The Sleepwalker

by Chris Bohjalian

  OTHER DAYS I would say, “Forgive yourself. They would. They will.”

  But I couldn’t. I can’t. It’s one of those things, like losing weight or being patient or following through on any New Year’s resolution, that’s just so much easier said than done.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TWO WEEKS BEFORE Thanksgiving, my father announced that Grandpa Manholt, my mother’s father, had invited us to Concord for the holiday. In my family, Thanksgiving had always been a movable feast with three rotating locations: our home in Vermont, my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Manhattan, and my grandparents’ majestic (and rather mannered) colonial in Massachusetts. It was technically our turn, but no one expected the Ahlbergs of Vermont to be capable of hosting a family gathering. Moreover, my grandfather could no longer care for my grandmother, and so he and my aunt had decided it was time for my grandmother to move into an assisted living facility that specialized in patients with Alzheimer’s. That would occur at some point before Christmas, and so this was a last hurrah of sorts: another sad landmark in a season that was crowded with them. But Paige and I told our father that we were fine with the idea of one final Thanksgiving with everyone gathered at Grandma and Grandpa’s; the three of us would drive down the day before and spend a few days in the Boston suburbs. My father suggested we could all go into the city on Black Friday and face the madness and the crowds on Newbury Street. I had expected Paige to resist, since that would mean she wouldn’t be skiing on Saturday, but she hadn’t objected. She hadn’t even brought up the conflict. Like me, she was sinking as inexorably as our mother; it was taking more time, but the course for us both was clear. Eventually, it seemed, we both would hit bottom.

  “And so we meet again,” said Dr. Cindy Yager, smiling. “Want to split another granola bar?”

  This time I was not in her office. I was in her examining room instead, a few doors down from her office and across the hall, seated atop the cushioned table with a paper sheet. It resembled the examining room of the pediatrician I had seen as a little girl and the examining room of the family practitioner I saw now as an adult. Narrow, antiseptic, and decorated with a diploma and a health poster—this one about proper sleep hygiene, with a child’s crayon drawings of sheep and stars and a four-poster bed. The biggest difference between this room and the ones in which I had been examined before? We were on the fourth floor of an impressive hospital complex and so there was a window. The view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks was similar to the one in reception: a tourist postcard that trumped most artwork Yager (or any physician) was likely to use to try and brighten the space. I was still in my jeans and a sweater, but I knew the flimsy gown loomed. There was a folded one beside me on the examining table.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound agreeable. My father and Paige were in the waiting room. Paige and I had flipped a coin to see who would go first. I’d lost.

  “This will be a pretty low-key physical,” she said, leaning against the counter opposite me. “I won’t be drawing blood, for instance. Mostly I just want to get a medical history.”

  “Did my mom tell you much about my sleepwalking as a girl?”

  “A little bit. With your permission, I’ll want to ask your father what he recalls.”

  “That’s fine. I mean, I really didn’t do much. I woke up a couple of times and didn’t recognize them. Pretty common, right?”

  She held her clipboard against her chest like a shield and corrected me: “There was more. Considerably more. You know that.”

  I realized that my mother must have told her about the time I wound up in their bathroom after the miscarriage. But I was a little taken aback by how dire the physician made it sound. “The bathroom and the Barbie dollhouse,” I said.

  “Yes. And your father told me about the night you emptied out your bureau when you were in kindergarten. All your clothes were on the floor in the morning.”

  I had never heard this story. I tried to downplay my surprise with a joke. “Well, I do that now when I’m awake—before dates.”

  “And then there was the time you wandered downstairs and rearranged the logs beside the woodstove.”

  I sat up a little straighter and tried to muzzle my wariness. This, too, was news to me. “What did my dad—or maybe my mom—tell you about that?”

  She shrugged. “You took the wood that was piled near the stove and made a little corral for your plastic horses on the carpet.”

  “Sounds pretty harmless,” I said defensively, but I wished I could recall anything from this nocturnal adventure.

  “So, is it now my turn to ask you some questions, Lianna?”

  “May I have one more?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Am I definitely going to have to spend the night being wired? And, if yes, when?”

  “That’s two questions,” she replied, raising a single eyebrow good-naturedly. Then: “Not definitely, no. Let’s see. And it would probably be in a month or so, based on my schedule.”

  “Paige, too?”

  “Correct.”

  “So, we’re talking December for the both of us?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Do you still do the sleep studies at the hotel?”

  “We do.”

  “I am so not looking forward to that,” I told her. “All the wires. My mom said you even wire the eyes.”

  “Your mom fell asleep. You’ll be fine.”

  “If it comes to that,” I said hopefully.

  She nodded. It was clear she was confident that it would.

  “I thought she was nice,” Paige was saying from the backseat in the car on the way home, referring to Cindy Yager. Our father was driving, and I was in the front seat beside him.

