Secrets of Eden LP Edition: A Novel [Large Print]-By Chris (Author) Bohjalian
Date: 2010-02-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Mystery; Contemporary; Adult Fiction; Suspense; Angels; Literary Fiction; Thriller; Mystery Thriller
Description: From the bestselling author of The Double Bind, Midwives, and Skeletons at the Feast comes a novel of shattered faith, intimate secrets, and the delicate nature of sacrifice. "There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about . . . angels. Heather su
Publisher: Large Print

CHRIS BOHJALIAN

Chris Bohjalian is the author of nineteen books. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three of his novels have become movies. His newest full-length novel, The Sleepwalker, will be released on January 10, 2017.

www.chrisbohjalian.com
www.facebook.com/ChrisBohjalian

Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @ChrisBohjalian, and find him on Goodreads.

ALSO BY CHRIS BOHJALIAN

Novels

The Guest Room

Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

The Light in the Ruins

The Sandcastle Girls

The Night Strangers

Secrets of Eden

Skeletons at the Feast

The Double Bind

Before You Know Kindness

The Buffalo Soldier

Trans-Sister Radio

The Law of Similars

Midwives

Water Witches

Past the Bleachers

Hangman

A Killing in the Real World

Essay Collection

Idyll Banter

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Chris Bohjalian

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Ebook ISBN 9781524732936

Cover design by John Fontana

Cover photograph by Lario Tus / Shutterstock
v4.1
ep

Contents

Cover

Chris Bohjalian

Also by Chris Bohjalian

Title Page

Copyright

The Premonition

It wasn’t a premonition. That was too strong a word.

But as I stood by the side of the road and watched the power line buffeted by the great, persistent gusts from the south, I had a sense—a distinct sense—that the line was going to snap. It was going to whip high above the wooden poles, then fall to the earth, surrounded by the sparks from the nearby transformer. There it would electrify the ground. I was seventeen that afternoon and I saw it all in my mind: the black thunderclouds rising up above the fields behind the line, the corn tasseled, two Morgan horses looking wary as they walked in small circles in the fenced-in meadow at the edge of the road, and the sparks as they pinwheeled like fireflies above the pavement.

In my imagination, the line would hit the oncoming blue Pathfinder—my mother’s brand-new car and the only vehicle within sight—electrocuting her.

But it didn’t.

The automobile was beyond the line when it was ripped from the top of the pole by a particular whoosh of wind, first jerking high into the air, then curlicuing to the ground almost gently amid its pyrotechnics: garish, sparkling yellow and blue palm fronds.

“Hi, sweetie,” my mother said, unaware that the bang behind her was not thunder but something considerably more ominous. Something legitimately dangerous.

“Oh, my God, did you see that?” I cried out when I opened the passenger door. I didn’t climb in, but leaned in instead. I realized as soon as the sentence had escaped my mouth that my mother had not seen it. She would have been staring behind her if she had. She would be astonished at how close she had come, perhaps, to being killed. And so I continued, my voice a little frantic, “The wind just took out that power line!” I pointed and my mother put the car into park, stepped on the emergency brake, and emerged from the driver’s side of the vehicle. The two of us, a statuesque forty-three-year-old and her still-adolescent daughter, stood on opposite sides of the car on the otherwise deserted two-lane Vermont road for easily ten seconds, neither speaking, as the line twitched once and then twice like a dying snake.

We both felt the first drops of rain at the same time, whipped into our faces as if sprayed by a fan, and it was my mother who spoke next.

“Get in the car, Lianna. Now,” she commanded, and I did just that. My mother accelerated fast, peeling out much the same way that my more idiotic male friends did in the weeks after they got their driver’s licenses. But in this case it made sense: that night we would hear on the news from Vermont Public Radio that a pair of horses had been electrocuted when the sudden storm had blown in and taken down that power line a few miles from the village of Bartlett. The rain had spread the current like a wildfire across the wet grass, the charge executing the animals as they stood near the fence.

*

The year was 1996 and I was weeks away from starting my senior year of high school. The afternoon the power line snapped I’d been waiting at the end of my friend Heather Prescott’s long driveway a few miles from my family’s own red Victorian in the village. My mother was picking me up on the way home from Middlebury. She was supposed to meet me at the Prescotts’ house—the house itself, not at the end of their three-hundred-yard driveway—but I was so pleasantly stoned that I had walked out the front door and started following the clouds as the storm raced east across the Champlain Valley. The air was charged and I just started to stroll. Before I knew it, I was at the road, watching the clouds in the sky and the horses in the field across the street.

The horses were new, which was part of the attraction for me. The people who lived there were new. They’d just moved in the week before. Neither Heather nor I knew anything about the family except the fact they had these two beautiful Morgan horses.

In hindsight, I don’t believe that I would have attached such supernatural significance to the premonition if I hadn’t been baked. If Heather and I hadn’t fired up the banana-yellow bong with the very serious weed that Heather’s older brother had brought back from Boston, I presume that I would have understood as the power line was bucking that what I was experiencing was something far more likely and far more common than a premonition: dread. It was like watching a car swerving on an icy hill and knowing that it was going to slide into the banks the snowplows had created along the sides of the switchbacks. It was just common sense, that’s all.

And yet I couldn’t shake my belief that I had experienced something more dramatic than that. I was confident that even if my mother hadn’t known that the road, once wet, was going to conduct the current and demanded that I get in the car, I would have felt this was more than common sense. And then when we heard on the news that Heather’s neighbor’s horses had been electrocuted? I was particularly unnerved.

But the whole summer had been a little unnerving after my mother’s two sleepwalking events. The whole year had felt off-kilter. Hence the dread. Two times my father, an English professor at the college, had been out of town, and each time my mother had gone sleepwalking in the smallest hours of the morning. Moreover, she didn’t merely sleepwalk downstairs from their bedroom or cook up an omelet in the kitchen. She did far stranger things. The first time she had gone cross-country skiing in our backyard. The second time she had coated the magnificent hydrangea outside our bay window with silver spray paint. We discussed it as a family and my parents had discussed it on their own, and we told ourselves we would be vigilant. We also told ourselves that it wouldn’t happen again, though I know none of us believed that.

Nevertheless, I kept my belief that I’d had a premonition about the power line to myself. I didn’t dare tell my kid sister, because Paige was still weeks shy of the third grade and I didn’t want to frighten her. Paige, of course, might also have been merely incredulous. A gift of prophecy? Please. Paige was young, but she was still precocious enough to call me out for having the arrogance to believe that I may have forecasted the future.

I took comfort in the fact that at least I hadn’t been wearing my harem pants when I had seen the power line snap. Had I been in my magician’s garb—had I just done a children’s birthday party—I might have been seriously creeped out.

*

Two days later, one of those steamy Saturdays in the middle of August, I had a job performing a magic show at one of those children’s parties.

I painted my toenails with glitter polish and donned the purple harem pants and paisley vest I had found at a vintage clothing store in Burlington. This was my first summer as Lianna the Enchantress, a new, more adult persona. (At least I thought it was more adult. Both Paige and my father—who was forty-five and well versed in both popular culture and the classics—presumed I was channeling a Disney princess named Jasmine.)

