The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Okay.”

  “Would you like a list of every single place we ever went?”

  “Maybe. Not today.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What did you two talk about? Clearly it wasn’t just sleepwalking and dreams.”

  He was eating a chocolate and peanut butter cupcake that had to be the size of a softball. He took a bite with a fork and murmured, “Most satisfactory.” Then: “We talked a lot about you and your sister. I was serious when I told you how much she loved you two. I mean, she told me all about your magic and Paige’s skiing. I gather the kid was practically skiing before she could walk.”

  “An exaggeration,” I said, a sibling reflex that I regretted as soon as I had spoken.

  “And she was thrilled about Amherst and so proud that you were going there.”

  “I was a freshman when you were transferred, right? When you two stopped seeing each other?”

  “That’s right. You had just started your junior year of high school when we met.”

  “My mom ever talk about my dad?”

  “Little bit.”

  “But not really.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So she didn’t, I don’t know, exude love for him the way she did for my sister and me.”

  “Oh, I never doubted she loved him. It never crossed my mind that she didn’t love him.”

  “Then why do you think she didn’t talk about him?”

  “Talking about your husband to another man implies the two of you are lovers or confidants. We weren’t—at least not in that way. We were sleep confidants, and I mean sleep in the literal sense.”

  “It’s still kind of intimate,” I said carefully.

  “Arguably.”

  “And, as you said, a woman having an affair doesn’t talk much about her husband, either.”

  “Maybe. I’ve never slept with—excuse me, had sex with—a married woman.”

  I had about a third of the cake left before me, but put down my fork. I was pretty sure I would finish it if I were stoned. But now? I had eaten plenty. “I just want to make sure I understand the chronology. You saw each other eight or nine times over a year and a half and then, when you were transferred to Waterbury, you just stopped seeing each other.”

  He smiled a little boyishly. “Still don’t trust me?”

  “I trust you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you. I just want to be sure I get this—this relationship you had with my mom.”

  “It was all about sleep and sleepwalking. We were sounding boards. We were our own little sleepwalking support group.”

  “I want to believe that.”

  “You can.”

  I thought about my mother’s computer, which had been returned by the police. If my mother and the detective had simply grown apart because he had been transferred to Waterbury, why wasn’t there any correspondence? Or, perhaps, why wasn’t there evidence of a fight?

  “See those two?” he was saying. He was pointing at a pair of uniformed police officers walking slowly but with great assurance down the street.

  “Yeah.”

  “I know them. Two of Burlington’s finest. And a baby step above felon. Both of them.”

  “Seriously?”

  “A lot of cops are. For some people, it’s a razor-thin line between good guy and bad guy.”

  “How did you wind up a state trooper?” I asked.

  “Wondering if I could just as easily have gone to the dark side?”

  “Maybe.”

  He sat back and told me. He talked for easily five solid minutes about what an incredible screwup he had been in high school and how lucky he was to have wound up at even a state college—and without ever having been busted for dope or speeding or any of the ridiculous things he had done when he was sixteen and seventeen years old. When he was a junior in college, he was still unsure what he was going to do with his life, but he wanted something that promised a little excitement—and would allow him to remain in Vermont. When he was home for Thanksgiving that year, a friend of his parents’ who was a state trooper was regaling the family with what he called “idiots behind the wheel” stories, and Gavin grew interested. Soon after graduating, he was at the State Police Academy in Pittsford.

  Outside the bakery it was starting to rain, a drizzle that was darkening the sidewalk.

  “My God,” I said, “it’s raining. It hasn’t rained since August, has it?”

  “We’re not supposed to get very much. It won’t do much to ease the drought.”

  “Still.”

  “Still,” he agreed.

  I thought about what he had said at his niece’s birthday party about the river. If the drought lasted long enough, the Gale might fall so low that my mother’s body might emerge. It was ghoulish to imagine. I wanted closure, but I wanted hope far more.

  “Is the job as exciting as you thought it would be?” I asked.

  “It’s not. Which is probably a good thing. It’s like flying. Hours of boredom interrupted by moments of terror—but I might replace terror with intense interest. Trust me, I don’t miss the time I used to spend pulling over high school kids in pickup trucks who think they’re immortal and drive a hundred miles an hour. God, I used to be one of those kids. And I really don’t miss the time I spent with their corpses. I like what I do now much more. It’s cerebral. And it makes a difference.”

  I watched a woman in a khaki-colored raincoat pull up her collar against the rain and my heart skipped a beat. The woman’s hair was the same incredible shade of blond as my mother’s, and my mother had a raincoat just like that. But then she turned and I saw she was younger than my mother. She really looked nothing at all like her.

  “You okay?” the detective was asking.

  I turned back to him. “I miss my mom,” I said.

  “I know,” Gavin told me. “I do, too.” For a second I thought he was going to reach across the table and take my hand, but he didn’t. I wished he had. “I do, too,” he said again, and this time he sighed.

  THE WORD POLYSOMNOGRAM makes all the sense in the world when you break it down into its three-part origin: poly for “many” or “much”; somnus, “to sleep”; and gram, from the verb graphein, which means “to write.”

