The Premonition

by Chris Bohjalian

  *

  Most of the rest of Vermont was sound asleep. Certainly there were musicians playing at the clubs in Burlington, most of them jam-band disciples of Phish, and there were young adults a little older than me dancing. There were state troopers who were awake and the state’s few professional firefighters were awake, and there were insomniacs who were awake watching late-night TV or videocassettes of movies they had rented. But the Green Mountains late at night grow quiet, and most of the houses in the village of Bartlett were dark.

  A few miles away, however, the lights were on at the Holbrooks’ farmhouse. I would learn more when I got home—and more still when the sun was up and my family’s own nocturnal adventure was behind us.

  *

  Where do you go when the part of your brain that controls judgment is asleep, but the part that controls your motor activity is awake? I wouldn’t have known to phrase the question that way in the mid-1990s, but already I understood enough intuitively about sleepwalking to realize this was the issue. And while some sleepwalkers simply rearrange the furniture in modest ways, my mother’s two noctivagant journeys that year were decidedly more extreme.

  I walked along the road in flip-flops and my hoodie toward the village center and the streetlights a quarter mile distant: a general store, a church, a station house for the volunteer firefighters. A cluster of houses. I started in that direction for the simple reason that my other options—the tree-lined road into the valley or the woods themselves—seemed daunting. I saw no one. I saw a feral cat and I heard other animals in the brush on both sides of the road. I thought I saw a bat. I know I heard an owl.

  Across the street from the general store a bridge spanned the Gale, long enough that it was illuminated by four streetlights. It was the brightest corner of the village by far, inappropriately and garishly lit in the night, and my father had once joked it was one of the man-made wonders of the world because at night you could see it from space. I saw someone there, a person alone, and I started to walk faster. I hadn’t seen a car or a truck, not at that hour, and I wouldn’t.

  I was perhaps a hundred yards away when I understood that the individual was my mother.

  *

  Cristina had premonitions of her own. She never saw the wire electrocuting her horses, but she told my mother later that year, as her marriage was imploding, that she’d seen her husband’s final infidelity coming. Apparently there had been others. My own father may have chuckled dismissively about Cristina’s husband being an empty suit who raised money for what we sometimes called “Club Midd,” but apparently one of those erotically alive young poets from Bread Loaf thought otherwise.

  Cristina also told my mother this: on the night my father was in Los Angeles and I went in search of my mother in the village, Eric was melting down. She and her husband had fought over the young poet and either he had stormed off or she had thrown him out. It was, she told my mother, maybe a little bit of both. Meanwhile, the boy watched and the emotions hit him hard—as they would any eight-year-old. This was both wrenching and unpredictable, and Eric was in sensory overload. He exploded moments after his father’s car started down their long driveway.

  And so she called our house, despite the fact it was after midnight, because she was in a panic and my mother was the closest thing that Cristina Holbrook had to a friend. No one answered, but the ringing—and it rang five times before the answering machine picked up—woke my little sister.

  *

  My mother was climbing up onto the concrete balustrade of the bridge across the Gale River. It was about four feet high and a foot wide. I had leaned on it dozens of times as a girl. The bridge was just high enough and the water just shallow enough that a fall from it was not necessarily fatal—unless you landed headfirst—but almost certainly would be crippling. You’d break bones. If you broke the right ones and couldn’t make it to shore, you would indeed drown, especially with the current surging from all those August storms.

  “Mom!” I called out, but she seemed utterly oblivious to me, and so I started to run.

  By the time I had reached the bridge, she was atop the balustrade, poised like one of the marble angels that stand watch on the bridges across the Tiber and the Seine. She was naked and alone, beneath clouds that were gauzy and swift and lit by a moon that now felt as full and bright as a klieg light.

  My mother was lit by that moon, too.

  *

  My mother was striking. She was slender, with legs that were long and a blond mane that was still wild with sleep as she balanced atop the narrow parapet. Her feet were flat and her arms were at her sides. Later I would contemplate the idea that I was with my mother when she could not possibly have been more vulnerable and exposed: I’m sure there are seventeen-year-olds in this world who go skinny-dipping with their parents, but I was not among them. Our family was not uptight, but I had never seen my mother in less than her underwear. I had never seen my father in less than a bathing suit.

  In the surreal quickening of that moment, however, I was only terrified, aware of the abyss that loomed if my mother jumped. I guessed it was an old wives’ tale that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, but I also didn’t want to startle her and cause her to topple over the side of the bridge. And so at first I spoke in a tone that I might use at the beach: louder than conversation at the dining room table, but far from a shout. “Mom? Can you wake up?” I heard a quiver in my voice.

