The Sleepwalker

  “Okay, this is going to sound way more dismissive than I mean it to be. Forgive me. But you are really cute, and I think you have way too much time on your hands.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “I shouldn’t because this is an open investigation. And I shouldn’t because it’s not fair to your mother to share with you those sorts of confidences—the things she told me in our little support group.”

  “But you will,” I said, smiling.

  He pulled his hands apart and sat back. “No,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “Will you look into my theory?”

  “That Paige is a sleep sex baby?”

  “God, there’s a term for it.”

  “There’s a term for everything. You’re Warren Ahlberg’s daughter. You know that as well as anyone.”

  “And is Paige his daughter, too?”

  “Absolutely. Whether she has his DNA is irrelevant.”

  “Is that a hint?”

  “No. I promise you, it’s not. Whatever your mother did or did not do in a hotel in 1987 had absolutely nothing to do with her death. Nothing.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked, my face growing hot.

  “Because I am.”

  “But how? Why?”

  He took a breath and looked at me as intensely as he ever had. “Let this one go, Lianna. It’s not making you happy, and it can’t be good for your mental health. And it’s all just a dead end. I’ve done this long enough that I can say that with confidence. So, please, let it go.”

  The waitress came over at that moment and topped off our coffee. It only took ten or fifteen seconds, but it was enough. Neither of us completely relaxed, but the thunderheads rising up between us dissipated harmlessly. When she left the table and Gavin suggested we go to a movie that Friday night, I agreed. I didn’t stop thinking about whether Warren Ahlberg was really my sister’s father, but I didn’t bring it up for the rest of that breakfast.

  And while I might have raised the issue again when I saw Gavin that weekend, I didn’t. I didn’t before the movie because I was just so happy to see him. And the next morning? I didn’t because the night before I had finally met the sexual ogre he could become in his sleep.

  And then, far worse, I had found the first of his lies.

  “I KNOW YOU. I know what no one else knows about you.

  “I know what you did.

  “You are a coward. You are despicable. And I loathe you. I know just how much hurt you have left in your wake.”

  For a while, that’s how I would begin my day. I would stare at myself in the mirror and say exactly those words aloud.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I AWOKE IN the night on my side, my back to Gavin, and felt his hands on my rear. He was prying apart my cheeks with his fingers. His police academy T-shirt, which I was sleeping in those days when I was staying at his apartment, was up over my waist. In the haze that brackets sleep, for a moment I assumed he was awake, too. The room was black. I whispered his name and he said nothing. His breathing was a guttural rustle, a moan uninterested in a response, and I understood. This was his other self. His sleeping self.

  I said his name again, louder this time, planning to wake him. (Looking back, I find it revealing that I had been so irresponsible about sex. I was on the Pill and so I wasn’t worried about getting pregnant, but it never crossed my mind to insist that Gavin—or any of my lovers while I was in college—wear a condom.) But then I went quiet. I was curious. I was interested to see what he would do, what this would be like. I told myself I had no reason to be frightened because this was Gavin. I could, I decided, just get out of bed if he became too rough and let him finish himself off. Apparently he had done that in the past. He might follow me, he had warned, but he had said he might not. He never knew what would happen, and he certainly couldn’t control it. As a last resort, I guessed I could wake him. At least I thought I could. The issue—and now its reality gave me pause—was that he was stronger than me. He could hold me down. He might, if I couldn’t rouse him, hurt me.

  But he didn’t.

  He wasn’t gentle, and he was utterly oblivious to me as a person. The novelty of the experience had me moist, and that helped. But he never bothered to roll me over, and he didn’t care at all about my pleasure: he just pounded hard against me, his hands on my hips. (If there was pain, it was on the skin there, the intensity with which he was grasping my flesh; I tried to pull his hands off me, but they were epoxied there. In the morning, I would have two small, circular bruises from two of his fingers.) It wasn’t violent sex, but neither was it tender. It just…was. And then I felt him shudder, and he pulled out and fell back into his pillow. His breathing went silent as his semen rolled down my thigh and onto the sheets.

  It was odd: I didn’t feel as if I had been violated. I felt it was more degrading for him than it had been for me. But I did not feel like I had been a partner—even a person—in the enterprise. It was nothing at all like when we would make love when he was awake. I also had a sense that this was, given his history, a rather tame assignation; the next time might be considerably more violent.

  I wondered if tomorrow Gavin would know what he had done. And I pondered this: When it happened again—and I knew it would—what could I do to make it work for me?

  In the morning, I woke before Gavin. I wanted to shower. As I was passing his desk, I noticed his pocket calendar. I had seen him remove it once or twice from his blazer pocket but thought nothing of it. He had never before left it sitting, as it was right now, on his small desk beside his wallet and keys. What drew me to it that moment? Most likely it was the sleep sex. It was the connection to my mother. And so just as I had read his e-mails and my mother’s e-mails, just as I had gone through their computers and drawers, I opened it. My mother had disappeared on Friday, August 25. I folded back the weeks, seduced as I was then—as I am now—by that date. What had been on his calendar that day? A haircut? A staff meeting with other detectives? A dinner with friends? On two facing pages, the calendar showed the week beginning Sunday, August 20.

