The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  She looked at me. “That’s not true.”

  “Seriously? When? I think Mom or Dad would have told me.”

  “Well, you think wrong. I told Mom. I don’t know if she told Dad.”

  I tried to clear my head and focus. “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  “One night in August—about a week before Mom disappeared—I think I went downstairs.”

  “You think?”

  “My swim bag wasn’t where I’d left it.”

  “Maybe you forgot where you put it.”

  “It was on the floor in the den by the TV set. I always leave it by the front door so I don’t forget it.” Paige was as meticulous about her swim bag—always packing a dry towel, a dry suit, and her goggles—as she was her ski gear. Sometimes her wet towel wound up in the back of the car on the way home if it was warm out, because she would walk from the pool to the car in her suit, wearing the towel like a skirt. But before leaving the house, she always double-checked that she had what she needed in that bag.

  “So one time you just put it down in the den by mistake,” I said. “Or maybe Mom or Dad moved it.”

  “Also, it was unpacked.”

  “Unpacked?”

  “Everything was on the rug.”

  “What did Mom say?”

  “She said I was worried for nothing. She said I just forgot to pack it. And even if I had gotten up in the middle of the night, she said it was probably a one-time thing.”

  “Okay, then. It sounds like the odds you were sleepwalking are pretty slim.”

  She took a deep breath: “But then this happened: last week, I woke up in the barn.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I was in Mom’s car.”

  “At night?”

  “Uh-huh. The middle of the night. And I don’t remember walking out to the barn or getting inside. I don’t remember getting behind the wheel. But there I was.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Gee. Did I wake up in my bed or outside in the barn? Hard to be sure,” she said sarcastically. “Of course I’m sure.”

  Paige had been one of those kids who’d always loved to sit on our mother’s or father’s lap and steer the car as a little girl. Now, though she was still a few years from even a learner’s permit, our parents would let her back in and out of the barn. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell Dad?”

  “I didn’t want to worry Dad. He’s kind of a mess. And I’m telling you now.”

  I thought about this. “Well, thank you.”

  “I mean, I guess I should have made a bigger deal about the swim bag in August. But we were all freaking out because Dad was about to go to that conference. You know, his first big trip leaving Mom. I didn’t want to ruin everything and prevent him from going. I guess Mom didn’t either.”

  I understood completely, and I didn’t want her to become any more alarmed than she already was. “I get it,” I said. “At some point we should probably let Dad know. I really don’t think it’s a big deal, so you shouldn’t either. But let’s find a moment in the next couple of days when you or I can tell him.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. Then she sat back against my headboard and folded her arms across her chest. “So what do you think of your odds and probabilities now?” she asked me.

  “I think you worry too much,” I told her, smiling.

  The image on the TV screen was still frozen where I had paused the cassette. The magician had just returned the second dove to the cage on the table beside him. For a long second we both stared at it. The magician had tattoos of the sun and a crescent moon on his neck.

  “What do you remember about your own sleepwalking?” she asked me after a moment.

  Like most sleepwalkers, I recalled almost nothing. I really had but one memory: waking up and my mother was sobbing. It was one of those horrific, perfect storms. It was ten at night and I was six. In my memory, my mother was writhing alone on the floor of the bathroom off the master bedroom, curled up almost in the fetal position beside the tub. She was wearing a white nightshirt and there was blood on one of her thighs. I was clutching a portable, plastic Barbie dollhouse. I had no idea how or why I had woken up, or what I was doing with the dollhouse in my arms. I had been oblivious to my mother’s crying. My father had gone outside to bring the car to the front steps from the carriage barn. I had been terrified when I had woken and seen my mother in that condition, and I had dropped the dollhouse onto the tile, breaking off a part of the roof and the wall. A small, sharp piece of plastic had shot into my mother’s face, nicking her just below her eye, and the blood had mixed with her tears, making the wound look far worse than it actually was.

  Years later, my mother would explain to me what I had walked in on: the third miscarriage. It was starting and my mother knew the feeling, having endured it twice before. She was going to lose another baby.

  “I don’t remember anything,” I told Paige. “I really don’t recall anything at all.” The last thing I wanted to do was share that nightmare of a recollection with my kid sister, especially when she was already feeling such anxiety. Our conversation had put a serious crimp in my buzz.

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Paige seemed to think about this. “What are you dreaming about these days?” she asked. “You said you’re dreaming more.”

  “I’m not one of those people who recalls her dreams.”

  “Can you think of anything?”

  “Sure. I had a dream last night about a building on campus that—at least a part of it—has eight sides. It’s called the Octagon. I’ve had two classes in there. It’s an older building.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wish I could tell you something interesting and amazing. But all I remember is that I was eating cigarettes.”

  “Eww. Gross. Why?”

  “It’s even grosser. The cigarettes were lit. I was doing a magic trick.”

  “Who was in the room?”

  “A couple people. I have no idea who.”

  “You’re right: that’s not very interesting. It’s only disgusting.”

