The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian
It was clear to me that she had been smoking before I arrived: the living room reeked of weed, and her eyes were a red I knew well. I almost offered her the Visine I had in my shoulder bag. If I had any doubts, they were obliterated by what she said next: “This pot has been well seasoned over the years. It has the flavor of a thousand cups inside it.”
Only someone who was stoned could say something like that with conviction.
“I’m impressed,” I answered because I couldn’t think of anything else I could say that would sound in the slightest way earnest. Moreover, I wasn’t a big fan of tea. The few times I had drunk it, I had simply dropped a bag in a mug filled with tap water and nuked it in the microwave for a minute.
“You’ll detect a hint of jasmine in the flavor,” Marilyn told me affably.
“Jasmine,” I repeated. The word was everywhere these days. It was, I decided, a sign—though I had no idea what the sign meant.
“And lily,” Marilyn added. I reached for the mug—a local potter’s own hypsiloid-shaped, thunder-head-colored creation—and took a small sip. The woman was watching me intently. It wasn’t coffee, but it was drinkable. I was pleasantly surprised.
“Delicious,” I told Marilyn.
“I’m so glad you like it!”
“This is what you served my mom?”
“Absolutely. She was a fan.”
I nodded. My mom drank coffee at home and when she worked, so clearly she wasn’t a big fan. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about my parents at the supermarket.”
“Oh, you should probably forget I ever said anything. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“You said that my mom was very close to the detective and my dad was a pill. That was the gist of it.”
“I didn’t say he was a pill, did I?”
“You said he was difficult to live with.”
“Children don’t need to know their parents’ secrets. I was just babbling.”
“I do need to know my parents’ secrets.”
“Why?”
“Because my mother is missing.”
She blinked and held her eyes shut a long second. I knew that maneuver. She was trying to will her buzz away. It never worked. “And your father had nothing to do with that,” she said after a moment, her eyes open and veined as ever.
“I know.”
She sipped her tea and savored—or pretended to savor—the experience. I sensed she was stalling. “Then why?” she asked. “What could I possibly tell you?”
“What sorts of things did my mom say about my dad?”
“She wasn’t playing Mrs. Robinson with that detective, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I believe you. But what might she have been sharing with Gavin Rikert that she wouldn’t tell my dad? I mean, was it as simple as she was making fun of my dad’s poetry? Or was it something more important?”
“I doubt she was making fun of his poetry. I think she respected his work.”
“Then what?”
Her shoulders sagged ever so slightly and she put down her mug. “You know how much I loved your mother,” she said, her voice a little soft and soapy because of the weed. “You know how much I miss her.”
I believe that in Marilyn’s own way she had indeed loved my mother and now she did miss her; but I had not for one moment lost sight of how quickly she had moved on—the speed with which she had forgotten my father and Paige and me. I wasn’t moved, but I pretended to be; I sensed it was the best way to wear Marilyn down. She was close to telling me something, and she was just stoned enough that she might. “I do,” I said. “And I know she felt the same way about you.”
“We were a little like sisters.”
“Absolutely.”
“Absolutely,” she agreed.
Half a dozen turkeys were wandering through Marilyn’s yard. At first I thought they were aimless, but then they stopped beneath a bird feeder on a low branch in one of her sugar maples. They were like a family. Another time, I might have watched them until they moved on, and it would have made me happy.
“So, my mom and Gavin,” I said. “Was it just the sleepwalking that connected them—when they first met?”
“Pretty much.”
“Pretty much? There’s more.”
“No. Not really.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
She looked away.
“There’s something else,” I pressed.
“Oh, Lianna, you must know.” When I said nothing, she went on. “Your mother said something to me once that gave me the impression you did. Maybe you walked in on your parents and your mother didn’t stop—because she was asleep.”
“Walked in on them doing what? Having sex?”
“God, I’ve said too much.”
“No, this is important. Go on.”
She put her forehead in her hands and shook her head ever so slightly. When she looked up, I thought she was on the verge of tears. “Sleep sex,” she began. “It sounds fun and maybe it would have been okay if your father had been, I don’t know, less uptight. Hell, Justin would have been thrilled if my thing had turned out to be sleep sex. That’s part of what I mean about how your dad could be difficult. The right sort of man…the right sort of attitude…what’s the big deal? But maybe I shouldn’t judge. We all have our demons, right? Look at me. I can’t hold my dope, and I’m telling you things I shouldn’t. I just shouldn’t.”
I sat back against the couch cushions. I hadn’t heard the term sleep sex before, but its meaning was evident in the context of my mother’s parasomnia. I recalled what Cindy Yager had said at the sleep center: They have sex in their sleep. “No. You’re right to tell me,” I said simply, hoping that Marilyn hadn’t detected the way the short sentence had caught in my throat.
“So I haven’t spoken out of turn? Really, I haven’t?”
“You haven’t,” I lied.
“I mean, she was a different person. They all are then, I guess. When they’re asleep.”
“They?” I suspected I knew who she meant—what she meant. But she made them sound like werewolves, so I asked her to elaborate.
