“Middlebury.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Anyone I know?” I could tell he was hoping that he was somehow the conduit. Maybe the party was for a faculty brat.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know the details yet.”
“What’s the family’s name?”
I shrugged. “The mom is going to call me. A…friend recommended me.”
“Well, I’m thrilled. Whoever it is, they are very lucky to have you.”
“We’ll see.”
He took a deep breath and stood, stretching his long, rangy body. He lifted the glass with the last of his scotch and went to turn off the television. He stroked the cat’s fur and smiled down at the animal. As he was leaving the room, I considered calling after him, telling him that the friend who had recommended me was the sleepwalking detective who had once known his wife. But, once more, I kept the source to myself.
Despite the fact there was no body, my father was far from alone when it came to referring to my mother in the past tense. I had friends at Amherst and at home in Vermont who would make the leap that she was dead (because who were we kidding? of course she was), and then tell me how they had never had a person close to them die or the only funerals they had ever attended were for their grandparents. One evening when my friend Ellen Cooper and I were sitting around her bedroom, both of us buzzed, she confessed that she had never been to a funeral. Her grandparents were still alive. Then she added, “I mean, I’ve had dogs die. And a cat. But they don’t really count, do they?”
“They count,” I said, partly to be kind but also because I loved Joe the Barn Cat and I had loved his feline predecessors in our home. But I knew what she meant. It spoke volumes about the cocoon in which my friends and I lived and how lucky we really had been. Yes, some of us had lost grandparents we loved. I had lost both of my father’s parents, and based on how devastated—and frail—my mother’s parents had been when they had come to Vermont in August, I expected soon I would lose them, too. But my friends and I had been spared our peers’ violent deaths in automobile accidents and we had been spared our parents’ deaths from cancer and ALS and the sudden, tectonic change that accompanies a fatal heart attack or ruptured aneurysm. My mother’s disappearance was a sad, strange wake-up call for so many of my friends. It scared them. My presence scared them. I reminded them of the one thing in the world we want most to forget.
It may have been the sound of Gavin Rikert’s voice and his connection to my mother—my living, breathing, sleepwalking mother, not the ever-fading specter whose disappearance the detective was investigating—but the next day I drove to the hospital sleep center in the beige brick building in the midst of the University of Vermont campus in Burlington. I’d been considering a visit for a week now, ever since the shock of my mother’s disappearance—the mourning, the listlessness, the exhaustion—had begun to morph into something else. Real life. Regular life. Gavin’s voice had rallied me.
I didn’t phone ahead because I had a feeling that calling would accomplish nothing. The minute I said who I was, the receptionist would take a message and the doctor would be appropriately guarded when she called me back. I understood the basics of HIPAA and patient privacy. And with a criminal investigation surrounding one of her patients? The woman would be especially circumspect.
But perhaps in person I could get something out of her, though what that something was I couldn’t say. Still, I would play the gamin. I would look pathetic and lost—which really wasn’t all that difficult those days.