“Sleepwalking, I think. I don’t know for sure,” I answered. “But they loved each other.” I tried to sound more confident about this than I was. I presumed my father loved my mother—or, at least, thought he loved her, which even then I understood wasn’t quite the same thing as actually loving someone. I was less convinced that my mother loved him back, but I was unwilling to admit such a thing aloud. I certainly wouldn’t say that to Paige. But I sometimes wondered if my mother was in fact too smart and too creative and perhaps even too imaginative for her English professor husband: a man who had an endowed chair at an elite New England college. A man who had published widely and written two acclaimed biographies of American poets. Annalee Ahlberg was probably too smart for most men. Moreover, she battled depression: a shelf in the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom was an honor guard of orange vials of antidepressants.
Still, I honestly believed that much of the tension between my parents was born of the sort of fears and frustrations that would cripple any relationship. Their marriage had almost certainly changed between when I was born and when my sister was born. I was nine years older than Paige, and separating the two of us were five miscarriages. I had been old enough to recall vividly my mother’s despair and my father’s disappointment after the last three. I remembered well the months my mother had spent in bed, an invalid, before Paige was born. The hours and hours I would have to be quiet so Mom could rest. The sleepovers at friends so Mom could rest. The week with my grandparents so Mom could rest. And then Paige had arrived: not quite full term, but close. Thirty-four weeks. A shade under five pounds. A week and a half in the neonatal intensive care unit, that was all. In my opinion, my sister had never resembled the aliens that are some premature babies. She had raven-black hair from the moment she was born, a rarity in my family: the Ahlbergs on my father’s side and the Manholts on my mother’s all looked like extras in Scandinavian tourism commercials. The women had long blond braids; the men, with their high foreheads and wispy yellow hair, belonged in the background of old Bergman movies.
And then, seven years later, there was my mother’s sleepwalking. I was in high school. Paige was in second grade. I had read all that I could about the phenomenon at the time, interested because I had occasionally walked in the night as a child. I read about other parasomnias. I read about dreams. (I also read almost every word that my father had written: the published books and the myriad articles in academic journals, as well as his notebooks of unpublished—unpublishable, I sometimes feared—poetry. A lot of it, I noted sadly, was about somnambulism.)
Our house was at the edge of the village in Bartlett, three-quarters of an acre across the street from the river and a five-minute walk to the center: a general store, a library, a firehouse for the volunteer firefighters, and a bed and breakfast. There was a brick church, ostensibly Congregational, but the worshippers—and there were seventy-five or so most Sundays—were largely American Baptist and Methodist, with a handful of Presbyterians. But it was the only church in the village, and so if you went to church, you probably went there. My family didn’t, other than on Christmas Eve and Easter morning. And so I felt more guilty than grateful at the way the pastor, a woman with green eyes and short salt-and-pepper hair who looked more like a lawyer than a minister, had made warm overtures to take my family under her wing since our mother had disappeared. In the last week, the pastor had even gotten me a pair of gigs for later that autumn: magic shows at birthday parties for two kids in the Sunday school.
Our next-door neighbors, the McClellans, had heard what Paige referred to as that “epic fight” five years ago. I overheard Carol McClellan sharing her description of the shouting match with the police the day my mother vanished. And so my father was briefly a suspect, but I don’t think anyone really believed that he had murdered his wife.