“Sleepwalkers. Sleep sexers. It really freaked your dad out. It made him feel like he was inadequate. It made him feel like he wasn’t satisfying her. And your mom was already so humiliated. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. She was. And he just made her feel even worse. The things she would do…the things she wanted. For years their sex life was just a minefield.” She gave me a small, sad smile: “It’s a miracle their marriage worked as well as it did. It says something really powerful and lovely about both your parents.”
I felt queasy, and put down my tea. “My dad said he didn’t know why my mom only went sleepwalking when he was gone. But he did know why, didn’t he?”
“Of course he did. When he was in bed with her, she’d have sex with him. Or try and have sex with him. Sometimes she’d just, you know, finish herself. But he was the warm body her sleeping self needed.”
“And when he was gone…”
“She’d try and find someone else. And the key word is try. It’s not like she ever did—at least around here. Maybe if she was alone at a hotel she found someone. She fears that once happened at an architectural conference of some sort—back in the days when she worked for that firm in Burlington. What was it called?”
“Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw,” I reminded her.
“Yes. She traveled for them. She saw people at night. But, God, what was she going to do around here in Bartlett? Knock on Nick McClellan’s front door at two in the morning and ask him to come out and play? Walk over to Donnie and Erin Hempstead’s? Come here to my house?” She snorted and shook her head. “It goes without saying that Justin would have been fine if she’d ever come here and tried to get in bed with the two of us. I’m kidding—but only sort of,” she added.
“So you knew the sleepwalking didn’t begin just five years ago?”
“I did. It just got a lo
“And you think my mom used to talk to Gavin about it? She used to talk to him about her…her sleep sex?”
“Of course!” she told me. “That’s what the two of them had in common: Sleep sex. That’s his parasomnia, too!”
“I’m a mess,” I told Gavin. “I’m way more of a mess than you realize. Than I realized.” We were sitting at a bar on Church Street in Burlington, though both of us were sipping decaf coffee: by then I had learned that he drank very little alcohol because of his sleepwalking. And me? I had no desire for wine or beer after our evening in Montreal. I had driven to Burlington after having dinner with my father and Paige because—rather like my mother, I guess—I needed to speak to someone. I needed to speak to him. I wanted to tell him I knew.
“You have every right to be a mess,” he said. “It’s okay. It might be worse if you weren’t a mess.”
“I almost fell off a bridge. I almost jumped off a bridge,” I told him.
At this he looked alarmed. He was still wearing the blazer and tie he had worn to work that day, but at some point he had loosened the knot below his neck. He pulled it a little farther now from his throat, opening the collar of his shirt, and gazed at me intently. I recounted what I had done the other night—what I almost had done—and when I was through, he looked at the bartender, and I expected him to order a beer. He didn’t. He just asked for more decaf.
“And I know way too much about my parents’ sex life,” I went on. “Way. Too. Much.”
“You got rid of all that dope, right? There’s none left in another baggie?” he asked, still on the bridge story with me.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Why? Are you afraid I’m going to do something that stupid again?”
He nodded. “A little. But mostly I’m just worried it was laced with something. PCP, maybe. It happens, even here in Vermont.”
“I just smoked too much.”
“Either way, it’s gone.”
“It is,” I assured him. Then: “And I almost wish I hadn’t talked to my mom’s friend. It was awful enough remembering my mom on the bridge or spray-painting the hydrangea. Now? Now I can’t help but imagine her as some predatory sex zombie.”
“It’s not like that. Not always.”
“Gavin, I did my homework. I always do my homework. You locked yourself out of your own bedroom the night I passed out because you were afraid you’d attack me in your sleep. Am I right?”
“I’d had a drink and a glass of wine at the restaurant, and another hours later at the magic show. I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t even buzzed. But I couldn’t take the chance. Alcohol is one of those things that can trigger an event.”
“An event. I love that. Nice euphemism, Detective.”
“But we’re not zombies.”
“I didn’t realize there was a politically correct term for it.”
“Just saying: we’re not the walking dead. At least not always.”
“Could my mom’s disappearance have something to do with sleep sex?”
“It could. It was something we were exploring in those first days. But it’s not likely. You know exactly what I think happened: I’ve told you. I believe your mother walked into the Gale River in her sleep. I believe it was a more traditional parasomnia occurrence.”
“I remember you said that you and my mom were your own little sleepwalking support group. I’m not angry, but it might have been helpful if you’d said you were your own little sleep sex support group.”
“That day in the cruiser? Hours after your mother had disappeared? I disagree: it wouldn’t have been helpful at all for you to hear that.”
“Well, then, maybe you could have shared that little bit of news with me any day since then. You’ve had plenty of chances.”
“I would have told you. Eventually. And certainly before our relationship had progressed to someplace where it might matter.”
I thought about the word relationship, and I realized I liked how it sounded on his lips. “So, we have a relationship?” I asked.
He sat up perfectly straight and folded his arms across his chest. “Arguably, yes. We’ve been on two dates. This might count as a third. My hope is there will be more.”
“Then tell me now. Tell me all that you can about your sleepwalking. Tell me the sorts of things that you told my mom.”
