“It wasn’t my Heineken,” I said. Erica was glaring daggers at him from her side of the seat.
“I know that! It belonged to the idiots I kicked out before I saw you two.”
And then we set off, and it might have been the smell of the beer and it might have been the way the cabbie drove with undisguised rage, starting and stopping, but suddenly I was clammy and nauseous. Before I could stop myself, I added to the reek of the cab by vomiting between my legs and onto the floor.
“No, no! How dare you!” he yelled. “How dare you!”
“I’m sorry,” I groaned. “Can you stop? Please? Can you pull over?”
Erica found a small packet of tissues in her purse, but they were mere sandbags against a tsunami. The driver pulled over against the curb, still blocks from Storrow Drive, and I mopped the floor mat and the back of the front seat. (I wouldn’t allow Erica to help; I was ashamed and this was penance.) I had a little bottle of perfume in my purse, and without telling the cabbie I sprayed some into the rear of the vehicle. Erica paid the angry man, tipping him well after my meltdown.
“I am so sorry,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Now what?”
She looked at me as deeply as she ever had: “Are you seeing someone? Are you pregnant?”
“No. I’m still on the Pill,” I told her, and then added quickly, “Not that it would matter, because I’m not seeing anyone. I’m just…”
“Tell me.”
“I just think I’m really close to falling apart some days.”
She put her arm around my shoulders and started walking me past the long block of stately brownstones, some of which already were festive with Christmas lights. I saw one family trimming their tree through the bay window, and I felt as if I had traveled back in time to my parents’ or even my grandparents’ childhood. The father was actually wearing a sweater vest. “We’re just going to get you some crisp, fresh night air. We’ll promenade,” she said. She waved cheerfully at a woman walking a pair of tiny dogs in black dog booties and an older couple in elegant Burberry trench coats and scarves; she knew none of them. We had walked four blocks and I was feeling better, and my dreamlike fear that our friendship was failing began to evaporate. We’d be fine. Still, I apologized once more.
“Stop that. You’ve been through a lot.”
“I guess.”
“I still remember meeting your mom. Parents Weekend our first year.”
I nodded. She hadn’t met my mother the day I moved into the dormitory because my family had already come and gone. They had dropped me off and settled me in by the time Erica and her parents arrived.
“I thought she was so glamorous,” Erica went on. “Not what I expected from a rube like you from Vermont.”
I knew what Erica meant. I wasn’t insulted at all. “She was, wasn’t she?”
“And she used to walk so fast,” said Erica, nodding. “Those great big strides. She was wearing such hip boots that weekend we met. I loved them.”
I recalled how my father sometimes teased her for walking so quickly. When Paige had been little, she’d practically had to skip to keep up (which was usually fine with Paige; like her mother, she was rarely a body at rest). “I remember those boots,” I said.
“I mean, even when that annoying client called her that afternoon, your mom was so together. That was among my very first impressions of your mom: dialing down a madman. She was so firm. So totally in the captain’s chair.”
“The Friday of Parents Weekend,” I murmured.
“She was so chill. Ice queen cool. And whoever it was, was so…desperate. Remember?”
I did. I had forgotten, but it came back to me now. It was the sort of moment that might bewitch a young person meeting my stunning, statuesque mother for the first time. We had been walking across the quad toward Johnson Chapel, Erica’s family and mine, and my mother had taken a call on a cell phone that was still a clam shell. She slowed her gait to give herself privacy, and we had gotten a little ahead of her. But soon we were at the entrance to the nineteenth-century brick chapel, where the president was going to address the parents, and my mother was now two dozen yards behind us on the grass. My father seemed at ease, but I wanted us to get inside and choose our seats. Erica’s family did, too. And so I had gone to retrieve my mother, and Erica had, for whatever the reason, accompanied me.
“I would tell you to relax and get some sleep—get over it—but obviously that’s not the answer,” my mother was saying, the autumn sun on her hair. Her back was to us. “And, frankly, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss this. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. I can’t help you. I never could help you. Don’t you see? I can’t even help myself.” When she turned and saw the two of us motioning for her to hurry up, she looked at us and said firmly into the phone, “I’m sorry, but I think you need to find another architect.” Then she snapped the phone shut. “Well, I just fired a client,” she told us. She sounded neither bitter nor sad. She sounded as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
As Erica and I walked along that Boston street a little more than three years later, I recalled the e-mail I had found on Gavin’s computer—the very last one from my mother. The one where she had canceled on him because it was my first Parents Weekend, and she had written that she and my father and Paige were driving to Massachusetts that Friday.
My mother hadn’t been speaking to a client as she had stood on the college quadrangle before Johnson Chapel. She had been talking to Gavin. If she had been firing anyone, she had been—and I knew these weren’t the right words, but they were the ones I heard in my head that Thanksgiving weekend—firing him.