  She raised her hands and I wondered what she was seeing: it looked like she was about to conduct an orchestra. Instead she only brushed an unruly lock of hair from her face, then lowered her arms back to her sides.

  “Mom: can you kneel down?”

  Again she ignored me. Or, to be precise, she was oblivious to me. And so I made a decision: I would yell, I would call out to her as if I were Auntie Em calling for Dorothy because the twister was nearing, and I would grab her around her thighs, just above her knees. I would hold on tight. If necessary, I would yank her back on the sidewalk, pulling her down on top of me. I took a breath, reached my arms around her legs, and locked my fingers together.

  And she awoke.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice frightened…for me. Her body was still facing the water, but she had turned her head around. I could see her eyes—the deepest blue of anyone I have ever known—looking down upon me, motherly and loving and deeply concerned. When I didn’t let go, she continued, “I can do it. I can get down. I’m awake now, sweetheart.”

  Reluctantly I unclasped my arms, but I watched intently as she lowered herself cautiously down to one knee on the balustrade and then, rather like a gymnast, hopped down. I was wobbly, as was she, and I took off my hoodie and handed it to her. She climbed into it, zippering it to the base of her neck. Above her naked legs it looked like a purple sack that had been tailored badly to resemble a miniskirt.

  “Is your father home?” she asked.

  “No. He’s in Los Angeles. Remember?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Of course.” Then with a start she said, “Paige is home alone.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I left her a note. I was hoping I’d find you quickly and we’d be home before she woke up.”

  “Okay.”

  We walked most of the way back to the house in silence, stunned at the way my mother had just flirted with the rocks and chill water of the Gale River.

  “What were you seeing?” I asked only as we neared our driveway.

  She shook her head. “It’s all silly…”

  “Were you dreaming?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, but I sensed both that she was lying and that I should not press her. Not that night. That might come later.

  We were just approaching the front door when Paige came running out, sobbing both because I had left her alone and because our mother had disappeared. She managed in the way that only hysterical people can to be both furious with me for deserting her and frantic that her mother
had vanished. Our mother knelt before her and hugged her, but she continued to wail inconsolably, her cries directed one moment at me (“You left me alone!”) and the next at our mother (“Where were you?”).

  Finally, my mother stood and for a moment I thought she was going to lift Paige into her arms the way our father, even now, sometimes did. Instead she took her by the hand and led her inside the house. I stood in the front hallway and watched her lead Paige upstairs. I knew that she would tuck Paige back into bed and read to her until, once again, her daughter was sound asleep and felt safe.

  *

  I saw the red light on the answering machine in the kitchen blinking while my mother and Paige were upstairs. Initially I presumed that the message had been around most of the evening—perhaps all day—and my family hadn’t noticed it. When I pressed play, however, and heard Cristina’s voice I understood. She sounded a little hysterical, too, and behind her I could hear Eric yelling that it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all, and they needed to make up. He was demanding that his mother chase after her husband and bring him back or he would do it himself. He was wild with despair, an animal panicked and trapped.

  The world, I remember thinking, is unraveling.

  Years later I would read about the differences between tantrums and meltdowns, how the former begins with a desire—an unmet need—while the latter is more about overload: too many emotions or sensations coming at you at once. But that night? All I knew was that my mother and Cristina Holbrook were in different ways at the breaking point, and their children—including me—were wounded and scared.

  It was nearly one thirty in the morning when my mother finally came back downstairs and found me in the kitchen sipping herbal tea.

  “I’ll tell your father what happened in the morning,” she said. “Even in L.A. he’s probably gone to bed by now.” I was leaning against the counter beside the refrigerator, taking unexpected comfort in the hum of the appliance.

  “Good. Maybe there’s a doctor you can see,” I said.

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “Cristina called,” I said.

  “Tonight?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you talk to her?” she asked.

  “She called when we were gone. I think it must have been the phone that woke Paige.”

  She went to the answering machine and listened to the message I had already played. It was horrible to hear it again. When it was over, she simply shook her head sadly. Then: “Maybe they’ll work it out.”

  “Cristina and her husband?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “Not for a second.”

  I asked my mother if she wanted any tea. When she said no, I put my mug in the dishwasher. “I can sleep on Dad’s side of the bed tonight,” I said.

  “Oh, you don’t have to.”

  “I do,” I said. And I did, though neither of us slept much that night. We dozed and we read and we talked, waiting anxiously for the sun to rise and the birds to chirp. I’m not sure we even turned out the lamps on both sides of the bed. In the morning we discovered there was a sleep center at the university hospital in Burlington and we scheduled an appointment.

