I went to bed last. I peeked into my sister’s bedroom and then my mother’s, and I took comfort in the fact they were both sound asleep. I e-mailed my friends, including an Amherst boy I had some interest in named David, who lived in Los Angeles. I remembered to keep my door open to increase the likelihood that I would wake up if my mother had an incident. A little before one in the morning, I put down the novel I was reading, checked my e-mails a final time, and turned out the light. The fact it was almost one in the morning was reassuring, because my mother had gone to sleep around ten p.m. The witching hour when sleepwalkers arose like the undead—those first three hours, that first third of the sleep cycle—was past.
In the morning, Paige shook me awake. I opened my eyes and instantly understood this was bad. My sister had both of her hands on my shoulders and was practically pummeling me. For a fleeting second, in the murk between sleeping and waking, I thought we were on a train hurtling down a wooded mountain pass—the remnant of a dream. But then, even before I comprehended what Paige was saying, I realized this was about our mother.
“Mom’s gone!” Paige was telling me, not screaming precisely, but her panic evident. “She’s gone!”
I was sleeping only beneath a sheet, but I kicked it off without saying a word and stumbled toward our parents’ bedroom. My sister followed me, continuing to babble. “I went into their room to check on her the second I woke up, and she wasn’t there! She must have left sometime in the night!” Outside, the sun was just over the mountain and so it was still early. I wished I had glanced at the clock to see what the hell time it was. I understood on some level that it made no sense at all to go to our parents’ bedroom first, since Paige was pretty clear on this one fact: our mother wasn’t there. But I went anyway; I had to see for myself.
For a moment I stood in the doorway and stared at the empty bed. Then I went and touched my mother’s side. The sheets and the pillowcase were cold. I glanced around the room to see if her summer nightshirt was there. My mother liked to get dressed before breakfast, and over the years I had noticed that she usually tossed her nightgown onto the foot of the bed. Sometime after breakfast—after she had gotten Paige and me off to school, after her husband had left for work—she would go upstairs and make the bed, and put whatever nightshirt or pajamas she had slept in under the pillow. Invariably, I remembered from the days before I left for college, the bed looked as perfect as an image from a Bloomingdale’s catalog by the time I returned home from school, because my mother was an architect—and an architect who cared deeply that her own spaces should be as finely articulated and comfortable as the homes she designed for others. But there was no sign of the nightshirt. Not on the foot of the bed, not draped over the chair by the window, not on her nightstand. Not on the floor.
“You’ve checked downstairs?” I asked Paige. “You’ve checked the kitchen?”
“Of course I’ve checked downstairs.”
“The garden? Outside?”
“Yes, I went outside.” Then, to make her point, Paige shrieked at the top of her lungs, “Mom!” extending the single syllable for at least three or four seconds.
When there was no response, I asked simply, “The basement?”
Paige put her hands on her hips. We both knew that Paige was a little scared of the basement. I was, too. It was a terrifying, windowless world with a dirt floor except for the cement pads for the hot and cold water tanks and the washer and dryer. The walls were stone. The ceiling, mostly decaying insulation, was low. It was lit by two swaying lightbulbs at opposite ends. It was like a dungeon and we rarely went there—and never after dark when we were alone.
“Yes. I checked the basement. I checked everywhere.”
“Is her car here?”
My sister sighed but said nothing. I went to the window and looked out at the carriage barn. In the summer, our family never bothered to close the garage doors. The bay where our father parked his car was empty, because he had driven to the airport yesterday. Our mother’s SUV, however, was in its usual spot.
“Okay, I’ll call Dad,” I told Paige. I was pretty sure that Iowa was an hour behind Vermont. “What time is it?”
Paige pointed at the clock. It was a little before seven.
“Oh. Right,” I said. “Thank you.”
When I lifted the handset from the cradle, I was struck by its weight and shape. My parents had each owned what we called a car phone for nearly four years by then, though the phones were no longer tethered to their vehicles and my mother always had hers in her purse when she wasn’t behind the wheel. But it was only that summer that they had gotten me my first cell phone. Earlier that year a tower had been built not far from Bartlett, and suddenly we had cell service in the village. Of course, coverage across most of Vermont was still spotty at best—my parents used their car phones mostly on the interstate or while they were in Burlington—and so I had used my stubby new phone no more than a dozen times in the six weeks I’d owned it. Already, however, the transition from landlines to cell phones was beginning, and I couldn’t help but notice how different the bedroom phone felt in my fingers.
“Call him!” Paige was demanding.
Slowly my father’s number came to me and I rang him. I got only his recorded voice at the other end, suggesting that I leave a message.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I hope you have your phone with you. I’m sorry to call you, but we maybe—kind of—have an emergency. Paige just got me. It’s, like, seven in the morning here and Mom’s gone. Call me the second you wake up.”
Then I hung up.
“You didn’t say who you were,” Paige said.
“I think he probably figured it out.”
“Call the hotel. Wake him up.”
“I don’t know what hotel he’s at,” I said. And then, without consulting Paige or telling her what I was doing, I dialed 911.
