“You?”
“Ten years ago, they didn’t test men. They are only beginning to study us now. Molecular karyotyping. Perhaps the miscarriages were my fault.”
“Did you and Mom ever consider adopting?”
“As I recall, we were just about to begin that process when your mother became pregnant with your sister. And this time—miracle of miracles—the pregnancy had a perfectly wonderful happy ending.”
“And Mom never walked in her sleep those years?”
“Oh, occasionally she did. But not like years later. She didn’t leave the bedroom quite so often. She rarely got out of bed. Sometimes, it was more like a…a childhood arousal disorder. Still between the miscarriages—and my fears they were my fault—and the sleepwalking, I probably wasn’t a perfect husband. I resented not traveling. I really did. I loved your mother, but I didn’t handle the realities of her infirmity all that well. You were at college when I was chafing most at the bit.”
I felt queasy. My father sounded tired.
“What…”
“Go on,” he urged.
“What triggered it?”
“Your mother’s sleepwalking? Hard to say. We really don’t even know why it got worse. It could have been a sleeping pill. She was trying them when you were in high school. It could have been perimenopause. It could have been the idea you were growing up and would soon be leaving home. The parasomnia seemed to escalate your junior year of high school, when you were deep into the college process.”
“But when you were with her, she’d sleep through the night.” I wanted confirmation that my father had never had to wake my mother up in the midst of one of her episodes.
“That’s correct. As far as I know, whenever she left the bed when I was with her—here in Vermont or on vacation somewhere—she was wide awake. Not sleepwalking.” I noticed how carefully he had framed his response, how meticulously he had chosen his words. It was either the sort of answer an erudite college professor would offer, or the careful obfuscation of someone who had something to hide.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked him.
“Always.”
“Paige thinks she may have started sleepwalking.”
He sat forward and grew attentive. “Go on.”
“She thinks she moved her swim bag one night in August. Last week she woke up in the barn. In Mom’s car.”
“The first may be nothing.”
“And the second may be something,” I added, finishing the thought. I told him why Paige hadn’t said anything until now. I said she was worried.
“I’ll talk to her tonight,” he said.
“Should we be alarmed?”
“Alarmed may be too extreme a reaction. But after your mother’s disappearance, we should be attentive. Concerned. I may call the sleep center.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “Oh, I wouldn’t thank me. These days, I seem to be a study in ineffectiveness.” Over my shoulder there was a knock on the door.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No. But I will be.”
“You and I can talk more tonight, too.” Then he motioned at the door. “Go ahead, open it,” he said.
I stood up and went to the door. In the frame was another student, a beautiful girl with clementine-colored hair cut into a bob and plate-round purple eyeglasses. I had acquaintances who dyed their hair just like that. She looked like she should be working in a store that sold vinyl records or vintage clothes.
“Ah, Sam, as always you are right on time,” my father was saying, his voice melodic and happy. “Lianna, this is Sam, a very gifted Elizabeth Bishop scholar. Sam, this is my daughter Lianna. Lianna is a very gifted”—and here he paused ever so slightly, and it left me feeling strangely insulted—“magician.”
I said hello to the girl and motioned at the seat in which I had been sitting, but she was already melting into it, kicking off her clogs and curling her feet beneath her. I tried not to read anything into how comfortable she felt around my father, but of course I did. Her socks were dainty; her jeans were tight. “You’ll be home for dinner?” I asked my father.
“Yes. Mexican wraps?”
“I can do better.”
He smiled. “You’re doing just fine. I think you’re doing great and I’m very, very proud of you.”
SRV IS SLEEP-RELATED violence.
SBS is sexual behavior in sleep.
The charges in SRV include murder and attempted murder. In SBS, there is rape. Sexual assault. Assault with intent to rape. Sexual misconduct. Indecent exposure.
