Sally was inadvertently terrifying in her directness. “My uncle found a piece of clothing on a tree by the Gale,” she said. “I heard it on one of the scanners. The police are about to ask you about your mom’s clothes—what she was sleeping in.”
I felt sick: I got dizzy and thought I might actually black out, and so I put my forehead down on the counter. I took a few deep breaths and after a moment forced myself to sit up. “How big?” I asked. “Do you mean a whole piece of clothing, like a shirt? Or a piece of clothing, like part of a sleeve? And what kind of clothes? Did you hear?”
But before Sally could tell me, a female trooper who couldn’t have been more than thirty was sitting down on the barstool beside me. I told Sally I’d have to call her back in a couple of minutes.
The trooper had creosote-colored hair cut short and insisted that Paige and I call her Rosanne. She rubbed my back and asked, “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing bad. I’m kind of freaking out.”
“Yeah. I get it. Your father’s plane lands in about an hour. He should be home soon.”
I nodded. My father had caught a plane from Iowa City to Chicago, and then another from Chicago to Burlington. It was twelve fifteen now. I was about to bring up Sally Sheldon’s phone call, but Rosanne beat me to it.
“We may have a lead,” she began. “A volunteer found something a few minutes ago and they’re bringing it to the mobile crime lab right now. Can you tell me what your mother was wearing when you last saw her? You know, before bed?”
“A summer nightshirt. Navy. Victoria’s Secret. Buttons down the front.”
The trooper wrote down the description.
“Is that what they found?” I asked. “They found her nightshirt?” If they had, I wondered if that meant my mother’s sleeping self had stripped off the nightshirt to go skinny-dipping. I knew waking Vermonters who did—whole families in the privacy of their backyard ponds or in secluded corners of the Gale—but most still had a bit of hippie in them. My mother? As far as I knew, it would only cross her mind in her sleep to peel off her nightshirt and go for a swim. And even then, skinny-dipping wasn’t really her style. That time when I pulled her naked from the bridge? That wasn’t somnambulant skinny-dipping. That was something else entirely. Somnambulant soaring, maybe. Somnambulant base-jumping. Believing in her sleep she could fly.
“They found a piece of fabric—not a piece of clothing. They found a little piece hanging from a dead branch beside the road. By the banks of the river. It’s near here. Between here and the store.”
I glanced down at the kitchen phone and thought of what I had just asked Sally. I took a breath and repeated that short, critical, two-word question: “How big?”
“It’s little. It’s small. Maybe a couple of inches by a couple of inches. It got caught on the branch.”
“What color is it?”
“Navy.”
“So it is from my mom’s nightshirt.”
“We don’t know that.”
But, I understood, they did. They did know that.
My father had told me that he had long ceased trying to understand the meaning of the code: he left and his wife would rise like the undead from the sheets. No one, he insisted, had been able to explain to him or to my mother why she only walked in her sleep when she was alone. One time, I had watched my parents and two of their friends joking that she was trying to find him, though the attempt at humor seemed to make both my mother and father uncomfortable. Did my mother fret that she would find her husband in bed with another woman? Did my father fear the same thing?
Now I tried to push my memory of that conversation from my mind. I tried to push the fragment of nightgown from my mind. I tried to reassure myself that my mother had walked to the nearby elementary school and broken an ankle, and the only reason it was taking so long to find her was that the school was empty in August. Or she had walked to her friends the Bryces and broken her leg on a fallen tree in the woods. She was closer to Marilyn Bryce than she was to her husband, Justin, but I knew she enjoyed his company, too. Marilyn was a painter her age, and Justin was a restaurateur, older than his wife, who owned bistros in Burlington and Middlebury that specialized in what he considered comfort food: the menus were rich with variations on macaroni and cheese and French fries.
But the fact that my mother hadn’t been found yet was obviously a very bad sign—especially since at least once before she had walked to the river. To the bridge.
I wished I were more comfortable with prayer. I wished I were that little girl again who actually went to Sunday school for a couple of years when I was in preschool and kindergarten.
Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so.