  I smiled at her. “Okay, then. What about you? What have you been dreaming?”

  “Joe the Barn Cat watched Mom leave the house.”

  “That’s the dream?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, he probably did.”

  “I was with him—in the dream. We followed her.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “That’s the problem. That’s what’s so frustrating. All I remember is that Joe and I follow her downstairs. We follow her when she opens the front door, and we follow her when she goes outside. We follow her when she starts to walk down the street toward the village. She’s walking on the yellow lines right in the middle of the road, but it doesn’t matter because it’s nighttime.”

  “Arguably, that’s an even worse time to sleepwalk down the middle of the road.”

  Paige frowned in exasperation. “I just mean there aren’t a lot of cars on the roads around here at night.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, there’s Mom and Joe and me. Mom is maybe twenty-five meters ahead of us. You know, the length of the college pool.”

  “Do you call out to her?”

  “I want to, but I can’t speak. I can’t make my voice work. Dreams are like that, right? Then she disappears. It’s so frustrating.”

  I thought about this. “Did you get as far as the general store? The bridge?”

  “Nope. Then, poof, Joe and I are just home again.”

  “I’m really not an expert on dreams. But I think it shows how much you miss her. That’s all.”

  “Duh.”

  “You asked.”

  She pointed at the television screen and the frame of the magician with his doves. “You’re not going to get doves, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. It would just be so sad when Joe ate them or they died.”


  “God, you can be ghoulish.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m just the realist in this house.”

  YOU MASTURBATE IN your sleep. So you are told. So it begins. And, for some people, so it ends. Self-stimulation. That’s all.

  That’s…all.

  But, alas, not for you. You swim through a nocturnal world of slow-wave non-REM stage-three sleep—a clinical term that is just metrical enough to sound like bad poetry—and experience an abrupt pseudo-awakening with your heartbeat a frenetic paradiddle in your chest. And your prefrontal cortex, which is dormant because you are asleep, can’t help you. It can’t rein in your hands as they reach down below your waist. Or, when that’s not enough, as they reach for whoever’s beside you. Or, when there is no one beside you, as you set out to find someone.

  We see a Berlin Wall between sleeping and wakefulness, between the conscious and the unconscious mind. But that’s wrong. Think a spectrum. Imagine a line.

  And then imagine your limp surrender when you cross that line—the tremors, the unbidden release, the subsequent shame when you wake. And then imagine that you cross that line one time too many.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT WAS A revelation as a twenty-one-year-old to push a grocery cart. I realized that despite having been in supermarkets easily hundreds of times in my life, I had never before taken a metal cart and guided it up and down the aisles. I had sat in them, of course. I had walked beside my mother or father as one or the other had pushed one, eventually with Paige in the seat. And I had shopped for myself at the grocery in Amherst and I had picked up things for my family right here over the years, but I had always used a plastic basket. Or I had balanced the cat food, the apples, and the heavy cream in my arms like a circus clown. And now I decided that I rather liked pushing the cart. I knew the pleasure would wear thin if this really were a weekly chore, but there was still an element of unreality to it—a sense that I was playacting. Twice when I was alone in one of the long, well-lit aisles, I had given the cart a little shove with the toe of my sneaker and watched it roll half a dozen yards ahead of me. I might have done it a third time, but my second push had sent it swerving like a bowling-alley gutter ball into a section of boxed cereals, and the impact had caused some of the cartons on the very top shelf to fall to the floor. Still, this task—grocery shopping—had exhumed some latent childhood happiness. There were the Saturday mornings before Paige was born, when my parents together would do weekly errands and I would wander these aisles with either my mother or father or both, and pick out the items that I wanted to bring with me to preschool or daycare, or I wanted packed in my lunch for school. How many of those very early memories were real and how many were manufactured from conversations with my parents or photos of me and my preschool pals at snack time I would never know. But the recollections from second grade? Precise. Same with the Uncrustable lunch phase. The peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich phase (still one of my favorite sandwiches when I came home from college and craved comfort food). And, yes, the curried egg salad phase. (I was, apparently, a fourth-grade gourmand.)

  But what did it matter if those first memories were, in fact, fabricated? It mattered not at all. The images in my mind were all as pleasant and reassuring as the supermarket recollections that I was confident were real: all those times after Paige had arrived when it would be only my father and me, because my mother would be home with my baby sister. Two aisles away from where I was standing right now, poised behind the back of the cart, was the bakery section, where my father and I had picked out the cake mixes and the icings and the sprinkles and the candles for my tenth birthday party cupcakes. (I smiled almost reverentially at the memory, and how I had wanted cupcakes instead of a cake, and how each one had to be decorated a little bit differently—and how my father had obliged. Paige was still an infant, and my father had done most of the heavy lifting at that birthday party. It was a sleepover on a Friday night. The next day, Saturday, after my friends had gone home, my father had taken me to Boston and brought me to a place called Club Conjure, the shabby second floor of a comedy club where magicians performed on the weekend. I was awed. By the time I was twenty-one, I had performed there twice myself, once with Rowland the Rogue in the audience. He brought me flowers.)

