“Maybe.”
He sat back and told me. He talked for easily five solid minutes about what an incredible screwup he had been in high school and how lucky he was to have wound up at even a state college—and without ever having been busted for dope or speeding or any of the ridiculous things he had done when he was sixteen and seventeen years old. When he was a junior in college, he was still unsure what he was going to do with his life, but he wanted something that promised a little excitement—and would allow him to remain in Vermont. When he was home for Thanksgiving that year, a friend of his parents’ who was a state trooper was regaling the family with what he called “idiots behind the wheel” stories, and Gavin grew interested. Soon after graduating, he was at the State Police Academy in Pittsford.
Outside the bakery it was starting to rain, a drizzle that was darkening the sidewalk.
“My God,” I said, “it’s raining. It hasn’t rained since August, has it?”
“We’re not supposed to get very much. It won’t do much to ease the drought.”
“Still.”
“Still,” he agreed.
I thought about what he had said at his niece’s birthday party about the river. If the drought lasted long enough, the Gale might fall so low that my mother’s body might emerge. It was ghoulish to imagine. I wanted closure, but I wanted hope far more.
“Is the job as exciting as you thought it would be?” I asked.
“It’s not. Which is probably a good thing. It’s like flying. Hours of boredom interrupted by moments of terror—but I might replace terror with intense interest. Trust me, I don’t miss the time I used to spend pulling over high school kids in pickup trucks who think they’re immortal and drive a hundred miles an hour. God, I used to be one of those kids. And I really don’t miss the time I spent with their corpses. I like what I do now much more. It’s cerebral. And it makes a difference.”
I watched a woman in a khaki-colored raincoat pull up her collar against the rain and my heart skipped a beat. The woman’s hair was the same incredible shade of blond as my mother’s, and my mother had a raincoat just like that. But then she turned and I saw she was younger than my mother. She really looked nothing at all like her.
“You okay?” the detective was asking.
I turned back to him. “I miss my mom,” I said.
“I know,” Gavin told me. “I do, too.” For a second I thought he was going to reach across the table and take my hand, but he didn’t. I wished he had. “I do, too,” he said again, and this time he sighed.
THE WORD POLYSOMNOGRAM makes all the sense in the world when you break it down into its three-part origin: poly for “many” or “much”; somnus, “to sleep”; and gram, from the verb graphein, which means “to write.”
When you have a polysomnogram, you have twenty-two wires and sensors attached to parts of your body—including a pair for your eyes. They measure movement (eye movement, too, of course), heart rate, and oxygen saturation. There are the wires along your scalp for the electroencephalography, which record the brain’s electrical activity. A video watches you while you sleep.
You wouldn’t think a person could ever doze off amid those wires and sensors. But we do. I did.
One of my videos, I gather, is pornographic.
CHAPTER SEVEN