The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  “The news cycles move on. The media interest wanes.”

  “And the police interest?”

  “Sadly, that wanes, too. Human nature. Detectives lose interest when we’re getting nowhere. When we’ve exhausted every possibility. And, for better or worse, we don’t have any reason to believe this is a homicide investigation.”

  “No.”

  “At one point, there must have been a dozen of us working on the case. But once we’d talked to your mother’s friends and her clients, once forensics had analyzed her computer and phone, once we’d followed up on every crazy sighting”—he put his soda down on the counter and extended his hands, palms up, a universal sign for capitulation—“what’s left? So we wait for a break. We work on other things.”

  “Do you still think her body is in the river?”

  “If it is, the drought helps. Maybe eventually the water will get so low that we find it. We dragged part of the river, but maybe it was wedged perfectly under a rock.”

  I bit my lip and looked away, hoping Gavin wouldn’t notice how the image had unnerved me. As painful as it was for me to hear the conjecture, I didn’t want him to stop.

  “I said too much,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I need to know. Go on.”

  He took a sip of his soda. “Maybe the divers stirred up just enough sediment in the water that they missed her,” he said. “It happens. Think of that poor kid from Dartmouth.”

  I nodded. I recalled the story. When I’d been in elementary school, a junior there had disappeared the first Friday in February. He’d left a friend’s dorm room late at night and vanished. But no one seriously suspected foul play, because there were footprints his boot size that led to the crew team’s boathouse near the Connecticut River. He’d been a member of the team his first two years at the college, a rower in the shell’s engine room. He was no longer on the team, and apparently he grieved that loss immensely. His friend said he had been drunk when he had left that last night.

  “The kid’s body wasn’t found until June,” the detective said. “But it had been in the water the whole time, in that very spot no more than a half mile from the boathouse. So tragic. So sad.”

  He finished his soda and rinsed out the bottle in the sink. “But your mom? We just don’t know. We assume she’s there because of a scrap of nightshirt and because one night years ago she walked to the river—to the bridge. But there are no footprints in the snow this time.”

  “Then she might be alive?”

  “I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t want to get your hopes up. But, yes, without a body, we can’t rule out that possibility.”

  “But she wouldn’t just leave my dad and Paige and me. You said that yourself.”

  “I did, yes. I believe that.”

  “So you’re thinking…what? This might not have been a sleepwalking thing? She might have been murdered?”

  “At the moment, I’d say that was unlikely. But, yes, it’s a possibility. Maybe she was killed while she was sleepwalking. Maybe she was killed after she woke up—on her way home.”

  “But there would still be a body.”

  He nodded. “One would think so. And we certainly found no one who would seem to have any reason to want her dead. She didn’t have enemies. No one in her address book, none of her clients. None of your neighbors. You didn’t want her dead. Paige didn’t want her dead. Your dad didn’t want her dead. I mean…people loved her. All of you loved her.”

  I opened the cabinet under the sink where I suspected there would be a kitchen garbage can. There was. I tossed my lemonade cup into it. Then I stood up and asked another of the hard, horrible questions that had been gnawing at me as a woman. “Okay, here’s another gruesome question: Are you investigating if she was raped? A random thing? She was outside alone at night and someone attacked her?”

  “So she was raped and murdered? Yes. But so far that track hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “Have you ever had a case like this?”

  “I haven’t. And I’ve been doing this twelve years.”

  Instantly I did the math in my head. I supposed he was thirty-three, a dozen years my senior. My mom was forty-seven. That meant she was fourteen years older than he was. My mom had been forty-two when they met, and he had been twenty-eight.

  “It’s baffling,” he was saying. “But you do this long enough, you get a case like this. Every cop does. Sometimes you solve them. And sometimes you don’t. They just grow cold.”

  “God,” I murmured. “If only I’d slept on my dad’s side of the bed that night.”

  “Yeah, but that still assumes you might have woken up. This isn’t your fault, Lianna. Your mom worried if something ever happened to her you’d feel this way. But she never wanted you to feel even a twinge of guilt.”

  “She talked about something happening to her?”

  “Of course she did. You pulled her off a bridge, for God’s sake.”

  “Did she think she’d go back there?”

  “She was more afraid she’d set the house on fire. She was more afraid she’d accidentally hurt you or your sister.”

  “Is that why you asked me about her dreams the day she disappeared?”

  “Not really. There’s only the most mundane association between sleepwalking and dreams. They occur in different parts of the sleep cycle. It’s not like a sleepwalker is acting out a dream.”

  “Then why?”

  “They tell us a bit about a person’s inner life, don’t you think? And in your mom’s case? Plane crashes. Dead bodies.”

  “She was scared of leaving people behind?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “But her dreams may not mean that at all. A lot of shrinks will tell you a plane crash dream is about failure. Nothing more. You’re not achieving your goals.”

  “Or maybe you’re out of control?”

