The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian
“Nope.”
“Any?”
“Nope.”
Our father looked up from his plate and smiled. I studied him and waited, but he said nothing and then rather delicately cut a piece of the chicken into a pair of even smaller cubes.
After dinner, I cleaned up the dining room and loaded the dishwasher. My father offered to help, but both of us knew I would decline. By the time I was done, he was sitting in the den with a book in his lap, already dozing. I went upstairs and peeked in on Paige and saw that she was lying on her back in bed and playing with her Game Boy. She had gotten into her pajamas but was wearing a sweatshirt with the logo for her ski team above the kangaroo pocket.
“What do you want?” Paige asked, not looking up from the device.
“Nothing. But…”
“But what?”
“You know you’re not supposed to be playing video games on a school night.”
“It’s Mario Brothers. It’s for kids.”
“That’s not the point. I wasn’t judging its suitability. I was just reminding you that Mom and Dad don’t want you playing video games on nights when you have school the next day.”
“Well, Dad is half in the bag—”
“Where did you hear an expression like that?”
“Ally McBeal.”
“Since when do you watch Ally McBeal? Since when do you even understand Ally McBeal?”
She raised her eyebrows and looked at me as if the questions evidenced previously uncharted realms of utter cluelessness.
“Dad’s not half in the bag,” I said.
Paige dropped the Game Boy on the mattress beside her and pulled herself up against the headboard. “Okay. He’s not half in the bag. He’s all the way in the bag. And Mom’s dead.”
For a moment we stared at each other, the last word—a single syllable—as tangible in the air between us as smoke. Without thinking, Paige had verbalized the unthinkable. And then, aware of what she had done and how now she could never go back, she repeated the adjective. “She’s dead. She’s dead and we both know it.”
Still I said nothing. I wanted to reassure my sister that we didn’t know this, there wasn’t a body. But those words would have been unbearably hollow. Paige was smart. It would have been insulting to try and dissuade her of the truth. So instead I went to the bed and sat down beside her. I felt my own eyes welling up, but Paige didn’t seem close to tears. It wasn’t at all like that moment by the edge of the Gale, when Paige had started to cry and swatted away my arm with one of her swim fins. Instead she seemed resigned, maybe a little numbed by what she had said.
“Wow,” I murmured simply, gently rubbing her back.
“Why? Is it because I finally said what you’ve wanted me to say for weeks?”
“I didn’t want you to say it.”
“But it’s what you believe.”
I bit my upper lip so I wouldn’t break down. “I don’t know what I believe,” I said carefully.
“Of course you do. We both know she’s gone.” She put her hands in the sweatshirt pocket.
“I guess.”
“You guess,” Paige said, her voice dismissive and curt.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When you would wander across the beaver pond those afternoons…when you would walk along the road beside the Gale…”
“Maybe I was looking for clues. But I was also looking for the body.”
“Oh.”
“She’s never coming back. I’m twelve. Not retarded.”
“Why would you use a word like that?”
“Twelve?”
I waited.
“Fine. I’m twelve. Not mentally challenged. Whatever.”
I looked at the Game Boy. “Can two people play Mario Brothers?”
“No, they invented and designed the whole thing without a multiplayer mode.”
“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”
Paige nodded. “Uh-huh.” Then: “You’re going to suck at first, but I can teach you.”
“Thanks.”
She shrugged and moved over, giving me more room on the bed. That night we would play the game for close to an hour, and although I thought Mario looked ridiculous—blue overalls barely restraining a throw pillow of a paunch, a tennis ball for a nose, and a pair of great hairy wings for a mustache—he would come to me in my dreams.
The next morning, I made Paige her lunch for school and then phoned one of the girls I would have been living with had I returned to college. Erica was a double major in chemistry and political science who was going to change the world by irrigating Central Asia. I had been friends with her since we had had rooms next to each other our freshman year.
We discussed how little news there was about my mother and then segued somehow to the guy Erica was thinking of dating. Erica talked about our mutual friends, telling me what they were doing and whom they were seeing. What they were planning or hoping to do in eight or nine months when school (at least their undergraduate years) was behind them. She asked me if I had heard from David, another senior in whom I had admitted some interest as classes had been winding down the previous May, and I said I hadn’t since those very first days after my mother had disappeared. But, then, I hadn’t reached out to him either, and the reason had something to do with Gavin: the detective interested me a bit like a thunderstorm. Erica did not bring up any mutual professors, because we had none. Finally she asked me whether I was returning for January term and the spring semester. I supposed Erica was dressed by now, and in my mind I saw her in her crewneck sweater the colors of corn silk and red maple leaves. I presumed that her hair was brushed. Me? I was still in the gym shorts and T-shirt I had slept in. My hair was, I feared, a rat’s nest.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s still the plan. Coming back.”
“J-term?” she asked, using the shorthand for the brief burst of classes that some of us took in January.
