The Curious Incident of the Child In The Nighttime

Putting your kids to bed just doesn’t happen the way it does in The Sound of Music. If you’ve never seen it, picture a bunch of stylish bilingual children peacefully walking themselves up the stairs, singing, leaving the grownups downstairs to finish their drinks and conversations. 

I mean, really. 

I only have the two kids, forget seven - which I’m pretty sure is the number of Von Trapp offspring - and bedtime is a whole ordeal. Even on a regular night. Even when it’s not the coldest goddamn day of the year, even when your boiler doesn’t break down – even then, bedtime can take hours. 

Unfortunately, on that particular Christmas Eve, we were contending with all of the above. 

“Leo,” my wife had called from the downstairs that afternoon, maybe four hours before bedtime. “Does it feel chilly in here to you?”

Relevantly, my wife is never not cold. It can be eighty degrees out and Eleanor will go back in for a sweater. So I didn’t think much of it, and definitely didn’t run to go check the heat. I didn’t even put down the scissors. We were in Christmas crunch time, when one parent has to entertain both kids while the other one frantically wraps gifts in some dark closet. Said dark closet, being very small, also wasn’t very cold. 

“Not really,” I called, which apparently was distracting enough for me to slice the skin between my thumb and forefinger on some wrapping paper. I’ve broken my collarbone and two ribs before, and I swear getting papercuts in that one little spot approaches the same level of misery. So I was pretty focused on my papercut - also on the process of trying to wrap weird octagonal objects – and didn’t reconsider the issue until I emerged from the closet almost two hours later. I was drying off my hands and putting a Band-Aid on my papercut when I noticed that it was, in fact, chilly in here. 

Not just chilly. Actively cold. 

I went downstairs. My wife and daughters had completely deconstructed the living room, transforming our respectable little couch into a blanket fort lit by flashlights. It was already full dark on the East Coast. 

“Hey, monsters,” I said, crawling in on my hands and knees.

“Daddy!” shouted Cora, my youngest. “Come inside!” 

“He’s already inside, Cora,” pointed out Amelia, her older sister. “Daddy, don’t knock it down, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” I grunted, trying to squeeze myself into a space barely large enough for a cat. It was much warmer inside the fort, but the girls were still wrapped up in sweaters and blankets. I glanced at Eleanor, who looked worried.

“I checked on the boiler,” she said. “It has plenty of water, I think. But I swear it’s been off for hours.”

“I’ll take a look,” I said, pushing Cora’s wispy hair off her forehead. The tip of her nose was ice. “How are my girls doing, besides chilly?”

“Good,” said Amelia. “I was reading Clifford: The Big Red Dog to Mommy and Cora.”

Amelia, just turned six, was starting to read. But she was only reading three things: Clifford, the BOB books, and every other word of Junie B. Jones. The rest of us had heard these books read aloud so often that we had to remind Cora it was rude to plug her ears. 

“Well,” I said, tugging on one of Amelia’s long braids, “I really wish I could stay to hear Clifford. But I’ve gotta go check on the boiler.”

“Sure you do,” said Cora sourly, and I winked at her. My wife pinched Amelia’s cheek. 

“Go on, pumpkin,” she said. “You were at the part where Emily Elizabeth realizes Clifford is getting too big.”

I wriggled my way out of the blanket fort, which took almost five full minutes, and went into the basement to check on the boiler. It was as silent and cold as a corpse. No pilot light, unsuccessful reset, low pressure on the gauges. I was immediately stumped. 

“And this is why I should have become an engineer, and not a middle manager,” I muttered, aiming one hopeful kick at the boiler’s base. Unsurprisingly, the only outcome of that decision was a sore toe. 

Also unsurprising: nobody was coming to fix stuff on Christmas Eve, even if it was colder than the ninth circle of hell outside. They weren’t coming Christmas morning, either.

“Best I can do is tomorrow afternoon,” the boiler guy mumbled into the phone. “All my guys are off for Christmas. Nobody’s working. I’d use a space heater if I were you.”

So: Cora’s fourth Christmas Eve wound down with a mad hunt for space heaters, the taping up of windowpanes and doorways, and an impromptu batch of cookies just so we had an excuse to turn the oven on. When it was time for bed – extra important on Christmas Eve, as every parent knows – we had a problem. 

“Only two space heaters, and we need one in our room,” Eleanor whispered to me while the girls were brushing their teeth. “Should we push their beds together?” 

“I honestly think they should share a bed,” I whispered back. “That’ll be a little warmer, at least.”

Eleanor laughed. “Good luck pitching that one,” she said, and headed out of the bathroom to take her turn wrapping stuff in the closet. 

Sure enough, my announcement that the girls were having a “sleepover” went over about as well as my announcement that the heat wouldn’t be fixed until the next day. 

“Cora kicks too much!” Amelia moaned. 

“Amelia snores,” Cora added. 

“Well, you’ll freeze otherwise,” I said, trying for the no-more-arguments voice that my dad had used on us when I was a kid. As always, it had no effect. 

“I’ll never be able to sleep if Cora’s in my bed! It’s not big enough!” wailed Amelia. 

Cora’s eyes went big. “And if we don’t fall sleep, Santa will never come! Oh no, Daddy! We can't!”

In the end, it was their icy sheets on their skin that persuaded them. I turned the space heater on blast, tucked a veritable mountain of blankets tightly around them, read The Night Before Christmas about sixteen times, and finally snuck my way out of the room. Amelia shifted a little closer to Cora as I shut the door, but didn’t open her eyes. 

