The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  Would she have seen it without the drought? Would she have smelled it?

  Unlikely.

  Certainly the photographer would have missed it. But the days and then weeks without rain had dropped the water to its lowest level in years. In decades.

  Still, without Lola he most likely would have captured the shot of the trees and climbed back up the steep bank from the water. A body that has been in a river or lake that long is difficult to see. My mother was hard to distinguish from the slime that enshrouded her. But Lola was adamant, and there my mother was: all that was left of Annalee Ahlberg, half submerged in the shallow current, bobbing like rotting wood against the penstock grate. Had there not been a drought, had the reeking cadaver not been spotted by Lola, it is likely that eventually the body would have oozed through the bars like apples through a cider press, disappearing in pieces into the turbine, and then through the outflow and back into the Gale.

  But there was a drought. And so, in the end, my mother’s body was found. It was recovered and gently laid inside a mesh bag (for drainage) and then a zippered body bag, and transported to the morgue at the hospital in Burlington—where it was given its own cooler, one reserved specifically for bodies that pungent.

  My mother’s dental records were already at the morgue: they had been there for weeks, in the event that her body was discovered after hours and no one could reach her dentist. There it was autopsied.

  And it was from there that the Vermont state medical examiner, a trim physician with a graying beard who biked to and from the morgue when the weather cooperated, surprised us all by announcing that the cause of death was not likely the Gale River. It was not likely that Annalee Ahlberg had drowned.

  Which is where this story would begin anew.

  PART TWO

  ON MAY 23, 1987, Kenneth Parks—husband and father of a five-month-old infant—rose from his bed and drove fourteen miles to his in-laws’ home. There he stabbed his mother-in-law to death and nearly killed his father-in-law with a tire iron. Then he drove to the police station and turned himself in. He was acquitted of both crimes because the jury agreed he was sleepwalking.

  Melissa Toms of Scotland would emerge from her bed, her husband asleep beside her, and meet college boys from the nearby university. The Tomses lived at the edge of the campus. At first she met them at the hall in which the students resided. But then, for reasons no one can quite recall, the boys started coming to her house, where they would be waiting for her in her front yard. She would have sex with three and four of them at a time there, though always on her terms. She hardly spoke. It only stopped when her husband found the condoms scattered in the wood chips along the front walkway. To this day, she insists she has no recollection. Two of the college boys have admitted they were quite sure when they were having sex with Melissa—or as one said, “she was having sex with me”—that she was sound asleep.

  In January 2009, Timothy Brueggeman of northern Wisconsin walked in his sleep from his house into the nearby woods in only his underwear and froze to death.

  James Currens, seventy-seven, once walked in his sleep into a pond full of alligators in Palm Harbor, Florida. He survived because he had been sleepwalking with his cane, which he would use that particular night to keep the animals at bay.

  I collected stories like these like stamps. I hoarded them the way some people amass matchbooks, postcards, or old coins.

  In them I saw deviance and strangeness, but also the raw power of the id. I saw its absolute independence.

  And, of course, I saw…me. And I knew I was not alone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I CLUNG TO my memories of Annalee Ahlberg that autumn and tried to focus on the mother I knew. It was impossible to ignore the thrum of words and the sexual werewolf they conjured—parasomnia, sexsomnia, sleepwalking, sleep sex—but our home was a museum to the singular woman she was. Even the footlocker with the magic tricks I had outgrown but was unable to bring myself to resell could resurrect her for me in my mind.

  When I was ten and Paige was still a baby, my father had a conference at Columbia University, and my mother joined him and brought her girls to Manhattan. (And, in hindsight, we always were her girls: not their girls and not his girls.) While he was uptown at the university, she took me to my favorite store for magic tricks on Broadway and Twelfth Street. It was near the Strand Bookstore, where we would also spend hours on that trip, and a restaurant that specialized in chocolate. (I had honed my appreciation for decadent chocolate desserts long before my mother would die and I would meet Gavin Rikert.) The store was on the second floor of the building, and on that particular visit we took the elevator, rather than the stairs as we had in the past, because Paige was against my mother’s chest in a robin’s-egg blue Snugli.

  Like Lindsay McCurdy—a.k.a. Rowland the Rogue—the gentleman behind the counter was from another era, but otherwise he was nothing like the dapper and rather elegant old magician I would meet when I was in college. This fellow was crusty and brusque. He had a paunch reined in ever so slightly by suspenders, unruly topiaries growing from his ears, and a thick shock of salt-and-pepper hair it seemed he hadn’t washed or combed in a very long time. I saw men like him in magic stores or in how-to videocassettes about magic all the time. His hands were awash in tea-colored sunspots, but I loved watching him use them to demonstrate tricks for us. They were smooth and fast. And like a lot of the magicians of his generation, he tolerated a girl like me—but just barely. My mother and I were the only customers in the store that morning.

