The Sleepwalker(17)

“Maybe white noise. Not wine. Alcohol can trigger a parasomnia.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” I said. Then: “I got a gig for Saturday. A little girl’s birthday party.”

“Oh, really? Wonderful. Where?”

“Middlebury.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Anyone I know?” I could tell he was hoping that he was somehow the conduit. Maybe the party was for a faculty brat.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know the details yet.”

“What’s the family’s name?”

I shrugged. “The mom is going to call me. A…friend recommended me.”

“Well, I’m thrilled. Whoever it is, they are very lucky to have you.”

“We’ll see.”

He took a deep breath and stood, stretching his long, rangy body. He lifted the glass with the last of his scotch and went to turn off the television. He stroked the cat’s fur and smiled down at the animal. As he was leaving the room, I considered calling after him, telling him that the friend who had recommended me was the sleepwalking detective who had once known his wife. But, once more, I kept the source to myself.



Despite the fact there was no body, my father was far from alone when it came to referring to my mother in the past tense. I had friends at Amherst and at home in Vermont who would make the leap that she was dead (because who were we kidding? of course she was), and then tell me how they had never had a person close to them die or the only funerals they had ever attended were for their grandparents. One evening when my friend Ellen Cooper and I were sitting around her bedroom, both of us buzzed, she confessed that she had never been to a funeral. Her grandparents were still alive. Then she added, “I mean, I’ve had dogs die. And a cat. But they don’t really count, do they?”

“They count,” I said, partly to be kind but also because I loved Joe the Barn Cat and I had loved his feline predecessors in our home. But I knew what she meant. It spoke volumes about the cocoon in which my friends and I lived and how lucky we really had been. Yes, some of us had lost grandparents we loved. I had lost both of my father’s parents, and based on how devastated—and frail—my mother’s parents had been when they had come to Vermont in August, I expected soon I would lose them, too. But my friends and I had been spared our peers’ violent deaths in automobile accidents and we had been spared our parents’ deaths from cancer and ALS and the sudden, tectonic change that accompanies a fatal heart attack or ruptured aneurysm. My mother’s disappearance was a sad, strange wake-up call for so many of my friends. It scared them. My presence scared them. I reminded them of the one thing in the world we want most to forget.



It may have been the sound of Gavin Rikert’s voice and his connection to my mother—my living, breathing, sleepwalking mother, not the ever-fading specter whose disappearance the detective was investigating—but the next day I drove to the hospital sleep center in the beige brick building in the midst of the University of Vermont campus in Burlington. I’d been considering a visit for a week now, ever since the shock of my mother’s disappearance—the mourning, the listlessness, the exhaustion—had begun to morph into something else. Real life. Regular life. Gavin’s voice had rallied me.

I didn’t phone ahead because I had a feeling that calling would accomplish nothing. The minute I said who I was, the receptionist would take a message and the doctor would be appropriately guarded when she called me back. I understood the basics of HIPAA and patient privacy. And with a criminal investigation surrounding one of her patients? The woman would be especially circumspect.

But perhaps in person I could get something out of her, though what that something was I couldn’t say. Still, I would play the gamin. I would look pathetic and lost—which really wasn’t all that difficult those days.

When I arrived, a little before lunch, I took a seat in the waiting room on the third floor of the building and gazed out at the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain in the distance. The room was across the corridor from the reception desk, but I didn’t introduce myself. My plan, as much as I had one, was to catch the doctor as she strolled toward the elevator bank for lunch and walk with her wherever she was going, even if that meant only the parking lot. I had met the woman once but had researched her on my laptop—brand-new that summer, my first—before leaving Bartlett to refresh my memory. Cindy Yager had been running the sleep center at the hospital for eight and a half years now. She was fifty-six (“and holding,” the woman joked in a recent newspaper interview I had found about her and the center), and planned to stay at the hospital another few years before retiring. She had brown eyes and curly, auburn hair that was starting to gray.

I had been in the waiting room over an hour, alone for most of the time, browsing through the magazines on the small side table. Just after one I saw the doctor. She was walking a young man in blue jeans and a windbreaker who might have been a college student like me to the elevator. I got up and followed the pair, and was relieved when Yager didn’t get into the elevator with him. The moment the doors slid shut, I said to the physician, “I am really sorry to bother you. My name is Lianna Ahlberg. We met one time when I was in high school and my mom first came here.”

The woman was holding a clipboard and lowered it against her skirt. “Yes, I remember meeting. Of course. How are you?” She emphasized the verb, lengthening the single syllable. She tilted her head ever so slightly and smiled at me.