For a couple more minutes I sat beside my sister on the bank of the river, and neither of us said a word. I was just about to rise and resume my walk to the general store when Paige surprised me and asked, “Did they fight a lot? I mean, in comparison to other married couples?” She was talking about our parents.
“Nah. Probably not.”
“I hated it when the house would get all tense.”
“It didn’t very often—not, I believe, compared to other couples.”
“They had that epic fight five years ago. I remember them yelling at each other. Screaming even.”
“Just that once,” I said. It really was the only time I could recall my parents raising their voices at one another, but it had been horrible. Paige had hidden in my room with me, my door shut, sniffing back tears as she buried her face in the quilt on my bed. For the only time in my life, I’d feared that my parents might actually strike each other. Usually when they fought, they fought rather quietly, their barbs sharpened on whetstones of condescension and sarcasm. My father’s vocabulary seemed to expand, a black hole of erudite scorn. My mother was less articulate—less verbal—but she could be colder and her silences even more dismissive. What triggered the pyrotechnics that awful night, what led the skirmish to migrate from room to room and their voices to carry beyond the Victorian? It had something to do with my mother’s sleepwalking and the way my mother’s behavior was embarrassing my father. They both felt shame, but for different reasons: he because of what people saw and she because of what she could not control. “They were pretty stressed out that night.”
“Why?”
“Sleepwalking, I think. I don’t know for sure,” I answered. “But they loved each other.” I tried to sound more confident about this than I was. I presumed my father loved my mother—or, at least, thought he loved her, which even then I understood wasn’t quite the same thing as actually loving someone. I was less convinced that my mother loved him back, but I was unwilling to admit such a thing aloud. I certainly wouldn’t say that to Paige. But I sometimes wondered if my mother was in fact too smart and too creative and perhaps even too imaginative for her English professor husband: a man who had an endowed chair at an elite New England college. A man who had published widely and written two acclaimed biographies of American poets. Annalee Ahlberg was probably too smart for most men. Moreover, she battled depression: a shelf in the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom was an honor guard of orange vials of antidepressants.
Still, I honestly believed that much of the tension between my parents was born of the sort of fears and frustrations that would cripple any relationship. Their marriage had almost certainly changed between when I was born and when my sister was born. I was nine years older than Paige, and separating the two of us were five miscarriages. I had been old enough to recall vividly my mother’s despair and my father’s disappointment after the last three. I remembered well the months my mother had spent in bed, an invalid, before Paige was born. The hours and hours I would have to be quiet so Mom could rest. The sleepovers at friends so Mom could rest. The week with my grandparents so Mom could rest. And then Paige had arrived: not quite full term, but close. Thirty-four weeks. A shade under five pounds. A week and a half in the neonatal intensive care unit, that was all. In my opinion, my sister had never resembled the aliens that are some premature babies. She had raven-black hair from the moment she was born, a rarity in my family: the Ahlbergs on my father’s side and the Manholts on my mother’s all looked like extras in Scandinavian tourism commercials. The women had long blond braids; the men, with their high foreheads and wispy yellow hair, belonged in the background of old Bergman movies.
And then, seven years later, there was my mother’s sleepwalking. I was in high school. Paige was in second grade. I had read all that I could about the phenomenon at the time, interested because I had occasionally walked in the night as a child. I read about other parasomnias. I read about dreams. (I also read almost every word that my father had written: the published books and the myriad articles in academic journals, as well as his notebooks of unpublished—unpublishable, I sometimes feared—poetry. A lot of it, I noted sadly, was about somnambulism.)
Our house was at the edge of the village in Bartlett, three-quarters of an acre across the street from the river and a five-minute walk to the center: a general store, a library, a firehouse for the volunteer firefighters, and a bed and breakfast. There was a brick church, ostensibly Congregational, but the worshippers—and there were seventy-five or so most Sundays—were largely American Baptist and Methodist, with a handful of Presbyterians. But it was the only church in the village, and so if you went to church, you probably went there. My family didn’t, other than on Christmas Eve and Easter morning. And so I felt more guilty than grateful at the way the pastor, a woman with green eyes and short salt-and-pepper hair who looked more like a lawyer than a minister, had made warm overtures to take my family under her wing since our mother had disappeared. In the last week, the pastor had even gotten me a pair of gigs for later that autumn: magic shows at birthday parties for two kids in the Sunday school.
Our next-door neighbors, the McClellans, had heard what Paige referred to as that “epic fight” five years ago. I overheard Carol McClellan sharing her description of the shouting match with the police the day my mother vanished. And so my father was briefly a suspect, but I don’t think anyone really believed that he had murdered his wife.