  He was showing us a trick called the magic pan, a silver skillet perhaps four inches deep with a silver lid. You show the audience it’s empty, cover it, and then whisk off the lid to reveal an overflowing mound of sponge balls, flowers, or silks. I liked it, but I worried that if I couldn’t produce something more solid—something not easily compressed in the hidden panel—the trick would lack dazzle. I was imagining hard candy: a great big, colorful pile of hard candy. Then I would toss it to my classmates or the really little kids who, back then, were my audience. My mother and I were discussing this possibility with the salesman, and my mother was asking him if he could disclose the size of the compartment. It was right about then that Paige awoke and started to fuss. My mother gently lifted her from the carrier, unbuttoned her own blouse, and pulled the lone chair in the small showroom up to that counter. And then she sat down and began to nurse my baby sister. Instantly, Paige settled down.

  I never thought twice about my mother nursing in public in Vermont in 1989. I might not have thought about it in Manhattan that day. But the old magician said to my mother, “If you’d like, you can do that in the storeroom.” His eyes were on the corner of the floor behind us. It was as if my mother’s breast, even shielded by a rapacious infant’s mouth, was the sun.

  My mother smiled at him, momentarily surprised by his discomfort. Soon, however, she was relishing it. “Oh, we’re fine,” she said. “You were about to show us the panel. The secret panel. I’m guessing it’s in the tray, and when you lift the lid, you release it—and then it becomes hidden in the top. True?”

  He glanced down at the trick. He eyed me. He was going to gaze everywhere but at my mother. “Look, you really need to do that elsewhere,” he said finally, speaking straight into the glass display case. “What if another customer comes in here?”

  My mother shook her head. “They won’t care,” she told him, losing none of her equanimity. “I think you might. But most men your age have seen breasts, and I know every woman has. Now, one of my daughters is hungry and one is interested in buying some magic tricks. I think between the two of us, we can make them both very happy. Why don’t you pay attention to Lianna here, and I’ll pay attention to this little one. That way, everyone will get what they want.”

  The salesman knew he had lost. He saw my mother’s logic; he respected her intensity. And so he said nothing more to her while Paige snacked, and a few minutes later, when Paige was sated, he welcomed my mother ba
ck into the conversation.

  And when the three of us returned to my aunt and uncle’s later that day, I had with me in a big paper shopping bag the magic pan, as well as a trick deck and a spring bouquet I could stash inside a hollow wand or up my sleeve. The salesman had given me the last two items.

  Make no mistake: my mother was a lioness with a ferocious love for her cubs. I recalled how she had gone to battle on my behalf when my high school guidance counselor had insisted that certain colleges were beyond my reach, and how she had gone nuclear when a boy drove me home from a party when I was in tenth grade and she could see (and smell) that he’d been drinking. She’d driven him to his house in her car and presented him drunk to his parents.

  Yes, I had lost her earlier than I should have. Paige, of course, had too. But something inside me changed when her body was found, something inside me grew up. I understood once and for all that my courageous mother was never coming back, and I vowed to stop sleepwalking through grief.

  My mother was probably as good as dead by the time her body broke the plane of the Gale River. There was water in her lungs, but little indication of active respiration; her injuries suggested she was going to die even on dry land soon enough.

  Cause of death? A skull fracture and an acute subdural hematoma. Blood had pooled between her brain and her skull, suggesting a violent head injury prior to her body hitting the water. It seemed that someone or something—and when my father and I were informed of the autopsy results, I envisioned a wooden baseball bat—had caved in the back of her skull. My college roommate Erica, however, told me later that day when we were talking on the phone that my imagination had run wild: Who carries around a baseball bat as a bludgeon? she had asked.

  It was also possible that my mother had had consensual but violent sex (which led me to wonder privately if there could have been consensual but violent sleep sex). Still, that was merely conjecture, too. The medical examiner could catalog the contusions near my mother’s genitalia, but how was he to know for sure the bruising was not the result of the rocks and logs and debris against which her body—naked but for the tattered remnants of a navy-blue sleep shirt—had been colliding for weeks? She had a pelvic fracture, but the M.E. said that the injury may have occurred postmortem. In the water. Her corpse (what was left of it) was a ragged, gelatinous, stringless marionette. Entire strips of sinew, muscle, and tissue had washed away. After so many days in the Gale River, her skin was the texture of cottage cheese and the fathomless brown of a swamp.

  The pathologist examined her vaginal walls with a speculum; he combed her pelvic girdle for foreign hairs. He found none. He might have aspirated fluid from her vagina, searched for semen and blood, but the Gale had performed its ablutions: any liquid residues from a sexual encounter had long since washed away. Still, he swabbed what he could. He found nothing.

  To perform the toxicology report, he squeezed the spleen: spleen blood is less costly to test than brain or liver tissue, and he was saving taxpayers a little money. We would have to wait a few weeks for those results, but no one expected any surprises.

  And then, of course, there was this: that small strip of fabric that was found on the dead twig of a dying maple.

  The investigators returned to that patch of the riverbank, hoping for a miracle. A clue. A trace of someone else’s DNA.

  They found none.

