The Sleepwalker(83)

“I do.”

“Why were you so desperate and—just maybe—selfish? What did you say that led my mom to cut you off?”

“Whoa! I’m not sure I was either. I mean, maybe I was. Maybe I am. But I’d had an event the night before, and it was the last straw for my girlfriend. That, if you must know, was when we broke up. And I was on my meds—same meds as your mom—but I’d started taking an antihistamine, and I wanted to know if your mother had ever had a drug interaction like that.”

“With an antihistamine?”

“That’s right.”

“Were you on one this fall?”

“I took one a couple of times, but never when I was going to see you. Why risk it? And it wasn’t a bad allergy season for me. Maybe it was the drought.”

“If it was just about Benadryl or whatever, why was my mom such a…such a bitch to you?”

“She wasn’t!”

“She said, ‘I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself.’ I heard her.”

“She was being honest. And maybe my experience the night before just made her sad. Too sad. Maybe even close to despairing. It’s really not curable what we have. The clonazepam seems to help keep us in bed. At least it does more often than not when we have an incident. But it doesn’t dial down the rest. You know that now as well as anyone. And so maybe being around me just got to be too much for your mom. The support group became, I don’t know, too hard. Too painful.” He looked at me intensely. “Let me ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“On some level, is it possible that you just see me as a way to learn more about your mother?”

“Like I’m using you, because you know what really happened and I don’t?” I said evenly, clarifying.

“Precisely.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and found the blue horseshoe headband I was wearing. I thought of the way my father often lectured with a prop for emphasis, and pulled it out. I pointed it at him dramatically. “I am not using you,” I told him firmly.

“Have you told your father about me?”

“I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

“Your friends?”

“No. But it’s not like I’m hiding you from them. If they saw us together in Burlington, I’d introduce you.”

He took my headband and gently combed it back into my hair. “And later,” he murmured, his face close to mine, “you would tell them not to tell your father about me.”

“You have kebob breath,” I said, instead of refuting what we both knew was the truth.

“You do, too,” he whispered. And then he kissed me.



That night I awoke and I felt him before I heard him. He was aroused and on his side, once again trying to find me in his sleep. Perhaps we both should have expected it, given how hard he had been working and how overtired he was.

The T-shirt I was wearing was above my navel, and his hands were underneath it, fondling me—groping me—roughly. I thought of the man I knew when he was awake and how he would never touch me like this. I thought of how I wanted to be with that man tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. And that meant knowing I could corral the animal he could become in the small hours of the night, and (if possible) love that part of him, too. And so I pried his fingers off my breasts and rolled him onto his back. It was a feat of wrestling that demanded strength, but not the superhuman effort I had anticipated. When I climbed on top of him, the city, the apartment, the bedroom—including Gavin—went quiet. I pressed his wrists against the mattress, turned on by my own power, and lowered myself onto him.



I went to the bathroom to freshen up before going back to sleep. I wanted a clean washcloth and looked for one in the cabinet under his sink. I wasn’t sure what I’d find, but it was the middle of the night and I wasn’t thinking especially clearly. I squinted against the brightness of the ceiling fixture, wishing he had a night-light.

It was amid the extra rolls of bathroom tissue, unopened tubes of toothpaste, and spray bottles of tile cleaner, that I saw it. It was all the way in the back against the far wall. His leather shoulder bag. I didn’t believe I had seen it since the day we’d met. It was a handsome bag, the leather well aged and the buckles made of brass, and I hadn’t forgotten what it looked like. I recalled how it had been slung over his shoulder the very first time I saw him, that August morning my mother had disappeared, when he had been emerging from the carriage barn where my parents parked their cars.

And instantly I knew. I knew it all.

I grabbed the bag almost frantically, knocking over the toilet paper and the cleansers, some of which fell out and rolled against the sink pedestal. In my hands, I was surprised by its heft, but that only confirmed for me what I was going to find as I worked the buckles. And when I peered inside, there it was: one of Paige’s swim towels, folded and rolled into a tube. I pulled it from the bag and for a moment cradled it against me as if it were one of my stuffed animals from my childhood. I was woozy and scared and sad—but mostly sad. Finally I forced myself to unroll it. To see it, to see it all. When I did, I was almost hypnotized by the image of seashells and beach, the sand once so white now stained red, and the great, swirling Rorschach of my mother’s dried blood.