The Sleepwalker Read online

  “Lianna,” he murmured simply.

  “I thought you might be more comfortable if you went to bed.”

  “Thank you.” He gazed over my shoulder at the television and saw the score. “When I dozed off, they were winning. No longer, it seems.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I was having the most lovely dream.” Briefly he studied his wedding band. Then he rubbed his eyes.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “I was reading aloud to you from one of Roald Dahl’s books. The BFG, I believe. We were on a plane to Disney World. I was doing my terrible Scottish accent, and a fellow in one of the seats ahead of us turned around. He was British and disabused me of the notion that my brogue had the slightest basis in reality.”

  “That really happened, Daddy. I was, like, seven.”

  He shook his head. “In my dream, the other passenger was the BFG himself. The Giant.”

  “Oh.”

  “But what was beautiful was that your mother was asleep against the window. Remember how she always loved the window seats on planes?”

  “I do,” I said. Sometimes I wanted to correct him when he spoke of his wife—my mother—in the past tense. But I never did. Who was I to condemn what I knew in my heart was realism? I was not at that place yet, but I understood that eventually I would get there.

  “That was the best part of the dream,” he went on. “The presumption of normalcy. Your mom with her head against the window.”

  “She does sleep great on planes.”

  He grinned a little mischievously: “She was always well medicated: Xanax. And the wine helped. And the white noise.”

  “Maybe the sleep doctors should have explored white noise or wine.”

  “Maybe white noise. Not wine. Alcohol can trigger a parasomnia.”

  “That’s right, I forgot,” I said. Then: “I got a gig for Saturday. A little girl’s birthday party.”

  “Oh, really? Wonderful. Where?”

  “Middlebury.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Anyone I know?” I could tell he was hoping that he was somehow the conduit. Maybe the party was for a faculty brat.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know the details yet.”

  “What’s the family’s name?”

  I shrugged. “The mom is going to call me. A…friend recommended me.”

  “Well, I’m thrilled. Whoever it is, they are very lucky to have you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He took a deep breath and stood, stretching his long, rangy body. He lifted the glass with the last of his scotch and went to turn off the television. He stroked the cat’s fur and smiled down at the animal. As he was leaving the room, I considered calling after him, telling him that the friend who had recommended me was the sleepwalking detective who had once known his wife. But, once more, I kept the source to myself.

  Despite the fact there was no body, my father was far from alone when it came to referring to my mother in the past tense. I had friends at Amherst and at home in Vermont who would make the leap that she was dead (because who were we kidding? of course she was), and then tell me how they had never had a person close to them die or the only funerals they had ever attended were for their grandparents. One evening when my friend Ellen Cooper and I were sitting around her bedroom, both of us buzzed, she confessed that she had never been to a funeral. Her grandparents were still alive. Then she added, “I mean, I’ve had dogs die. And a cat. But they don’t really count, do they?”

  “They count,” I said, partly to be kind but also because I loved Joe the Barn Cat and I had loved his feline predecessors in our home. But I knew what she meant. It spoke volumes about the cocoon in which my friends and I lived and how lucky we really had been. Yes, some of us had lost grandparents we loved. I had lost both of my father’s parents, and based on how devastated—and frail—my mother’s parents had been when they had come to Vermont in August, I expected soon I would lose them, too. But my friends and I had been spared our peers’ violent deaths in automobile accidents and we had been spared our parents’ deaths from cancer and ALS and the sudden, tectonic change that accompanies a fatal heart attack or ruptured aneurysm. My mother’s disappearance was a sad, strange wake-up call for so many of my friends. It scared them. My presence scared them. I reminded them of the one thing in the world we want most to forget.

  It may have been the sound of Gavin Rikert’s voice and his connection to my mother—my living, breathing, sleepwalking mother, not the ever-fading specter whose disappearance the detective was investigating—but the next day I drove to the hospital sleep center in the beige brick building in the midst of the University of Vermont campus in Burlington. I’d been considering a visit for a week now, ever since the shock of my mother’s disappearance—the mourning, the listlessness, the exhaustion—had begun to morph into something else. Real life. Regular life. Gavin’s voice had rallied me.

  I didn’t phone ahead because I had a feeling that calling would accomplish nothing. The minute I said who I was, the receptionist would take a message and the doctor would be appropriately guarded when she called me back. I understood the basics of HIPAA and patient privacy. And with a criminal investigation surrounding one of her patients? The woman would be especially circumspect.

  But perhaps in person I could get something out of her, though what that something was I couldn’t say. Still, I would play the gamin. I would look pathetic and lost—which really wasn’t all that difficult those days.

  When I arrived, a little before lunch, I took a seat in the waiting room on the third floor of the building and gazed out at the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain in the distance. The room was across the corridor from the reception desk, but I didn’t introduce myself. My plan, as much as I had one, was to catch the doctor as she strolled toward the elevator bank for lunch and walk with her wherever she was going, even if that meant only the parking lot. I had met the woman once but had researched her on my laptop—brand-new that summer, my first—before leaving Bartlett to refresh my memory. Cindy Yager had been running the sleep center at the hospital for eight and a half years now. She was fifty-six (“and holding,” the woman joked in a recent newspaper interview I had found about her and the center), and planned to stay at the hospital another few years before retiring. She had brown eyes and curly, auburn hair that was starting to gray.

