On the road perpendicular to the bridge the pickup rumbled by, and I felt the bridge shudder, but the driver didn’t notice me. I collapsed onto my back, breathing heavily with relief and disgust. I was topless, I was stoned, and (now) I was crying.
Slowly, carefully, I sat up and checked myself. My hands were bleeding, but not horrifically so. Same with a long scratch on my side. Mostly my wrists hurt, but the pain was not incapacitating. I rolled my eyes as if someone were actually present, and patted myself down: I was not merely checking for broken bones (which I thought were unlikely), but actually reassuring myself that I was alive. That I was fine. I hadn’t fallen into the river and died instantly by smashing my head on a rock. Or in minutes by drowning. When I stood, I saw my pipe on the ground near my feet. Near my clothing. I reached into the sweatshirt for my baggie and opened it, sprinkling the dope into the river, though I guessed most of it would waft in the night breeze into the brush along the banks. Then, even before getting dressed, I reached down for my pipe and hurled it as far as I could into the Gale River. Somewhere downstream I heard a small thwap as it parted the plane of the water.
I ONCE HAD a lover who didn’t mind the sleepwalking. It was the sleep sex that was the problem.
And I once had a lover who didn’t mind the sleep sex. It was the sleepwalking that ruined our relationship.
For me, the trouble always was this: I knew what I had done.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING, in the fifteen minutes between when Paige left for the school bus and my father left for the college, I confronted him in the kitchen. He had a stack of student compositions in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other. He was about to head out the door.
“Why do you really want me to go to the sleep clinic?” I asked him point-blank.
He stared at me, but I couldn’t decide whether his gaze was angry or defensive. Clearly I had caught him off guard. “So Paige feels less frightened,” he said finally. “Frankly, I think she’s being a bit of a worrywart. A drama queen. I’m really not all that concerned.”
“Don’t you think you should have asked my permission?”
“Your history is actually far more extensive than hers.”
“So you just went ahead and made an appointment? You should have checked with me.”
“Why? Because your calendar is so busy?” he asked, in an acerbic tone he rarely (if ever) used on me.
“What does that mean?”
“It means nothing,” he said, softening. “I’m sorry. I know you’re struggling—like me. That’s all I meant.”
“Honestly, how worried are you about her—about either of us?”
“Honestly? Not in the slightest. This is all just a precaution,” he said, and then he put his glass in the sink and pushed past me. I wasn’t sure I believed him.
It wasn’t lunchtime yet, but already I viewed the day as a small victory: apparently, neither my father nor Paige had noticed the scrapes on my hands over breakfast. My right wrist was sore, as were my ribs, but neither was incapacitating and I had gotten dressed. Most importantly, no one had witnessed my debacle last night on the bridge. Now I was sitting across from Marilyn Bryce in her home on one of the hills high above the village. Marilyn’s painting studio was in an old sugarhouse behind their home, near a pond the Bryces had constructed some years ago. It was just the two of us, and we were sitting in the family’s living room with its spectacular view of Mount Lincoln, one of the few four-thousand-foot massifs in Vermont. I was on the couch and Marilyn was on a burgundy pouf. She had set the tea service between us, on a round table fashioned from an antique milk jug and a dark marble saucer the size of a manhole cover. I watched in silence as she poured what she called the oolong tea from the special red clay pot she had brought back from China; the tea had been steeping inside it for precisely three minutes. The woman had used the timer on the oven.
It was clear to me that she had been smoking before I arrived: the living room reeked of weed, and her eyes were a red I knew well. I almost offered her the Visine I had in my shoulder bag. If I had any doubts, they were obliterated by what she said next: “This pot has been well seasoned over the years. It has the flavor of a thousand cups inside it.”
Only someone who was stoned could say something like that with conviction.
“I’m impressed,” I answered because I couldn’t think of anything else I could say that would sound in the slightest way earnest. Moreover, I wasn’t a big fan of tea. The few times I had drunk it, I had simply dropped a bag in a mug filled with tap water and nuked it in the microwave for a minute.
“You’ll detect a hint of jasmine in the flavor,” Marilyn told me affably.
“Jasmine,” I repeated. The word was everywhere these days. It was, I decided, a sign—though I had no idea what the sign meant.