Chapter 4: The Walk

It is three AM and Claire will not stop crying. You have tried everything. The bottle. The diaper change. The swing. The walking. The bouncing. The white noise machine that cost sixty dollars and sounds like a jet engine.

Nothing works.

Amanda is asleep. You told her you would handle this. You have been handling this for ninety minutes and you are losing.

You put Claire in the stroller. You do not bother with the straps. You put on your jacket and your shoes and you go outside because outside has to be better than inside.

The November air is sharp and cold. You walk south on Seventh Avenue. The bars are closed. The restaurants are dark. A garbage truck works its way up the street and the sound is somehow soothing.

Claire stops crying.

You keep walking. You will walk to Battery Park if that is what it takes. You will walk to New Jersey. You will walk until the sun comes up and someone who knows what they are doing can take over.

At Union Street you pass a twenty-four-hour diner. Through the window you can see a man eating eggs alone at the counter. He looks up as you pass. You wonder what he is running from or toward.

You reach Carroll Street and turn west. The brownstones here are the expensive ones. The ones with gardens and original molding and the kind of stability you thought you wanted.

Claire is asleep now. You stop walking and wait for her to start crying again. She does not. You stand on Carroll Street at three in the morning with your sleeping daughter and you cannot move because movement might break the spell.

Your phone buzzes. Amanda.

Where are you.

Walking, you write. She's asleep.

Come home, Amanda writes.

Not yet, you write. She might wake up.

Three dots appear and disappear. Then: I'm not asking because of Claire.

You stand on Carroll Street and look at the message and understand what it means. You turn the stroller around and walk back the way you came.

At home Amanda is sitting on the couch in the dark. You bring the stroller inside and she stands and comes to you and puts her arms around you and you realize you are shaking.

I don't know what I'm doing, you say.

Neither do I, she says.

You expect her to say something else. Something reassuring or constructive or parental. Instead she starts crying. Not the desperate tears of exhaustion but something quieter and more honest.

You stand in your apartment on the third floor of a brownstone in Park Slope holding your wife while your daughter sleeps in the stroller between you and you think about all the things you used to believe mattered.

The job that seems very far away now. The article you will probably never finish. The bars where you used to know the bartender's name. The restaurants where you performed the version of yourself that seemed most likely to succeed.

All of it is still there. The city has not changed. You have changed.

I love you, you say to Amanda.

I know, she says. I love you too. Even though you smell terrible.

You laugh and it comes out wrong. Half laugh and half something else. Claire stirs in the stroller but does not wake.

We should sleep, Amanda says.

She takes your hand and leads you to the bedroom. You leave Claire in the stroller in the living room. This violates several rules you have read about safe infant sleep. You do not care.

You lie in bed next to Amanda and she falls asleep immediately. You listen to her breathing and through the wall you can hear the neighbors arguing about whose turn it is to take out the trash.

You close your eyes. You think about the man in the diner eating eggs alone. You think about the bodega owner who promised it gets easier then harder then easier again.

You think about Claire asleep in the other room and how she has no idea that her existence has reordered everything you thought you knew about being alive.

The sun will come up in two hours. She will need to eat again in one. You should sleep but you cannot stop thinking about the walk and the silence and the way the city looked with no one in it but you and your daughter.

This is the territory you are in now. The four AM walks. The uncertainty. The love that feels like terror and the terror that feels like love.

You do not know if you are ready for this.

You are in it anyway.