Sleepwalking in Daylight Page 28

  Sunny days are dark to me now as if I’ve walked out of a matinee to the jarring brightness of a bustling workday. It startles me to see people moving around in the world. Driving, playing Frisbee, carrying briefcases, talking on cell phones. How can it be a normal day for them?

  The locks confuse me. I stand at our front door with my key chain, fumbling for the right key. Do I turn it clockwise or counterclockwise? Did I lock the one on the doorknob or the bolted one on top? So much thought put into entering a shell of a home. The boys move around and whisper and sometimes I hear them laugh, but if I walk in they become quiet like they’re in church.

  Most things bewilder me. Food appears in the fridge but I have no idea where it came from. The laundry is clean and folded and I haven’t a clue who’s responsible for it. I find shirts in different stacks and I’m not sure if I’ve done this or if a stranger has. I’m aware of Lynn letting herself in and out every day. And Mike’s voice mixes with Bob’s off in the distance. Maybe another man is with them, I can’t be sure. Somewhere in the house a TV is on and bursts of applause and laugh tracks make it feel like a creepy carnival.

  Somehow the boys are taken to school and picked up. Somehow their lunches get made. Somehow mail is collected and neatly stacked.

  Bob takes up smoking. Out of nowhere. I watch him pace on the back deck. He taps ash into an empty Coke can that sits on top of the barbecue that hasn’t been covered yet for winter. He’s on the phone all the time this week. Making arrangements. I hear the lowered voices. A memorial service is being planned. Mr. Black says it will give students closure. The school was thrown into a tailspin with the news. Counselors were brought in to talk with shocked kids who never gave her the time of day. Bob walks back and forth with his cigarettes, talking into the phone about the music she would’ve liked played. About getting pictures blown up. Easels to set them on. The church next to school will host even though we aren’t members. Even though we’re lapsed Jews. Lynn brings Bob more Coke. She sets ice water in front of me but I don’t drink it. It sweats and leaves rings on the wood coffee table.

  I hear all this. I watch Lynn and Mike and other friends I no longer recognize move around in my house. I see them tiptoeing in and out past me like I’m taking a nap. All these people. In the middle of it, sitting in the vortex of the house of pain, I figure out the one thing Cammy would have wanted for the memorial service was her birth mother. She’d want Gerry Wilkes there. That I can do for her. I can give her that much. That, Mr. Black, would be closure. I will find her and ask her Cammy’s question. How could you do this to me? I know the answer of course but I want her to suffer. I want her to feel what I’m feeling. I will leave that burden on her shoulders. I’ll let her carry it around for a while. I’ll let her see what it feels like to fail your child.

  I can’t keep the speech from replaying in my head. She wanted to know you. She wanted to belong. She wanted you to show her how to be. And then you did and it was too late and she knew it. She died mad at you, Gerry Wilkes. She died furious. I will say this to her, I think. But behind the wheel, turning in to the library, I know I won’t.

  The search was over in a two-second finger point across a quiet room. I watch her walk toward me, cocking her head, a friendly question mark on her face.

  “I’m Gerry Wilkes,” she says, holding out her hand for a proper handshake. I look at it in wonder. Those niceties are curiosities to me now. What a waste of time. She withdraws her hand as her smile flickers away to match my seeming unfriendliness. But it’s not that, I want to tell her. I’m not unfriendly. I just don’t care. I thought I was mad at her but seeing her in front of me I’m suddenly not.

  “What can I do for you?” Gerry Wilkes asks me.

  I knew she was a librarian but I’d expected someone else. A drug addict. Someone greasy, dirty, unkempt with slurred speech, shaking for anything to keep her head in the clouds. I thought she’d look like a runaway with Magic Marker words on a scrap of cardboard: Help. I’m homeless. Anything you can spare. God bless you. But no. She was probably never homeless. Somehow she’d raised a child for two years. Somehow she’d had the good sense to give her daughter away before she circled the drain. She’d loved her baby enough to want something better for her. The cliché of young mothers who spend all their money buying drugs and when there’s no money they spread their legs to buy more. This was Gerry Wilkes seventeen years ago.

