A few minutes later, I stood frozen, because the man on the camera was awake and not awake at the same time, and I did not know which was worse.
The footage showed the father walking into the nursery at three in the morning with a strange, stiff, unhurried gait. He stood over the crib. He rearranged the blankets that did not need rearranging. He picked a toy off the floor and set it on a shelf and then moved it back. His eyes, when the camera caught them, were open and completely empty. Then he turned and walked out as mechanically as he had come, and the whole time his face never changed at all.
It was the emptiness in his eyes that had me packing. There is nothing more frightening than a familiar person who is not quite there.
But when I mentioned, as lightly as I could, that I had heard him up in the night, the mother sighed the sigh of a woman who has explained this before. He sleepwalks. He has done it since he was a boy. Stress makes it worse, and a new baby is nothing but stress, however sweet. He has no memory of any of it in the morning. None. The stiff walk, the blank eyes, the tidying of a room that did not need tidying, all of it happens while he is fast asleep, and he wakes with no idea he ever left the bed.
The hollow figure I had been so afraid of was only a tired man whose body wandered to his baby even when his mind had gone off the clock entirely.
In the morning he made coffee and joked like always, honestly not knowing the camera, or anyone, had watched him drift through the house all night. I smiled back, a little embarrassed at how quickly I had thought the worst.
I did not pack my bag. But I did quietly worry, because sleepwalking near a staircase and a crib is not nothing, and a body that wanders is a body that can fall. So I brought it up, kindly, and it turned out no one had ever really pushed him to have it looked at. I helped the mother book the appointment. A sleep clinic saw him, sorted out the worst of it, gave him small changes that made the nights calmer, and put a simple gate at the top of the stairs so a sleeping man could not come to harm.
The wandering has mostly stopped now. Now and then, still, on a hard week, I will hear those slow careful footsteps in the dark. I get up. I steer him gently back to his room by the elbow, and he goes, obedient as a child, and remembers nothing. And every time, on the way, he pauses at the nursery door, even in his sleep, to be sure his baby is there. Even switched off, the man cannot stop being a father.
