“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I want to talk to them, too.” Then he handed me his card and we both climbed from the cruiser. “I’ll stay in touch, but you stay in touch with me, too. And Lianna?” I waited as he leaned over the roof of the car. “I’m going to say this one more time because I want to be sure you believe me: your mother and I were not having an affair. We were friends who shared one very uncommon personality trait. That’s all.”
I nodded. I wanted to believe him. But the idea that he was so adamant only made me more dubious.
THEY TELL YOU the term is “arousal disorder.” An arousal disorder occurs during NREM sleep. Non–rapid eye movement. Non-REM. The patient seems to be simultaneously awake and asleep. There are subsets: Sleep terrors. Confusional arousals. Sleepwalking. The patient is oblivious to the environment. The patient is, more or less, inaccessible.
In the morning, the patient is amnestic. The patient remembers nothing or next to nothing, or presumes that whatever occurred was merely a dream.
Merely a dream. Only a dream. Parents say that to comfort their children a dozen times when they’re young, right? “Shhhhhhh. It was only a dream.” They go to their room (if the children have not already come to theirs) and hold them tight, murmuring those magic words. Only. A. Dream. How many times did my own mother say that to me?
Arousal disorders are, most of the time, benign.
Only rarely is the term an inadvertent and wholly unintended pun.
CHAPTER FOUR
NOT QUITE THREE weeks after my mother had disappeared, I was folding laundry and practicing patter in my bedroom. It was a little before nine at night and my father had come home for dinner, spent a little time helping Paige with her analysis of the novel her class was reading, and then fallen asleep in front of the television downstairs. A glass, still a finger width of amber at the bottom, was on the table beside him. The scotch seemed to help him sleep.
I took real pleasure in folding laundry then, especially sheets and towels. I savored their warmth when I pulled them from the dryer, and I derived a strangely deep satisfaction from the rectangles and squares I would create. The stacks of ivory (sheets) and blue (towels). It was work that was orderly and utterly mindless. My thoughts could roam or I could rein them in and focus. That night I was thinking about a magic trick called the Square Circle, and how little kids absolutely loved it. I would show them an exotically decorated, bright yellow cylinder and a square cage that looked vaguely Ottoman: it had wire screens in frames shaped liked minarets. I would take great pains to show my audience that both the circle and the square were hollow—sometimes I would whisk my wand through the circle and run my arm through the square—before placing the tube inside the square. Then I would pull a dozen scarves from the cylinder, the scarlet and purple and canary-colored silks tied together so the rope would seem endless. And just when the kids would think that was it—the circle was empty—I would pull a Beanie Baby squirrel from inside it. I was tweaking my patter that evening because I was considering replacing the squirrel with a Beanie Baby kitten. The story would have something to do with a runaway kitten that was frightened. A scaredy cat. That would be the pun. The key would be to find a way to integrate the scarves into the tale. I wondered if Hello Kitty made kerchiefs or bandanas. They would have to be thin or I would have to use fewer of them, because the secret sleeve was only so big. But I thought the kids—especially the girls—would appreciate the kitten more than the squirrel.
I was bringing a stack of sheets to the linen closet when the phone rang. I put the laundry down on the hallway floor outside my parents’ bedroom and reached for the phone on the nightstand beside their bed.
“Hello?”
“Lianna, it’s Detective Rikert. How are you?”
I sat down—collapsed really—onto the mattress, suddenly scared. They had found my mother’s body. I tried to convince myself that he was just checking in again with nothing to report: he’d done that a week earlier, calling only to ask how Paige and I were holding up. But why would he do that at nine at night? This was different. This was not what my parents referred to as “normal business hours.”
“You there, Lianna?”
I swallowed. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“You okay? You don’t sound good.”
“You found my mother’s body, didn’t you?” My voice sounded very small and childlike in my head.
“No. God, no. I’m so sorry I scared you. I’m not calling about the investigation at all.”
“Okay.”
“This is about business, however; but it’s about your business.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is kind of last minute, forgive me. But I just got off the phone with my sister in Middlebury. Her daughter—my niece—is having a birthday party this Saturday. Feel like performing? Are you up to working?”
“How old is she?” I was fragile and didn’t want the hassle of working with middle-schoolers.
“She’s going to turn eight.”
“In that case, sure. What time?”
“It’s in the afternoon.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you’ll do it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Excellent.”
“How many kids will be there?”
“No idea. I’ll have my sister call you with the details.”