The Sleepwalker(19)

“I read that sleepwalking runs in families. Is that true?”

“It is. It certainly can. Are you sleepwalking, Lianna? Have you had an incident? Is that why you’re here now?” She sounded concerned.

I thought about the word now. I guessed my mother must have told the physician that I had walked in my sleep as a little girl. Maybe my mother had filled out that detail on some form. A patient questionnaire. A family history. “No.”

“Good. But please come in if you do—if something happens. Deal?”

“Sure. I’ll call if something happens.”

“Is that it?”

I shook my head and asked, “I know sleepwalking is a non-REM phenomenon. Why is that when people sleepwalk?”

“We only have theories. If you look at the delta waves on an electroencephalograph—an EEG—most of the time you really won’t see a big difference. There isn’t a huge physiologic marker.”

“Is it as simple as the part of the brain that controls judgment is asleep, while the part that controls motor activity is awake?”

“You might say that. But it may also come down to one little chemical messenger in the brain: gamma-aminobutyric acid. GABA. It’s an inhibitor that calms the brain’s motor system. In little kids, the neurons are still developing, which might explain why childhood arousal disorders are so common. And for some people, the inhibitor may always remain a little undeveloped, even into adulthood. Or it may be easily affected by all those environmental factors that we know can trigger a parasomnia. A lack of sleep. Exhaustion. Stress. Certain medications.”

“Had my mom changed her meds?”

“I can’t discuss that.”

“I mean, maybe because my father was going to be gone, she did something different to be sure she’d stay in bed. But whatever she did, maybe it had the opposite effect. Is that possible?”

Yager looked at me, but said absolutely nothing.

“You really can’t tell me,” I murmured.

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Can you tell me why she only walked in her sleep when my dad was gone?”

“No.”

“Because you don’t know or because of patient confidentiality?”

“I have my suspicions,” she said, and waved her hand vaguely.

“Have you had other cases like hers?”

“It has certainly happened before: people sleepwalking only when they’re alone in bed. Again, it’s not common. Nothing about sleepwalking is. But there are plenty of documented cases.”

“May I ask one more thing?”

“Of course. I just worry I won’t be much help.”

“Is there any chance my mom killed herself?”

“You mean on purpose?”

“Yes.”

The doctor gazed at the UVM commons for a long moment. Then she turned back to me and said, “No. I can’t say that definitively or categorically. Like I said, I’m not a therapist. We’ll probably never know for sure. But speaking as a mother myself and speaking from my conversations with your mother while we were treating her parasomnia, I would say no. I understand she was taking antidepressants. But there is a chasm between taking antidepressants and taking your life. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, but it really wasn’t. Over my shoulder I saw the receptionist in Yager’s doorway. I didn’t have to ask if my time was up. I knew it was. The doctor and I stood almost at the same time. She rounded her desk to hug me, and then I thanked her and left.



Annalee Ahlberg was gone, but my mother remained as present and real as a shadow in the red Victorian. She was, at once, never there and always there, as undeniable yet untouchable as the sky. Though my father spoke of my mother in the past tense, in many ways he remained as incapable of moving on as my sister and me. It was still early autumn: Didn’t missing people reappear all the time many months later? And so there lived a hollowness in the heart of the house. The three of us were missing the semaphore that was wife and mother. We needed a new language and new rituals, but it was going to take time for them to evolve.

My mother’s clothing sat folded in her dresser and hanging in her closet in the master bedroom. The book she was reading, a beautiful black-and-silver doorstop of a novel about Marilyn Monroe, was on her nightstand, the bookmark still between pages 218 and 219. Her jewelry sat where she had left it on her dresser, the different pairs of earrings she wore most often (the hoops, the love knots, the teardrops) on a small silver tree denuded of leaves, perhaps six inches tall. Her charm bracelet was half in and half out of her jewelry box, and I took the cat and the barn and the butterfly and the heart and folded them back into one of the box’s small drawers. I picked up a heavy bangle she slid over her wrist often when my parents went out in the evening, a silver cable with blue topaz at the tips, and held it in my hand a long moment, comforted by its totemic heft. My mother clearly had loved it. I put it back atop her necklaces, coils of moonstones and gold and one string of pearls that had once belonged to my grandmother.

The police had taken her computer, hoping there might be a clue somewhere among the e-mails and web history or in a document (there wasn’t), but when they returned it, my father had placed it back in the guest room, where she worked those days when she was designing and drafting from home. (It was an unspoken rule that computers, along with television, did not belong in the sanctum sanctorum of the bedroom.) Her briefcase with the sketches for the vacation house she was designing in the White Mountains hung over the back of the wrought-iron barstool on the far side of the kitchen island. Until Paige had been born, our mother had worked for a large architectural firm in Burlington and commuted to and from the city daily; she had also traveled with some frequency for work. But she had left the firm when Paige was born, because she wanted to choose her own hours and be available for her children. Her two children. She had worked exclusively from home until Paige had begun first grade, and then gotten a small office on the second floor of a building near the bookstore in Middlebury. I dropped by there one afternoon weeks after she had disappeared and saw that once the police had finished scouring it, my father had made sure that it looked exactly as it had before they had arrived. He had even placed his wife’s favorite coffee mug beside her drafting table, and it waited for her there like a faithful dog. I wondered how much longer he would pay rent for the space.