Sleepwalking

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Are you sure we should just leave her?” Helen asked. Ray nodded, and so they kept walking.

  She was perplexed by Claire. Every day Claire stayed up in her bedroom—in Lucy’s old room—late into the morning. There wasn’t much work for her to do and Helen didn’t care, but it made her uneasy. When Claire finally wandered downstairs to rummage through the refrigerator for yogurt or juice, Helen was usually sitting out on the cold sun deck. She would hear Claire coming down the stairs and would turn to watch her through the glass as she moved around the kitchen.

  What a force Claire was in her silence. And what a familiar feeling, to look at Ray over Claire’s head and shrug and have Ray shrug back. It sent something through Helen, the chill of déjà vu that can be instantly placed in time, in space. This was not one of those senses you have when you go somewhere new and think, I have been here before. I have stood on this hill, but I don’t know when.

  The déjà vu that Helen felt was instantly resolved. It did not shock her. She recognized that when Claire came to the house that day, something about her made Helen move to open the door and invite her in. Certainly she did not let in everyone who showed up outside. There had been those two giggling women once who wanted to know if Helen would talk to them about what Lucy was like as a baby, and there had been the serious, tailored woman who asked if Helen and Ray would like to be the keynote speakers at an annual dinner meeting of the Long Island Association of Bereaved Parents.

  She didn’t let any of these people in. She had been startled and shook her head at them and then backed up, softly closing the door. After she did this, her heart pounded. She felt an anxiety attack coming on each time and leaned against the shut door until she heard the sound of footsteps giving up and going away, retreating along the flagstone walk that Ray had laid when they first moved in.

  With Claire, something had touched Helen—the need, probably, the plain show of desperation. Helen had spent so many years responding to these things in Lucy, grappling with them, not understanding them. It had almost become her role in life to do this, and she could not turn Claire away. Claire was a child, a young scared girl with an oversized suitcase. She was the baby in the basket left on the doorstep with a note tagged to one wrist: “Take care of her for us, please. We know you can do it better than anyone else.”

  At the very least, it was ironic. Helen and Ray had certainly proved themselves to be incompetent as parents, although their friend Len Deering had assured Helen that it was not as simple as all that. “You can’t just say, ‘I have failed as a mother,’” he told her. “There are so many other factors involved. Lucy was a grown woman. It’s very hard, and you have a lot of exploring to do, but after a while you’re just going to have to let go.”

  Letting go. It was such an easy phrase. It brought to mind a series of wonderful images: a dam bursting forth into a spill of clean, flowing water, a kite string being unraveled into the sky, or a couple arching their backs in the middle of making love, one of them looking up and calling out in rapture, “Now!”

  It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days. In the supermarket one day the summer before, Helen had heard a woman saying to a friend as the two of them peered over the frozen-foods counter, “I’m taking a jazz dance class. It’s real therapy for me.”

  What about the other side of letting go, the side that stuck closest to the words themselves? When you really let go, you were saying goodbye forever. No one ever wanted to talk about that aspect; it was universally considered too painful. It didn’t seem as if anyone came to terms with the real business of letting go. You just gradually loosened your grip, and after a while you simply forgot that you were holding on. That was what Helen had started to do with Lucy. Somehow, it had eventually happened. Helen had woken up and been too exhausted to think about her. She usually lost herself in such thoughts each morning.

  She remembered as she lay in bed that Claire was fast asleep in Lucy’s old room. She wondered if she was warm enough. There were two blankets on the bed, but they were fairly thin. The night before, when the temperature suddenly dropped, Claire had assured her that she would be fine, but still Helen worried. Claire’s stance made it seem as though she were constantly trying to prove that she needed no protection, and it was this that drew Helen to her. Lucy had done the same thing, had tried so hard to appear deadpan, and Helen had wanted to rush to her, to change her, to hold her.

  Having Claire in the house brought out these feelings all over again. It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open, empty space.

  When Lucy was alive, she couldn’t be figured out, no matter how hard Helen or Ray tried. She was solidly there, but she was made up of all smooth edges. You couldn’t hold her. So instead, Helen and Ray had held each other. In the old days, they made love after coming back from the lab, both of them stinking of shared chemicals. Helen knew that having each other did not compensate for their emptiness with Lucy, but it helped.

  When Lucy died, Helen and Ray did not continue to move closer together. There was a point in life when you had to remain separate, when you could not share anything more. Helen bought an electric blanket at Sears for them that first winter after the death, and it had two individual heat controls. Ray would turn his side way up to High, and Helen would keep hers on Low, so even their bodies were in different terrains, polar opposites.

  Everything was unspoken. She thought of Lucy as a child, and she thought of her muteness that summer, such a long time ago. It had confounded Helen then and remained a mystery throughout the years. But now, with Claire in the house, she thought she finally understood what it was to be unable to speak but to want to desperately. That was how Claire was—always on the brink of saying something, then pulling back. Lucy had been the same, and Helen had done nothing about it. She had not yanked her depressive daughter by the collar and made her talk, made her unload all the secrets she had been storing up for a lifetime.

