Page 14 of The Girl from Widow Hills
A rattle in an amber bottle. The scent of hot chocolate. “I’m not sure.”
The pen stilled. He looked unsure, like maybe I was pulling this out of thin air. “That would be unusual,” he said.
But I didn’t want to tell him—it wasn’t a usual case. I had wandered away from home while asleep, without regard to the storm that was raging through. Gotten swept away by the flash flood that came through the valley with a vengeance.
This was why I trusted myself and my instincts. More even than my conscious thoughts. Because I knew, underneath, there was something stronger. Something that understood how to survive. That there was a person I could not remember who had endured something unimaginable for three full days before someone found me.
It was how I knew I was right to change my name. To break it off with Jonah. To stay here.
It was why I had picked that house but hadn’t changed the locks yet. And why I had bought that hook and eye at the store. Why I was sitting here right now.
The less I actively dissected a situation, the clearer the answer became.
“Are you on any medications currently?” he asked, pen hovering over the yellow notepad once more. “Sleepwalking can, unfortunately, be a side effect of other sleep aids. Even over-the-counter ones.”
“No. Though I guess there goes my hope for a sleep aid.”
He gave me a small smile. “Walk me through the night,” he said. “Before you went to sleep.”
It had been a night like so many others. I had run into Bennett heading out at the same time, and we’d grabbed a burger at the grill across the street before going our separate ways. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said. “I ate dinner out with a friend, finished some paperwork at home, watched TV, had a drink, went to bed.” I shrugged. It all sounded so mundane when reduced to a sentence.
“What was the drink?” he asked.
“A glass of wine.” The bottle had partially turned, but it unwound me at the end of the day.
“Alcohol can contribute to sleepwalking,” he said.
“It hasn’t in the past,” I said. “And it was only half a glass.” I never drank a lot at once. I’d gone out with my roommates in college at the end of sophomore year, let myself get to the point where the night had leaps and gaps, and then I’d never done it again.
We had been at a party in another dorm, and from what I could gather, a senior I liked had pulled me into the storage area under the stairs. I couldn’t be certain how long I’d been in there, but the story ended with me barging out in a fury, the guy following a moment later, bent over, hands held to his bloody nose.
By the next day, the story had taken on a life of its own: my roommates high-fiving me, announcing to anyone who would hear,Don’t fuck with the girls in 423!But I couldn’t say for sure. Couldn’t say whether I was protecting myself or reacting to the small, dark space—needing, above all, to escape.
They couldn’t really know the girl in 423.
I knew better now—fearing, most of all, that disconnect between my mind and body, when I was no longer the one in control.
The therapist I had to see briefly in high school was the one who explained that my need to always know my exits, to calculate my steps, was probably a symptom of the PTSD that manifested alongside my primal need to escape—a coping mechanism to feel in control.
This was just routine: that half-glass at the end of the day while I watched television; a bottle of wine that usually managed to turn before I could finish it. There had been nothing unusual about last night.
Dr. Cal tilted his head back, assessing me. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
Then he shook his foot, like maybe I hadn’t noticed the dog bones. Waiting for me to make conversation, give something away. Eventually, he gave up and put his feet solidly on the floor.
“Anything stressful in your life?”
“Yes.” I didn’t elaborate. He wasn’t a therapist.
“I know how it is here,” he said with a tight smile. “After hours is when the work really begins, am I right?”
“Partly.” But I had managed to keep up just fine to this point. That was the work culture at a place like this. Each of us putting in the extra hours, here and at home—a shared exhaustion that bound us together. Even though I was in a different department, it permeated everything. They had their patient appointments, I had the administrative meetings; and after, we did the paperwork or the research or the list of obligations that had to be fulfilled one way or another. We were in it together, and it kept us all afloat.
“The older I get, the harder it is to sustain,” he added, though I was guessing he was somewhere in his thirties, and he seemed to be holding everything together just fine. “You’ve got to make sure you’re putting yourself first. Carve out rest. Stick to healthy patterns. Eat well. Exercise.”
I let out a small laugh, and he genuinely smiled, like he was pleased with himself for successfully cracking through my surface. But the truth was, I hadn’t noticed the creeping exhaustion, the lack of nutrition or energy, until he started tallying it off. I felt the inadequacies all rising to the surface under his gaze. All the things I wasn’t doing to keep myself healthy. The caffeine in place of calcium, potential weak spots in my bones. The quick meals on the go. The bags of chips I grabbed from the cafeteria instead of the apple. Layers of stress piling on top of one another, my body rebelling. The simplest things.
