TWO WEEKS BEFORE Thanksgiving, my father announced that Grandpa Manholt, my mother’s father, had invited us to Concord for the holiday. In my family, Thanksgiving had always been a movable feast with three rotating locations: our home in Vermont, my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Manhattan, and my grandparents’ majestic (and rather mannered) colonial in Massachusetts. It was technically our turn, but no one expected the Ahlbergs of Vermont to be capable of hosting a family gathering. Moreover, my grandfather could no longer care for my grandmother, and so he and my aunt had decided it was time for my grandmother to move into an assisted living facility that specialized in patients with Alzheimer’s. That would occur at some point before Christmas, and so this was a last hurrah of sorts: another sad landmark in a season that was crowded with them. But Paige and I told our father that we were fine with the idea of one final Thanksgiving with everyone gathered at Grandma and Grandpa’s; the three of us would drive down the day before and spend a few days in the Boston suburbs. My father suggested we could all go into the city on Black Friday and face the madness and the crowds on Newbury Street. I had expected Paige to resist, since that would mean she wouldn’t be skiing on Saturday, but she hadn’t objected. She hadn’t even brought up the conflict. Like me, she was sinking as inexorably as our mother; it was taking more time, but the course for us both was clear. Eventually, it seemed, we both would hit bottom.
“And so we meet again,” said Dr. Cindy Yager, smiling. “Want to split another granola bar?”
This time I was not in her office. I was in her examining room instead, a few doors down from her office and across the hall, seated atop the cushioned table with a paper sheet. It resembled the examining room of the pediatrician I had seen as a little girl and the examining room of the family practitioner I saw now as an adult. Narrow, antiseptic, and decorated with a diploma and a health poster—this one about proper sleep hygiene, with a child’s crayon drawings of sheep and stars and a four-poster bed. The biggest difference between this room and the ones in which I had been examined before? We were on the fourth floor of an impressive hospital complex and so there was a window. The view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks was similar to the one in reception: a tourist postcard that trumped most artwork Yager (or any physician) was likely to use to try and brighten the space. I was still in my jeans and a sweater, but I knew the flimsy gown loomed. There was a folded one beside me on the examining table.
“No, I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound agreeable. My father and Paige were in the waiting room. Paige and I had flipped a coin to see who would go first. I’d lost.
“This will be a pretty low-key physical,” she said, leaning against the counter opposite me. “I won’t be drawing blood, for instance. Mostly I just want to get a medical history.”
“Did my mom tell you much about my sleepwalking as a girl?”
“A little bit. With your permission, I’ll want to ask your father what he recalls.”
“That’s fine. I mean, I really didn’t do much. I woke up a couple of times and didn’t recognize them. Pretty common, right?”
She held her clipboard against her chest like a shield and corrected me: “There was more. Considerably more. You know that.”
I realized that my mother must have told her about the time I wound up in their bathroom after the miscarriage. But I was a little taken aback by how dire the physician made it sound. “The bathroom and the Barbie dollhouse,” I said.
“Yes. And your father told me about the night you emptied out your bureau when you were in kindergarten. All your clothes were on the floor in the morning.”
I had never heard this story. I tried to downplay my surprise with a joke. “Well, I do that now when I’m awake—before dates.”
“And then there was the time you wandered downstairs and rearranged the logs beside the woodstove.”
I sat up a little straighter and tried to muzzle my wariness. This, too, was news to me. “What did my dad—or maybe my mom—tell you about that?”
She shrugged. “You took the wood that was piled near the stove and made a little corral for your plastic horses on the carpet.”
“Sounds pretty harmless,” I said defensively, but I wished I could recall anything from this nocturnal adventure.
“So, is it now my turn to ask you some questions, Lianna?”
“May I have one more?”
“Absolutely.”
“Am I definitely going to have to spend the night being wired? And, if yes, when?”
“That’s two questions,” she replied, raising a single eyebrow good-naturedly. Then: “Not definitely, no. Let’s see. And it would probably be in a month or so, based on my schedule.”
“Paige, too?”
“Correct.”
“So, we’re talking December for the both of us?”