“Go ahead.”
“On some level, is it possible that you just see me as a way to learn more about your mother?”
“Like I’m using you, because you know what really happened and I don’t?” I said evenly, clarifying.
“Precisely.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and found the blue horseshoe headband I was wearing. I thought of the way my father often lectured with a prop for emphasis, and pulled it out. I pointed it at him dramatically. “I am not using you,” I told him firmly.
“Have you told your father about me?”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to.”
“Your friends?”
“No. But it’s not like I’m hiding you from them. If they saw us together in Burlington, I’d introduce you.”
He took my headband and gently combed it back into my hair. “And later,” he murmured, his face close to mine, “you would tell them not to tell your father about me.”
“You have kebob breath,” I said, instead of refuting what we both knew was the truth.
“You do, too,” he whispered. And then he kissed me.
That night I awoke and I felt him before I heard him. He was aroused and on his side, once again trying to find me in his sleep. Perhaps we both should have expected it, given how hard he had been working and how overtired he was.
The T-shirt I was wearing was above my navel, and his hands were underneath it, fondling me—groping me—roughly. I thought of the man I knew when he was awake and how he would never touch me like this. I thought of how I wanted to be with that man tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. And that meant knowing I could corral the animal he could become in the small hours of the night, and (if possible) love that part of him, too. And so I pried his fingers off my breasts and rolled him onto his back. It was a feat of wrestling that demanded strength, but not the superhuman effort I had anticipated. When I climbed on top of him, the city, the apartment, the bedroom—including Gavin—went quiet. I pressed his wrists against the mattress, turned on by my own power, and lowered myself onto him.
I went to the bathroom to freshen up before going back to sleep. I wanted a clean washcloth and looked for one in the cabinet under his sink. I wasn’t sure what I’d find, but it was the middle of the night and I wasn’t thinking especially clearly. I squinted against the brightness of the ceiling fixture, wishing he had a night-light.
It was amid the extra rolls of bathroom tissue, unopened tubes of toothpaste, and spray bottles of tile cleaner, that I saw it. It was all the way in the back against the far wall. His leather shoulder bag. I didn’t believe I had seen it since the day we’d met. It was a handsome bag, the leather well aged and the buckles made of brass, and I hadn’t forgotten what it looked like. I recalled how it had been slung over his shoulder the very first time I saw him, that August morning my mother had disappeared, when he had been emerging from the carriage barn where my parents parked their cars.
And instantly I knew. I knew it all.
I grabbed the bag almost frantically, knocking over the toilet paper and the cleansers, some of which fell out and rolled against the sink pedestal. In my hands, I was surprised by its heft, but that only confirmed for me what I was going to find as I worked the buckles. And when I peered inside, there it was: one of Paige’s swim towels, folded and rolled into a tube. I pulled it from the bag and for a moment cradled it against me as if it were one of my stuffed animals from my childhood. I was woozy and scared and sad—but mostly sad. Finally I forced myself to unroll it. To see it, to see it all. When I did, I was almost hypnotized by the image of seashells and beach, the sand once so white now stained red, and the great, swirling Rorschach of my mother’s dried blood.
In the morning, Gavin found me sitting on the couch, still clad in only his T-shirt. I must have looked waiflike and pathetic to him, and I could see in his eyes that he thought my despair was about the man he had become, once more, in his sleep. But then he noticed the towel in my lap and his shoulder bag on the couch beside me. And he understood. He reached for the attaché and tossed it onto the carpet beside the coffee table. Then he sat down next to me, where it had been.
“I was planning to burn it,” he said. “I was planning to burn the bag and the towel.”
“Where?”
“My aunt and uncle’s hunting camp. They have a little cottage up in the Northeast Kingdom.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Life just intervened. Either someone was there or I had too much work here. And it was going to be…hard. Emotionally.”
Hard. The word echoed for me.
“The thing is, my parents gave me the bag when I graduated from college,” he went on. “You know what a fuckup I’d been, I told you. The fact I’d made it? Graduated? It meant a lot to them. And the towel? That was going to be difficult to burn, too, but for different reasons. Cops don’t burn evidence. At least good cops. Burning it was, I don’t know, crossing a line. So maybe I kept finding excuses not to go to the camp and just do it.”
“You found the towel in my mom’s car?”
He nodded. “It was in the backseat. I cleaned the grill and the bumper. I cleaned the top of the windshield where it met the roof.”
“My father knows, too, doesn’t he?”
He spoke with an air of resignation. “A father doesn’t say those things aloud to a cop. And a cop—in this case, at least—doesn’t say them to a dad. I can’t tell him what I know. Excuse me, what I believe. But I encouraged him rather strongly to bring your sister to the sleep clinic.”
