The Sleepwalker(25)

I switched on the cell phone, wondering if Gavin Rikert’s name would be among the contacts. I imagined my mother phoning him to coordinate their calendars and schedule their little support group—their discussions of their sleepwalking over coffee. There were perhaps twenty-five or thirty phone numbers stored, and his wasn’t among them. But this meant nothing, I decided, because my mother’s phone was only two years old.

So I booted up her computer. I was struck by how much bigger the screen was than my laptop as I searched it for Gavin Rikert’s name, too. I typed his first name, then his last name, and finally both names together in the search bar on her e-mail program. It never appeared. There was no trace of the detective in any of her documents either. He wasn’t in her lengthy address book full of contacts.

Still, before shutting the machine down, I scanned some of the e-mails between my mother and my mother’s clients and some of the e-mails between my parents. I read some random e-mails between my mother and my grandfather about my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and it was heartbreaking to see the two of them outline the options for care as, in the coming months and years, she deteriorated. I guessed this was an invasion of privacy, but certainly the police had done this. And clearly they hadn’t found anything of importance as far as the investigation was concerned, because they wouldn’t have returned the computer if they had. They wouldn’t have returned her cell phone. That was just common sense. I was moved by how many of the e-mails were about Paige and me. Our mother seemed to brag a lot about the two of us. I was touched by how often our parents e-mailed, and how domestic it all was. A lot of their e-mails would have been texts a half decade later, they were so brief: grocery store reminders (“We’re out of half-and-half”) and references to newspaper articles (“They found the plane’s black box!”), or the times of the movies they wanted to see. Sometimes my father was pleading with her to join him at a college function or thanking her profusely when she did. Sometimes she was referencing one of their inside jokes about their friends, like Marilyn Bryce’s husband, Justin, a self-proclaimed foodie restaurateur, who mostly just added truffle oil to starch. Other times she was asking him to endure Bill and Emily Caldwell for a dinner in Burlington, even though they both agreed that Bill was a world-class bore. It made me a little sad that—as I had always assumed—my father seemed to love my mother more than she loved him. He often signed his e-mails “Love, W.” She never signed hers at all. He told her how beautiful he thought she was. She never responded. I never found a single e-mail where my mother complimented my father at all. Her e-mails weren’t cold; some were even playful. But the romance, such as it was, felt almost unrequited.

It was in the e-mails about my sister and me that I was able to glimpse the mother I recognized: passionate and funny and loving. So warm. So creative. So clever.

And I saw that my father was her equal when it came to his girls. Among the e-mails that left me wiping my eyes was one from my scholarly and (yes) bookish dad, observing how much he loved chatting with me about fiction and poetry and whatever I was reading. He had recently driven me back to college, and he had written how the car ride had left him wistful because I was so grown up. Discussing with me a Kent Haruf novel that was a finalist for the National Book Award that year had left him “proud and moved because she has become so astute. She is a much better reader than I am.” It wasn’t true, but it made me happy he thought so. And I remembered that afternoon ride well. I remembered most of our journeys well.

And, of course, some of the oldest e-mails on the machine between my parents were about the sleep study. But these were, again, all very businesslike. The schedule. When she would be gone. He’d express his concern. She’d tell him not to worry. There was no mention of a support group or a detective. There was no mention of any other sleepwalkers.

But then there was this: an e-mail my mother had sent my father that very June. It was the subject line that caused me to pause: “MCA and Miscarriages.” My mother had written:

This is all ancient history. The study might be new, but it should mean nothing to you and me anymore. Nothing. Okay?



She was responding to an e-mail from my father. I followed the chain and understood quickly that MCA stood for “male chromosomal abnormalities.” My father had found a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that suggested chromosomal defects in male sperm were occasionally the cause of recurrent or multiple miscarriages. Based on the e-mail he had sent her, he had come across the article that day and was bringing it home to show her—even years later, it seemed, trying to take the bullet for my mother’s miscarriages. Clearly, he had made this argument before—taken the blame. My mother, meanwhile, had her two girls and wasn’t especially interested in the study. Even if this research suggested that all of the miscarriages she’d endured had had more to do with his biology than hers, she didn’t care. Clearly two of his swimmers had been athletic and healthy. Paige and I were the proof.

I shut the machine down, heavy-hearted and stoop-shouldered with grief. I went downstairs and woke my father and walked him up to his bedroom. Then I climbed into the gym shorts and T-shirt that I was sleeping in those days and went to bed. For a long time I tossed and turned in the dark, tortured as much by what I knew as what I didn’t, before finally getting up and pulling up the shade and opening the window. In the chill air I watched the night sky and stars from my window seat and I listened to the river, and over and over I asked my mother where she had gone.