“There’s not a hard-and-fast rule,” Ms. Bernstein said. “It’s just a guideline.”
“Does it depend on how the person died?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would I feel different if Mom had died by suicide, the way she was supposed to?” I felt so stuck on Miss Ida’s prediction. I wondered how a psychic could stay in business if she got major details like cause of death wrong.
“Do you think you would feel differently?” Ms. Bernstein sometimes did this annoying thing where she repeated my own questions back to me, without answering them.
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Maybe.” She nodded her head like the Bo Jackson bobblehead that Dad kept on his dashboard.
“I wish we had rescued her,” I said. “My dad knows CPR, but he wasn’t there to use it.”
“It’s not healthy to blame yourself, or your father.”
“So what is healthy?”
“It’s healthy to cry,” Ms. Bernstein said. “I haven’t seen you cry.”
I hadn’t cried when Mom disappeared, or when she was found dead, and neither had Lizzie. Mom had always said we weren’t a family of criers, not on her side anyway. I had come home crying only once, in the second grade, because I had been the last kid picked on the dodgeball team in gym.
“Well, look at those skinny legs,” Mom had said, poking my thigh. “You’re not an athlete. Those legs are for reading books. Those legs are for studying.”
Mom had hated when Dad cried, and she’d flip off the TV if he teared up over a sad commercial like those ones with starving children in Africa.
Dad was sobbing in his room when I got home from school that afternoon, I could hear him. He came out with red-rimmed puffy eyes and even Lizzie had enough sense not to push it. My sister wasn’t evil, just angry, which was a normal stage of grief, according to the DSM for Kids! Guilt was another normal stage, and I hoped Dad knew that, that lots of people felt guilty about losing someone.
When my classmates finally stopped tiptoeing around me, they asked me what the worst thing was about having a dead mom. They wanted to know who tucked me in at night, who matched my socks and rolled them into little organized balls. There were a few kids in our grade who didn’t have a dad, but everyone else still had a mom. Some dads were divorced, some dads appeared only in old photographs, and David’s dad was in Afghanistan, a country that Ms. Powell had to spell on the board when the whole class wrote letters to the troops.
I said that some of the worst things about Mom being dead were that no one woke me up in the morning for school so I had to set an alarm, and no one ever cleaned the microwave so sauce was splattered inside. I told them I had more chores. I said my dad had been trying on different shades of Mom’s lipstick, which I felt bad for telling about, but I had gotten carried away with all the attention. Lots of kids knew my dad, since he still had the Freedom High record of most career touchdown throws, so I think the boys were surprised about the lipstick.
I told my classmates how Lizzie blamed our dad for Mom’s drowning, even though anyone could have pulled her out of the water that night.
“Is your sister still cracked?” Billy Dickle asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Cracked in the head,” Billy said, circling his finger around his temple. “My brother said she was.”
“No,” I said, because I didn’t think that was anyone’s business, and besides, Lizzie was really boring these days, baking at home all day like Rachael Ray on TV. She didn’t seem to be teaching herself anything in homeschool, but I guess Dad figured that she’d go back to high school eventually.
There was another thing I wasn’t honest about, because my classmates wouldn’t have understood, but one of the worst things about Mom being dead was that she would never finish the book that she’d been writing. The working title was The Sleep Habits of Animals and What They Tell Us about Our Own Slumber, but Mom had mostly called it The Book. She’d been trying to get a grant to finish it. Mom had said if I helped with the research, she’d make me a coauthor, or at least thank me on the acknowledgments page.
“Write it yourself,” Dad suggested, when I told him how much it bothered me that The Book would never be on the shelf in a bookstore or in the library under Nonfiction, Babbitt. He had a point, since I was already nearly an official coauthor. I printed out the rough draft and three-hole-punched it into a red binder. I carried the binder around with me everywhere, making notes on the empty pages I had put in the back.
