The Sleepwalker(26)

Once, when our family was starting to understand the connection between my father’s absences and my mother’s nocturnal journeys, my father had asked one of the clinicians at the sleep center whether I should lock my mother in the bedroom from the hallway when he was gone. Of course we would have had to add such a lock to the outside of the door. Or, he had suggested, we could add an electric light beam with an alarm to the frame. The alarm would sound if his wife walked through the doorway, at the very least awakening me. I had not been present for the discussion, but my father had shared it with me. Unfortunately, there were problems with both solutions. What if there were a fire and my mother couldn’t escape the bedroom? What would we do when I left for college in a year? Paige was still so young. No, the best solution was that my father simply wouldn’t travel until the medication took hold and it seemed likely that his wife’s sleepwalking was cured—or at least in remission.



The next day, Sunday night, my father and Paige and I were fighting another losing battle against awkward silences over dinner. I had improvised a Chinese stir-fry using the very last of the carrots and green peppers from the garden and the last chicken breasts they had at the general store. I promised myself that someday I would actually drive to the supermarket and buy a week’s worth of groceries. Wasn’t that what grown-ups did? Homemakers? My own mother? I watched Paige push the vegetables around her plate as if they were elements of a board game. Finally I asked my sister, “You have a lot of homework?”

“Nope.”

“Any?”

“Nope.”

Our father looked up from his plate and smiled. I studied him and waited, but he said nothing and then rather delicately cut a piece of the chicken into a pair of even smaller cubes.



After dinner, I cleaned up the dining room and loaded the dishwasher. My father offered to help, but both of us knew I would decline. By the time I was done, he was sitting in the den with a book in his lap, already dozing. I went upstairs and peeked in on Paige and saw that she was lying on her back in bed and playing with her Game Boy. She had gotten into her pajamas but was wearing a sweatshirt with the logo for her ski team above the kangaroo pocket.

“What do you want?” Paige asked, not looking up from the device.

“Nothing. But…”

“But what?”

“You know you’re not supposed to be playing video games on a school night.”

“It’s Mario Brothers. It’s for kids.”

“That’s not the point. I wasn’t judging its suitability. I was just reminding you that Mom and Dad don’t want you playing video games on nights when you have school the next day.”

“Well, Dad is half in the bag—”

“Where did you hear an expression like that?”

“Ally McBeal.”

“Since when do you watch Ally McBeal? Since when do you even understand Ally McBeal?”

She raised her eyebrows and looked at me as if the questions evidenced previously uncharted realms of utter cluelessness.

“Dad’s not half in the bag,” I said.

Paige dropped the Game Boy on the mattress beside her and pulled herself up against the headboard. “Okay. He’s not half in the bag. He’s all the way in the bag. And Mom’s dead.”

For a moment we stared at each other, the last word—a single syllable—as tangible in the air between us as smoke. Without thinking, Paige had verbalized the unthinkable. And then, aware of what she had done and how now she could never go back, she repeated the adjective. “She’s dead. She’s dead and we both know it.”

Still I said nothing. I wanted to reassure my sister that we didn’t know this, there wasn’t a body. But those words would have been unbearably hollow. Paige was smart. It would have been insulting to try and dissuade her of the truth. So instead I went to the bed and sat down beside her. I felt my own eyes welling up, but Paige didn’t seem close to tears. It wasn’t at all like that moment by the edge of the Gale, when Paige had started to cry and swatted away my arm with one of her swim fins. Instead she seemed resigned, maybe a little numbed by what she had said.

“Wow,” I murmured simply, gently rubbing her back.

“Why? Is it because I finally said what you’ve wanted me to say for weeks?”

“I didn’t want you to say it.”

“But it’s what you believe.”

I bit my upper lip so I wouldn’t break down. “I don’t know what I believe,” I said carefully.

“Of course you do. We both know she’s gone.” She put her hands in the sweatshirt pocket.

“I guess.”

“You guess,” Paige said, her voice dismissive and curt.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“When you would wander across the beaver pond those afternoons…when you would walk along the road beside the Gale…”

“Maybe I was looking for clues. But I was also looking for the body.”

“Oh.”

“She’s never coming back. I’m twelve. Not retarded.”

“Why would you use a word like that?”

“Twelve?”

I waited.

“Fine. I’m twelve. Not mentally challenged. Whatever.”