“I will keep my eyes out at the service,” I reassured Paige. I had no expectations that I would learn anything, but I felt a deep pang when I looked at her, and I wanted her to know I was listening.
Before we left the house, I found Paige and brought her to our parents’ bedroom. I waved my arm theatrically over our mother’s dresser and the jewelry there, as if I were a genie who had just made a small mountain of precious stones appear in the desert.
“Take something,” I said. “For the funeral—and, I guess, forever.”
“We can’t just take Mom’s jewelry,” she said, uncharacteristically aghast.
“Why not? Eventually Dad will just divvy it up between us. Besides, the seriously valuable stuff is in the safe deposit box at the bank.” To show her that I meant business, I took the cable bracelet with the blue topaz and cuffed it over my wrist. “I view this as a tribute.”
“I view it as theft.”
“Oh, please.”
She looked around the room as if she wanted to be sure that no one was watching us, and then reached for the charm bracelet. “Everyone will know it was hers,” she said.
“That’s exactly the point.”
I had to help her with the clasp that first time, but over the following weeks she learned to do it by herself. She didn’t really have places to wear it, but she liked having it with her. She kept it in her swim bag some days and in her school knapsack on others. And then there were the days when she just wore it around the house, an amalgam of mourning and dress-up.
I did keep it together at the funeral. I cried silently, as did Paige. Our father was handsome and stoic, and his voice never broke. The autumn sun gave the stained-glass windows a phantasmagoric glow.
And I did scan the sanctuary, despite the reality that I expected to learn nothing. Moreover, I understood that everyone present—and the small church was indeed packed—wanted to look at my father and Paige and me. (Of course, they wanted to see only the backs of our heads; none, I knew, really wanted to have to make eye contact with any of us as we sat in the front pew.) But I turned around and examined the crowd row by row whenever we stood and sang, and whenever Pastor Katherine Edwards welcomed another speaker to the pulpit. My father. Marilyn Bryce. My aunt. I watched Donnie Hempstead, wondering if it was possible that he and my mother could have had an affair. I decided it wasn’t. They hadn’t. But I was basing this solely on the way he stood beside his wife, Erin, and the proximity of their bodies. The way Erin discreetly held on to his elbow with her slender fingers with their impeccable nails. He was tall, like my father, with chestnut hair that showed no signs of either thinning or turning gray, and that immaculate beard. He was one of the few men in the church in a suit. A magnificent red-and-yellow necktie against a crisp white shirt. I recalled how different he had appeared the day he had been among the search parties out looking for my mother: the white T-shirt, the jeans, the way exhaustion and worry and intensity had all marked his face as he had stood beside Paige and me on the porch. In my mind, I saw my mother working with Donnie and Erin as she designed their aqua solarium. I imagined them in her small office in Middlebury or standing around a beautiful kitchen island, looking at plans. I envisioned the couple in their bathing suits, submerged to their shoulders in their hot tub. I saw my mother alone with Donnie in that tub. There she was sleepwalking to him. There he was taking advantage of her.
But this was groundless. I knew that.
And Justin Bryce? Again, unlikely. My mother would never have betrayed Marilyn. Besides, I’d read the jokes she had shared with my father about him. I rather doubted that Justin was her type. The same probably went for Donnie Hempstead with his nut-brown beard. If my mother had a type and it wasn’t Warren Ahlberg, I had a feeling it was probably a man like Gavin Rikert. Arguably—and this gave me pause—my mother’s type was my type.
I studied my father’s female friends from the English department at the college, the other scholars with whom my father might have been sleeping. And I concluded they were either asexual or settled in marriage. These, I told myself, were not the randy, erotically alive poets of Bread Loaf, the slender women who would take you by the hands and melt with you into the dew, the rugged men who would take you on the porches and Adirondack chairs beneath the nighttime August sky—though, in all fairness, I also told myself that I might be wrong. What really did I know of midlife sexuality? Or monogamy versus polyamory? Of extramarital relationships? I knew nothing.