  “Maybe. And your mom did remember more than a lot of sleepwalkers. She sure as hell remembered more than I ever did. Most of us have amnesia. But not your mom. At least not precisely. She would remember a detail here and there, and sometimes she’d think it was a dream. She’d actually hope it was a dream.”

  “Where did you two used to go to talk?”

  “You should be the detective.”

  It was getting late in the afternoon now, and I felt a chill on my stomach. I went ahead and untied my shirt and then buttoned the three lower buttons. “That’s not an answer.”

  “No, it’s not. Sometimes we went to the coffee shop near the hospital and the hotel they use for their sleep studies. Sometimes we’d head downtown. We’d go to that bakery across the street from the library on College Street.”

  “My mom did love their cupcakes.”

  “And their coffee. Decaf, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you inherit her love of cupcakes?”

  “I did.”

  “Ever have the time to come to Burlington?”

  I chuckled. “These days I have nothing but time.”

  “The bakery has more than cupcakes. They have pretty good sandwiches. Want to come to lunch on Monday? It’s one of my days off this week.”

  His voice was casual, but once more the room shifted. I wanted to see him again, but I needed reassurance that he and my mother had never been romantically involved. I met his eyes: “You swear that you and my mom were not having an affair?”

  He raised his right hand. “I swear. It was never, ever like that. She loved your dad. And I was dating someone else back then, too.”

  “What happened?”

  “She moved to Boston. We grew apart.”

  “And you’re not, I don’t know, crossing some ethical line as a detective?”

  “By taking you to lunch?” He smiled. “Arguably.”

  “So I shouldn’t,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. I felt a pang of disappointment.

  “Oh, I’m sure some people would frown. But like I said,
we have no reason to believe this is a murder investigation. And I promise you: it won’t cloud my ability to explore what happened. So you should.”

  “Okay,” I said. There was a tremor of doubt in my voice, and he heard it, too. I told myself that by seeing him, I was in fact the one playing detective. I might learn something more about my mother and her disappearance. But there was more to it than that: I understood the way I was attracted to him.

  “Okay, we’re on?”

  “Uh-huh. We’re on. What time?”

  “Twelve thirty?”

  “I can squeeze you in,” I said.

  “Excellent.”

  When I left the party a few minutes later, driving home in my mother’s Pathfinder, I considered whether I would tell my father and Paige that I was seeing the detective for lunch. But I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t. That I shouldn’t. I had the sense that Gavin wouldn’t want them to know. I convinced myself—and it really took very little work—that they didn’t need to know. No one did. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my meeting the detective at the bakery; there was absolutely nothing wrong with my meeting him anywhere.

  Nevertheless, a part of me wondered what the hell I was doing.

  THE DREAM HOLDS you tight. The voices inside you drone on, but you ignore them because this is but a dream.

  So you give in. Lovers don’t enter your life out of the blue. You summon them in your sleep.

  A lucid dream? A technical term. A term coined by a Dutch psychiatrist just before the First World War. In a lucid dream, people wield some control over their sleeping world. They choose to fly. Or they choose not to. But they are aware that they’re dreaming. There is activity in the parietal lobes.

  A lucid dream is particularly vivid. The physical sensations can be…remarkable.

  You have all the cerebral activity but none of the control. None. Your dreams are lucid, but you are not technically a lucid dreamer.

  And so when you see a new lover, you start to unbutton your shirt.

  Or not.

  You have no recourse but release, and so sometimes you don’t even bother to undress.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THAT NIGHT, WHEN the Saturday Night Live rerun was over and I was confident that my sister was asleep and our father had passed out—that was how I was starting to view the sleep that followed his drinking—I went to the guest bedroom. My mother had usually worked at her office in Middlebury the last six years, but she kept a computer and an old drafting table in the guest room so she could still get something done those days when Paige was home with a cold or strep throat, or the roads were too snowy to drive to Middlebury (which usually meant some combination of all of us were home anyway, because there was a snow day and the schools were closed). I swung open the door and, as I expected, saw my mother’s handbag and cell phone on the credenza beside her drafting table. On a separate desk was the computer. I paused: I had never appreciated the warm molasses of the wood and how meticulously my mother must have selected each piece.

  I switched on the cell phone, wondering if Gavin Rikert’s name would be among the contacts. I imagined my mother phoning him to coordinate their calendars and schedule their little support group—their discussions of their sleepwalking over coffee. There were perhaps twenty-five or thirty phone numbers stored, and his wasn’t among them. But this meant nothing, I decided, because my mother’s phone was only two years old.

  So I booted up her computer. I was struck by how much bigger the screen was than my laptop as I searched it for Gavin Rikert’s name, too. I typed his first name, then his last name, and finally both names together in the search bar on her e-mail program. It never appeared. There was no trace of the detective in any of her documents either. He wasn’t in her lengthy address book full of contacts.

