The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  The police had taken her computer, hoping there might be a clue somewhere among the e-mails and web history or in a document (there wasn’t), but when they returned it, my father had placed it back in the guest room, where she worked those days when she was designing and drafting from home. (It was an unspoken rule that computers, along with television, did not belong in the sanctum sanctorum of the bedroom.) Her briefcase with the sketches for the vacation house she was designing in the White Mountains hung over the back of the wrought-iron barstool on the far side of the kitchen island. Until Paige had been born, our mother had worked for a large architectural firm in Burlington and commuted to and from the city daily; she had also traveled with some frequency for work. But she had left the firm when Paige was born, because she wanted to choose her own hours and be available for her children. Her two children. She had worked exclusively from home until Paige had begun first grade, and then gotten a small office on the second floor of a building near the bookstore in Middlebury. I dropped by there one afternoon weeks after she had disappeared and saw that once the police had finished scouring it, my father had made sure that it looked exactly as it had before they had arrived. He had even placed his wife’s favorite coffee mug beside her drafting table, and it waited for her there like a faithful dog. I wondered how much longer he would pay rent for the space.

  One night, Paige and I spent hours with some of our family’s photo albums on our laps, flipping the thick pages with the images in clear plastic sleeves. We weren’t looking for clues (at least I wasn’t). We simply wanted to see our mother once more. See her with the two of us and with our father. See her in a bathing suit on a friend’s deck on Lake Champlain, or having a hot chocolate with other friends after skiing. See her with our father at a restaurant in Burlington. See her with clients as a house she had designed was being built, its shape starting to grow in the timber framing above the foundation. It was disturbing to see her with people far away who probably had no idea that she had disappeared. An acquaintance from college who now lived in Greece. A childhood friend who had moved to London. And then there were the photos of our neighbors in local Fourth of July parades or in the background of images of Paige and me—at the base lodge of the Snow Bowl, watching me perform, eating cupcakes at the volunteer fire company’s annual fund-raising barbecue—some of whom, I knew, had driven my father a little crazy those last days in August with their public prayers and cloying remarks about courage and hope.

  Mostly, however, it was just…us. The Ahlbergs. Here was our story: Me in a purple flapper wig when I was ten, and Paige making a snow angel at the base of a ski slope when she was seven, her skis planted like trees in the snow behind her. My sister still has her race bib on. There are my mother and father, not much older than I was then, young lovers leaning into each other on a bench in Washington Square Park; there they are again, years later, parents now, one time when we were all visiting my aunt and uncle and our cousins who lived in Manhattan. There are the three Ahlberg females on a half dozen Christmas mornings, always in the dining room, our stockings on the table around the coffee cake that my mother baked every Christmas Eve. There is my mother mugging with a chocolate bunny on an Easter Sunday four or five years ago. There she is at the drafting table at her office in Middlebury, playfully feigning exasperation—those turquoise eyeglasses a pointer in one hand—because she is trying to work. There are all four of us on Captiva Island six years ago, Paige in a pink bathing suit with the Little Mermaid on the front, our mother in a modest two piece—but a bikini of sorts, nonetheless. There is my mother kissing my sister on the forehead when Paige can’t be more than six months old, and there is my mother swinging my sister in the air when Paige is perhaps a year and a half. (The two of them are, I speculated, dancing to a song by 10,000 Maniacs my mother adored. There was a period when both my mother and father would dance with Paige before dinner to 10,000 Maniacs. I was in middle school then, and far too self-conscious to join the fun.) There I am, a toddler, sitting on a blanket outside by the vegetable garden, a board book in my lap, while my mother seems to be weeding the channel between the first lettuce and the first peas. There I am again, sixteen years older, about to leave for the prom with my high school boyfriend, Stewart Godwin, my dress a white strapless sheath that I still rather liked, but I recalled was difficult to dance in. Stewart looks a little awkward in his tux, but he is a good-looking guy roughly my height, and I had only fond memories of him. And there I am as a girl magician on the stage in a New Year’s Eve talent show in Burlington, a silver sequin skirt, a black leotard, and a dark purple cape as my costume. I have just made three large, seemingly solid metal rings link together. There were dozens of pictures of me performing my magic, just as there were dozens of my sister skiing. There were dozens of our father lounging with a notebook in his lap on the shore of Lake Champlain or in one of the Adirondack chairs in our backyard or at the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton. There he was laughing with colleagues (and visiting luminaries) at Middlebury.

  But the ones that were hardest for us both to look at were those of our mother. We each picked out three photographs—a number we chose because it was finite, not because it was spiritual or symbolic—and brought them back to our separate bedrooms, where their sentimental importance to us grew daily that autumn.

  Sometimes when I was alone in the house—when Paige was at school and our father was at the college—I would hear the sound of my mother’s voice. This wasn’t a ghostly apparition. This was only in my head and it was almost always a recollection of the prosaic, not the profound.

  Fettuccine Alfredo okay for dinner?

  I saw the most beautiful field of sunflowers.

  Bring your phone: I want to know I can reach you.

