The Sleepwalker(58)

The salesman knew he had lost. He saw my mother’s logic; he respected her intensity. And so he said nothing more to her while Paige snacked, and a few minutes later, when Paige was sated, he welcomed my mother back into the conversation.

And when the three of us returned to my aunt and uncle’s later that day, I had with me in a big paper shopping bag the magic pan, as well as a trick deck and a spring bouquet I could stash inside a hollow wand or up my sleeve. The salesman had given me the last two items.

Make no mistake: my mother was a lioness with a ferocious love for her cubs. I recalled how she had gone to battle on my behalf when my high school guidance counselor had insisted that certain colleges were beyond my reach, and how she had gone nuclear when a boy drove me home from a party when I was in tenth grade and she could see (and smell) that he’d been drinking. She’d driven him to his house in her car and presented him drunk to his parents.

Yes, I had lost her earlier than I should have. Paige, of course, had too. But something inside me changed when her body was found, something inside me grew up. I understood once and for all that my courageous mother was never coming back, and I vowed to stop sleepwalking through grief.



My mother was probably as good as dead by the time her body broke the plane of the Gale River. There was water in her lungs, but little indication of active respiration; her injuries suggested she was going to die even on dry land soon enough.

Cause of death? A skull fracture and an acute subdural hematoma. Blood had pooled between her brain and her skull, suggesting a violent head injury prior to her body hitting the water. It seemed that someone or something—and when my father and I were informed of the autopsy results, I envisioned a wooden baseball bat—had caved in the back of her skull. My college roommate Erica, however, told me later that day when we were talking on the phone that my imagination had run wild: Who carries around a baseball bat as a bludgeon? she had asked.

It was also possible that my mother had had consensual but violent sex (which led me to wonder privately if there could have been consensual but violent sleep sex). Still, that was merely conjecture, too. The medical examiner could catalog the contusions near my mother’s genitalia, but how was he to know for sure the bruising was not the result of the rocks and logs and debris against which her body—naked but for the tattered remnants of a navy-blue sleep shirt—had been colliding for weeks? She had a pelvic fracture, but the M.E. said that the injury may have occurred postmortem. In the water. Her corpse (what was left of it) was a ragged, gelatinous, stringless marionette. Entire strips of sinew, muscle, and tissue had washed away. After so many days in the Gale River, her skin was the texture of cottage cheese and the fathomless brown of a swamp.

The pathologist examined her vaginal walls with a speculum; he combed her pelvic girdle for foreign hairs. He found none. He might have aspirated fluid from her vagina, searched for semen and blood, but the Gale had performed its ablutions: any liquid residues from a sexual encounter had long since washed away. Still, he swabbed what he could. He found nothing.

To perform the toxicology report, he squeezed the spleen: spleen blood is less costly to test than brain or liver tissue, and he was saving taxpayers a little money. We would have to wait a few weeks for those results, but no one expected any surprises.

And then, of course, there was this: that small strip of fabric that was found on the dead twig of a dying maple.

The investigators returned to that patch of the riverbank, hoping for a miracle. A clue. A trace of someone else’s DNA.

They found none.



Neither my father nor Paige wanted breakfast the morning of my mother’s funeral. I wasn’t hungry, either, but I drove to the bakery in Bristol and brought back a dozen maple scones and then brewed a pot of coffee. My grandparents—my mother’s parents—were staying with us for the funeral, and I figured when they awoke they would want something. They did. My grandmother, falling deeper almost daily into the fog of Alzheimer’s, had gotten lost in the second-floor bathroom. But she loved the scones, and food seemed to ground her with us in the moment. My grandfather offered to scramble some eggs to go with them, but the idea of eggs made me nauseous. I passed. Our father was going to give the eulogy, and he was alone in the den, editing and rehearsing his remarks. My aunt and uncle and my younger cousins—two rambunctious blond boys, one in the fourth grade and one in the first—were staying at a country inn in Middlebury, but they were already at our house for breakfast, too. Paige rather liked them both, because (like all boys, I had already decided) there was no sport involving a ball that did not interest them. Like my sister, they were energetic and competitive; they traveled that autumn with a soccer ball and a football.

It had been a week since the body was recovered and three days since the medical examiner had determined that Annalee Ahlberg hadn’t drowned.

I had laid out on my bed three dresses I was considering, all appropriately dark and all inappropriately summery, revealing, or cheerful, when Paige came into my room. She was already wearing the black dress our aunt had bought her the day before in Burlington. She sat down on the edge of the mattress beside the clothes.

“I think you should say something,” she told me.

“You mean at the service?”

“Yes.”

“Dad will be way more articulate. And I don’t think I’d be able to keep it together up there. I’d be a disaster.”