The Sleepwalker(62)

“Here? Seriously?” he said, his tone a little incredulous.

“I didn’t just ask you to have sex with me on the dining room floor,” I told him.

“It’s not the time or the place to talk about the investigation. Are you around later today? We could go somewhere and talk then.”

“No. I’ll be here. I want to be with my family. My dad. My sister. My grandparents. You know, the whole crowd.”

“Good. That makes sense. What about tomorrow?”

“Sure. But at least tell me this: Did you see someone here who’s a suspect? A person of interest?”

He smiled at me. “Spoken like someone who’s seen one too many cop dramas.”

“I don’t watch cop dramas.”

“But you have a pop culture implant. You know the terms.”

“And?”

He sighed. “I promise you, there is no one here you should worry about.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

“So you have absolutely no new leads?”

He shook his head. “But we’ll talk more tomorrow. Can I take you to dinner?”

“Okay. I’d like that.”

“Can I pick you up?”

“No.”

“Got it. I’m still a secret.”

“I honestly can’t tell: Are you offended or relieved?”

“Neither. You have your reasons for not telling your dad, I have my reasons for not telling my boss,” he answered. But then, in a gesture that felt oddly threatening, he took his coffee and went to the living room to say hello to my father. I scanned the room for Paige and saw her. She was with two of her friends from the ski team, and I could tell that she had been watching me from the corner of her eye.





SOME MEN DON’T mind when their lover has sexsomnia. They view it as a little something something—an unexpected sexual bonus. Others are threatened: they fear they aren’t sexually satisfying their partner if they wake up and the person beside them is masturbating or reaching for their penis in the night. And still other men? They’re merely annoyed that they’re being woken from a sound sleep at one or two in the morning.

It’s different for a woman whose man has sexsomnia. Occasionally, especially if they’re young, it’s a pleasant extra. Again, a bonus.

But most male sexsomniacs aren’t especially giving lovers. They’re not known for their gentleness or sensitivity. They get in and get out and then continue on their descent to serious REM sleep. Their partner’s pleasure? Irrelevant. (Certainly this is true for female sexsomniacs, too, but men—especially young men—rarely complain when sex is offered. Recall those students in Scotland.) Moreover, what if the woman once was sexually assaulted or raped, or was abused as a child? A sexsomniac, male or female, doesn’t take no for an answer. For those couples, therein lies the greatest sadness of all.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


A MEMORY CAME to me the night we buried my mother, unbidden and forlorn, as I was trying (and failing) to fall asleep.

My bedroom didn’t share a wall with my parents’ bedroom. The way our house was laid out, only the guest bedroom did. But before my freshman year of high school, that August, my mother and I together repainted the ceiling and hung new paper in my bedroom. The wild stallions wallpaper had been perfect when I was six, but that summer we replaced it with a floral design rich with shades of orange and peach. And so I was sleeping those days in the guest room. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of my father’s voice. He was speaking firmly, as if talking to a recalcitrant child.

“Annalee. Annalee. Stop it. Annalee.”

I was on my side and sat up so I could hear more clearly. “Annalee. No. I can’t perform like that.”

A moment later I heard their bedroom door open and close, and then I heard my father going downstairs to the den. I wondered if my mother would follow him. She didn’t. By the time my father returned to their bedroom—if he did return that night—I had fallen back to sleep.

For years, however, I had been haunted by that one sentence: I can’t perform like that. In my mind, it was suggestive of my father’s sexual inadequacy: his emasculation. I had been mortified and had tried to forget it. I couldn’t. Clearly it had colored so much of my view of him.

The night of my mother’s funeral, knowing what I understood now of my mother’s parasomnia, I felt guilty that I had thought less of him—and now that haunted me, too.



The next day was the first day that I volunteered at the elementary school in Bartlett. I had taken my father’s advice and called the principal—the same woman who had been running the school over a decade earlier when I had been there—and offered to spend a few mornings a week wherever they needed me. The school had exactly one classroom for each grade, kindergarten through five, and fewer than twenty kids in each room except for the second grade. The Bartlett sixth graders left the village for the area middle school. I offered to do a magic show, but the principal was more interested in having me work with the second graders, where there were twenty-two kids, making it the largest grade in the school.

As I walked through the hallways, the adults I would pass would grow somber. The custodian, a kind man whose hair was now white but whom I remembered well from my years there, wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to hug me and finally decided that the best thing to do was pat me awkwardly on the shoulder. He murmured how sorry he was. The teachers who had arrived since I had left a decade ago looked at me gravely and nodded, as if we were privy to a very special secret. The teachers who I knew told me how special my mother was and asked that great, wholly unanswerable question: How was I doing? I would shrug and lie. I’m fine, I said over and over that day. I’m fine.