So far, The Book had a chapter on the sleep of nocturnal animals, one on diurnal animals, and one on crepuscular animals, animals that stay awake during dawn and dusk. There was a chapter on animals that sleep for more than twelve hours a day (lions, gerbils) and another on hibernating animals (bears, bats, lemurs, turtles).
The chapter Mom had been working on hardest was on sleep-disturbed animals, which she said was work that no one had compiled before, really important science. She said it would open doors and windows for us.
Mom had hated being stuck teaching at a community college, lecturing to uninterested students and growing bacteria in petri dishes. She had really believed that The Book would put her name on the map, and she could get a tenure-track position at a university somewhere. We’d have to move, but she said it would be worth it. “No one knows about the sleeping lives of animals,” she’d declared. “Everyone wants to know what their dog dreams.” Boomer had been awake when she said that, sitting at her feet.
That was something that still bugged me: Mom had always been Boomer’s favorite. When she came home, he would jump and wiggle and wag his tail, dash around the living room with excitement, even if she’d just been out to the grocery store. He followed her around the house, except when she was vacuuming; then he’d hide under a bed. He could stare at her for hours with his deep chocolate-brown eyes, measuring her every move. Mom used to say that Boomer would always be her baby, even though he was getting to be an older dog with some arthritis in his hips. We didn’t know how old he was exactly, he’d been full-grown from the shelter.
Dad used to take Boomer when he went to watch Mom sleepswim in the river; no matter how late it was, Boomer never turned down an offer to go outside for a walk. I knew Boomer wasn’t a heavy sleeper, so the night Mom drowned, why didn’t Boomer wake Dad up to go out? Why wasn’t Boomer the one to save her? Why wasn’t he the hero?
I wanted to believe that Boomer did try to follow Mom that night. He would have trotted down the stairs at her side, run right to the front door to see if she would grab the leash. But maybe, as Mom was leaving the house, she turned to face her beloved dog and held up her hand like a stop sign, the motion for stay. Boomer was a good dog. He would have listened.
After Mom drowned, Boomer was sick for days with diarrhea, and we had to feed him white rice and boiled chicken instead of kibble. I didn’t think about it until later, but maybe he was sick with guilt.
5.
Boomer didn’t even like Lizzie much, but one night he woke me up with a cold nudge of his nose. He knew something was wrong. I found my sister in the kitchen drinking milk straight out of the carton. The milk had gone sour, I could smell it from where I stood. Mom had kept our house clean, and she would have been horrified to see the clutter we left around, the things that molded in the fridge.
I flipped on the light, and Lizzie had that glossed-over look I knew so well, the sleepwalker’s gaze. There were food wrappers everywhere; she’d already gnawed her way through a block of cheese and a head of cauliflower. I tried to take the milk carton from her, but she wouldn’t loosen her grip. Some of the curdled milk splashed onto the floor, and not even Boomer would lick it up.
“She’ll get food poisoning,” I said to Dad, when I woke him up to tell him. “Or regular poisoning.” I thought of the jug of blue antifreeze in our garage, the easy twist-off top. I’d read that antifreeze tastes like sugar going down, but then causes vomiting, a heart attack, and, finally, kidney failure.
“She’ll be fine,” Dad mumbled, still half-asleep.
“Mom wasn’t fine,” I said, but Dad didn’t hear, or he pretended not to.
I went out to the garage for the antifreeze. I poured it into the toilet and flushed over and over until the toilet bowl was no longer tinged blue. There were probably other poisons in our house, but it was a start.
Lizzie didn’t look sick when she came down for breakfast, so we didn’t tell her what she’d done. Dad cleared all the expired food out of the fridge, and we hoped that maybe the sleepeating was a one-time thing.
But after it went on for a week, after a key lime pie she’d baked earlier that day and a box of Pop-Tarts and a loaf of bread had disappeared, Dad said he’d be the one to break it to her. I was relieved, because there was the time I’d told Lizzie that her favorite sitcom was canceled and she tied me up with a jump rope and filled my mouth with pine needles. I’d started to choke just as Mom had come running outside.
