“How hard can it be? It’s, like, hamburger meat and ketchup and onions. Maybe an egg. But I’ll check a cookbook. Trust me, Mom isn’t the French Chef. I think that’s about all she does.”
Paige nodded. “Okay.” And then she repeated the word and started to reach for her swim fins so she could carry them home. But then she stopped and gazed down at the water in the river as it meandered past us. When she looked up again she was crying. Soundlessly. I started to hug her, but she swatted at my arm with one of the fins. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m fine.”
But, of course, she wasn’t. Neither of us was.
YOU CAN’T ARGUE with a dream.
Because you don’t know it’s a dream.
It may be nonsensical, but in the insinuating, slow-motion faithfulness of this nocturnal world—its grave commitment to its madness, the confidence it has in the rightness of its unreason—you respect this new normal. The world is a fog, especially when you are in the solarium-like heat that lives under the sheets.
They tell you there is no connection between sleepwalking and dreams. Perhaps. After all, you can remember your dreams.
You have heard of people who can wake themselves up from a bad dream. Or control the environment. The experience. You are not among them. You can neither turn away nor turn back. You make the best decisions you can.
CHAPTER TWO
I DECONSTRUCTED MY mother’s last night countless times as summer segued into fall that year. I described everything I could recall for my father. For the police. For myself. I talked it through with Heather Prescott when we were sitting around her dingy apartment in Burlington just off the UVM campus, and with another of my high school friends, Ellen Cooper—who hadn’t gone to college, but was making what seemed to me at the time to be scary amounts of money designing jewelry and candlesticks at a pewter smith in Middlebury—when she would stop by my house on her way home to Bartlett. The thing I kept coming back to was how pedestrian my mother’s last night really was. There were no warnings, no ominous asides, nothing that could be construed by even the most rabid conspiracy theorists as foreshadowing.
My father was a time zone to the west at his academic conference. Scholars and professors dissecting poetry. Because he was going to be gone for two nights, it had crossed my mind that my mother might sleepwalk. It had crossed all of our minds. After all, it was only when her husband was gone that she would arise at some point in the night and embark upon one of her journeys. But she hadn’t left her bed in the night in nearly four years—at least that we knew of, and wouldn’t my father have known?—which was why my father was even willing to leave for the conference. (There had been some discussion that my mother might accompany him since I was home and could look after Paige, but it had never struck me as very serious: my mother had her own work here in Vermont.)
And so this was the first time that my father was leaving Annalee alone in their bed since her work at the sleep clinic had, my family believed, given us a course of treatment for her somnambulism. Proper sleep hygiene. No alcohol. Hypnosis (which, in the end, my mother felt had not been a factor). And, most importantly, a small tab of clonazepam before bed. The clonazepam, perhaps in concert with her antidepressants, knocked her right out. She slept, it seemed, without waking. The polysomnographs of her brain when she was on the drug were fascinating to the physicians and technicians at the sleep center; they actually showed montages of Annalee Ahlberg’s EEGs to students at the adjacent medical school.
Nevertheless, my father reminded me to be alert. He said, his eyebrows raised, to refrain from any recreational activities that might diminish my attentiveness. But I had just turned twenty-one and my father knew that I would approach this responsibility with the appropriate gravity. I was a grown-up.
And I had indeed taken my father’s words seriously. I hadn’t partied that night at all, even though it was the end of August. I had stayed home and watched TV with Paige, petting Joe the Barn Cat—we were as likely to call the eighteen-pound bruiser Joe the Barn Cat as we were Joe, even though he had lived inside our house for five years now—when he would jump into my lap. I had slept with my door open. I reassured myself that I had brought my naked mother in from the bridge when I was seventeen; I reminded myself that I had awoken in time to save half our hydrangea from being asphyxiated by silver spray paint. I would awaken if my mother left her bedroom; I would let no one down.
And I took comfort in the reality that I myself hadn’t gone sleepwalking in fifteen years. I had experienced a relatively brief, not uncommon pediatric arousal disorder, and I had outgrown it quickly. No one believed it was worrisome; no one considered it a sympathetic reaction to my mother’s sleepwalking, because it had preceded her nocturnal forays by nearly a decade. By nearly ten full years.