Two years after Pete’s place in the bed opens up, Teddy occasionally wanders in to fill it. Pursued by monsters or dragons in his dreams, my child who prefers to sleep alone will accept co-sleeping in self-defense.

I am intrigued by the genius of DNA as I watch him move through an exact replica of his father’s sleep pattern rotation. My sleep position is, invariably: fetus. Pete sleeps mostly on his back, arms raised over his head, with a few flung-to-the-side variations. My son, his synchronized sleep swimmer.

I think of how Teddy’s face lights up with Pete’s mother’s smile, his grumpy face my brother’s. How all the secrets and triumphs and heartbreaks of two family lines are embedded deep in the seams of his being. We are a weave, he and Pete and I, of the best that we all knew how to bring forward from where we’ve been, of the stories we haven’t begun yet to comprehend.