Once she fell asleep, I kissed her forehead, and crept out, leaving the door open a crack in case she woke up again.
Dominic and Jayne sat at the kitchen table, talking quietly, and they gave me hopeful smiles as I entered.
“She’s out for the count,” I told them. “I think she tired herself out.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jayne said. “She certainly knows how to scream.”
“I wish I knew what happened in those nightmares. She won’t tell.”
“When she woke up, she said there was a stranger in her room,” Dominic said. “At first she kept saying, ‘Make her go away,’ then she started screaming for you.”
Maybe the Disney movies she loved which emphasised wicked stepmothers, combined with her fear of who would take care of her in New York had led to her bad dreams.
I’d had a few similar nightmares myself.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Jayne asked, standing up. “I was about to put the kettle on.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll head home. I’m tired now.”
“I understand,” Jayne replied, with a smile. “But you’ll come round sometime this week, won’t you? It’s been a long time since we’ve had a good natter!”
“Of course. I’ll give you a ring, and we’ll arrange a time.”
Jayne gave me another hug, and Dominic said, “Do you need a lift home?”
“Yes please, if you don’t mind leaving Tilly.”
“She’ll be fine with mum for a while. I’ll take you.”
The silence in Dominic’s car as he drove me home made me nervous. When he offered me a lift, I assumed he had something he wanted to say. Scratch that. I knew he had something to say by the way he focused so intently on the road. He’d driven these streets a million times, it didn’t need such a high level of concentration. He was thinking. My heart began to pound, slowly at first, but by the time he pulled up outside my parents’ house, it was hammering to the point where I thought I might require a trip to A&E.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, trying not to look at him.
“Thank you for coming over.”
“No problem. I’m glad Tilly’s feeling better now.”
I reached down to unclip my seatbelt, but Dominic put his hand over mine, forcing me to look up at him.
“I realised something tonight,” he said. His voice was shaky, his breath a little ragged. “I realised that I don’t know how to look after my own daughter. I don’t know how to make the nightmares go away, I don’t know how to calm her down. I forgot to pack her monkey.”
“Dom-”
“I should know these things, Madison. But I don’t. I don’t know a thing about her.”
“That’s not true,” I told him. “And the things you don’t know, you can learn.”
“She’s going to be six next week! I should know them by now!”
He slammed his hands against the steering wheel, then leaned his head against it.
A picture of despair.
“I watched you with her tonight,” he said, after a while. “I saw you holding her hand, stroking her hair. Talking to her about your toy dog, and listening to every word she said, even though it was coming out in a tired jumble. You always know the right things to say to her. I don’t know how to do that.”
Resting my hand on his shoulder, I said, “It takes time. You can’t just have a kid and expect to know what they’re thinking or how they feel if you’re not always around. They change and grow up so quickly. If you turn away even for a minute, they’ve learned something new.”
“Everything she learned, she learned from you. She tells me. Every night on the phone, and when I come home, she tells me about the things you’ve done together.”