The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  But before Sally could tell me, a female trooper who couldn’t have been more than thirty was sitting down on the barstool beside me. I told Sally I’d have to call her back in a couple of minutes.

  The trooper had creosote-colored hair cut short and insisted that Paige and I call her Rosanne. She rubbed my back and asked, “How are you doing?”

  “I’m doing bad. I’m kind of freaking out.”

  “Yeah. I get it. Your father’s plane lands in about an hour. He should be home soon.”

  I nodded. My father had caught a plane from Iowa City to Chicago, and then another from Chicago to Burlington. It was twelve fifteen now. I was about to bring up Sally Sheldon’s phone call, but Rosanne beat me to it.

  “We may have a lead,” she began. “A volunteer found something a few minutes ago and they’re bringing it to the mobile crime lab right now. Can you tell me what your mother was wearing when you last saw her? You know, before bed?”

  “A summer nightshirt. Navy. Victoria’s Secret. Buttons down the front.”

  The trooper wrote down the description.

  “Is that what they found?” I asked. “They found her nightshirt?” If they had, I wondered if that meant my mother’s sleeping self had stripped off the nightshirt to go skinny-dipping. I knew waking Vermonters who did—whole families in the privacy of their backyard ponds or in secluded corners of the Gale—but most still had a bit of hippie in them. My mother? As far as I knew, it would only cross her mind in her sleep to peel off her nightshirt and go for a swim. And even then, skinny-dipping wasn’t really her style. That time when I pulled her naked from the bridge? That wasn’t somnambulant skinny-dipping. That was something else entirely. Somnambulant soaring, maybe. Somnambulant base-jumping. Believing in her sleep she could fly.

  “They found a piece of fabric—not a piece of clothing. They found a little piece hanging from a dead branch beside the road. By the banks of the river. It’s near here. Between here and the store.”

  I glanced down at the kitchen phone and thought of what I had just asked Sally. I took a breath and repeated that short, critical, two-word question: “How big?”

  “It’s little. It’s small. Maybe a couple of inches by a couple of inches. It got caught on the branch.”

  “What color is it?”

  “Navy.”

  “So it is from my mom’s nightshirt.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  But, I understood, they did. They did know that.

  My father had told me that he had long ceased trying to understand the meaning of the code: he left and his wife would rise like the undead from the sheets. No one, he insisted, had been able to explain to him or to my mother why she only walked in her sleep when she was alone. One time, I had watched my parents and two of their friends joking that she was trying to find him, though the attempt at humor seemed to make both my mother and father uncomfortable. Did my mother fret that she would find her husband in bed with another woman? Did my father fear the same thing?

  Now I tried to push my memory of that conversation from my mind. I tried to push the fragment of nightgown from my mind. I tried to reassure myself that my mother had walked to the nearby elementary school and broken an ankle, and the only reason it was taking so long to find her was that the school was empty in August. Or she had walked to her friends the Bryces and broken her leg on a fallen tree in the woods. She was closer to Marilyn Bryce than she was to her husband, Justin, but I knew she enjoyed his company, too. Marilyn was a painter her age, and Justin was a restaurateur, older than his wife, who owned bistros in Burlington and Middlebury that specialized in what he considered comfort food: the menus were rich with variations on macaroni and cheese and French fries.

  But the fact that my mother hadn’t been found yet was obviously a very bad sign—especially since at least once before she had walked to the river. To the bridge.

  I wished I were more comfortable with prayer. I wished I were that little girl again who actually went to Sunday school for a couple of years when I was in preschool and kindergarten.

  Jesus loves me! This I know,

  For the Bible tells me so.

  We sang that in the little classroom in the wing off the sanctuary every Sunday morning. We drew pictures of angels and sheep and pinned them to one of the walls. In the end, my parents had preferred sleeping late to walking me to and from the church, and so I had stopped going. Eventually, the awkwardness brought on by the fact that neither of my parents was sufficiently inspired to attend more than twice a year meant that I, too, had slipped from the fold. I sighed. I regretted that in a paper in college I had grouped the origin stories of the Christian church with—and I felt guilty remembering this, a vestigial shadow from those days in Sunday school—the lunacy that grounded Scientology.

  I wondered why my parents had grown further from God (any god) as they had aged. One of my professors had lectured that faith was an upside-down bell curve: a U. It grew weaker through adolescence and adulthood, and then—as mortality started to rear its ugly, cadaverous head—started to rise. Faith made it a hell of a lot easier to put one foot in front of the other when your feet were old and swollen and riddled with arthritis; when your hair was thinning and gray; when your neck was showing its first signs of caruncle droop. My parents weren’t precisely atheists; they did go to church on those two important occasions each year, and at least my mother defined herself as a Christian whenever she was asked (though clearly she was uncomfortable with the question). But neither of them leaned upon the church in times of need, either because they felt it was beneath them or because they had never—even after five miscarriages—felt the church would offer much comfort. I guessed I was like them in that regard.