“We were just playing,” Lizzie had said, but Mom had asked me for the real story.
“Lizzie,” she scolded. “Don’t kill the messenger.”
But Lizzie didn’t flip out on Dad like I thought she might. She just said: “That makes sense.” I guess she’d been waking up the past few mornings with food on her face, in her hair.
“Are you scared?” I asked her.
“I have a fast metabolism,” she snapped. “You’re the one who will probably get fat like Dad.”
Our family doctor said that somnambulatory eating was becoming more common in teenagers, and it wasn’t usually very serious. “She’s still growing, so she’s probably just hungry,” Dr. Agee said. “Leave some healthy snacks out.”
Dad sighed. “Can I lock her door or something? Maybe use a handcuff?”
Dr. Agee looked horrified. “She will likely hurt herself trying to get out, not understanding why it won’t open. And she might break her own arm in a handcuff.”
“Okay,” Dad said. “Got it. Healthy snacks.”
That night, Dad and I waited up together. I was glad to see Dad taking it seriously, even if he fell asleep in his armchair before Lizzie wandered in, her eyes glossy, crouched forward at the waist. Mom had called it Lizzie’s velociraptor walk, because she looked like those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. “Bloodthirsty and clever,” Mom had said, when we watched the movie as a family, “just like my Lizzie-bell.” When Mom sleepwalked, you could have balanced a book on her head she was so graceful and upright.
Lizzie ignored the carrot sticks and hummus that Dad had arranged, and I followed her as she headed to the cereal cabinet. I took the box from her when she tried to open it with her teeth. I poured the Lucky Charms into a plastic bowl and tried to get Lizzie to the table, but she wouldn’t get into a chair. She started whining, loudly. I didn’t want to wake up Dad. I sprinkled some of the cereal on the floor in front of her and she went right for it.
Then Boomer came over too, started eating alongside her, until Lizzie lunged for him. She scratched him right across the nose. Boomer bared his teeth for a second, like we were in the dog park, then looked up at me, ashamed. I filled Boomer’s dish and gave the bowl to him in the other room. I didn’t know what else to do.
I thumbed through every page of Mom’s work in progress, and there wasn’t anything about animals that eat in their sleep. In the chapter on sleep-disturbed animals, there were two horses that Mom had observed with parasomnias, which is the medical word for sleep disorders. One horse had escaped from her stall and cantered in her sleep down the highway. The mare was nearly hit by a semitruck. There was a stallion who tried to mate in his sleep, mounting anything that was around. He had killed a stable hand that way.
Mom had found a sleepwalking beagle in Wyoming, had interviewed the dog’s owner over the phone. Every night, Larry the beagle stumbled his way around the house, knocking into furniture and smashing his skull into walls. His owner said it was obvious that Larry was asleep the whole time; the dog continued to snore, and his eyelids twitched. After Larry fell down the stairs, his owner had to put up baby gates to keep Larry on the first floor at night.
Then there were the scientific studies to create sleep disturbances in mice, which Mom kept track of in a file on her computer since there were so many of them. I didn’t know how I felt about tests on animals, like the ones where scientists put mascara on rabbits or give loads of drugs to mice. But Mom argued that studying animals helps us understand human behavior, because we’re all animals, all connected.
“But what if you come back as a lab rat in your next life? With tubes in your brain?” I asked her once.
“I won’t be a lab rat forever.” She shrugged.
Mom had collected stacks and stacks of books on reincarnation, books with titles like Past Lives and Journey of Souls. We still kept them stacked next to the bathtub, where Mom liked to read. The books said there were rules about your next life: If you ate meat, you’d be born the next time with bad skin. If you had sex with too many women, either you would come back with diseases or you would be a horse. If you drank beer, you’d have bad teeth. If you stole, you’d come back as an ant. If you ended your life by suicide, you would come back as a defenseless prey animal, like a rabbit or a moth.
I started leaving the porch light on all night, so moths would gather on our front door to be near the glow. I warned Dad not to smoosh them if he came in from work late.
