“Just saying: we’re not the walking dead. At least not always.”
“Could my mom’s disappearance have something to do with sleep sex?”
“It could. It was something we were exploring in those first days. But it’s not likely. You know exactly what I think happened: I’ve told you. I believe your mother walked into the Gale River in her sleep. I believe it was a more traditional parasomnia occurrence.”
“I remember you said that you and my mom were your own little sleepwalking support group. I’m not angry, but it might have been helpful if you’d said you were your own little sleep sex support group.”
“That day in the cruiser? Hours after your mother had disappeared? I disagree: it wouldn’t have been helpful at all for you to hear that.”
“Well, then, maybe you could have shared that little bit of news with me any day since then. You’ve had plenty of chances.”
“I would have told you. Eventually. And certainly before our relationship had progressed to someplace where it might matter.”
I thought about the word relationship, and I realized I liked how it sounded on his lips. “So, we have a relationship?” I asked.
He sat up perfectly straight and folded his arms across his chest. “Arguably, yes. We’ve been on two dates. This might count as a third. My hope is there will be more.”
“Then tell me now. Tell me all that you can about your sleepwalking. Tell me the sorts of things that you told my mom.”
And he did.
He told me of his past. He told me of the girl who had accused him of sexual assault when the two of them were sixteen-year-old counselors at a summer camp in central Vermont, and how close he had come to the sort of criminal record that would have dogged him forever as a sex offender. He confessed that this was actually why he had gone to a nearby state college: he wanted to live at home. He thought it would be safer for everyone. He shared with me that since then he had had girlfriends who, in the end, could not bear the man he became some nights in his sleep and some who, for a time, thought it was an interesting kink in their sex life—but only for a time. The novelty grew thin. Some relationships, he said, simply can’t endure that sort of nocturnal murk.
The sleep center had dialed down his sleepwalking; they had failed to rein in the sexually voracious golem he occasionally became in the night.
I did not return with him to his apartment that evening. But what does it say about me that I considered it, that I wondered if I should try and meet his other, stranger self? Would it suggest that I was kindhearted and giving—a girl who thought I could cure or comfort him? Or would it convey only a wanton sexual adventurousness? Either way, it would have been a gesture that Gavin Rikert would have refused. I was not merely a mess that night; I was na?ve and he was not going to take advantage of me.
And so I went straight home from the bar. Paige and my father were asleep when I got there, my sister in her bedroom and my father in the chair in the living room. I woke him, turned off the television, and put his scotch glass in the dishwasher. Then I went to bed, too.
It would be late the next morning when my father would call me from the college. It seems that the detective had phoned him with news. My mother’s body had been found.
Annalee Ahlberg’s body floated and sank, and then refloated and sank again, as it decomposed in the cooling waters of the Gale. In the first moments after my mother hit the river, water supplanted the little air that was left in her lungs—a palace coup in the alveoli she was by then powerless to stop—and her body grew heavier and drifted to the bottom. Over the following weeks, however, as above the river the leaves began their phantasmagoric autumnal transformation (dying, too, in truth), her body’s decomposition continued. Microbial-induced putrefaction. Microbial-induced bloat. Microbial-induced stink. Gases lifted her body back to the surface—rather like a blimp, except even inflated with the miasma of death Annalee Ahlberg was no dirigible. There was little fat on her at all, and lean bodies can stay at the bottom with the ease of catfish and hermit crabs.
But eventually, the gases win out. The currents win out. My mother was dragged in death nearly three miles along the Gale River, sometimes along the bottom and sometimes along the surface. Her body would most often drift in that classic pose known as the dead man’s float, a lowercase n, because that is how dead bodies move in the water: her fingers and forehead and knees showed the expected abrasions from scraping against pebbles and sludge.