The Sleepwalker(11)

I shook my head. This wasn’t about my parents growing old or infirm in ten or twenty years. This was about the here and now and the reality that my mother was missing, and how my life might be about to change in ways for which I was neither prepared nor trained. I was, I realized, scared. Very scared. I would take comfort wherever I had any chance of finding it. Any chance at all. And so I went upstairs to my bedroom. I looked out the window, actually up at the cloudless blue sky, and there I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed.



Our red Victorian had three porches, one with glass windows that faced south, one with screens that faced west, and one that was open and faced east. The southern porch doubled as a greenhouse in April and early May, incubating the tomato seedlings and pepper plants until it was likely the last spring frost was past and we—my mother and I, and then my mother and Paige—could transplant them into the garden outside. The open porch was at the front of the house, and near the entrance: a pair of heavy, cinnamon-colored doors with slender stained-glass windows in the top halves. Half a dozen feet to the right of the doors was a white wooden glider swing, long enough for two people to sit comfortably. Before my mother had spray-painted the hydrangea silver and my father had been forced to trim and cut away at least half its branches, it had shielded the glider from the street. Less so, now. Sometimes in the summer my mother would have her coffee on the swing and read the newspaper there in the morning; my father would occasionally grade final papers there in mid-May and read books in June and July. By August, the sun had moved, and the swing would remain empty until my father took it down in October and carried it up to the attic.

But not now. It was August, and my sister and I had gone to the swing to sit and wait for our father to return from the airport. I had brought a deck of playing cards and was absentmindedly shuffling it with one hand. Some people bit their nails; I cut cards, equally adept those days with either hand.

Our father had called home the moment he had landed in Burlington, asking for news—which I had, a story in a scrap of a nightshirt—and telling me that he would be here in an hour. I guessed he would be home any minute now, well under an hour, because most likely he was speeding. In my mind, I saw him passing the slow-moving tractors and manure spreaders that congested the two-lane roads between the dairy farms in Starksboro and Hinesburg, and roaring past the pickups and sedans that were flirting with the speed limit. No doubt he was racing near seventy-five in the fifty-mile zones, and topping fifty where he was supposed to be traveling along at thirty-five. Inside our house, detectives were combing my parents’ bedroom and had set up a command center of sorts in the kitchen. I imagined them writing down my mother’s prescriptions from the bottles in the medicine chest in the master bathroom; perhaps they were even confiscating the bottles for analysis.

I saw Donnie Hempstead trudging from the woods across the street. He was among the first responders my father had asked me to call. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that was filthy from the woods and his sweat. He had a radio on his belt. He saw my sister and me and paused before us. “We’ll find her, girls,” he said, running one of his hands through the trim brown beard that followed the line of his jaw. “Any minute now. Hang in there, okay?” We nodded; we hadn’t a choice. Then he continued on into our house.

A moment later, Paige and I heard a dog barking somewhere near the river. We looked at each other and my sister spoke first. “That sounds like one of those dogs the police brought,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t convinced. About an hour earlier, the K-9 team had arrived, a pair of German shepherds and two handlers. They had gotten there moments after the piece of my mother’s nightshirt had been discovered. I had overheard the troopers discussing the animals’ deployment, and the plan was to bring one dog to that spot. The other had set off from our house’s front yard. The dogs were named Tucker and Max. The names of the handlers hadn’t registered with either Paige or me. Before the dogs had started off, I had had to give their handlers a piece of clothing my mother had worn. Originally I had brought down a pair of her summer shirts to choose from, but they were clean. The handlers had asked for dirty clothes, items that would be rich with the scent of Annalee Ahlberg. And so I had gone to the clothes hamper in my parents’ bathroom and retrieved the black sweatpants and maroon sports bra she had worn to the gym the day before. It had felt like a violation, but I did it. “Of course, it could be Dandelion,” I added, referring to our neighbor’s yellow lab. Dandelion barked at almost anything that moved: Squirrels. Cats. Extra-large butterflies.

Paige shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s Max.” Max had sniffed at our mother’s sports bra from the front steps and then yanked his handler across the yard and off toward the woods by the Gale.

I tried to imagine what would cause the animal to bark now. Would another scrap of clothing do that? Or would it demand a body? My mind had just begun down that especially menacing track when Paige and I saw our father’s car approaching. We hopped off the swing simultaneously and ran to the spot on the driveway where we knew he would glide to stop.



I could see that my father was being emotionally drawn and quartered, pulled in more directions than any one body could handle. He was having a conversation with the state police, and though I could tell that while they believed they were asking him questions, my father—ever the professor—had the upper hand and mostly was interrogating them. But he was also trying to field phone calls from my aunt—my mother’s sister in Manhattan—and from his father-in-law in Massachusetts. Paige was on the couch beside him, half in his lap, her head against his chest. I feared that my kid sister, disarmingly mature most of the time, was now such a wreck that she was a snippet of bad news away from sucking her thumb. Already she was chewing on her lower lip.