It wasn’t the first time we’d broken into the neighbor’s chicken coop. It was something we’d done with Mom last Christmas, when the grocery store was closed and we were out of eggs. Mom had wanted to make a rabbit cake, she’d said we couldn’t celebrate without one, she always said that. So Mom had kept watch, and she’d sent both Lizzie and me into the coop to gather eggs. The chickens went berserk. Then we all ran, our pockets full of eggs, even though we only needed two for the cake. It was one of our best memories.
“Lizzie,” I tried one more time. “Come home.” She acted like she couldn’t hear me.
I’m not sure how long I watched my sister. I was hoping she’d wake up, I guess, although who knows what would have happened then. Eventually, I backed away and walked down the neighbor’s long gravel driveway, shivering though it wasn’t really cold. I hugged myself and tried not to think of my sister back in the chicken coop, or of the time Mom had made us steal eggs, and the way we laughed and laughed when we made it home safe. My chest ached.
A naked mole rat cannot feel pain, I remembered. It is one of the reasons naked mole rats are studied so extensively in labs. The rodents are missing some neurons or something, scientists aren’t sure, but you can dribble acid directly on their skin and they won’t even shudder.
In the morning, there were eight eggs on the kitchen table, in the fruit bowl. They were different shades of white and brown and even bluish, not all clean white like the ones from the supermarket. When Lizzie got up, I presented the eggs as my proof, told her what I’d seen. She still had a feather in her hair.
She ran to the bathroom and retched over the toilet, but nothing came up. I stood in the doorway while she curled up on the bathmat, her head between her knees. Mom would have sat on the side of the tub and rubbed her back, but I didn’t think Lizzie would want me to do that.
“Dad’s going to freak,” she said. “He’s going to send me away.”
“To where?” I asked, but I realized I already knew. Dad still kept the business card from Dr. Monroe in his wallet. I didn’t think we were ready for a last resort.
“I’ve heard what happens at places like that,” she said. “Mom told me.” I could see the fear in Lizzie’s eyes.
“We won’t tell him,” I said. “He doesn’t have to know.”
Lizzie held out her little finger to me, and I accepted the pinkie-swear.
Of course I knew that I should tell Dad that Lizzie had been sleepwalking outside. She could drown; she could get hit by a car. Dad really should have been the one to stay up to watch Lizzie at night, but he probably didn’t want to be blamed again if another sleepwalker went missing. If Lizzie’s body was found twisted in a ditch off the highway, the blanket of guilt would fall on me.
9.
My grades in math were slipping because I kept falling asleep when we were supposed to be doing worksheets on long division.
“Are you eating breakfast?” Ms. Powell asked. “At least a granola bar?”
After I fell asleep on my desk for the third time, Ms. Powell sent me to the nurse’s office.
“I’m sure it’s mononucleosis,” I told the nurse. “Or my thyroid.”
“What kind of kid are you?” the nurse asked. “Lie down over there. I’ll call your mother.”
“Father,” I corrected her.
Dad had to leave the carpet store to come sign me out from the nurse’s office and take me home.
“Is it the flu?” he asked. He didn’t know that I’d been staying up at night to watch out for Lizzie. It had always been easy to slip something by him. Mom would have noticed I wasn’t in bed.
“It could be the flu,” I said.
I was already falling asleep in the truck, letting Dad talk. He said it had been kind of a slow day, except that our neighbor Paul Greenburg had come in and ordered wall-to-wall carpeting for his upstairs bedroom. “Paul said we’re lucky we don’t raise chickens,” Dad said.
I snapped awake. “What?”
Paul Greenburg had told Dad that his coop and three others in the area had been raided in the past two nights. I breathed in. I hadn’t even heard Lizzie leave the house, I must have nodded off.
“I didn’t know foxes ate eggs, but Paul said foxes are notorious egg thieves,” Dad said. “Sometimes they hunt in groups. What’s a group of foxes called? A herd? A pack?”