In any case, this afternoon I was taking my mother’s car and driving my trunk full of illusions to Ethan Gollner’s home. Ethan was in Paige’s class at school: he, too, was about to start the third grade. Paige was going to be at the party, which actually made me a little nervous. Paige would never undermine me publicly—she saved her barbs for the privacy of our home—but I had never done a show where she was in the audience. I would be driving her to and from the party, too. She warned me what I was in for.

“Ethan is a mess,” she said. “He’s smart, but he’s always hitting kids and last year he was always in trouble with Ms. Furchgott. He wet his pants one time when he was playing kickball and made an out.” Ms. Furchgott was the second-grade teacher at the school.

“Will it be mostly boys at the party?”

Paige nodded. “Mostly,” she answered, but she did name two girls who she believed might be there in addition to herself.

When I was nearing the Gollners’ house—a red saltbox with an addition to the east and a connector that looked like a clapboard jet bridge to the barn they used for a garage to the west—I noted that the sky had grown from overcast to a threatening, gunmetal gray. It was going to rain and it was going to rain soon. It was probably going to thunder.

As I was pulling the black-and-silver trunk with my act from the car and setting it on the ground so I could roll it into the house, my stomach lurched and I felt a wave of the queasiness and anxiety that seemed to mark that summer. I wished it was just stage fright, but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t. In this case, it was that awful, endless dark sky.

*

“As you can see, it’s just a cup of sugar,” I was saying, holding what my grandmother called a highball glass in my hand. There were eleven boys and girls—and as Paige had predicted, there were only three girls, including her—on the living room floor before me. Already the kids were pretty hopped up, and I could see the mothers standing behind their kids looking a little apprehensive: they weren’t thrilled by the idea that I might be giving nearly a dozen soon-to-be third-graders a highball glass full of sugar. The fact I had called the trick the Candy Factory only had them further on alert.

Outside, it was pouring now, the rain whipping against the glass windows almost like hail, and sometimes when it thundered the children’s heads turned reflexively and they would scream or squeal at the proximity of the house-rattling bangs.

Now I reached into the cup and rubbed some of the crystals between two of my fingers.

“I want some!” yelled Ethan, the birthday boy, not in a bratty voice, but in the tone of a kid who was just having a little fun at my expense. I had been performing for forty-five minutes now, and managed to convince myself that Paige had exaggerated how difficult the child was. Nevertheless, one of the mothers standing behind the children was begging me with her eyes not to give the child any of that sugar straight. In her opinion, the glass might just as well have been filled with cocaine.

“Well, it’s your big day,” I reassured him. “But we can do better than boring old sugar.”

In all fairness, the mother was right to be worried, and I understood that. The trick was about transformation: changing the sugar into something else. In this case, I was going to change it into a highball glass full of M&M’s. If only out of self-preservation, I saved this trick for the end—it was the second-to-last illusion before my finale—because there was no way I was going to amp these kids up any more than they already were while I was still onstage. Still, I understood that what I did was indeed a little subversive: I was giving the kids a cupful of candy and a few minutes later I would drop the proverbial mic and be out the front door.

“We can do much, much better,” I repeated. Then I took the fire-engine-red cylinder that fit over the glass, first demonstrating to my audience that it was hollow. One child, a lanky girl with a Barbie headband in her hair, jumped up and peered in to be sure, but I was ready. I held tight to the cylinder. From the corner of my eye I saw Paige smirking. She did not know precisely the trick behind the illusion, but she understood that it had something to do with the cylinder.

“Who’s hungry?” I asked, and most of the kids shrieked that they were. But not all. I noticed one little boy was still sitting with his back to the coffee table that had been pushed against the wall, staring at me—through me—but silent. For a brief moment I lost my concentration as I tried to recall if the child had been involved at all in my show, and didn’t believe that he had. He had dark eyes and raven-black hair that hung over his ears and his forehead like a mop. He was the only boy in long pants, a pair of jeans that were cuffed.

I regained my focus and gripped the top of the cylinder with my fingers, placing the glass of sugar in the palm of my other hand. Then I slid the cylinder over the glass, covering it completely, and shook it: not enough to spray the sugar out the top, but enough that the kids and their parents could hear the “factory” at work. It was a clatter, the sound of peanuts rattling in a can, perhaps, or just maybe…M&M’s candies bouncing against the glass.

Abruptly I whisked off the cylinder and put it on the table behind me, revealing for the kids a full glass of colorful M&M’s. The kids cheered and I was about to pour a few into each of their hands, when Ethan’s mother said from the back of the room, “Lianna, I think those would be great on the cake, don’t you? I could put them in the icing.”

I understood the cue. “That’s exactly what the Candy Factory is for, Mrs. Gollner,” I said, and I stepped through the kids, planning to hand Ethan’s mother the glass.

But then Ethan screamed, “No!,” his tone this time very different from his earlier outburst, and I stopped dead in my tracks. This was legitimate rage at the unfairness of his mother and her collusion with Lianna the Enchantress—at the way the two of us were denying him a wish on this, his day of days. “It’s my birthday and I want that candy!”

“Ethan, that’s enough,” said his mother, and she folded her arms across her chest.

Before I could either cross through the audience to hand the cupful of candy to Mrs. Gollner or retreat and place it back behind me on my table, there was another clap of thunder and Ethan leapt at me, a lemur in the guise of a boy. I had children all around me and there was no place to run without stepping on someone, and so reflexively I pulled back my hand and raised my arm, but I moved so quickly that I sent half the candy saucering into the air and onto the living room furniture and floor. It was raining M&M’s and the kids were laughing and diving over one another to get them, and in the madness one of the other boys conked Ethan on the side of the face with his elbow. The child bellowed and the rest of the room went silent. Even his mother was so stunned by the cry that it took her a moment to go to him.

“I’m sorry, Ethan,” the other boy said, pleading. “It was an accident.”

But it was too late. The birthday boy was crying, and already I was inhaling the acidic smell of urine and noticing the stain that was spreading along the front of his khaki cargo shorts. I knew instantly that the fact he was crying was the least of the child’s problems today and, alas, probably for years to come. Ethan Gollner was now the Boy Who Had Peed His Pants at His Own Birthday Party. The children noticed it, too, of course, and were hollering and gagging histrionically, pointing at him as his mother knelt in front of him, examining his cheek, kissing it, and then murmuring that she would get some ice. From her spot on the floor Paige nodded knowingly at me: she had picked this one.

At some point the boy’s father had appeared and was leading him from the room. “Let’s get you some new pants, champ,” he said. “Not the end of the world. Your mom can bring the ice upstairs.”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” wailed the other boy, his voice choked with his own sobs.

Almost everyone else, however, was making fun of Ethan or heading off to the basement to play, including my sister. The only child or grown-up who remained was the boy with the dark eyes and the blue jeans with the cuffs. He was still in his spot on the floor with his back to the coffee table. He was still watching me.

“Hi,” I said to him.

“Hi,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

“Eric.”

His tone was neutral, utterly without emotion.

“Are you in Ethan’s class?”

Instead of answering my question, he said, “You’re not really an alchemist. I know what real alchemists can and can’t do. You put the cylinder behind you. Inside it is the fake glass.”

That wasn’t precisely the secret, but it was pretty close. I considered seeing if there was a way I could remove the evidence from inside the cylinder before showing it to him, but there probably wasn’t. Before I even had to make that decision, however, he continued, “I waited until everyone left to tell you. I’m not a know-it-all who wrecks things. I appreciate wizardry.” His tone was completely sincere.

