“I thought you looked pretty good out there,” I told Paige as we were driving home that afternoon.
“Your goggles must have been fogged up. Or you couldn’t see in the glare. I sucked.”
I was a little startled. “You didn’t suck.”
“I’ll be better on Tuesday,” she said. That was the day when the team would have its next practice. Then she asked me, “So who really gave you the posies?” She had brought up the flowers out of the blue to try and catch me off guard; I knew her well enough to know how her mind worked.
“I told you,” I answered blandly. “I treated myself. I treated us.”
“I don’t think so. I think whoever brought them is the same person who left his sunglasses at our house. The Ray-Bans sitting right now by Mom’s knives.”
A little flutter of panic rolled over me, and instantly I started rummaging in my mind for names I could claim had been in our kitchen. But I drew a blank and said nothing. I kept my eyes on the tortuous two-lane road down from the mountain so I wouldn’t have to look at my sister.
“Not even going to lie, eh?” she said, and then she laughed. “Feeling a little busted?”
“Only a little.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please?”
She must have sensed I was weakening. She turned off the radio.
“Fine,” I said. “But don’t tell Dad.”
“I won’t.”
“One of the detectives investigating Mom’s death gave me the flowers. A guy with BCI—”
“BCI?”
“Bureau of Criminal Investigation. A part of the state police.”
“A state trooper?”
“Sort of.”
“And he was at our house yesterday?”
“That’s right,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether she was a little floored because I was seeing a cop or because the cop had been at our home. But when she spoke next, I understood it was the latter that had caused her voice to rise ever so slightly in astonishment.
“Why? What happened? Did they learn something new?” she asked.
“No. He came by to bring me the flowers.”
“That’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough dish for one car ride?”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
“Actually, I hadn’t seen him in a while. I thought we were over. But then he showed up with the flowers and I guess we’re not.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gavin.”
“Gavin what?”
“Rikert.”
“Is he old?”
“No!” I didn’t take my eyes off the road, but I knew she was smirking. “You talked to him the day Mom disappeared.”
“I talked to so many people.”
“I know. We both did,” I agreed.
“He was at the funeral, wasn’t he?” I could hear in her voice the way she was putting his name to a face.
“Yup.”
“Any special reason why you don’t want Dad to know?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a little weird that we’re dating. I guess it happens sometimes. But, also, he and Mom were friends…sort of.”
“Friends,” she murmured, as if she were trying the word out. Then: “What kind of friends?”
“It’s complicated. They were—”
“Okay, that’s just gross,” she said, interrupting me. “Are you really about to tell me that our mom had an affair, and now you’re dating the guy? The same guy? Seriously? If so, then you are responsible for the most puke-worthy thing in the history of the world.”
“It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Then what was it like? Explain it to me.”
“First of all, Mom was not having an affair with him,” I told her. “Okay? She loved Dad.”
“Go on.”
“Second, they were friends from the sleep center.”
“Is he a sleepwalker, too?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you mean by ‘friends’?”
“Just that. They had coffee a couple of times to compare notes about their sleepwalking.”
“Okay, so you’re involved with something that’s puke-worthy—but not historically so.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked.
“God, haven’t you had enough of sleepwalking?”
“Sleepwalking doesn’t define him any more than it defined Mom.”
She put the heels of her feet on the seat and wrapped her arms around her ski pants. “Did he say anything more to you about the investigation? I’m sure he did.”
We reached the bottom of the hill and the traffic that invariably formed at the stop sign this time of the day in November: a long line of salt-splattered cars with skis and snowboards in roof racks. “Yeah, he did,” I confessed. “But don’t get your hopes up. It was nothing really helpful.”
“Tell me.”
“He thinks maybe she jumped off the bridge. She jumped off the bridge and hit her head on a rock, but she wasn’t killed right away. That’s why she didn’t drown.”
I expected her to say something right away, but she didn’t. I turned to her. She was staring straight ahead and she looked grim. “You’re right. That’s not very helpful,” she said finally, her voice soft and throaty. “But it is awful. Just…awful.”
I nudged our mother’s car forward and waited once more. “You, okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Then: “I mean, that’s something we both guessed might have happened. It’s just a horrible way to die.”
“Yup.”
“So, Mom wasn’t murdered. Is that what they’re saying now?”
“Well, they’re not saying anything. That’s just the guess of one detective.”
She sighed and stared out her window. At the corner was a log cabin diner and sandwich shop that catered to skiers.
“You want anything?” I asked. “A hot chocolate?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe some popcorn to munch on?”
“No,” she said, a yawn interrupting and elongating that one small syllable. “I just want to go home.” Then she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
Would it have made any difference if Paige had told our father about Gavin? Would it have made any difference if I had?
I used to wonder about this, playing out the cause and effect that either of us might have unleashed, the alternate ways our family’s tensile core might have been fractured. When I would be awake in the small hours of the night, I’d speculate that something might have changed had either of us, for different reasons, told our father then that I was seeing the detective. A grown-up—someone more grown up than I was at twenty-one—would have done something.