  “I’m glad,” our father said, his face lost in the evening shadows.

  “But I wish Lianna and I could have our sleep test in the same room. It would be kind of like we were on vacation.” For years when our family went away, our parents would have one hotel room and Paige and I would share another.

  “Kind of,” I agreed, though I understood why we needed separate rooms and how the experience would be nothing at all like a typical night at a Sheraton. I knew that Paige understood this, too.

  “And a hotel breakfast the next morning? That’s cool,” she went on.

  “Waffles,” our father murmured, knowing my kid sister’s affection for them. “I have always liked waffles in winter. They are definitely a winter food group for me.”

  “Dad?” she asked after a moment.

  I saw him glance into the rearview mirror. “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Where were you the night Mom had her sleep study?”

  “I was home with you girls.”

  “And then you picked up Mom after you got us off to school? You went and got her?”

  “Oh, no. Your mom drove herself home from the hotel that morning. Twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “Well, not really. But your mother was so disoriented when she woke up in the morning that she forgot her eyeglasses in the hotel room. She had actually driven about five miles before she realized why the world was so foggy.”

  “Kind of dangerous,” I said. “Will we be that disoriented?”

  “I doubt it. Your mother was a rarity in a lot of ways.”

  “Don’t worry,” Paige said to me. “You won’t come home and build a pen for your toy horses by the wood stove.”

  “I should never have told you that,” I said.

  “Nope,” she agreed. Then to our father she asked, “But you’ll be spending the night at the hotel while we’re being tested, right?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. But you really have no reason to worry—no reason at all.”

  “I guess.”

  “And let’s face it,” I added. “Most of the time you’re a world-class sleeper.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “This was my big idea in the first place, remember? I think you are way more worried than I am.”
r />   That probably wasn’t true: Paige was anxious, too. That was clear. But she was right: as I had confessed to Cindy Yager, I was dreading that night.

  The day after Paige and I were examined at the sleep center, Gavin showed up at our house. It was late Friday morning and I was—as I was most of the time—alone. I considered not answering the bell when I saw who it was, but I did. I was unable not to: I could feel my color rising. On some level, I had to know that by opening the door I was letting him back into my life. I told myself that I would find out what he wanted and send him away, but I must have known in my heart that in the end I would be incapable. I didn’t believe he was coming with new information about my mother’s death. If the investigation had had some sort of unexpected breakthrough, he would have contacted my father. Besides, he had brought flowers. It was clear he had come only for me.

  “I see you’re expecting company,” he said, pulling off his aviators and smiling. I had brushed my hair that morning, but otherwise I had dressed primarily for Joe the Barn Cat. I was wearing my pajama bottoms and an especially ratty college hoodie.

  “What do you want?”

  He extended the bouquet in my direction. He raised his eyebrows boyishly. I took the flowers without saying a word and motioned him into the house. He knelt and started to untie his shoes, and I told him not to bother.

  “Because I’m not staying long?” he asked.

  “Because I haven’t vacuumed today, and your shoes don’t look all that messy.”

  “The house looks nice. It was so crowded the last time I was here, it was hard to see how well designed all the spaces are—how light and open it is, especially for an old Victorian in Vermont.”

  “My mom was an architect, remember?” I got a vase from the dining room sideboard and a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer. I remembered how my mother always snipped the stems of cut flowers before placing them in water. He’d put his sunglasses down on the kitchen island exactly where I wanted to arrange the lilies and irises and daisies. I pushed them against the wooden knife block. “What would you have done if my father was home? You know I didn’t want him to know about us. I wasn’t even sure you wanted him to know about us.” I hadn’t snarled, but neither had I hid my disgust.

  “His car was gone. And—oh, by the way—he teaches Friday morning.”

  “Is there nothing you haven’t researched about my family? Do you have any idea how creepy you just sounded?” I asked, irked by his knowledge of the Ahlbergs and our routines.

  “A: there is plenty I don’t know about you. And B: at different times in different conversations, both you and your father have told me that he has a class on Friday mornings. Contemporary American Poetry. It didn’t take a stalker to figure that one out.”

  “And that ethical line?”

  He shrugged. “A gray area. I know cops who’ve done much worse.”

  I shook my head. “You know, I used to be afraid that you and my mom were lovers. Now I wonder if you killed her. I really do, you know.” I had said it facetiously, but a part of me still doubted him.

  “And yet you let me into the house.”

  I motioned at the knife block and arched my eyebrows. I squeezed the scissors twice so they made a loud snipping sound.

  “Why do you keep wanting to view this story as a late-night crime drama?” he asked me. “Why can’t this be a romance?”

  “I used to think it might be. I told myself that very thing in the car when we were driving to Montreal.”

