“7-Eleven.”
“Right. So he walks back to the truck, opens the passenger side. There’s someone sitting in it; I can’t see, I’m too far back, but now I’ve got to wait and see, right? Turns out it’s an old lady. He helps her down, walks her over to the bench, then walks away, no kiss, no wave good-bye, no nothing, just hops back into the truck and pulls away, leaves her right there in front of the 7-Eleven. I watch all the other people walk by, and nobody says a thing.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” said Maggie. What’s interesting? Something was. She didn’t know what yet.
SINCE THE AGE of five, Maggie had been a sleepwalker. It was possible she had been doing it longer than that, but it was a few days after Maggie’s fifth birthday—two slices of pink-frosted birthday cake still left in the refrigerator—that her mother first recalled finding her out of bed, late at night, eyes wide open, standing in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, tiny hands slapping on the already open door as if she were banging some tribal drum. Once they uncovered her disorder, everything changed at once.
“Let’s make a list of everything we need to do,” said her mother. “To help Maggie.” Diane was tiny and seemingly battery-powered; she never stopped running. Her husband, Bill, called her his “secret weapon” sometimes and his “ballbuster” other times.
“You just let me know what I need to do,” said Bill. “What I can fit in between classes and writing. Because I will be there. I will do it.”
“Bill—”
“You know my schedule,” he said. “Work with me here.”
So first Diane took Maggie to the doctor, then a specialist, then a sleep-disorder institute; there were tests and pills, and then she sent her to a therapist to see if there was anything traumatic going on there deep underneath, you know, in the subconscious, like some secret that she didn’t know about. Diane didn’t even want to think about the worst that could have happened. (This was when they first started putting the faces of missing children on the sides of milk cartons, and Diane would study them carefully over breakfast each morning, then keep an eye out wherever she went. This obsession carried on throughout her life; she was proud to have started the first neighborhood watch in their community. When she retired she bought a police radio on the Internet and would happily listen to the local force’s regular banter well into the night.)
No, said the first doctor, and the second, and the next and the next. There’s nothing wrong with your little Maggie that we can see. She’s happy, she’s healthy. In fact, what a delight! It’s probably just a glitch in the system.
Meanwhile Maggie was an unstoppable night cruiser, and her family’s house was her terrain. She found her way into every crevice of the home, from the laundry room to the dank crawl space she wouldn’t go near when she was awake, up and down the stairs, into both bathrooms (including in the shower, where her parents once found her sitting in an inch of cold water), her big sister Holly’s room quite frequently, and of course her parents’ room, where she would sometimes hover over them as they lay hugging opposite sides of the bed, Maggie squeezing and opening her fists and gently counting to ten. She often expressed an affinity for tapping and thumping and pounding, and that’s how her parents usually found her: they followed the noise. It was as if the house was haunted, that’s how they felt sometimes, only there was no ghost, just a little girl who couldn’t sleep through the night.
And while they tried to prevent her mobility with baby guards and locked doors for rooms they considered danger zones, they knew that eventually they would have to find another solution, that she would get taller and stronger and smarter and would be able to take down anything they threw her way. There was also the fear that she would start falling more, down steps, or down anywhere really, and break a limb or hurt her young, fragile head. She already had bruises up and down her knees, so much so that her parents were called into Maggie’s school, where they were forced to provide documentation of her illness to an uncomfortable-looking principal and a fiery teacher who had the audacity to imply that they were incompetent parents.
“It’s about keeping your eyes open,” she said. “Eyes and ears, Mr. and Mrs. Stoner. It’s not that hard.”
“We’re going to move, that’ll help,” explained Diane to the school principal. “We’re going to move to a ranch house—no stairs. And carpeting in every room. It’s not because we’re not trying, we are. It’s just hard.” Her eyes filled up with gentle tears. The principal looked at her husband, but Diane didn’t bother. She knew he was looking at the bookshelf behind the principal’s desk, or at the view of the empty playground through the window, or anywhere at all, really, that took him somewhere else.