  I shook my head. This wasn’t about my parents growing old or infirm in ten or twenty years. This was about the here and now and the reality that my mother was missing, and how my life might be about to change in ways for which I was neither prepared nor trained. I was, I realized, scared. Very scared. I would take comfort wherever I had any chance of finding it. Any chance at all. And so I went upstairs to my bedroom. I looked out the window, actually up at the cloudless blue sky, and there I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed.

  Our red Victorian had three porches, one with glass windows that faced south, one with screens that faced west, and one that was open and faced east. The southern porch doubled as a greenhouse in April and early May, incubating the tomato seedlings and pepper plants until it was likely the last spring frost was past and we—my mother and I, and then my mother and Paige—could transplant them into the garden outside. The open porch was at the front of the house, and near the entrance: a pair of heavy, cinnamon-colored doors with slender stained-glass windows in the top halves. Half a dozen feet to the right of the doors was a white wooden glider swing, long enough for two people to sit comfortably. Before my mother had spray-painted the hydrangea silver and my father had been forced to trim and cut away at least half its branches, it had shielded the glider from the street. Less so, now. Sometimes in the summer my mother would have her coffee on the swing and read the newspaper there in the morning; my father would occasionally grade final papers there in mid-May and read books in June and July. By August, the sun had moved, and the swing would remain empty until my father took it down in October and carried it up to the attic.

  But not now. It was August, and my sister and I had gone to the swing to sit and wait for our father to return from the airport. I had brought a deck of playing cards and was absentmindedly shuffling it with one hand. Some people bit their nails; I cut cards, equally adept those days with either hand.

  Our father had called home the moment he had landed in Burlington, asking for news—which I had, a story in a scrap of a nightshirt—and telling me that he would be here in an hour. I guessed he would be home any minute now, well under an hour, because most likely he was speeding. In my mind, I saw him passing the slow-moving tractors and manure spreaders that congested the
two-lane roads between the dairy farms in Starksboro and Hinesburg, and roaring past the pickups and sedans that were flirting with the speed limit. No doubt he was racing near seventy-five in the fifty-mile zones, and topping fifty where he was supposed to be traveling along at thirty-five. Inside our house, detectives were combing my parents’ bedroom and had set up a command center of sorts in the kitchen. I imagined them writing down my mother’s prescriptions from the bottles in the medicine chest in the master bathroom; perhaps they were even confiscating the bottles for analysis.

  I saw Donnie Hempstead trudging from the woods across the street. He was among the first responders my father had asked me to call. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that was filthy from the woods and his sweat. He had a radio on his belt. He saw my sister and me and paused before us. “We’ll find her, girls,” he said, running one of his hands through the trim brown beard that followed the line of his jaw. “Any minute now. Hang in there, okay?” We nodded; we hadn’t a choice. Then he continued on into our house.

  A moment later, Paige and I heard a dog barking somewhere near the river. We looked at each other and my sister spoke first. “That sounds like one of those dogs the police brought,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t convinced. About an hour earlier, the K-9 team had arrived, a pair of German shepherds and two handlers. They had gotten there moments after the piece of my mother’s nightshirt had been discovered. I had overheard the troopers discussing the animals’ deployment, and the plan was to bring one dog to that spot. The other had set off from our house’s front yard. The dogs were named Tucker and Max. The names of the handlers hadn’t registered with either Paige or me. Before the dogs had started off, I had had to give their handlers a piece of clothing my mother had worn. Originally I had brought down a pair of her summer shirts to choose from, but they were clean. The handlers had asked for dirty clothes, items that would be rich with the scent of Annalee Ahlberg. And so I had gone to the clothes hamper in my parents’ bathroom and retrieved the black sweatpants and maroon sports bra she had worn to the gym the day before. It had felt like a violation, but I did it. “Of course, it could be Dandelion,” I added, referring to our neighbor’s yellow lab. Dandelion barked at almost anything that moved: Squirrels. Cats. Extra-large butterflies.

  Paige shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s Max.” Max had sniffed at our mother’s sports bra from the front steps and then yanked his handler across the yard and off toward the woods by the Gale.

  I tried to imagine what would cause the animal to bark now. Would another scrap of clothing do that? Or would it demand a body? My mind had just begun down that especially menacing track when Paige and I saw our father’s car approaching. We hopped off the swing simultaneously and ran to the spot on the driveway where we knew he would glide to stop.

  I could see that my father was being emotionally drawn and quartered, pulled in more directions than any one body could handle. He was having a conversation with the state police, and though I could tell that while they believed they were asking him questions, my father—ever the professor—had the upper hand and mostly was interrogating them. But he was also trying to field phone calls from my aunt—my mother’s sister in Manhattan—and from his father-in-law in Massachusetts. Paige was on the couch beside him, half in his lap, her head against his chest. I feared that my kid sister, disarmingly mature most of the time, was now such a wreck that she was a snippet of bad news away from sucking her thumb. Already she was chewing on her lower lip.

  And then there was the guilt our father seemed to be shouldering. I, too, was feeling its weight. He had gone away; I hadn’t awoken. He should have stayed; I should have slept on his side of the bed. We both had let Annalee Ahlberg down. Our guilt coated the house like pollen. I told myself it was my imagination, but the more the state police learned, the more I felt judged.