In one study in The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, the defendants who used sleepwalking as a defense for an SBS crime were acquitted nine out of ten times. The defendants who used sleepwalking as a defense for an SRV crime were acquitted four out of nine times—and the case was dropped in two others.
You take comfort in these odds if all you care about is acquittal. But someone has still been assaulted. Or raped. Or killed.
CHAPTER NINE
“OH, BOY,” SAID Paige slowly, her voice an absolute monotone. “A magic show in Montreal. Corny patter in French. Sign me up.” It was Saturday morning and she was helping me put the last of the vegetable garden to bed for the winter. I was dumping the ruins of the tomato plants—long, stringy tentacles that reminded me of the remains of the dead man o’ war jellyfish I had seen on a Florida beach as a little girl—into the wheelbarrow. I had told my father and Paige that I was going to the club with a friend from Amherst who lived in Montpelier. My father had asked whether this friend was a boy. He had seemed a little disappointed when I had said, no, it was a girl.
“English and French, probably,” I replied, correcting Paige.
“Well, corny is a universal language,” she went on, a study in sarcasm.
“You know, I don’t make fun of the things you love.”
“I love normal things.”
“And so do I.” I pulled from the earth another of the tomato cages. I was pretty sure that our mother had been all alone when she had pushed the prongs of it into the earth back in May. I would have been writing my final papers in Massachusetts and my father, most likely, had been at the college. He never helped with the garden. My mother usually planted it by herself. My mother usually did most things by herself. Even her job was far more solitary than not. It made me sad.
“How did you talk this girl into going with you?” Paige asked. She took the trowel from the wheelbarrow before it was buried completely by garden detritus and knelt in the dirt. She stabbed at the soil, rooting around for beets we might have missed.
“She was the one who suggested it.”
“Is she a magician, too?”
“No.”
“Just insane?”
“Paige, come on. Let it go. I get it. You don’t like magic. Fine.”
Paige found a beet and tossed it underhand into the grass. “Dad wishes you were going with a boy,” she said.
“I know.”
“I think he feels guilty you’re stuck here—carting me around everywhere and making my lunch and stuff.”
“What did he say?”
She shrugged. “He wishes you had a boyfriend who was taking you. It was random. You know how he is these days.”
“Well, he shouldn’t feel guilty. And neither should you.”
“I’m twelve. My mom is gone and my dad’s a zombie. I don’t feel guilty about anything.”
“Good. I really don’t want you to feel bad about the fact I’m here. I want to be here.”
“So it really isn’t a boy?”
“It really isn’t a boy. Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know. Mom had secrets. Dad has secrets. Why wouldn’t you have secrets?”
I stared at my sister, but Paige was on her knees, looking at the earth and not at me. “What do you mean?”
“About what?”
“Secrets. How do you know either of our parents had secrets?”
Pai
ge took the trowel with both hands as if it were a spike and plunged it as hard as she could into the soil. “Die, Vampire!” she yelled. “Die!”
“I’m serious, Paige.”
Still she didn’t glance up from the ground. “Got him. The world of the undead just got a little smaller.”
“How do you know they had secrets?”
“Because sometimes when I’d be playing Snake on Mom’s phone, it would ring. We’d be in the car. She’d take the phone and tell whoever was calling that she couldn’t talk.”
“Maybe Mom was just being a good driver.”
“She took calls from Dad or Marilyn when we were on roads that actually had cell service.”
“Who were they from—the calls Mom wouldn’t take? Any idea?”
She pulled out the trowel and studied it as if she were inspecting it for blood. “I don’t know.”
“The same number?”
“I told you, I was usually playing Snake. I didn’t check. I don’t think I even know how to check.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Sometimes I did. She’d say it was nothing. She’d say it wasn’t worth turning off the radio. She’d say she’d call them back.”
“But it could have been just a client or something. Or her hairdresser.”
“She took those calls. At least usually she did—like when she was building a ski house in Sugarbush or something.”
“And this was during the last three years,” I murmured, thinking aloud as much as I was speaking with my sister.
