The Sleepwalker(64)

“Are you wondering if the miscarriages are somehow connected to her death?”

“I’m honestly not sure what I mean.”

He sighed. “It’s an ongoing investigation, Lianna.”

“So you’re not going to tell me.”

He shook his head. But I wondered if in my unfiltered questions, my random associations, I had tugged at a thread of some consequence for Gavin. It felt as if I had hit a nerve.



Was it the reality that I had, finally, been forced to say good-bye to my mother? Perhaps. But it may also have been the way his fingers had felt against the small of my back, the welcome pressure, or the way the sides of his face had felt against my fingers when we kissed. So warm. I felt the color rising up along the nape of my neck and the most exquisite tingling just below my waist. We fell upon each other the moment he had shut the door to his apartment, undressing on his living room couch, that sickle moon still agleam in the sky beyond his window. He knelt before me on the floor and I spread my legs, opening myself to him, losing myself to the wondrous, wet recklessness of the moment. His mouth. His tongue. Later, when he was inside me in his bed, he whispered how he had never been with a woman as beautiful as I was, and how he had never been happier than he was that moment. The whole world went away. It really was just the two of us.



And yet later, when I was lying with my head against his chest, warm beneath his sheets and listening to the waves of his heart, he urged me to leave. He said that was safest. I told him no; I told him I wasn’t going home. And when I refused, he said he would sleep once more on his living room couch, locking me safely in his bedroom. I said he would do no such thing. I insisted he remain in his bedroom with me because I could not bear to have him leave me that moment. It took us both a long time to fall asleep, though Gavin was more worried than me. I was twenty-one, and mostly I was curious. I watched him. I watched him so much, I made him uncomfortable, and so we made love again. But eventually we did fall asleep. Both of us.

And he slept through the night. As did I. It was lovely.



I had called my father and told him that I was spending the night with Heather Prescott at her apartment just off the UVM campus. By then my grandparents had left. My aunt and uncle and my cousins had returned to Manhattan, as well.

On my way home Saturday morning, I drove past Heather’s place and considered dropping by. I was looking for a reason not to return to the strange, sad emptiness of the red Victorian. I could explain to Heather that I had used her as an alibi if it ever came up. She’d like to be complicit in a lie about a lover. But if she were home—and awake—she’d want to know who I had been with the night before. She’d ask who this new man was in my life. And I wasn’t prepared to discuss Gavin. Moreover, she’d probably want to smoke a bowl, and I would have to defend my resistance, my rather sudden aversion to dope.

And so I returned to Bartlett, but I did make one stop there before going home. I dropped by Marilyn Bryce’s and found the woman in her studio. She was standing before a canvas the size of a queen mattress in a pair of jeans and a well-worn and impressively stained sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was listening to late Beatles on a boom box and staring at the kaleidoscopic waves of neon that rippled across the painting. I had expected the room to reek of weed—and wondered briefly what it said about me that I had passed on one stoner and wound up with another—but there was only the tiniest hint of skunk. She seemed so focused on her work that I considered whether I needed to take her more seriously.

She suggested that we go inside the house for a cup of tea, but I said I only had a couple of minutes, so she motioned for me to take one of the two wobbly, paint-splattered ladder-back chairs in the corner, and she took the other. We discussed the funeral and I reiterated how much I appreciated what she had said about my mother—which was true. But then I asked her the question that was on my mind, the reason why I had come here: “Did you and my mom ever talk about her miscarriages?”

“Oh, of course. How could we not?”

“Did she ever, I don’t know, speculate why?”

“Why they happened? As in a meaning of life, spiritual thing? Or why they happened biologically?”

“The latter.”

“Well, she knew, didn’t she? They did all those tests. Wasn’t it something to do with your dad?”

“I don’t know,” I lied, curious where this was leading.

“It was,” she said. “Your mom was quite sure.”

“And my dad?”

“Well, he had to know, too, didn’t he? If it wasn’t her, it had to be him. Right?”

I thought of the e-mail from him I had discovered. I recalled what he had said to me in his office. “I would think if my father knew, he would have felt horrible. He would have felt pretty bad.”

“I’m sure he did. But after Paige was born, none of that mattered now, did it?”

“But all the years in between?”

“What about them?”

“How did it affect their marriage?”

“It added stress, I guess. How could it not? But I don’t know what you’re driving at. I have no idea where you’re going with this, sweetie.”

“I’m not sure, either.”

She scrunched up her face and looked at me intently. She sat forward on her chair and leaned into me. “Are you worried that Paige is, I don’t know, just your half sister? Because that’s insane. That is seriously kooky talk.”