The Sleepwalker(54)

“Pretty much.”

“Pretty much? There’s more.”

“No. Not really.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

She looked away.

“There’s something else,” I pressed.

“Oh, Lianna, you must know.” When I said nothing, she went on. “Your mother said something to me once that gave me the impression you did. Maybe you walked in on your parents and your mother didn’t stop—because she was asleep.”

“Walked in on them doing what? Having sex?”

“God, I’ve said too much.”

“No, this is important. Go on.”

She put her forehead in her hands and shook her head ever so slightly. When she looked up, I thought she was on the verge of tears. “Sleep sex,” she began. “It sounds fun and maybe it would have been okay if your father had been, I don’t know, less uptight. Hell, Justin would have been thrilled if my thing had turned out to be sleep sex. That’s part of what I mean about how your dad could be difficult. The right sort of man…the right sort of attitude…what’s the big deal? But maybe I shouldn’t judge. We all have our demons, right? Look at me. I can’t hold my dope, and I’m telling you things I shouldn’t. I just shouldn’t.”

I sat back against the couch cushions. I hadn’t heard the term sleep sex before, but its meaning was evident in the context of my mother’s parasomnia. I recalled what Cindy Yager had said at the sleep center: They have sex in their sleep. “No. You’re right to tell me,” I said simply, hoping that Marilyn hadn’t detected the way the short sentence had caught in my throat.

“So I haven’t spoken out of turn? Really, I haven’t?”

“You haven’t,” I lied.

“I mean, she was a different person. They all are then, I guess. When they’re asleep.”

“They?” I suspected I knew who she meant—what she meant. But she made them sound like werewolves, so I asked her to elaborate.

“Sleepwalkers. Sleep sexers. It really freaked your dad out. It made him feel like he was inadequate. It made him feel like he wasn’t satisfying her. And your mom was already so humiliated. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. She was. And he just made her feel even worse. The things she would do…the things she wanted. For years their sex life was just a minefield.” She gave me a small, sad smile: “It’s a miracle their marriage worked as well as it did. It says something really powerful and lovely about both your parents.”

I felt queasy, and put down my tea. “My dad said he didn’t know why my mom only went sleepwalking when he was gone. But he did know why, didn’t he?”

“Of course he did. When he was in bed with her, she’d have sex with him. Or try and have sex with him. Sometimes she’d just, you know, finish herself. But he was the warm body her sleeping self needed.”

“And when he was gone…”

“She’d try and find someone else. And the key word is try. It’s not like she ever did—at least around here. Maybe if she was alone at a hotel she found someone. She fears that once happened at an architectural conference of some sort—back in the days when she worked for that firm in Burlington. What was it called?”

“Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw,” I reminded her.

“Yes. She traveled for them. She saw people at night. But, God, what was she going to do around here in Bartlett? Knock on Nick McClellan’s front door at two in the morning and ask him to come out and play? Walk over to Donnie and Erin Hempstead’s? Come here to my house?” She snorted and shook her head. “It goes without saying that Justin would have been fine if she’d ever come here and tried to get in bed with the two of us. I’m kidding—but only sort of,” she added.

“So you knew the sleepwalking didn’t begin just five years ago?”

“I did. It just got a lot worse five years ago. A lot more frequent. And it changed. Suddenly she was leaving the bed and going to the bridge and painting the tree. Suddenly she was…you know, more often.”

“And you think my mom used to talk to Gavin about it? She used to talk to him about her…her sleep sex?”

“Of course!” she told me. “That’s what the two of them had in common: Sleep sex. That’s his parasomnia, too!”



“I’m a mess,” I told Gavin. “I’m way more of a mess than you realize. Than I realized.” We were sitting at a bar on Church Street in Burlington, though both of us were sipping decaf coffee: by then I had learned that he drank very little alcohol because of his sleepwalking. And me? I had no desire for wine or beer after our evening in Montreal. I had driven to Burlington after having dinner with my father and Paige because—rather like my mother, I guess—I needed to speak to someone. I needed to speak to him. I wanted to tell him I knew.

“You have every right to be a mess,” he said. “It’s okay. It might be worse if you weren’t a mess.”

“I almost fell off a bridge. I almost jumped off a bridge,” I told him.

At this he looked alarmed. He was still wearing the blazer and tie he had worn to work that day, but at some point he had loosened the knot below his neck. He pulled it a little farther now from his throat, opening the collar of his shirt, and gazed at me intently. I recounted what I had done the other night—what I almost had done—and when I was through, he looked at the bartender, and I expected him to order a beer. He didn’t. He just asked for more decaf.