“They?” I suspected I knew who she meant—what she meant. But she made them sound like werewolves, so I asked her to elaborate.
“Sleepwalkers. Sleep sexers. It really freaked your dad out. It made him feel like he was inadequate. It made him feel like he wasn’t satisfying her. And your mom was already so humiliated. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. She was. And he just made her feel even worse. The things she would do…the things she wanted. For years their sex life was just a minefield.” She gave me a small, sad smile: “It’s a miracle their marriage worked as well as it did. It says something really powerful and lovely about both your parents.”
I felt queasy, and put down my tea. “My dad said he didn’t know why my mom only went sleepwalking when he was gone. But he did know why, didn’t he?”
“Of course he did. When he was in bed with her, she’d have sex with him. Or try and have sex with him. Sometimes she’d just, you know, finish herself. But he was the warm body her sleeping self needed.”
“And when he was gone…”
“She’d try and find someone else. And the key word is try. It’s not like she ever did—at least around here. Maybe if she was alone at a hotel she found someone. She fears that once happened at an architectural conference of some sort—back in the days when she worked for that firm in Burlington. What was it called?”
“Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw,” I reminded her.
“Yes. She traveled for them. She saw people at night. But, God, what was she going to do around here in Bartlett? Knock on Nick McClellan’s front door at two in the morning and ask him to come out and play? Walk over to Donnie and Erin Hempstead’s? Come here to my house?” She snorted and shook her head. “It goes without saying that Justin would have been fine if she’d ever come here and tried to get in bed with the two of us. I’m kidding—but only sort of,” she added.
“So you knew the sleepwalking didn’t begin just five years ago?”
“I did. It just got a lot worse five years ago. A lot more frequent. And it changed. Suddenly she was leaving the bed and going to the bridge and painting the tree. Suddenly she was…you know, more often.”
“And you think my mom used to talk to Gavin about it? She used to talk to him about her…her sleep sex?”
“Of course!” she told me. “That’s what the two of them had in common: Sleep sex. That’s his parasomnia, too!”
“I’m a mess,” I told Gavin. “I’m way more of a mess than you realize. Than I realized.” We were sitting at a bar on Church Street in Burlington, though both of us were sipping decaf coffee: by then I had learned that he drank very little alcohol because of his sleepwalking. And me? I had no desire for wine or beer after our evening in Montreal. I had driven to Burlington after having dinner with my father and Paige because—rather like my mother, I guess—I needed to speak to someone. I needed to speak to him. I wanted to tell him I knew.
“You have every right to be a mess,” he said. “It’s okay. It might be worse if you weren’t a mess.”
“I almost fell off a bridge. I almost jumped off a bridge,” I told him.
At this he looked alarmed. He was still wearing the blazer and tie he had worn to work that day, but at some point he had loosened the knot below his neck. He pulled it a little farther now from his throat, opening the collar of his shirt, and gazed at me intently. I recounted what I had done the other night—what I almost had done—and when I was through, he looked at the bartender, and I expected him to order a beer. He didn’t. He just asked for more decaf.
“And I know way too much about my parents’ sex life,” I went on. “Way. Too. Much.”
“You got rid of all that dope, right? There’s none left in another baggie?” he asked, still on the bridge story with me.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Why? Are you afraid I’m going to do something that stupid again?”
He nodded. “A little. But mostly I’m just worried it was laced with something. PCP, maybe. It happens, even here in Vermont.”
“I just smoked too much.”
“Either way, it’s gone.”
“It is,” I assured him. Then: “And I almost wish I hadn’t talked to my mom’s friend. It was awful enough remembering my mom on the bridge or spray-painting the hydrangea. Now? Now I can’t help but imagine her as some predatory sex zombie.”
“It’s not like that. Not always.”
“Gavin, I did my homework. I always do my homework. You locked yourself out of your own bedroom the night I passed out because you were afraid you’d attack me in your sleep. Am I right?”
“I’d had a drink and a glass of wine at the restaurant, and another hours later at the magic show. I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t even buzzed. But I couldn’t take the chance. Alcohol is one of those things that can trigger an event.”
“An event. I love that. Nice euphemism, Detective.”
“But we’re not zombies.”
“I didn’t realize there was a politically correct term for it.”