The Sleepwalker(80)

“It wasn’t my Heineken,” I said. Erica was glaring daggers at him from her side of the seat.

“I know that! It belonged to the idiots I kicked out before I saw you two.”

And then we set off, and it might have been the smell of the beer and it might have been the way the cabbie drove with undisguised rage, starting and stopping, but suddenly I was clammy and nauseous. Before I could stop myself, I added to the reek of the cab by vomiting between my legs and onto the floor.

“No, no! How dare you!” he yelled. “How dare you!”

“I’m sorry,” I groaned. “Can you stop? Please? Can you pull over?”

Erica found a small packet of tissues in her purse, but they were mere sandbags against a tsunami. The driver pulled over against the curb, still blocks from Storrow Drive, and I mopped the floor mat and the back of the front seat. (I wouldn’t allow Erica to help; I was ashamed and this was penance.) I had a little bottle of perfume in my purse, and without telling the cabbie I sprayed some into the rear of the vehicle. Erica paid the angry man, tipping him well after my meltdown.

“I am so sorry,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Now what?”

She looked at me as deeply as she ever had: “Are you seeing someone? Are you pregnant?”

“No. I’m still on the Pill,” I told her, and then added quickly, “Not that it would matter, because I’m not seeing anyone. I’m just…”

“Tell me.”

“I just think I’m really close to falling apart some days.”

She put her arm around my shoulders and started walking me past the long block of stately brownstones, some of which already were festive with Christmas lights. I saw one family trimming their tree through the bay window, and I felt as if I had traveled back in time to my parents’ or even my grandparents’ childhood. The father was actually wearing a sweater vest. “We’re just going to get you some crisp, fresh night air. We’ll promenade,” she said. She waved cheerfully at a woman walking a pair of tiny dogs in black dog booties and an older couple in elegant Burberry trench coats and scarves; she knew none of them. We had walked four blocks and I was feeling better, and my dreamlike fear that our friendship was failing began to evaporate. We’d be fine. Still, I apologized once more.

“Stop that. You’ve been through a lot.”

“I guess.”

“I still remember meeting your mom. Parents Weekend our first year.”

I nodded. She hadn’t met my mother the day I moved into the dormitory because my family had already come and gone. They had dropped me off and settled me in by the time Erica and her parents arrived.

“I thought she was so glamorous,” Erica went on. “Not what I expected from a rube like you from Vermont.”

I knew what Erica meant. I wasn’t insulted at all. “She was, wasn’t she?”

“And she used to walk so fast,” said Erica, nodding. “Those great big strides. She was wearing such hip boots that weekend we met. I loved them.”

I recalled how my father sometimes teased her for walking so quickly. When Paige had been little, she’d practically had to skip to keep up (which was usually fine with Paige; like her mother, she was rarely a body at rest). “I remember those boots,” I said.

“I mean, even when that annoying client called her that afternoon, your mom was so together. That was among my very first impressions of your mom: dialing down a madman. She was so firm. So totally in the captain’s chair.”

“The Friday of Parents Weekend,” I murmured.

“She was so chill. Ice queen cool. And whoever it was, was so…desperate. Remember?”

I did. I had forgotten, but it came back to me now. It was the sort of moment that might bewitch a young person meeting my stunning, statuesque mother for the first time. We had been walking across the quad toward Johnson Chapel, Erica’s family and mine, and my mother had taken a call on a cell phone that was still a clam shell. She slowed her gait to give herself privacy, and we had gotten a little ahead of her. But soon we were at the entrance to the nineteenth-century brick chapel, where the president was going to address the parents, and my mother was now two dozen yards behind us on the grass. My father seemed at ease, but I wanted us to get inside and choose our seats. Erica’s family did, too. And so I had gone to retrieve my mother, and Erica had, for whatever the reason, accompanied me.

“I would tell you to relax and get some sleep—get over it—but obviously that’s not the answer,” my mother was saying, the autumn sun on her hair. Her back was to us. “And, frankly, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss this. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. I can’t help you. I never could help you. Don’t you see? I can’t even help myself.” When she turned and saw the two of us motioning for her to hurry up, she looked at us and said firmly into the phone, “I’m sorry, but I think you need to find another architect.” Then she snapped the phone shut. “Well, I just fired a client,” she told us. She sounded neither bitter nor sad. She sounded as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

As Erica and I walked along that Boston street a little more than three years later, I recalled the e-mail I had found on Gavin’s computer—the very last one from my mother. The one where she had canceled on him because it was my first Parents Weekend, and she had written that she and my father and Paige were driving to Massachusetts that Friday.