I'd Give Anything(14)
“Yes, I can see how it might have,” she said and, with one last flick of her finger, dismissed me.
When my daughter, Avery, was born, taking a full twenty-five hours to hem and haw, crown and retreat her way into the world, she didn’t cry, just radiated pale gold light and stared around with wondering fawn eyes. Later that day, in my hospital room, after Harris convinced me to let them put her into the nursery so that I could sleep after the long labor (and so that he could go home to his own bed), when the nurse took her from me, I swear—and no amount of infant brain science can change my mind about this—she turned her head to look over her shoulder and stare exactly into my eyes, and a mantle of peace fell over me. That’s precisely how it was: a direct gaze and a mantle of peace. I felt visited upon; I believed we had a spirit child, a mystic, a Buddha. I fell asleep certain that her days would slip like pearls onto the string of my life, one luminosity after the next after the next, and I slept for six hours.
I woke up in my dark, quiet room, twenty-three years old, alone, bereft of my child’s presence, craving her river stone tranquility and her tuft of hair. Gingerly, I sat up, shimmied myself to the edge of the bed, slid into my slippers, and found my way to the nursery, one with a big viewing window, just like in the movies. Through the glass, the rows of bassinets awash in faint lunar light from some unseen source created a landscape that struck me as solemn, lonesome, and majestic, like Stonehenge, except that even through the closed door, I could hear one baby crying, an unhinged sound, hoarse goose-calls scratching rents in the stillness. The night nurse sitting at a desk outside the nursery gave me a tired smile and, when she checked my hospital bracelet, a wry laugh.
“She’s fine. I’ve gone in twice. Normal temperature, normal everything. Some of them just cry. Although that one seems to be trying to set a record.”
“You mean”—I gestured toward the window—“that one’s mine?”
The nurse nodded. “Yours,” she said. “Forever and ever.”
“You think it’s because she misses me, right?”
“Sure,” said the nurse. “Let’s go with that.”
It was the beginning of over fifteen years (and counting) of insomnia, of watching my daughter be not just awake in the middle of the night but something beyond awake, hyper-attuned, as if not only her eyes but also her entire consciousness were dilated, letting in too much world. When she was crib-bound, she would scream until I picked her up, at which point her screams would drain out of her little by little until she fell into a soap bubble–fragile sleep. When I tried to put her down, performing a kind of breath-held series of glacially slow ballet moves in which my chest remained pressed to her body long after she had made contact with the mattress, she would wait until the moment when I thought I was home free, when my hand was on the doorknob, to scream once again.
Once she could get out of bed by herself, she would come into our room and stand next to ours, edgy and trembling as a gazelle when the lions are nearby, whispering, “Mama,” her middle-of-the-night name for me (the rest of the time it was “Mommy”), until I walked her back and either resettled her and left or, more often, lay down next to her, where she affixed herself to me with the tenacity of a tree toad. Until she was five years old, the wakeups occurred every two hours. At five, old enough both to read on her own and to feel ashamed of sleeping with her mother, she would come into our room just two or three times a week. On the mornings of the nights that she didn’t, I would walk into her room to find all her lights burning and books everywhere, on the floor, on the bed, sometimes splayed open across her chest, or tucked under her head. Her face would be flushed, damp tendrils of dark hair sticking to her pink cheeks, as if she hadn’t so much fallen into sleep as wrestled it bodily to the ground.
At fifteen, when most of her friends could sleep anytime, anywhere, and well past noon, Avery and I had cobbled together a bedtime system that involved equal parts science, common sense, and superstition verging on witchcraft. A weighted blanket, a diffuser with an array of essential oils on rotation (lavender, jasmine, vetiver, bergamot, rose, vanilla, chamomile), meditation apps, visualization apps, soothing music, soothing teas, melatonin, breathing exercises, yoga poses, warm baths, soothing bath salts, soothing books, amber lightbulbs: Avery would try various combinations of these elements until something worked, and then she would use that combination again and again, until it stopped working, which it always, eventually, did, usually because some bump in her daytime life jarred her and caused the tricky off switch in her brain to malfunction. The bumps were mostly ordinary growing-up issues—a fight with a friend, a big test, a bad grade, a missed goal on the field hockey field, a boy who decided he liked someone else—but after dark, fueled by adrenaline and exhaustion, the bumps would grow into mountains, into volcanoes.
But what always astonished me about Avery was how pulled together she seemed during the day. Not seemed, was. Funny, popular, a better than decent athlete, a way better than decent student. Her friends and teachers didn’t know, couldn’t have guessed, that the girl with the clear eyes, ringing laugh, and sheet of shining hair, the one winning debates and field hockey games and reading her papers aloud in class, was also the one who would sit in the passenger seat on our desperation nighttime drives, her eyes fixed on the windshield, her right thumbnail clenched between her teeth or the one who would still, at least once a month, sleep in our bed with me, slipping in one side while Harris, out of long habit, slipped out the other.