“Thank you,” I said. Then: “How old are you?”

“Eight.”

“How do you know about alchemists? How do you even know that word?”

“I want to learn every single thing there is to know about the Middle Ages.”

I glanced out the window and noted that the rain seemed to be slowing. I considered urging him to join the kids who had been herded downstairs to run around the basement, where earlier in the party they had been playing games. I wondered if his mother or father was among the parents who had remained to help chaperone the party, and guessed not.

But I was wrong. Before I said another word to the boy, I felt a presence behind me and turned to see a woman my own mother’s age with caramel-colored hair that fell to her shoulders.

“I see you met my Eric,” she said to me, sitting on the floor beside the boy and patting his knee in a way that exuded good-natured camaraderie as much as maternal love. “I’m Cristina. Cristina Holbrook.”

“I’m Lianna.”

“We’re new here.”

“Oh?”

“Yup. We bought the Thompsons’ house out on Orchard Street.”

“Across from the Prescotts’?”

“That’s the one.”

“Then”—and I paused, unsure how to phrase what I was about to say, hoping to find the least disconcerting construction—“those were your horses.”

The woman nodded, stealing a glance at her son as she did. He wrapped his arms around his rib cage as if he were binding himself, holding himself together—creating a straitjacket or a defensive cocoon, I thought.

“Yes,” said Eric’s mother. “Those were our horses.”

*

The problem with bringing Paige to the party was that I had to wait for it to end to bring her home. I had to watch Ethan open his presents and then some of the kids pull the M&M’s from the cake frosting the way nasty children pull wings from flies—the index finger and thumb working like tweezers—and I had to chat with the grown-ups. They wanted to be polite and show their interest in my life, which meant they tortured me by asking me about my upcoming senior year of high school and where I might be applying to college. The one parent that interested me, Eric’s mother, was always near her son and so we never spoke again that afternoon.

But it did mean that on the car ride home I could ask Paige about the party and the new boy.

“He was kind of quiet during the show,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“Maybe he just knows magic is stupid,” Paige said, trying not to smile, but the side of her mouth was curled up the tiniest bit.

“Yeah, it wasn’t that. But he did become one heck of a big talker when it was just the two of us.”

“He must have figured out pretty fast that Ethan Gollner is a disaster.”

“He really is. But it was nice of him to invite you.”

“He just wanted as many presents as possible.”

“He probably likes you.”

“He likes that I’m good at sports.”

“Maybe. But all the kids like you.”

We paused at a stop sign. In the brief quiet, she asked me, “Is there something wrong with the new kid?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Well, one minute he’s super-quiet. And then he just goes off on dragons and wizards and stuff. He said something about this special saddle and blanket he had for his horse. He said he owns jousting pads for it. He said he owns a lance, but it isn’t real. When I asked what jousting pads are, he might have talked for eleven hours if Ricky Atkins hadn’t shut him up.”

“Why does that mean there’s something wrong with him?” I said, though I had a feeling she was onto something.

“That was, like, all he would talk about. Ask him if he wants cake and he answers that in the old days dessert was honey and wine.”

“Oh. Maybe he is a little strange.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“But I’m glad Ethan’s parents thought to invite him. You’ll look out for him, right—when school starts?”

She turned to me, horrified. “He’s a boy and he’s weird and I don’t even know him.”

“No one does.”

She reached forward and turned on the radio, scanning the stations until she found a song that she liked. I knew my sister well enough to know that she had no intention of continuing this conversation while trapped alone in the car with me.

*

My father swirled his scotch in his glass and I found myself gazing at the ice cubes in the amber. In school that spring I had read that once upon a time advertisers put the word sex into alcohol ads, sometimes hiding the letters in the ice, because nothing sells like sex. I felt only a little buzzed now, and I tried to find the x in the contents of my father’s glass. I thought I might have discovered one in the highest of three cubes, but of course no one had airbrushed that ice. This was real.

I sat back in the couch. Maybe I was more wasted than I realized. I had no plans tonight but to hang around with my family, which I always enjoyed, but I had retreated to my own room after dinner and smoked a small bowl first.

“I wouldn’t call the little boy strange because he is fascinated by the Middle Ages,” our father was saying to Paige. She was in her pajamas now and had curled up in the great chair with him, half on his lap. Soon he would walk her up to her bedroom and either he or our mother would read to her. Our parents alternated, but I couldn’t remember whose turn it was this Saturday night. “Perhaps it’s evidence of a keen intellectual curiosity.”

“Okay. I’ll stick to weird,” Paige said.

Our mother was upstairs taking a bath. She had read somewhere that a warm bath decreases the likelihood of a sleepwalking event, and so she had begun taking baths before bed. We suspected this was just an old wives’ tale, but it was harmless and she had discovered just how much she enjoyed devouring novels in the tub.

“That’s not a very precise word, either, Paige,” he answered, his voice soft and professorial. “Weird can mean an awful lot of things. I think he actually sounds a little shy. Maybe all his talk of wizards and jousting is a defense mechanism. Remember, he doesn’t know anyone yet.”

“I think in this case, weird’s a pretty good word, Dad,” I chimed in. “I’m with Paige on this one.” I knew that I wasn’t being helpful from a pedagogical perspective, but it was going to take a lot more time or considerably stronger weed for me to forget the way Eric had waited behind to tell me that he knew the secret behind the Candy Factory. It also annoyed me when our father pretended he was Atticus Finch.

“Lianna! I am sure there are people who think your magic is…weird,” my father reminded me.

“Okay. Let’s try this one,” I said. “How about awkward. He’s the most awkward kid I’ve met in a very long time.”

“I’ll accept that. And Paige?”

My sister looked up at our father.

“I would suggest you just view this awkwardness as a part of what makes Eric who he is,” he said.

“Like a condition?” she asked.

He sighed. It wasn’t like a condition at all, but he wasn’t going to correct her yet again. The truth was, we referred to my mother’s sleepwalking as a condition, and obviously Paige did not think less of her because of it. I sensed this was what my father was thinking, and I smiled at him. I wanted him to know that I appreciated how difficult it was sometimes to be a parent.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“Why is he so awkward?”

“I have no idea. All I know is what your sister has told us.”

Paige looked over at me and scowled. “You didn’t ask enough questions at the party.”

“I didn’t have a chance,” I answered defensively. We had gone through all of this at dinner. About the very same moment that Cristina Holbrook told me that she had moved into the Thompson house across from Heather Prescott and those were her horses that had been electrocuted, Ethan Gollner’s mom had come in and said I’d done a great job, but the magic-show part of the celebration clearly was over. I had felt a little chastened and a little judged. I didn’t believe that the Candy Factory trick had tanked the party, but I had a feeling that Mrs. Gollner did. Nevertheless, I had already decided to remove the trick from the parties where the audience was going to be this young.

“You know, I wish I hadn’t even brought the kid up at dinner,” I added.

“Oh, I’m glad you did,” our father said. “I think your sister is, too.”

“Maybe he was so quiet because he was so sad,” Paige said.

“Probably true. Imagine if you had two horses and they were both electrocuted,” said our father.

“And you’re in a new village,” I added. “You haven’t made any friends yet.”

Inside, however, I didn’t believe it was quite that simple. Eric Holbrook might have been sad that the horses had died—he might have been devastated or stunned or scarred—but he was also…something else.

