The Sleepwalker(52)

No, I’d die that way, too: I’d drown because I wouldn’t be able to swim to the side.

I stared up at the moon, my arms still spread like wings. I craned my neck and liked how it felt. I stretched my fingers and recalled how my mother had stood here with her arms at her sides. My naked mother. That naked angel. Her skin had struck me as especially pale that evening, the alabaster of renaissance statuary. I wondered what it would feel like to stand here, a nude at night, alone with the moon. Had my mother been howling inside or was she as serene as the seraphs spanning the Tiber or Seine?

I had an idea; no, I was experiencing a craving. Here was the difference between a want and a need. This was not something I could do; this was something I had to do.

I made sure of my footing and then pulled my hoodie over my head and tossed it behind me onto the sidewalk. I unbuttoned my flannel shirt and carefully slipped that off, too. A part of me thought, I am stoned and I am out of control, but it didn’t stop me from reaching behind me and unclasping my bra. I watched it fall and was disappointed that it didn’t drift like a kite. Shouldn’t lingerie float to the earth in slow motion?

I heard a vehicle in the distance, the growl of a pickup. I wondered if the truck was coming this way. I ran my fingers over the goosebumps on my arms, and I blinked at the tears that for reasons I couldn’t fathom were starting to pool in my eyes. Perhaps somewhere nearby was my mother’s body. Or had its final journey begun downstream of where I was standing now—near where the shred of her nightshirt had been discovered?

I unzipped my jeans. I unbuttoned them. It was only as I was starting to pull them down below my hips, taking my panties with them, that I remembered I was wearing my sneakers. I couldn’t take off my pants without first taking off my sneakers. This was…logic.

I started to kneel so I could untie them, planning to begin with my right foot, but suddenly the toe of my left foot was slipping on a stone or thick twig—no, it was my pipe, my goddamn pot pipe—and I was falling. For a second I was suspended, tottering, a tightrope walker losing her balance and about to plummet from high above the circus ring, the audience gasping, but it was only a second, because although I was stoned I was able to think street and hurl myself toward the sidewalk instead of the river. I landed hard on the asphalt—beyond the sidewalk—palms out, and rolled onto my side. Instantly I felt the road burn on my hands and my shoulders, but somehow I managed not to crack my skull on the ground.

On the road perpendicular to the bridge the pickup rumbled by, and I felt the bridge shudder, but the driver didn’t notice me. I collapsed onto my back, breathing heavily with relief and disgust. I was topless, I was stoned, and (now) I was crying.

Slowly, carefully, I sat up and checked myself. My hands were bleeding, but not horrifically so. Same with a long scratch on my side. Mostly my wrists hurt, but the pain was not incapacitating. I rolled my eyes as if someone were actually present, and patted myself down: I was not merely checking for broken bones (which I thought were unlikely), but actually reassuring myself that I was alive. That I was fine. I hadn’t fallen into the river and died instantly by smashing my head on a rock. Or in minutes by drowning. When I stood, I saw my pipe on the ground near my feet. Near my clothing. I reached into the sweatshirt for my baggie and opened it, sprinkling the dope into the river, though I guessed most of it would waft in the night breeze into the brush along the banks. Then, even before getting dressed, I reached down for my pipe and hurled it as far as I could into the Gale River. Somewhere downstream I heard a small thwap as it parted the plane of the water.





I ONCE HAD a lover who didn’t mind the sleepwalking. It was the sleep sex that was the problem.

And I once had a lover who didn’t mind the sleep sex. It was the sleepwalking that ruined our relationship.

For me, the trouble always was this: I knew what I had done.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


THE NEXT MORNING, in the fifteen minutes between when Paige left for the school bus and my father left for the college, I confronted him in the kitchen. He had a stack of student compositions in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other. He was about to head out the door.

“Why do you really want me to go to the sleep clinic?” I asked him point-blank.

He stared at me, but I couldn’t decide whether his gaze was angry or defensive. Clearly I had caught him off guard. “So Paige feels less frightened,” he said finally. “Frankly, I think she’s being a bit of a worrywart. A drama queen. I’m really not all that concerned.”

“Don’t you think you should have asked my permission?”

“Your history is actually far more extensive than hers.”

“So you just went ahead and made an appointment? You should have checked with me.”

“Why? Because your calendar is so busy?” he asked, in an acerbic tone he rarely (if ever) used on me.

“What does that mean?”

“It means nothing,” he said, softening. “I’m sorry. I know you’re struggling—like me. That’s all I meant.”

“Honestly, how worried are you about her—about either of us?”

“Honestly? Not in the slightest. This is all just a precaution,” he said, and then he put his glass in the sink and pushed past me. I wasn’t sure I believed him.