But as I stared out the window at the night sky or at the dark ceiling above me, I could never see what that something might have been. What is the opposite of postponing the inevitable? Prepone? Expedite? Hasten? Eventually, I came to the vaguely Calvinist certainty that telling our father would only have accelerated our fate. It would, in fact, have changed nothing. After all, by then the die had been cast.
IT WAS DARK and macabre, but I made deals. Think Kübler-Ross. I would say, it’s okay if I have sleep sex, just so long as I don’t get out of bed. Please, I would pray, whatever I do, let it be only in this room.
Because most of the damage that I did and most of the pain that I caused happened when I left the room. When I got out of bed. Despite all the nocturnal hypersexuality they filmed, they never captured what I was really capable of—because that would have meant following me out into the night.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
OVER THANKSGIVING, WHILE visiting our grandparents in Concord, Paige and I watched a stack of VHS cassettes of my family. Our mother had brought them to Massachusetts the last time we had had Thanksgiving here so she could share them with her parents. The two of us watched them on Thursday night, long after we ha
d finished dinner and everyone else—including my aunt and uncle and our cousins—had retreated to their bedrooms to read or sleep. My father was in almost none of the short videos, because he was usually the one behind the camcorder. So, it was mostly my mother and Paige and me on the TV screen. There was my mother dipping me in a blue kiddie pool I vaguely recalled in our backyard, and there were all three Ahlberg females at Disney World in front of Peter Pan’s Flight: above and behind us was the crocodile with his Victorian lantern and rows of dagger-like teeth. (Our father zoomed in on him and made the iconic tick-tock sounds with his tongue.) There we were hiking Camel’s Hump one year and Snake Mountain another. There we were skiing. There I was doing a magic trick at a middle school variety show, making the bright-red bowling pins I had given a father and mother from the audience disappear from the tubes they were holding and then reappear in a box at their feet.
In the end, the experience was far more wrenching than looking at the images in the photo albums had been: the sound of Annalee Ahlberg’s voice wrecked my sister and me. When we had started to watch, mostly we had been laughing at the memories and making jokes about our parents or how we were dressed. But the experience grew sad fast. Soon we were watching in almost absolute silence; without saying a word, one of us would eject the cassette when it was over and put another one in. We no longer looked at each other, both of us lost in our private yearnings for our mother—a need for her that was almost like food after days and days without eating. I know I cried myself to sleep that night, and I think it is likely that my sister did, too.
My father and I were cleaning up the kitchen and loading my grandparents’ dishwasher after breakfast on Black Friday. “Are you still nervous about having to spend a night wired in a couple of weeks?” he asked me, referring to the sleep center.
We were alone in the kitchen. I had been leaning over, lining up plates in the bottom rack. I stood up. “Yes. I think I’m going to hate it,” I told him. “I think it’s going to be awful.”
“No. I told you, even your mother fell asleep.” He was drying the skillet in which our aunt had made scrambled eggs. After a long moment he said, “The night your mother died…”
I waited.
“Did I ever tell you about our last phone call?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did she?”
“You mean before she went to sleep?”
He nodded.
“She didn’t,” I answered. “I guess I figured you two talked that night. But Mom never said anything.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“I was busy at the conference. I was presenting an important paper the next day—at least I was supposed to. And I was seeing people that night. When I think about our very last conversation, I’ve always been afraid that I was a little short.”
I was moved that he wanted to get this off his chest and had selected me as his confessor: I hated to think of him living with that regret. But I also felt a small pang of anger that he had been—as he put it—short with my mother. And that might have been that, those two reactions jostling for my attention. But then he asked two more questions in rapid succession that left me as unsettled as ever.
“So she never said a word to you about our conversation that night?” he asked once more.
“No.”
“And you never said a word to the police?”
“No,” I repeated. “There was nothing to say. Why?”
He sighed. “No reason, really. I just don’t want them to think any worse of me than they already must.” Then he added, “I hate platitudes. I really do. But sometimes I believe we would all be better off if we always treated people like this was the last time we were ever going to see them.”
“God, what would your mother have done if she’d had boys?” my grandfather said to me that afternoon. We were standing outside a gallery near the corner of Newbury and Fairfield in Boston. He was smiling as he peered into the gallery window and pointing at an oil painting of a woman in her early thirties from the 1920s surrounded by her three children—all boys, which was what had triggered his observation in the first place.
“She would have figured it out,” I said lightly, but recalling my mother with pride. “You know your daughter. She would have figured boys out just fine.”
It was brisk, and the air was charged with anticipation for most of the people we passed on the street. I hadn’t expected my grandfather to come with us into the city, but my aunt and uncle had offered to stay behind in Concord with my grandmother, and I was pleased. It made the excursion seem a little more festive. It meant that my father and Paige and I weren’t once more left alone to our own devices and private pain.
