The Sleepwalker(73)

Erica continued to beg me to please phone the registrar at Amherst, insisting it wasn’t too late. Gavin continued to beg me to please call him back, trying to convince me that I was overreacting. And my father? He asked for nothing. I made my family breakfast and dinner, and I drove my sister to the mountain, where now they were making snow, instead of to the swimming pool at the college. I made sure that my father had his scotch and my sister had batteries for her Game Boy. I cut cards and talked to myself, pretending it was patter. I voted for the first time in my life, using a pencil and a piece of paper in a three-sided wooden booth because this was a small village in Vermont that had no need for voting machines. Occasionally my mother’s friends or the pastor would phone the house to check in, and I would lie and say we were fine. Sometimes my own friends would call and plead with me to join them for a movie or a drink or to get high. They wanted to talk about the election and Florida, and how a presidential contest could become such a disaster. But always I passed. Mostly those weeks I read and I dozed, and I would lie on the floor before the wood stove and beside Joe the Barn Cat. Sometimes he would get up and wander upstairs to the guest room with my mother’s drafting table and computer, where he would sniff at her handbag and a scarf on the credenza, and then curl up on her chair. It broke my heart to see how much he missed her, too.





OTHER DAYS I would say, “Forgive yourself. They would. They will.”

But I couldn’t. I can’t. It’s one of those things, like losing weight or being patient or following through on any New Year’s resolution, that’s just so much easier said than done.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


TWO WEEKS BEFORE Thanksgiving, my father announced that Grandpa Manholt, my mother’s father, had invited us to Concord for the holiday. In my family, Thanksgiving had always been a movable feast with three rotating locations: our home in Vermont, my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Manhattan, and my grandparents’ majestic (and rather mannered) colonial in Massachusetts. It was technically our turn, but no one expected the Ahlbergs of Vermont to be capable of hosting a family gathering. Moreover, my grandfather could no longer care for my grandmother, and so he and my aunt had decided it was time for my grandmother to move into an assisted living facility that specialized in patients with Alzheimer’s. That would occur at some point before Christmas, and so this was a last hurrah of sorts: another sad landmark in a season that was crowded with them. But Paige and I told our father that we were fine with the idea of one final Thanksgiving with everyone gathered at Grandma and Grandpa’s; the three of us would drive down the day before and spend a few days in the Boston suburbs. My father suggested we could all go into the city on Black Friday and face the madness and the crowds on Newbury Street. I had expected Paige to resist, since that would mean she wouldn’t be skiing on Saturday, but she hadn’t objected. She hadn’t even brought up the conflict. Like me, she was sinking as inexorably as our mother; it was taking more time, but the course for us both was clear. Eventually, it seemed, we both would hit bottom.



“And so we meet again,” said Dr. Cindy Yager, smiling. “Want to split another granola bar?”

This time I was not in her office. I was in her examining room instead, a few doors down from her office and across the hall, seated atop the cushioned table with a paper sheet. It resembled the examining room of the pediatrician I had seen as a little girl and the examining room of the family practitioner I saw now as an adult. Narrow, antiseptic, and decorated with a diploma and a health poster—this one about proper sleep hygiene, with a child’s crayon drawings of sheep and stars and a four-poster bed. The biggest difference between this room and the ones in which I had been examined before? We were on the fourth floor of an impressive hospital complex and so there was a window. The view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks was similar to the one in reception: a tourist postcard that trumped most artwork Yager (or any physician) was likely to use to try and brighten the space. I was still in my jeans and a sweater, but I knew the flimsy gown loomed. There was a folded one beside me on the examining table.

“No, I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound agreeable. My father and Paige were in the waiting room. Paige and I had flipped a coin to see who would go first. I’d lost.

“This will be a pretty low-key physical,” she said, leaning against the counter opposite me. “I won’t be drawing blood, for instance. Mostly I just want to get a medical history.”

“Did my mom tell you much about my sleepwalking as a girl?”

“A little bit. With your permission, I’ll want to ask your father what he recalls.”

“That’s fine. I mean, I really didn’t do much. I woke up a couple of times and didn’t recognize them. Pretty common, right?”

She held her clipboard against her chest like a shield and corrected me: “There was more. Considerably more. You know that.”

I realized that my mother must have told her about the time I wound up in their bathroom after the miscarriage. But I was a little taken aback by how dire the physician made it sound. “The bathroom and the Barbie dollhouse,” I said.

“Yes. And your father told me about the night you emptied out your bureau when you were in kindergarten. All your clothes were on the floor in the morning.”

I had never heard this story. I tried to downplay my surprise with a joke. “Well, I do that now when I’m awake—before dates.”