“Your house looks pretty,” I told her, trying to be polite. The house was a rambling farmhouse, the clapboards tired and old. I had not been inside it, but I had lived my whole life in Vermont and knew that the inside was most likely a series of small, dark rooms and a second floor with claustrophobically low ceilings. I had a sense that the family had bought it mostly for the land for the horses, and for the fencing that was already here.
“Hah!” She turned to her son and asked, “Eric, would you like to show Paige the keep?”
“Okay.”
“A keep?” I asked.
“It’s the castle within the castle: the final defense. It’s not done here. I had a much stronger castle keep in our old house,” Eric said, and he looked a little annoyed when he explained that he had a more finished keep back in Saratoga Springs.
“I’m okay here,” said Paige, and she motioned at her glass of lemonade.
“It’s his bedroom,” Cristina said to me, her tone almost confidential.
“I’m using Clara’s caparison for the entrance. But I used it even before she died,” Eric told us. “It has our colors.”
“What’s a—”
“It’s the fancy draping a horse wears during a joust,” Cristina’s mother explained before I had even finished my question.
“Or any tournament,” Eric corrected her.
“Sounds cool,” I said. Then I turned to my sister. “Why don’t you go see it, Paige?” I knew that the last thing in the world Paige wanted was to be alone with this boy. But I was afraid it would be rude not to go. There was a pause that probably lasted no more than a couple of seconds, but it felt like hours to me.
“Sure,” said Paige finally, the reluctance in her voice obvious to me, but I hoped not to Eric’s mom.
The boy rose, taking his thick book with him. Paige followed, but she glanced back at me once, her eyes narrow and the message clear: you owe me big-time, Big Sister.
When they were gone, Cristina reached over and topped off my lemonade and murmured, “I grew up in North Carolina. We take our lemonade very seriously.”
“You don’t have any accent at all,” I said, and instantly regretted the remark. I was afraid that I had sounded condescending and rude.
“I grew up in Durham,” she said, as if that explained everything. She didn’t sound as if she felt insulted.
“I like Eric,” I said, hoping to move beyond my observation about her accent. “He seems like a very nice boy.”
“He is. I wish I could read how much he misses the horses.”
“I bet he misses them a lot.”
“Clara and Marnie were very good for him. I do know that.”
“I bet they were.”
“We all have our quirks, don’t we?”
“I know I do,” I answered, trying to be agreeable. Again I felt a twinge of unease. It grew more pronounced when Cristina sat back and folded her arms across her chest.
“When I was at the general store this morning,” she began, “that chatty woman who works there—you know, the one at the deli counter?—said your mom had a really quirky experience this summer.”
I knew instantly what was coming. Our house was in the center of the village, and word spread quickly that the massive hydrangea before the bay window in the front of our house had been spray-painted silver. Plenty of our neighbors passed it when they drove through Bartlett, and others made special detours to see it. My father eventually had cut away most of the branches, and I thought it unlikely the tree was going to live. And so I wasn’t surprised that Peggy Woodward, the gossip who worked at the store, had reported my mother’s sleepwalking; I was, however, a little taken aback that Cristina Holbrook had been willing to bring it up.
“The hydrangea and my mom’s sleepwalking?” I volunteered. There was really no reason to be evasive or coy.
“Yes! I find that so interesting.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
“Oh, I agree. I just found it kind of amazing. She really had no idea that she had done it—spray-painted a tree?”
“Nope.”
“And no idea why?”
“Not a clue.”
Cristina shook her head and said, “As a little boy, Eric sometimes woke up in his sleep and didn’t recognize us.”
“I know that can happen.”
“The pediatrician said it happens with lots of little kids. They outgrow it—which Eric did. Did it ever happen to you or your sister?”
I nodded. “It happened to me. Not Paige. I outgrew it, too.”
“Good,” she said. “Good.” She took a sip of lemonade and went on. “Your father is a professor. English, right?”
“That’s right.”
“My husband is new to the college. It’s why we moved here. He’s in the development office.”
“What do you do?”
Her gaze went distant. “I ride horses. I raise my son.”
“Will you get more horses?”
“I don’t know. This house kind of swamped our savings, and horses aren’t cheap. But I’m hoping to figure something out.”
We chatted for another fifteen minutes, and I told her what I thought she might find interesting about Bartlett and Vermont. I had loved growing up in the village and tried to make it sound as appealing as possible, because the death of her horses had to have been the worst introduction to the area imaginable. Eventually, Paige reappeared alone, her face a little pleading. “We should get to the store before it closes,” she said to me.
“Everything okay, Paige?” asked Cristina, rising. I stood, too.
“Uh-huh.”
The woman walked past Paige and into the house, and Paige and I followed. When my sister and I made eye contact, she swirled her index finger around her ear, the universal way we dismiss someone as crazy. I knew she was referring to Eric.
We went to the boy’s bedroom. Instead of a door, there was the horse’s red-and-white cloth caparison. It was pinned to the top of the frame. The walls were cardboard bricks from the floor to the ceiling, and even the two windows were mostly covered with them. There were but thin slits from which to peer out. There was a massive coat of arms above his wooden headboard, with eagles and sabers on a purple-and-gold shield. On two wooden shelves were medieval soldiers, all beautifully colored and perhaps two inches tall. He was arranging them when we got there, comfortable and content and utterly at peace with the world.
