The Sleepwalker(24)

“She was more afraid she’d set the house on fire. She was more afraid she’d accidentally hurt you or your sister.”

“Is that why you asked me about her dreams the day she disappeared?”

“Not really. There’s only the most mundane association between sleepwalking and dreams. They occur in different parts of the sleep cycle. It’s not like a sleepwalker is acting out a dream.”

“Then why?”

“They tell us a bit about a person’s inner life, don’t you think? And in your mom’s case? Plane crashes. Dead bodies.”

“She was scared of leaving people behind?”

“Possibly.”

“Lucky guess.”

“But her dreams may not mean that at all. A lot of shrinks will tell you a plane crash dream is about failure. Nothing more. You’re not achieving your goals.”

“Or maybe you’re out of control?”

“Maybe. And your mom did remember more than a lot of sleepwalkers. She sure as hell remembered more than I ever did. Most of us have amnesia. But not your mom. At least not precisely. She would remember a detail here and there, and sometimes she’d think it was a dream. She’d actually hope it was a dream.”

“Where did you two used to go to talk?”

“You should be the detective.”

It was getting late in the afternoon now, and I felt a chill on my stomach. I went ahead and untied my shirt and then buttoned the three lower buttons. “That’s not an answer.”

“No, it’s not. Sometimes we went to the coffee shop near the hospital and the hotel they use for their sleep studies. Sometimes we’d head downtown. We’d go to that bakery across the street from the library on College Street.”

“My mom did love their cupcakes.”

“And their coffee. Decaf, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Did you inherit her love of cupcakes?”

“I did.”

“Ever have the time to come to Burlington?”

I chuckled. “These days I have nothing but time.”

“The bakery has more than cupcakes. They have pretty good sandwiches. Want to come to lunch on Monday? It’s one of my days off this week.”

His voice was casual, but once more the room shifted. I wanted to see him again, but I needed reassurance that he and my mother had never been romantically involved. I met his eyes: “You swear that you and my mom were not having an affair?”

He raised his right hand. “I swear. It was never, ever like that. She loved your dad. And I was dating someone else back then, too.”

“What happened?”

“She moved to Boston. We grew apart.”

“And you’re not, I don’t know, crossing some ethical line as a detective?”

“By taking you to lunch?” He smiled. “Arguably.”

“So I shouldn’t,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. I felt a pang of disappointment.

“Oh, I’m sure some people would frown. But like I said, we have no reason to believe this is a murder investigation. And I promise you: it won’t cloud my ability to explore what happened. So you should.”

“Okay,” I said. There was a tremor of doubt in my voice, and he heard it, too. I told myself that by seeing him, I was in fact the one playing detective. I might learn something more about my mother and her disappearance. But there was more to it than that: I understood the way I was attracted to him.

“Okay, we’re on?”

“Uh-huh. We’re on. What time?”

“Twelve thirty?”

“I can squeeze you in,” I said.

“Excellent.”

When I left the party a few minutes later, driving home in my mother’s Pathfinder, I considered whether I would tell my father and Paige that I was seeing the detective for lunch. But I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t. That I shouldn’t. I had the sense that Gavin wouldn’t want them to know. I convinced myself—and it really took very little work—that they didn’t need to know. No one did. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my meeting the detective at the bakery; there was absolutely nothing wrong with my meeting him anywhere.

Nevertheless, a part of me wondered what the hell I was doing.





THE DREAM HOLDS you tight. The voices inside you drone on, but you ignore them because this is but a dream.

So you give in. Lovers don’t enter your life out of the blue. You summon them in your sleep.

A lucid dream? A technical term. A term coined by a Dutch psychiatrist just before the First World War. In a lucid dream, people wield some control over their sleeping world. They choose to fly. Or they choose not to. But they are aware that they’re dreaming. There is activity in the parietal lobes.

A lucid dream is particularly vivid. The physical sensations can be…remarkable.

You have all the cerebral activity but none of the control. None. Your dreams are lucid, but you are not technically a lucid dreamer.

And so when you see a new lover, you start to unbutton your shirt.

Or not.

You have no recourse but release, and so sometimes you don’t even bother to undress.





CHAPTER FIVE


THAT NIGHT, WHEN the Saturday Night Live rerun was over and I was confident that my sister was asleep and our father had passed out—that was how I was starting to view the sleep that followed his drinking—I went to the guest bedroom. My mother had usually worked at her office in Middlebury the last six years, but she kept a computer and an old drafting table in the guest room so she could still get something done those days when Paige was home with a cold or strep throat, or the roads were too snowy to drive to Middlebury (which usually meant some combination of all of us were home anyway, because there was a snow day and the schools were closed). I swung open the door and, as I expected, saw my mother’s handbag and cell phone on the credenza beside her drafting table. On a separate desk was the computer. I paused: I had never appreciated the warm molasses of the wood and how meticulously my mother must have selected each piece.