  Here she is in front of me. Pretty with her brown hair brushed and pushed primly back behind her ears. I squint to try to picture her with Cammy’s rage-black dyed hair. She’s short—five foot three maybe. Petite. Clear skin and large eyes Cammy inherited. Shocking to see them on someone else.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asks me.

  “I’m Sam Friedman.” I wait for the name to register. If she’d looked for her daughter she’d know the name. Otherwise it would hold no significance. Her face is expressionless. Not even a lifted eyebrow. She is searching her mind for a connection. High-school friend? she’s asking herself. Old neighbor? She might even be worried I am someone from her not-so-distant past, someone she stole from? Someone she offended? All this might be playing out in her brain, but her face is frozen in blankness. She is standing on the other side of the front desk, so I can’t tell if her hands are twitching with nervousness. Or maybe it comes out with foot tapping, which I can’t see either.

  “I thought you might want this,” I say.

  I put the newspaper clipping down and slide it toward her like a bartender. At the bottom I’d highlighted the date and time of the memorial service at the school. The one I had no part in planning. Cammy hated school. School hated Cammy.

  Gerry Wilkes stares at the headline and the face in the picture. The freshman-class picture. When Cammy’s hair was still naturally brown, her skin makeup free, a pink shirt underneath her favorite fuzzy cream-colored sweater she’d spent her allowance on. Because I’d told her I wouldn’t pay for anything else since we’d finished all the back-to-school shopping. I’d wanted her to learn money management. I was pleased with myself that day. I didn’t buy her that goddamn fuzzy cream-colored sweater she wanted more than anything else in the world because I wanted to teach her a lesson. I found the sweater in the back of her closet. She’d never let me have it dry-cleaned because she’d been afraid it would lose its softness. I held it up to my face and inhaled the smell of my dead daughter.

  “I’m …” I can’t speak. If I speak I will choke on tears I thought I’d tapped dry. I don’t put on mascara anymore. Of course I don’t wear mascara. I don’t brush my teeth. I don’t wash my face. I can’t remember the last time I took a shower.

  But here, in front of Gerry Wilkes, I fear I might have hit a vein of emotion. She looks up from the picture into my eyes and I know what she will say next.

  “I know who she is,” is exactly word for word what I sensed when she looked at me.

  Just in case I say, “I’m not sure you do.”

  “I do,” she says.

  She hesitates and when she continues I can tell she’s practiced what to say. Maybe she stood in the shower and had this very conversation. She’s wearing a simple thin gold wedding band. Maybe she tried out different versions of the speech for her husband. Maybe he helped hone it. Then again, when she starts I see the edge melt and I realize she hasn’t rehearsed it at all. She’s trying to pick her words carefully. She’s trying hard not to cry.

  “You did a beautiful job raising her,” she says.

  She looks away and I can tell that number one, she regrets saying this, and number two, we’re both thinking the same thing:

  If I’d done—if we’d done—a beautiful job raising her she’d be alive right now.

  Her eyes are filling. I’m heaving the weight of a dead child onto her just like I’d planned. She should know this pain, too, I thought on my way to the library. She should carry it for a while to see how it bends time and space. How hours can feel like minutes and days can feel overcast even in bl
inding daylight. She should suffer. She should cry. She should forget to eat and bathe and sleep. Facing her now … seeing my daughter’s eyes staring back at me … I regret rubbing her face in it. I don’t feel better. I have no idea what to say and while I’m aware of the silence begging for something from me I don’t fill it. Those words, Cammy’s words, are distant. How could you have done this to me?

  Finally I say, “So you knew.”

  “I knew,” she says.

  “She died here,” I tell her. “In the parking lot.”

  Then Gerry Wilkes says, “Who do you think took her to the hospital?”

  One Month Later

  I have to be careful. I try to watch every step because I have to. I’ve been pulled back to the curb by strangers pointing to traffic that hasn’t stopped yet because I forget to look both ways before crossing streets. The boys, when I’m with them, take either hand and I’m aware they are reminding me to stop for traffic, not the other way around. They’re the ones walking me across streets. When they’re with me they’re solemn. I feel sorry for this but I can’t find the energy to do anything about it. I leave it to others. Lynn takes them to school. She still makes their lunches. She takes them to practices and games. She makes sure they laugh at least every once in a while. If I’m passing a window when she pulls up to let them off, I see them bounding out of her minivan. I see them calibrate their steps when they reach the front walk. They do this automatically now. Our house echoes with hushed voices and muted TVs.

