She went to college far from Vermont, already distancing herself from those of us who knew her best and suspected what she had done. After graduating, she went to work for an airline as a flight attendant because it meant that she could travel and stay in nice hotels. Her base was Los Angeles. She was, she told me one time when she was drunk, feeding her beast. She said she was ravenous when she was asleep. She came home once a year at Christmas. She never allowed my father and me to visit her.
And then, at twenty-six, she disappeared, too. She did not disappear the way our mother did. She went, as she put it, off-line. Off radar. She could no longer bear even that lone, annual return trip to Bartlett, where our father continued to live, and the Victorian’s proximity to the Gale River. She could no longer subject herself to what she seemed to view as the pitying—perhaps in her eyes, even judgmental—gazes of my father and Gavin and me.
She lets my father and me know she is alive, but she discourages us from trying to find her. Last year, she sent him Red Sox tickets on his birthday. For Christmas, she sent her niece and nephew trinkets and books. She assures us that we need never fear for her safety: she knows the pain that killing herself would cause us. Breathing is her atonement. That’s just how she’s built. Sometimes I post oblique messages for her on the social networks that no one would understand but her, hoping to convey how much my father and I miss her and how nothing could have prevented what happened, because I am sure that in a sad, melancholic way she stalks the Ahlberg family. How could she not?
Before she went underground and cut us off, she mailed me her journal. I read it and reread it once. Then I buried it in a gift box that had once held a sweater in Gavin’s and my attic in Burlington, hiding it behind the larger cartons where I stored the magic tricks I have been unable to say good-bye to. I never showed the journal to my father or to Gavin. There are no clues in it that would help us find her.
And, as Gavin reminds me, she doesn’t want to be found. At least not yet. He says she will come home when she is ready: when she is at peace. He says as a magician (albeit retired) I should know better than anyone that what we believe has vanished is really just hidden.
He may be right. The earth is as rich with magic as it is with horror and sadness. One day, I will pull back the curtain and there she will stand, smiling and rolling her dark eyes at me.
And this time it won’t be a dream.
YES, LIANNA, YES. Since you wonder but are afraid to ask, I’ll tell you. Live with it. I do.
Mom wasn’t out sleepwalking. Mom was out looking for me.
Acknowledgments
ONCE AGAIN, THANKS are in order.
First of all, the experts: Dr. Garrick Applebee, a sleep medicine physician, for teaching me about sleepwalking and other parasomnias; Mike Cannon, with the Colchester, Vermont, Technical Rescue Team, and Essex, Vermont, police officer Andrew Graham, for discussing with me the specifics of search and rescue; Emmet Helrich, formerly a lieutenant with the Burlington Police Department and now the coordinator for Vermont’s rapid intervention community court, for helping me understand how this sort of investigation would proceed; Michael Mangan, PhD, for his book Sleepsex: Uncovered; and Dr. Steven Shapiro, chief medical examiner for the state of Vermont, who shared with me the mysteries of the morgue.
I am deeply grateful to my friends at Doubleday for all they do before (and after) my books are published: Todd Doughty, Emma Dries, Jenny Jackson, and John Pitts.
And then there are my agents: thank you, Jane Gelfman, Cathy Gleason, Victoria Marini, Deborah Schneider, and Brian Lipson.
Finally, I want to thank Victoria Blewer and Grace Experience, two of my earliest and best readers—always.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Bohjalian is the author of nineteen books, including such New York Times bestsellers as The Guest Room, The Light in the Ruins, The Sandcastle Girls, The Double Bind, and Skeletons at the Feast. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three of his books have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers). His novels have been chosen as best books of the year by The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Hartford Courant, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Salon. He lives in Vermont. Visit him at www.chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook or Twitter.