“Maybe. Maybe February. In time for the spring semester.”
The college had filled what would have been my bedroom in the suite. The dormitory flat had four bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom. Erica said the new girl was quiet and nice and more or less fit in. “Have they told you where you would live?” Erica asked hesitantly.
“No. But I haven’t really talked to them.”
“When do you need to let them know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think you need to get on that?” Erica asked, a ripple of urgency marking her tone. “At least find out the deadlines?”
“Probably.”
“Because you are coming back. Right? You just said that’s the plan.”
There was a line in one of my father’s poems that I tried now to recall. It was about how we work to reject the realities right in front of us. It wasn’t a great poem, but it was better than most of them. It was one that I believed should have been published somewhere. “Who would take care of my sister?” I asked Erica. “Who would take care of my dad?”
“Latchkey. Paige would thrive as a latchkey kid.”
“No, she wouldn’t. No one thrives as a latchkey kid.”
“And isn’t that your dad’s problem?”
“Spoken like a true younger sister.”
“Spoken like someone who’s worried about her friend.”
“I learned something this weekend,” I told her, wanting to change the subject.
“Oh?”
“Remember when I told you about my mom’s miscarriages?” It had been our sophomore year, one of those revelatory conversations I occasionally had with my close friends during finals week when we were taking breaks from the papers we were writing in the small hours of the morning.
“Yes,” she said, drawing out the word expectantly, curious.
“My dad thought he might have been responsible for them.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. I was…oh, what t
“What did your mom say?”
“She said to let it go. My dad was just bouncing around an idea. But it made me sad that he was still thinking about that. Still feeling guilty. Based on the e-mail, it was something he had considered—something I guess both my parents had considered—as the reason for all those miscarriages between Paige and me.”
“Your dad’s sweet.”
“He is. I’m worried about him.”
“And I’m worried about you. There’s something else going on inside you, I get it. You’re not ready to come back to school now. I understand. But you will be ready in three or four months, I’m telling you that. And you need to plan for that eventuality now.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Thank you. So, you’ll talk to the college?”
“I guess.”
“You guess,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed in me. “So, what are your exciting plans this week? Anything special?”
I almost confided that I was seeing a detective with ash-blond hair and hazel eyes twelve years my senior for lunch that day. But I stopped myself. Instead I said, “I’m going to vacuum. I’ll go to the supermarket. You know, push a shopping cart with a crappy wheel that makes it slide into the shelves of potato chips. I’ll buy lots of food with high-fructose corn syrup. I’ll be a homemaker.”
“This will pass, Lianna Ahlberg. I mean that: this nightmare will pass.”
When I said good-bye, I thought of the word nightmare. An expression came to me: it was like a dream, but it was real. I couldn’t recall who had said that and wondered if it was also something I had read in one of my father’s poems. It was, I decided, an eerily apt summation for my life.
IT’S SO OBVIOUS a distinction, it’s often overlooked: your eyes are open. But when you’re dreaming—at least in the traditional sense, deep in a REM world without natural laws—your eyes are closed. And yet the wide-eyed sleepwalker is sometimes acting out a desire. Bringing to life something a bit like a dream. Instead of thrashing about in your bed, you’re moving about in the world. And there is the problem. The big problem. You are bringing those desires or dreams to bear on a world that has laws—natural and otherwise.
And so sleepwalkers worry and fret, because we know what we dream. We know what we desire. And there always are consequences. The depth of our amnesia varies—some of us, in truth, know almost nothing—but we still know just enough to be scared.
Yes, our eyes are open. But only we know what we see.
CHAPTER SIX
THE NEWSPAPERS WITH their stories of my mother from those first days were still strewn on the far side of the living room. We couldn’t throw them away, but we couldn’t recycle them either. They sat like swatches of carpets for a makeover we had chosen to abort. When I finally picked them up, squaring their edges and piling them together, most of the ink that remained on my fingers was from photographs of my beautiful mother. I carried them up to the attic and placed them on top of the carton that held my kid sister’s old Barbie dolls. Neither my father nor Paige ever remarked upon the fact they were gone.
Tattered gray clouds blanketed the mountains to the east, and it was deep enough into September that the sun was too weak to burn them off. The autumnal equinox was later that week. If I weren’t going to Burlington, I thought I might have started the first fire of the season in the woodstove in the den. I wondered if it would rain. We needed rain so badly.
Now, as I was finally getting dressed for the day, I stared long and hard at my sweaters, a little disgusted. If I had been at school and were planning to see a boy on what could only be construed as a date, I would have borrowed one of Erica’s. I hadn’t that choice here in Vermont. I considered a dress, and threw three possibilities on their hangers onto the bed. I toyed with a dotted shirtdress pulled extra tight at the waist with a belt, but that seemed a little too formal for lunch with a cop. It screamed date and neediness in ways that I didn’t like. And so I wandered into my parents’ bedroom to see what my mother had. She was four inches taller than me, so anything I found was sure to be a little big. But maybe I could find something that would work if I rolled up the sleeves.