  In the two years since Lucy’s death, Helen also had been unable to speak, unable to tell Ray how she felt. She had really not wanted to. What could he possibly have said? He would have nodded and stroked her shoulders and back with his huge, warm hands, and it would have actually felt good, and she would have hated herself for responding so dumbly to touch.

  She heard Claire waking up. A couple of pronounced yawns, the rustle of covers, then the swing and thump of feet over the side of the bed. Helen felt the way she used to feel—she had an urge to get up and meet her daughter in the hallway, to watch the stagger of waking up, the sweetness of a child still drunk with sleep.

  She made herself stay in bed. It would seem odd if she were to go out and stand in the hall, waiting. Claire would look at her with unblinking eyes, and Helen would be embarrassed. She stayed under the blanket with Ray asleep in his warm patch next to her. “Ray?” she said, touching one finger to his chest.

  It was the way she had always wakened him, ever since the beginning of their marriage. After a while he would feel the extra bit of pressure there and wake up. It took him several seconds this time, then he reached out in his sleep to brush her finger away. She did not move her finger, and soon he reached for it again, and this time he held it for a moment, trying to figure it out. It reminded her of the parable of the three blind men and the elephant. Ray moved from her finger to her hand and then up to her arm. He opened his eyes, and he was holding her elbow in a formal way, as though he were escorting her to a ball.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning.”

  He let go of her elbow and turned over onto his back. He stretched out his arms and legs—she could hear tiny
bone explosions, as though he were cracking his knuckles. “Ray?” she said again.

  “What?”

  “I was wondering what you think of her.”

  “Claire?” he said, yawning. “She’s all right.”

  That was the end of it for the time being. They lay there together without moving. She could hear Claire walking around and doing morning things. There were the sounds of the window shade being whisked up, and a few seconds later, the shower being turned on.

  It was ludicrous, all of it. Helen wanted very much to tell Claire what was happening, just how she was feeling with her in the house. She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, stepping into the flattened green slippers that waited there on the floor each morning.

  “You’re going?” Ray asked, his hand on her spine.

  “I’m restless,” she said. “I want to get up.” She turned to look at him. She was aware of the way her breasts swung around as she turned; she could feel the shifting of their weight. Her nightgown was almost diaphanous. It had not looked that way in the store. It just seemed light and easy to wash, so she bought it. For years clothes had been covering, nothing more.

  Ray regarded her breasts through the material. This deeply embarrassed her, as though she and Ray were teenagers all over again, sitting half naked on a grassy rise and looking at each other but pretending to be looking out at the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which formed a loose star chain in the night.

  She had to go to Claire.

  She walked down the hallway, and the shower was still running. She sat down on the carpeted step and waited. Soon the water was shut off, and she could hear a few last drops spattering down.

  There was a squeal of curtain rings being shoved along the rod as Claire stepped out. The door opened a few minutes later, and the bathroom was like a tropical rain forest, steaming and lush with exotic plant smells. Herbal Essence shampoo, probably. Claire stood in the doorway with a thick yellow towel wrapped around her middle. She looked as though she had just forged her way through the rain forest and made it safely out into the dry sun, the forest still wet and alive behind her.

  Helen thought that Claire must have been mystically sent to them. She had had that feeling with Lucy, the same bewilderment. Perhaps it was a naïveté—Helen was reminded of all those cases of women in Appalachia who go to the doctor because their stomachs hurt and then find out that their stomachs hurt because they’re really six months pregnant.

  Helen did not wonder at the act of birth itself—that had always seemed too grueling and stark to be anything other than earthly. Everything in the delivery room had been hospital-green, and in the background a nurse was endlessly telling her to bear down harder. There was a painless snip of her skin, a tearing that eased the way, and after all the open-mouthed panting, she felt the baby’s head crowning. Crowning—it was such a wonderfully apt word for a baby who was going to be at the center of everyone’s life for years, sitting calmly each day in its highchair throne.

  Helen could not understand how babies turned into whom they did; she did not see where any of it came from. Throughout the years, Helen and Ray had looked at seashells and tried to interest Lucy in them. She had remained impassive. When they held out a conch to her and invited her to come look, she would barely glance at it before turning and trotting back to whatever she was doing—drawing concentric circles with her finger in the sand or sitting in the shade of the porch reading a book. That was why it was startling when Lucy grew up and wrote poetry, and her poems were filled with references to shells, to the ocean. Had she been studying them on the sly all those years? In her first collection, there was a whole cycle of poems devoted to sea anemones. Helen was surprised at the accurate, good detail in every line.

  She telephoned Lucy after she read the manuscript and asked, “When did you learn all that?”

  “When you weren’t looking,” Lucy answered stiffly.