Besides, although it was Carol who told the police that she had heard the Ahlbergs screaming at one another that night, she was also the one who had told them about the time my mother had spray-painted the massive hydrangea silver by the lights from the bay window. The tree was in the front yard, twenty or twenty-five feet from the front door. I was the one who had heard my mother and brought her back inside, but the lights and our conversation had awakened the McClellans, too, and so Carol had witnessed Annalee Ahlberg’s nocturnal eccentricities. (Somehow, the tree, though deformed, would survive. My father cut down the silver branches and tried to shape those that remained so that in time the hydrangea once more resembled a mushroom cloud.) And then there was the night when other neighbors, Fred and Rosemary Harmon, outside together to gaze at a spectacular full moon, saw me walking my mother back over the bridge across the Gale River by the general store a little past midnight. I knew it was an old wives’ tale that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, and so I had woken my mother. By then she had climbed atop the concrete balustrade and was poised like one of the marble angels that stand watch on the bridges across the Tiber and the Seine. The bridge was high enough that had she jumped she would have been crippled or killed: she would have broken her back or crushed her skull or (merely) drowned. She was naked and I, seventeen at the time, was struck by how very beautiful she was. When she was back on the ground, I covered her up in the cardigan sweatshirt I was wearing and led her home.
When my mother was sleepwalking, it seemed she was oblivious even to the cold. One March night, after a late spring blizzard had turned Bartlett into a Currier and Ives print, she took her Nordic skis and went on a cross-country journey throughout the woods behind our house. She had no recollection at breakfast the next morning, but her clothes were drying beside the woodstove—which she had also started in the night—and I followed her tracks the next day when I came home from school.
What all of this somnambulism had in common was that it occurred only when my father was out of town—including the night when she vanished once and for all. It was why the police almost instantly discarded him as a suspect. He had been at a poetry conference in Iowa City.
Of course, that also meant that my mother’s disappearance would be a source of guilt and self-loathing for my sister and me. After all, neither of us woke up that night. Why did neither of us hear something, climb from our beds, and stop her? And as the older sibling, the one who once before had pulled our mother back from the precipice—the one who understood as well as anyone her noctivagant tendencies—I
felt the remorse especially deeply. It was why I had chosen not to return to college for my senior year. I couldn’t bear to leave my father and my sister alone. I couldn’t bear to resume a normal life. Amherst had understood. The plan, as much as I had one, was that I would return after Christmas, in time for the spring semester.
Some people speculated that I was waiting for my mother to return—that I wasn’t giving up hope until a body was found and all hope was lost. I wished that were the case, but I knew deep inside that it wasn’t; it was heartbreak, not hope, that was keeping me here.
“Do you know what time Dad will be home tonight?” Paige asked me.
“I don’t.”
“Have you talked to him today?”
“I haven’t.”
Paige sat up and shook her head dismissively. “Mom would have talked to him. She would have known what’s up.”
“I’m not your mother. I’m your sister.” When Paige said nothing, I rattled off a litany of questions as sarcastically as I could: “How was school, Paige? How are you doing with your polynomials? Did you bring home your Lord of the Flies? What are you going to be for Halloween? Or is that too far away? Are you and your little friends too old now to dress up?”
Paige looked at me and her dark eyes grew small. I knew that the girl was going to be a knockout, especially when she was pissed off. When some people are annoyed, their mouths collapse and their face falls into neutral. Not Paige. Even at twelve, she smoldered well. “Why do you make fun of everything?” she asked me finally. “Everything’s just patter for you. Why are you always so…so cynical?”
I sighed. Most seventh graders didn’t use words like patter and cynical, either. But most seventh graders didn’t have an English professor and wannabe poet for a father. They didn’t have an older sister whose summer job was magician: Lianna the Enchantress. (Before our mother had vanished, I had been thinking it was time to tweak my stage name. Come up with something that sounded less like a personal ad for an escort.) I knew that when I had been Paige’s age, I had also taken great pride in my vocabulary. “I work hard at it. People think it’s easy to be like this. It’s not,” I said simply.
“You smell like weed.”
I probably did and it made me feel guilty. I guessed it was my clothes. Dope stuck like Gorilla Glue to L.L. Bean flannel shirts. Of all my good friends from high school, only Heather Prescott had not chosen a college in Maine or Massachusetts or New York, so I’d been hanging around mostly with her lately. She was a senior at the University of Vermont, and still a very serious partier. I had spent the afternoon with her and a couple of nice but not especially bright frat boys. Now I inhaled my sleeve and, sure enough, it was a tad pungent. Skunky. It was a testimony to how much slack people wanted to give me—Warren Ahlberg’s daughter, the girl whose mother had disappeared and who hadn’t gone back to college—that not a single person those days ever asked me why sometimes I reeked like the backroom of a head shop.
“So, I’ll call Dad at the college and see what time he’s coming home for dinner,” I said, not wanting to escalate the fight. I really did feel like a bad role model; on some level, I wanted to do better for Paige. “I was just going to get us wraps and potato salad at the store. But maybe I’ll make a meat loaf. Do you want me to make a meat loaf? You love Mom’s meat loaf.”
“You know how to make meat loaf?”
“How hard can it be? It’s, like, hamburger meat and ketchup and onions. Maybe an egg. But I’ll check a cookbook. Trust me, Mom isn’t the French Chef. I think that’s about all she does.”
Paige nodded. “Okay.” And then she repeated the word and started to reach for her swim fins so she could carry them home. But then she stopped and gazed down at the water in the river as it meandered past us. When she looked up again she was crying. Soundlessly. I started to hug her, but she swatted at my arm with one of the fins. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m fine.”