“Stay in bed, stay in bed,” I chanted to myself, using my socks to stealth-slide across the floorboards. And stay in bed they did, like some kind of Christmas miracle, all the way through the rest of the gift-wrapping, the dumping of Santa’s cookies and milk down the sink disposal, and the stacking of presents under the tree. It wasn’t until 1 or 2 AM, just after Eleanor had finally fallen asleep, that I heard Amelia’s door creak open.

“Daddy,” she hissed, poking my arm. “Daddy. Wake up!”

Damn. I was about to be out. “What is it?” 

“I can’t find Cora,” said Amelia, her eyes wide and glassy in the dark room. “She’s gone.”

“She’s probably just in the bathroom,” I said. 

“She’s not. I checked. She’s not in the closet either, or under the bed. I think Santa kidnapped her.”

“Santa doesn’t kidnap kids,” I reassured her, and got up, wrapping her in one of my sweatshirts. It hung to her ankles like a ballgown. “She might have gone down to look at her presents early. Go back to bed, I’ll find her.”

“I want to come with you,” Amelia said, and slipped her cold little fingers into mine. 

Once, when the girls were very young, we’d taken them for a hike. I’d worn toddler-Amelia like a backpack, and Eleanor had baby Cora strapped to her chest, and so we didn’t bring many supplies. No compass, not much water, only a handful of nuts and chocolate as a snack. Our hands were already too full to carry much besides the girls. But it had stormed on that trail recently, and after we climbed our way over some fallen trees and around a sinkhole of mud, we realized we hadn’t seen a blaze in a long time. We were lost. 

I’d been lost as a hiker before, but never as a parent. The feeling is completely different. The stomach-churning panic, the racing thoughts, the pounding heart. We’re lost. My babies are lost. It’s some kind of animal thing, I swear. I can’t explain it. It’s like the bottom falls out of the whole world. 

I didn’t have that feeling as Amelia and I checked behind the shower curtain, under her bed, or in her closet. I didn’t even have it as we looked behind the couch, under the tree, and inside the blanket fort. It started, like a tingle in the base of my spine, after we had checked the basement. 

“I told you,” Amelia whispered, tears making her voice thick. “Santa kidnapped her. She was telling me she was going to pretend to be asleep and then go find him in his sleigh, and he must have taken her with him!”

“She said what?” I asked. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears now, like a drum. “She wanted to find his sleigh?”

Amelia nodded, too fast. “I told her not to. I told her that isn’t how the magic works. But she said if he parks the sleigh on the roof that she could just go out to the front yard and look up and see it!”

I had no idea how cold it was outside. It was so cold inside that I could see my breath, fast white clouds, coming out of my mouth. “Do you think she went outside by herself?”

“I don’t know!” Amelia squealed. “I told her not to!”

I went to the door and twisted the handle. It opened easily, blasting me with icy air, and I slammed it again. Had we forgotten to lock it in all the bustle of Christmas, or had Cora gone outside? 

“Go wake up Mommy,” I said, pulling my coat on. “I’ll go see if she’s outside.”

Outside was the kind of cold that’s acutely painful, like breathing knives. My eyes burned, and my nose immediately started running. “Cora!” I called. “Cor! Are you out here?” If she had come outside, if she hadn’t put her coat on first… 

Eleanor appeared at the door, white-faced, holding Amelia’s hand. I started to jog, moving around the house and into the backyard, checking behind bushes and parked cars. Eleanor pushed the front door open before I reached it again. “Anything?” she called. 

I shook my head and hurried up the stairs towards them, shutting the door behind me. “Let’s go put Amelia back in bed to warm her up,” I said, “and check everywhere one more time before we panic.”

As if we weren’t already panicking. I knew it was cold, colder than it had any right to be, but I was sweating, my skin so hot I thought it might be steaming. Eleanor seemed to be going the opposite way, all the blood and color draining from her until she looked like a snowgirl standing frozen in our hall.

“Okay,” she agreed. We went upstairs and Eleanor put Amelia under the covers again, rubbing warmth back into her fingers and toes. I leaned heavily against the foot of the bed, digging for my phone - and felt a lump under the covers. 

“Wait, El,” I breathed. “Wait. There’s something here.”

We heaved the blankets all the way off the bed to reveal our youngest child, curled like a cat into a ball, apparently having scooted herself down to the very bottom of the bed in search of warmth. The mountain of blankets had been so thick and lumpy that Cora’s form had been completely obscured underneath them, and she had been too far down for Amelia to feel, even with her legs stretched out. Amelia started to hiccup her way into laughter. Eleanor, previously stone-faced, burst into tears. I put one hand on Cora’s little back and felt it expand reassuringly under my fingers. I wasn’t far from tears myself.

“C’mon,” I said, hoisting my sleeping four-year-old into my arms. “Christmas sleepover in Mommy and Daddy’s room.”

And that’s how we woke up on Christmas morning, all of us squeezed into a queen-sized bed with a space heater blaring on either side, and Cora poking me in the cheek. 

“Daddy,” she announced, somewhat grandly, “I think Santa is going to make it snow inside today.”

I blinked the sleep out of my eyes. Christmas morning, somehow, already. “It’s not impossible, Cor,” I said, grabbing her little icy hand and holding it between both of mine. “Not impossible.”