“Again. Wow, I was just great company.”
“You were.”
“I gather I locked you out of your bedroom.”
There was a beat I hadn’t expected, a pause. Then: “What do you mean, you locked me out?”
“The bedroom door was locked. From the inside.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You know, I don’t think you would have done that. I don’t think you could have done that. I must have locked it by mistake when I was getting my clothes,” he said, but something had changed in the tenor of our conversation. He sounded at once affable and false. But I couldn’t imagine why he would lie.
“Okay,” I said. I let it go, but I knew my curiosity and confusion about it were going to gnaw at me—like so much else that autumn.
“Have you called my buddy?” he asked. “He’s doing nothing today but watching football. He lives in the building and he’s happy to bring you to your wheels.”
“I’ll just take a cab.”
“No, call him! It’s all good.”
“We’ll see,” I murmured. “I like your apartment,” I told him.
“Thank you. I hope you’ll come back.”
“I will. But don’t bother to chill a bottle of wine.”
“I’ll make a note,” he said.
After we hung up, I called my father and told him that I was on my way home. In the background, I heard Paige singing “Drunken Angel” for my benefit. I folded the sheet and the blanket on the couch. Then I returned to his bedroom to retrieve my boots. I made Gavin’s bed. There was a computer on a small, antiseptic black desk by the window—there it was, the digital knowledge free to be plucked—and for a long moment I stared at it. I knew I couldn’t resist, and so I didn’t even try. I turned it on and watched it spring to life: the cobalt blue of Windows and rows of square icons. One of them, I noticed, was for an art program that came with the operating system, and it reminded me of an armoire or clothing cabinet. Narnia, I thought: I was about to open the wardrobe. I told myself that I should turn the machine off before I had gone too far.
But I didn’t. There was a document on the desktop, and I assumed by its name that it was a case file. I opened it and saw it was about a domestic abuse murder-suicide that had been in the news all week. An unemployed car mechanic in Newport had shot his wife and then himself. Gavin probably was working on it before leaving to meet me yesterday afternoon. I closed it and clicked on his e-mail. I felt bad, but I knew I wouldn’t turn back. Not now. I resolved that I would do one search and one search only. I put my mother’s name in the search bar and pressed the return key. And there they were: a dozen and a half e-mails from her. Maybe more. All were short, but all were clear.
I’m designing a guesthouse on the lake out along Appletree Point. I’ll be there on Wednesday. Up for a cupcake?
No adventures. I slept through the night.
Clonazepam dreams. Not for the faint of heart. You?
Paige will be racing all day Saturday and Warren is entertaining some poet from Scotland. Any chance you’re around for coffee?
I’d love to see you. I need to see you. But I can’t. Not this week. I’m so sorry.
The coffee shop on Tuesday would be great. 11:30?
Perfect. I’m actually at the sleep center that day. See you then.
I read through the chains that led to each final e-mail in the mailbox. There was nothing incriminating in them, though I stared long and hard at my mother’s sentence, I need to see you. The tone of that one unnerved me. But most really were about nothing more than logistics: where and when they would meet. Gavin was more likely to bring up sleepwalking than my mother was, but always as a dark aside or deliberately bad joke.
Yeah, if I believed in God, I’d be a roamin’ Catholic.
Surest cure for my sleepwalking? The night I walk off my roof.
I know there’s not supposed to be a connection between our dreams and our parasomnias, but I think there is—which is why the sex dreams are the scariest. (Your Honor, my client was only in bed with her because of a very rare parasomnia.)
There were no e-mails in nearly three years. The last one from my mother was an apology of sorts that she couldn’t see him after all, because that Friday was my first Parents Weekend at the college, and she and Warren and Paige would be in Amherst then. I found it reassuring to see that Gavin hadn’t lied to me: based on the dates of the e-mails, at least, he and my mother hadn’t met each other in a very long time. Less reassuring, however, was the realization that my mother must have been deleting the e-mails between herself and the detective as soon as she wrote and received them, which suggested she felt they were incriminating. Or they made her feel guilty. Either way, she didn’t want anyone else to see them.