“He didn’t seem all that worried when I told him that Paige was afraid she’d gone sleepwalking.”
“He probably didn’t want to alarm you. He probably didn’t want to alarm her. But he was. He is. Even if you hadn’t told him about her sleepwalking, he would have found an excuse to get her to the sleep center. He told me you girls had appointments before you did.”
“But why me?”
“Think misdirection. You’re a magician.”
“So I’m going to be wired at the clinic for nothing?”
“Not for nothing. But not because you’re a sleepwalker.”
“But what if she got in the car again in her sleep?”
“Your father has been giving her your mother’s clonazepam.”
“He’s drugging her?”
“He’s medicating her, Lianna. There’s a difference.”
“And she doesn’t know?”
“No. A half tab ground up in her milk. Or orange juice. Whatever.”
I thought of the night when Paige complained that the milk had gone bad. I was sure I would recall other moments, too, as time went on. I pointed at the leather bag on the floor. “My mom’s DNA is in there, isn’t it? From the towel.”
“Yes.”
Outside, it was growing light and I heard the annoying, monotonous bleep of a garbage truck in reverse. The sky was streaked with the deep, beautiful violet of a bruise.
“My dad told me the dings on the car were from a streetlight. He said he had done a bad job of parking at the college.” My voice was small, incredulous.
“Was he convincing?”
I shook my head. “Not in the slightest.”
“Is that when you knew?”
I sighed. “He hadn’t been driving that night: I knew that. After all, he was in Iowa. And I wasn’t driving. At least I didn’t think I was.”
“So Paige.”
“I remembered how much she used to like to drive in and out of the barn, and back and forth in the driveway. Would she take the car out at night? It hadn’t crossed my mind until I saw the dings. But I told myself I was crazy.” The conversation felt surreal to me. Even now, the recollection of what we were saying—acknowledging life’s spectacular, numbing horrors in such quiet, measured tones—can leave me unsteady.
“If it hadn’t been an SUV, I doubt your mother would have been thrown so far. It took that high a center of gravity,” he said. “Her body hit the gril
l. Then her head, I believe, hit the corner where the windshield met the roof.”
“Was Paige speeding?”
“Well, she was driving fast. Fast enough to…to send your mother over the riverbank. I’m sorry.”
“No,” I murmured, “I asked.” She was an athlete. A ski racer. She was intense. She did almost nothing slowly. “Does anyone suspect it might have been a hit-and-run? Did you have to investigate that?”
“We went to a few auto-body shops in the area to see if anyone had brought in a car or truck claiming they’d smacked into an animal, but obviously that avenue went nowhere. It was make-work.”
Finally I put the towel down. I laid it gently atop the shoulder bag on the floor, imagining it was a quilt draped upon a coffin. “When you told me that my mom came to see you a few days before she died, you said she was afraid she was going to sleepwalk with my dad away,” I said. “You were lying about that, too, weren’t you? She came to see you because she was worried about my sister.”
“Yes.” He sat forward, his chin in his hands, and gazed out the window. “Does she have any inkling? Any idea at all?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered, but when I thought a moment more I couldn’t help but wonder at Paige’s sudden resolve not to travel to Chile to ski the coming summer. I remembered the dream my sister had shared with me—the one where she and Joe the Barn Cat were following our mom down the road. Had she been reaching out to me, trying to tell me something?
And then I recalled the hours and hours she had spent walking along the riverbank looking for something.
“Tell me: Was my mom sleepwalking when it happened?” I asked.
“Her eyeglasses weren’t in the bedroom.”
“Meaning?”
“She probably put them on. We never found them.”
“Of course. She’d never wear them while sleepwalking.”
“We don’t know that. I said probably. Maybe her eyeglasses will turn up any day now in the kitchen or the bedroom or under the seat in her car.”
But we did know that. We did. My mother wasn’t sleepwalking, and I didn’t correct him. I think I knew that moment that my sister had found our mother’s eyeglasses. Paige had found those great turquoise ovals our mother wore when she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses. She had unearthed them from whatever brush or leaves they were beneath as she walked day after day along the side of the road that paralleled the river. The odds of my mother and my sister both sleepwalking at the very same moment? Infinitesimal. Annalee Ahlberg had been awake. Wide awake.
Looking back, that might have been the cruelest irony of all.
EPILOGUE
THIS IS WHAT I mean about fate: when, eventually, I told my father I was dating Gavin Rikert, it meant that now there were three of us who were complicitous. Three of us who knew. And while we never spoke of it, whenever we were around Paige together—as we would be more and more often, especially in the first eight months of 2001 and then again the year after I finally finished college, before Gavin and I married, when I was again living at home—it was an increasingly awkward conspiracy of silence.
