As Lance drifted back toward consciousness, the first thing that seemed peculiar was how loud the rain was. It pounded the roof above his head, which didn’t seem right. Even during torrential downpours, he had never heard it so loud. The attic and all that pink fiberglass insulation meant the sound of the rain always had a muffled quality. But he wasn’t in his bed, was he?
He was sitting in a chair, but as he blinked open his eyes, he realized that wasn’t quite right either. He was in a seat, specifically the driver’s seat of his wife’s Land Cruiser. Please let me be in the driveway, he silently wished as he squinted at the rainy landscape outside the windshield. He was scared that he would find himself looking at the smashed front end of her vehicle, and if that was the case, he prayed that all he had hit was a telephone pole or fire hydrant or some other inanimate object.
It came as a pleasant surprise that the car did not appear to be at all smashed, and instead looked to be parked legally and competently on some unfamiliar road. He had no memory of taking the car for a drive, but was it possible he had simply forgotten about this? Maybe he had found himself getting drowsy and pulled off the road to get some sleep. None of this felt vaguely familiar.
To the best of his knowledge he had never driven a car in his sleep before, though he wasn’t sure how he had gotten to and from the bar the night he had his run-in with Jacob Pinochet. He supposed there was a first time for everything. Stress tended to bring on his sleepwalking bouts, and the past twelve or so hours had been remarkably stressful. So he shouldn’t have been surprised that his disorder had been triggered. But the car thing, well, that was a surprise. A big one. Where the hell was he?
He started the car up and switched the wipers on. It wasn’t the first time he had woken up and not known where he was. Usually when something like this happened, it was because he had been sleeping in an unfamiliar place. A locked door tended to be enough to keep him from getting into too much trouble, but bunking on someone’s living room couch, outside in a tent, or that time he and Caitlin got stuck sleeping in the sunporch during the Rixby family vacation could lead to trouble. He remembered that morning waking up in a patch of scrubby grass near the beach with sand in his mouth. No way he wanted to embarrass himself in front of the snobby Rixby clan. So he had done his best to slip into the house unnoticed. Caitlin was the only one who suspected something might have been amiss, but she didn’t say anything.
He almost confessed the whole thing to her that afternoon when they stopped off somewhere on the way home for lunch, but he chickened out. What if she freaked out when she found out the truth about him? If she left him, he didn’t know what he would do. Of course, the longer they were together, the harder it became to slip into casual conversation the statement, “Oh, by the way, I’m a sleepwalker.”
So Caitlin never knew, and his secret remained his and his alone. Well, and now Garvey knew about it as well. He realized how remarkably wrong it was that his defense attorney now officially knew more about him than his own wife.
The police won’t understand. That damn memory of him and his mother came back to him again. What was it about that memory? It struck him now how much it reminded him of the day he awoke in the bathroom after what he now knew was him beating the crap out of Jacob Pinochet. His mind went back to the bathroom of their old Culver Creek house. He saw his dazed reflection in their cloudy bathroom mirror. His clothing looked to be stained and dirty. Was that mud or blood? His face had blood on it. He must have cut himself at some point. Could he have fallen down the stairs? The thought gave him a chill, but this would have been years after his father’s death. It must have been right before he went away to Ryerson. What was it the police wouldn’t understand?
And as if they could read his thoughts, a cop car approached in the dim morning light. Was he going to get a ticket? Had he even remembered to bring his wallet? The car slowed as it approached, and Lance’s palms started to sweat, but then the cruiser made an abrupt left turn, and Lance saw that it had pulled into a parking lot full of police cars, which was when he realized he had parked only feet from a police station. Smooth.
What had he been thinking? He didn’t have time to figure out an answer because he had realized where he was. The street wasn’t unfamiliar at all. It was insane, but it also made perfect sense. He had driven to Culver Creek.
He looked out the windshield at the torrential downpour and thought about Adam being out there somewhere. He wondered if the police had tailed him from New Jersey, but no. He had been parked here awhile. Nobody seemed particularly interested in him.
But how would it look when they went to the house and he wasn’t there? When nobody there knew where he was? He needed to call Caitlin or his mom and let them know where he was. What would he tell them when they asked why he had driven to Culver Creek in the pre-dawn hours? He wanted to look for Adam? He had felt helpless just sitting at the house, and he couldn’t sleep anyway? He decided it was a perfectly reasonable explanation, but when he reached for his phone, it wasn’t in the cupholder where he normally left it. He checked the glove box and under the seats as well, but he already knew his phone and his wallet were probably still in his bedroom. It was interesting that in his sleep logic, he had the foresight to grab the car keys but nothing else.