  I listened to the conversations until I couldn’t bear it and then went back outside. I heard a helicopter nearing and was surprised for only a second: of course there was a helicopter. I was confident that soon there would be a second and a third. I watched it hover over the village on the far side of the river and then continue on its way in the direction of the elementary school and, eventually, the forest. I noticed the sun on the maples at the edge of our driveway—the light almost like honey—and saw that a few of the leaves were already starting to turn. A state police truck rumbled by the house with a pair of Zodiac rubber boats on a trailer behind it. There were two state police cruisers in our driveway now, as well as the mobile crime lab—a long green-and-white van with logos and shields for the State of Vermont—parked on the street.

  I turned and saw a fellow in a gray tweed blazer and a silver-and-black-striped necktie emerging from the barn where we parked our cars. I hadn’t spotted him earlier, and wondered if he was a reporter nosing around our property. I guessed he was in his early to midthirties, trim, thin yellow hair just starting to roll back. He had a leather attaché slung over his shoulder. When he reached me, I saw that his eyes were hazel, a kaleidoscopic (and rare) spatter of brown and green. I thought he was cute, and then felt guilty for noticing.

  “A sleepwalker, eh?” he said to me.

  “Yes,” I told him firmly, unsure whether he was asking because he doubted the story. Most people, I had learned, were skeptical of sleepwalkers. They couldn’t believe the things a person could do in that state. “My mom walks in her sleep. You can check her medical records. It’s all there.”

  He nodded. “I wasn’t doubting. I’m Detective Rikert, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am? I’m twenty-one.”

  “Would you prefer I called you Lianna?”

  “I would,” I said. I wasn’t surprised he knew my name. It was clear I was the missing woman’s older daughter. “And you’re not a reporter? You’re really a detective?”

  “Yes. Let’s start again. I’m Detective Rikert. I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Waterbury—a part of the state police.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a leather wallet with a badge and ID card. “The G stands for Gavin.”

  I waited. When I said nothing, he continued, “You’re the magician. And you’re home from college for the summer.”

  “I’m not a magician. I do kids’ birthday parties to make money and clubs sometimes in Massachusetts. Small clubs. It’s not exactly a career path.”

  “What is your career path?”

  “I’m an English major. I have no idea.”

  “Teaching, maybe? Like your father?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Writing?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I ask you a few questions about your mother?”

  “Why not? Everyone else has been,” I answered, exasperated.

  “I’ve looked through a lot of the team’s notes about her and thought about what we know. What I know.” He shook his head. “She wasn’t having an affair. She hasn’t run off with some other man. The fallacy with that theory is you and your sister. My sense is she wouldn’t just up and leave the two of you because there was some man she loved more than your father. And for that same reason—you and your sister—I don’t think she killed herself.”

  “I agree. Thank you.”

  “Nah, don’t thank me. At least not yet. All that means is…” His voice trailed off.

  “Is what?”

  “It means nothing,” he said, trying to sound definitive. But it was clear he was backpedaling.

  “Tell me.”

  He sighed. He looked away. “All that means is that she’s probably had an accident. It means that we need to find her soon or this doesn’t end well.”

  I was shocked by his candor. But I also sensed a subterranean ripple of pain as he spoke. Of empathy. And, of course, I knew he was right; I’d known it for hours. He was simply the first person to verbalize the obvious around me. I understood it had taken some courage to speak so frankly, and, in truth, a part of me was grateful. I sw
allowed hard and asked, “If that’s true, what happens next?”

  “Tell me if I’m being too honest—Just stop me, okay, Lianna?—but if we don’t find her in the next day or so, all of this activity will turn from a search-and-rescue mission to one of body retrieval.”

  “And then you’ll find her?”

  “I expect so. We’ll find her in a ravine somewhere. Some corner of the woods. Maybe even in the water. There’s actually a lot of research into—forgive me—how far a body will drift.”

  Once again, I felt a little sick. “So, you think she might already have drowned?”

  He took a deep breath. He looked a little forlorn. “It’s my fear, yes. Think of where we found that scrap of nightgown: it was by the river. Think of the time you pulled her down from the side of the bridge. So, yes, we have to consider that possibility.” He motioned ever so slightly with his head in the direction of the village. “So, let’s hope she’s in the woods and the accident is a broken leg. Worst case, a concussion. But let’s pray she’s not in the water.”

  “I can’t handle this,” I said slowly, carefully, staring at my legs and trying to lose myself in the blue of my jeans. I was angry with myself for pressing him and wished that I hadn’t goaded him into elaborating. I had to remind myself that he was only saying what I already knew. If my mother were alive and unhurt, she would have woken up by now and come home; if she were alive but injured, someone would have found her and the radios would be crackling with the news. After all, how far could she have walked?

  “I said too much,” he said. It felt like an apology.

  “No. You were just being straight with me.”

  “But I am sorry. Like you, I want to find her.”

  “What can I do?”