  When you have a polysomnogram, you have twenty-two wires and sensors attached to parts of your body—including a pair for your eyes. They measure movement (eye movement, too, of course), heart rate, and oxygen saturation. There are the wires along your scalp for the electroencephalography, which record the brain’s electrical activity. A video watches you while you sleep.

  You wouldn’t think a person could ever doze off amid those wires and sensors. But we do. I did.

  One of my videos, I gather, is pornographic.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PAIGE DIDN’T WANT me hovering while she swam her laps at the college pool that afternoon, and so I considered stopping by my father’s office and saying hello, but I didn’t want to disturb him if he had student conferences. And so I watched her bring her fingers to her toes at the edge of the water, compacting that small, athletic frame of hers, and then explode like a torpedo, elongating, flying, and finally plunging into the water and leaving a wake of bubbles and froth behind her. She was alone in the pool and I was alone on the tile. Her splash echoed inside the massive natatorium. I waved at her, aware that she wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t have stopped to wave back if she had, and wandered to the snack bar, where I thought I would have a cup of coffee and read the student newspaper. When I got there, instead I thought mostly about Rikert. Gavin. Even in my head I wasn’t sure what I should call him.

  When we had left the bakery in Burlington, it was still sprinkling, but only slightly. Rikert had walked me to the car, which—just like the sweater—he had recognized instantly as my mother’s SUV. He had apologized again for making fun of the cardigan and then asked me if I had any plans that Saturday night. There was a comedy club in Montreal that actually had a magician that evenin
g, and it might be fun to go see him. Montreal was a long drive from Bartlett—three hours—and so I wasn’t entirely sure what he had in mind. Did he expect we’d spend the night there? And so I had agreed that I’d think about it, figuring if I said yes I could decide then on the ground rules: whether he had to drive me home or whether we could stay in Montreal. I’d also have to decide what, if anything, I told my father, and that might be the deal breaker for me right there. I wasn’t sure I was prepared to fess up. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.

  Just before I had climbed into the car, while we were standing on the sidewalk, he took my hands in his and gave me a very chaste kiss on the cheek. “A kiss in the rain is one of the few romantic fantasies that lives up to the hype—at least for me,” he said softly. Now, in the snack bar at the college, I found myself running two fingers over the spot on my face where his lips had been.

  Driving home from the college, I recalled the woman in the khaki-colored raincoat with hair so reminiscent of my mother’s, and thought of all the women I had seen that month who had inadvertently toyed with me. Given me brief, explosive bursts of possibility—That’s her! There she is! She’s alive!—and then left me only with longing and a dreamlike confusion. How many more times in my life would I glimpse women on buses, in the general store, or along the pathways of my father’s campus who would tease me like that, and then leave my hopes scotched? If I lived to be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, would I still see her, forever unchanged, racing through airport concourses or along the corridors of skyscrapers as the elevator doors slid shut and separated us once again?

  “And how was your day?” my father asked Paige over dinner.

  Paige held the Mexican wrap from the Bartlett General Store in her hands and stared at it. “It was unbelievable,” she said, “but Kenny picked up Jennifer’s plate at lunchtime and licked some of her macaroni and cheese off it with his tongue. It was disgusting. So gross. And he was already on bubble three.” At the nearby middle school, where children from four different villages assembled, discipline was meted out via something called the Bubble System. When students misbehaved, they were placed on the bubble. When they reached bubble level four, they were sent to the principal, and a note would go home to their parents. They were guaranteed detention. Kenny Sheldon—Elliot and Vangie’s little boy—lived on the bubble. I actually liked the kid—everyone liked him, even Paige, though she would never admit it—but he was a hellion.

  “Did he wind up in Donna’s office?” I asked, referring to the school principal.

  “Not then, but only because Jennifer didn’t tell on him. But he had to go when we started talking about the Shakespeare play.” Every year, the sixth and seventh graders at the school performed a different Shakespeare play in the spring. It was dramatically abridged, but still impressive. They worked on it for months, and my father on occasion brought some of his college students to Bartlett to watch a performance. “You really haven’t seen Shakespeare until you’ve seen it performed by twelve-year-olds,” he once said.

  “How come?” I asked. “What did he do this time?”

  “He kept using a pointer as a sword. He said Shakespeare always needs swords.” She swallowed the last of her milk and made a face: “I think the milk is just about to go bad.”

  “Oh, Shakespeare does not always need swords,” my father corrected Paige. He sniffed her glass and shrugged. “But sometimes swords help. As You Like It this year, correct?” He smiled at my sister, his hands in his lap. His shoulders were sagging. I wondered how long it would be until his smiles weren’t so beaten and sad.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There is at least one lovely reference to a sword—‘I remember when I was in love I broke my sword upon a stone’—but, alas, there is no sword fighting. Kenny will have to soldier on without brandishing whatever sword he has as a prop.” He turned his attention upon me: “And you, my dear?”

  “Me?”

  “What did you do today?”

  I wanted to reward my father’s attempt to rise above his despair and show some interest in life—in my life, in my sister’s. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I had had lunch with the detective, especially given the murkiness of my mother’s relationship with the man. I still had a feeling that this needed to be a secret. So I lied to him: “I read and watched it drizzle. It was kind of heavenly.”

