8. Graham
GRAHAM
I 've watched Marisol run bedtime twice now. I know the sequence. I tell myself that's enough.
That's the part that makes it worse — the fact that I walk into Isla's room at seven-fifty with reasonable confidence, having observed the routine twice now from the hallway.
I know the sequence. Bath, pajamas, two books, lights out.
Marisol makes it look like nothing. Unhurried, easy, Isla moving through each step without resistance like water finding its natural level.
I've run international acquisitions. I've managed boards full of hostile shareholders. I can execute a bedtime routine for a six-year-old.
"Okay," I say from the doorway. "Time to get ready for bed."
Isla looks up from the rug where she's arranging small animal figures into a configuration that apparently means something, though I couldn't tell you what. She glances at me. Then she looks past me toward the hallway, checking for Marisol.
"She's in the kitchen," I say. "It's just us tonight."
Isla looks back at her animals.
"Isla. Pajamas first."
Nothing.
I walk in, crouch down to her level — I've seen Marisol do this, the physical equalizing — and say, "Which pajamas do you want to wear?"
She picks up a small giraffe figure and walks it across the rug.
"The ones with the stars or the ones with the—" I look toward the dresser, realize I don't actually know what options exist, and lose the thread of the sentence entirely.
Isla ignores me with the focused serenity of a child who has decided a person isn't in the room.
I stand back up. Run a hand across the back of my neck. Look at the dresser.
"Marisol." I don't raise my voice. I don't need to. She appears in the doorway in under thirty seconds, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed and an expression that is trying very hard to be neutral.
"How's it going?" she says.
"She won't engage."
"She's engaging. Just not with you yet."
"That's the same thing."
"It really isn't. What did you say to her?"
"I told her it was time for bed and asked which pajamas?—"
"Did you sit down?"
"I crouched?—"
"Sit down, Graham. On the floor. All the way down."
I look at the floor. I'm in dress trousers. I sit down on the floor in dress trousers because the alternative is admitting this is beyond me, and I'm not there yet.
Isla glances at me sideways. Marginally more interested.
"Now ask her what the giraffe's name is," Marisol says.
"What does that have to?—"
"Ask her."
I look at the giraffe in Isla's hand. "What's its name?"
Isla considers whether I deserve this information. Then: "Gerald."
"Gerald," I repeat. "That's a good name."
Isla looks faintly surprised that I said this. Like she expected a different response. She sets Gerald down carefully and picks up the star pajamas from the pile beside her — I didn't see them there — and stands up.
"Bathroom," Marisol says from the doorway, soft and easy, and Isla goes.
I get up off the floor and look at Marisol.
"You could have told me about Gerald," I say.
"You could have asked."
The bath is fine. The pajamas are fine. The wheels come off at books.
There are two of them on the nightstand — Marisol's selection, I assume, because my contribution to Isla's reading material was a set of educational encyclopedias that have not been opened. Isla gets into bed, pulls the blanket up, and picks up the first book, which has a bear on the cover.
She holds it out toward me.
I take it. Open it. Clear my throat.
"Bertie the bear lived at the edge of a very tall forest?—"
"Not like that," Isla says.
I stop. "Not like what?"
"You're doing the voice wrong."
"I'm not doing a voice."
"That's why it's wrong."
I stare at her. She stares back.She has her mother's eyes — I know that from the photograph, the same wide hazel, the same extraordinary directness.
From the hallway, completely unhelpfully, I hear Marisol make a sound.
"Are you laughing?" I say toward the doorway.
"No." A pause. "Try it again. Differently."
"I don't do voices."
"Graham." Marisol appears in the doorway again, and she's pressing her lips together in a way that fools nobody. "It's a children's book. Bertie the bear needs some personality."
"Bertie the bear is not a performance requirement."
"Bertie the bear is absolutely a performance requirement. Isla, what does Bertie sound like?"
Isla thinks about it with tremendous seriousness. "Old," she says. "And a little grumpy."
Marisol’s gaze catches mine. Something dances behind her eyes that I feel in my back teeth.
"Sounds familiar," she says.
"I heard that."
"I know."
I look down at the book. I look at Isla, who is watching me with the patient, expectant energy of a child with all night and no intention of letting me off the hook. I look at the bear on the page, who does, objectively, look a little grumpy.
"Bertie the bear," I say, and I drop my voice into something slower and rougher than my normal register, "lived at the edge of a very tall forest, and he did not, under any circumstances, like mornings."
Isla's face opens up. Not a full smile, not yet, but something ahead of one — a loosening around the eyes, a shift in the set of her small shoulders.
"Keep going," she says.
I read the whole book. Then the second one, which is about a rabbit who loses a shoe, and I give the rabbit a different voice than Bertie because apparently I'm doing this now, giving voices to illustrated animals on a Friday night while sitting on the edge of a bed in dress trousers.
Isla is asleep before the rabbit finds the shoe.
I close the book and sit there in the low light for a moment, looking at her. The nightlight throws that same pale yellow it always does. Her breathing is slow and even, one hand tucked under her cheek, the stuffed elephant pressed against her side.
Marisol is leaning against the doorframe when I stand up. She doesn't say anything, just tips her head toward the hallway, and I follow her out.
"You stayed," she says, keeping her voice low.
"You told me not to disengage."
"I told you that twenty minutes before Bertie the bear. You could have handed it back to me when she pushed back."
"That would have been delegating."
"Yeah," she says. "It would have."
We're standing in the dim hallway, close enough that I can see the small gold stud in her left ear, the loose curl that's come free from the knot at the back of her neck. She smells like something warm — vanilla, maybe, or something close to it. I notice this and file it nowhere useful.
"She'll let you do it again tomorrow," Marisol says. "She remembers."
"How do you know?"
"Because she asked you to keep going." She pushes off the wall. "That was her saying you were doing okay."
She walks back toward the kitchen, bare feet quiet on the hardwood.
I stand in the hallway outside Isla's door and look at nothing for a brief second.
Doing okay.
I'll take it.