  “Lianna?”

  I awoke from the daydream and saw Marilyn Bryce was beside me. Marilyn was a friend of my mother’s who tended to drive my father a little crazy. She was a painter in one of the hills beyond the village of Bartlett. Sometimes both of my parents joked about what my father called Marilyn’s “peace, love, and tie-dye” vibe—which was shorthand for the fact that her paintings all looked like album covers from 1967 and there was always the chance when you dropped by her studio that you would be offered some pretty serious weed—but her canvases went for thousands of dollars in galleries in Vermont and two and three times that in Massachusetts and Manhattan. It seemed as if her husband, Justin, was rarely in Bartlett: he was either at one of his bistros in Middlebury or Burlington, or visiting other restaurants that he thought might have something to teach him. Their son, Paul, was three years younger than me, and the sort of kid who smoked dope with his mom and had all the drive of a well-fed house cat. He was, I presumed, a freshman in college, and it embarrassed me now that I had no idea where.

  “Marilyn, hi,” I said, trying to focus.

  The woman was wearing a black-and-purple peasant dress as a tunic over blue jeans. The dress had Arabesque stitching that reminded me of the designs on some of my magic tricks. She was tall and slender, her hair still a lush reddish brown: today it was in a long braid that fell to the base of her spine. She would have been beautiful if her eyes weren’t quite so close set. She was standing behind her cart as if it were a podium.

  “I keep meaning to stop by the house and check in on all of you,” Marilyn said, and she shook her head and smiled in a way that at least hinted at self-loathing. Disappointment in herself. I hadn’t seen Marilyn since the very first days after my mother had disappeared. Marilyn, like most everyone else, had moved on.

  “We’re okay,” I said.

  “I’m sure you are, but only because you don’t have any choice but to be okay. When do you go back to school?”

  “I’m not.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m not this semester. I probably will in January.”

  “God.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Tell me more: How is your father? And Paige?”

  “Like I said, we’re okay. Maybe a little shell-shocked. I mean, it sucks, but what are we supposed to do? Dad is teaching and Paige is going to school and swimming and I’m”—and I motioned at the cart overflowing with (among other things) paper towels and cat sand and coffee, cereal and cookies and beer—“I’m shopping.”

  “So, you’re the glue.”

  “No. I’m just…here.” I glanced briefly into Marilyn’s cart but suddenly felt this was invasive. Carts were public, and yet it felt intrusive to peer in. I looked away.

  “Are there any new leads?” Marilyn asked.

  “No.”

  “How can a person just evaporate into thin air?”

  “A person can’t.”

  “Do you all need anything?”

  I took a breath and thought about it. “Not really,” I answered finally.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Then, almost impulsively, I said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything, Lianna. Anything.”

  “Did you and my mom ever, you know, get high?” I had come across an article online that suggested marijuana might diminish a sleepwalker’s tendency to get up in the night. Most physicians saw no reason to believe this, but I knew Marilyn liked to smoke and I pondered the lengths to which my mother might have gone to dial down her sleepwalking. Also? I was curious. I wanted to learn what I could about my mother.

  “No. Okay, yes.”

  “You did.”

  “Once in a while. May
be twice. One time right after she left that architectural firm up in Burlington and needed to chill. Another time when your grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

  “That’s it?”

  She looked around conspiratorially. It was as if she wanted to be sure we were all alone in the aisle. “I guess we did more than twice, in that case. Maybe three or four times. We also shared a bowl before you went away to school for the first time, and then again when Paul got into college last spring.”

  “You would light up before and after the life-changers,” I said, and I smiled ever so slightly at the idea. “Those really big moments. The really big good ones and the really big bad ones.”

  “When your child is growing up and leaves home, it’s good and bad. It’s both. But mostly good. It’s only bad because we’re all a little selfish as parents, and we hate to see our babies move away. But, of course, we’re also crazy proud. I mean, I’m living that empty nest right now with Paul off at school.”

  “Did my dad ever join you when you’d smoke? Or your husband?”

  “So, is this what happens when our kids grow up? We talk to them about our dope?”

  “Oh, come on,” I said playfully. “I know you and Paul sometimes light up together.”

  “Well, there is that…”

  “So, did my dad sometimes come over with my mom?”

  “For a smoke? No. She wouldn’t have wanted you and your father to know.”

  “Really? Not even my dad?”

  “No way. Your father? He would so not have approved,” she said, and she laughed once, an exuberant and unexpectedly big chuckle.

  A thought came to me, and I wasn’t sure whether to pursue it. But I also knew that I couldn’t resist. “I guess not,” I agreed. “Did my mom have any other secrets from my dad? You know, things she would tell you but not him?”

  Instantly Marilyn stood up very tall, her whole body stiffening. She reached behind her head for her braid, as if she wanted to make sure it was still there. “What sorts of things?”