SLEEP WALK

The room is dark, except for moonlight gleaming off the faceted glass and polished oak of the built-in sideboard.  The lace-edged curtains lift slightly in the cooling breeze. 

My younger daughter and I are enjoying our nightly walk, while the rest of the family sleeps. Torrey is six months old, and has colic; I am 37 and have work in the morning. Her mother, who has been in a state of chronic exhaustion since Torrey’s birth, sleeps in the master bedroom with the door ajar; across the hall, our older daughter, 2-½, sleeps sweetly, enfolded in an animal-covered blanket. Our son, now 10, sleeps upstairs in an attic space made into his first “own” bedroom. 

Torrey is half-asleep on my shoulder, while I steadily pat her back. Two pats for every step, a rhythm that operates without my thinking about it, minute after minute, as we make the long circuit around the dining room table.

Sometimes I sing softly to her. Sometimes my song drifts into wordless crooning, or humming. (But humming is a danger: It can trick me into closing my eyes.) Also, I think -- sometimes in a focused, sustained way that’s hard to achieve in the midst of a busy day, sometimes drifting and leaping sleepily from idea to idea, image to image.

Once in a while, Torrey’s small body will rise and twist a little, and she may emit a tiny groan or whimper. A few focused pats and she relaxes again. They’re “claps,” really -- I learned to administer them to my goddaughter, now almost 4, who was born with cystic fibrosis. When I “clap” Torrey, I thank God that she and her sister and brother are all so healthy. 

We circle the dining room times beyond counting, sometimes for an hour, sometimes from bedtime to dawn. As we do, I’m vaguely aware that our bodies are becoming very attuned to one another. I think more about our emotional bond, wanting her to feel safe, loved. But soon -- about a year and a half from now -- the physical harmony will prove to be a life-saver.      

As we walk, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is taking another job. Our growing family is pushing the limits of what the college can pay me. At the same time, my brother has come back from one of his long-term assignments abroad, exciting me with prospects of working in a country where the need is greater, and the agency he works for will pay far more.

Eventually, after several hundred more circuits of the dining room, I will take him up on it, and sign a contract to help open a university in the Middle East. We will leave this comfortable Milwaukee bungalow, and spend 18 months in a totally unfamiliar desert world. Our fourth child, a second son, will be born there. And when we return -- suddenly, driven out by an escalating war -- we will take shelter in the desert of the American Southwest.

There, at a friend’s house, I will be sitting and talking with our friend on the edge of their pool, while the children (except for the new baby) play in it. One moment, in mid-sentence, I will be surprised to find I am no longer speaking --- instead, I am underwater, swiftly planing across the pool. I start to rise in the very spot where Torrey is toddling off one of the pool’s steps and falling in. We burst up out of the water together, her body riding on my hands, both of us shocked; everyone cheers with surprise. Only later, when she’s wrapped in a towel and over my shoulder, and I’ve been unable to explain what just happened, do I begin to suspect the connection to our late-night “sleep walks” back in the bungalow. 

That’s the first of several episodes where Torrey’s insatiable adventurousness gets her into perils that our unconscious bond alerts me to -- even from hundreds of miles away. But those are yet to come. For now, we are walking through the night’s deep shadows, breathing together, our bodies drummed by the rhythm of walking and patting, while the family sleeps and shards of our own music float around us.