“I remembered how much she used to like to drive in and out of the barn, and back and forth in the driveway. Would she take the car out at night? It hadn’t crossed my mind until I saw the dings. But I told myself I was crazy.” The conversation felt surreal to me. Even now, the recollection of what we were saying—acknowledging life’s spectacular, numbing horrors in such quiet, measured tones—can leave me unsteady.
“If it hadn’t been an SUV, I doubt your mother would have been thrown so far. It took that high a center of gravity,” he said. “Her body hit the grill. Then her head, I believe, hit the corner where the windshield met the roof.”
“Was Paige speeding?”
“Well, she was driving fast. Fast enough to…to send your mother over the riverbank. I’m sorry.”
“No,” I murmured, “I asked.” She was an athlete. A ski racer. She was intense. She did almost nothing slowly. “Does anyone suspect it might have been a hit-and-run? Did you have to investigate that?”
“We went to a few auto-body shops in the area to see if anyone had brought in a car or truck claiming they’d smacked into an animal, but obviously that avenue went nowhere. It was make-work.”
Finally I put the towel down. I laid it gently atop the shoulder bag on the floor, imagining it was a quilt draped upon a coffin. “When you told me that my mom came to see you a few days before she died, you said she was afraid she was going to sleepwalk with my dad away,” I said. “You were lying about that, too, weren’t you? She came to see you because she was worried about my sister.”
“Yes.” He sat forward, his chin in his hands, and gazed out the window. “Does she have any inkling? Any idea at all?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered, but when I thought a moment more I couldn’t help but wonder at Paige’s sudden resolve not to travel to Chile to ski the coming summer. I remembered the dream my sister had shared with me—the one where she and Joe the Barn Cat were following our mom down the road. Had she been reaching out to me, trying to tell me something?
And then I recalled the hours and hours she had spent walking along the riverbank looking for something.
“Tell me: Was my mom sleepwalking when it happened?” I asked.
“Her eyeglasses weren’t in the bedroom.”
“Meaning?”
“She probably put them on. We never found them.”
“Of course. She’d never wear them while sleepwalking.”
“We don’t know that. I said probably. Maybe her eyeglasses will turn up any day now in the kitchen or the bedroom or under the seat in her car.”
But we did know that. We did. My mother wasn’t sleepwalking, and I didn’t correct him. I think I knew that moment that my sister had found our mother’s eyeglasses. Paige had found those great turquoise ovals our mother wore when she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses. She had unearthed them from whatever brush or leaves they were beneath as she walked day after day along the side of the road that paralleled the river. The odds of my mother and my sister both sleepwalking at the very same moment? Infinitesimal. Annalee Ahlberg had been awake. Wide awake.
Looking back, that might have been the cruelest irony of all.
EPILOGUE
THIS IS WHAT I mean about fate: when, eventually, I told my father I was dating Gavin Rikert, it meant that now there were three of us who were complicitous. Three of us who knew. And while we never spoke of it, whenever we were around Paige together—as we would be more and more often, especially in the first eight months of 2001 and then again the year after I finally finished college, before Gavin and I married, when I was again living at home—it was an increasingly awkward conspiracy of silence.
Should I have stayed home through Paige’s last years of high school? Perhaps. My father was not left completely alone trying to rein in his younger daughter’s increasingly dangerous late-night excursions. He had the sleep center. Her treatment was similar to my mother’s, and worked in the same ways and failed in the same ways. But the more Paige walked, the more she knew she was her mother’s daughter. (Was she her father’s as well? Absolutely. Whether she was Warren Ahlberg’s daughter biologically has long become irrelevant. For one season, blinded by the tears that came at me in brackish waves following my mother’s disappearance and death, I questioned his paternity. I am ashamed of that dreamlike madness.)
And, yes, the more she walked, the more she must have known she was her mother’s killer, too. Her visions from that August night grew crisp, the memories lucid, and the truth unavoidable. I imagine her squirreling away the eyeglasses in a drawer or jewelry box somewhere, a renunciate totem she is unable to live with or without.