  I had been in the waiting room over an hour, alone for most of the time, browsing through the magazines on the small side table. Just after one I saw the doctor. She was walking a young man in blue jeans and a windbreaker who might have been a college student like me to the elevator. I got up and followed the pair, and was relieved when Yager didn’t get into the elevator with him. The moment the doors slid shut, I said to the physician, “I am really sorry to bother you. My name is Lianna Ahlberg. We met one time when I was in high school and my mom first came here.”

  The woman was holding a clipboard and lowered it against her skirt. “Yes, I remember meeting. Of course. How are you?” She emphasized the verb, lengthening the single syllable. She tilted her head ever so slightly and smiled at me.

  “Not great. But not awful. I mean, I haven’t given up all hope,” I told her, craving a professional’s reassurance. “I’ve got this fantasy that maybe my mom has some head injury or something and got amnesia. You know, she fell while sleepwalking and hit her head just right. People get amnesia all the time and then, suddenly, get their memories back. Right?”

  “Oh, maybe they do all the time in movies. But not in real life.” Her eyes were gentle, her tone definitive.

  “Or maybe she was abducted. Maybe she’s locked in a bedroom or building somewhere, and any second now the police will find her and rescue her.” After I had verbalized the idea, I felt guilty for wishing such a thing on my mother, and naïve to suggest it was likely. But wasn’t imprisonment better than being dead? Wasn’t it?

  “Yes,” the doctor agreed, “I guess that’s possible.” But I could tell that she didn’t be
lieve it, and I felt patronized—and I knew I deserved to feel that way.

  “But it’s not very likely, is it?”

  “No.” Then: “What can I do for you, Lianna? How can I help?”

  “I want to talk about my mom’s sleepwalking. I want to know—”

  “I’m not allowed to discuss any of that,” she said firmly, but not unkindly. “Your mother was a patient and there are very strict laws that protect patient confidentiality. I am so sorry, but that’s just how it is.”

  “I get it. And I know the police have probably asked you a thousand questions already. But can I ask you a few things that wouldn’t be confidential?”

  “Like what?”

  “About sleepwalking generally, I guess. I mean, I learned a lot from those days when Mom started to sleepwalk when I was in high school. And I’ve researched it a ton the last couple of weeks. But there is still so much I just don’t get.”

  Yager looked at her watch. “I have a patient in a few minutes and I was going to try and squeeze in a moment with a banana and a granola bar I brought from home. But if you don’t mind watching me eat, join me in my office.”

  “Absolutely. I’m crazy grateful,” I said, and I followed the doctor back down the corridor and through the reception area, past a narrow room with a bed and a wall of sleep apnea masks and tubes that looked like props from a horror movie. It was unfair, but I imagined a serial killer wearing one and wielding the hose like a noose. The physician’s office was small, but it faced the grassy quadrangle in the center of the UVM campus. Yager motioned for me to take the chair in front of the desk, and she sat in the larger, leather one behind it. She reached behind her for a knapsack and extracted the banana and granola bar. She broke the granola bar in half and handed me a piece.

  “My very glamorous life,” the doctor said. Then: “So: sleepwalking.”

  “I miss my mom,” I said, surprising myself with this first short sentence. It wasn’t at all what I had planned. I had thought I was fine, but apparently the presence of this older woman—a physician who knew the demons who came to my mother in the night—was going to dismantle the wall of grown-up resolve I had built. The words began gushing like the prattle from an overwrought child, and none of them were the reasonable, adult things I had imagined I’d say. “It feels like she got sick and I went away to college. I had a couple of summers. And now she’s gone. I want to know where she is. I’m doing my best for my family, but it’s just not enough. It’s just not very good. And I didn’t hear her that last night when I should have. And—”

  “And this isn’t about sleepwalking at all, is it? No one should have to shoulder what you are right now, Lianna. It must be horrible. But I’m not a therapist. I’m so sorry. Even if I knew how to help you, I couldn’t. Tell me: do you have general sleepwalking questions for me?” The doctor was leaning forward across her desk, her hands folded between piles of papers on the blotter. I saw in her eyes how sad she was, either because she was mourning my mother, too, or because so far there was nothing in the world she could do for me.

  “Okay,” I began again, gathering myself. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  I started again. “No one’s found her body. Someone did find part of her nightshirt beside the Gale River. At least once before she walked to the bridge. So, let’s say that the worst thing that could have happened did happen—what a lot of people believe. She walked into the river that night near where they found the scrap of nightshirt. Why didn’t she wake up when her feet hit the water? Can you be in that deep a sleep when you’re sleepwalking?”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “Wake up.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was too late? She was already drowning?”

  “Could be.”

  “Have you ever had a patient die while sleepwalking before now?”

  “No. Thank God.”

