“Were you embarrassed?” Paige asked. She took a sip of her soda and frowned. “I think they gave me diet soda by mistake.”
Our father nodded and looked around for our waiter. “Again, who’s to say it really happened quite that way? But that’s how I recall it,” he said. Then: “No, Paige, your grandmother never embarrassed me.”
“Did she ever sleepwalk?” I asked.
“No.”
“Your father?”
He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “But did your mother’s parents?” he asked me in response, ever the professor. “That would be a far more interesting and practical question.”
“Did they?”
“No. The question is more interesting than the response. I’m sorry. Lianna, tell me why you just asked me about sleepwalking: Have you had an incident?”
“No.”
“Good. You girls really shouldn’t fret, in that case. The doctor at the sleep center is looking forward to seeing you both, but she really isn’t alarmed in the slightest. Neither of you should be worried.”
Paige looked across the restaurant at the large chalkboard with the specials and shrugged. I had to restrain myself from reminding the two of them that I really didn’t need to see Dr. Yager at all—at least not as a patient.
“I was looking at your parents and Mom’s parents in lots of old family photos today,” I said instead. “I also looked at a lot of the family reunions. Wedding pictures. Our family has some of the worst hair on the planet,” I went on, unsure how far I would take this line of inquiry with Paige sitting beside me. “With the exception of Mom, there is just so much mousy blond. So much thinning hair.”
“I seem to be the only one who got stuck with black hair,” Paige said. She sounded disgusted, and instantly I regretted what I had begun.
“You have the best hair,” I said. “I would kill for hair as thick as yours.”
“No, you wouldn’t. I’m this weird black sheep. We all know that.”
“You are way prettier than the rest of us,” I tried to reassure her.
“I used to think I was adopted.”
My father, I noticed, seemed to pay a little more attention. “Why in the world would you think that?”
“Because I don’t look anything like you and Mom and Lianna the Enchantress over here. And because I’m nothing like the rest of you.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I’ve seen you on skis. You’re a spaz. I saw Mom on skis. She wasn’t exactly Picabo Street. And Dad, no offense, but you’re not an Olympic athlete, either.”
“No offense taken,” he said, smiling in acknowledgment. “But, first of all,” he added, “it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if you were adopted. You’re my daughter. You were your mother’s daughter. Second, you weren’t adopted. Lianna and I can assure you of your mother’s pregnancy. I was in the delivery room when you arrived—dark hair and rosebud mouth and all.”
“So who in our family do I look like? Who am I most like?”
He sniffed and thought. He was stumped. Finally he said to Paige, “Your mother’s uncle Arvid was a very good Nordic skier, I understand.”
“And he had your color hair,” I added, recalling the photo and trying to be helpful. But our father corrected me.
“No,” he said, “it was brown, but it was light brown. Maybe it looked darker in the photograph. It certainly wasn’t that lovely raven’s black of yours, Paige.”
“ ‘Raven’s black,’ ” my sister repeated. “Seriously? That’s what people think of when they think of my hair?”
“The world needs more goth ski racers,” I said, hoping to reassure her with a small joke.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Paige?”
“Do you think the police will ever find who killed Mom?”
“If someone killed her? I hope so.”
“But do you think they will? Do you believe they will?”
I could tell my father wasn’t at all confident, but I could see the acute need he felt to reassure Paige. He met her gaze so deeply that she stared down at the menu before her. “Yes, my dear,” he said. “I believe that.”
She didn’t look up. “And then what will happen?”
“There will be more media coverage. There will be negotiations between the state’s attorney—the lawyer on our side—and the defense attorney. There may be a plea deal of some kind. Maybe the person who did it will plead guilty. Maybe not. And so there may be a court case. A trial. If so, there will be yet more media attention and interest. Newspaper stories. Television stories. It will seem to be opening old wounds, but in reality it will be healing them. It will be giving us justice.”
“Whoever killed her will go to jail?”
“Yes. Whoever killed her will go to jail.”
Paige said nothing more. She kept her attention on the long list of pizzas and salads. I couldn’t tell if she found this likely sequence at all comforting. I know I didn’t—though it would still be a while before I would understand why.
I WANTED TO tell someone—at least a part of me did.
But the bigger part of me couldn’t bring myself to admit it. To speak the truth aloud. To share what I thought I had seen. What I thought I remembered.
Some days I managed to convince myself that I was simply imagining the worst because I knew what I was capable of in my sleep. You have no idea how many hours I spent online researching the probabilities, especially as I grew older and more research became available on the Internet.
But over time, the reality grew inescapable. The truth.
