The Briar Archive

4. Sebastian

Sebastian

“The benefit of living in the middle of nowhere is the proximity to things left forgotten.”

BlackBronze

I wasn’t aware that I was screaming until a librarian came to quiet me down. Sebastian was having a grand mal seizure and I was in a mad, ineffectual panic. Once the librarian realized what was happening, bless her, she pushed me aside and put her cardigan under Sebastian’s head. He seized for only a minute or so, but it felt like lifetimes.

By the time paramedics arrived, he was calm, breathing normally, but he was confused and unresponsive. They put him on a gurney and wheeled him toward the waiting ambulance.

Bella met us at the hospital. When she entered the room, both she and Sebastian began to cry. They held each other and wept until a nurse came in with food. Bella fed Sebastian like she used to when he was a toddler, even getting him to laugh at her feeble train sounds when it trundled “into the station.”

Sebastian looked so small and frail in his hospital gown. The bed swallowed him. Even so, he looked to be no worse for wear now that his mother was there.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“At the hospital,” I said.

“Mom?”

“You’re at the hospital, dear,” Bella said. “You came here in the ambulance.”

“Oh,” he said, playing with the hem of his gown.

Sebastian had said nothing on the way to the hospital, nothing during his initial examination other than to tell the doctor his name, address, and phone number. I was delighted he was speaking now that Bella was there, but that delight slowly turned to horror when, after a moment, he asked again, “Where am I?”

Bella and I exchanged a look and I said, “At the hospital. We rode in the ambulance.”

“Mom?”

For some reason, Sebastian wouldn’t look at me.

“You’re at the hospital,” Bella said, “just like your father said.”

The boy nodded, but a minute later, asked the question again.

For the next hour, Bella and I explained the morning’s events to him, but he would instantly forget and ask the same questions, over and over. Even more frustrating was that he never paid any attention to me. Whenever I spoke, he interrupted and asked why Bella only stared at him instead of answering his question.

“You and I went to the library, remember? I was telling you a story—”

“Where am I, Mommy?”

“You’re here, in the hospital. With Mommy and Daddy.”

“How did I get here?”

“You rode in the ambulance with Daddy.”

“Daddy? The one in the blue uniform?”

“No, cariño, Daddy,” Bella said, pointing to me. But Sebastian’s eyes glazed over me, as if he wasn’t even aware I was in the room.

The doctor said his short-term memory had been affected by the seizure, but that it could function normally in a matter of days. An MRI scan and a battery of neurological tests later, there was still nothing conclusive. No one was quite sure what had happened, though the final verdict was that his seizure could have been caused by a fever brought about by some sort of viral infection. After a night of observation, we were allowed to take him home.

Just as the doctor said, his short-term memory returned to normal, though he was quieter and more withdrawn than usual. Otherwise, he seemed to be fully recovered.

Except that he still refused to acknowledge me. I assumed that whatever had happened to him in the library, he blamed me for it and was clearly angry at me.

He had fallen asleep in front of the TV one afternoon. I picked him up to put him in bed, and he woke in my arms. He began howling and flailing so badly, I thought he was having another seizure. Bella rushed in and took him from me. He instantly calmed, and Bella was able to carry him into his room and tuck him in without much more of a fuss.

“What did you do?” she asked when she came out of his bedroom.

“I just picked him up, that’s all.” But the way Bella stared at me, I wasn’t sure if she was asking about that moment, or the afternoon when it all began.

The following weeks were a nightmare. Sebastian would not acknowledge my existence. He acted as if he couldn’t hear me, couldn’t see me, and whenever I touched him, he would flinch, and his eyes would dart around in confusion. Bella couldn’t leave him alone with me. She had to be the one to pick him up from school every day, take him to the dentist, drop him off at daycare. For Sebastian, I simply did not exist.

At first, Bella thought I must have done something to make him afraid of me, but it soon became obvious to her that he wasn’t scared of me—he simply didn’t see or hear me. She tried showing him pictures of the three of us, and even then, he only saw her and himself in the photograph. There was a hole where I should have been, a shadow that covered me. Even when he recalled his own favorite memories, memories of times I had been the only person with him, I was absent. Trips to the zoo, jumping in piles of leaves in the park, reading his favorite books—Sebastian either substituted Bella in my place or insisted he had been alone the entire time.

I was a ghost in my son’s world.

Bella was convinced there was a medical reason for his strange behavior toward me. Of course. What else could explain it? But in the back of my mind, I knew there was something else.

Desperate, I went back to the library, hoping to somehow recapture the memory of what had happened that day. I waited an hour for a student to leave so that I could sit in the same leather chair that Sebastian and I had sat in. With a copy of Bears in the Night in hand, I sat in the chair and waited. And waited. Nothing. No memory of the unnamed book came. Instead, I sat in the chair, alone, wondering what I had done to my son.

Eventually, I had to leave. I took Bears in the Night to the front counter so that the librarian could reshelve it. When I handed it to her, she said, “Not checking it out?”

“No, my son already has a copy.”

“We have a lot of other Berenstain Bears books available.”

I tried to smile. “Thank you, but no. He already has every book the Berensteins ever wrote, so—”

“Stain, you mean?” the librarian asked.

“I’m sorry?”

She pushed her thick glasses up the bridge of her nose and said, “It’s pronounced BerenSTAYN, not BerenSTEEN. A lot of people make that mistake.”

“Are you sure? S-T-E-I-N is usually pronounced steen or stine. Never heard it pronounced stayn before.”

“But it’s spelled S-T-A-I-N, same as in ‘I have a stain on my shirt.’ See?” She pushed the book in front of me and pointed to the name on the cover. Berenstain.

“Uh, that’s not right,” I said. “Is it?”

She slid the book onto a pile of other books needing to be reshelved. “I thought it was spelled stein, too, until I was inputting the names into our computer system a few months ago. We’re getting rid of the card catalog. It is the 80s after all. Time to embrace the future, you know.”

“Wait, how long has it been like that?”

“We’ve always used a card catalog.”

“No, no, the name.”

“It’s always been like that.”

Without another word, I turned and ran to the children’s section and examined all the Berenstein—no, Berenstain Bears books I could find. Sure enough, every single one was Berenstain. So why did I remember it otherwise? My mind must have been going. It was the only way I could explain what was happening.

But that wouldn’t explain what had happened to Sebastian. Something else was going on. I could never have accepted it at the time, but part of me knew what it was: Magic.

The world had changed, ever so slightly, but I could still remember the way it once was. There was no scientific explanation for this. Yet I knew that the unnamed book had to have existed, and now, somehow, it had disappeared from the world.

Just as I had disappeared from Sebastian’s.