Caroline’s Night Instructions
Monday, May 25th, 2009
She walks up your back, her tiny feet pushing into the natural rungs in your vertebrae. By midnight, though it seems later, her feet are moving further up the spine, then something flashes in her memory – in her dream – and they run up clear to the shoulders. Her feet are blunt, the toes curled in fear, and the push so that the torso rocks, re-settles, then rocks again, so that it is not a painful stamp, like someone climbing stairs. After the first few hits from fisted feet, you come to life.
Something has made you uncomfortable and before you can recognize what room you are in, another shots shakes your hair and you know exactly where you are. In bed on dry ground, not mid-level on some ocean steamer that’s encountered high waves. To the glow from the night light, you turn and she is almost perpendicular to you, all 35 pounds and three-feet something.
Baby faced but all girl, her sun-bleached hair long and white from early summer lays on her cheeks, and she looks as much like a teenage girl as she sometimes feels. Caroline is the most consistently defiant among the children, but in her thin nightgown caught mid-dream, she’s lost. You turn on your back, move her gently – your whole hand fits around her body – and you try to talk in your awake voice, one that won’t frighten her.
“Caroline … It’s okay. Daddy’s here.”
The words don’t seem to matter. As long as she has heard them, she shuts her body down. She’s peaceful and rather jostle her too much, you only go for a subtle realignment. Lifting her legs first, then her hips and upper-body, she is in the center of the bed, enoigh for you to feel as though you won’t fall off.
This pattern repeats at least twice in the night (last night, at 2 and at 4). Once, in between, she talks plainly to you, like she’s been awake most the night.
“Tickle my arm.” Then after a few minutes, “‘Keep going.”
You wake at 6 and your lower back is tightened up and one side is dulled from having only enough bed to sleep on it all night. So you get up, pour yourself some Raisin Bran and eat alone at the table reading the sports page and trying not to let the milk dots that spill over dampen the news print. On a full stomach an hour later, you find her in the same place. The shades are drawn and with the overcast sky, the room is only slightly brighter. Her body senese this is the perfect morning for sleep. You lie down with her, put your arm over her and wait for her feet to move.
