The Sleepwalker(18)

“Not great. But not awful. I mean, I haven’t given up all hope,” I told her, craving a professional’s reassurance. “I’ve got this fantasy that maybe my mom has some head injury or something and got amnesia. You know, she fell while sleepwalking and hit her head just right. People get amnesia all the time and then, suddenly, get their memories back. Right?”

“Oh, maybe they do all the time in movies. But not in real life.” Her eyes were gentle, her tone definitive.

“Or maybe she was abducted. Maybe she’s locked in a bedroom or building somewhere, and any second now the police will find her and rescue her.” After I had verbalized the idea, I felt guilty for wishing such a thing on my mother, and na?ve to suggest it was likely. But wasn’t imprisonment better than being dead? Wasn’t it?

“Yes,” the doctor agreed, “I guess that’s possible.” But I could tell that she didn’t believe it, and I felt patronized—and I knew I deserved to feel that way.

“But it’s not very likely, is it?”

“No.” Then: “What can I do for you, Lianna? How can I help?”

“I want to talk about my mom’s sleepwalking. I want to know—”

“I’m not allowed to discuss any of that,” she said firmly, but not unkindly. “Your mother was a patient and there are very strict laws that protect patient confidentiality. I am so sorry, but that’s just how it is.”

“I get it. And I know the police have probably asked you a thousand questions already. But can I ask you a few things that wouldn’t be confidential?”

“Like what?”

“About sleepwalking generally, I guess. I mean, I learned a lot from those days when Mom started to sleepwalk when I was in high school. And I’ve researched it a ton the last couple of weeks. But there is still so much I just don’t get.”

Yager looked at her watch. “I have a patient in a few minutes and I was going to try and squeeze in a moment with a banana and a granola bar I brought from home. But if you don’t mind watching me eat, join me in my office.”

“Absolutely. I’m crazy grateful,” I said, and I followed the doctor back down the corridor and through the reception area, past a narrow room with a bed and a wall of sleep apnea masks and tubes that looked like props from a horror movie. It was unfair, but I imagined a serial killer wearing one and wielding the hose like a noose. The physician’s office was small, but it faced the grassy quadrangle in the center of the UVM campus. Yager motioned for me to take the chair in front of the desk, and she sat in the larger, leather one behind it. She reached behind her for a knapsack and extracted the banana and granola bar. She broke the granola bar in half and handed me a piece.

“My very glamorous life,” the doctor said. Then: “So: sleepwalking.”

“I miss my mom,” I said, surprising myself with this first short sentence. It wasn’t at all what I had planned. I had thought I was fine, but apparently the presence of this older woman—a physician who knew the demons who came to my mother in the night—was going to dismantle the wall of grown-up resolve I had built. The words began gushing like the prattle from an overwrought child, and none of them were the reasonable, adult things I had imagined I’d say. “It feels like she got sick and I went away to college. I had a couple of summers. And now she’s gone. I want to know where she is. I’m doing my best for my family, but it’s just not enough. It’s just not very good. And I didn’t hear her that last night when I should have. And—”

“And this isn’t about sleepwalking at all, is it? No one should have to shoulder what you are right now, Lianna. It must be horrible. But I’m not a therapist. I’m so sorry. Even if I knew how to help you, I couldn’t. Tell me: do you have general sleepwalking questions for me?” The doctor was leaning forward across her desk, her hands folded between piles of papers on the blotter. I saw in her eyes how sad she was, either because she was mourning my mother, too, or because so far there was nothing in the world she could do for me.

“Okay,” I began again, gathering myself. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

I started again. “No one’s found her body. Someone did find part of her nightshirt beside the Gale River. At least once before she walked to the bridge. So, let’s say that the worst thing that could have happened did happen—what a lot of people believe. She walked into the river that night near where they found the scrap of nightshirt. Why didn’t she wake up when her feet hit the water? Can you be in that deep a sleep when you’re sleepwalking?”

“Maybe she did.”

“Wake up.”

“Yes.”

“And it was too late? She was already drowning?”

“Could be.”

“Have you ever had a patient die while sleepwalking before now?”

“No. Thank God.”

“So why then is everyone so sure my mom did? Why are you?”

“It’s rare what your mother may have done in her sleep. But far from unprecedented. A few years ago, a woman walked into a lake in North Carolina and drowned.”

“I saw that online. I found that news story.”

“There are lots of stories similar to that in their degree of sadness…of strangeness. There are lots of accounts of sleepwalking excursions that could only be called…extreme. People cook in their sleep. They have sex in their sleep. They commit crimes in their sleep. I had a patient a few years ago who was driving in her sleep. One night, she backed her car out of the garage and into the mailbox. That’s when she woke up—and that’s when she came in for treatment. But there had been at least one other time when she didn’t wake up. She drove around. How do we know? She drove to the parking garage down by the waterfront, parked on the top floor, and then walked a mile or so back home.”