*
My father left for Los Angeles and the Huntington Library, where Wallace Stevens’s papers were archived. He was thinking of writing a biography of the poet, but first he was going to test the water with an article for a scholarly journal. It was the week before the fall semester was about to start, and so he was going to be gone only three days—but he said that was plenty for his purposes. If he did decide to write the book, he would return to L.A. for a longer period.
Certainly it had crossed all of our minds (even Paige’s, I suppose) that Annalee Ahlberg might once again rise in her sleep like the undead and do something a little odd. It was August, so we were not worried about her going for a ski in the woods, but it was certainly possible there were other trees or shrubs that her sleeping self wanted to decorate.
“Should I put the paints in the basement under lock and key?” my father had asked, only half kidding, and my mother had laughed.
When I was little, before Paige was born, my mother had worked for a large architectural firm in Burlington. Now she worked alone so she could choose her own hours and be there for my sister and me. Some days she even worked from home. My father did not travel much, either: an occasional academic conference, a little research for an article or a book—he had published two, both biographies of American poets—but he was never gone for more than a few nights at a time.
I thought of the way Cristina had referred to my mother’s sleepwalking: a quirk. That was an apt word. That was how we viewed it.
None of us worried all that much that Warren Ahlberg was go
ing to be in California for a few nights in August. I experienced nothing like the premonition I had felt the day that Cristina Holbrook’s horses had died.
*
My mother invited Cristina and Eric to our house for dinner the first night our father was away. She’d invited Eric’s father, too, but he was at an alumni function and didn’t join us. When they arrived, my mother put my sister and Eric to work shucking the fresh corn, and the two of them sat in the glider swing on the front porch with a tray between them for the corn and a brown paper grocery bag on the floor for the husks and silk. I went to help because I could see that Paige was not pleased with the way she had once again been paired with the new kid who was fixated on jousting and alchemists.
“I might apply to Skidmore,” I said to Eric, leaning against the railing. I hated talking about college and the process of applying, but I wanted to find something that might interest Eric that didn’t involve castles, and this thread combined both his family and his old home. “I thought it was a really pretty campus. I have no idea if I could get in, but I really liked it. I liked Saratoga Springs. Do you miss it?”
He worked a cob free and was now meticulously pulling each piece of silk from the ear of corn, a single thread at a time. Paige was transfixed by his focus on the task. Of course, she might just as easily have grown fixated on my rambling monologue. I tended to babble when I was nervous, my words the gas that fills the empty container.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I know I’d miss it,” I went on, and Paige turned from Eric to me.
“Gee, would you miss it, Lianna?” she asked, smiling.
“In the Middle Ages, people never moved. You lived your whole life in the same place,” said Eric. “Unless you were a warrior or a knight. Then you might be gone your whole life.”
On the tray between the youngsters were nine ears of husked corn, every one of them placed there by Paige. Eric still had that first ear in his hand. Paige looked at it and said, “I think that’s done.”
He shook his head and kept working, fixated on a thread near the tip. Paige rolled her eyes and took the tray with the rest of the corn into the kitchen, leaving me alone with the boy on the porch.
*
After dinner, my mother said, “Paige, do you want to show Eric your trampoline?”
The sun was setting, but it was still light enough for Paige to do her wild-woman thing on the trampoline. Her athletic skills already were evident, and though she viewed herself as a skier, she was capable of front and back somersaults, backflips, and multiple twists on the trampoline. It was round and had a twenty-five-foot diameter, and it dominated our backyard in the summer.
“I don’t feel like the trampoline tonight,” she answered.
“Want to show him your Gooey Louie?” Gooey Louie was a more grotesque version of the classic game “Operation,” but instead of removing organs and bones with a pair of tweezers without causing the sides to buzz, you had to extract boogers from inside Louie’s nose. Eventually, someone pulls out the booger that causes the brain to explode. It was ridiculous and tended to grow old fast, but the premise itself was enough to make Paige squeal with genuine delight when she was in the right mood.
“Nope.”
When my mother saw that she was going to have no success encouraging Paige to be a hostess to her new classmate, she glared ever so slightly at my sister. But Paige was always an immovable object when she wanted to be. So I said to the boy, “I’m going to jump around on it. Come with me.”
“Can we go to the river instead?” he asked.
“Sure,” I agreed. The Gale River ran across the street from our house. It was never a burbling brook, hence its name, especially when melting snow and summer thunderstorms would create a magnificent torrent of white water and foam—and it had rained plenty that August. The river was froth and speed, and Paige and her friends sometimes would stand by the railing on the bridge in the village and toss sticks into the water and watch them jerked west toward Lake Champlain. There had even been times over the years when the Gale had overflowed its banks and savaged the county—one year taking out a steel bridge that had stood for decades, another year flooding our small library and turning the children’s books into unreadable sponges—but the river bent away from our house and we’d never even had water in our basement.
“Want to come with us, Paige?” I asked.