I heard our mother on the stairs, and a moment later there she was. She was in her favorite navy-blue sleep shirt: it buttoned up the front and fell to a few inches above her knees. Annalee Ahlberg was tall and beautiful, and her legs seemed to go on forever.

She bent over and kissed me on the top of my head as she passed me.

“What are you all talking about?” she asked.

“The boy whose horses were killed,” said Paige.

She seemed to think about this as she sat down on the couch. Then she said, “I called Cristina tonight—his mom. Mostly just to introduce myself. You know, welcome her to the area, see if she needs anything. Tell her how sorry I was about those poor animals.”

“Did you tell her how close we were when the power line snapped?” I asked.

“I did.”

“And does she need anything?” my father asked.

“Not really. It’s just the three of them: Cristina, her husband, and Eric. He works at the college.”

“Does he?”

“Yes, but in administration, not faculty. He’s in development. They just moved here from Saratoga Springs. He used to work at Skidmore.”

“Ah, development,” my father said, nodding dismissively. “He makes sure there is money for climbing walls and a world-class natatorium.”

“And financial aid,” my mother said, raising an eyebrow. Then she turned back to me and said, “She liked your show, Lianna. She thought you were adorable.”

I wasn’t sure I liked being adorable. I thought kittens were adorable. Babies were adorable. I wanted to be mystifying or surprising or professional, at least when I was performing.

Paige nuzzled a little farther into our father’s chest. She rested her head against him. “Is Eric really upset?” she asked our mother.

“About the horses? Oh, I guess he was. He is. Certainly Cristina is. They were her horses at first.”

Paige toyed with one of the covers on the armrest. “I just can’t see that weird kid on a horse.”

“Apparently he rides rather well. Before they moved here this summer, he was in some medieval equestrian festival in New York.”

I could imagine Cristina Holbrook elaborating on her son’s interests, though with a voice that was not nearly as obsessed as Eric’s. I had the sense that Cristina had probably shared a good deal more about her disconcerting little boy, because my mother was confident and kind and invited confession. I did my best to listen as our parents and Paige continued to chat, but whether it was the dope or the fact it had been a long day, my mind wandered.

And soon I was filled again with the dread and anxiety that had been trailing me lately, and that I just couldn’t seem to shake.

*

On Sunday afternoon, my mother let me drive the new Pathfinder to Middlebury so Paige and I could buy our notebooks, binders, and pens for the school year that was soon to begin. Our family had purchased the SUV specifically because eventually my parents would be carting me and all of my furniture and clothes to (and from) college, and in the meantime it would make traveling to the Snow Bowl, where our family skied, considerably more comfortable. Paige was already a promising young ski racer, a kid who was fearless, athletic, and fast.

On our way out of town, just a few miles from the village center, I coasted to a stop and pulled off to the side of the road near the Prescotts’ driveway.

“Are we going to Heather’s?” Paige asked, her voice tinged with both annoyance and surprise.

“No.”

I saw that the power line was repaired. I spotted a backhoe in the field across the street and two fresh hillocks of dry August dirt where I presumed the horses were buried.

I turned off the ignition and climbed from the car. “Want to come with me or wait here?” I asked Paige.

“Where are you going?”

I pointed at the field across the street, and Paige rolled her eyes, unbuckled her seat belt, and joined me. The sun was high and the air felt steamy.

Though I loved our cat, I really didn’t view myself as much of an animal person. Today, however, I was drawn to those mounds. I felt a need to pay my respects. It was as if those horses had taken the bullet for my mother and me.

“Come on,” I said to my sister, crossing the street and climbing over the wooden fence into the meadow.

The two of us stood there before the graves for about thirty seconds in absolute silence. I tried to rein in my more ghoulish thoughts, but it was impossible. I heard the horses’ whinnies as they felt the electricity coursing through them, the agony of the shock and then the unbearable spike of pain as their hearts abruptly stopped beating. Did they rear up on their hind legs or did it happen too fast? I imagined Cristina finding them dead in the field. I saw the backhoes digging the two plots and then unceremoniously pushing the dead animals into the deep rectangular trenches.

Finally, Paige spoke, motioning up toward the house. “Is this okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine. No one would mind.” But when I followed my sister’s eyes, I felt a pang of worry. There, watching us from the terrace at the back of the house, perhaps fifty yards away, was Eric. Either we hadn’t noticed the boy, which was possible, or he had seen the two of us and come outside. I wondered now if this was in fact a violation of some sort, an impingement on the family’s privacy or mourning.

“I think he’s coming,” Paige said. I thought she sounded anxious, as if she were thinking the same thing that I was. I could see that Cristina had joined her son and the two of them were fast approaching.

“It will be fine,” I reassured Paige.

“Hi, there,” Cristina said when she reached us. She was wearing a white sundress with a print of blue irises.

“Hello. We just…I just wanted to pay my respects, I guess. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Oh, not at all.”

“This is my sister, Paige. You might remember her from the birthday party. She’s in Eric’s class.”

“Hello, Paige.”

“Hello.”

I glanced at Eric. He was gazing past us at Mount Abraham in the distance. Paige was staring down at the twin mounds, apparently fearful that it would be awkward to observe this strange new classmate, but also afraid to look at the boy’s mother.

“What were the horses’ names?” I asked the woman.

“Clara and Marnie. Clara was seven. Marnie was eleven.”

“I am really sorry, Mrs. Holbrook.”

“I know. Thank you. And, please, call me Cristina.”

“Does Eric miss riding them?” asked Paige.

“Why don’t you ask him?”

Paige nodded, embarrassed. She understood on some level that she shouldn’t have been speaking as if he weren’t present. She looked at the boy, and though he didn’t look back, she asked, “Do you miss riding your horses?”

“Yes.” The answer was short but not brusque. He continued to look out at the mountain.

“I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened to them,” she went on.

“Clara was one year younger than me,” he said, finally looking at Paige. “I didn’t get to name her because she was named when I was a baby. If I had gotten to name her, I would have called her Brunhild, which is a much better name for a jousting mare.”

“Brun what?” asked Paige.

“Brunhild. It means armored battle maiden.”

“Do you two want to come up to the house for lemonade?” Cristina asked.

I knew that I didn’t and I suspected that my sister didn’t. We both wanted to get to Middlebury and do our back-to-school shopping, and steer clear of conversations about armored battle maidens. But I thought of what this woman and this boy had lost and couldn’t imagine saying no.

“Okay,” I answered.

“Lovely,” Cristina said. She looked at Eric, who once more had grown quiet and was staring at the two mounds. The boy raised his hand and waved at them, using mostly his wrist. Then his mother did, too.

*

Cristina seated the two of us on the terrace in elegant wrought-iron chairs with weather-resistant plaid cushions. She poured the lemonade from what I thought looked exactly like the old Kool-Aid pitcher: bulbous and squat, but cheerful. It was delicious. Eric sat beside his mother on the wrought-iron settee. He draped a massive, illustrated children’s encyclopedia of the Middle Ages on his lap as if it were a napkin. He thumbed through it intensely as if we weren’t there and he was all alone on the porch.

For the first few minutes Cristina asked Paige all about the kids in Eric’s and her class, some of whom she had seen at the party. She was mining for friends for her son. And Paige obliged because Paige was smart and understood this as well, and because she was always happy to share the skinny on the kids around her. Sometimes Paige answered Cristina directly and other times she spoke to Eric; almost always her candor left me smiling.

