Besides, although it was Carol who told the police that she had heard the Ahlbergs screaming at one another that night, she was also the one who had told them about the time my mother had spray-painted the massive hydrangea silver by the lights from the bay window. The tree was in the front yard, twenty or twenty-five feet from the front door. I was the one who had heard my mother and brought her back inside, but the lights and our conversation had awakened the McClellans, too, and so Carol had witnessed Annalee Ahlberg’s nocturnal eccentricities. (Somehow, the tree, though deformed, would survive. My father cut down the silver branches and tried to shape those that remained so that in time the hydrangea once more resembled a mushroom cloud.) And then there was the night when other neighbors, Fred and Rosemary Harmon, outside together to gaze at a spectacular full moon, saw me walking my mother back over the bridge across the Gale River by the general store a little past midnight. I knew it was an old wives’ tale that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, and so I had woken my mother. By then she had climbed atop the concrete balustrade and was poised like one of the marble angels that stand watch on the bridges across the Tiber and the Seine. The bridge was high enough that had she jumped she would have been crippled or killed: she would have broken her back or crushed her skull or (merely) drowned. She was naked and I, seventeen at the time, was struck by how very beautiful she was. When she was back on the ground, I covered her up in the cardigan sweatshirt I was wearing and led her home.
When my mother was sleepwalking, it seemed she was oblivious even to the cold. One March night, after a late spring blizzard had turned Bartlett into a Currier and Ives print, she took her Nordic skis and went on a cross-country journey throughout the woods behind our house. She had no recollection at breakfast the next morning, but her clothes were drying beside the woodstove—which she had also started in the night—and I followed her tracks the next day when I came home from school.
What all of this somnambulism had in common was that it occurred only when my father was out of town—including the night when she vanished once and for all. It was why the police almost instantly discarded him as a suspect. He had been at a poetry conference in Iowa City.
Of course, that also meant that my mother’s disappearance would be a source of guilt and self-loathing for my sister and me. After all, neither of us woke up that night. Why did neither of us hear something, climb from our beds, and stop her? And as the older sibling, the one who once before had pulled our mother back from the precipice—the one who understood as well as anyone her noctivagant tendencies—I felt the remorse especially deeply. It was why I had chosen not to return to college for my senior year. I couldn’t bear to leave my father and my sister alone. I couldn’t bear to resume a normal life. Amherst had understood. The plan, as much as I had one, was that I would return after Christmas, in time for the spring semester.
Some people speculated that I was waiting for my mother to return—that I wasn’t giving up hope until a body was found and all hope was lost. I wished that were the case, but I knew deep inside that it wasn’t; it was heartbreak, not hope, that was keeping me here.
“Do you know what time Dad will be home tonight?” Paige asked me.
“I don’t.”
“Have you talked to him today?”
“I haven’t.”
Paige sat up and shook her head dismissively. “Mom would have talked to him. She would have known what’s up.”
“I’m not your mother. I’m your sister.” When Paige said nothing, I rattled off a litany of questions as sarcastically as I could: “How was school, Paige? How are you doing with your polynomials? Did you bring home your Lord of the Flies? What are you going to be for Halloween? Or is that too far away? Are you and your little friends too old now to dress up?”
Paige looked at me and her dark eyes grew small. I knew that the girl was going to be a knockout, especially when she was pissed off. When some people are annoyed, their mouths collapse and their face falls into neutral. Not Paige. Even at twelve, she smoldered well. “Why do you make fun of everything?” she asked me finally. “Everything’s just patter for you. Why are you always so…so cynical?”
I sighed. Most seventh graders didn’t use words like patter and cynical, either. But most seventh graders didn’t have an English professor and wannabe poet for a father. They didn’t have an older sister whose summer job was magician: Lianna the Enchantress. (Before our mother had vanished, I had been thinking it was time to tweak my stage name. Come up with something that sounded less like a personal ad for an escort.) I knew that when I had been Paige’s age, I had also taken great pride in my vocabulary. “I work hard at it. People think it’s easy to be like this. It’s not,” I said simply.
“You smell like weed.”
I probably did and it made me feel guilty. I guessed it was my clothes. Dope stuck like Gorilla Glue to L.L. Bean flannel shirts. Of all my good friends from high school, only Heather Prescott had not chosen a college in Maine or Massachusetts or New York, so I’d been hanging around mostly with her lately. She was a senior at the University of Vermont, and still a very serious partier. I had spent the afternoon with her and a couple of nice but not especially bright frat boys. Now I inhaled my sleeve and, sure enough, it was a tad pungent. Skunky. It was a testimony to how much slack people wanted to give me—Warren Ahlberg’s daughter, the girl whose mother had disappeared and who hadn’t gone back to college—that not a single person those days ever asked me why sometimes I reeked like the backroom of a head shop.
“So, I’ll call Dad at the college and see what time he’s coming home for dinner,” I said, not wanting to escalate the fight. I really did feel like a bad role model; on some level, I wanted to do better for Paige. “I was just going to get us wraps and potato salad at the store. But maybe I’ll make a meat loaf. Do you want me to make a meat loaf? You love Mom’s meat loaf.”
“You know how to make meat loaf?”