There was a beat while we all waited. Finally, she pushed herself from the table and mumbled, “Okay.”
We watched the water and tossed in a few sticks and clusters of leaves from the riverbank. It was all very congenial.
*
The next day my mother told me that the backhoe that had dug the graves for the Holbrooks’ horses was gone. She had noticed when she was returning from Middlebury.
“How worried were you really that we might have been electrocuted?” I asked her. “Were we really close enough that we might have been in trouble?”
She was unpacking groceries in the kitchen. “I don’t know. When I told you to get in the car and we drove off, it was kind of a maternal reflex. I probably overreacted. We might have been fine.”
“But the horses…that’s scary.”
She leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “I want you to help me with Paige.”
“What about her?”
“I want her to look out for Eric when school starts. Someone has to, and Paige is popular and Paige is a leader. I don’t want that child bullied.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said. “I told Paige the same thing after Ethan’s birthday party.”
“You don’t think Paige will protect him?”
“I don’t know if it would make a difference if she did. The kids who pick on Ethan Gollner are going to pick on him, and the kids like Ethan Gollner are going to pick on him. The boy is toast.”
“Well, with that attitude, maybe. But I expect more from you and I expect more from Paige.”
“Okay,” I agreed, “I’ll talk to her again.” But my heart wasn’t in it. Outside, I saw once again that it was starting to rain. My heart sank inexplicably at the sight of the drops on the windowpane.
*
I awoke that night to the sound of the river, full from two days of rain, reassuring and lush. A distant echo from the womb. The roll of the blood in our mother’s veins when we are in utero. I looked at the clock. It wasn’t yet midnight. I’d been asleep barely an hour.
For a moment I gazed out the window and watched the last wisps of clouds pass the full moon. That summer my mind roamed mostly between the boys that interested me and the parts of my body that I feared were inadequate. I hated my hips. This may have been another way that angst was dogging me that August, but the truth was I hated my hips even when the world felt gentle and safe and kind. I pondered a new approach to an old magic trick that I thought I might incorporate into my routine. I thought of Eric and the dead horses, and of my mother’s determination that Paige look out for the boy. And I thought of my mother and her two strange—yes, quirky—sleepwalking events.
Whenever I awoke in the night that summer, regardless of how deeply I had been sleeping or how real the dream, soon enough I would think of her. It was inevitable. And that night it was especially likely because my father wasn’t home, which meant that she was alone in their bedroom.
We knew far less about sleepwalking then than we know now. Sleep specialists knew some of the triggers—exhaustion, stress, select medications—but research into the role of chemical messengers in parasomnia was still in its infancy. Besides, that August night my mother had yet to visit the sleep center at the university hospital in Burlington. We hadn’t reached the stage yet where we even viewed her sleepwalking as an ailment for which there might be a treatment, other than those long, languid baths that had become a part of her nighttime ritual.
I climbed from beneath the sheet in which I was sleeping and walked down the dark second-floor corridor. I wasn’t worried; after all, it had been month
s since she had spray-painted the hydrangea, and last night—the first night my father was gone—she had slept uneventfully until morning. Nevertheless, I wanted to be reassured that she was still home. Still in bed.
She wasn’t. I stared for a moment into my parents’ own moonlit bedroom, at the emptiness of their queen-sized bed, at the bedding that had been pushed to the foot. When I had passed the top of the stairs on the way there, I’d noticed that the first floor looked dark, but now I held out hope that my mother might be in one of the rooms far from the front hall: our father’s small study, perhaps, or the den with the sole television in the house. And so I checked on my sister, saw she was sound asleep in her bed, and tiptoed down the stairs so I wouldn’t wake her.
“Mom?” It was a stage whisper into the shadows of the front hall. I flipped on the overhead light, even then a little scared of the dark, and checked the kitchen, then the living room, then the den. They were empty. I stood at the top of the stairs that led to the unfinished basement—the dirt floor with the concrete pad for the washer and dryer—and called down into the blackness in a voice loud enough that my mother would hear but too soft to awaken my kid sister upstairs: “Mom? You there?”
But she wasn’t. I knew that.
I grabbed a flashlight from the utility drawer and went outside. I slept that summer in gym shorts and a T-shirt, and the night air was chillier than I’d expected and the grass was damp beneath my feet. I went first to the hydrangea, the scene of my mother’s arboreal carnage, and then to the carriage barn where my parents parked their cars. My father’s, of course, was gone because he had driven to the airport the other day. I was relieved to see that my mother’s was still there.
For a long moment I stood in our driveway, gazing up at that wondrous moon and the sea of summer stars, wondering what I should do. But in the end there really wasn’t a choice. I went back inside and scribbled a brief note for Paige, and left it at the top of the stairs in the event she woke up. Then I grabbed a hoodie that was hanging from the coat rack by the front door and zipped it partway up. I would leave my kid sister alone in the house and go try to find our mother. I knew this was irresponsible: Paige was precocious, but she hadn’t even started third grade yet. I feared, however, that it was far worse to leave my mother to her own devices when the sleepwalker inside her was in control, especially during this odd, strange summer of dread.