  Lynn asks me what I need and I want to tell her I need a do-over. I need to go back to the beginning. Before children, before marriage, before the inertia, the infidelity, the drugs, the missed signals. Back to my mother who would have been the only person to know how to stop my ache. A dead mother who did everything right. A dead daughter with a mother who did everything wrong. I need my daughter back, I have told Lynn. I need my Cammy back. The doctor has prescribed an Ativan a day. I take three, sometimes four.

  Lynn asks me what I need and I say I need someone to make lists for me so I don’t forget what I’m supposed to do to keep on moving through the day. On a pad that has “Memo from Lynn” in a cheerful circus font, she’s written me daily instructions:

  * Give the boys their multivitamins at breakfast.

  * If you run out of something at night, write it down on the sticky pad by the phone in the kitchen and I’ll pick it up for you at the market the next day.

  * Andrew’s dentist appointment is on Friday at noon.

  * Remember the boys’ birthday is on Tuesday next week. I will order the cupcakes from the Swedish Bakery and give you the ticket so you can pick them up on your way to school that day.

  What I really need though is someone to tell me how I can pull myself out of bed in the morning. Someone to tell me how to close my eyes and not see her.

  I no longer drive car pool, but on the boys’ birthday I have to pull it together to bring in the cupcakes Lynn ordered to their class like the other parents do. I’m supposed to bring them at lunchtime because the teacher says the smell would be too distracting for the class if I dropped them off in the morning. This way they have something to look forward to, she said. She is chipper like all elementary teachers. The first time the boys went back to school after Cammy died, Bob and I walked them to class before the bell and she patted my arm and said, I’m sorry for your troubles. Troubles? I wanted to ask. My troubles?

  Bakery. I’m going to the bakery. I’m pretty sure I have the claim ticket Lynn gave me but I’ll check my purse again. There it is. Side pocket. Bakery. Side pocket. I watch every step. Step on a crack break your mother’s back. Bakery. Side pocket.

  The Swedish Bakery is a block and a half from Starbucks. Block and a half. I say this to myself so I don’t pass it. Block and a half. I reach the corner and make a point to pause and look up. A guy in a U-Haul waves me to cross. On the other side I find myself in front of Starbucks. The green awnings, the circle logo, the huge pictures of frothy drinks on the plate-glass windows. I am moving slowly, mechanically. I don’t know why I turn my head to look in. Force of habit from a life lived in a selfish fog.

  I don’t recognize him at first. From the side he looks different. His shoulders are slumped. He is staring straight ahead at the purple wall across the room. His elbows are on the table. His hands in a V fold over his coffee cup like he’s praying.

  I realize I’ve stopped moving. I am facing him and for the first time since the hospital called something in my brain snaps. It’s as though I’ve come out of my coma. I’ve shaken off the trance. It’s him.

  Craig Riggs. Sitting at our table. Craig Riggs. I look at him and something in his hunched back makes me wonder if he lied after all. There he is, the same-size coffee in front of him. He hasn’t moved since I stopped but then again I have no idea how long I’ve been standing here. Maybe it’s been five minutes. Maybe it’s only been a second or two. I wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder if he’s mourning me. The loss of me. I think he is. The way he’s sitting. And it’s our table. Oh, God, it wasn’t a lie. He’s alone like he’s waiting for me. It wasn’t a lie but he couldn’t explain because I’d cut him off. I’d cut him out of me like a cancer. I hadn’t replaced my cell phone that broke in the hospital parking lot. I hadn’t checked my e-mail. I’d made him dead to me. The pills I’d been taking were numbing me against him as much as they were keeping me from feeling the ache of Cammy. Looking in at him, seeing him alone … he wasn’t lying, was he? So I make a deal with myself: If he looks over at me, if he sees me, I will go to him. I will walk away from this life.