One night, Lizzie took everything out of the pantry and put it on the floor, leaving paths to walk through between the flour and dried beans. It looked like a lot of food, once it was out of the cabinets, even though I’d just said that day that there was nothing to eat in the house. Lizzie also pulled all the utensils out of their drawers, made a big sterling silver pile of forks and spoons and knives. The knives made me nervous, especially the one Mom used for carving the turkey at Thanksgiving. I wasn’t sure how Lizzie had gotten into the knife drawer when Dad had a child lock on it.
“What were you looking for?” I asked Lizzie in the morning, as we started to put things back in their places. It looked like she’d been searching for something, tearing the kitchen apart for some missing ingredient.
“You really think I know what I was doing?” Lizzie asked, sweeping some spilt flour into a dustpan. “I was asleep, you moron.” Lizzie could be mean in the morning, especially if she hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before. Mom used to say that was normal for teenagers.
When Dad saw the mess, he called a sleep specialist in Birmingham, since our family doctor had been no help. The sleep specialist was booked solid until mid-November.
“We can handle it until then,” Dad said. “It’s not an emergency.”
“It could be an emergency,” I said, thinking of the carving knife.
“If only your mother was around,” Dad said, hanging his head in his hands. “She’d know what to do.”
Of course I would have liked to ask Mom about Lizzie’s sleepeating, but that wasn’t an option. I asked Ms. Bernstein instead, since she had a master’s degree framed on her wall in the guidance office. She didn’t seem to understand my question, but she said that changes in sleep patterns and appetite were to be expected. They were both on her list of Physical Symptoms of Grief, another handout she’d printed for me to take home. Ms. Bernstein said she’d lost twenty pounds and barely slept for a whole year after her husband left. I didn’t see how divorce was anything like a death. Mr. Bernstein had only moved to the next town and into an apartment complex.
Still, Ms. Bernstein was probably onto something. I didn’t have any trouble sleeping, and my appetite was the same as always, but Lizzie had her own ways to grieve.
6.
September, October
When I got up to check on her, I found Lizzie working her way through a bag of marshmallows, the Jet-Puffed ones. Her lips were powdered with sticky sugar.
In the morning, she didn’t want to talk about how many marshmallows she had stuffed into her cheeks.
“It’s called emotional eating,” I said. That’s what Ms. Bernstein had told me about, the physical symptoms of grief. “There’s a lot of information about it online.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Lizzie said. “That’s for ugly people.”
“You’re sad about Mom,” I told her. “You’re eating your feelings.”
“You’re sad about Mom,” Dad repeated, and tears gathered in his eyes.
“I’m going for a walk,” Lizzie said. Boomer raised his head at the word.
“It’s okay to be sad,” Dad called after her. “Come back and we’ll be sad together!”
But Lizzie didn’t come back, and Dad shushed me when I asked him whether marshmallows were still made with bone marrow. Dad seemed to be getting plenty of sleep, but the skin underneath his eyes was purple and sagging, and sometimes he was cranky for no reason. Ms. Bernstein had said it sounded like my father was being morose, which was another word I liked the sound of. I made Mr. Oakes a clipping of that one too.
“Someday I’d like you to tell me about her,” Ms. Powell said, when I got back from my guidance appointment. Someone must have finally told Ms. Powell that I had a dead mom.
“Okay,” I said.
“When you’re ready,” she said, before she walked away, which seemed to mean that I wasn’t ready yet.
I didn’t tell Ms. Powell anything about my mother, because she never asked me again, and I didn’t know how to bring it up. I wouldn’t have told her about her affair with Mr. Oakes, that didn’t seem appropriate for school. I would have told Ms. Powell that there were times when my mother was terrible, and that was where Lizzie got some of her terribleness. Sometimes Mom got such bad headaches that she wouldn’t come out of her room for days, and she would ground us for no reason if we were making too much noise. But she had mostly been wonderful. She had been smart and funny, and everyone had looked at her when she walked down the street in the town center.
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