The Sleepwalker(72)

He went to me, his arms extended, and I batted them down. He tried again and I pushed him away. “Stay away from me,” I ordered. “Don’t touch me.”

He stretched out his arms, palms open. “I’m unarmed,” he said, trying to dial down my rage.

“Tell me why you lied.”

“I just did. Because it’s not your concern.”

“That’s not what I mean. Why did you see her the Wednesday before she disappeared?”

“Because she called me and wanted to talk.”

“Why?”

“Fine. You win. Your father was about to go on a business trip, and your mother was frightened. She was afraid that what did happen might happen.”

“So you met her at the bakery.”

“Yup.”

“How many times have you really seen her the last few years?”

He turned around and went to his bedroom. I was unsure whether to follow him, but he was gone only a moment. When he returned, he tossed the pocket calendar onto the kitchen counter beside me. “Just that one time. But if you don’t believe me, thumb through it. Have a ball.”

“Are you bluffing?”

“Only way you’ll ever know is if you read it. Go ahead.”

And so I did, while he resumed making the coffee. My mother’s name appeared but once. When I put the datebook down, he said to me, “Shall we now turn our attention to what happened last night?”

“What did my mom say when you met that Wednesday?”

He took a deep breath and he told me. He shared with me her anxieties that without my father beside her, she would rise and she would roam. She might feel for a body with her fingers or legs, find none, and leave the bedroom. She would leave the house. She insisted that she hadn’t had any incidents in years, but then Warren had always been in bed beside her.

“When she was done, I advised her to tell your father to stay home,” he said. “I told her he should cancel the trip. I reminded her that we’re never cured. Exhibit A? What I did to you last night. I said she should say to him, pure and simple, ‘Don’t go.’ But either she convinced herself that she was worried for naught or she decided she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to give up that conference.”

“Which?”

“No idea. But if you made me guess, I would pick the latter. In any case, I don’t believe she ever asked him to stay home. I don’t know that for sure, but your father is on the record that she never asked.”

I watched the coffee drip and listened to the machine’s gurgle. “I think I should go,” I said.

“You don’t want to talk about last night?”

“No. Not now.”

“Can I call you?”

I shook my head. I pulled on my boots. I went home.



That night my mother came to me in my dreams. It was the first time since she had died. She gave me no clues as to what had happened to her, no insights in which I could take comfort. We were grocery shopping. The only twists my subconscious offered? We were shopping at a supermarket that sold swim fins beside the fresh peas and carrots, and magic tricks in the same aisle with the Juicy Juice. She was wearing an ink-blue pencil skirt that was among her favorites when we were visiting Manhattan, a white blouse, and black stiletto heels. She was overdressed for a Hannaford’s supermarket in rural Vermont, but in the mystifying world of a dream her attire made all the sense in the world and no one seemed to notice. Certainly I thought nothing of it. Mostly I was just happy. I was happy with the normalcy and I was happy to see her. Neither of us commented on the fact she was dead, because neither of us remembered.

And so when I awoke, I was weeping. I recalled Gavin’s observation in the cruiser the day we had met back in August: at that moment, alone in my bed, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the sadness we feel when we understand an utterly perfect dream was only a tease. My mother was still dead and I was still a mess.



How many times had my father looked at Paige and thought to himself, Whose eyes are those? Because they looked nothing like his and nothing like his late wife’s. And the child’s athleticism? Wholly foreign to either him or his wife. Did he ask himself about that, too?

I pondered those questions that autumn, and I decided he was too smart not to wonder. I thought about them on Halloween night, as Paige and I gave out candy to children from a front porch strangely and uncharacteristically bereft of jack-o’-lanterns. (Our mother would not have approved.) Paige did not go trick-or-treating; if one of her friends had a party, she never told me. (She said none of the seventh graders had dressed up as Al Gore or George Bush, but one group of girls was decked out in long black tunics and sunglasses à la The Matrix.) The questions were with me as the first snow fell on November 1 and the deadline passed to tell my college I was coming back. I wasn’t. At least not in January. I thought about the mysteries of sleep and conception when my sister’s ski coach called the house, looking for our father, and asked me why my sister was having second thoughts about Chile—why suddenly she wasn’t going. He wanted to see if our father could change her mind and rekindle her interest. And, yes, I thought about them when I listened to the messages from Gavin Rikert on my cell phone, none of which I had returned. I missed him, and the sound of his voice could make me at once wistful and giddy. But I wasn’t sure I could trust him. The fact is, there was a part of me now that feared him.