But I felt the tenor change abruptly when Cristina focused on me and said, “Your mom and I had an interesting conversation.”

“Oh?”

“She told me she’s an architect,” the woman said, and I was relieved. I told myself that I was overreacting in this summer of dread. “Someday my husband and I might have her here to do some serious renovations on this place.”

“Your house looks pretty,” I told her, trying to be polite. The house was a rambling farmhouse, the clapboards tired and old. I had not been inside it, but I had lived my whole life in Vermont and knew that the inside was most likely a series of small, dark rooms and a second floor with claustrophobically low ceilings. I had a sense that the family had bought it mostly for the land for the horses, and for the fencing that was already here.

“Hah!” She turned to her son and asked, “Eric, would you like to show Paige the keep?”

“Okay.”

“A keep?” I asked.

“It’s the castle within the castle: the final defense. It’s not done here. I had a much stronger castle keep in our old house,” Eric said, and he looked a little annoyed when he explained that he had a more finished keep back in Saratoga Springs.

“I’m okay here,” said Paige, and she motioned at her glass of lemonade.

“It’s his bedroom,” Cristina said to me, her tone almost confidential.

“I’m using Clara’s caparison for the entrance. But I used it even before she died,” Eric told us. “It has our colors.”

“What’s a—”

“It’s the fancy draping a horse wears during a joust,” Cristina’s mother explained before I had even finished my question.

“Or any tournament,” Eric corrected her.

“Sounds cool,” I said. Then I turned to my sister. “Why don’t you go see it, Paige?” I knew that the last thing in the world Paige wanted was to be alone with this boy. But I was afraid it would be rude not to go. There was a pause that probably lasted no more than a couple of seconds, but it felt like hours to me.

“Sure,” said Paige finally, the reluctance in her voice obvious to me, but I hoped not to Eric’s mom.

The boy rose, taking his thick book with him. Paige followed, but she glanced back at me once, her eyes narrow and the message clear: you owe me big-time, Big Sister.

When they were gone, Cristina reached over and topped off my lemonade and murmured, “I grew up in North Carolina. We take our lemonade very seriously.”

“You don’t have any accent at all,” I said, and instantly regretted the remark. I was afraid that I had sounded condescending and rude.

“I grew up in Durham,” she said, as if that explained everything. She didn’t sound as if she felt insulted.

“I like Eric,” I said, hoping to move beyond my observation about her accent. “He seems like a very nice boy.”

“He is. I wish I could read how much he misses the horses.”

“I bet he misses them a lot.”

“Clara and Marnie were very good for him. I do know that.”

“I bet they were.”

“We all have our quirks, don’t we?”

“I know I do,” I answered, trying to be agreeable. Again I felt a twinge of unease. It grew more pronounced when Cristina sat back and folded her arms across her chest.

“When I was at the general store this morning,” she began, “that chatty woman who works there—you know, the one at the deli counter?—said your mom had a really quirky experience this summer.”

I knew instantly what was coming. Our house was in the center of the village, and word spread quickly that the massive hydrangea before the bay window in the front of our house had been spray-painted silver. Plenty of our neighbors passed it when they drove through Bartlett, and others made special detours to see it. My father eventually had cut away most of the branches, and I thought it unlikely the tree was going to live. And so I wasn’t surprised that Peggy Woodward, the gossip who worked at the store, had reported my mother’s sleepwalking; I was, however, a little taken aback that Cristina Holbrook had been willing to bring it up.

“The hydrangea and my mom’s sleepwalking?” I volunteered. There was really no reason to be evasive or coy.

“Yes! I find that so interesting.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said.

“Oh, I agree. I just found it kind of amazing. She really had no idea that she had done it—spray-painted a tree?”

“Nope.”

“And no idea why?”

“Not a clue.”

Cristina shook her head and said, “As a little boy, Eric sometimes woke up in his sleep and didn’t recognize us.”

“I know that can happen.”

“The pediatrician said it happens with lots of little kids. They outgrow it—which Eric did. Did it ever happen to you or your sister?”

I nodded. “It happened to me. Not Paige. I outgrew it, too.”

“Good,” she said. “Good.” She took a sip of lemonade and went on. “Your father is a professor. English, right?”

“That’s right.”

“My husband is new to the college. It’s why we moved here. He’s in the development office.”

“What do you do?”

Her gaze went distant. “I ride horses. I raise my son.”

“Will you get more horses?”

“I don’t know. This house kind of swamped our savings, and horses aren’t cheap. But I’m hoping to figure something out.”

We chatted for another fifteen minutes, and I told her what I thought she might find interesting about Bartlett and Vermont. I had loved growing up in the village and tried to make it sound as appealing as possible, because the death of her horses had to have been the worst introduction to the area imaginable. Eventually, Paige reappeared alone, her face a little pleading. “We should get to the store before it closes,” she said to me.

“Everything okay, Paige?” asked Cristina, rising. I stood, too.

“Uh-huh.”

The woman walked past Paige and into the house, and Paige and I followed. When my sister and I made eye contact, she swirled her index finger around her ear, the universal way we dismiss someone as crazy. I knew she was referring to Eric.

We went to the boy’s bedroom. Instead of a door, there was the horse’s red-and-white cloth caparison. It was pinned to the top of the frame. The walls were cardboard bricks from the floor to the ceiling, and even the two windows were mostly covered with them. There were but thin slits from which to peer out. There was a massive coat of arms above his wooden headboard, with eagles and sabers on a purple-and-gold shield. On two wooden shelves were medieval soldiers, all beautifully colored and perhaps two inches tall. He was arranging them when we got there, comfortable and content and utterly at peace with the world.

*

My father left for Los Angeles and the Huntington Library, where Wallace Stevens’s papers were archived. He was thinking of writing a biography of the poet, but first he was going to test the water with an article for a scholarly journal. It was the week before the fall semester was about to start, and so he was going to be gone only three days—but he said that was plenty for his purposes. If he did decide to write the book, he would return to L.A. for a longer period.

Certainly it had crossed all of our minds (even Paige’s, I suppose) that Annalee Ahlberg might once again rise in her sleep like the undead and do something a little odd. It was August, so we were not worried about her going for a ski in the woods, but it was certainly possible there were other trees or shrubs that her sleeping self wanted to decorate.

“Should I put the paints in the basement under lock and key?” my father had asked, only half kidding, and my mother had laughed.

When I was little, before Paige was born, my mother had worked for a large architectural firm in Burlington. Now she worked alone so she could choose her own hours and be there for my sister and me. Some days she even worked from home. My father did not travel much, either: an occasional academic conference, a little research for an article or a book—he had published two, both biographies of American poets—but he was never gone for more than a few nights at a time.

I thought of the way Cristina had referred to my mother’s sleepwalking: a quirk. That was an apt word. That was how we viewed it.

None of us worried all that much that Warren Ahlberg was going to be in California for a few nights in August. I experienced nothing like the premonition I had felt the day that Cristina Holbrook’s horses had died.

*

My mother invited Cristina and Eric to our house for dinner the first night our father was away. She’d invited Eric’s father, too, but he was at an alumni function and didn’t join us. When they arrived, my mother put my sister and Eric to work shucking the fresh corn, and the two of them sat in the glider swing on the front porch with a tray between them for the corn and a brown paper grocery bag on the floor for the husks and silk. I went to help because I could see that Paige was not pleased with the way she had once again been paired with the new kid who was fixated on jousting and alchemists.