“It was. I mean, we didn’t even have cell service in a lot of this area four years ago,” she said. “So, yeah, it was this summer. It was this spring.”
I thought about the detective and wished that I would simply trust Gavin. There was no reason to leap to the conclusion that some of the calls were from him and, thus, he had lied to me about when he and my mother had lost touch. But this was where my mind had wandered. And yet I was drawn to him, too: I wasn’t sure any of the boys or younger men I had dated had left me with the sort of exquisite longing I felt as I anticipated Montreal. I could try and convince myself that I was seeing him because I was the hunter on the scent of details he might not otherwise share about my mother’s disappearance, but I knew in my heart—truly, in my heart—that there was more to it than that.
“And Dad?” I asked finally. “What were his secrets?”
Paige had found another beet, this one a giant the size of a peony, and she rolled it along the grass as if it were a bowling ball. “A perfect strike—no bumpers needed!”
“Paige, you just said you think Dad had secrets,” I repeated. “What were you talking about? Give me an example.”
“I can’t.”
“Then why would you say he did?” I snapped.
“Don’t get all bitchcakes with me—”
“And where did you hear that word? You’re too young to use it!”
“I probably learned it from you. And as Dad says, words are just words. Some are better than others, but only because they are better at explaining what you mean.”
“Dad was in professor mode when he said that. Not dad mode. You’re too young to say bitchcakes.”
“I’m in seventh grade. We say a lot worse. I could have called you a dick.”
“Paige!”
“You’re not my mom.”
I thought my head was going to explode and took a deep breath to calm myself. “I’m as close as it gets,” I said finally. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. You can’t use words like that, just like you can’t smoke cigarettes or drink beer.”
Paige didn’t say anything in response. She rooted around and found a much smaller beet, this one the size of a grape. “We did a terrible job harvesting these,” she said, holding the beet in her hand. For a moment I thought she was going to apologize. But then she continued, “Mom is in heaven going bitchcakes over the waste.” For a split second we both waited, the air between us charged, but when Paige looked up, her eyes were wide and her smile was mischievous. I couldn’t help but laugh. Then she put the beet in the palm of her left hand and flicked it at me with her right middle finger. She missed, but it was close—a testimony, I thought, to what an incredible athlete my kid sister was.
I drove to the Sears outside of Burlington, where I was meeting Gavin, confident that I had dodged a bullet and not overdressed, but worried (not for the first time) that I was not as beautiful as my mother. I had neither her height nor her hair, that incredible blond mane. My blond? Mousy and thin, I fretted. My mother was forty-seven the summer she disappeared, and her hair was as lush and luminescent as ever.
Originally I had chosen a pair of high heels, black with a strap around the ankle, but the temperature was supposed to flirt with the lower thirties tonight, and I didn’t have the right tights to accessorize them. And so instead I had gone with my brown Frye boots, which meant changing from a skirt and a blouse to a white-and-gold wrap dress—the gold was fiddleheads and ferns—that fell almost to my knees, and my leather jacket. But in between my first and my final choice, I had run through easily a third of my wardrobe, scattering the mix-and-match ensembles on my bed and the floor. I had agonized for easily ten minutes on my lingerie, even though I had no plans to sleep with Gavin that night. But what if? I recalled my conversation with Paige. Our mother had secrets. Our father had secrets. I myself now had secrets.
When Paige had strolled past my bedroom and spied the disarray—the dresses waterfalling off the side of the bed, some still on their hangers, the underwear and shirts and socks rising like bread from the open drawers, the shirts and jackets now throw rugs on the floor—she had shaken her head and said, “Yeah, you’re going to Montreal with a girl. Uh-huh.” I had defended myself by saying that I was hoping I might have the chance to meet the magician after the show and needed to look professional and mature, but Paige was having none of it.
