The Sleepwalker(28)

I nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Thank you. So, you’ll talk to the college?”

“I guess.”

“You guess,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed in me. “So, what are your exciting plans this week? Anything special?”

I almost confided that I was seeing a detective with ash-blond hair and hazel eyes twelve years my senior for lunch that day. But I stopped myself. Instead I said, “I’m going to vacuum. I’ll go to the supermarket. You know, push a shopping cart with a crappy wheel that makes it slide into the shelves of potato chips. I’ll buy lots of food with high-fructose corn syrup. I’ll be a homemaker.”

“This will pass, Lianna Ahlberg. I mean that: this nightmare will pass.”

When I said good-bye, I thought of the word nightmare. An expression came to me: it was like a dream, but it was real. I couldn’t recall who had said that and wondered if it was also something I had read in one of my father’s poems. It was, I decided, an eerily apt summation for my life.





IT’S SO OBVIOUS a distinction, it’s often overlooked: your eyes are open. But when you’re dreaming—at least in the traditional sense, deep in a REM world without natural laws—your eyes are closed. And yet the wide-eyed sleepwalker is sometimes acting out a desire. Bringing to life something a bit like a dream. Instead of thrashing about in your bed, you’re moving about in the world. And there is the problem. The big problem. You are bringing those desires or dreams to bear on a world that has laws—natural and otherwise.

And so sleepwalkers worry and fret, because we know what we dream. We know what we desire. And there always are consequences. The depth of our amnesia varies—some of us, in truth, know almost nothing—but we still know just enough to be scared.

Yes, our eyes are open. But only we know what we see.





CHAPTER SIX


THE NEWSPAPERS WITH their stories of my mother from those first days were still strewn on the far side of the living room. We couldn’t throw them away, but we couldn’t recycle them either. They sat like swatches of carpets for a makeover we had chosen to abort. When I finally picked them up, squaring their edges and piling them together, most of the ink that remained on my fingers was from photographs of my beautiful mother. I carried them up to the attic and placed them on top of the carton that held my kid sister’s old Barbie dolls. Neither my father nor Paige ever remarked upon the fact they were gone.



Tattered gray clouds blanketed the mountains to the east, and it was deep enough into September that the sun was too weak to burn them off. The autumnal equinox was later that week. If I weren’t going to Burlington, I thought I might have started the first fire of the season in the woodstove in the den. I wondered if it would rain. We needed rain so badly.

Now, as I was finally getting dressed for the day, I stared long and hard at my sweaters, a little disgusted. If I had been at school and were planning to see a boy on what could only be construed as a date, I would have borrowed one of Erica’s. I hadn’t that choice here in Vermont. I considered a dress, and threw three possibilities on their hangers onto the bed. I toyed with a dotted shirtdress pulled extra tight at the waist with a belt, but that seemed a little too formal for lunch with a cop. It screamed date and neediness in ways that I didn’t like. And so I wandered into my parents’ bedroom to see what my mother had. She was four inches taller than me, so anything I found was sure to be a little big. But maybe I could find something that would work if I rolled up the sleeves.

And I did. I found a Norwegian cardigan that hung midway down my thighs, red and white and gray, buttons the size of checkers, and it would work well with jeans. It might be a little heavy for the first days of autumn, but I reminded myself that this was Vermont and it wasn’t supposed to climb above fifty-five degrees that afternoon. I dressed up my jeans with a pair of black shoes with lace accents on the sides that Erica had christened my lingerie flats.

I was nervous as I was driving to Burlington, and a little relieved that I had nearly an hour to listen to music and steady myself. I hadn’t had a boyfriend since the middle of my sophomore year, and even Carl—another kid who, like Erica, planned to change the world—had been more like someone to hang out with at parties and sleep with than a boyfriend. We’d spent the summer between our first and second years apart because he was an aspiring documentary filmmaker and was interning with the PBS affiliate in New York City, while I was working children’s birthday parties across northern Vermont. I certainly hadn’t ached for him. I was pretty sure that he hadn’t ached for me. I presumed that was why we broke up just before Christmas that year. It had been almost eerily amicable, in hindsight.

And yet there had been a time when I was nineteen when I’d been quite sure that I loved him. Same with my boyfriend in high school.

I’d never been on a date before with someone older than me. I’d never been on a date before with—and the words caused me to smile and roll my eyes, even though I was alone—a grown-up.

I shook my head reflexively, trying to clear my memories of Carl. Of all my boyfriends. I told myself that viewing this as a date might be a stretch. I was, arguably, simply grabbing a bite to eat with a friend of my mother’s. I reminded myself that I might even discover something interesting or important about her, and that this alone was sufficient justification. Still, I understood there was a reason for stealth.