All young parents watch their children sleep. We stand over the crib, the bed with rails, and then the bed without rails, and we smile at the utter miracle and welcoming innocence that is a child asleep. We watch them dream, wondering what they are seeing as they stretch out their small fingers or pedal their knees once or twice. We savor the aroma of baby shampoo or strawberry shampoo. We adjust a blanket. We kiss a forehead or cheek. Before we leave, we check the thermostat.
I do all that now, decades removed from the summer my mother disappeared.
But you can bet that I also watch my own children for any signs of parasomnia. I watch for arousal disorders and night terrors and sleepwalking. I think more than any parents I am likely to meet at my children’s elementary school about—and here is a technical term that many husbands (though not mine) would find baffling—sleep-stage transition impositions.
So far there have been none. There have been no parasomnias at all. Both of my children seem fine. I pray—and I pray with a self-taught and childlike innocence, the way I learned when I was twenty-one and would roam alone through the red Victorian—that they have been spared that part of their family history. The odds still are against them.
They have their grandmother’s eyes and their grandmother’s lush yellow mane. A boy and a girl. Someday, they will be knockouts.
On Saturday morning, over Thanksgiving weekend, while Paige was asleep in the guest room we shared at our grandparents’ and my father was grading papers, I drove to Somerville to have breakfast with Rowland the Rogue. I had suggested any old diner or bakery, but he insisted on having me to his home, and that meant we ate in his pleasantly retro kitchen: the dining room, after all, was cluttered with old magic tricks. But the kitchen was perfect, even though I always felt when we sat there that I was visiting the set of a black-and-white sitcom from the 1950s. The appliances were from the Eisenhower administration, and one time he had shown me the warranties with pride to prove it. The knobs and handles were chrome, and looked like they were from a spaceship in a low-budget science fiction film, and the white siding on the stove and the refrigerator was badly chipped. Though he had traveled for much of his career and lived on second-rate room service at second-rate hotels, he was a very good cook: rather effortlessly he made me eggs Benedict that morning and served the two English muffins on rose-colored c
hina that had once belonged to his mother. For a while he regaled me with tales of tricks that had failed or illusions that had bombed, and how he had responded onstage. I had a sense he was exaggerating: he would not have had the career that he did if he were flubbing routines as epically as he was suggesting in his stories. He would not have been on prime-time television shows.
“Tell me more about the Sleepwalker—that illusion you performed on Sonny and Cher,” I said, dabbing with a napkin at the hollandaise sauce that I feared was on my lips. “Were you a good enough hypnotist that you could have done the trick without using an audience plant?”
He folded his arms across his chest and rocked back on the two hind legs of his chair. “I could have hypnotized a person and convinced her to walk to a platform and wind up doused in a dunk tank. But you know how the levitating woman works. I need an accomplice. I need a mesh form roughly the shape of her body under the sheet. I need a secret escape from the couch, so she can get offstage.”
I did know the secret behind the illusion, but somehow hearing it spoken aloud made me a little sad. On some level, I had wanted to believe there was more hypnosis involved than elaborate stagecraft. “But you called it the Sleepwalker,” I said.
“I did.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, still tipped back on the legs of his chair. “It conjured dreams. It conjured a lack of control. It conjured the undead: zombies and vampires and ghosts. And, of course, a lot of magicians have levitated their assistants. But what’s really the fun in that? It screams ‘trick.’ It seemed to me that it was far more dramatic to levitate a person from the audience. Yes, I am sure some people knew she was a plant or suspected she was a plant. But, still, the idea that she was being moved by me like a marionette? Far more interesting.”
“You had her dunk Sonny Bono on TV that night. How did it normally end? Most of the time you didn’t have a foil like that.”
“No. Most of the time? I would whisk off the sheet and she would be gone. Vanished. The audience would gasp. A moment later, with a great splash, she would break the surface of the water tank, and I would help her out rather gallantly.”
Years earlier I had told Lindsay about my mother’s sleepwalking and about the night I had walked her in from the bridge. “Of course, if you really wake up underwater, I imagine you’re likely to drown. You’ll take in a great gulp of water and the rest won’t be pretty,” I said.
“No. But many of our illusions are like that. It’s also not pretty if you actually saw a woman in half—I imagine.”
He was right, of course. “Thank you for coming to my mother’s funeral,” I said.
“You’ve already thanked me. You don’t need to keep thanking me.”
“Well, it’s good to see you.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Sometimes these days I feel guilty when something makes me happy.”
“That’s just what your mom wants,” he said. “She wants to be sure you never go on living. She wants to be sure you are miserable and in mourning forever.”
If he had been younger—if he had been my age—I would have taken a dollop of hollandaise on my finger and flung it at him. Instead I just shook my head and smiled. I liked the fact that he had referred to my mother in the present tense.
