The Sleepwalker(9)

“Uh-huh. So what did they argue about? Your parents, that is.”

“I don’t know, what do all parents argue about? What do all people fight about? I guess they fought about money. They fought about my mom’s sleepwalking—what to do about it. They fought about the stuff that disappointed them. The stuff that’s hard.”

“What do you mean, ‘the stuff that’s hard’? Give me some specifics.”

The sergeant had a notebook, but as far as I could tell he had written almost nothing down. For the first time, however, he seemed really to be listening. Cop schadenfreude.

“Depression. My mom can get depressed. But she’s been treated for it. It’s under control. I promise you, she didn’t kill herself.”

“Are her drugs upstairs?”

“Yes.” He wrote that down, I noticed. “What I guess I meant by stuff that’s hard,” I went on, trying to explain and get the conversation back on track, “is that she had miscarriages. But this isn’t about that either.”

“Your mom had a miscarriage? When?”

“Look, you want to write something down?” I said. “Write down sleepwalker.”

He leaned as far back as he could in the chair, tipping back on the two spindly rear legs, visibly irritated with me. Instead of heeding my suggestion, he dropped his notebook into his lap and folded his arms across his chest. “And you’re absolutely sure there wasn’t a note?”

“There was no note.”

“Because you wouldn’t want to hide evidence. That’s not just a crime, young lady. It makes our job harder. It makes it way more difficult for us to find your mother.”

“I told you: there wasn’t a note.”

“And so you want me to believe that she just went sleepwalking in the middle of the night and still hasn’t woken up?”

“No, I want you to believe that she just went sleepwalking in the middle of the night and is somewhere in the woods or near the river or something,” I said, and the combination of the awful truth of what I was saying and my escalating frustration with the officer caused me, suddenly, to break down. My face fell into my hands, my elbows on the thighs of my blue jeans, and I was sobbing, sobbing in a way that I hadn’t in years.

Somewhere far away I heard the other trooper and Paige on the stairs, my kid sister coming to my aid, but the sergeant didn’t move from the ladder-back chair.





YOU WISH YOU could remember their faces when you’re awake. But they dissolve. They become indistinguishable, the faces on the deck of a great ship as it pushes away from the port. You are aware mostly of their arms waving.

You wish when you were down the rabbit hole that the laws of physics applied. That you couldn’t have sex on a cloud. That your college roommate wasn’t judging you. That the cars on the roller coaster weren’t airplanes—actual Airbuses. That your bed wasn’t a chaise lounge beside a hotel swimming pool, and there on a towel beside the recliner was your lover—naked, ravenous, wanton—reaching up to you from the coralline deck.

No one ever thinks of dreams as playful. But they are. At least they can be. Think of an amusement park that is utterly oblivious to the conventions of nature. It’s only when the dreams lead you from your bed—from sleep—that the amusements become dangerous.





CHAPTER THREE


IT WAS JUST after noon when one of the first responders, a volunteer firefighter from Bartlett named Elliot Sheldon, noticed the small piece of fabric dangling from the dead finger of a dead branch on the steep pitch of the riverbank. It was beside the road, the Gale aligning there with the asphalt. The scrap was navy blue and it seemed to be cotton. It was perhaps the size of a playing card. There was a toothpick-wide bit of red piping. He thought it was part of a cuff, but it might just as easily have been part of the hem. He knew not to touch it.

I was sitting on one of the black leather barstools around the kitchen island my mother had designed, fretting and staring out the window when the kitchen phone rang. It was from Elliot’s niece, a girl a year younger than I was and not a kid that I considered a part of my posse, and she was looking for me. I liked Sally Sheldon just fine, but Sally was the sort of girl who had played lacrosse and softball in high school, and she was now a lacrosse star at Syracuse. She was, God help her, kind of like Paige: athletic and enthusiastic and social. She wasn’t the brightest bulb in the tanning bed, but I thought she was sweet and well-intentioned.

Sally was inadvertently terrifying in her directness. “My uncle found a piece of clothing on a tree by the Gale,” she said. “I heard it on one of the scanners. The police are about to ask you about your mom’s clothes—what she was sleeping in.”

I felt sick: I got dizzy and thought I might actually black out, and so I put my forehead down on the counter. I took a few deep breaths and after a moment forced myself to sit up. “How big?” I asked. “Do you mean a whole piece of clothing, like a shirt? Or a piece of clothing, like part of a sleeve? And what kind of clothes? Did you hear?”

But before Sally could tell me, a female trooper who couldn’t have been more than thirty was sitting down on the barstool beside me. I told Sally I’d have to call her back in a couple of minutes.

The trooper had creosote-colored hair cut short and insisted that Paige and I call her Rosanne. She rubbed my back and asked, “How are you doing?”