  And there they were, the two words. Annalee. Bakery.

  He had written her name in that Wednesday, the twenty-third, two days before she would be killed. He had met her—or at least planned to meet her—for lunch at twelve thirty. I recalled the day. My mother had said she was meeting a possible client in Burlington about a lake house he was contemplating. But that almost certainly had been a lie. She had been meeting Gavin.

  I closed the datebook and took a step away from the desk. Even if he hadn’t seen Annalee Ahlberg that day—even if for some reason either he or my mother had canceled, and my mother had done something else that afternoon—they had been in contact. His insistence that he hadn’t heard from her in years? An absolute lie.

  And it seemed to me, if you are capable of one lie, you are capable of two. Or three. Or many. The first lie is the hardest. The rest, I had learned myself since I had started dating Gavin, came rather easily.

  I turned and watched him sleeping. I thought of what had happened last night and what he had told me of his history. How much of it was the truth and how much of it was fabrication? It occurred to me that he and my mother might in fact have been lovers, a realization that sickened me, but far worse possibilities crossed my mind as well. I recalled what the coroner had stipulated as the cause of my mother’s death: A subdural hematoma. A violent head injury.

  I told myself that I needn’t be frightened. I had been alone with Gavin a lot since we had met. But I was scared, I couldn’t deny that. I went to shower as I had planned, hoping to clear my head there and decide whether to confront him with what I had learned. When I closed the bathroom door, I locked it.

  I dressed in the bathroom. When I emerged, he was in his kitchen making coffee; it smelled heavenly. He was wearing an old rugby shirt he liked and a pair of baggy gym shorts. He turned to me and looked a little sheepish. The sky out the window was a flat sheet of gunmetal gray
. The lake was choppy.

  “I woke up and was…” he began, his voice trailing off awkwardly. “Did something happen last night?”

  I nodded.

  He put the black plastic scoop back in the canister. He wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me against him. I let him, but I was reserved. I could tell he thought it was because of the sleep sex. “I am so sorry,” he murmured. “Was it awful?”

  “No. It was strange. You were a little rough—”

  “But only a little?”

  “Maybe a little more than a little.”

  “Tell me the truth: Did I hurt you?”

  I thought of the bruises I had noticed in the shower, but I answered, “Not really. No.”

  “Can you talk about it? I need to know what I did. I need to know how upset you are.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because I care about you. I don’t want to lose you.”

  I pushed him away and took a step back.

  “If you had to testify under oath in court,” I said, speaking carefully because I knew how much I was risking, “could you honestly say you had not seen my mother in years?”

  “What in the world does that have to do with last night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what’s going on here? Was I talking in my sleep, too? Did I say something about her?”

  “No. You were only moaning.”

  “Well, I guess I should be relieved. But clearly you were pretty disgusted. You are pretty disgusted.”

  “You left out your datebook,” I told him.

  His face went a little blank for a moment while he tried to understand what I was referring to. Then he leaned back against the counter and shook his head, annoyed with me. He knew what I was talking about. He knew what I had seen. “Do you make it a habit of going through people’s things? Did you rifle through my wallet, too?”

  “No.”

  “Kind of a violation, don’t you think?”

  “Kind of a lie, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “The fact I saw your mother two days before she disappeared is part of the record. Everyone who needs to know knows. I told them.”

  “But not me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? Explain. Haven’t I earned that?”

  “Earned that? This isn’t about recognition or achievement. It’s not like you’re back at college and you’ve passed some test.”

  Does anyone ever fight reasonably? Perhaps. But I’ve never met that person. It would have been reasonable for me to respond by reminding him that we were lovers or we were dating or, maybe, that I had a particularly vested interest in the status of the investigation. A reasonable person wouldn’t have risked her life by antagonizing him. But the combination of my love for my mother and the fact he had lied to me trumped all of that. I was almost delirious. “You fucked me last night without my permission,” I hissed.

  “We’re back there now, are we? Are you going to play the consent card? Claim I raped you? Or is this really about why I didn’t tell you that I saw your mother two days before she died? Pick one and let’s begin there,” he said, exasperated.

  “All right, why did you lie to me?”

  “Because it’s an ongoing investigation and you’re not a cop. I told the people who are involved. But you and me? We’re not partners in this, Lianna. It was—and I am being brutally honest here—none of your business.”

  “Why? Because you were fucking her, too? Did you have some kinky sleep sex club? Was ‘bakery’ a creepy euphemism for fucking?”

  “Why are you using that word?”

  “Because it’s violent and nasty. Because I’m really pissed off. And because you lied to me.”

  He went to me, his arms extended, and I batted them down. He tried again and I pushed him away. “Stay away from me,” I ordered. “Don’t touch me.”

  He stretched out his arms, palms open. “I’m unarmed,” he said, trying to dial down my rage.

  “Tell me why you lied.”

  “I just did. Because it’s not your concern.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Why did you see her the Wednesday before she disappeared?”

  “Because she called me and wanted to talk.”

  “Why?”

  “Fine. You win. Your father was about to go on a business trip, and your mother was frightened. She was afraid that what did happen might happen.”

