Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(7)
She didn’t nag him about it, though. She knew he hadn’t slept a wink the night before. When she got up with the baby before six, she found her husband still on the couch, watching another old comedy—but not laughing.
“Why don’t you go up to bed?” she suggested.
“Because I won’t be able to fall asleep. What’s the point?”
“The girls will be down here soon, and if they see you, they’ll want to play. If you’re not in the mood, you’d better make yourself scarce.”
He did.
It was a little better this morning. When he climbed into bed, she stirred enough to see that the bedside clock read 4:30, and when she got up an hour later, he was snoring.
Now, Allison starts up the stairs with J.J. balanced on her hip. He squirms, not happy to have been interrupted on his journey across the hardwoods, undoubtedly toward some kind of mischief. But he quickly switches gears, deciding to indulge his favorite new habit: pulling his mother’s long hair.
She hasn’t had time yet this morning to pull it back into a ponytail, her daily hairstyle these days—not because it’s flattering, by any means, but to spare herself endless tugging by J.J.’s chubby fingers, perpetually wet from teething drool.
He delights in pulling his sisters’ hair, too, leaving them much less eager to “babysit” their little brother lately.
It’s just as well. When he was immobile, the girls loved to keep an eye on him as he lounged in his bouncy seat or swing while Allison bustled around the house. Now she wouldn’t dare leave them alone in a room with J.J.-the-human-monkey.
Hudson, six, and Madison, almost four, were much more laid back at this age. Either that, or Allison has simply forgotten how challenging it is to keep a baby-on-the-move out of trouble. J.J.’s had too many close calls for comfort. Just yesterday, she found him pulling on a cord, Mack’s heavy desktop computer teetering just above his fragile little head. She caught it just in time.
“You’re a handful, you know that, J.J.? And you’ve got a handful. Ouch!”
The baby affectionately tightens his grip, laughing in such delight that Allison can’t help but smile through her grimace.
Sometimes she wonders whether this child would even exist had Mack been promoted last January instead of this past one.
On New Year’s Day 2010, they’d started discussing having a third child, torn between expanding their family and upsetting the already delicate balance. Their daughters were just becoming old enough to be more flexible and portable; less needy. Neither Allison nor Mack relished the idea of going back to diapers and schedules and wee-hour feedings.
In the end, they realized that parenthood has been the most rewarding thing in their world, and their desire for another child to love won out. By April, she was expecting.
The third pregnancy was more exhausting than the others had been. She had morning sickness all day, every day, for the entire nine months—boy hormones, predicted her closest friend, Randi Weber. Neither Allison nor Mack wanted to know the baby’s gender in advance, though. Everyone assumed they were “trying for a son,” but that wasn’t the case. They’d have been just as happy with another daughter, as long as the baby was healthy.
Please let this baby be healthy, Allison prayed frequently throughout the pregnancy, worried that her life was already too good to be true.
The baby was healthy—though the breech delivery was excruciating. But it quickly became apparent that J.J. was a colicky infant. Now, on the verge of toddlerhood, he remains far more demanding than his sisters ever were.
It’s all worthwhile, of course, every exhausting maternal moment, but still . . .
Between the baby and the girls’ needs and Mack’s new job and the ever-challenging treadmill of life in suburban New York, Allison sometimes finds herself thinking, It isn’t supposed to be like this.
But of course, that isn’t really true. This is exactly how it’s supposed to be; it was part of her master plan in another lifetime. She’d not only longed to one day become a wife and mother, but she’d hungered for the breakneck velocity of New York, with its vast population of ever-striving overachievers, a welcome world away from the lazy pace and status-quo lifestyle of her rural Midwestern hometown.
Her dream became reality: she transformed herself from impoverished Nebraska schoolgirl to Manhattan fashion editor with dozens of pairs of Christian Louboutins in her closet.
But after the September 11 attacks, the things that had once mattered so much—the designer status symbols she had coveted all her life and worked so hard to eventually own—seemed frivolous.
Not only that, but she realized that she lived in a city that lay squarely in terrorism’s crosshairs. She felt as though she were taking her life in her hands every time she rode the elevator up to her office, or got on a subway, or even walked down the street.
Yes, she considered moving away in those months following the attacks. Even now, it bothers her to admit that, even to herself. After all she had survived in her childhood, she almost let fear get the better of her as an adult.
In the end, it came down to the same choice she’d faced all her life.
You can run scared, or you can dig deep for inner strength, hold your head high, and fight for what you deserve.
She’d stayed in New York, and thank goodness for that. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be—