I arrived in the parking lot where I was meeting Gavin before he did and once again checked my lipstick and hair. The irony that I was checking them in the mirror behind the visor in my mother’s car was not lost on me. I took comfort in the fact that today, unlike the last time I saw Gavin, I was not wearing one of her sweaters.
He arrived in a red Acura, the vehicle still dripping from the car wash, and hopped out quickly to open the passenger’s-side door for me.
“I don’t know much about cars,” I said, “but I didn’t expect a Vermont cop to drive an Acura.”
“Entry level,” he said, smiling. “But clean.”
“And red. Isn’t that a magnet for speeding tickets?”
“Only if you speed—or you don’t have connections. You know, I still feel a little guilty about meeting you here. I really could have picked you up.”
“That was so not happening.”
“Still haven’t told your dad about me?”
“Nope.”
“Probably wise. I’ll bet you haven’t told anyone, have you?”
“Not a soul.”
He shook his head. “Playing with fire. Isn’t this how pretty girls disappear?”
“I don’t expect to disappear,” I told him, sitting down and adjusting my seat belt.
Once he was inside the car, I could see his eyes behind his sunglasses. He stared at me for a moment, appraising me, and then said, “Well, you look great. You look beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“Next stop? Montreal. You’ll love the restaurant.”
And then we were on the highway, heading north, and I gazed up at the few clouds in an otherwise cerulean sky and at Lake Champlain when the interstate neared the water. I watched the mountains to our east and our west recede as Canada neared and the topography flattened. Most of the time, though not always, I was able to push from my mind sleepwalking and my mother and the questions I hoped I would have the courage to ask Gavin. I told myself that I was in the midst of a love story, not a mystery. Not a murder mystery. I tried to read nothing into his car or his relations
hip with my mother or the way he was attracted to me. The way I was attracted to him. I was—and the realization surprised me—happy.
He ordered a bottle of wine, a Riesling he thought I would like, but he was still nursing his second glass when our entrees were cleared. I ordered the risotto he’d recommended, and I’d enjoyed it—just not as much as the wine. We’d each begun with a pear mojito, the glasses rippling with chartreuse and topped with mint leaves, and I had polished off mine with uncharacteristic zeal. I’d never had one. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had any cocktail with juice other than a screwdriver. Over dinner, the waiter refilled my wine goblet three times, and now he was draining the last of the bottle into my glass. I was tipsy, I knew it, and I was aware that even my grin was growing a little sloppy. Though I was a girl who was, by any standard, expert at navigating the world stoned, I rarely got drunk. I rarely drank. This was different. It was less…cerebral. It was (and I understood what the word really meant) intoxicating. I felt wobbly and courageous at once.
I knew on some level that I should stop, but then decided it was too late. An expression came to me: in for a nickel, in for a dime. I was going to finish this last glass because I did indeed like the Riesling, and because I liked the permission the alcohol was giving me to lose a little of the control that had marked my world since my mother had disappeared. Had died. I blinked at the way my mind had made that alliterative jump. I vowed that I would not slur my words; I would think before I spoke; my pronunciation would remain crisp. Gavin might suspect I was getting drunk, but I didn’t need to advertise the fact for him. We were sitting in a corner, nestled on an L-shaped settee, seated on adjacent sides of the table. He had been right about how the hostess would give us a lovely spot, but he had been wrong about it being a showplace table by the window. It was instead a nook that purred romance.
“So, you know nothing about this magician,” he was saying.
“Not a whole lot. I hadn’t heard of him before you suggested we come here, but I found out a little about him on the web.”
“And?”
And he was handsome, I recalled, though I didn’t say that. He was young, maybe thirty or thirty-five, with dark eyes and a Scottish accent. He was part of that newer breed of magicians who performed in skintight black T-shirts, had serious guns for arms, and did a lot of terrifying things involving knives and Sweeney Todd straight razors. He had tattoos. Watching him turned me on. “He isn’t your mother’s magician. He’s pretty hip. Think David Copperfield with an edge,” I answered.