerance to levels he thought were reserved for squeezing oversized baby heads out of a woman's pelvis.

He found his laptop on the chaise of the humongous couch, reached for the remote of the equally humongous TV and fired up ESPN on mute.

He'd discovered this forum a few weeks ago when the sleeplessness had begun-The Insomniacs. His whole life he had slept like, as his mom used to say, he'd been kissed on the ass by God. Maybe he had been. Athletic, handsome with broad shoulders, an arm that threw a fastball like an artillery cannon, well-liked enough to win homecoming king. You already knew his story before you even met him. So sleep, no, that had never eluded him. Even on the team bus. Even on the team plane. Through time zone changes and after-hours parties and nightclub hopping in Ibiza and through the South of France, though Zeke rarely partook in nightclub hopping.

Zeke Rodriguez had never had a singular worry in his conscious world. Even on game day, even the night before game day.

Now it felt like this forum was a life jacket holding his head above the water before he was pulled under and drowned. Someone was always online, ready to chat like they were all old friends, like they didn't know that the man behind the screen name Beartown was named Rookie of the Year, was an All-Star nine seasons in a row, was one of the top ten highest-paid players in the league. They didn't, of course, know. Here, he was just a kid from Oklahoma who couldn't sleep like the rest of them. He squeezed his eyes closed, reopened them, his left lid spasming from fatigue. Even if his arm were decent enough to throw right now, the rest of his body never could. The precision required to hurl exactly the right spin or exactly the right placement or exactly the right velocity meant every single thing had to be in perfect working order, create a synergistic harmony. He couldn't even control his left fucking eyelid right now, like the lid was a cry for help, a representation that the rest of his body was breaking down too.