  Still, before shutting the machine down, I scanned some of the e-mails between my mother and my mother’s clients and some of the e-mails between my parents. I read some random e-mails between my mother and my grandfather about my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and it was heartbreaking to see the two of them outline the options for care as, in the coming months and years, she deteriorated. I guessed this was an invasion of privacy, but certainly the police had done this. And clearly they hadn’t found anything of importance as far as the investigation was concerned, because they wouldn’t have returned the computer if they had. They wouldn’t have returned her cell phone. That was just common sense. I was moved by how many of the e-mails were about Paige and me. Our mother seemed to brag a lot about the two of us. I was touched by how often our parents e-mailed, and how domestic it all was. A lot of their e-mails would have been texts a half decade later, they were so brief: grocery store reminders (“We’re out of half-and-half”) and references to newspaper articles (“They found the plane’s black box!”), or the times of the movies they wanted to see. Sometimes my father was pleading with her to join him at a college function or thanking her profusely when she did. Sometimes she was referencing one of their inside jokes about their friends, like Marilyn Bryce’s husband, Justin, a self-proclaimed foodie restaurateur, who mostly just added truffle oil to starch. Other times she was asking him to endure Bill and Emily Caldwell for a dinner in Burlington, even though they both agreed that Bill was a world-class bore. It made me a little sad that—as I had always assumed—my father seemed to love my mother more than she loved him. He often signed his e-mails “Love, W.” She never signed hers at all. He told her how beautiful he thought she was. She never responded. I never found a single e-mail where my mother complimented my father at all. Her e-mails weren’t cold; some were even playful. But the romance, such as it was, felt almost unrequited.

  It was in the e-mails about my sister and me that I was able to glimpse the mother I recognized: passionate and funny and loving. So warm. So creative. So clever.

  And I saw that my father was her equal when it came to his girls. Among the e-mails that left me wiping my eyes was one from my scholarly and (yes) bookish dad, observing how much he loved chatting with me about fiction and poetry and whatever I was reading. He had recently driven me back to college, and he had written how the car ride had left him wistful because I was so grown up. Discussing with me a Kent Haruf novel that was a finalist for the National Book Award that year had left him “proud and moved because she has become so astute. She is a much better reader than I am.” It wasn’t true, but it made me happy he thought so. And I remembered that afternoon ride well. I remembered most of our journeys well.

  And, of course, some of the oldest e-mails on the machine between my parents were about the sleep study. But these were, again, all very businesslike. The schedule. When she would be gone. He’d express his concern. She’d tell him not to worry. There was no mention of a support group or a detective. There was no mention of any other sleepwalkers.

  But then there was this: an e-mail my mother had sent my father that very June. It was the subject line that caused me to pause: “MCA and Miscarriages.” My mother had written:

  This is all ancient history. The study might be new, but it should mean nothing to you and me anymore. Nothing. Okay?

  She was responding to an e-mail from my father. I followed the chain and understood quickly that MCA stood for “male chromosomal abnormalities.” My father had found a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that suggested chromosomal defects in male sperm were occasionally the cause of recurrent or multiple miscarriages. Based on the e-mail he had sent her, he had come across the article that day and was bringing it home to show her—even years later, it seemed, trying to take the bullet for my mother’s miscarriages. Clearly, he had made this argument before—taken the blame. My mother, meanwhile, had her two girls and wasn’t especially interested in the study. Even if this research suggested that all of the miscarriages she’d endured had had more to do with his biology than hers, she didn’t care. Clearly two of his swimmers had been athletic and healthy. Paige and I were the proof.

  I shut
the machine down, heavy-hearted and stoop-shouldered with grief. I went downstairs and woke my father and walked him up to his bedroom. Then I climbed into the gym shorts and T-shirt that I was sleeping in those days and went to bed. For a long time I tossed and turned in the dark, tortured as much by what I knew as what I didn’t, before finally getting up and pulling up the shade and opening the window. In the chill air I watched the night sky and stars from my window seat and I listened to the river, and over and over I asked my mother where she had gone.

  Once, when our family was starting to understand the connection between my father’s absences and my mother’s nocturnal journeys, my father had asked one of the clinicians at the sleep center whether I should lock my mother in the bedroom from the hallway when he was gone. Of course we would have had to add such a lock to the outside of the door. Or, he had suggested, we could add an electric light beam with an alarm to the frame. The alarm would sound if his wife walked through the doorway, at the very least awakening me. I had not been present for the discussion, but my father had shared it with me. Unfortunately, there were problems with both solutions. What if there were a fire and my mother couldn’t escape the bedroom? What would we do when I left for college in a year? Paige was still so young. No, the best solution was that my father simply wouldn’t travel until the medication took hold and it seemed likely that his wife’s sleepwalking was cured—or at least in remission.

  The next day, Sunday night, my father and Paige and I were fighting another losing battle against awkward silences over dinner. I had improvised a Chinese stir-fry using the very last of the carrots and green peppers from the garden and the last chicken breasts they had at the general store. I promised myself that someday I would actually drive to the supermarket and buy a week’s worth of groceries. Wasn’t that what grown-ups did? Homemakers? My own mother? I watched Paige push the vegetables around her plate as if they were elements of a board game. Finally I asked my sister, “You have a lot of homework?”