Yes, sleepwalkers usually recall very little. Unfortunately, I always recalled more than most.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BEFORE MY MOTHER’S body was found, the mystery surrounding her story had revolved around her disappearance. After an exuberant dog and a determined photographer had discovered her corpse, the mystery focused instead upon the cause of her death and whether she might actually have been murdered. But when the state police could find no clues—there were still neither suspects nor motives, the toxicology report revealed nothing, and no one seemed to worry that my father and Paige and I were in danger—even that puzzle failed to hold anyone’s interest. Once again the media and the detectives moved on. The last of the leaves died and fell, and the autumn rains commenced. The drought became a mere meteorological footnote. We no longer spotted the great well-drilling trucks as they rumbled along our shady, narrow roads or discussed whether the ski resorts would have sufficient water in their holding ponds to make snow. My sister would be back on the slopes right on time.
By the third week in October, once more my father and Paige and I had settled into a routine. At least it looked like a routine on the surface: I would get the two of them off to work and school respectively, keep house, and make dinner. I would cart Paige wherever she needed to go. I would visit my friends in Vermont or call my friends at Amherst. I still hadn’t decided whether I was going to return to college in the spring, but the deadline was nearing: I had until November 1. If my father was aware of the date, he never mentioned it; looking back, I like to believe that he presumed all along that I was returning, because the alternative—that he expected me to remain indefinitely in Bartlett—makes him seem selfish and a little dislikable. He was neither; he simply wasn’t coping, I told myself. He was grieving. That was it.
And, of course, I would visit my secret vice, a cop twelve years my senior, at least every second or third day. On a Friday or a Saturday, depending upon his work schedule, I would even spend the night in his apartment. Never once had there been any sleep sex. But Gavin insisted it would happen someday, and he worried that I didn’t comprehend what I was signing up for. I assured him I would be fine. I was falling in love.
About a week before Halloween, I was almost finished with the application for Paige’s ski camp in Chile and her visa to visit the country. Our father had signed the permission forms and written the check for the down p
ayment. A little after nine o’clock in the evening, I put my head into her bedroom and told her that I had two quick questions to wrap it up. She was lying on her back in bed in her pajamas and playing with her Game Boy.
“I’m not sure I feel like going anymore,” she told me.
I was shocked; she’d given me no hint that she was having second thoughts as we’d driven day after day to the college swimming pool. “Why not?”
“I just don’t want to.” She still wasn’t looking at me; she was focused entirely on her video game.
“You have to have a reason.”
“I have to go to school. I have to breathe”—and here she made an exaggerated gasping sound—“but I don’t have to go to Chile.”
I sat down in her desk chair. “Why did you change your mind?”
“I just did.”
“Did you have a fight with Lucy or one of the other kids who are going? Did you and Coach Noggler have some sort of falling out?”
She tossed the Game Boy onto the mattress beside her and rolled so she was facing the wall. “No. If I don’t go, Lucy will be disappointed and Coach will be pissed off.”
“Have you suddenly lost interest in ski racing?”
“I don’t know.”
A part of me wanted to scream at her, Why have I been driving you to the swimming pool almost every single day if you’re not interested in ski racing anymore? But I restrained myself. It wasn’t like I was so busy.
“No, I still like racing,” she went on. “I’m still looking forward to the season.”
“Are you worried about being away from home for a month? I mean, that is a crazy long time and Chile is crazy far away. Maybe you could just go for two weeks.”
“Look, it’s not like you’ve been so brave and gone back to college.”
“That isn’t quite the same thing,” I told her. “But tell me: Are the second thoughts because of all that time away from Vermont?” It dawned on me that Paige had never even gone to a sleep-away camp. I’d been a Brownie; Paige hadn’t.
“Can we talk about this some other time? The forms aren’t, like, due tomorrow.”
“No,” I agreed. “They’re not.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you done your homework?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to go to bed soon?”
“I’m in bed right now.”
“Let me rephrase that: Are you going to go to sleep soon?”
“I guess.”
“Good.”
“You know what I wish?” Paige asked.
I waited.
“I wish I were a cat who didn’t have to think about grades or Chile or dying or even whether your dad was ever going to be okay again.”
“I don’t think you have ever in your life lost any sleep over grades. You get A’s without breaking a sweat.” I focused on the grades because it seemed the most innocuous and unreasonable of her anxieties. I understood I was avoiding the bigger issues. So, I am sure, did she.
“You don’t know that,” she murmured.
“Well, I know how smart you are and how together you are. Okay? You’re way smarter than I am. And I’m not just saying that. Try not to be such a goofball worrywart.”
She rolled back over so she was facing me. I realized she had been crying. I went to her, but as she did whenever I tried to comfort her, she batted my arms and pushed me away. “I’m fine,” she said, sniffing and wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “I’m fine. I’ll go to sleep.” She tossed the Game Boy onto the floor, and as I sat helplessly by the side of her bed, she turned off the standing lamp beside it.
“Paige has always been a wild card,” Heather Prescott told me late that night on the phone. I called her to talk about my kid sister because we had been friends forever and she had known Paige since she was a baby.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“All that downhill craziness: you have to be a wild woman to be a ski racer. And there was her determination to find your poor mom back in August and September. You told me she was out there all the time looking for clues. And Zach always said there was no one like her when they’d be playing kickball or soccer in elementary school. That no sliding rule? She ignored it.” Zach was the youngest of Heather’s three siblings. He was in Paige’s grade at school.