“An earth. An earth of foxes.”
“You’re amazing,” he said, smiling, because he didn’t know I was lying to him, didn’t know that I knew exactly what had happened to the missing eggs. “Well, I guess they’ll have to buy eggs at the supermarket like the rest of us.”
Before bed, I told Lizzie what Dad had told me. “They all think it’s foxes,” I explained. “You’re off the hook.”
“But why am I doing it?” Lizzie was lying on the floor of her bedroom, looking up at the ceiling, her hands on her stomach. “How can I stop?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’ve been dreaming you’re a fox.”
“Elvis,” Lizzie said. “Stop being stupid.”
“I’m just kidding. Just trying to be funny.” I turned to leave the room.
“Elvis, wait.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think Mom was dreaming when she drowned?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Sure.”
“I don’t like to think that she was afraid when she died.”
“I don’t either.”
“I hope she was still dreaming. I hope she didn’t know what was happening.”
“Maybe Mom dreamt she was a fish, and she thought she had gills.”
“Or an alligator,” Lizzie said.
“Alligators breathe air,” I pointed out.
But then I remembered that alligators always look like they’re smiling, so sometimes I still try to picture Mom drowning like that, floating down the river and grinning with all of her teeth.
10.
It was halfway through November, month five on the grieving chart, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop Lizzie from sleepwalking. I read online that there are only a couple of ways to keep a fox out of a chicken coop: you can install an electric fence or you can sprinkle coyote urine around the area. A fox will not cross a boundary that smells strongly of a larger animal. Of course I didn’t really believe Lizzie was a fox, but I thought it was worth a try to see if those tricks would work on Lizzie too. I couldn’t put an electric fence around our house, so I ordered a half gallon of coyote urine on Dad’s account from Amazon.com.
“That smells awful,” Dad said, when he found me with the watering can outside of Lizzie’s room.
“It should,” I said. “It’s urine.” I told him that it would help Lizzie stop sleepwalking, or it would at least keep her in her room. Since I didn’t tell him about the chicken coop, I guess the idea made less sense to him than it did to me. He snatched the watering can away.
“Who told you that would work?” he snapped.
“At least I’m doing something,” I said. “You aren’t doing anything.”
“What else can I do? I took her to the doctor. I took her to two doctors.”
I stopped there because I remembered what Dr. Monroe said we should do as a next step if things got worse. I imagined what the house would be like without Lizzie, and without Mom too: it would be like a desert island, abandoned and lifeless. I pictured the rooms of our house filling with sand.
I got a book out from the Freedom Public Library, Sleep Walking and Moon Walking by Isidor Isaak Sadger. Moon walking, Sadger explains, is when you sleepwalk under the influence of the full moon. Moonstruck is another word for this state.
While I was reading, Mrs. Reasoner, the librarian, pointed out that the book was published in 1920, and there had been many advances in science in the years since. But I thought Sadger’s information was pretty good; it said that sleepwalking is classified as a “nervous disease,” which means it comes from the mind. The author said that a sleepwalker is trying to work out some problem from her curr
ent life in her dreams.
The book also had another theory that I thought was interesting: Isidor Sadger wrote: “Too much sex, or too little for that matter, can turn any woman into a noctambulist.” That is one of the Latin words for sleepwalker; somnambulist is another. Mrs. Reasoner said I should “absolutely not believe that bullshit,” and I was surprised that a librarian would swear to a kid.
Late that night, I realized there was someone who could tell me if Mom had been having too much sex, or too little. I took Mom’s cell phone from her office, we’d left it on its charger all this time, and went up to my room. I found him listed in her contacts under The Tongue Doctor, which she had called him when he’d been my speech therapist.
“Tell me from the start,” I demanded, after Mr. Oakes picked up. I tried to enunciate every word I said.
