The Sleepwalker(77)

“Why? What happened? Did they learn something new?” she asked.

“No. He came by to bring me the flowers.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that enough dish for one car ride?”

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“Actually, I hadn’t seen him in a while. I thought we were over. But then he showed up with the flowers and I guess we’re not.”

“What’s his name?”

“Gavin.”

“Gavin what?”

“Rikert.”

“Is he old?”

“No!” I didn’t take my eyes off the road, but I knew she was smirking. “You talked to him the day Mom disappeared.”

“I talked to so many people.”

“I know. We both did,” I agreed.

“He was at the funeral, wasn’t he?” I could hear in her voice the way she was putting his name to a face.

“Yup.”

“Any special reason why you don’t want Dad to know?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a little weird that we’re dating. I guess it happens sometimes. But, also, he and Mom were friends…sort of.”

“Friends,” she murmured, as if she were trying the word out. Then: “What kind of friends?”

“It’s complicated. They were—”

“Okay, that’s just gross,” she said, interrupting me. “Are you really about to tell me that our mom had an affair, and now you’re dating the guy? The same guy? Seriously? If so, then you are responsible for the most puke-worthy thing in the history of the world.”

“It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Then what was it like? Explain it to me.”

“First of all, Mom was not having an affair with him,” I told her. “Okay? She loved Dad.”

“Go on.”

“Second, they were friends from the sleep center.”

“Is he a sleepwalker, too?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you mean by ‘friends’?”

“Just that. They had coffee a couple of times to compare notes about their sleepwalking.”

“Okay, so you’re involved with something that’s puke-worthy—but not historically so.”

“Why would you say that?” I asked.

“God, haven’t you had enough of sleepwalking?”

“Sleepwalking doesn’t define him any more than it defined Mom.”

She put the heels of her feet on the seat and wrapped her arms around her ski pants. “Did he say anything more to you about the investigation? I’m sure he did.”

We reached the bottom of the hill and the traffic that invariably formed at the stop sign this time of the day in November: a long line of salt-splattered cars with skis and snowboards in roof racks. “Yeah, he did,” I confessed. “But don’t get your hopes up. It was nothing really helpful.”

“Tell me.”

“He thinks maybe she jumped off the bridge. She jumped off the bridge and hit her head on a rock, but she wasn’t killed right away. That’s why she didn’t drown.”

I expected her to say something right away, but she didn’t. I turned to her. She was staring straight ahead and she looked grim. “You’re right. That’s not very helpful,” she said finally, her voice soft and throaty. “But it is awful. Just…awful.”

I nudged our mother’s car forward and waited once more. “You, okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Then: “I mean, that’s something we both guessed might have happened. It’s just a horrible way to die.”

“Yup.”

“So, Mom wasn’t murdered. Is that what they’re saying now?”

“Well, they’re not saying anything. That’s just the guess of one detective.”

She sighed and stared out her window. At the corner was a log cabin diner and sandwich shop that catered to skiers.

“You want anything?” I asked. “A hot chocolate?”

She shook her head.

“Maybe some popcorn to munch on?”

“No,” she said, a yawn interrupting and elongating that one small syllable. “I just want to go home.” Then she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes.



Would it have made any difference if Paige had told our father about Gavin? Would it have made any difference if I had?

I used to wonder about this, playing out the cause and effect that either of us might have unleashed, the alternate ways our family’s tensile core might have been fractured. When I would be awake in the small hours of the night, I’d speculate that something might have changed had either of us, for different reasons, told our father then that I was seeing the detective. A grown-up—someone more grown up than I was at twenty-one—would have done something.

But as I stared out the window at the night sky or at the dark ceiling above me, I could never see what that something might have been. What is the opposite of postponing the inevitable? Prepone? Expedite? Hasten? Eventually, I came to the vaguely Calvinist certainty that telling our father would only have accelerated our fate. It would, in fact, have changed nothing. After all, by then the die had been cast.