  “So you met her at the bakery.”

  “Yup.”

  “How many times have you really seen her the last few years?”

  He turned around and went to his bedroom. I was unsure whether to follow him, but he was gone only a moment. When he returned, he tossed the pocket calendar onto the kitchen counter beside me. “Just that one time. But if you don’t believe me, thumb through it. Have a ball.”

  “Are you bluffing?”

  “Only way you’ll ever know is if you read it. Go ahead.”

  And so I did, while he resumed making the coffee. My mother’s name appeared but once. When I put the datebook down, he said to me, “Shall we now turn our attention to what happened last night?”

  “What did my mom say when you met that Wednesday?”

  He took a deep breath and he told me. He shared with me her anxieties that without my father beside her, she would rise and she would roam. She might feel for a body with her fingers or legs, find none, and leave the bedroom. She would leave the house. She insisted that she hadn’t had any incidents in years, but then Warren had always been in bed beside her.

  “When she was done, I advised her to tell your father to stay home,” he said. “I told her he should cancel the trip. I reminded her that we’re never cured. Exhibit A? What I did to you last night. I said she should say to him, pure and simple, ‘Don’t go.’ But either she convinced herself that she was worried for naught or she decided she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to give up that conference.”

  “Which?”

  “No idea. But if you made me guess, I would pick the latter. In any case, I don’t believe she ever asked him to stay home. I don’t know that for sure, but your father is on the record that she never asked.”

  I watched the coffee drip and listened to the machine’s gurgle. “I think I should go,” I said.

  “You don’t want to talk about last night?”

  “No. Not now.”

  “Can I call you?”

  I shook my head. I pulled on my boots. I went home.

  That night my mother came to me in my dreams. It was the first time since she had died. She gave me no clues as to what had happened to her, no insights in which I could take comfort. We were grocery shopping. The only twists my subconscious offered? We were shopping at a supermarket that sold swim fins beside the fresh peas and carrots, and magic tricks in the same aisle with the Juicy Juice. She was wearing an ink-blue pencil skirt that was among her favorites when we were visiting Manhattan, a white blouse, and black stiletto heels. She was overdressed for a Hannaford’s supermarket in rural Vermont, but in the mystifying world of a dream her attire made all the sense in the world and no one seemed to notice. Certainly I thought nothing of it. Mostly I was just happy. I was happy with the normalcy and I was happy to see her. Neither of us commented on the fact she was dead, because neither of us remembered.

  And so when I awoke, I was weeping. I recalled Gavin’s observation in the cruiser the day we had met back in August: at that moment, alone in my bed, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the sadness we feel when we understand an utterly perfect dream was only a tease. My mother was still dead and I was still a mess.

  How many times had my father looked at Paige and thought to himself, Whose eyes are those? Because they looked nothing like his and nothing like his late wife’s. And the child’s athleticism? Wholly foreign to either him or his wife. Did he ask himself about that, too?

  I pondered those questions that autumn, and I decided he was too smart not t
o wonder. I thought about them on Halloween night, as Paige and I gave out candy to children from a front porch strangely and uncharacteristically bereft of jack-o’-lanterns. (Our mother would not have approved.) Paige did not go trick-or-treating; if one of her friends had a party, she never told me. (She said none of the seventh graders had dressed up as Al Gore or George Bush, but one group of girls was decked out in long black tunics and sunglasses à la The Matrix.) The questions were with me as the first snow fell on November 1 and the deadline passed to tell my college I was coming back. I wasn’t. At least not in January. I thought about the mysteries of sleep and conception when my sister’s ski coach called the house, looking for our father, and asked me why my sister was having second thoughts about Chile—why suddenly she wasn’t going. He wanted to see if our father could change her mind and rekindle her interest. And, yes, I thought about them when I listened to the messages from Gavin Rikert on my cell phone, none of which I had returned. I missed him, and the sound of his voice could make me at once wistful and giddy. But I wasn’t sure I could trust him. The fact is, there was a part of me now that feared him.

  Erica continued to beg me to please phone the registrar at Amherst, insisting it wasn’t too late. Gavin continued to beg me to please call him back, trying to convince me that I was overreacting. And my father? He asked for nothing. I made my family breakfast and dinner, and I drove my sister to the mountain, where now they were making snow, instead of to the swimming pool at the college. I made sure that my father had his scotch and my sister had batteries for her Game Boy. I cut cards and talked to myself, pretending it was patter. I voted for the first time in my life, using a pencil and a piece of paper in a three-sided wooden booth because this was a small village in Vermont that had no need for voting machines. Occasionally my mother’s friends or the pastor would phone the house to check in, and I would lie and say we were fine. Sometimes my own friends would call and plead with me to join them for a movie or a drink or to get high. They wanted to talk about the election and Florida, and how a presidential contest could become such a disaster. But always I passed. Mostly those weeks I read and I dozed, and I would lie on the floor before the wood stove and beside Joe the Barn Cat. Sometimes he would get up and wander upstairs to the guest room with my mother’s drafting table and computer, where he would sniff at her handbag and a scarf on the credenza, and then curl up on her chair. It broke my heart to see how much he missed her, too.