The Sleepwalker(13)

“I can’t handle this,” I said slowly, carefully, staring at my legs and trying to lose myself in the blue of my jeans. I was angry with myself for pressing him and wished that I hadn’t goaded him into elaborating. I had to remind myself that he was only saying what I already knew. If my mother were alive and unhurt, she would have woken up by now and come home; if she were alive but injured, someone would have found her and the radios would be crackling with the news. After all, how far could she have walked?

“I said too much,” he said. It felt like an apology.

“No. You were just being straight with me.”

“But I am sorry. Like you, I want to find her.”

“What can I do?”

“I want you to tell me everything you know about her sleepwalking the last few years. Anything that’s happened this summer. Anything she might have said about it.”

“Why?”

“Because it might be useful,” he said, and then he paused. “And because I can probably relate.”

“Your mom was a sleepwalker?”

“No. I was.”

“You?”

He tapped his pen against his pad, once more unwilling to meet my eyes. “I actually met your mom some years back,” he said. “We were going to the sleep center at the same time. We met in the waiting room. It’s why I’m here now.”



The detective wouldn’t say why he didn’t want to speak with me in front of my father. When I suggested I go get him, he said only that he wanted to chat with me first. We could get him in a few minutes, he added. My sister, too, because he was going to want to chat with her as well. Besides, it was madness right now in the house, he observed. Madness. That was the word he used. He walked me toward one of the cruisers and opened the passenger’s-side door for me.

“Are you taking me somewhere?” I asked. I wasn’t precisely afraid of Rikert, but I was wary.

“Nope. Get in,” he urged. “You’ll be more comfortable sitting down.”

And so I did, but I kept my right leg dangling outside on the pavement so he couldn’t shut the door. He didn’t seem to care and went around the front of the vehicle, rapping the hood with his knuckles as he passed it. I stared for a moment at the radio microphone and then at the radar gun; I’d never seen one up close.

“A magician,” Rikert said when he got in. He removed a yellow pad from his leather attaché and then tossed the bag into the backseat. “I think that’s really interesting.”

“It’s not,” I corrected him, my voice cool. “I told you, it’s a summer job, mostly.”

“Times like this I wish there was a little real magic in the world,” he said. “Make disappeared people reappear. Make the kids in the Subaru I once found wrapped around a tree breathe again. Just get up and walk away from the wreck.”

“So you know my mom?” I asked. I had no idea where this was going, but I wasn’t happy with the digression.

“Yup. Sleep may not be as intimate as sex, but it’s a weirdly personal experience.”

The word sex stopped me. “Does that mean you two slept together? Not had sex, but…slept?”

“No. We were in separate rooms for the sleeping. But we had the same doctor. The same technician. And there’s no such thing around here as a sleepwalking support group, so we sort of created our own one.”

“God.”

“And when I saw your mother was missing, I asked my captain if I could help. I told him I knew her—and how I knew her—and he agreed it was in the best interests of the investigation for me to get involved. So, here I am.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Your mom and me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We talked about why we were at the sleep center. Our sleepwalking. You assume everyone else is there for something like sleep apnea. But that wasn’t her deal, obviously. Or mine.”

“Did you ever meet outside of the sleep center?” I asked. It was a hunch and I thought—I feared—I knew the answer.

He hesitated. Then: “Yeah, we did. In fact, after we met that first time in the waiting room, we only met outside the sleep center. But we were just friends. And we were just friends in the context of our sleepwalking. We had something in common that neither of us had with anyone else.”

I thought of how Rikert didn’t want to speak with me in front of my father. I felt unsettled in the claustrophobic air of the cruiser, as if something was ever so slightly wrong and I was learning things my mother would never have wanted me to know. I watched the search teams, the state troopers, and the local police coming and going from our house. A second TV news van had rolled to a stop behind one of the state police pickups. Had there ever been this many people at one time in the Victorian? I doubted it. “How often?”

“How often did we see each other?”

I looked straight ahead. I nodded.

“I’m the one who usually asks the questions. It’s why I brought you over here,” he said, his voice light. When I remained silent, he continued, “We got together maybe eight or nine times.”

“Does my dad know you two are friends?” I thought of how I was referring to my mother in the present tense. I was afraid it would be disloyal and jinx any chance of her safe return by transitioning now to the past.