  “So why then is everyone so sure my mom did? Why are you?”

  “It’s rare what your mother may have done in her sleep. But far from unprecedented. A few years ago, a woman walked into a lake in North Carolina and drowned.”

  “I saw that online. I found that news story.”

  “There are lots of stories similar to that in their degree of sadness…of strangeness. There are lots of accounts of sleepwalking excursions that could only be called…extreme. People cook in their sleep. They have sex in their sleep. They commit crimes in their sleep. I had a patient a few years ago who was driving in her sleep. One night, she backed her car out of the garage and into the mailbox. That’s when she woke up—and that’s when she came in for treatment. But there had been at least one other time when she didn’t wake up. She drove around. How do we know? She drove to the parking garage down by the waterfront, parked on the top floor, and then walked a mile or so back home.”

  “I read that sleepwalking runs in families. Is that true?”

  “It is. It certainly can. Are you sleepwalking, Lianna? Have you had an incident? Is that why you’re here now?” She sounded concerned.

  I thought about the word now. I guessed my mother must have told the physician that I had walked in my sleep as a little girl. Maybe my mother had filled out that detail on some form. A patient questionnaire. A family history. “No.”

  “Good. But please come in if you do—if something happens. Deal?”

  “Sure. I’ll call if something happens.”

  “Is that it?”

  I shook my head and asked, “I know sleepwalking is a non-REM phenomenon. Why is that when people sleepwalk?”

  “We only have theories. If you look at the delta waves on an electroencephalograph—an EEG—most of the time you really won’t see a big difference. There isn’t a huge physiologic marker.”

  “Is it as simple as the part of the brain that controls judgment is asleep, while the part that controls motor activity is awake?”

  “You might say that. But it may also come down to one little chemical messenger in the brain: gamma-aminobutyric acid. GABA. It’s an inhibitor that calms the brain’s motor system. In little kids, the neurons are still developing, which might explain why childhood arousal disorders are so common. And for some people, the inhibitor may always remain a little undeveloped, even into adulthood. Or it may be easily affected by all those environmental factors that we know can trigger a parasomnia. A lack of sleep. Exhaustion. Stress. Certain medications.”

  “Had my mom changed her meds?”

  “I can’t discuss that.”

  “I mean, maybe because my father was going to be gone, she did something different to be sure she’d stay in bed. But whatever she did, maybe it had the opposite effect. Is that possible?”

  Yager looked at me, but said absolutely nothing.

  “You really can’t tell me,” I murmured.

  “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “Can you tell me why she only walked in her sleep when my dad was gone?”

  “No.”

  “Because you don’t know or because of patient confidentiality?”

  “I have my suspicions,” she said, and waved her hand vaguely.

  “Have you had other cases like hers?”

  “It has certainly happened before: people sleepwalking only when they’re alone in bed. Again, it’s not common. Nothing about sleepwalking is. But there are plenty of documented cases.”

  “May I ask one more thing?”

  “Of course. I just worry I won’t be much help.”

  “Is there any chance my mom killed herself?”

  “You mean on purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor gazed at the UVM commons for a long moment. Then she turned back to me and said, “No. I can’t say that definitively or categorically. Like I said, I’m not a therapist. We’ll probably never know for sure. But speaking as a mother myself and speaking from my conversations with your mother while we were treating her parasomnia, I would say no. I understand she wa
s taking antidepressants. But there is a chasm between taking antidepressants and taking your life. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, but it really wasn’t. Over my shoulder I saw the receptionist in Yager’s doorway. I didn’t have to ask if my time was up. I knew it was. The doctor and I stood almost at the same time. She rounded her desk to hug me, and then I thanked her and left.

  Annalee Ahlberg was gone, but my mother remained as present and real as a shadow in the red Victorian. She was, at once, never there and always there, as undeniable yet untouchable as the sky. Though my father spoke of my mother in the past tense, in many ways he remained as incapable of moving on as my sister and me. It was still early autumn: Didn’t missing people reappear all the time many months later? And so there lived a hollowness in the heart of the house. The three of us were missing the semaphore that was wife and mother. We needed a new language and new rituals, but it was going to take time for them to evolve.

  My mother’s clothing sat folded in her dresser and hanging in her closet in the master bedroom. The book she was reading, a beautiful black-and-silver doorstop of a novel about Marilyn Monroe, was on her nightstand, the bookmark still between pages 218 and 219. Her jewelry sat where she had left it on her dresser, the different pairs of earrings she wore most often (the hoops, the love knots, the teardrops) on a small silver tree denuded of leaves, perhaps six inches tall. Her charm bracelet was half in and half out of her jewelry box, and I took the cat and the barn and the butterfly and the heart and folded them back into one of the box’s small drawers. I picked up a heavy bangle she slid over her wrist often when my parents went out in the evening, a silver cable with blue topaz at the tips, and held it in my hand a long moment, comforted by its totemic heft. My mother clearly had loved it. I put it back atop her necklaces, coils of moonstones and gold and one string of pearls that had once belonged to my grandmother.