My bedroom didn’t share a wall with my parents’ bedroom. The way our house was laid out, only the guest bedroom did. But before my freshman year of high school, that August, my mother and I together repainted the ceiling and hung new paper in my bedroom. The wild stallions wallpaper had been perfect when I was six, but that summer we replaced it with a floral design rich with shades of orange and peach. And so I was sleeping those days in the guest room. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of my father’s voice. He was speaking firmly, as if talking to a recalcitrant child.
“Annalee. Annalee. Stop it. Annalee.”
I was on my side and sat up so I could hear more clearly. “Annalee. No. I can’t perform like that.”
A moment later I heard their bedroom door open and close, and then I heard my father going downstairs to the den. I wondered if my mother would follow him. She didn’t. By the time my father returned to their bedroom—if he did return that night—I had fallen back to sleep.
For years, however, I had been haunted by that one sentence: I can’t perform like that. In my mind, it was suggestive of my father’s sexual inadequacy: his emasculation. I had been mortified and had tried to forget it. I couldn’t. Clearly it had colored so much of my view of him.
The night of my mother’s funeral, knowing what I understood now of my mother’s parasomnia, I felt guilty that I had thought less of him—and now that haunted me, too.
The next day was the first day that I volunteered at the elementary school in Bartlett. I had taken my father’s advice and called the principal—the same woman who had been running the school over a decade earlier when I had been there—and offered to spend a few mornings a week wherever they needed me. The school had exactly one classroom for each grade, kindergarten through five, and fewer than twenty kids in each room except for the second grade. The Bartlett sixth graders left the village for the area middle school. I offered to do a magic show, but the principal was more interested in having me work with the second graders, where there were twenty-two kids, making it the largest grade in the school.
As I walked through the hallways, the adults I would pass would grow somber. The custodian, a kind man whose hair was now white but whom I remembered well from my years there, wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to hug me and finally decided that the best thing to do was pat me awkwardly on the shoulder. He murmured how sorry he was. The teachers who had arrived since I had left a decade ago looked at me gravely and nodded, as if we were privy to a very special secret. The teachers who I knew told me how special my mother was and asked that great, wholly unanswerable question: How was I doing? I would shrug and lie. I’m fine, I said over and over that day. I’m fine.
But mostly that morning I helped the children iron leaves under wax paper. I recalled doing it myself years ago with my mother, just the two of us working one afternoon on the counter of the kitchen island. I was terrified the kids were going to burn themselves because at any given moment I and the teacher—a woman in her late twenties who insisted the kids call her Hailey—had six hot irons going. She may have been no more than seven or eight years older than me, but she knew what she was doing: she had brought in a heavy-duty, six-outlet power strip with a fifteen-foot cord precisely for this project. She had lined up the irons on one long table—the pressing station, she called it—and the night before had shorn hundreds of sheets of wax paper from once-thick rolls. No one got hurt. We were an assembly line.
At one point a tiny girl named Dakota was showing me the fan of neon-yellow ash she had brought in from home, the seven leaves still attached to the thin branch. Most of the other students had maples—so many maples, some sugar, some red, all phosphorescent—so her ash was a lovely change of pace. Together we carefully snipped the leaves where their stems met the branch, dried them, and sealed them in the wax paper. As we were surveying the last one, I sat down. The final step would be trimming the wax paper, shaping it with scissors. Suddenly Dakota climbed into my lap, wrapping one arm around my neck and just plopping her head against my chest.
“I don’t know what I’d do if my mommy died,” she said.
I saw Hailey watching us—watching me—her eyes a little wide with worry. I nodded at her. I was okay. I was grateful for the child’s warmth.
“You would do just what you’re doing this second,” I told the girl. “You’d hug people. And you’d be really happy when people hugged you.”
The sky was perfectly clear that night, a Friday, and so after dinner Gavin and I walked from the restaurant to the Burlington waterfront. I buttoned up my jean jacket and tightened the scarf around my neck, and was comfortably warm. He took my hand as we walked and only released it when we stood by the railing not far from where the ferries docked. We looked at the sickle moon over the Adirondacks.
“I wish I had understood my parents’ marriage better,” I told him.
He shrugged. “I know your mom loved your dad and I know your dad is an amazing person. Really loving. And really patient.”
“But you guys were looking at him again as a suspect.”
“You have to be thorough.”
“How did he do it if he was in Iowa?”