The Sleepwalker(4)

Still, I honestly believed that much of the tension between my parents was born of the sort of fears and frustrations that would cripple any relationship. Their marriage had almost certainly changed between when I was born and when my sister was born. I was nine years older than Paige, and separating the two of us were five miscarriages. I had been old enough to recall vividly my mother’s despair and my father’s disappointment after the last three. I remembered well the months my mother had spent in bed, an invalid, before Paige was born. The hours and hours I would have to be quiet so Mom could rest. The sleepovers at friends so Mom could rest. The week with my grandparents so Mom could rest. And then Paige had arrived: not quite full term, but close. Thirty-four weeks. A shade under five pounds. A week and a half in the neonatal intensive care unit, that was all. In my opinion, my sister had never resembled the aliens that are some premature babies. She had raven-black hair from the moment she was born, a rarity in my family: the Ahlbergs on my father’s side and the Manholts on my mother’s all looked like extras in Scandinavian tourism commercials. The women had long blond braids; the men, with their high foreheads and wispy yellow hair, belonged in the background of old Bergman movies.

And then, seven years later, there was my mother’s sleepwalking. I was in high school. Paige was in second grade. I had read all that I could about the phenomenon at the time, interested because I had occasionally walked in the night as a child. I read about other parasomnias. I read about dreams. (I also read almost every word that my father had written: the published books and the myriad articles in academic journals, as well as his notebooks of unpublished—unpublishable, I sometimes feared—poetry. A lot of it, I noted sadly, was about somnambulism.)

Our house was at the edge of the village in Bartlett, three-quarters of an acre across the street from the river and a five-minute walk to the center: a general store, a library, a firehouse for the volunteer firefighters, and a bed and breakfast. There was a brick church, ostensibly Congregational, but the worshippers—and there were seventy-five or so most Sundays—were largely American Baptist and Methodist, with a handful of Presbyterians. But it was the only church in the village, and so if you went to church, you probably went there. My family didn’t, other than on Christmas Eve and Easter morning. And so I felt more guilty than grateful at the way the pastor, a woman with green eyes and short salt-and-pepper hair who looked more like a lawyer than a minister, had made warm overtures to take my family under her wing since our mother had disappeared. In the last week, the pastor had even gotten me a pair of gigs for later that autumn: magic shows at birthday parties for two kids in the Sunday school.

Our next-door neighbors, the McClellans, had heard what Paige referred to as that “epic fight” five years ago. I overheard Carol McClellan sharing her description of the shouting match with the police the day my mother vanished. And so my father was briefly a suspect, but I don’t think anyone really believed that he had murdered his wife.

Besides, although it was Carol who told the police that she had heard the Ahlbergs screaming at one another that night, she was also the one who had told them about the time my mother had spray-painted the massive hydrangea silver by the lights from the bay window. The tree was in the front yard, twenty or twenty-five feet from the front door. I was the one who had heard my mother and brought her back inside, but the lights and our conversation had awakened the McClellans, too, and so Carol had witnessed Annalee Ahlberg’s nocturnal eccentricities. (Somehow, the tree, though deformed, would survive. My father cut down the silver branches and tried to shape those that remained so that in time the hydrangea once more resembled a mushroom cloud.) And then there was the night when other neighbors, Fred and Rosemary Harmon, outside together to gaze at a spectacular full moon, saw me walking my mother back over the bridge across the Gale River by the general store a little past midnight. I knew it was an old wives’ tale that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, and so I had woken my mother. By then she had climbed atop the concrete balustrade and was poised like one of the marble angels that stand watch on the bridges across the Tiber and the Seine. The bridge was high enough that had she jumped she would have been crippled or killed: she would have broken her back or crushed her skull or (merely) drowned. She was naked and I, seventeen at the time, was struck by how very beautiful she was. When she was back on the ground, I covered her up in the cardigan sweatshirt I was wearing and led her home.

When my mother was sleepwalking, it seemed she was oblivious even to the cold. One March night, after a late spring blizzard had turned Bartlett into a Currier and Ives print, she took her Nordic skis and went on a cross-country journey throughout the woods behind our house. She had no recollection at breakfast the next morning, but her clothes were drying beside the woodstove—which she had also started in the night—and I followed her tracks the next day when I came home from school.

What all of this somnambulism had in common was that it occurred only when my father was out of town—including the night when she vanished once and for all. It was why the police almost instantly discarded him as a suspect. He had been at a poetry conference in Iowa City.

Of course, that also meant that my mother’s disappearance would be a source of guilt and self-loathing for my sister and me. After all, neither of us woke up that night. Why did neither of us hear something, climb from our beds, and stop her? And as the older sibling, the one who once before had pulled our mother back from the precipice—the one who understood as well as anyone her noctivagant tendencies—I felt the remorse especially deeply. It was why I had chosen not to return to college for my senior year. I couldn’t bear to leave my father and my sister alone. I couldn’t bear to resume a normal life. Amherst had understood. The plan, as much as I had one, was that I would return after Christmas, in time for the spring semester.