The Sleepwalker(85)

“Yes.” He sat forward, his chin in his hands, and gazed out the window. “Does she have any inkling? Any idea at all?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I answered, but when I thought a moment more I couldn’t help but wonder at Paige’s sudden resolve not to travel to Chile to ski the coming summer. I remembered the dream my sister had shared with me—the one where she and Joe the Barn Cat were following our mom down the road. Had she been reaching out to me, trying to tell me something?

And then I recalled the hours and hours she had spent walking along the riverbank looking for something.

“Tell me: Was my mom sleepwalking when it happened?” I asked.

“Her eyeglasses weren’t in the bedroom.”

“Meaning?”

“She probably put them on. We never found them.”

“Of course. She’d never wear them while sleepwalking.”

“We don’t know that. I said probably. Maybe her eyeglasses will turn up any day now in the kitchen or the bedroom or under the seat in her car.”

But we did know that. We did. My mother wasn’t sleepwalking, and I didn’t correct him. I think I knew that moment that my sister had found our mother’s eyeglasses. Paige had found those great turquoise ovals our mother wore when she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses. She had unearthed them from whatever brush or leaves they were beneath as she walked day after day along the side of the road that paralleled the river. The odds of my mother and my sister both sleepwalking at the very same moment? Infinitesimal. Annalee Ahlberg had been awake. Wide awake.

Looking back, that might have been the cruelest irony of all.





EPILOGUE





THIS IS WHAT I mean about fate: when, eventually, I told my father I was dating Gavin Rikert, it meant that now there were three of us who were complicitous. Three of us who knew. And while we never spoke of it, whenever we were around Paige together—as we would be more and more often, especially in the first eight months of 2001 and then again the year after I finally finished college, before Gavin and I married, when I was again living at home—it was an increasingly awkward conspiracy of silence.

Should I have stayed home through Paige’s last years of high school? Perhaps. My father was not left completely alone trying to rein in his younger daughter’s increasingly dangerous late-night excursions. He had the sleep center. Her treatment was similar to my mother’s, and worked in the same ways and failed in the same ways. But the more Paige walked, the more she knew she was her mother’s daughter. (Was she her father’s as well? Absolutely. Whether she was Warren Ahlberg’s daughter biologically has long become irrelevant. For one season, blinded by the tears that came at me in brackish waves following my mother’s disappearance and death, I questioned his paternity. I am ashamed of that dreamlike madness.)

And, yes, the more she walked, the more she must have known she was her mother’s killer, too. Her visions from that August night grew crisp, the memories lucid, and the truth unavoidable. I imagine her squirreling away the eyeglasses in a drawer or jewelry box somewhere, a renunciate totem she is unable to live with or without.

She went to college far from Vermont, already distancing herself from those of us who knew her best and suspected what she had done. After graduating, she went to work for an airline as a flight attendant because it meant that she could travel and stay in nice hotels. Her base was Los Angeles. She was, she told me one time when she was drunk, feeding her beast. She said she was ravenous when she was asleep. She came home once a year at Christmas. She never allowed my father and me to visit her.

And then, at twenty-six, she disappeared, too. She did not disappear the way our mother did. She went, as she put it, off-line. Off radar. She could no longer bear even that lone, annual return trip to Bartlett, where our father continued to live, and the Victorian’s proximity to the Gale River. She could no longer subject herself to what she seemed to view as the pitying—perhaps in her eyes, even judgmental—gazes of my father and Gavin and me.

She lets my father and me know she is alive, but she discourages us from trying to find her. Last year, she sent him Red Sox tickets on his birthday. For Christmas, she sent her niece and nephew trinkets and books. She assures us that we need never fear for her safety: she knows the pain that killing herself would cause us. Breathing is her atonement. That’s just how she’s built. Sometimes I post oblique messages for her on the social networks that no one would understand but her, hoping to convey how much my father and I miss her and how nothing could have prevented what happened, because I am sure that in a sad, melancholic way she stalks the Ahlberg family. How could she not?

Before she went underground and cut us off, she mailed me her journal. I read it and reread it once. Then I buried it in a gift box that had once held a sweater in Gavin’s and my attic in Burlington, hiding it behind the larger cartons where I stored the magic tricks I have been unable to say good-bye to. I never showed the journal to my father or to Gavin. There are no clues in it that would help us find her.

And, as Gavin reminds me, she doesn’t want to be found. At least not yet. He says she will come home when she is ready: when she is at peace. He says as a magician (albeit retired) I should know better than anyone that what we believe has vanished is really just hidden.

He may be right. The earth is as rich with magic as it is with horror and sadness. One day, I will pull back the curtain and there she will stand, smiling and rolling her dark eyes at me.