“I might apply to Skidmore,” I said to Eric, leaning against the railing. I hated talking about college and the process of applying, but I wanted to find something that might interest Eric that didn’t involve castles, and this thread combined both his family and his old home. “I thought it was a really pretty campus. I have no idea if I could get in, but I really liked it. I liked Saratoga Springs. Do you miss it?”

He worked a cob free and was now meticulously pulling each piece of silk from the ear of corn, a single thread at a time. Paige was transfixed by his focus on the task. Of course, she might just as easily have grown fixated on my rambling monologue. I tended to babble when I was nervous, my words the gas that fills the empty container.

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I know I’d miss it,” I went on, and Paige turned from Eric to me.

“Gee, would you miss it, Lianna?” she asked, smiling.

“In the Middle Ages, people never moved. You lived your whole life in the same place,” said Eric. “Unless you were a warrior or a knight. Then you might be gone your whole life.”

On the tray between the youngsters were nine ears of husked corn, every one of them placed there by Paige. Eric still had that first ear in his hand. Paige looked at it and said, “I think that’s done.”

He shook his head and kept working, fixated on a thread near the tip. Paige rolled her eyes and took the tray with the rest of the corn into the kitchen, leaving me alone with the boy on the porch.

*

After dinner, my mother said, “Paige, do you want to show Eric your trampoline?”

The sun was setting, but it was still light enough for Paige to do her wild-woman thing on the trampoline. Her athletic skills already were evident, and though she viewed herself as a skier, she was capable of front and back somersaults, backflips, and multiple twists on the trampoline. It was round and had a twenty-five-foot diameter, and it dominated our backyard in the summer.

“I don’t feel like the trampoline tonight,” she answered.

“Want to show him your Gooey Louie?” Gooey Louie was a more grotesque version of the classic game “Operation,” but instead of removing organs and bones with a pair of tweezers without causing the sides to buzz, you had to extract boogers from inside Louie’s nose. Eventually, someone pulls out the booger that causes the brain to explode. It was ridiculous and tended to grow old fast, but the premise itself was enough to make Paige squeal with genuine delight when she was in the right mood.

“Nope.”

When my mother saw that she was going to have no success encouraging Paige to be a hostess to her new classmate, she glared ever so slightly at my sister. But Paige was always an immovable object when she wanted to be. So I said to the boy, “I’m going to jump around on it. Come with me.”

“Can we go to the river instead?” he asked.

“Sure,” I agreed. The Gale River ran across the street from our house. It was never a burbling brook, hence its name, especially when melting snow and summer thunderstorms would create a magnificent torrent of white water and foam—and it had rained plenty that August. The river was froth and speed, and Paige and her friends sometimes would stand by the railing on the bridge in the village and toss sticks into the water and watch them jerked west toward Lake Champlain. There had even been times over the years when the Gale had overflowed its banks and savaged the county—one year taking out a steel bridge that had stood for decades, another year flooding our small library and turning the children’s books into unreadable sponges—but the river bent away from our house and we’d never even had water in our basement.

“Want to come with us, Paige?” I asked.

There was a beat while we all waited. Finally, she pushed herself from the table and mumbled, “Okay.”

We watched the water and tossed in a few sticks and clusters of leaves from the riverbank. It was all very congenial.

*

The next day my mother told me that the backhoe that had dug the graves for the Holbrooks’ horses was gone. She had noticed when she was returning from Middlebury.

“How worried were you really that we might have been electrocuted?” I asked her. “Were we really close enough that we might have been in trouble?”

She was unpacking groceries in the kitchen. “I don’t know. When I told you to get in the car and we drove off, it was kind of a maternal reflex. I probably overreacted. We might have been fine.”

“But the horses…that’s scary.”

She leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “I want you to help me with Paige.”

“What about her?”

“I want her to look out for Eric when school starts. Someone has to, and Paige is popular and Paige is a leader. I don’t want that child bullied.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said. “I told Paige the same thing after Ethan’s birthday party.”

“You don’t think Paige will protect him?”

“I don’t know if it would make a difference if she did. The kids who pick on Ethan Gollner are going to pick on him, and the kids like Ethan Gollner are going to pick on him. The boy is toast.”

“Well, with that attitude, maybe. But I expect more from you and I expect more from Paige.”

“Okay,” I agreed, “I’ll talk to her again.” But my heart wasn’t in it. Outside, I saw once again that it was starting to rain. My heart sank inexplicably at the sight of the drops on the windowpane.

*

I awoke that night to the sound of the river, full from two days of rain, reassuring and lush. A distant echo from the womb. The roll of the blood in our mother’s veins when we are in utero. I looked at the clock. It wasn’t yet midnight. I’d been asleep barely an hour.

For a moment I gazed out the window and watched the last wisps of clouds pass the full moon. That summer my mind roamed mostly between the boys that interested me and the parts of my body that I feared were inadequate. I hated my hips. This may have been another way that angst was dogging me that August, but the truth was I hated my hips even when the world felt gentle and safe and kind. I pondered a new approach to an old magic trick that I thought I might incorporate into my routine. I thought of Eric and the dead horses, and of my mother’s determination that Paige look out for the boy. And I thought of my mother and her two strange—yes, quirky—sleepwalking events.

Whenever I awoke in the night that summer, regardless of how deeply I had been sleeping or how real the dream, soon enough I would think of her. It was inevitable. And that night it was especially likely because my father wasn’t home, which meant that she was alone in their bedroom.

We knew far less about sleepwalking then than we know now. Sleep specialists knew some of the triggers—exhaustion, stress, select medications—but research into the role of chemical messengers in parasomnia was still in its infancy. Besides, that August night my mother had yet to visit the sleep center at the university hospital in Burlington. We hadn’t reached the stage yet where we even viewed her sleepwalking as an ailment for which there might be a treatment, other than those long, languid baths that had become a part of her nighttime ritual.

I climbed from beneath the sheet in which I was sleeping and walked down the dark second-floor corridor. I wasn’t worried; after all, it had been months since she had spray-painted the hydrangea, and last night—the first night my father was gone—she had slept uneventfully until morning. Nevertheless, I wanted to be reassured that she was still home. Still in bed.

She wasn’t. I stared for a moment into my parents’ own moonlit bedroom, at the emptiness of their queen-sized bed, at the bedding that had been pushed to the foot. When I had passed the top of the stairs on the way there, I’d noticed that the first floor looked dark, but now I held out hope that my mother might be in one of the rooms far from the front hall: our father’s small study, perhaps, or the den with the sole television in the house. And so I checked on my sister, saw she was sound asleep in her bed, and tiptoed down the stairs so I wouldn’t wake her.

“Mom?” It was a stage whisper into the shadows of the front hall. I flipped on the overhead light, even then a little scared of the dark, and checked the kitchen, then the living room, then the den. They were empty. I stood at the top of the stairs that led to the unfinished basement—the dirt floor with the concrete pad for the washer and dryer—and called down into the blackness in a voice loud enough that my mother would hear but too soft to awaken my kid sister upstairs: “Mom? You there?”

But she wasn’t. I knew that.