  Other times when I was alone, I would catch Joe the Barn Cat looking a little anxious as he sniffed among my mother’s shoes in the mudroom just off the front door. And so I would sit on the floor beside him and pet him. I would take him into my lap. These were the moments when I was most likely to stare up at the ceiling and either blink back the tears or, as I did equally often, embrace the solitude and cry.

  When my mother started to sleepwalk, my family joked that she had gotten it from me—some sort of bizarre reverse inheritance. I had always been told that I was the first Ahlberg to have an arousal disorder, though they hadn’t used that term when I was a child. They hadn’t even taken me to the doctor when it first happened. My mother had only mentioned it, almost in passing, to the pediatrician some months later when I had my annual physical. The physician had asked a few questions, and when he’d understood that only three or four times had I actually gotten out of bed in my sleep (and not once in the last month), he’d smiled and said there was nothing to worry about. It was not an uncommon occurrence among small children. Even the way I would seem to be awake—wide awake—and not recognize my father or mother. The physician had reassured my mother that I would outgrow it. And I did. The disorder may (or may not) have had something to do with starting kindergarten, the brain wanting to process all these new experiences and stimulations, or it may have been part of a growth spurt. Or maybe I was responding to stress in the house. But it didn’t matter. I would sleepwalk a couple more times over the next two years, but by the summer between first and second grade, I was sleeping through the night. When I saw my mother and father, I always knew exactly who they were.

  “So, we have a box—an antique box I brought back from Egypt,” Lianna the Enchantress was saying to the dozen girls and boys at the party on Saturday afternoon. I was wearing my purple harem pants, a white dress shirt I had tied into a midriff, and a paisley vest I had found at a vintage clothing store in Burlington. My feet were bare, and I had painted my toenails a shade of lavender to match my pants. The costume was neither inappropriate nor revealing, but never before had I tied my shirt up to expose a part of my abdomen. As I worked, I was aware that some of the moms and dads were watching me as avidly as the children. But mostly I was aware of Gavin Ri
kert. The detective was leaning against the fireplace mantel of his sister and brother-in-law’s house, wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck. I tried not to think about him, but it was difficult. His gaze was lionesque and he was standing perfectly still. I felt a bit like a gazelle.

  “Did you bring it back on a flying carpet, Jasmine?” The question was shouted by a boy on his knees, a chubby kid in camo pants and a John Deere sweatshirt. In addition to interrupting my patter, he was leaning in a lot closer than I liked. But I guessed I had earned the Jasmine joke. I had spotted the boy right away as the child in the audience most likely to drive me crazy, and so I had brought out the Clatter Box earlier in the show than usual so I could involve him right away and win him over early on. Usually I wasn’t a fan of rewarding bad behavior, but the rules were different when I was performing: I did whatever it took to bring the skeptics and hecklers into the fold.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Foster.”

  “Well, Foster, I need your help,” I told him, and with the speed of a lemur he bolted to his feet and was standing beside me. The box was about five inches square and decorated with neon-red camels against a banana-yellow desert on three sides and a cocoa-colored pyramid on the fourth. It was made of tin and had a gold tassel at the top. I gave him the box and asked him to hold it by the tassel with his right hand. Then, so he couldn’t use his free hand to examine the box, I gave him a silk to hold in his left.

  “As you all can see—as you can see, Foster—the box is empty,” I said, opening the box’s front door, the side with the pyramid. The children and the parents all peered into the blackness. Meanwhile, I babbled about the mysteries of the pyramids and the way treasure hunters disappeared inside them. “The treasure chests were booby-trapped by the ancients to shoot daggers if someone ever opened them,” I added ominously.

  I reached onto the card table beside me for a cobalt-blue scarf. I closed the pyramid door. Then I made a tube with my left hand and pressed the scarf into it with my right, reminding everyone how very different Egypt was from Vermont. I encouraged them to imagine how spooky it must be to wander through the dusky corridors and tombs inside a pyramid. When I opened my left hand, spreading my fingers into a starfish and exposing my palm, the scarf was long gone.

  “But is it really gone?” I asked the kids, raising an eyebrow. “Does anything really disappear forever?” I glimpsed the detective against the fireplace and briefly our eyes connected.

  “No!” the kids shrieked at once, aware that this was most certainly the correct answer, and I regained my focus.

  “Indeed,” I said. “Now, my hope is that the scarf is inside this box. I would hate to think I needed a new one. Foster, would you please open the door for me?”

  The boy did. And the trick worked like a charm. Foster pulled on the tiny front door handle, the very same one I had used, but this time all four sides and the base of the box exploded out, falling to the floor with a clatter. Only the roof and the tassel remained in the boy’s fingers. And there, dangling from a hook in the ceiling, was the cobalt-blue scarf. The kids squealed and their parents clapped, and Foster would be putty in my hands for the rest of the show. I could now turn my attention to the birthday girl, a child with blond hair and a blue bow and a white party dress—which I did.

  But always as I worked, I was aware of Detective Rikert.