And I did. I found a Norwegian cardigan that hung midway down my thighs, red and white and gray, buttons the size of checkers, and it would work well with jeans. It might be a little heavy for the first days of autumn, but I reminded myself that this was Vermont and it wasn’t supposed to climb above fifty-five degrees that afternoon. I dressed up my jeans with a pair of black shoes with lace accents on the sides that Erica had christened my lingerie flats.
I was nervous as I was driving to Burlington, and a little relieved that I had nearly an hour to listen to music and steady myself. I hadn’t had a boyfriend since the middle of my sophomore year, and even Carl—another kid who, like Erica, planned to change the world—had been more like someone to hang out with at parties and sleep with than a boyfriend. We’d spent the summer between our first and second years apart because he was an aspiring documentary filmmaker and was interning with the PBS affiliate in New York City, while I was working children’s birthday parties across northern Vermont. I certainly hadn’t ached for him. I was pretty sure that he hadn’t ached for me. I presumed that was why we broke up just before Christmas that year. It had been almost eerily amicable, in hindsight.
And yet there had been a time when I was nineteen when I’d been quite sure that I loved him. Same with my boyfriend in high school.
I’d never been on a date before with someone older than me. I’d never been on a date before with—and the words caused me to smile and roll my eyes, even though I was alone—a grown-up.
I shook my head reflexively, trying to clear my memories of Carl. Of all my boyfriends. I told myself that viewing this as a date might be a stretch. I was, arguably, simply grabbing a bite to eat with a friend of my mother’s. I reminded myself that I might even discover something interesting or important about her, and that this alone was sufficient justification. Still, I understood there was a reason for stealth.
Rikert was already at the bakery when I arrived. He had a table in the back corner, beside the window. He was seated facing the door. For a moment I was surprised that he was dressed as casually as he had been at his niece’s birthday party, but then I remembered: he had said it was his day off. He had a leather jacket draped over the back of the chair, the coat a shade of dark caramel.
“Oh, my God,” he said, laughing, as he stood to greet me, “you’re wearing your mother’s sweater.”
He was extending his hand, but I stopped and stood perfectly still, a little nonplussed. “You recognize it?”
“I do. Your mom loved it because it was warm and had pockets. But even she called it ‘the spinster sack.’ ”
“Well, thank you. You really know how to make a girl feel good about herself.”
He shook his head. “You’re beautiful. Your mother was beautiful. But I’m a guy. I will always prefer what you were wearing as Lianna the Enchantress over Lianna the Spinster.”
“It’s too cold for a belly shirt.”
“And harem pants. I get it. I’m sorry, it was just a reflex. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have said anything. Let’s start again. Lianna, lovely to see you. Thanks for joining me.” He pulled out a chair for me and I sat down.
“That’ll work,” I said.
“Again, my bad.”
“I guess I should be impressed that you remember the sweater. A lot of guys probably wouldn’t even have noticed.”
“Maybe not.”
“On the other hand, you’ve been carrying a grudge against it for a really long time.”
He chuckled. “Grudge is a ve
I almost said something about the profound effect my mother must have had on him, but stopped myself. “This place smells pretty incredible,” I said instead, inhaling the aromas of confectioner’s sugar, vanilla, and maple. There were a dozen tables in the bakery, all but one taken, and the crowd was a mix of students and Burlington executives. People were chatting easily, laughing at some tables, leaning in attentively at others.
“It does. The secret is to make a decision: entrée or dessert. If you order a sandwich, you won’t be able to restrain yourself. You will eat every bite. And then you won’t have room for dessert.”
“I am an eat-dessert-first girl. Life is short.”
“Very wise. That’s how you have to approach a place like this.”
He nodded in the direction of the glass case with the desserts and the long blackboard with the lunch specials. “The way it works here is that we go order and then they bring it to our table. We should decide what we want so they don’t kick us out.”
It wasn’t especially nutritious, but I guessed the flourless chocolate cake was pretty low on carbs—which was a good thing because unlike Paige, I wasn’t getting a whole lot of exercise those days. Vacuuming was as good as it got most of the time, and I really didn’t vacuum all that often. The slice of cake was indecently large. The cappuccino I ordered had a cinnamon-colored heart swirled into the foam.
“So what did my mom eat when you two would come here?” I asked the detective. I was curious, but it was also among the most innocuous questions I could think of. “A big cupcake?”
“Usually a slice of the maple cake with vanilla icing and walnuts. And, like you, a cappuccino.”
I nodded. “I’m not surprised. She loved maple. And not just maple syrup.”
“I once saw her inhale a maple creemee.”
“So you didn’t just come here or the coffee shop.”
“Busted. Yes, one time we went across the street from the hospital and down the road to the ice cream place for creemees.”