My father and Paige and I drove home from Concord on Saturday afternoon, and we stopped for gas at the midway point, which was roughly Warner, New Hampshire. We had taken my mother’s Pathfinder because it was roomier and more comfortable than my father’s Accord. He was behind the wheel and pulled into the gas station and convenience store just east of the interstate exit. I hopped from the passenger side to open the gas tank and fill up while my father and Paige wandered into the store to use the restrooms and get snacks. It had snowed here the night before, but little more than enough to glaze the trees and dust the brown grass. None had stuck to the roads, and now the sun was out once again. I thought of Paige’s team on the ski slopes without her. It was, I knew from experience, a glorious day to be on the mountain.
As I was walking around the front of the vehicle after replacing the nozzle in the pump, I noticed it: A modest dent. A pucker. It was on the bumper, near the right headlight. About six inches higher, between the grill and the light—just below the hood—was a second concave ding. A strip of blue paint not quite the width of a pinky had peeled away inside it. I wondered if another car had backed into the SUV in a parking lot at some point that autumn and I hadn’t noticed, or whether the dings had occurred when my mother had been behind the wheel and thus had been there for months. The damage was in a spot I was unlikely to notice, and obviously I had other distractions that fall. I wasn’t annoyed by the nicks because they were minor, and I might not have thought much more about them if my father hadn’t emerged from the store that very moment. He was pulling his black leather gloves back on and at first was oblivious to me. He was squinting up into the sky and enjoying the sun on his face. But then he saw me hunched over by the right headlight, and he came rushing over.
“Look at this little dent,” I said, and I pointed. “And here’s another.”
“I did that,” he said.
I stood up straight. “You? When?”
“Oh, months ago. Spring semester. I pulled in too close to a streetlight at the college. One of the ones in the lot near the library.”
“I never noticed.”
He smiled in a way that I am sure he thought was conspiratorial and funny. “Fortunately, your mother never did, either.”
“You never told her?”
He brought his gloved index finger to his mouth and pretended to shush me. I think he thought he was being funny.
I THINK MOSTLY of her eyes. They were open.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I WENT TO see Gavin when we got home from Boston late that Saturday afternoon. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?” I asked him that night.
Two days earlier, on Thanksgiving, a young drug dealer had been shot in his squalid little apartment in Burlington’s old North End, and Gavin had been working around the clock ever since. We were sitting on his couch eating takeout kebobs from a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner from his building. We were both having juice instead of wine or beer. In his case, it was because of his sleep sex; in mine, it was because the simple thought of alcohol after the Boston cab ride the night before made me queasy. He had bags under his eyes, but he was happy because they had arrested someone late that afternoon. The TV was on because there was news from Florida as well: that day Broward County had completed its hand recount of the presidential ballots. The sound was almost but not quite off, and I felt oddly grown-up. Paige knew I was with my detective—my “super trooper,” she was calling him, often with a roll of her eyes—but our father presumed I was spending the night once again with Heather Prescott.
“I don’t know anything I haven’t told you,” Gavin said, wiping his fingers with a paper napkin.
“You’re lying.”
“Of course.”
“Are you ever going to tell me?” I wanted to be angry with him, but I was so content to be around him that I couldn’t. It had been a revelation in Boston, but the truth was that ever since my mother had died, I really was happiest when I was with Gavin.
He knitted his eyebrows at me, but he was smiling. “I don’t know what you think I know that I’m not telling you.”
“It seems like I only learn things from you when I’ve already started to figure it out and you fess up.”
“Like the fact I saw your mother a few days before she died.”
“Yeah,” I said, not trying to diminish the facetiousness in my tone. “Kinda like that.”
With the remote he muted the sound on the television. “And yet you’re here,” he said, regarding me.
“I am.” I thought back to my mother’s phone conversation more than three years ago on the Amherst quad over Parents Weekend. “Do you remember a phone call with my mother in Octobe
r 1997? It would have been on a Friday afternoon, a day when my mom was going to see you, but she canceled. It was my first Parents Weekend at college.”
“I do.”
“Why were you so desperate and—just maybe—selfish? What did you say that led my mom to cut you off?”
“Whoa! I’m not sure I was either. I mean, maybe I was. Maybe I am. But I’d had an event the night before, and it was the last straw for my girlfriend. That, if you must know, was when we broke up. And I was on my meds—same meds as your mom—but I’d started taking an antihistamine, and I wanted to know if your mother had ever had a drug interaction like that.”
“With an antihistamine?”
“That’s right.”
“Were you on one this fall?”
“I took one a couple of times, but never when I was going to see you. Why risk it? And it wasn’t a bad allergy season for me. Maybe it was the drought.”
“If it was just about Benadryl or whatever, why was my mom such a…such a bitch to you?”
“She wasn’t!”
“She said, ‘I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself.’ I heard her.”
“She was being honest. And maybe my experience the night before just made her sad. Too sad. Maybe even close to despairing. It’s really not curable what we have. The clonazepam seems to help keep us in bed. At least it does more often than not when we have an incident. But it doesn’t dial down the rest. You know that now as well as anyone. And so maybe being around me just got to be too much for your mom. The support group became, I don’t know, too hard. Too painful.” He looked at me intensely. “Let me ask you something.”
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