when they could n't sleep , she was there with warm milk ; when hal woke at three in the morning with nightmares ( nightmares in which his mother approached the water cooler without seeing the monkey that floated and bobbed in its cool sapphire depths , grinning and clapping its cymbals , each converging pair of sweeps leaving trails of bubbles behind ) ; she was there when bill came down with first a fever and then a rash of painful mouth sores and then hives three days after the funeral ; she was them .