  Neither my father nor Paige wanted breakfast the morning of my mother’s funeral. I wasn’t hungry, either, but I drove to the bakery in Bristol and brought back a dozen maple scones and then brewed a pot of coffee. My grandparents—my mother’s parents—were staying with us for the funeral, and I figured when they awoke they would want something. They did. My grandmother, falling deeper almost daily into the fog of Alzheimer’s, had gotten lost in the second-floor bathroom. But she loved the scones, and food seemed to ground her with us in the moment. My grandfather offered to scramble some eggs to go with them, but the idea of eggs made me nauseous. I passed. Our father was going to give the eulogy, and he was alone in the den, editing and rehearsing his remarks. My aunt and uncle and my younger cousins—two rambunctious blond boys, one in the fourth grade and one in the first—were staying at a country inn in Middlebury, but they were already at our house for breakfast, too. Paige rather liked them both, because (like all boys, I had already decided) there was no sport involving a ball that did not interest them. Like my sister, they were energetic and competitive; they traveled that autumn with a soccer ball and a football.

  It had been a week since the body was recovered and three days since the medical examiner had determined that Annalee Ahlberg hadn’t drowned.

  I had laid out on my bed three dresses I was considering, all appropriately dark and all inappropriately summery, revealing, or cheerful, when Paige came into my room. She was already wearing the black dress our aunt had bought her the day before in Burlington. She sat down on the edge of the mattress beside the clothes.

  “I think you should say something,” she told me.

  “You mean at the service?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dad will be way more articulate. And I don’t think I’d be able to keep it together up there. I’d be a disaster.”

  “You’d be fine. But I wasn’t even thinking about what you’d say.”

  “Then what?”

  “I was thinking about what you’d see.”

  I paused and said nothing. I didn’t understand what she was driving at. When I just looked at her, she went on, “You could see people’s faces in the pews. Their reactions. You might be able to see who did it.”

  She was absolutely serious. “Who do you think you are, Cam Jansen? Nancy Drew?”

  “Don’t you think it’s possible that whoever killed Mom will be in the church?”

  “Not for one single second.”

  “Criminals always return to the scene of the crime.”

  “They don’t.”

  “And they’re never as smart as they think they are. In the end, they always do something stupid.”

  I knew what she was referring to: Gavin’s boss, the head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Waterbury, had said essentially that to the media after the medical examiner’s findings were released. He’d said if Annalee Ahlberg had been murdered—and even the head trauma did not definitively support that hypothesis—it was likely that whoever had killed her had made a mistake at some point. I was less confident. Gavin was, too. I had only seen him once in the last few days, and I missed him. But it was difficult for me to get away with my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins in town. Moreover, the state police had been energized by my mother’s corpse. They were looking once more at my mother’s clients and friends and—it was clear to me—my father. They insisted that none of us needed to be afraid, though how they could be so confident that whoever had killed my mother had no interest in the three of us sometimes left me perplexed. In any event, Gavin himself was busy, though he had told me that he would be at the service.

  “Usually they only do something stupid in the movies,” I said to Paige.

  “Or around here. Some of the dumbest criminals in the world live around here.”

  “I’ll give you that,” I agreed. A few weeks earlier, a guy my age had tried shoplifting a couple of hunting knives from a sporting goods store near Burlington. He had hidden them, unsheathed, under his shirt. When he was running from the store, he had tripped and stabbed himself in the stomach. He’d nearly bled to death in the parking lot.

  “So you’ll do it? You’ll say something about Mom?”

  “No. I told you, I’m not capable. I’m just…not. But I will see who’s there, okay?” I tried not to sound patronizing.

  “I will, too,” she said, nodding. Then she reached for one of the dresses beside her on the bed. “Wear this one,” she suggested, holding up a black pullover with embroidered flowers along the bodice that fell to just below my knees. I always felt like a flamenco dancer when I was wearing it.


  “It’s not too, I don’t know, frivolous?” It was a testimony to how out of sorts I was that season that I was even considering the fashion advice of my kid sister.

  “No. Besides Mom liked it.”

  “Mom did.”

  Our father had had our mother—or, to be precise, what was left of our mother—cremated. The small urn with her ashes was going to be buried after the service in the Bartlett Cemetery. My father and Paige and I had picked out a spot on a hill that got a lot of sun. It was in the newer section—the original cemetery had plots dating back to 1785—but there was a hydrangea nearby and we all liked the irony.

  I heard my grandfather’s heavy walk on the corridor and then on the stairs. He wasn’t a big man and he wasn’t an especially old man. He was only seventy-six then. But he had outlived his daughter, a tragedy no parent should have to endure, and he had aged worse than any of us that autumn. Twice I had found him crying softly in our house. My grandmother was usually oblivious, which may have been a blessing for her, but it was devastating for me to witness. She was seventy-four and, it seemed to me, extraordinarily beautiful. Like her daughter, she was tall, though her hair by then was a lush alabaster mane that fell to her shoulders and that my grandfather brushed in the morning and evening. She was slender, and her eyes remained electric—undimmed, despite the way her mind was failing. She was, I had deduced as a very young girl, the source of my mother’s charisma.