For
almost two full years after my wife died, I slept with my daughter.
Obviously, this wasn't Abby's idea (and I think, even if it were,
as her father I'd insist now on taking responsibility). After all,
she was only two when the dairy delivery truck slammed into her
mother's Subaru wagon and drove the mass of chrome and rubber and
glass down the embankment and into the shallow river that ran along
the side of the road.

In all fairness, of course, it wasn't my idea either. At least the
two years part. I'd never have done it once if I'd realized it
would go on for so long.

But about a week after Elizabeth's funeral, when Abby and I were
just starting to settle into the routine that would become our
life, I think the concept that Mommy really and truly wasn't coming
back became a tangible reality in my little girl's mind --- more
real, perhaps, than the lunch box I packed every night for day
care, or the stuffed animals that lined the side of her bed against
the wall. It happened after midnight. She awoke and called for
Mommy and I came instead, and I believe that's exactly when
something clicked inside her head: There is no Mommy. Not
tonight, not tomorrow, not ever again.

And so she had started to howl.

Forty-five minutes later, she was still sobbing, and my arms had
become lead wings from holding her and rocking her and pacing the
room with her head on my shoulder. I think that's when I paced out
the door of her room and into mine. Into what had been my wife's
and my room. There I placed her upon Elizabeth's side of the bed,
pulled the quilt up to her chin, and wrapped one pajamaed arm
around her small, heaving back. And there, almost abruptly, she
fell asleep. Sound asleep. Boom, out like a light.

Later I decided it was the simple smell of her mother on the
pillowcase that had done the trick. I hadn't changed the sheets on
the bed in the week and a half since Elizabeth had died.

Of course, it might also have been the mere change of venue. Maybe
Abby
understood that she wasn't going to be left alone that night in
that bed; she knew I wasn't going to kiss her once on her forehead
and then go someplace else to doze.

The next night it all happened again, and it happened almost
exactly the same way. I awoke when I heard her cries in the dark
and went to her room, and once again I murmured "Shhhhhh" by her
ear until the single syllable sounded like the sea in my head,
while Abby just sobbed and sobbed through the waves. Finally I
navigated the hallway of the house like a sleepwalker, my little
girl in my arms, and placed her upon what had been Elizabeth's side
of the bed, her head atop what had been Elizabeth's pillow.

This time as I lay down beside her I realized that I was tearing,
too, and I was relieved that she'd fallen instantly asleep. The
very last thing she needed was the knowledge that Daddy was crying
with her.

Was the third night an exact replica of nights one and two?
Probably. But there my memory grows fuzzy. Had Abby asked me at
dinner that evening if she could sleep yet again in Mommy and
Daddy's room? In my room, perhaps? Or had I just carried her
upstairs one evening at eight o'clock --- after dinner and her
bath, after we'd watched one of her videos together in the den,
Abby curled up in my lap--and decided to read to her in my room
instead of hers? I haven't a clue. All I know is that at some point
our routine changed, and I was putting Abby to sleep in my bed
before coming back downstairs to wash the dinner dishes and make
sure her knapsack was packed for day care the next day: Her lunch,
a juice box, two sets of snacks. Extra underpants in case of an
accident, as well as an extra pair of pants. A sweater eight or
nine months of the year. The doll of the moment. Tissues. Lip balm
when she turned three and developed a taste for cherry Chap
Stick.

I rarely came upstairs before eleven-thirty at night because I had
my own work to tend to after I'd put Abby's life in order ---
depositions and motions and arguments, the legal desiderata that
was my life--but once I was in bed, invariably I would quickly doze
off. The bed was big, big enough for me and my daughter and the
stuffed animals and trolls and children's books that migrated one
by one from her room to mine. And I reasoned that after all Abby
had been through and would yet have to endure, it was only fair for
me to give her whatever it took to make her feel safe and sleep
soundly.

Occasionally, I'd wake in the middle of the night to find Abby
sitting up in bed with her legs crossed. She'd be staring at me in
the glow of the night-light and smiling, and often she'd giggle
when she'd see my eyes open.

"Let's play Barbie," she'd say. Or, "Can we do puzzles?"

"It's the middle of the night, punkin," I'd say.

"I'm not sleepy."

"Well, I am."

"Pleeeeeeeease?"

"Okay, you can. But you can't turn on the light."

In the morning, I'd see she'd fallen back to sleep at the foot of
the bed with a Barbie in one hand and a plastic troll in the other.
Or she'd fallen asleep while looking at the pictures in one of her
books, the book open upon her chest as if she were really quite
adult.

I learned early that she would sleep through my music alarm in the
morning.
And so I would usually get up at five-thirty to shower and shave,
so that I
could devote from six-thirty to seven-thirty to getting her dressed
and fed, her teeth brushed, and a good number (though never all) of
the snarls dislodged from her fine, hay-colored hair. I usually had
her at the day care in the village by twenty to eight, and so most
days I was at my desk between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty.

I think it was a few weeks after Abby's fourth birthday, when she
was taking a bath and I was on the floor beside the tub skimming
the newspaper as she pushed a small menagerie of toy sharks and sea
lions and killer whales around in the water, that I looked up and
saw she was standing. She was placing one of the whales in the soap
dish along the wall, and I realized all of her baby fat was gone.
At some point she had ceased to be a toddler, and in my head I
heard the words, It's time to move out, kid. We're getting into
a weird area here.

The next morning at breakfast I broached the notion that she return
to the
bedroom in which she'd once slept, and which still housed her
clothes and all of the toys that weren't residing at that moment on
my bed. Our bed. The bigger bed. And she'd been fine. At first I'd
feared on some level her feelings were hurt, or she was afraid she
had done something wrong. But then I understood she was simply
digesting the idea, envisioning herself in a bed by herself.

"And you'll still be in your room?" she asked me.

"Of course."

That night she slept alone for the first time in almost
twenty-three months, and the next morning it seemed to me that she
had done just fine. When I went to her room at six-thirty, she was
already wide awake. She was sitting up in bed with the light on,
and it was clear she'd been reading her picture books for at least
half an hour. The pile of books beside her was huge.

I, on the other hand, wasn't sure how well I had done. I'd woken up
in the night with a cold --- what I have since come to call
the cold. A runny nose, watery eyes. A sore throat. The
predictable symptoms of a profoundly common ailment, the
manifestations of a disease that decades of bad ad copy have made
us believe is wholly benign. Unpleasant but treatable, if you just
know what to buy.

There was, in my mind, no literal connection between evicting my
daughter and getting sick, no cause and effect. But it was indeed a
demarcation of sorts. The cold came on in the middle of that night,
the cold that --- unlike every cold I'd ever had before--would not
respond to the prescription-strength, over-the-counter tablets and
capsules and pills that filled my medicine chest.

The cold that oozy gel caps couldn't smother, and nighttime liquids
couldn't drown.

Indeed, things began spiraling around me right about then. Not that
night, of course, and not even the next day. It actually took
months. But when I look back on all that I risked --- when I look
back on the litany of bad decisions I made --- it seems to me that
everything started that night with that cold: the very night my
daughter slept alone in her room for the first time in two
years.

Excerpted from THE LAW OF SIMILARS © Copyright 2002 by
Christopher Bohjalian. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All
rights reserved.