“Luca? Anna?”
“She started screaming and nothing I did helped. And now…”
Greta took her from my arms, turning on her overhead light to examine her. “Airways are fine. No fever.” She pulled up the back of her diaper. “Not dirty.”
“So what’s wrong with her?” I asked, feeling fit to be tied.
“Nothing now. Probably a bad dream.”
“A bad dream made her scream like that? She’s never done that before.”
Greta shrugged. “She is growing. Her brain is developing all the time. Something she saw likely stuck with her and came back as a nightmare.” I frowned, trying to think of anything I’d shown her that would cause such an extreme reaction. “When you were little, child of light, you had night terrors. You tried to climb up the walls to get away from whatever had frightened you.”
I scratched my head. I could recall some nightmares, but climbing the walls?
“You probably will not remember,” Greta said as if knowing what I was thinking. “You were no more than two. Not much older than Anna is now. She may have inherited this from you.”
Then I remembered. “Gabriel brought in a doll for her. Could that h
ave been it?”
“Perhaps. Is something about it scary?” Greta asked.
“It’s a doll. All dolls are kind of creepy, don’t you think?”
And the woman who’d taken care of me, my brothers, and Anna tilted her head back and laughed out loud. I felt a frisson of awareness from behind me and had this impulse to reach out and connect to it. To Molly. I turned to see her smiling before she broke out into laughter, too.
“What’s so funny?” I wanted to know.
“You,” Molly said, her face wreathed with merriment.
“Why me?”
“You’re this big bad mobster guy, but you’re afraid of dolls,” Molly told me, then gave another peal of laughter.
Greta hadn’t stopped laughing yet. She leaned over my daughter, tickling her on the tummy. “Is Daddy silly? Is he?”
Molly joined our nanny, using a similar singsong voice. “Daddy’s silly, huh? So silly.”
I might’ve gotten a bit irritated at them laughing at my expense, except Anna started to giggle along with them. She’d giggled before, of course, and I’d always loved the sound. And after the scare I’d just had, hearing it sounded better to my ears than about anything I could imagine. So I jumped in, too, so relieved I didn’t care if I looked like a total doofus.
I leaned over her, pulled up her onesie and blew on her belly. My daughter wiggled around, blue eyes sparkling, giggling as loud as she’d cried a little bit ago. “Yep, Daddy’s silly,” I said, smiling widely at her. Everyone’s laughter was contagious, and soon we were all standing there over Anna laughing our asses off.
After the four of us came back to earth, my daughter yawned, reminding us of the late hour. “Sorry I woke you two up,” I said. “She scared the bejesus out of me.”
“Don’t you dare apologize to me, Luca Antonio Varasso. This is what I am here for,” Greta told me, stern and affectionate as always. I hugged her.
“Parenthood is just this never-ending, stroke-inducing heart attack, isn’t it?” Molly asked, a strange tone in her voice I couldn’t identify.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I huffed out another chuckle. Anna was my world, but sometimes I thought maybe a warning label saying only the most adventurous should apply.
“No, parenthood is a gift, pure and simple,” Greta corrected me. My brothers and I all knew her story. She’d had her own child, a boy, long before any of us had been born and had lost him before his first birthday. What we didn’t know was how she’d lost him or why. Any time we dared to ask, she’d cried.
So we stopped asking.
“That’s true,” I agreed.
When Anna started to nod off, I lifted her back into my arms. “Time for bed, sweetness,” I said on a yawn. But then, sleep often eluding me was my norm.