Toward the back of the sanctuary I saw some of my friends from Amherst, including Erica, and at the very edge of the pew, beside the students he must have just met, was another traveler from Massachusetts: Lindsay McCurdy. The old magician had made the drive, too. I was moved.
And I spied Gavin: he was standing between the most distant of the stained-glass windows and the heavy door to the narthex. When our eyes met, he nodded almost surreptitiously so that only I would notice.
I listened carefully to everything my father and my aunt and my mother’s roommate from college said about her, wondering if I might find a bit of evidence in their eulogies.
But there were no revelations; there were no clues. Other than my father, no one spoke of her sleepwalking, and my father only used it poetically, expressing his hope that his wife’s ever-restless soul might now be at rest. No one spoke of her occasional bouts of depression. No one spoke of the bombshell from the Office of the State Medical Examiner.
Instead, people rather accurately captured Annalee Ahlberg’s eccentricities and talents and her creativity: her ingenuity as an architect and her inventiveness as a mom. Her friends would smile at Paige and me and tell us how much she loved being our mother. We had never doubted it: We had worn the Halloween costumes. We had felt firsthand the power of her embrace. And so we nodded at the stories, most of which we had known or had lived, and occasionally we even laughed through our tears. For most of my life, I had only heard Katherine Edwards speak in this church on Christmas and Easter. I decided that I had underestimated the pastor; maybe I had underestimated religion. Katherine made me want to come back on a regular Sunday.
At the end of the service, as I exited the church, I asked Gavin if he would be at the reception back at our home. First, however, my family—and only the family—was going to watch the mahogany box with Annalee Ahlberg’s ashes be placed into its spot in the cemetery. He reassured me that he’d be waiting at the house when we returned in half an hour.
One of my father’s poems compared wedding receptions with funerals. When I first read the poem, I had misunderstood it, assuming it was a predictable (and uncharacteristically puerile) dismissal of marriage. At my mother’s funeral, however, some of the couplets came back to me, and I realized that the poem was actually a rather astute appreciation of the unfair velocity with which time moved at these rituals for the immediate families. There were too many people for too little time. I would have two- and three-minute conversations with guests and mourners that really went nowhere, and we were all saying the same largely meaningless things:
Your mother was amazing.
Yes, she was.
You’re holding up well. She’d be proud of you.
I guess.
I miss her.
Yeah. I do, too.
I kept trying to inch my way across the house to get to my friend Erica, because here was a person I missed and whom I actually wanted to talk to. But it didn’t seem possible. It was too crowded and I was, as Annalee’s older daughter, too in demand.
And then there were the exchanges that were surreal and left me stupefied by the utter strangeness of the world. At one point I saw my elderly magician friend Lindsay McCurdy and Donnie Hempstead chatting like old pals with their backs to the breakfront in the living room, each holding a sweating bottle of beer. Lindsay’s Bengal tiger cravat was as striking as Donnie’s red-and-yellow necktie. I worked my way through the throng to them just in time to overhear Donnie saying, “It was Sonny and Cher, right? I was a kid, but now that y
ou mention it, I know I saw you on TV. I remember it really well!”
Lindsay nodded. “Mostly I was supposed to be a foil for Cher. A lot of jokes, I recall, about making Sonny disappear.”
I was vaguely familiar with the show, associating it in my mind with other programs from before my time, such as The Ed Sullivan Show. “They had magicians on Sonny and Cher?” I asked, inserting myself into the conversation. “I wish you had told me you were on it, Lindsay!”
“I was on it just the one time. It was more of a comedy show than a variety show,” he said. “I did a little magic that night and we all stood around gaping at whatever costume Cher came out in.”