I didn’t mean to fall asleep after I hung up the phone, but I woke up a couple of hours later to yelling from the kitchen. I went running downstairs to find Dad holding Lizzie by the waist. She had oven mitts on both of her hands, and she appeared to be trying to climb into the oven.
“Turn the stove off,” Dad yelled. All four gas burners were on full-blaze. The oven was set to 450 degrees. There was so much in the kitchen Lizzie could hurt herself with: knives, household cleaners, the oven.
I saw then that the rabbit cake pan was out on the counter, and Lizzie had cracked a half-dozen eggs inside. She had also set the table with the good china, and somehow she hadn’t broken one plate.
“Leave it,” Dad said, when I started cleaning up. “She should see it tomorrow.”
“You could have set the house on fire,” Dad scolded Lizzie in the morning. “You could have set yourself on fire.”
I didn’t think I was supposed to be part of the conversation, but I peeked into the kitchen from the other room. Dad was holding a little white business card. It had to be the one Dr. Monroe had given him.
“Daddy,” Lizzie begged, though both of us had grown out of calling him that years before. “Just give me another chance. I’ll get better, I promise. I’ll fix it.”
“You can’t blame her,” I said, stepping into the room. “She was asleep.” It was my fault, I wanted to say, I should have been watching her. I didn’t want her to be sent away to St. Cloud’s. I didn’t want another member of our family to go missing.
“Another chance,” the parrot echoed, and I know that helped.
“Okay,” Dad sighed, “one more chance.” He fed a grape to the parrot. “Keep taking your meds.”
“Thanks, Elvis,” Lizzie said, giving me a one-armed hug.
I borrowed the credit card and overnight-express packages filled our mailbox by noon the next day. I ordered Eyes Open Hypnosis, a self-hypnosis kit that promised to curb your smoking, gambling, overeating, or sleepwalking habits. It came with headphones, a back massager, and a bonus coffee mug. I bought a leather dream catcher from Horsefeathers.com.
I also hid the rabbit cake pan underneath my bed, where Lizzie wouldn’t find it. It was another happy memory that I didn’t want her to wreck.
11.
“I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they’re really in love.”
It was our Tuesday meeting, and Ms. Bernstein wasn’t talking about Mr. Oakes, even though that was one thing I’d found out during the short phone call with him last week, that he had really loved my mom. Ms. Bernstein was talking instead about the affair her ex-husband had had with her sister, which was why Ms. Bernstein was divorced. Her sister was expecting a baby.
“I don’t know either,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am alone but I am not lonely.” She repeated that last part several times. It was what she called her divorce mantra. Sometimes she made me chant it with her, and I did kind of like doing that.
When I called Mr. Oakes, he hadn’t wanted to talk to me at first, but then he said, “You know, what the hell, I can’t tell anyone else about it, and you called me.” He told me that he and my mom had been seeing each other for about three months, which was long enough for two people to fall in love, he assured me. They had connected on Craigslist, the same website where we had sold our moth-eaten couch. Mom had put up a personal ad.
“What did it say?” I asked, but Mr. Oakes was sure I shouldn’t know.
“It’s really an adult website,” he said. “You can’t call here again. I’m trying to move on.”
I’d agreed that I wouldn’t call him again as long as he admitted that Mom hadn’t loved him back, that it had been a one-sided thing.
“You know,” Mr. Oakes had sniffed, “I’m not sure she did. She never said it back.”
That made me feel a lot better and I hung up the phone. I decided not to tell Dad or Lizzie about what I’d learned from Mr. Oakes, they would be too upset. I wasn’t even going to tell Ms. Bernstein. She was judgmental about extramarital affairs.
Ms. Bernstein had finished chanting her divorce mantra, and she asked me about dinner the night before; she always wanted to know what I’d eaten. I said that my sister had made shrimp and grits, but it must not have been enough food for Lizzie because that night I’d watched her eat a stick of butter rolled in sugar.
“I think your obsession with Lizzie is hindering your own grieving process,” Ms. Bernstein said, when I told her that the hypnosis tapes weren’t working.