“You’re right,” my grandfather said. “After all, look how well she did with Paige!” He was joking, of course, a reference to the simple reality that my sister was something of an athletic outlier among us. But boyish? Not Paige. It was an offhand remark about one of his granddaughters that was nonsensical, and maybe another day I would have let it go. Looking back, my father certainly planned to. But I didn’t.
“Since when is it boyish to be a great athlete? Kind of a sexist thing to say, don’t you think, Grandpa?” I asked, and I put my arm around Paige’s shoulder, squeezing it through the down of her parka. I was hoping to convey solidarity, nothing more.
“You’re right! I am showing my age. I’m sorry, Paige,” he said.
But Paige surprised me; she probably surprised us all. She ducked out from under my arm, pulling away swiftly, and stood with her back to the gallery glass. “I don’t need you to defend me,” she snapped, setting her jaw stubbornly. “And I don’t need you to say you’re sorry, Grandpa. I just don’t. Mom…”
“Mom what?” I asked. All of us—my grandfather, my father, and I—waited.
“Mom knew me better than anyone,” she said, and she shook her head, a little disgusted with the three of us. “And I knew her better than anyone.” Then she used her fingers to brush her windblown black hair back behind her ears and glared at us, her head lowered ever so slightly. I almost told her she was beautiful when she was mad—because she was—but I didn’t dare say another word.
The rest of my family returned to Concord late that Friday afternoon, but I stayed in Boston and met my college friend Erica, whose family lived in Brookline; she’d taken the Green Line into town but said she would drive me back to my grandparents’ after we had a drink. She was twenty-one now, too, and it felt very grown-up to be able to meet at a bar in Boston and each of us have a glass of wine. Erica had never been the stoner I was, though she drank considerably more keg beer at college than I ever did. I had seen her once since we had left Amherst in May, and that had been at my mother’s funeral. We hadn’t gotten to speak very much that day; she had driven up from the college that morning and driven back that afternoon.
We met at five thirty outside the bar, arriving there at almost the same moment, and when we peered inside from the doorway we saw beneath a galaxy of Christmas lights that it was packed shoulder to shoulder with raucous people in their twenties and thirties, and it was so loud it would be impossible to have a meaningful conversation. There was no place to sit. We would get hit on by young stockbrokers and young advertising executives, and it was absolutely no place for a real reunion. We left and started walking aimlessly down Boylston toward the library and Copley Square, and it was dusk and the streetlamps were beautiful. It felt like it might snow.
I noticed that Erica didn’t want to talk about college, changing the subject gracefully whenever I mentioned what had once been our shared world. I could tell she felt bad that I wasn’t coming back in the spring: it was as if she were leaving me behind. But when she brought up my mother’s death, trying to deflect my inquiries about her thesis or our mutual friends, I brushed her aside. I needed a respite after last night’s videocassettes and the fact that I had just spent all day with my family. So she actually asked me about my magic, feigning interest in the chil
dren’s parties that—other than Gavin and the local elementary school and the ski slopes—were the only part of my life that existed outside of the red Victorian. I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. My magic, it seemed to me that moment, was ridiculous. Lianna the Enchantress was ridiculous.
“I miss watching you practice!” she insisted, and I thought about all the times I had made her watch me make scarves disappear in ornate little boxes or paper flowers appear in what had been empty glass vases. I stood up straighter as we strolled; suddenly I was afraid I was collapsing in upon myself, shrinking with sadness and loss. I wanted Gavin, I realized, I wanted that feeling of anticipation I had when I knew I was going to see him; I wanted that rush I felt when I was back in his arms.
“I think my sister will have a stroke if she hears me one more time,” I said, and I could sense how remote I sounded.
Erica said nothing in response—really, what was there to say?—and it’s possible that our friendship might have begun to evaporate forever right there on Boylston Street. We had lost all commonality, and now we would just grow apart. But then an empty cab stopped at the traffic light, and Erica abruptly pulled me inside it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“One of my friends from high school is having a party. She has her own apartment now in Cambridge.”
“Really? I won’t know anyone.”
“Doesn’t matter. It will be good for you. It will be good for us.”
The taxi smelled of beer even worse than the bar, and when I looked down I saw why: an empty Heineken bottle was on its side, the last of its contents on the floor mat. When the cabbie accelerated through the light, the bottle rolled against the bottom of the seat and tinkled with a weirdly appropriate holiday-season cheer. The driver heard it, swore in a language I didn’t recognize, and stopped at the next red light. There he climbed out, opened the back door, and grabbed the bottle with the urgency of a mother plucking a child from harm’s way on a busy city street. He was furious. He slammed our door and dropped the bottle into a metal garbage can on the corner—or, to be precise, smashed it into the garbage can. We could hear it break even inside the vehicle. When he got back in, he turned to us and said, his dark eyes piercing us with rage, “My cab is not a speakeasy. No drinking, do you two understand?”