  It was the kind of response that you had to toy around with all day in order to understand. What did it really mean? Was Lucy implying that Helen hadn’t been a good mother, that she hadn’t been watching when she was supposed to? It upset Helen, but she did not broach the subject again. She did not want to disturb Lucy, not when her book was coming out. She seemed so shaky all the time, and Helen did not want to add to it. Lucy was living in New York, in a tiny, dim apartment in the West Village. Every time Helen and Ray came to visit they would bring with them a couple of potted plants. The apartment hardly got any light, and Lucy usually forgot to water the plants, so they soon died. She didn’t move the clay pots from their places on the sill, and crumbled brown leaves littered the floor underneath the window like spilled tobacco.

  “Sweetie,” Helen said the first time she came to visit after Lucy moved in, “why don’t you fix the place up a little?”

  “It’s the way I like it,” Lucy answered, leaning back against the cold silver radiator. She stayed like that for several minutes, with her bare feet crossed in front of her, her head tilted up. It was as though she were challenging them.

  Ray touched Helen’s arm. “Don’t,” he said to her in a soft voice, meaning: Don’t anguish over this.

  He had done that sort of thing right from the start, when things first began to go bad. The day Lucy stopped talking, Helen had called him up and had him come home in the middle of a class. He had said it to Helen as he stood next to her in Lucy’s bedroom. Lucy was crouched in a corner of the room, wedged between the bedstead and the wall. Helen stood there, stunned, shaking her head slowly back and forth.

  “Don’t,” he said, his hand on her arm.

  She had not known what to do when she found Lucy huddled there. She had started thinking about people going into shock, and how you weren’t supposed to move or even touch them. Maybe that was what had happened to Lucy: shock. You were supposed to call somebody—the doctor, an ambulance. But Helen had not wanted to do that; there was something, a kind of terrified look in Lucy’s eyes, that made Helen want to have Ray there with her. She had dialed the department. The secretary walked down the hall into Ray’s classroom and told him he was wanted at home. He had been about to administer a quiz on algae, and when he canceled it and packed up his briefcase hurriedly, all of his students had cheered.

  Helen was always struck by the innocence of young girls. It really didn’t have much to do with experience, it was just a certain look that all of them had. When Helen went into the hospital one winter for a routine D&C, there had been a young girl in the next bed who was there for an abortion. When the nurses brought her back after it was over and made her sit up and get ready to leave, she had said in a tiny, sleepy voice, “Oh, couldn’t I stay in bed a little longer?” She was no older than fifteen, and Helen thought she sounded like a small child begging to sleep a few moments more before getting up for school. The girl’s parents stood slope-shouldered in their overcoats in the doorway, silently waiting to take her home. Helen had turned to face the wall so she would not have to watch anymore.

  It didn’t mean much to be a parent. All of those books—advice from Dr. Spock and the rest of them—could take you only so far. They told you how to make the baby stand and take its first steps like a little sleepwalker, arms stretched out in front for leverage. They told you the right way to mix up the food, to mash together the greens and oranges and yellows into a muddy paste and spoon it in so it got swallowed. Here comes the train, choo-choo, speeding around the tracks, clickety-clack, and into Lucy’s mouth. Open the tunnel wide and let the train through. That’s a good girl. They told you a few basic tenets of child psychology. They told you what was the right allowance to give a child at each age; there was even a chart. They told you how to make your child feel independent. How to give your child responsibility. A pet, perhaps, a small one at first. Lucy had overdone it with nine hamsters. She had gotten them from her third-grade class at school. The mother hamster that lived in a cage by the window had given
birth once again, and there were too many animals in the classroom. The metal exercise wheels squeaked all the time and distracted the children from their lessons, so the teacher asked if anybody would like to take a couple of the hamsters home as pets. Lucy had somehow ended up with nine. She brought them into the house in a shoe box, and a couple managed to nudge their way out and run all over the place. Helen had to chase them around the kitchen, dropping a colander to the linoleum as a net. One of the hamsters disappeared completely, and the whole family searched the house for an entire morning. Ray moved the sofa away from the wall and knelt with a flashlight in front of every open closet. Lucy searched the house with her parents, but she did it dispassionately, as though she were looking for something she did not want to find, like a poor report card that needed to be signed by a parent and brought back to school. The hunt ended when there were no obvious places left to look.

  A few weeks later, when Helen was vacuuming in the living room, she found the lost hamster lodged in the bottom of the wall, where a small chunk of molding had come loose. It had crawled its way into the darkness and died in a nest of electrical wire. Helen took out the hard little body in some bunched-up newspaper and buried it in the sand. She never told Lucy about it, and Lucy never asked. She didn’t seem to care what had happened to it. As far as Lucy was concerned, the hamster had simply vanished. It might have sprouted little furry wings and flown away.

  You couldn’t raise a child to love life. You just had to cross your fingers and hope that it would happen naturally. Life is good, you subtly had to drum into your child’s ears, bolstering the message by displays of love and affection. You had to hold your child, and you had to be unafraid of holding your spouse in front of your child. Helen and Ray were embracing once when Lucy came into the room. Ray started to break away, but Helen held him there for a few more seconds. She wanted Lucy to see the love that stirred between her parents, to see that it was a good thing. Lucy had barely been interested. She looked up at them with a slightly annoyed expression. “Are you going to fix my lunch or not?” she asked.