The Sleepwalker(66)

My grandfather, however, had died suddenly when I was in kindergarten, and so I had never really gotten to know the man who had raised my father. He had been an advertising executive, though precisely what he did was beyond me.

“Oh, my parents are a very broad topic,” my father said in response to my question. He was sitting across from Paige and me, leaning back against the wall of the settee with his arms folded across his chest. “What would you like to know about them?”

“I don’t know: tell me about the time you introduced Mom to them. What was that like for you? For them? How did they respond?”

“Well, there’s probably what actually occurred and then there’s the way I massaged my recollections over time. That’s how it is with everything, isn’t it?” my father answered.

“Lianna’s clearly about to bring someone home for you to meet, Dad,” Paige said. “It’s why she didn’t come home a couple of nights the last few weeks.”

I glared at her. “Nope. I was just crashing at friends’ houses in Burlington and Montpelier.”

My father didn’t seem to acknowledge Paige’s supposition. “Your grandmother had her mouth filled with an indecent-sized scoop of chopped chicken livers on a cracker when I brought your mother home to meet her. She had just gotten home from work and was starving. She was hoping to snack quickly before we arrived. She didn’t hear us come in and we surprised her in the kitchen. She was standing in a blue suede gaucho skirt, with one hand on the counter above the dishwasher. Your grandmother’s bite was so big—so marvelously and uncharacteristically gluttonous—that she couldn’t speak for easily thirty seconds while she chewed. She gave your mother a half wave.”

“Were you embarrassed?” Paige asked. She took a sip of her soda and frowned. “I think they gave me diet soda by mistake.”

Our father nodded and looked around for our waiter. “Again, who’s to say it really happened quite that way? But that’s how I recall it,” he said. Then: “No, Paige, your grandmother never embarrassed me.”

“Did she ever sleepwalk?” I asked.

“No.”

“Your father?”

He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “But did your mother’s parents?” he asked me in response, ever the professor. “That would be a far more interesting and practical question.”

“Did they?”

“No. The question is more interesting than the response. I’m sorry. Lianna, tell me why you just asked me about sleepwalking: Have you had an incident?”

“No.”

“Good. You girls really shouldn’t fret, in that case. The doctor at the sleep center is looking forward to seeing you both, but she really isn’t alarmed in the slightest. Neither of you should be worried.”

Paige looked across the restaurant at the large chalkboard with the specials and shrugged. I had to restrain myself from reminding the two of them that I really didn’t need to see Dr. Yager at all—at least not as a patient.

“I was looking at your parents and Mom’s parents in lots of old family photos today,” I said instead. “I also looked at a lot of the family reunions. Wedding pictures. Our family has some of the worst hair on the planet,” I went on, unsure how far I would take this line of inquiry with Paige sitting beside me. “With the exception of Mom, there is just so much mousy blond. So much thinning hair.”

“I seem to be the only one who got stuck with black hair,” Paige said. She sounded disgusted, and instantly I regretted what I had begun.

“You have the best hair,” I said. “I would kill for hair as thick as yours.”

“No, you wouldn’t. I’m this weird black sheep. We all know that.”

“You are way prettier than the rest of us,” I tried to reassure her.

“I used to think I was adopted.”

My father, I noticed, seemed to pay a little more attention. “Why in the world would you think that?”

“Because I don’t look anything like you and Mom and Lianna the Enchantress over here. And because I’m nothing like the rest of you.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I’ve seen you on skis. You’re a spaz. I saw Mom on skis. She wasn’t exactly Picabo Street. And Dad, no offense, but you’re not an Olympic athlete, either.”

“No offense taken,” he said, smiling in acknowledgment. “But, first of all,” he added, “it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if you were adopted. You’re my daughter. You were your mother’s daughter. Second, you weren’t adopted. Lianna and I can assure you of your mother’s pregnancy. I was in the delivery room when you arrived—dark hair and rosebud mouth and all.”

“So who in our family do I look like? Who am I most like?”

He sniffed and thought. He was stumped. Finally he said to Paige, “Your mother’s uncle Arvid was a very good Nordic skier, I understand.”

“And he had your color hair,” I added, recalling the photo and trying to be helpful. But our father corrected me.

“No,” he said, “it was brown, but it was light brown. Maybe it looked darker in the photograph. It certainly wasn’t that lovely raven’s black of yours, Paige.”