“Well, then: her deciding not to go to Chile doesn’t exactly fit that profile.”
“She’s kind of acting like you. You don’t want to leave home at the moment. Neither does she. Frankly, I can’t blame either of you.”
“She said the same thing.”
“There you have it.”
“But she was the one who initiated this whole Chile ski camp a couple of weeks ago.”
“Because her coach brought it up.”
“So I shouldn’t be wigging out?”
“No, you shouldn’t be wigging out. I mean, at least don’t wig out about Paige. There are plenty of other perfectly good reasons to wig out, beginning with the fact that your mom is gone.”
Gone. The word was one of those euphemisms that some people used instead of dead. It sounded less harsh. It was closer to out. Here was the spectrum, I thought: Your mom is out. Your mom is gone. Your mom is dead. But I said none of that. People meant well. Heather meant well. She was a good friend.
“Okay,” I agreed simply. “Can I ask you a question that might seem kind of random?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think my dad might have been having an affair?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just been wondering lately. There must be so much temptation.”
“Because he’s a college professor?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. “Have you ever actually wanted to fuck one of your professors?”
“No.”
“Neither have I. They think we are way hotter than we think they are. I mean, I guess it happens—girls sleeping with their profs. Girls interested in older men. But I just don’t see the attraction, do you?”
I said nothing. I reminded myself that Gavin was only twelve years my senior, not two or three decades.
“Are you asking because you think he might have had something to do with your mom’s disappearance?” Heather went on.
“She didn’t disappear,” I told her. “She’s dead. For all we know, someone killed her.”
“God. Doesn’t that sentence freaking terrify you? My parents actually bought an alarm system for our home after it happened. I’m not sure they used to bother to lock the doors before then. And Ellen’s mom? I gather she won’t even leave the house at night.”
I thought about this. “Everyone tells us we have no reason to be scared,” I said. I recalled how Gavin had reassured me.
“But your mom was sleepwalking when she left the house, right?”
“Right,” I said. But something clicked as I spoke. We didn’t know that now, did we? All we knew for sure was that she had left the house in her nightgown.
“So, something happened to her when she went outside in the middle of the night,” Heather was saying. “If she didn’t sleepwalk, she’d still be alive.”
An idea hovered, hazy and embryonic, just beyond my reach. But it was out there. I got off the phone as quickly as I could. I called my secret vice. The next morning I met him for breakfast.
“The name of the firm was Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw,” I told Gavin. The two of us were meeting at a diner in Waterbury near his office, and we had both ordered waffles for the simple reason that we wanted maple syrup. The waffles themselves, he had warned me, would taste a little like paste. They did.
“I know,” he said. “We’ve talked to people there. We’ve talked to her former clients from that period in her life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that anyone there would have wanted to hurt your mother.”
“I figured you’d talked to them. That’s not where this is going. Sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry.”
“Here’s what I was hoping you could find out. Paige is twelve. Her birthday is March eighteenth. She was born March 18, 1988. But she was premature. She was due a month later—the middle of April. So she was conceived the previous June. My mom was still working for Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw then. I want to know if she was on any business trips early that summer.”
“Because you don’t believe that your father is Paige’s father?”
“Maybe he is,” I said. “But maybe not—because of the chromosomal abnormalities I told you about. I mean, look at the timing. My mother has a decade of miscarriages. She suddenly gets pregnant. She leaves the firm and stops traveling.”
“And so you think that Paige’s father is a man she met while on a business trip.”
“I’m just saying it’s possible. Perhaps my mom had a sleep sex encounter in a hotel and that’s how Paige was conceived. Have you investigated that?”
“I can’t say that we have.”
I smiled. “Chalk one up for the novice.”
“How does this connect to your mom’s death?”
“Maybe she was meeting Paige’s father the night she was killed.”
“So she wasn’t sleepwalking.”
“That’s right.”
He made a pyramid with his fingers, his elbows on the table, and leaned into his hands. “Your theory is that your mother left the house in the middle of the night in her nightshirt, barefoot, to meet a man she had had sleep sex with in some hotel far from Vermont thirteen years ago. And then he killed her and threw her body into the river.”
“It only sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud.”
“Sorry.” He looked at the silver bracelet on my wrist. “Is that new?”
“No. It was my mom’s.” I was relieved she hadn’t worn it around him.
“It’s pretty. The blue matches your eyes.”
“Tell me,” I said, afraid he was trying to change the subject, “did my mom ever say anything to you about Paige and sleep sex? The chronology just makes so much sense. And she told Marilyn Bryce that she thought she might have had sleep sex at least once at a hotel when she was still traveling for work.”
The Sleepwalker Page 21