The emergency call did not follow the script I expected, at least as much as I had a script in mind. But I had anticipated that instantly there would be police officers—state troopers, sheriffs, detectives—on their way to our house. There would be grown-ups wanting to help us.
“How long has she been missing?” the dispatcher—a woman with a very calm voice—asked me.
“I don’t know. But she was in bed last night. And she’s not in bed now.”
“Is her car still there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is there a note?”
I glanced around the bedroom and didn’t see one. “Hold on,” I said to the dispatcher. I put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and asked Paige, “Did you see a note?”
“No, but I wasn’t looking for one,” she answered defensively. “Mom doesn’t leave notes when she does this.”
“I don’t think so,” I told the woman on the phone. “But I’m not positive.”
“Is there anyone in the house other than you and your sister?”
“No. Our dad is away at a conference.”
“What kind of conference?”
“Poetry,” I answered, unsure why this mattered. I envisioned the officer scoffing.
“Have you let him know?” she asked.
“We just left him a message.”
“Was your front door locked?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Is there any reason why your mom might have left the house for a bit? An errand, maybe?”
“In the middle of the night?”
The dispatcher sighed audibly. “Is there some sick neighbor she might be helping? Could she have gone to a friend’s house?”
“She sleepwalks.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then: “Thank you.”
“So, you’ll send people over to help us? You’ll send out a search party or something?”
“How common is her sleepwalking?”
“Not common. She hasn’t done it in years. But—”
“We’re just about to have a shift change. The night shift is al
most done and the day shift is checking in. Your mother really hasn’t been gone all that long and you say she hasn’t been sleepwalking in a while. If she isn’t home in half an hour or you can’t find where she is, call us back then, okay?”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
I thanked the dispatcher, and in my haste to get off the phone I failed to summon the proper sarcastic tone. I imagine I sounded only curt, rather than frustrated or annoyed. The moment I hung up, however, the phone rang, startling me. I knew it was my father even before I had answered it.
“Your mother’s gone?” he asked me. “Tell me the specifics. How long?”
“I don’t know. I just got up.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Yes. They weren’t seriously helpful.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They said to call back in half an hour if she isn’t home.”
“That’s not right. That makes no sense.”
“I guess.”
“God. Okay, call Elliot Sheldon. Call Donnie Hempstead. They’re both first responders. Start with Elliot. I’m sure he hasn’t left for work yet—but he will soon. Call them the moment we get off the phone. I’ll call the state police myself. I’m so sorry I was in the shower when you were trying to reach me.”
“She’s probably fine, right?”
“Right,” he said. “But let’s leave nothing to chance.”
“Should I try and find her? Should I see if she’s in the woods or the village or someplace? Maybe the bridge?”
“No,” my father said. “Just get our neighbors out looking for her.”
When I hung up, I saw that Paige was about to cry. All it took was the word bridge, and what memories that word exhumed. Paige hadn’t witnessed our mother standing on the balustrade above the Gale, but she had seen her when I had brought her home. It was one of those haunting third-grade memories that only grew worse over time.
Annalee Ahlberg was strikingly beautiful. My mother had Swedish blue eyes that made her look a little possessed when she smiled. Lapis lazuli. A Kodachrome photo would not have done them justice. Think CGI. Only a computer could create eyes like that. She wore contact lenses during the day, but eyeglasses—stylish turquoise ovals—at night and those days when she worked from home. Her hair was a blond so yellow that it almost looked bleached, but it was natural. And she was tall, almost as tall as my father, and he was six feet. Her legs went on forever. If she had had a better nose—less upturned, perhaps—and more patience when standing still (she had none, her soul craving movement even when she was asleep), she might have been a model instead of an architect.
And so when the state police from the New Haven barracks were interviewing Paige and me later that morning while they waited for my father to fly home from Iowa City, they probed the possibility that our mother had run off or was having an affair. Obviously less attractive women than Annalee Ahlberg had extramarital dalliances, too, but one of the troopers, a squat, heavyset detective sergeant in his late thirties with a state police sort of buzz cut and a birdy little nose, tried—clumsily—to see whether Paige or I had suspicions that our mother had a lover. Or, perhaps, lovers. It was infuriating and I felt my family was being violated. I understood why they had to ask, but that did not make this line of investigation seem any less absurd or, on some level I could not quite parse at the time, degrading.
It was a little past nine o’clock in the morning now and we were in the living room. I was seated on the couch, and the sergeant was facing me in a ladder-back chair he had brought in from the dining room. I was convinced that the only reason the two officers finally came to our house was because my father had gone ballistic when he’d called the state police. It irritated me that they hadn’t taken me seriously. A shift change? Yeah, right. The search parties had been wandering in the woods around Bartlett and following the river for at least ninety minutes now, and no one had found my mother yet.
“So,” the sergeant was asking me, “did your mom have any…friends…she might have met?” The badge on his uniform said C. Hardy. Paige was showing a second trooper the upstairs of the house and the bedroom where our parents slept.
“I told you. She was sleepwalking.”