  It’s not too late, I’m thinking to myself. It’s not too late for us. If he looks at me I will know we were meant to be together. If he looks over. Even a glance.

  I think I see his eyes close a beat or two longer than a blink. I do the same thing and when I open them I think maybe that will be the moment he looks over.

  Someone is tapping on their horn. A friendly kind of honk for a driver who doesn’t realize the light’s turned green. It continues, so I turn my head to it. Reluctantly I tear my eyes from Craig.

  “Sam? You want me to run in?”

  Like a tennis match my head turns from Craig to Bob, who is leaning across the empty passenger seat, reaching for the bakery ticket, then back to Craig.

  “I can pick up the cupcakes,” he says. “Here, pass me the claim thing and I’ll meet you at the bakery. Will you grab me a tall cappuccino when you go in?”

  Craig’s shifted in his seat. He’s sitting up straighter. He’s looking toward the counter. I move my head along with his to see what he’s looking at.

  “Honey? Sam? Are you going in?”

  Her hair is down this time. She’s smiling, holding out his coffee, he’s standing, pulling out the chair for her. Craig and Evie Riggs. Perfect.

  A distant siren makes everything feel urgent. The wind’s blowing my hair into my face but I don’t push it back behind my ears. A bus is pulling up coughing exhaust. A homeless man calls out, “Streetwise!” and opens the Starbucks door for a tired mother pushing a double stroller.

  “Sam, are you going into Starbucks or not?” Bob calls.

  I need to wake up. Wake up, Sam. Wake up.

  I look down at my shoes. I hate these shoes. Clogs. Ugly brown crunchy-granola clogs. I’ve always hated these shoes. Then it hits me. I hate all my shoes. Every single pair. Even the black Sex and the City–ish pumps. They’re no more me than these clogs are. I hate my clothes, too. And our couch. And the fake-distressed kitchen table that seemed like a good idea in the store where they called it a refectory table. I look up at the gray sky and yes, I think, yes, exactly. My life is gray. I thought it would be Technicolor but it’s gray.

  “I’ve got to circle the block,” Bob yells. A MUNI bus is trying to squeeze by our car and gives up. I see the bus driver throw his hands up in frustration and deflate back into his seat because this is something he deals with a million times a day. Bob pulls forward and the bus
driver takes hold of his huge steering wheel and the whole mess is straightened up just like that.

  It’s not too late. Maybe it’s not too late to turn my life around. I could be the woman my mother was hoping I’d turn out to be. I could be the person I thought I’d be when I was a kid. Yes, exactly. That’s it. I mean, when I was a kid did I long to wear sensible shoes? Did I wish I would one day be standing on a dirty sidewalk under a heavy sky while a husband I don’t love calls out to me? Did I ever dream I would turn out to be a bad mother with a dead daughter?

  This is how it happens. This is how lives change. Sometimes all it takes is a moment. A defining moment. Oprah would call it a lightbulb moment, an aha moment. This is that split second of clarity. This is me saying … enough. No more sleepwalking. Enough.

  “Sam?” Bob’s back. “Where’re you going? Honey? The bakery’s that way, remember?”

  He’s talking to me like I’m a child who’s lost her way.

  Someone honks at him and I’ve walked too far down the sidewalk to see his face but I’m sure he’s saying “goddammit” and steering his way back around the block and I realize I will not get into a car with him again. Enough. I will not go back. I will take the boys and we will share them on weekends and they’ll forget cleats and at the last minute Bob will swing by my house to grab them before the game. I will tell their teachers we will need two copies of announcements and school calendars and class phone lists. One for Bob. One for me. Not Bob and me. Not Craig and me. Me. I will not lose my way with the boys like I did with Cammy. I will not. I will be the mother to them I should have been to Cammy. And they’ll be just fine. People get divorced every day. They’ll be fine.

  At the corner ten blocks away, in front of the fish store with aquariums in the windows and signs that meal worms are on sale, I realize I’ve stopped at the curb automatically. I may not have broken the spell altogether but I know now that I will. The light changes and I cross with the other pedestrians and I think to myself: this is how it happens. This is how you leave your life to start another.