He turned off the ignition as he sat and tried to figure out his next step. The voice of reason told him that what he should do was go home, but he thought of the excuse he had fabricated about driving out here to look for Adam. It wasn’t a bad idea. He could maybe drive around to the different places he and Adam had been on their boys’ day out. Maybe he would see some clue the police had overlooked. The rain might make things more difficult, but if there was even a chance that he could do something that would bring Adam home safe and sound, he had to try. He watched the rain cascade down the windshield and was reminded of the night his father died.
He saw the policemen standing in Mrs. Drummond’s kitchen, their sopping wet jackets dripping onto her linoleum floor. They left damp footprints as they walked back to the door. Mrs. Drummond followed behind them to let them out.
“We’re on sandbag patrol,” one of the police officers said, and Lance remembered thinking the police were playing with those little beanbags they had in his preschool classroom, but the other policeman said something about the creek flooding.
This seemed to be important, but Lance couldn’t figure out why at first. After she had seen the policemen out, Mrs. Drummond came into the kitchen. She mopped up the puddles with an old dish towel.
“Don’t worry, Lance,” she said. “Your mother is on her way home. She’ll be here as soon as she can, but it’s a long drive and the weather isn’t very good.”
A long drive? As Lance played the memory back in his mind, it didn’t make any sense. A long drive from where? Lance had assumed his mother was at the police station or maybe at their house, but neither one of those places qualified as a long drive. The police hadn’t even mentioned his mother. They were off to go deal with the creek.
Lance had a sudden flash of inspiration. The police had taken down a statement from Mrs. Drummond. That meant there had to be some sort of official police report on his father’s death. Surely that would be able to supply the information his memory was lacking.
He made a mad dash through the pouring rain to the front door of the police station. It was only as he gratefully entered the dry vestibule that it occurred to him it was a strange and suspicious hour to be going to a police station to get information on a death that had occurred twenty-six years ago.
So he wasn’t surprised that the officer on his way out of the building paused to give Lance a strange look. The cop was dressed in plain clothes with a flimsy windbreaker that would be no match for the downpour outside, but Lance could tell straightaway that he was law enforcement. He had that look.
“Can I help you?” the cop asked.
“I need to get a copy of a police report.” Lance hadn’t even considered what he was wearing, and he glanced down, relieved to see that he was at least in clothes and not pajamas. His khakis and shirt were beyond rumpled, but his short run to the police station had left him so drenched he doubted it mattered.
“You’ll need to go see the clerk at the window,” the cop said. He held the door for Lance but narrowed his eyes at him. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”
Lance had a panicked thought—had the police already found out he was missing from the house? Caitlin hadn’t taken any sleeping pills before bed. It was possible she had woken, found her car and her husband missing, and called the police. They might have been posting his photo along with Adam’s on all the news stories.
“Don’t think so,” Lance said, and then for good measure, “I’m not from around here.”
The cop shrugged it off. He seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, and Lance proceeded down a narrow hallway to a window with a little counter attached to it and one of those little speaking grates, but when he glanced back, he noticed the cop was still in the vestibule, a frown visible on his face. He nodded at Lance before turning to head out into the deluge.
The clerk at the window didn’t seem too troubled by Lance’s appearance or his early morning request. Unfortunately she was also unable to help him.
“Anything more than a year old is in our archives,” she said. “You have to go fill out a request at the courthouse for that, but the records office doesn’t open until ten.” She jotted down the address on a piece of paper and passed it through the little opening in the bottom of the window.
“Thanks,” Lance said. “Do you know how quickly I would be able to get that? Like would they be able to give it to me today?”
The clerk laughed at this. “Two to three weeks, if you’re lucky. That’s if they even have it. About ten years ago, some of the archives were lost in a big flood.”
Lance’s heart sank. He doubted he would even bother to make a request at the courthouse. The best thing to do would be to head home.
“You know they’re saying the creek might flood today,” the clerk said.
Lance got the impression that this shift didn’t give her the chance to talk to many people, and she was probably glad for the company.
“Is that so?” Lance didn’t really care about the creek, but he was doing his best to be polite and not arouse suspicion.
He remembered the police officers in Mrs. Drummond’s kitchen talking about sandbag duty. Had the creek flooded that night?
Lance felt dizzy as another memory came back to him. He had been sitting with his dad on the couch in their old living room, watching a show on the television. Lance didn’t quite remember the show, something with car chases and explosions that his mom never would have let him watch.
