“What do you remember about your own sleepwalking?” she asked me after a moment.
Like most sleepwalkers, I recalled almost nothing. I really had but one memory: waking up and my mother was sobbing. It was one of those horrific, perfect storms. It was ten at night and I was six. In my memory, my mother was writhing alone on the floor of the bathroom off the master bedroom, curled up almost in the fetal position beside the tub. She was wearing a white nightshirt and there was blood on one of her thighs. I was clutching a portable, plastic Barbie dollhouse. I had no idea how or why I had woken up, or what I was doing with the dollhouse in my arms. I had been oblivious to my mother’s crying. My father had gone outside to bring the car to the front steps from the carriage barn. I had been terrified when I had woken and seen my mother in that condition, and I had dropped the dollhouse onto the tile, breaking off a part of the roof and the wall. A small, sharp piece of plastic had shot into my mother’s face, nicking her just below her eye, and the blood had mixed with her tears, making the wound look far worse than it actually was.
Years later, my mother would explain to me what I had walked in on: the third miscarriage. It was starting and my mother knew the feeling, having endured it twice before. She was going to lose another baby.
“I don’t remember anything,” I told Paige. “I really don’t recall anything at all.” The last thing I wanted to do was share that nightmare of a recollection with my kid sister, especially when she was already feeling such anxiety. Our conversation had put a serious crimp in my buzz.
“Nothing?”
“Not a thing.”
Paige seemed to think about this. “What are you dreaming about these days?” she asked. “You said you’re dreaming more.”
“I’m not one of those people who recalls her dreams.”
“Can you think of anything?”
“Sure. I had a dream last night about a building on campus that—at least a part of it—has eight sides. It’s called the Octagon. I’ve had two classes in there. It’s an older building.”
“What happened?”
“I wish I could tell you something interesting and amazing. But all I remember is that I was eating cigarettes.”
“Eww. Gross. Why?”
“It’s even grosser. The cigarettes were lit. I was doing a magic trick.”
“Who was in the room?”
“A couple people. I have no idea who.”
“You’re right: that’s not very interesting. It’s only disgusting.”
I smiled at her. “Okay, then. What about you? What have you been dreaming?”
“Joe the Barn Cat watched Mom leave the house.”
“That’s the dream?”
“Yup.”
“Well, he probably did.”
“I was with him—in the dream. We followed her.”
“Where did she go?”
“That’s the problem. That’s what’s so frustrating. All I remember is that Joe and I follow her downstairs. We follow her when she opens the front door, and we follow her when she goes outside. We follow her when she starts to walk down the street toward the village. She’s walking on the yellow lines right in the middle of the road, but it doesn’t matter because it’s nighttime.”
“Arguably, that’s an even worse time to sleepwalk down the middle of the road.”
Paige frowned in exasperation. “I just mean there aren’t a lot of cars on the roads around here at night.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, there’s Mom and Joe and me. Mom is maybe twenty-five meters ahead of us. You know, the length of the college pool.”
“Do you call out to her?”
“I want to, but I can’t speak. I can’t make my voice work. Dreams are like that, right? Then she disappears. It’s so frustrating.”
I thought about this. “Did you get as far as the general store? The bridge?”
“Nope. Then, poof, Joe and I are just home again.”
“I’m really not an expert on dreams. But I think it shows how much you miss her. That’s all.”
“Duh.”
“You asked.”
She pointed at the television screen and the frame of the magician with his doves. “You’re not going to get doves, are you?”
“No.”
“Good. It would just be so sad when Joe ate them or they died.”
“God, you can be ghoulish.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just the realist in this house.”
YOU MASTURBATE IN your sleep. So you are told. So it begins. And, for some people, so it ends. Self-stimulation. That’s all.
That’s…all.