The Sleepwalker(20)

One night, Paige and I spent hours with some of our family’s photo albums on our laps, flipping the thick pages with the images in clear plastic sleeves. We weren’t looking for clues (at least I wasn’t). We simply wanted to see our mother once more. See her with the two of us and with our father. See her in a bathing suit on a friend’s deck on Lake Champlain, or having a hot chocolate with other friends after skiing. See her with our father at a restaurant in Burlington. See her with clients as a house she had designed was being built, its shape starting to grow in the timber framing above the foundation. It was disturbing to see her with people far away who probably had no idea that she had disappeared. An acquaintance from college who now lived in Greece. A childhood friend who had moved to London. And then there were the photos of our neighbors in local Fourth of July parades or in the background of images of Paige and me—at the base lodge of the Snow Bowl, watching me perform, eating cupcakes at the volunteer fire company’s annual fund-raising barbecue—some of whom, I knew, had driven my father a little crazy those last days in August with their public prayers and cloying remarks about courage and hope.

Mostly, however, it was just…us. The Ahlbergs. Here was our story: Me in a purple flapper wig when I was ten, and Paige making a snow angel at the base of a ski slope when she was seven, her skis planted like trees in the snow behind her. My sister still has her race bib on. There are my mother and father, not much older than I was then, young lovers leaning into each other on a bench in Washington Square Park; there they are again, years later, parents now, one time when we were all visiting my aunt and uncle and our cousins who lived in Manhattan. There are the three Ahlberg females on a half dozen Christmas mornings, always in the dining room, our stockings on the table around the coffee cake that my mother baked every Christmas Eve. There is my mother mugging with a chocolate bunny on an Easter Sunday four or five years ago. There she is at the drafting table at her office in Middlebury, playfully feigning exasperation—those turquoise eyeglasses a pointer in one hand—because she is trying to work. There are all four of us on Captiva Island six years ago, Paige in a pink bathing suit with the Little Mermaid on the front, our mother in a modest two piece—but a bikini of sorts, nonetheless. There is my mother kissing my sister on the forehead when Paige can’t be more than six months old, and there is my mother swinging my sister in the air when Paige is perhaps a year and a half. (The two of them are, I speculated, dancing to a song by 10,000 Maniacs my mother adored. There was a period when both my mother and father would dance with Paige before dinner to 10,000 Maniacs. I was in middle school then, and far too self-conscious to join the fun.) There I am, a toddler, sitting on a blanket outside by the vegetable garden, a board book in my lap, while my mother seems to be weeding the channel between the first lettuce and the first peas. There I am again, sixteen years older, about to leave for the prom with my high school boyfriend, Stewart Godwin, my dress a white strapless sheath that I still rather liked, but I recalled was difficult to dance in. Stewart looks a little awkward in his tux, but he is a good-looking guy roughly my height, and I had only fond memories of him. And there I am as a girl magician on the stage in a New Year’s Eve talent show in Burlington, a silver sequin skirt, a black leotard, and a dark purple cape as my costume. I have just made three large, seemingly solid metal rings link together. There were dozens of pictures of me performing my magic, just as there were dozens of my sister skiing. There were dozens of our father lounging with a notebook in his lap on the shore of Lake Champlain or in one of the Adirondack chairs in our backyard or at the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton. There he was laughing with colleagues (and visiting luminaries) at Middlebury.

But the ones that were hardest for us both to look at were those of our mother. We each picked out three photographs—a number we chose because it was finite, not because it was spiritual or symbolic—and brought them back to our separate bedrooms, where their sentimental importance to us grew daily that autumn.



Sometimes when I was alone in the house—when Paige was at school and our father was at the college—I would hear the sound of my mother’s voice. This wasn’t a ghostly apparition. This was only in my head and it was almost always a recollection of the prosaic, not the profound.

Fettuccine Alfredo okay for dinner?

I saw the most beautiful field of sunflowers.

Bring your phone: I want to know I can reach you.

Other times when I was alone, I would catch Joe the Barn Cat looking a little anxious as he sniffed among my mother’s shoes in the mudroom just off the front door. And so I would sit on the floor beside him and pet him. I would take him into my lap. These were the moments when I was most likely to stare up at the ceiling and either blink back the tears or, as I did equally often, embrace the solitude and cry.



When my mother started to sleepwalk, my family joked that she had gotten it from me—some sort of bizarre reverse inheritance. I had always been told that I was the first Ahlberg to have an arousal disorder, though they hadn’t used that term when I was a child. They hadn’t even taken me to the doctor when it first happened. My mother had only mentioned it, almost in passing, to the pediatrician some months later when I had my annual physical. The physician had asked a few questions, and when he’d understood that only three or four times had I actually gotten out of bed in my sleep (and not once in the last month), he’d smiled and said there was nothing to worry about. It was not an uncommon occurrence among small children. Even the way I would seem to be awake—wide awake—and not recognize my father or mother. The physician had reassured my mother that I would outgrow it. And I did. The disorder may (or may not) have had something to do with starting kindergarten, the brain wanting to process all these new experiences and stimulations, or it may have been part of a growth spurt. Or maybe I was responding to stress in the house. But it didn’t matter. I would sleepwalk a couple more times over the next two years, but by the summer between first and second grade, I was sleeping through the night. When I saw my mother and father, I always knew exactly who they were.