“Our little secret,” his dad had said to him with a wink.
The memory was fuzzy, but he had the vague sense that his mother had gone away for the weekend. Had she gone to his aunt’s house in Connecticut maybe? Or on a trip with some of her old school friends? He seemed to remember something like that happening when he was a kid. What he remembered was that it was just him and his dad.
“A boys’ weekend,” his dad had said. They had eaten French toast with sausage for dinner, and his dad hadn’t cared when he flooded his meal in a sea of syrup.
A loud sound drowned out the explosions on the TV, and a yellow banner started to scroll across the bottom of the screen.
“What’s it say, Daddy?” asked Lance, who was old enough to recognize the look of letters, but who hadn’t yet mastered putting them together to form words.
“Says there’s a flash flood warning in effect,” his dad said. “But don’t worry, kiddo, we’re far enough from the creek here that it won’t be an issue.”
“I moved a bunch of stuff upstairs.”
Lance looked up with a start. For a moment he had forgotten he was still inside the police station talking with the clerk.
“What’s that?” Lance asked.
“My place is less than a block from the creek,” the clerk said, “so I always end up moving the important stuff upstairs when we get a lot of rain, just in case.”
Lance nodded and thanked her again for the courthouse information.
“Hopefully it doesn’t flood,” he said as he backed away from the window and headed toward the exit door.
Something she had said had made him uneasy, but he was too distracted to place what it was until he got back in the car. He turned on the car and blasted the heat to try to dry himself off, but the car had been sitting too long and the chilly air that blew on him made him shiver.
She had been talking about stairs, and that was how his father had died. He fell down the stairs backwards Tucker had said, and now Lance was very sure of something. The night his father died, his mother hadn’t been home. It had been their boys’ weekend. She was away somewhere. That was why Mrs. Drummond said it would take her a while to get back.
So if his mother hadn’t been around that weekend, then that only left two explanations for his father’s strange and terrible death. The first was that somehow his father had accidentally stumbled backward down the stairs. It seemed such an unlikely scenario. Could his father have been very drunk? But Lance had no recollection of this. Sometimes his dad had a beer or two with dinner, but he had no memory of his dad stumbling around in a drunken way. Still, he was so young, would he have even recognized drunkenness? he wondered. Then there was the second possibility, the one that really frightened him—that his father’s death was not entirely an accident, that he had shoved his father down the stairs. Why would he do that when he loved his dad? A more recent memory came to Lance, the morning he awoke to find his hands around his son’s neck. He wasn’t the same person when he was sleepwalking, and when someone tried to rouse him, he turned violent. He knew this from his incident at Ryerson. Jacob Pinochet had been on the end of one of his sleepwalking attacks, and so maybe had his own father.
The thought left him so numb and bewildered, he didn’t know what to do. He remembered his plan to drive straight home. He pulled out onto the road, but when he came to the first intersection, he didn’t make a right and head out to the highway. Instead he drove through his hometown as thoughts tumbled through is head.
His mother had known, hadn’t she? When had he first started sleepwalking? He must have started very young. She knew better than to try to wake him, he supposed, but his father didn’t know that secret, maybe, or else Raquel had warned him, but like her rules about no violent TV shows and not too much syrup, he had decided to ignore her instructions.
That was why Raquel always said his father died of a heart attack. She wasn’t trying to protect him from a fear of stairs. She wanted to protect him from remembering that he had, in a sleeping state, killed his own father. He thought of how distant she had seemed to him as a child, and it made so much sense. She loved him, because he was her son, but she must have been fearful of him and considered him to be something of a monster. It was why she had sent him away to Ryerson, wasn’t it? She wasn’t worried about a neighborhood bogeyman. He was the bogeyman she feared. Certainly she must have lived with the knowledge that any night he might break into her bedroom and strangle her in his sleep.
His heart was heavy as he drove down half-familiar streets. The elementary school building looked unchanged from when he was a kid, but there was a newer townhome development just down the block from it that he didn’t think had been there before. He let memory guide him and was surprised how easily he found his way back to his old house. The old asbestos siding had been replaced by modern vinyl siding in a tasteful taupe, but otherwise the little house looked just the way he remembered it.
He idled at the curb as he stared at the house and the secrets it kept hidden in its walls. If only there was some way he could go back there and save his family from that tragic night.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he whispered to the empty car as he wept. “I’m so sorry.”
A light flicked on in the house, and he remembered it was still early morning, and he was an unfamiliar car on a residential street and drove away as the rain and his tears continued to fall.