And he did.
He told me of his past. He told me of the girl who had accused him of sexual assault when the two of them were sixteen-year-old counselors at a summer camp in central Vermont, and how close he had come to the sort of criminal record that would have dogged him forever as a sex offender. He confessed that this was actually why he had gone to a nearby state college: he wanted to live at home. He thought it would be safer for everyone. He shared with me that since then he had had girlfriends who, in the end, could not bear the man he became some nights in his sleep and some who, for a time, thought it was an interesting kink in their sex life—but only for a time. The novelty grew thin. Some relationships, he said, simply can’t endure that sort of nocturnal murk.
The sleep center had dialed down his sleepwalking; they had failed to rein in the sexually voracious golem he occasionally became in the night.
I did not return with him to his apartment that evening. But what does it say about me that I considered it, that I wondered if I should try and meet his other, stranger self? Would it suggest that I was kindhearted and giving—a girl who thought I could cure or comfort him? Or would it convey only a wanton sexual adventurousness? Either way, it would have been a gesture that Gavin Rikert would have refused. I was not merely a mess that night; I was naïve and he was not going to take advantage of me.
And so I went straight home from the bar. Paige and my father were asleep when I got there, my sister in her bedroom and my father in the chair in the living room. I woke him, turned off the television, and put his scotch glass in the dishwasher. Then I went to bed, too.
It would be late the next morning when my father would call me from the college. It seems that the detective had phoned him with news. My mother’s body had been found.
Annalee Ahlberg’s body floated and sank, and then refloated and sank again, as it decomposed in the cooling waters of the Gale. In the first moments after my mother hit the river, water supplanted the little air that was left in her lungs—a palace coup in the alveoli she was by then powerless to stop—and her body grew heavier and drifted to the bottom. Over the following weeks, however, as above the river the leaves began their phantasmagoric autumnal transformation (dying, too, in truth), her body’s decomposition continued. Microbial-induced putrefaction. Microbial-induced bloat. Microbial-induced stink. Gases lifted her body back to the surface—rather like a blimp, except even inflated with the miasma of death Annalee Ahlberg was no dirigible. There was little fat on her at all, and lean bodies can stay at the bottom with the ease of catfish and hermit crabs.
But eventually, the gases win out. The currents win out. My mother was dragged in death nearly three miles along the Gale River, sometimes along the bottom and sometimes along the surface. Her body would most often drift in that classic pose known as the dead man’s float, a lowercase n, because that is how dead bodies move in the water: her fingers and forehead and knees showed the expected abrasions from scraping against pebbles and sludge.
Some days, her body would remain where it was, her leg lodged beneath the trunk of a dead tree that had rolled underwater, or beneath the lip of a boulder. Snails and crayfish and brookies would gnaw at her. The animals would eat the juiciest parts.
What would propel it farther downriver? Either the current or the accumulation of the gases would trump the tree or the rock: it would glide or it would rise. In either case, it would move. It would carry with it the muck and the growth from the river bottom. My mother w
And in its movement, her body would be pummeled further, the integrity of its frame and its shell further violated. No: savaged. There were, in addition to the ineluctable deterioration that occurs because a body is dead, the rock surfaces that would grate the epidermis like cheese, peeling the skin from my mother’s thighs and breasts and the right side of her face; there was—and here, in truth, I am conjecturing—the rusting wrought-iron gate that had been lodged into the silt for decades that tore off her left arm, and the hubcaps, the metal mangled now into jagged throwing stars, that sliced off great swatches of tissue from her lower back; and, of course, there were the innumerable rocks and dead branches that battered all of her body as the waters dragged it over and upon and into them.
By the time it reached the intake grate at the penstock for the small, long-dormant hydroelectric plant near Atkins Falls, it was but a mephitic bag of jelly and goo, jostling around bone. The navy-blue nightshirt was history. Her tendons and skull were exposed to the world with pornographic cruelty. The power plant was an antique from the early part of the twentieth century; the remnants existed almost entirely underwater now. The powerhouse with its generator and transformers was long gone. But the turbines, primitive though they were, were still there. So were the scaffolding and the stanchions.
The body’s last great movement had been over the falls that neared the plant. Imagine a kayak taking on the white water there. Whether it had careened over the cascades days or weeks after disappearing into the water was anyone’s guess, though the search teams assumed it was days. They believed they would have found it near the LPS—the last point seen, a dot on the map selected from a strip of a nightshirt—had it remained upstream for any length of time.
And, of course, they didn’t find it. A dog did. And mostly she smelled it. She was a great, leaping, playful mutt that was part yellow lab named Lola. She belonged to a photographer from across the lake in Au Sable Forks who was in Bartlett, Vermont, to chronicle the fall foliage. And he was artistically relentless. Unstoppable and talented. And he was so entranced by the colors of the trees that he waded into the chilly waters of the Gale to capture a copse of red maples in their death throes from a very specific angle. Lola joined him and was drawn to the ripe stink of the corpse. Went right to it, splashing and dog-paddling her way there, sixty-plus pounds of canine exuberance and wonder and joy.