  “You didn’t leave the house?”

  “Not until I picked up Paige after school and we went to the swimming pool.”

  He nodded, but said nothing more. In another life, he would have asked me what I was reading.

  “Are you dreaming a lot these days? Like more than usual?” Paige was asking me.

  I was sitting at my desk and smoking a bowl. The nearby window was open an inch. I had carried our portable TV with the VHS slot up to my bedroom and was watching a video of a magic show I had been given at a magic “emporium” in Somerville. The store was actually what had once been a dining and living room in a rundown house in a once-proud neighborhood that was starting to grow seedy and tired. The shop was reminiscent of a dangerously overcrowded antique store, except instead of porcelain lamps and davenport desks, piled high and crowding the sofas and chairs were brightly colored wooden boxes and metal canisters—all with politically incorrect depictions of men and women from Asia and the Middle East—and top hats and wands. Dingy paper bouquets and worn silks, their once neon colors faded with time, cascaded from the shelves that climbed high on one of the walls. I used to go there soon after I started college in Massachusetts, making the pilgrimage whenever I was anywhere near Boston. The owner, a gentleman older than my grandfather with knobbly, age-spotted hands, had once been a rather successful performer who went by Rowland the Rogue. His real name was Lindsay McCurdy, and he was nothing like a rogue in real life. He was sweet and actually a little shy at first. My grandparents lived nearby in Concord, and on one of my family visits my sophomore year I had brought my parents and Paige to Somerville to meet him. Four of my illusions had once been his, and two of them he had given to me simply because I would have tea with him when I was in the area. Like most magicians, he was a wonderful raconteur, and he would regale me with tales of his late lovers, his partners, and his assistants. But unlike many magicians—and unlike most men of his generation—he was a really thoughtful and engaged listener. Although I saw him only seasonally, in some ways he knew as much about my life as anybody. I loved his emporium. I loved him. I had sent him a note two weeks after my mother disappeared, and he had written back using one of his old, elegant fountain pens with an italic nib. The letter was beautiful. It was not precisely a letter of condolence since my mother was missing, not dead, but it was at once realistic and deeply comforting. I considered now whether I should go visit him.

  “Maybe. I guess I’m dreaming more,” I answered Paige. I paused the cassette as the magician—a fellow in his midthirties, perhaps a half century younger than Rowland the Rogue—was striking a match and about to transform the flame into a live dove. Already there were two birds beside him. I wondered if I’d ever work with live animals. I had no idea how I’d care for them at college—assuming I returned to college (no, I told myself, I would, of course I would)—and then there was the whole animal rights dilemma. I was confident that PETA didn’t approve of using birds and bunnies in magic acts. I was pretty sure that I didn’t, either. But a live animal? It always left an audience awed. The rabbit in a top hat? It was iconic.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Paige wave one of her hands theatrically, as if the room were awash in teargas. There was no point in snuffing the bowl now. I didn’t like to smoke around Paige, but I was busted. I might as well finish it. My sister was in her pajamas and had appeared rather suddenly in the doorway to my bedroom. “Why do you ask?”

  “Sometimes I worry I’m going to wind up like Mom.”

  Instantly I understood how the question was connected to our mother’s disappearance. My kid sister’s worries were cra
zy, but she still needed reassurance.

  “I wouldn’t fret even a teeny bit,” I said finally. “Pardon the bad pun, but I would lose exactly zero sleep over that.”

  “A person who has a parent who sleepwalks is ten times more likely to sleepwalk than someone who doesn’t.”

  I knew there was a genetic component because of those incidents I’d had as a little girl. But ten times? Clearly Paige had found the statistic on a website or in a library book. Maybe she had come across it in our own Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, the doorstop of choice for hypochondriacs everywhere. The number was meaningless, I presumed, and I was certain that I would still believe it was meaningless even if I hadn’t lit up a few minutes ago.

  “Well, then: I was the one who got it,” I said, hoping this would be comforting.

  “Yeah, right. How many times did you actually get out of bed? Twice? Three times?”

  “It was more than that. Way more than that. At least that’s what they tell me. I think it went on for two years.”

  “Mostly you just sat up in bed and didn’t recognize Mom and Dad.”

  “Sometimes. Still an arousal disorder.”

  “A pediatric sleep disorder,” Paige said. “Super common.”

  “I am guessing you found that expression on whatever website or in whatever book gave you that ten times number.”

  “It was very informative.”

  I took a last drag on the bowl and tipped the ashes onto the dessert plate I had brought upstairs to my room expressly for this purpose. Then I went to my bed and sat down. I patted the mattress, encouraging my sister to join me. I was actually a little surprised when Paige did. “You’ve studied probabilities in math, right? You know what probability means?”

  “It means likelihood,” she said. “Odds, right?”

  “Right. It’s when we try and get a sense of how likely it is—how probable it is—that something is going to happen. And here’s why it matters: even if my arousal disorder was only a pediatric problem, it means that I inherited sleepwalking from Mom. And if I did, the probability falls that you did—or you will. And then there is this: Have you ever had an incident? No. Never.”