I grabbed a flashlight from the utility drawer and went outside. I slept that summer in gym shorts and a T-shirt, and the night air was chillier than I’d expected and the grass was damp beneath my feet. I went first to the hydrangea, the scene of my mother’s arboreal carnage, and then to the carriage barn where my parents parked their cars. My father’s, of course, was gone because he had driven to the airport the other day. I was relieved to see that my mother’s was still there.

For a long moment I stood in our driveway, gazing up at that wondrous moon and the sea of summer stars, wondering what I should do. But in the end there really wasn’t a choice. I went back inside and scribbled a brief note for Paige, and left it at the top of the stairs in the event she woke up. Then I grabbed a hoodie that was hanging from the coat rack by the front door and zipped it partway up. I would leave my kid sister alone in the house and go try to find our mother. I knew this was irresponsible: Paige was precocious, but she hadn’t even started third grade yet. I feared, however, that it was far worse to leave my mother to her own devices when the sleepwalker inside her was in control, especially during this odd, strange summer of dread.

*

Most of the rest of Vermont was sound asleep. Certainly there were musicians playing at the clubs in Burlington, most of them jam-band disciples of Phish, and there were young adults a little older than me dancing. There were state troopers who were awake and the state’s few professional firefighters were awake, and there were insomniacs who were awake watching late-night TV or videocassettes of movies they had rented. But the Green Mountains late at night grow quiet, and most of the houses in the village of Bartlett were dark.

A few miles away, however, the lights were on at the Holbrooks’ farmhouse. I would learn more when I got home—and more still when the sun was up and my family’s own nocturnal adventure was behind us.

*

Where do you go when the part of your brain that controls judgment is asleep, but the part that controls your motor activity is awake? I wouldn’t have known to phrase the question that way in the mid-1990s, but already I understood enough intuitively about sleepwalking to realize this was the issue. And while some sleepwalkers simply rearrange the furniture in modest ways, my mother’s two noctivagant journeys that year were decidedly more extreme.

I walked along the road in flip-flops and my hoodie toward the village center and the streetlights a quarter mile distant: a general store, a church, a station house for the volunteer firefighters. A cluster of houses. I started in that direction for the simple reason that my other options—the tree-lined road into the valley or the woods themselves—seemed daunting. I saw no one. I saw a feral cat and I heard other animals in the brush on both sides of the road. I thought I saw a bat. I know I heard an owl.

Across the street from the general store a bridge spanned the Gale, long enough that it was illuminated by four streetlights. It was the brightest corner of the village by far, inappropriately and garishly lit in the night, and my father had once joked it was one of the man-made wonders of the world because at night you could see it from space. I saw someone there, a person alone, and I started to walk faster. I hadn’t seen a car or a truck, not at that hour, and I wouldn’t.

I was perhaps a hundred yards away when I understood that the individual was my mother.

*

Cristina had premonitions of her own. She never saw the wire electrocuting her horses, but she told my mother later that year, as her marriage was imploding, that she’d seen her husband’s final infidelity coming. Apparently there had been others. My own father may have chuckled dismissively about Cristina’s husband being an empty suit who raised money for what we sometimes called “Club Midd,” but apparently one of those erotically alive young poets from Bread Loaf thought otherwise.

Cristina also told my mother this: on the night my father was in Los Angeles and I went in search of my mother in the village, Eric was melting down. She and her husband had fought over the young poet and either he had stormed off or she had thrown him out. It was, she told my mother, maybe a little bit of both. Meanwhile, the boy watched and the emotions hit him hard—as they would any eight-year-old. This was both wrenching and unpredictable, and Eric was in sensory overload. He exploded moments after his father’s car started down their long driveway.

And so she called our house, despite the fact it was after midnight, because she was in a panic and my mother was the closest thing that Cristina Holbrook had to a friend. No one answered, but the ringing—and it rang five times before the answering machine picked up—woke my little sister.

*

My mother was climbing up onto the concrete balustrade of the bridge across the Gale River. It was about four feet high and a foot wide. I had leaned on it dozens of times as a girl. The bridge was just high enough and the water just shallow enough that a fall from it was not necessarily fatal—unless you landed headfirst—but almost certainly would be crippling. You’d break bones. If you broke the right ones and couldn’t make it to shore, you would indeed drown, especially with the current surging from all those August storms.

“Mom!” I called out, but she seemed utterly oblivious to me, and so I started to run.

By the time I had reached the bridge, she was atop the balustrade, poised like one of the marble angels that stand watch on the bridges across the Tiber and the Seine. She was naked and alone, beneath clouds that were gauzy and swift and lit by a moon that now felt as full and bright as a klieg light.

My mother was lit by that moon, too.

*

My mother was striking. She was slender, with legs that were long and a blond mane that was still wild with sleep as she balanced atop the narrow parapet. Her feet were flat and her arms were at her sides. Later I would contemplate the idea that I was with my mother when she could not possibly have been more vulnerable and exposed: I’m sure there are seventeen-year-olds in this world who go skinny-dipping with their parents, but I was not among them. Our family was not uptight, but I had never seen my mother in less than her underwear. I had never seen my father in less than a bathing suit.

In the surreal quickening of that moment, however, I was only terrified, aware of the abyss that loomed if my mother jumped. I guessed it was an old wives’ tale that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, but I also didn’t want to startle her and cause her to topple over the side of the bridge. And so at first I spoke in a tone that I might use at the beach: louder than conversation at the dining room table, but far from a shout. “Mom? Can you wake up?” I heard a quiver in my voice.

She raised her hands and I wondered what she was seeing: it looked like she was about to conduct an orchestra. Instead she only brushed an unruly lock of hair from her face, then lowered her arms back to her sides.

“Mom: can you kneel down?”

Again she ignored me. Or, to be precise, she was oblivious to me. And so I made a decision: I would yell, I would call out to her as if I were Auntie Em calling for Dorothy because the twister was nearing, and I would grab her around her thighs, just above her knees. I would hold on tight. If necessary, I would yank her back on the sidewalk, pulling her down on top of me. I took a breath, reached my arms around her legs, and locked my fingers together.

And she awoke.

“Sweetheart,” she said, her voice frightened…for me. Her body was still facing the water, but she had turned her head around. I could see her eyes—the deepest blue of anyone I have ever known—looking down upon me, motherly and loving and deeply concerned. When I didn’t let go, she continued, “I can do it. I can get down. I’m awake now, sweetheart.”

Reluctantly I unclasped my arms, but I watched intently as she lowered herself cautiously down to one knee on the balustrade and then, rather like a gymnast, hopped down. I was wobbly, as was she, and I took off my hoodie and handed it to her. She climbed into it, zippering it to the base of her neck. Above her naked legs it looked like a purple sack that had been tailored badly to resemble a miniskirt.

“Is your father home?” she asked.

“No. He’s in Los Angeles. Remember?”

She nodded. “Yes. Of course.” Then with a start she said, “Paige is home alone.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I left her a note. I was hoping I’d find you quickly and we’d be home before she woke up.”

“Okay.”

We walked most of the way back to the house in silence, stunned at the way my mother had just flirted with the rocks and chill water of the Gale River.

“What were you seeing?” I asked only as we neared our driveway.

She shook her head. “It’s all silly…”

“Were you dreaming?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but I sensed both that she was lying and that I should not press her. Not that night. That might come later.

