The Sleepwalker(8)

“We’re just about to have a shift change. The night shift is almost done and the day shift is checking in. Your mother really hasn’t been gone all that long and you say she hasn’t been sleepwalking in a while. If she isn’t home in half an hour or you can’t find where she is, call us back then, okay?”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

I thanked the dispatcher, and in my haste to get off the phone I failed to summon the proper sarcastic tone. I imagine I sounded only curt, rather than frustrated or annoyed. The moment I hung up, however, the phone rang, startling me. I knew it was my father even before I had answered it.

“Your mother’s gone?” he asked me. “Tell me the specifics. How long?”

“I don’t know. I just got up.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Yes. They weren’t seriously helpful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They said to call back in half an hour if she isn’t home.”

“That’s not right. That makes no sense.”

“I guess.”

“God. Okay, call Elliot Sheldon. Call Donnie Hempstead. They’re both first responders. Start with Elliot. I’m sure he hasn’t left for work yet—but he will soon. Call them the moment we get off the phone. I’ll call the state police myself. I’m so sorry I was in the shower when you were trying to reach me.”

“She’s probably fine, right?”

“Right,” he said. “But let’s leave nothing to chance.”

“Should I try and find her? Should I see if she’s in the woods or the village or someplace? Maybe the bridge?”

“No,” my father said. “Just get our neighbors out looking for her.”

When I hung up, I saw that Paige was about to cry. All it took was the word bridge, and what memories that word exhumed. Paige hadn’t witnessed our mother standing on the balustrade above the Gale, but she had seen her when I had brought her home. It was one of those haunting third-grade memories that only grew worse over time.



Annalee Ahlberg was strikingly beautiful. My mother had Swedish blue eyes that made her look a little possessed when she smiled. Lapis lazuli. A Kodachrome photo would not have done them justice. Think CGI. Only a computer could create eyes like that. She wore contact lenses during the day, but eyeglasses—stylish turquoise ovals—at night and those days when she worked from home. Her hair was a blond so yellow that it almost looked bleached, but it was natural. And she was tall, almost as tall as my father, and he was six feet. Her legs went on forever. If she had had a better nose—less upturned, perhaps—and more patience when standing still (she had none, her soul craving movement even when she was asleep), she might have been a model instead of an architect.

And so when the state police from the New Haven barracks were interviewing Paige and me later that morning while they waited for my father to fly home from Iowa City, they probed the possibility that our mother had run off or was having an affair. Obviously less attractive women than Annalee Ahlberg had extramarital dalliances, too, but one of the troopers, a squat, heavyset detective sergeant in his late thirties with a state police sort of buzz cut and a birdy little nose, tried—clumsily—to see whether Paige or I had suspicions that our mother had a lover. Or, perhaps, lovers. It was infuriating and I felt my family was being violated. I understood why they had to ask, but that did not make this line of investigation seem any less absurd or, on some level I could not quite parse at the time, degrading.

It was a little past nine o’clock in the morning now and we were in the living room. I was seated on the couch, and the sergeant was facing me in a ladder-back chair he had brought in from the dining room. I was convinced that the only reason the two officers finally came to our house was because my father had gone ballistic when he’d called the state police. It irritated me that they hadn’t taken me seriously. A shift change? Yeah, right. The search parties had been wandering in the woods around Bartlett and following the river for at least ninety minutes now, and no one had found my mother yet.

“So,” the sergeant was asking me, “did your mom have any…friends…she might have met?” The badge on his uniform said C. Hardy. Paige was showing a second trooper the upstairs of the house and the bedroom where our parents slept.

“I told you. She was sleepwalking.”

“You said you’re twenty-one, right, Lianna?”

“Yes.”

“College, right?”

“I’m about to start my senior year.”

“Okay, then, I am going to ask you some very adult questions. May I?”

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. “It’s fine.”

He smiled approvingly at me. I hated him already. “Did your mom and dad ever squabble?”

“Sometimes, sure. But she’s a sleepwalker. That’s what this is about. Ask the people at the sleep clinic in Burlington.”

“What did they fight about? I can see all these pictures of her around the house. She’s a pretty lady. Do other men, you know, hit on her?”

“She’s my mother,” I snapped at him, disgusted by the way his tone managed to be both cloying and condescending. “I have no clue if men are hitting on her. But she wouldn’t care if they did.”