My mother picked up Paige at the college swimming pool late that August afternoon, and the two of them returned home to Bartlett about twenty minutes after I did from Heather Prescott’s—who was still in Bartlett in August, though she and her UVM friends were about to move into their apartment in Burlington. Already I had pulled carrots and cherry tomatoes and a green pepper from the garden in the back of our house, and made a tossed salad to accompany the curried chicken salad our mother was serving for dinner.
After supper, the three of us were a little on edge, but no one said anything about it. We were acutely aware that Professor Ahlberg was in Iowa, and Annalee would be alone in the master bedroom. It had crossed my mind that perhaps for this big experiment I should sleep in the room on my father’s side of the queen bed with the massive mahogany headboard. But I didn’t want my mother to feel like an invalid, and so I never even made the suggestion.
Paige and I watched a cassette of You’ve Got Mail, one of our favorite movies those days. It wasn’t merely a love story with bookstores as the backdrop. It was set in Manhattan, about as far from Bartlett, Vermont, as one could get in glamour and spirit. Our aunt and uncle and cousins lived there, and Paige and I always loved visiting them. And, of course, the movie ends with Harry Nilsson’s affecting cover of “Over the Rainbow.”
I went to bed last. I peeked into my sister’s bedroom and then my mother’s, and I took comfort in the fact they were both sound asleep. I e-mailed my friends, including an Amherst boy I had some interest in named David, who lived in Los Angeles. I remembered to keep my door open to increase the likelihood that I would wake up if my mother had an incident. A little before one in the morning, I put down the novel I was reading, checked my e-mails a final time, and turned out the light. The fact it was almost one in the morning was reassuring, because my mother had gone to sleep around ten p.m. The witching hour when sleepwalkers arose like the undead—those first three hours, that first third of the sleep cycle—was past.
In the morning, Paige shook me awake. I opened my eyes and instantly understood this was bad. My sister had both of her hands on my shoulders and was practically pummeling me. For a fleeting second, in the murk between sleeping and waking, I thought we were on a train hurtling down a wooded mountain pass—the remnant of a dream. But then, even before I comprehended what Paige was saying, I realized this was about our mother.
“Mom’s gone!” Paige was telling me, not screaming precisely, but her panic evident. “She’s gone!”
I was sleeping only beneath a sheet, but I kicked it off without saying a word and stumbled toward our parents’ bedroom. My sister followed me, continuing to babble. “I went into their room to check on her the second I woke up, and she wasn’t there! She must have left sometime in the night!” Outside, the sun was just over the mountain and so it was still early. I wished I had glanced at the clock to see what the hell time it was. I understood on some level that it made no sense at all to go to our parents’ bedroom first, since Paige was pretty clear on this one fact: our mother wasn’t there. But I went anyway; I had to see for myself.
For a moment I stood in the doorway and stared at the empty bed. Then I went and touched my mother’s side. The sheets and the pillowcase were cold. I glanced around the room to see if her summer nightshirt was there. My mother liked to get dressed before breakfast, and over the years I had noticed that she usually tossed her nightgown onto the foot of the bed. Sometime after breakfast—after she had gotten Paige and me off to school, after her husband had left for work—she would go upstairs and make the bed, and put whatever nightshirt or pajamas she had slept in under the pillow. Invariably, I remembered from the days before I left for college, the bed looked as perfect as an image from a Bloomingdale’s catalog by the time I returned home from school, because my mother was an architect—and an architect who cared deeply that her own spaces should be as finely articulated and comfortable as the homes she designed for others. But there was no sign of the nightshirt. Not on the foot of the bed, not draped over the chair by the window, not on her nightstand. Not on the floor.
“You’ve checked downstairs?” I asked Paige. “You’ve checked the kitchen?”
“Of course I’ve checked downstairs.”
“The garden? Outside?”
“Yes, I went outside.” Then, to make her point, Paige shrieked at the top of her lungs, “Mom!” extending the single syllable for at least three or four seconds.