The Sleepwalker(5)

Some people speculated that I was waiting for my mother to return—that I wasn’t giving up hope until a body was found and all hope was lost. I wished that were the case, but I knew deep inside that it wasn’t; it was heartbreak, not hope, that was keeping me here.

“Do you know what time Dad will be home tonight?” Paige asked me.

“I don’t.”

“Have you talked to him today?”

“I haven’t.”

Paige sat up and shook her head dismissively. “Mom would have talked to him. She would have known what’s up.”

“I’m not your mother. I’m your sister.” When Paige said nothing, I rattled off a litany of questions as sarcastically as I could: “How was school, Paige? How are you doing with your polynomials? Did you bring home your Lord of the Flies? What are you going to be for Halloween? Or is that too far away? Are you and your little friends too old now to dress up?”

Paige looked at me and her dark eyes grew small. I knew that the girl was going to be a knockout, especially when she was pissed off. When some people are annoyed, their mouths collapse and their face falls into neutral. Not Paige. Even at twelve, she smoldered well. “Why do you make fun of everything?” she asked me finally. “Everything’s just patter for you. Why are you always so…so cynical?”

I sighed. Most seventh graders didn’t use words like patter and cynical, either. But most seventh graders didn’t have an English professor and wannabe poet for a father. They didn’t have an older sister whose summer job was magician: Lianna the Enchantress. (Before our mother had vanished, I had been thinking it was time to tweak my stage name. Come up with something that sounded less like a personal ad for an escort.) I knew that when I had been Paige’s age, I had also taken great pride in my vocabulary. “I work hard at it. People think it’s easy to be like this. It’s not,” I said simply.

“You smell like weed.”

I probably did and it made me feel guilty. I guessed it was my clothes. Dope stuck like Gorilla Glue to L.L. Bean flannel shirts. Of all my good friends from high school, only Heather Prescott had not chosen a college in Maine or Massachusetts or New York, so I’d been hanging around mostly with her lately. She was a senior at the University of Vermont, and still a very serious partier. I had spent the afternoon with her and a couple of nice but not especially bright frat boys. Now I inhaled my sleeve and, sure enough, it was a tad pungent. Skunky. It was a testimony to how much slack people wanted to give me—Warren Ahlberg’s daughter, the girl whose mother had disappeared and who hadn’t gone back to college—that not a single person those days ever asked me why sometimes I reeked like the backroom of a head shop.

“So, I’ll call Dad at the college and see what time he’s coming home for dinner,” I said, not wanting to escalate the fight. I really did feel like a bad role model; on some level, I wanted to do better for Paige. “I was just going to get us wraps and potato salad at the store. But maybe I’ll make a meat loaf. Do you want me to make a meat loaf? You love Mom’s meat loaf.”

“You know how to make meat loaf?”

“How hard can it be? It’s, like, hamburger meat and ketchup and onions. Maybe an egg. But I’ll check a cookbook. Trust me, Mom isn’t the French Chef. I think that’s about all she does.”

Paige nodded. “Okay.” And then she repeated the word and started to reach for her swim fins so she could carry them home. But then she stopped and gazed down at the water in the river as it meandered past us. When she looked up again she was crying. Soundlessly. I started to hug her, but she swatted at my arm with one of the fins. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m fine.”

But, of course, she wasn’t. Neither of us was.





YOU CAN’T ARGUE with a dream.

Because you don’t know it’s a dream.

It may be nonsensical, but in the insinuating, slow-motion faithfulness of this nocturnal world—its grave commitment to its madness, the confidence it has in the rightness of its unreason—you respect this new normal. The world is a fog, especially when you are in the solarium-like heat that lives under the sheets.

They tell you there is no connection between sleepwalking and dreams. Perhaps. After all, you can remember your dreams.

You have heard of people who can wake themselves up from a bad dream. Or control the environment. The experience. You are not among them. You can neither turn away nor turn back. You make the best decisions you can.





CHAPTER TWO


I DECONSTRUCTED MY mother’s last night countless times as summer segued into fall that year. I described everything I could recall for my father. For the police. For myself. I talked it through with Heather Prescott when we were sitting around her dingy apartment in Burlington just off the UVM campus, and with another of my high school friends, Ellen Cooper—who hadn’t gone to college, but was making what seemed to me at the time to be scary amounts of money designing jewelry and candlesticks at a pewter smith in Middlebury—when she would stop by my house on her way home to Bartlett. The thing I kept coming back to was how pedestrian my mother’s last night really was. There were no warnings, no ominous asides, nothing that could be construed by even the most rabid conspiracy theorists as foreshadowing.

My father was a time zone to the west at his academic conference. Scholars and professors dissecting poetry. Because he was going to be gone for two nights, it had crossed my mind that my mother might sleepwalk. It had crossed all of our minds. After all, it was only when her husband was gone that she would arise at some point in the night and embark upon one of her journeys. But she hadn’t left her bed in the night in nearly four years—at least that we knew of, and wouldn’t my father have known?—which was why my father was even willing to leave for the conference. (There had been some discussion that my mother might accompany him since I was home and could look after Paige, but it had never struck me as very serious: my mother had her own work here in Vermont.)