Donnie waved a finger in the air. “Oh, you did much more than that. You were great! You were like a hypnotist. You did some trick you called ‘The Sleepwalker.’ ”
Instantly he went silent. He stood there, embarrassed, and then mumbled an apology. Meanwhile, Lindsay looked contrite, as if he had been caught speaking badly of someone behind her back.
“It’s okay,” I said to Donnie. Then, more because I was deeply curious than because I wanted to smooth over an awkward comment, I said to Lindsay, “I never think of you as a hypnotist. What was the illusion?”
“I levitated a woman,” he said slowly and without enthusiasm.
“And then she walked around?”
“She walked around first…like she was asleep.”
“An assistant?”
“Yes. An audience plant.”
“Did you have her do anything else?” I asked.
Donnie and the magician glanced unhappily at each other—Donnie remembered what came next, I could tell—and then down at his impeccably shined black wingtips.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I levitated her above a glass-walled tank of water. You know the trick, I am sure. I covered her with a sheet on a couch, rose her high above it, and then guided her sleeping body—still prone—over the tank. When she awoke, the audience expected she would fall in. The live audience and the TV audience all assumed it would be a little randy because she was pretty and her clothes would be sticking to her, and it would be a little cruel: what a horrible way to wake up! Remember, I was Rowland the Rogue. Instead, however, it was Sonny—who was standing on a trapdoor on the platform above the tank—who got dunked. When I whisked off the sheet, the girl had vanished. I summoned her back on stage from a wing, where she walked—still asleep and under my spell—to my side. Then, at my command, she sent Sonny into the water.”
I could understand why they didn’t want to share the story with me, but I had envisioned my mother sleepwalking or in the Gale River so many times by that afternoon that a magic trick called “The Sleepwalker” and a woman suspended above a water tank was not going to unsettle me. “Can you really hypnotize people?” I asked Lindsay.
“I could. I doubt I can now.”
“Well,” Donnie said, clearly wanting to move the conversation to less spongy ground, “Annalee told me how much she liked meeting you last year.”
I wasn’t sure what I found more curious: the idea that Lindsay had never told me that he had once been a hypnotist or that my mother had told Donnie Hempstead she had met Rowland the Rogue one day in Somerville. The more I learned about people, including my late mother, the more they surprised me.
I was unexpectedly nervous when I was finally able to speak with Gavin in my home. Despite the crowd on the first floor of our house, I always felt that my father or Paige or even Marilyn Bryce was watching me when I chatted with the detective. I understood this was paranoia; there wasn’t a soul in our living room or kitchen or den who knew I had said a single word to the detective since the day my mother had disappeared. (Even now, I still view August 25 as the day my mother disappeared, rather than the day she died. But, of course, it was both.) He was sipping coffee from a mug with a silhouette of William Shakespeare that I had put in my father’s Christmas stocking years ago and leaning against the walnut sideboard in the dining room when I asked him to tell me everything he could. I wanted to know what the police had learned since redoubling their efforts, and whether he had noticed anyone at the funeral who might have murdered my mother. Did I sound to him the way my sister had sounded to me that morning? Naïve and silly and rather childlike? Perhaps. But I asked anyway. The truth is, I had always viewed my younger sister as smarter than me.
“Here? Seriously?” he said, his tone a little incredulous.
“I didn’t just ask you to have sex with me on the dining room floor,” I told him.
“It’s not the time or the place to talk about the investigation. Are you around later today? We could go somewhere and talk then.”
“No. I’ll be here. I want to be with my family. My dad. My sister. My grandparents. You know, the whole crowd.”
“Good. That makes sense. What about tomorrow?”
“Sure. But at least tell me this: Did you see someone here who’s a suspect? A person of interest?”
He smiled at me. “Spoken like someone who’s seen one too many cop dramas.”
“I don’t watch cop dramas.”
“But you have a pop culture implant. You know the terms.”
“And?”
He sighed. “I promise you, there is no one here you should worry about.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“So you have absolutely no new leads?”
He shook his head. “But we’ll talk more tomorrow. Can I take you to dinner?”