Should I have stayed home through Paige’s last years of high school? Perhaps. My father was not left completely alone trying to rein in his younger daughter’s increasingly dangerous late-night excursions. He had the sleep center. Her treatment was similar to my mother’s, and worked in the same ways and failed in the same ways. But the more Paige walked, the more she knew she was her mother’s daughter. (Was she her father’s as well? Absolutely. Whether she was Warren Ahlberg’s daughter biologically has long become irrelevant. For one season, blinded by the tears that came at me in brackish waves following my mother’s disappearance and death, I questioned his paternity. I am ashamed of that dreamlike madness.)
And, yes, the more she walked, the more she must have known she was her mother’s killer, too. Her visions from that August night grew crisp, the memories lucid, and the truth unavoidable. I imagine her squirreling away the eyeglasses in a drawer or jewelry box somewhere, a renunciate totem she is unable to live with or without.
She went to college far from Vermont, already distancing herself from those of us who knew her best and suspected what she had done. After graduating, she went to work for an airline as a flight attendant because it meant that she could travel and stay in nice hotels. Her base was Los Angeles. She was, she told me one time when she was drunk, feeding her beast. She said she was ravenous when she was asleep. She came home once a year at Christmas. She never allowed my father and me to visit her.
And then, at twenty-six, she disappeared, too. She did not disappear the way our mother did. She went, as she put it, off-line. Off radar. She could no longer bear even that lone, annual return trip to Bartlett, where our father continued to live, and the Victorian’s proximity to the Gale River. She could no longer subject herself to what she seemed to view as the pitying—perhaps in her eyes, even judgmental—gazes of my father and Gavin and me.
She lets my father and me know she is alive, but she discourages us from trying to find her. Last year, she sent him Red Sox tickets on his birthday. For Christmas, she sent her niece and nephew trinkets and books. She assures us that we need never fear for her safety: she knows the pain that killing herself would cause us. Breathing is her atonement. That’s just how she’s built. Sometimes I post oblique messages for her on the social networks that no one would understand but her, hoping to convey how much my father and I miss her and how nothing could have prevented what happened, because I am sure that in a sad, melancholic way she stalks the Ahlberg family. How could she not?
Before she went underground and cut us off, she mailed me her journal. I read it and reread it once. Then I buried it in a gift box that had once held a sweater in Gavin’s and my attic in Burlington, hiding it behind the larger cartons where I stored the magic tricks I have been unable to say good-bye to. I never showed the journal to my father or to Gavin. There are no clues in it that would help us find her.
And, as Gavin reminds me, she doesn’t want to be found. At least not yet. He says she will come home when she is ready: when she is at peace. He says as a magician (albeit retired) I should know better than anyone that what we believe has vanished is really just hidden.
He may be right. The earth is as rich with magic as it is with horror and sadness. One day, I will pull back the curtain and there she will stand, smiling and rolling her dark eyes at me.
And this time it won’t be a dream.
YES, LIANNA, YES. Since you wonder but are afraid to ask, I’ll tell you. Live with it. I do.
Mom wasn’t out sleepwalking. Mom was out looking for me.
Acknowledgments
ONCE AGAIN, THANKS are in order.
First of all, the experts: Dr. Garrick Applebee, a sleep medicine physician, for teaching me about sleepwalking and other parasomnias; Mike Cannon, with the Colchester, Vermont, Technical Rescue Team, and Essex, Vermont, police officer Andrew Graham, for discussing with me the specifics of search and rescue; Emmet Helrich, formerly a lieutenant with the Burlington Police Department and now the coordinator for Vermont’s rapid intervention community court, for helping me understand how this sort of investigation would proceed; Michael Mangan, PhD, for his book Sleepsex: Uncovered; and Dr. Steven Shapiro, chief medical examiner for the state of Vermont, who shared with me the mysteries of the morgue.
I am deeply grateful to my friends at Doubleday for all they do before (and after) my books are published: Todd Doughty, Emma Dries, Jenny Jackson, and John Pitts.
And then there are my agents: thank you, Jane Gelfman, Cathy Gleason, Victoria Marini, Deborah Schneider, and Brian Lipson.
Finally, I want to thank Victoria Blewer and Grace Experience, two of my earliest and best readers—always.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Bohjalian is the author of nineteen books, including such New York Times bestsellers as The Guest Room, The Light in the Ruins, The Sandcastle Girls, The Double
Bind, and Skeletons at the Feast. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three of his books have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers). His novels have been chosen as best books of the year by The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Hartford Courant, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Salon. He lives in Vermont. Visit him at www.chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook or Twitter.
Chris Bohjalian, The Sleepwalker
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