  *

  Paige heard Eric’s desperate pleas on the answering machine. She came downstairs for breakfast just as my mother was playing the message again for herself, wanting to make sense of it by the light of the morning. My sister stood in the doorway and listened to the child’s laments, and my mother didn’t know she was there until it was too late.

  Paige’s response? She said only that it made her sad.

  *

  My father flew home from Los Angeles a day early when he heard that his wife had walked naked in the night to the Gale River Bridge. And so that evening was the last time that my mother would sleep alone for nearly four years.

  The elementary school year started the day before the high school’s that September, because all the rain that summer had put the construction of the new high school wing behind schedule. Paige climbed onto the school bus the first day, as she had every day since kindergarten, but she forgot the lunch our mother had made before leaving herself to meet with clients about a ski chalet she was designing near Mount Mansfield. I had no idea if Paige knew she had forgotten it, but at about ten in the morning I biked to the elementary school to bring it to her.

  When I arrived, I saw the third and fourth grades were outside at recess. Most of the kids were playing kickball, and I scanned the field for Paige. She was an outlier at kickball as she was at every sport she tried, relentless when she was in the field and accurate with her throws, and capable of kicking the ball with the ferocity of any of the boys when she was at the plate. But I didn’t see her anywhere on the diamond and for a moment grew worried. The dread I had been living with had certainly not diminished in the wake of my mother’s third—and most dire—sleepwalking occurrence. I scanned the rest of the playground, noted the third- and fourth-grade teachers, and still couldn’t find Paige.

  I started toward the jungle gym and the swings and the school’s small zip line, watching Ethan Gollner ranting about something on the kickball field from his perch at third base, and finally spotted my sister. She was seated in the sun at the lone picnic table, looking uncharacteristically placid, as she watched the game. Sitting beside her was Eric Holbrook, who was earnestly explaining to her the difference between mead and grog, and how he preferred mead because he liked honey but his mother preferred he drink grog because it had milk.

  “Usually the drinks have alcohol, but I don’t drink alcohol, so mine are safe,” he was telling her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “You feel okay?”

  “Sure,” she answered. “I feel fine. Why?”

  I motioned at the diamond. “Because you’re sitting here and not kicking the crap out of the ball over there.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe later.” It was then the reality that I was at her school seemed to dawn on her. “What’s going on? Why are you here?” There was a twinge of alarm in her voice, as if my summer of unease was contagious.

  “You forgot your lunch,” I told her, and I handed her the small bag.

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Eric says he might get another horse.”

  I smiled at the boy. “Awesome,” I said.

  He nodded. “This one will be named Brunhild,” he told me. “For sure.”

  “Do you like the name?” I asked Paige.

  “Nope,” she said. “I said it should be Clara Two.”

  “It will be Brunhild,” he told me calmly.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Yeah, and you wear harem pants,” my sister reminded me. “Your vote doesn’t count.”

  When I left, she was still sitting with the new boy, listening to him explain the nuances of medieval cuisine and debating names for a possible new horse. That night her teacher would call home to tell my mother that Paige had eaten lunch with him, too, and she was grateful.

  *

  I imagine that eventually my sister’s patience with Eric would have run out, but it didn’t that autumn. She looked out for him at school and she visited him at his house; he came to ours. She learned about baileys and arrow loops, and the difference between a catapult and a trebuchet. No one was going to make fun of him, at least to his face, because no one was ever going to make fun of Paige. The two of them were linked by that horrible night when his father walked out and my mother walked to the bridge.

  But the Holbrooks didn’t remain much longer in Vermont. Cristina took Eric and returned to her family in North Carolina—to her roots—just after Halloween. My sister would confess to me later that she liked playing with Eric just fine, even if he was (her word) weirdly obsessed with the Middle Ages, but he was still a boy. She was beginning to resent her small sacrifices, and she wasn’t sure what would have happened if any of the grown-ups had expected
her to miss ski practices or races that winter. I reminded her that she had done something kind and she should only be proud.

  Meanwhile, I did my magic shows on weekends and I applied to colleges. Whenever I put an application in the mail, I would feel for the first time that year that there was a legitimate reason for my dread. My father stopped traveling. And my mother went to the sleep center in Burlington to find a course of treatment for her sleepwalking. For a long while there would be no events (at least none that I knew of), and when the power lines would sway in the chill autumn winds, I would no longer hold my breath. It would not be until another August, years later—when I was about to return to college as a twenty-one-year-old senior—that once more she would rise from her bed and walk into the night.

  And this time she wouldn’t come home.

  www.chrisbohjalian.com

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