“Okay. I’d like that.”
“Can I pick you up?”
“No.”
“Got it. I’m still a secret.”
“I honestly can’t tell: Are you offended or relieved?”
“Neither. You have your reasons for not telling your dad, I have my reasons for not telling my boss,” he answered. But then, in a gesture that felt oddly threatening, he took his coffee and went to the living room to say hello to my father. I scanned the room for Paige and saw her. She was with two of her friends from the ski team, and I could tell that she had been watching me from the corner of her eye.
SOME MEN DON’T mind when their lover has sexsomnia. They view it as a little something something—an unexpected sexual bonus. Others are threatened: they fear they aren’t sexually satisfying their partner if they wake up and the person beside them is masturbating or reaching for their penis in the night. And still other men? They’re merely annoyed that they’re being woken from a sound sleep at one or two in the morning.
It’s different for a woman whose man has sexsomnia. Occasionally, especially if they’re young, it’s a pleasant extra. Again, a bonus.
But most male sexsomniacs aren’t especially giving lovers. They’re not known for their gentleness or sensitivity. They get in and get out and then continue on their descent to serious REM sleep. Their partner’s pleasure? Irrelevant. (Certainly this is true for female sexsomniacs, too, but men—especially young men—rarely complain when sex is offered. Recall those students in Scotland.)
Moreover, what if the woman once was sexually assaulted or raped, or was abused as a child? A sexsomniac, male or female, doesn’t take no for an answer. For those couples, therein lies the greatest sadness of all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A MEMORY CAME to me the night we buried my mother, unbidden and forlorn, as I was trying (and failing) to fall asleep.
My bedroom didn’t share a wall with my parents’ bedroom. The way our house was laid out, only the guest bedroom did. But before my freshman year of high school, that August, my mother and I together repainted the ceiling and hung new paper in my bedroom. The wild stallions wallpaper had been perfect when I was six, but that summer we replaced it with a floral design rich with shades of orange and peach. And so I was sleeping those days in the guest room. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of my father’s voice. He was speaking firmly, as if talking to a recalcitrant child.
“Annalee. Annalee. Stop it. Annal
ee.”
I was on my side and sat up so I could hear more clearly. “Annalee. No. I can’t perform like that.”
A moment later I heard their bedroom door open and close, and then I heard my father going downstairs to the den. I wondered if my mother would follow him. She didn’t. By the time my father returned to their bedroom—if he did return that night—I had fallen back to sleep.
For years, however, I had been haunted by that one sentence: I can’t perform like that. In my mind, it was suggestive of my father’s sexual inadequacy: his emasculation. I had been mortified and had tried to forget it. I couldn’t. Clearly it had colored so much of my view of him.
The night of my mother’s funeral, knowing what I understood now of my mother’s parasomnia, I felt guilty that I had thought less of him—and now that haunted me, too.
The next day was the first day that I volunteered at the elementary school in Bartlett. I had taken my father’s advice and called the principal—the same woman who had been running the school over a decade earlier when I had been there—and offered to spend a few mornings a week wherever they needed me. The school had exactly one classroom for each grade, kindergarten through five, and fewer than twenty kids in each room except for the second grade. The Bartlett sixth graders left the village for the area middle school. I offered to do a magic show, but the principal was more interested in having me work with the second graders, where there were twenty-two kids, making it the largest grade in the school.
As I walked through the hallways, the adults I would pass would grow somber. The custodian, a kind man whose hair was now white but whom I remembered well from my years there, wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to hug me and finally decided that the best thing to do was pat me awkwardly on the shoulder. He murmured how sorry he was. The teachers who had arrived since I had left a decade ago looked at me gravely and nodded, as if we were privy to a very special secret. The teachers who I knew told me how special my mother was and asked that great, wholly unanswerable question: How was I doing? I would shrug and lie. I’m fine, I said over and over that day. I’m fine.
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