“You said you’re twenty-one, right, Lianna?”
“Yes.”
“College, right?”
“I’m about to start my senior year.”
“Okay, then, I am going to ask you some very adult questions. May I?”
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. “It’s fine.”
He smiled approvingly at me. I hated him already. “Did your mom and dad ever squabble?”
“Sometimes, sure. But she’s a sleepwalker. That’s what this is about. Ask the people at the sleep clinic in Burlington.”
“What did they fight about? I can see all these pictures of her around the house. She’s a pretty lady. Do other men, you know, hit on her?”
“She’s my mother,” I snapped at him, disgusted by the way his tone managed to be both cloying and condescending. “I have no clue if men are hitting on her. But she wouldn’t care if they did.”
“Uh-huh. So what did they argue about? Your parents, that is.”
“I don’t know, what do all parents argue about? What do all people fight about? I guess they fought about money. They fought about my mom’s sleepwalking—what to do about it. They fought about the stuff that disappointed them. The stuff that’s hard.”
“What do you mean, ‘the stuff that’s hard’? Give me some specifics.”
The sergeant had a notebook, but as far as I could tell he had written almost nothing down. For the first time, however, he seemed really to be listening. Cop schadenfreude.
“Depression. My mom can get depressed. But she’s been treated for it. It’s under control. I promise you, she didn’t kill herself.”
“Are her drugs upstairs?”
“Yes.” He wrote that down, I noticed. “What I guess I meant by stuff that’s hard,” I went on, trying to explain and get the conversation back on track, “is that she had miscarriages. But this isn’t about that either.”
“Your mom had a miscarriage? When?”
“Look, you want to write something down?” I said. “Write down sleepwalker.”
He leaned as far back as he could in the chair, tipping back on the two spindly rear legs, visibly irritated with me. Instead of heeding my suggestion, he dropped his notebook into his lap and folded his arms across his chest. “And you’re absolutely sure there wasn’t a note?”
“There was no note.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to hide evidence. That’s not just a crime, young lady. It makes our job harder. It makes it way more difficult for us to find your mother.”
“I told you: there wasn’t a note.”
“And so you want me to believe that she just went sleepwalking in the middle of the night and still hasn’t woken up?”
“No, I want you to believe that she just went sleepwalking in the middle of the night and is somewhere in the woods or near the river or something,” I said, and the combination of the awful truth of what I was saying and my escalating frustration with the officer caused me, suddenly, to break down. My face fell into my hands, my elbows on the thighs of my blue jeans, and I was sobbing, sobbing in a way that I hadn’t in years.
Somewhere far away I heard the other trooper and Paige on the stairs, my kid sister coming to my aid, but the sergeant didn’t move from the ladder-back chair.
YOU WISH YOU could remember their faces when you’re awake. But they dissolve. They become indistinguishable, the faces on the deck of a great ship as it pushes away from the port. You are aware mostly of their arms waving.
You wish when you were down the rabbit hole that the laws of physics applied. That you couldn’t have sex on a cloud. That your college roommate wasn’t judging you. That the cars on the roller coaster weren’t airplanes—actual Airbuses. That your bed wasn’t a cha
ise lounge beside a hotel swimming pool, and there on a towel beside the recliner was your lover—naked, ravenous, wanton—reaching up to you from the coralline deck.
No one ever thinks of dreams as playful. But they are. At least they can be. Think of an amusement park that is utterly oblivious to the conventions of nature. It’s only when the dreams lead you from your bed—from sleep—that the amusements become dangerous.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS JUST after noon when one of the first responders, a volunteer firefighter from Bartlett named Elliot Sheldon, noticed the small piece of fabric dangling from the dead finger of a dead branch on the steep pitch of the riverbank. It was beside the road, the Gale aligning there with the asphalt. The scrap was navy blue and it seemed to be cotton. It was perhaps the size of a playing card. There was a toothpick-wide bit of red piping. He thought it was part of a cuff, but it might just as easily have been part of the hem. He knew not to touch it.
I was sitting on one of the black leather barstools around the kitchen island my mother had designed, fretting and staring out the window when the kitchen phone rang. It was from Elliot’s niece, a girl a year younger than I was and not a kid that I considered a part of my posse, and she was looking for me. I liked Sally Sheldon just fine, but Sally was the sort of girl who had played lacrosse and softball in high school, and she was now a lacrosse star at Syracuse. She was, God help her, kind of like Paige: athletic and enthusiastic and social. She wasn’t the brightest bulb in the tanning bed, but I thought she was sweet and well-intentioned.
Sally was inadvertently terrifying in her directness. “My uncle found a piece of clothing on a tree by the Gale,” she said. “I heard it on one of the scanners. The police are about to ask you about your mom’s clothes—what she was sleeping in.”
I felt sick: I got dizzy and thought I might actually black out, and so I put my forehead down on the counter. I took a few deep breaths and after a moment forced myself to sit up. “How big?” I asked. “Do you mean a whole piece of clothing, like a shirt? Or a piece of clothing, like part of a sleeve? And what kind of clothes? Did you hear?”