  “And wasn’t that a great day? A great evening?” He spread out his arms and grinned almost impishly. “Why can’t I be your Mr. Darcy? Or, given my age, your Colonel Brandon?”

  “Have you actually read Jane Austen?”

  “Not a single word. But I have a sister.”

  “Well, this isn’t a Jane Austen novel.”

  “Fair enough. But we’re not talking Hitchcock, either, Lianna,” he said softly. “Your mother’s story is a tragedy; it’s horrible. It’s devastating. But it’s not your story. It’s not our story—at least it doesn’t have to be.”

  “Someone killed her.”

  “Stop thinking like that.”

  “Stop thinking like that? How can you say that?”

  “Because I can.”

  “Because you and the rest of the police can’t solve the crime. Because none of you really know anything,” I snapped at him, frustrated. “It’s not your mother who was murdered.”

  “We don’t know your mother was murdered!”

  “Of course she was.”

  “No. We don’t know that. You don’t know that. We know she had a head injury. We know she wound up in the river. That’s all we know.”

  “Then what? Name one thing that could have happened to her. She sure as heck didn’t just walk into the river where we found that piece of her nightgown.”

  “Must we do this?”

  “Yes!”

  He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a pantry door. I waited. “Fine. She didn’t walk into the river. She jumped off the bridge and hit her head on a rock.”

  “She would have drowned, you know that.”

  “She jumped off the bridge and hit her head on a rock but made it back to the surface. She hung on to the rock. Or maybe she dog-paddled to the shore but couldn’t climb out. She was too weak and injured. She died there and slipped back into the current.”

  For a long moment I stood there, picturing this. I had thought about this possibility, but only in the abstract. I had never envisioned the specifics: my mother awakened by the cool river water and the blow to the back of her head, clinging to a rock as she bled out before, finally, losing consciousness. Or making it to the riverbank and trying to climb from the Gale, but too injured or frail, and so there she hangs on until, finally, she slides back in. In both scenarios, I heard her crying out for help. But maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was disoriented. Or she was incapable. Either way, she dies alone on the surface or the side of the river.

  I sat down—collapsed, really—onto one of the barstools around the kitchen island. I felt a little dizzy, as if I had bent over and stood up too quickly. I rested my head on the palm of my hand. Gavin remained where he was, staring straight at me. Gone was any hint of levity from his expression. “God…” I murmured.

  “Remember, your mother was my friend, too. If there was a killer out there, don’t you think I would be pretty damn invested in finding out who that person was? Don’t you?”

  “So you think she went back to the bridge.”

  “I don’t know what else to think.”

  “Why was a part of her nightgown on that branch?”

  He shrugged. “It was between your house and the bridge. It was near enough to the road.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, what else?”

  “What other possibilities have you considered?”

  “Stop torturing yourself. Please. For your sake and mine. Would you do that?”

  “Does my father know this theory?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “We have never discussed these…specifics.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re a tad more passionate, Lianna.”

  “I know. He’s given up.”

  “You sound so dismissive. He lost his wife. He’s mourning.”

  “Well, I lost my mom.”

  “People are built differently.”

  I sighed, gathering myself. “I guess.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “Good. Can I tell you one more thing?”

  “Sure.” I waited. I watched as he started to smile and his eyes grew playful.

  “You look cute in pajamas.”

  “Really: Why did I let you into the house?” I asked.

  “Because it’s almost noon and you haven’t gotten dressed. Clearly I�
�m the bright spot in your day.” He went around the island to stand behind me. Over my shoulder I heard him say, “Since we both know you aren’t going to tell your father and Paige that these are from me, I suggest you say you got them to cheer yourself up.”

  “See what a good liar you are?” I murmured. But then I felt him kissing the back of my neck, and I had neither the strength nor the inclination to stop him.

  Much of the world grows quiescent in autumn, but Vermont can feel especially depressing and (yes) dead those first weeks of November. The days are short and growing shorter still. But I watched the endless election news from Florida—the world’s ultimate game of musical chairs had actually ended in a tie—and so I saw sunshine and blue sky there. On television. Often I saw all that warmth after starting a fire in the wood stove.

  And yet a notable exception to the meteorological grayness that envelops northern New England that time of year are the mountains where we make snow. I was never the skier that my sister was, but even I appreciated that a whole other world existed when you slid off the top of the lift and paused for a moment amid the evergreens iced with vanilla.

  On the Saturday morning after Gavin had come by my house, I watched Paige and the rest of the ski team practice on one of the black diamond trails, a little awed by their speed and athleticism, the way they bounced over the moguls, but then I set off on my own and skied the intermediate slopes where I was most comfortable. The sky was cloudless and blue—a respite from the usual gray—and in my breath I saw the promise of the holiday season.

  Summer—and my mother’s death—began to seem very far away. I told myself I was getting better, not growing callous, and it did not diminish my mother’s memory when something would take my mind off her.