“I’m not obsessed with her, I’m trying to take care of her.”
“Siblings of the mentally ill often ignore their own problems, and you’ve been conditioned to believe your needs are not important.”
“Mentally ill?” I shook my head. “She’s not mentally ill. She’s a sleepwalker.”
Ms. Bernstein didn’t talk at all for a minute, until finally she said it was good that Lizzie was cooking our meals. “Sharing regular meals is an important part of collective grief,” she said. “It’s healthy for a family to get into that routine.”
Healthy and unhealthy. Normal and abnormal. I had borrowed the DSM for Kids! from Ms. Bernstein’s shelf. I was confused by a sentence in the book that read: There is no wrong way to grieve, but if you believe your grief is abnormal, seek professional help immediately.
I asked Ms. Bernstein if she could clarify normal and abnormal, and she sighed. I’d asked the question a few times by that point, and I guess she was tired of answering. Ms. Bernstein had banned a few topics from conversation in her office, like how a coroner knows for sure that a death was an accident and not a suicide.
“Abnormal grief means someone who never gets over the loss,” she finally said. “Nothing changes in the client, nothing improves. But you’ll get over it, honey, don’t worry. Most people recover from a major bereavement.”
“How do I know when I’m over it?” I asked, because I still didn’t know any other kid with a dead mom. I had the grieving chart, but not a lot of other guidelines to follow. Ms. Bernstein was looking at the framed photo of her ex-husband on her desk again.
“You’ll just know,” she said.
That night, Lizzie made a big mess of the pantry, pulling out all sorts of ingredients onto the counter. She took out a large bowl and made a mixture of flour and yogurt, sugar, food coloring, and milk. She cracked seven eggs into the batter. Then she pulled Dad’s gout medicine from the cabinet, and dumped all the pills in and stirred.
“Oh no,” I said, once I realized what that meant, how much pain Dad would be in. Dad had been diagnosed with gout the year before, and he’d been pretty ashamed about it. “It’s supposed to be for fat guys,” he said. “Or old people.”
“You’re not fat,” Mom said then. “Or old. It’s genetic. You’re still my hunk of beef.” He lifted her onto the kitchen counter for a kiss then, the same kitchen counter that Lizzie was making a mess of now.
I picked up the empty orange pill bottle, and the print on the side was pretty clear about the danger of an overdose. I thought we had hidden all the household poisons, but we hadn’t considered Dad’s gout medication a poison. I’d j
ust read in a pamphlet in Ms. Bernstein’s office that drug overdoses are the second most common tragic teen deaths, second only to car accidents. I tried to take the mixing bowl from my sister, and she pushed me down, knocking me to the floor. She was strong in her sleep.
“Lizzie,” I pleaded. “You’ll die.”
Lizzie picked the bowl up off the counter, put the goop into the freezer, and headed back to bed. My chest lifted in relief. I opened the freezer and dumped the purple slop in the trash.
In the morning, I’d have to tell Dad what she’d done, would have to explain why his pills were missing. When he didn’t take his meds, his gout acted up, and he could barely walk down the stairs. His stiff movements scared me; I didn’t like to think of my dad as an old man.
Dad was mad about the gout pills, and he warned Lizzie that she had two strikes.
“Are you trying to poison yourself?” I asked her. “Are you trying to poison us?”
“Sleepwalking isn’t like that; I’m not trying to do anything. No one understands.”
“I understand,” I said, but of course I didn’t.
12.
November, December
By the end of the week, Dad was back on his gout medication and in a much better mood. He bought a barbecue smoker for the backyard, a Big John E-Z Way Roaster. He said he’d always wanted to have a winter pig roast, and Mom had never let him. He ordered a two-hundred-pound swine from a farmer in Georgia. Dad said we’d go pick it up on Saturday, after we went to Dad’s friend’s funeral.
“I’ve realized that life is short,” he said; that was why he’d bought the smoker.
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