We were just approaching the front door when Paige came running out, sobbing both because I had left her alone and because our mother had disappeared. She managed in the way that only hysterical people can to be both furious with me for deserting her and frantic that her mother had vanished. Our mother knelt before her and hugged her, but she continued to wail inconsolably, her cries directed one moment at me (“You left me alone!”) and the next at our mother (“Where were you?”).

Finally, my mother stood and for a moment I thought she was going to lift Paige into her arms the way our father, even now, sometimes did. Instead she took her by the hand and led her inside the house. I stood in the front hallway and watched her lead Paige upstairs. I knew that she would tuck Paige back into bed and read to her until, once again, her daughter was sound asleep and felt safe.

*

I saw the red light on the answering machine in the kitchen blinking while my mother and Paige were upstairs. Initially I presumed that the message had been around most of the evening—perhaps all day—and my family hadn’t noticed it. When I pressed play, however, and heard Cristina’s voice I understood. She sounded a little hysterical, too, and behind her I could hear Eric yelling that it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all, and they needed to make up. He was demanding that his mother chase after her husband and bring him back or he would do it himself. He was wild with despair, an animal panicked and trapped.

The world, I remember thinking, is unraveling.

Years later I would read about the differences between tantrums and meltdowns, how the former begins with a desire—an unmet need—while the latter is more about overload: too many emotions or sensations coming at you at once. But that night? All I knew was that my mother and Cristina Holbrook were in different ways at the breaking point, and their children—including me—were wounded and scared.

It was nearly one thirty in the morning when my mother finally came back downstairs and found me in the kitchen sipping herbal tea.

“I’ll tell your father what happened in the morning,” she said. “Even in L.A. he’s probably gone to bed by now.” I was leaning against the counter beside the refrigerator, taking unexpected comfort in the hum of the appliance.

“Good. Maybe there’s a doctor you can see,” I said.

“Yes. Maybe.”

“Cristina called,” I said.

“Tonight?”

I nodded.

“Did you talk to her?” she asked.

“She called when we were gone. I think it must have been the phone that woke Paige.”

She went to the answering machine and listened to the message I had already played. It was horrible to hear it again. When it was over, she simply shook her head sadly. Then: “Maybe they’ll work it out.”

“Cristina and her husband?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“Not for a second.”

I asked my mother if she wanted any tea. When she said no, I put my mug in the dishwasher. “I can sleep on Dad’s side of the bed tonight,” I said.

“Oh, you don’t have to.”

“I do,” I said. And I did, though neither of us slept much that night. We dozed and we read and we talked, waiting anxiously for the sun to rise and the birds to chirp. I’m not sure we even turned out the lamps on both sides of the bed. In the morning we discovered there was a sleep center at the university hospital in Burlington and we scheduled an appointment.

*

Paige heard Eric’s desperate pleas on the answering machine. She came downstairs for breakfast just as my mother was playing the message again for herself, wanting to make sense of it by the light of the morning. My sister stood in the doorway and listened to the child’s laments, and my mother didn’t know she was there until it was too late.

Paige’s response? She said only that it made her sad.

*

My father flew home from Los Angeles a day early when he heard that his wife had walked naked in the night to the Gale River Bridge. And so that evening was the last time that my mother would sleep alone for nearly four years.

The elementary school year started the day before the high school’s that September, because all the rain that summer had put the construction of the new high school wing behind schedule. Paige climbed onto the school bus the first day, as she had every day since kindergarten, but she forgot the lunch our mother had made before leaving herself to meet with clients about a ski chalet she was designing near Mount Mansfield. I had no idea if Paige knew she had forgotten it, but at about ten in the morning I biked to the elementary school to bring it to her.

When I arrived, I saw the third and fourth grades were outside at recess. Most of the kids were playing kickball, and I scanned the field for Paige. She was an outlier at kickball as she was at every sport she tried, relentless when she was in the field and accurate with her throws, and capable of kicking the ball with the ferocity of any of the boys when she was at the plate. But I didn’t see her anywhere on the diamond and for a moment grew worried. The dread I had been living with had certainly not diminished in the wake of my mother’s third—and most dire—sleepwalking occurrence. I scanned the rest of the playground, noted the third- and fourth-grade teachers, and still couldn’t find Paige.

I started toward the jungle gym and the swings and the school’s small zip line, watching Ethan Gollner ranting about something on the kickball field from his perch at third base, and finally spotted my sister. She was seated in the sun at the lone picnic table, looking uncharacteristically placid, as she watched the game. Sitting beside her was Eric Holbrook, who was earnestly explaining to her the difference between mead and grog, and how he preferred mead because he liked honey but his mother preferred he drink grog because it had milk.

“Usually the drinks have alcohol, but I don’t drink alcohol, so mine are safe,” he was telling her.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“You feel okay?”

“Sure,” she answered. “I feel fine. Why?”

I motioned at the diamond. “Because you’re sitting here and not kicking the crap out of the ball over there.”

She shrugged. “Maybe later.” It was then the reality that I was at her school seemed to dawn on her. “What’s going on? Why are you here?” There was a twinge of alarm in her voice, as if my summer of unease was contagious.

“You forgot your lunch,” I told her, and I handed her the small bag.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Eric says he might get another horse.”

I smiled at the boy. “Awesome,” I said.

He nodded. “This one will be named Brunhild,” he told me. “For sure.”

“Do you like the name?” I asked Paige.

“Nope,” she said. “I said it should be Clara Two.”

“It will be Brunhild,” he told me calmly.

“I like it,” I said.

“Yeah, and you wear harem pants,” my sister reminded me. “Your vote doesn’t count.”

When I left, she was still sitting with the new boy, listening to him explain the nuances of medieval cuisine and debating names for a possible new horse. That night her teacher would call home to tell my mother that Paige had eaten lunch with him, too, and she was grateful.

*

I imagine that eventually my sister’s patience with Eric would have run out, but it didn’t that autumn. She looked out for him at school and she visited him at his house; he came to ours. She learned about baileys and arrow loops, and the difference between a catapult and a trebuchet. No one was going to make fun of him, at least to his face, because no one was ever going to make fun of Paige. The two of them were linked by that horrible night when his father walked out and my mother walked to the bridge.

But the Holbrooks didn’t remain much longer in Vermont. Cristina took Eric and returned to her family in North Carolina—to her roots—just after Halloween. My sister would confess to me later that she liked playing with Eric just fine, even if he was (her word) weirdly obsessed with the Middle Ages, but he was still a boy. She was beginning to resent her small sacrifices, and she wasn’t sure what would have happened if any of the grown-ups had expected her to miss ski practices or races that winter. I reminded her that she had done something kind and she should only be proud.

Meanwhile, I did my magic shows on weekends and I applied to colleges. Whenever I put an application in the mail, I would feel for the first time that year that there was a legitimate reason for my dread. My father stopped traveling. And my mother went to the sleep center in Burlington to find a course of treatment for her sleepwalking. For a long while there would be no events (at least none that I knew of), and when the power lines would sway in the chill autumn winds, I would no longer hold my breath. It would not be until another August, years later—when I was about to return to college as a twenty-one-year-old senior—that once more she would rise from her bed and walk into the night.

And this time she wouldn’t come home.

www.chrisbohjalian.com

What’s next on
your reading list?

Discover your next
great read!

Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

Sign up now.