But, of course, she wasn’t. Neither of us was.
YOU CAN’T ARGUE with a dream.
Because you don’t know it’s a dream.
It may be nonsensical, but in the insinuating, slow-motion faithfulness of this nocturnal world—its grave commitment to its madness, the confidence it has in the rightness of its unreason—you respect this new normal. The world is a fog, especially when you are in the solarium-like heat that lives under the sheets.
They tell you there is no connection between sleepwalking and dreams. Perhaps. After all, you can remember your dreams.
You have heard of people who can wake themselves up from a bad dream. Or control the environment. The experience. You are not among them. You can neither turn away nor turn back. You make the best decisions you can.
CHAPTER TWO
I DECONSTRUCTED MY mother’s last night countless times as summer segued into fall that year. I described everything I could recall for my father. For the police. For myself. I talked it through with Heather Prescott when we were sitting around her dingy apartment in Burlington just off the UVM campus, and with another of my high school friends, Ellen Cooper—who hadn’t gone to college, but was making what seemed to me at the time to be scary amounts of money designing jewelry and candlesticks at a pewter smith in Middlebury—when she would stop by my house on her way home to Bartlett. The thing I kept coming back to was how pedestrian my mother’s last night really was. There were no warnings, no ominous asides, nothing that could be construed by even the most rabid conspiracy theorists as foreshadowing.
My father was a time zone to the west at his academic conference. Scholars and professors dissecting poetry. Because he was going to be gone for two nights, it had crossed my mind that my mother might sleepwalk. It had crossed all of our minds. After all, it was only when her husband was gone that she would arise at some point in the night and embark upon one of her journeys. But she hadn’t left her bed in the night in nearly four years—at least that we knew of, and wouldn’t my father have known?—which was why my father was even willing to leave for the conference. (There had been some discussion that my mother might accompany him since I was home and could look after Paige, but it had never struck me as very serious: my mother had her own work here in Vermont.)
And so this was the first time that my father was leaving Annalee alone in their bed since her work at the sleep clinic had, my family believed, given us a course of treatment for her somnambulism. Proper sleep hygiene. No alcohol. Hypnosis (which, in the end, my mother felt had not been a factor). And, most importantly, a small tab of clonazepam before bed. The clonazepam, perhaps in concert with her antidepressants, knocked her right out. She slept, it seemed, without waking. The polysomnographs of her brain when she was on the drug were fascinating to the physicians and technicians at the sleep center; they actually showed montages of Annalee Ahlberg’s EEGs to students at the adjacent medical school.
Nevertheless, my father reminded me to be alert. He said, his eyebrows raised, to refrain from any recreational activities that might diminish my attentiveness. But I had just turned twenty-one and my father knew that I would approach this responsibility with the appropriate gravity. I was a grown-up.
And I had indeed taken my father’s words seriously. I hadn’t partied that night at all, even though it was the end of August. I had stayed home and watched TV with Paige, petting Joe the Barn Cat—we were as likely to call the eighteen-pound bruiser Joe the Barn Cat as we were Joe, even though he had lived inside our house for five years now—when he would jump into my lap. I had slept with my door open. I reassured myself that I had brought my naked mother in from the bridge when I was seventeen; I reminded myself that I had awoken in time to save half our hydrangea from being asphyxiated by silver spray paint. I would awaken if my mother left her bedroom; I would let no one down.
And I took comfort in the reality that I myself hadn’t gone sleepwalking in fifteen years. I had experienced a relatively brief, not uncommon pediatric arousal disorder, and I had outgrown it quickly. No one believed it was worri
some; no one considered it a sympathetic reaction to my mother’s sleepwalking, because it had preceded her nocturnal forays by nearly a decade. By nearly ten full years.
My mother picked up Paige at the college swimming pool late that August afternoon, and the two of them returned home to Bartlett about twenty minutes after I did from Heather Prescott’s—who was still in Bartlett in August, though she and her UVM friends were about to move into their apartment in Burlington. Already I had pulled carrots and cherry tomatoes and a green pepper from the garden in the back of our house, and made a tossed salad to accompany the curried chicken salad our mother was serving for dinner.
After supper, the three of us were a little on edge, but no one said anything about it. We were acutely aware that Professor Ahlberg was in Iowa, and Annalee would be alone in the master bedroom. It had crossed my mind that perhaps for this big experiment I should sleep in the room on my father’s side of the queen bed with the massive mahogany headboard. But I didn’t want my mother to feel like an invalid, and so I never even made the suggestion.
Paige and I watched a cassette of You’ve Got Mail, one of our favorite movies those days. It wasn’t merely a love story with bookstores as the backdrop. It was set in Manhattan, about as far from Bartlett, Vermont, as one could get in glamour and spirit. Our aunt and uncle and cousins lived there, and Paige and I always loved visiting them. And, of course, the movie ends with Harry Nilsson’s affecting cover of “Over the Rainbow.”
The Sleepwalker Page 2