The Sleepwalker(3)

“Dinner. Let’s see,” I murmured. In the first days after our mother had disappeared, our father had been a cyclone of activity. He tried to make sense of the path the detectives and a K-9 dog named Max had outlined across our yard—the way the grass had been matted down in the night, the way you could see what they decided were her footprints in the dew, and (most compelling) the small piece from the sleeve of her nightshirt, ripped and found hanging on the leafless branch of a dead tree along the bank of the river. He had designed posters with her picture on them and had Paige and me plaster them on telephone poles and bakery and grocery store corkboards for miles. I had spent hours and hours alone in my mother’s midnight-blue Pathfinder—an SUV my parents had gotten my junior year of high school because it was perfect for carting us all (but especially Paige) to and from the ski slopes, and because we would use it to haul my belongings to and from college—driving between Bartlett and Hinesburg and Middlebury, where my father taught at the college. He had placed ads with his wife’s photo in the area newspapers to prolong the story’s momentum and to prevent people from forgetting Annalee Ahlberg—because, he knew, quickly they would. People survive by being callous, not kind, he sometimes taught his students, not trying to be dismissive of the species, but realistic. How, he lectured, could we ever face the morning if we did not grow inured to the monstrosities that marked the world daily: tsunamis and plane crashes and terrorism and war? And even when the police followed up on a tip—an alleged sighting of a woman wandering aimlessly in her nightshirt, or a piece of clothing floating miles away in the river—and discounted it, he would investigate it on his own. His inquiries those first days often confused strangers and infuriated the police.

At the same time, he had shocked the dean of faculty and the president of the college by informing them the Sunday of Labor Day weekend—barely more than a week after his wife had gone missing—that he still planned to teach that fall. It was, he said, the only way he could take his mind off the madness. Eight days later, Paige and I were sitting on the banks of the Gale. And while our father may have been himself in the classroom—inspiring one moment, glib the next—he had grown almost catatonic around Paige and me. He was utterly spent. He would drink till he slept in the evenings. In the days immediately after my mother’s disappearance, he had depended upon my aunt—his sister-in-law—to make everyone dinner and do the laundry and, occasionally, brush Joe the Barn Cat. And then my aunt had left, returning to her own family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My mother’s parents, frail and inconsolable, tried to help, but my grandmother was descending fast into the murk of Alzheimer’s. They understood they were making things harder, not easier, and soon had gone home to their colonial outside of Boston, where my grandfather could do his best to care for his wife in the surroundings she knew. The neighbors stopped bringing us lasagna and macaroni and cheese and bowls of cut fruit. And so the task of making dinner had now fallen to me. Though our father’s classes met only three days a week, he had gone to the college every day since Labor Day. Faculty meetings, he said. Introducing himself to his new student advisees. His own writing. Talking to people himself who thought they might have seen Annalee Ahlberg. Each day he had left early in the morning and come home just before dinner. It seemed to me that he couldn’t bear to be in the house. Did he believe that his wife was still alive somewhere? At first he said that he did, reassuring his daughters, but already he was more likely to speak of her in the past tense. I knew in my heart that, like me, he was convinced she had walked herself to her death in a moment of slow-wave, third-stage sleep.

For a couple more minutes I sat beside my sister on the bank of the river, and neither of us said a word. I was just about to rise and resume my walk to the general store when Paige surprised me and asked, “Did they fight a lot? I mean, in comparison to other married couples?” She was talking about our parents.

“Nah. Probably not.”

“I hated it when the house would get all tense.”

“It didn’t very often—not, I believe, compared to other couples.”

“They had that epic fight five years ago. I remember them yelling at each other. Screaming even.”

“Just that once,” I said. It really was the only time I could recall my parents raising their voices at one another, but it had been horrible. Paige had hidden in my room with me, my door shut, sniffing back tears as she buried her face in the quilt on my bed. For the only time in my life, I’d feared that my parents might actually strike each other. Usually when they fought, they fought rather quietly, their barbs sharpened on whetstones of condescension and sarcasm. My father’s vocabulary seemed to expand, a black hole of erudite scorn. My mother was less articulate—less verbal—but she could be colder and her silences even more dismissive. What triggered the pyrotechnics that awful night, what led the skirmish to migrate from room to room and their voices to carry beyond the Victorian? It had something to do with my mother’s sleepwalking and the way my mother’s behavior was embarrassing my father. They both felt shame, but for different reasons: he because of what people saw and she because of what she could not control. “They were pretty stressed out that night.”

“Why?”

“Sleepwalking, I think. I don’t know for sure,” I answered. “But they loved each other.” I tried to sound more confident about this than I was. I presumed my father loved my mother—or, at least, thought he loved her, which even then I understood wasn’t quite the same thing as actually loving someone. I was less convinced that my mother loved him back, but I was unwilling to admit such a thing aloud. I certainly wouldn’t say that to Paige. But I sometimes wondered if my mother was in fact too smart and too creative and perhaps even too imaginative for her English professor husband: a man who had an endowed chair at an elite New England college. A man who had published widely and written two acclaimed biographies of American poets. Annalee Ahlberg was probably too smart for most men. Moreover, she battled depression: a shelf in the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom was an honor guard of orange vials of antidepressants.