“You wanna crawl into bed with me?” I asked hopefully.
“I’m hungwy.”
“Well, sure, but how ’bout we snuggle for a little while before we eat?”
“I’m hungwy.” There was a telltale threadiness to her voice this time around. I’d heard it before, usually right about the time this child I’d thought was perfect had launched into an unprovoked crying jag. I pushed back Bev’s lavender-scented sheets and swung my feet onto the chilly tile floor.
“You want a piece of bread?” I asked as Shayla and I padded down the hallway from my bedroom to the kitchen.
“Toast,” she said.
The apartment looked no better after a night of sleep than it had the day before. There wasn’t anything overtly wrong with it. It was just that the walls were all painted chalky white and everything was square and sterile. The off-white tile floors were cold and the furniture was hard and angular. I knew it would begin to feel familiar eventually, but for now, to my sleep-deprived mind, it felt more like a furnished science lab than a home.
I looked through the cupboards without finding a toaster. “There’s no toaster, sweetie,” I told the expectant child who stood no taller than my hip. “Can we just have bread this morning and we’ll buy a toaster later?”
Her mouth twisted a little and her chin began to wobble. “But I like toast,” she said.
“Shayla, there’s no toaster. And I can’t make you toast without a toaster.”
“But . . .” A house without a toaster was an aberration to her mind. “But I want toast.”
Toast was a big deal to my jet-lagged four-year-old. The wobble became a wail that started soft and crescendoed from there. Stream to torrent. Spark to blaze. Zero to sixty before I’d had time to quell it. I tried to reason with her.
“Shay, this isn’t our old place. . . . We don’t have everything we need here yet.”
The crescendo grew to new proportions. So I got defensive.
“There’s nothing I can do about it, Shayla. It’s practically the middle of the night and . . .”
The wail rose to greater heights. So I decided to get firm.
“Stop that right now, Shayla!”
And off we went into a stratosphere of weeping I’d only visited on a couple of previous occasions. How Shayla managed to stay upright with her head thrown back and her body gone limp was beyond my understanding, but there she stood, tears sliding down her cheeks and neck and under the collar of her Cinderella pj’s. While I pondered my options and feared another failure, Shayla gasped and sputtered and gathered another breath, then tore into the second chapter of her wail.
I sighed and lowered myself to the floor, pulling Shayla into my lap and holding her sideways against me. She resisted at first, leaning her body weight outward and down, her hands pushing weakly at mine. But I lifted her closer and kissed her hot, damp temple and shushed quietly against her ear and began to rock, side to side, like a metronome measuring her forlornness. She hiccuped once, twice, swallowed hard, let out another mini-wail, then ran completely out of steam. She burrowed a little deeper and rubbed her cheek against my chest, her lungs spasming in the wake of so much strain.
“Things feel really different this morning, don’t they, Shayla.” She took a tremulous breath, nodded, and wrapped an arm loosely around my waist. “Do you miss home?”
A tiny bubble of air sighed out of her. “I miss my daddy,” she said, and I felt a familiar sinking in my gut. I knew this wasn’t completely about her dad. I knew, on a rational level, that this was about a new place and new people and a new bed and a window that hadn’t been where it was supposed to be when she’d opened her eyes this morning, but on the level of my own inner six-year-old, her words punched the confidence out of my courage. She missed her dad. She missed her dad. There was nothing I could do for that other than hold her a little closer and stifle my denials of her dad’s wonderfulness. It was good that she loved him. A little girl needed that. It just made my own loss feel more empty.
We sat on the tile for a few minutes more, which gave me time to assess my response to this latest crisis and give myself a failing grade. I sang Barney’s theme song for her, and then she joined in