  “That costume is quite the bold fashion statement for Vermont,” the detective said to me. He had a bottle of soda in his hand and was leaning against the counter beside the dishwasher in the kitchen. His niece was opening her presents with the other kids in the living room, and the two of us were the only adults not watching. His sister had offered me a glass of wine, but I had declined. I hadn’t been twenty-one all that long, and I didn’t believe that Lianna the Enchantress should be drinking in front of children: it would be like the clown removing his makeup. Besides, I usually left the party as soon as I finished. The mom or dad would discreetly slip me a check and I’d be gone. Finally I had accepted a Barbie-pink paper cup of lemonade, but it was only so I would have something to do with my hands.

  “It…evolved,” I began. I wasn’t nervous, but I was wary. He was a detective, and I knew I still had much to learn about his relationship with my mother. And yet I was drawn to him: he was handsome and glib, and I felt a little unsteady around him. “There were iterations. When I was a kid—”

  “Spoken like someone who is facing midlife with real courage,” he said.

  “You know what I mean. When I was in middle school, I actually wore a cape and black pants. I had a top hat. But the whole outfit was, I don’t know, too manly. So I started trying to be more feminine.”

  “Always play to your strengths.”

  I tried not to be self-conscious. I would have untied my shirt and covered my stomach, but I feared that would only draw more attention to what I was wearing. “At first, I went with a sort of Merlin the wizard vibe. This was before Harry Potter, so he was the gold standard for me. I got a church choir robe and dyed it black. But I looked like I really was wiccan. And I couldn’t move the way I wanted. I need very free arms and very free hands.”

  “Which do you practice more? Your sleight of hand or your stories?”

  “Sleight of hand. I could ad-lib the patter if necessary—especially when my audience is second and third graders.”

  “I liked the stories and I am way older than the kids on the floor. Some of your stories reminded me of Indiana Jones.”

  I smiled. “When I was a junior in high school, I actually toyed with an Indiana Jones persona. But the safari jacket I tried on looked kind of ridiculous on me.”

  “So you went with something less ridiculous: harem pants.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m kidding you! I’m teasing. They’re perfect—especially for Lianna the Enchantress.”

  I took a sip of my lemonade.

  “What do you wear on your feet when it’s too cold to be barefoot?” he asked.

  “I have a pair of beaded slippers. They’re supposed to be Persian.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “I’m pretty sure they were made in China.”

  “How many shows a year do you do?”

  “Eleven or twelve during the summer when I’m home. Maybe three or four during the semester when I’m at college.”

  “And you told me you do a couple of clubs,” he said.

  “Wow. You have a good memory.”

  “It’s okay. It helps, given what I do. What about when you’re home in Vermont? Any clubs here?”

  “Nope—though I did do a country club on the Fourth of July. It was just outside of Burlington. I entertained the kids on a patio near the barbecue.”

  “In your harem pants.”

  “You really are fixated on them.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. You just don’t see them much around here.”

  “What was your favorite trick?”

  “I think when you made the ball levitate behind the scarf.”

  “Why?”

  “I liked the story you told. ‘Believe in ghosts,’ you said. That was it, right? You said you found the ball at a haunted minor league baseball stadium.”

  “Yup.”

  “And I never could see the wire.”

  “Not a wire.”

  “Oh, you really are magic?”

  “A magician never reveals the secret behind a trick.”

  From the other room we heard a crash—a table overturning—and then the detective’s sister saying it was okay, not a big deal. In seconds, Gavin’s brother-in-law was in the kitchen with us, grabbing a dishtowel off the handle of the stove and the entire roll of paper towels on the counter. “Fruit punch spill,” he said. “Nothing to worry about, unless you care about the beige upholstery on the couch.”

  “Need help?” the detective asked.

  “No. We can’t fit another person in the living room. Would be a fi
re code violation.”

  When he was gone, I said, “You just can’t have a kid’s birthday party without a spill. Trust me, I know.”

  “You’re good with kids.”

  “I like them. You couldn’t do what I do, if you didn’t.”

  “I got the sense the day I came to your house that you’re good with your sister, too.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Oh, sometimes she’s still her own search party. She’s still out there looking for clues.”

  “Find any?”

  “Nope.”

  “What else?”

  “She tries to get on with her life, I guess. She goes to school and does homework. She sees her friends. She swims.”

  “And you?”

  My answer was brutally honest. “Me? I just wait.”

  “For your mom to walk in the front door…”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But I wait for something.”

  “You wish you were back at college?”

  “Yes and no. I miss my friends. I miss classes and studying. I miss my life. But I want to be here for my dad and Paige. I need to be here for them. I mean, it hasn’t even been a month yet since Mom disappeared. And, I have to admit, I don’t think I’d be able to focus away from home right now.”

  For a moment we were quiet. We had both felt the air in the room grow heavy. Then I took a breath and asked, “Is there any news about her? Any new leads?”

  “We get fewer new leads now than the first couple of days. A lot fewer. But someone will spot a homeless woman who looks even a teeny bit like your mom in Rutland or Albany, and we follow up. Someone will see something in the river or the lake that they think might be your mom, and we follow up.”

  “But it’s never her.”

  “No. It’s never even a clue.”

  “At first, it was the biggest story in Vermont. Now, it hasn’t been in the papers in days. I don’t think there’s been a mention on the TV news in over a week.”