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“How about the sleeping pills?” he asks. “Have you been taking those?”
“On occasion,” I say. “But the strength still seems a bit low.”
“You’re on the highest dosage.”
“I know.”
Dr. Harris eyes me, shifting in his chair.
“So, what is it you wanted to talk to me about?” he asks, spinning a pen between his fingers like a baton. “You mentioned you had some questions.”
“Yes. Not about insomnia, though. About sleepwalking, actually.”
“Ah,” he says, leaning back with a playful grin. “You used to be a sleepwalker, correct? I remember discussing that.”
“When I was a kid. It used to happen pretty frequently.”
“That’s not uncommon in adolescence.”
“What triggers it, exactly?”
“Oh, lots of things,” he says. “Fatigue, irregular sleep schedules. High fever, some medications, trauma, genetics, stress. Most of the time, though, it just happens.”
“For no real reason?”
“Yes,” he says. “During stages three and four of deep sleep. It’s calleddisassociated arousal. Some parts of the brain are asleep while others are still awake.”
“I was just wondering,” I say, looking down at my lap. More and more, this is feeling like that morning with Chief Montgomery: him, sitting too close in my bedroom, and me, hiding the truth. Diverting my eyes. Too afraid of what he might find there: my secret, my lie, curled up somewhere deep in my pupils like a hibernating animal. “Is it possible for someone to do something bad while they’re sleepwalking? And not know it? Not remember?”
“Definebad,” he says, resting his chin in his hand. “Sometimes people urinate in their closets, for example, or venture outside. Have entire conversations, even. That can be embarrassing.”
“No, I mean, can they do something… dangerous,” I ask, looking up at him. “Violent.”
“It’s rare,” he says, speaking slowly. “But sometimes people will try to drive cars or climb out of windows, and that can of course be very dangerous—”
“What about to other people?”
Dr. Harris stops talking. His eyes narrow. “Why are you asking?”
“I think maybe I’ve started again.” The story I developed in the car on the way over flows from my lips so naturally now, just the way I practiced. “I woke up the other morning and there were some things rearranged in my living room, things I don’t remember moving. It was a little unsettling.”
I remember all those mornings when I was younger, finding my belongings out of place: my shoes in two different spots, my hairbrush in the laundry room. The way I would pick them up, eye them curiously, as if they had sprouted legs in the night and roamed around the house on their own.
“I’m sure it was,” he says. “But rest assured, you have nothing to worry about. Just keep your doors locked so you don’t wander outside, maybe set an alarm. About two percent of children go on to become adult sleepwalkers, so considering your history, I’m not exactly surprised.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding. “That’s good to know. So no one has ever… I don’t know,killed someonein their sleep, then?”
I smile, let out a little laugh, trying to signal that I’m kidding. That I don’t actually believe it to be possible. That I haven’t been thinking it, wondering it, ever since I was a child but instead just erased it from my mind—like those footprints, that mud—pretending the thought was never even there to begin with.
“Homicidal sleepwalking,” Dr. Harris says, smiling back. “Believe it or not, it has happened. But again, it’s very rare.”
I feel that familiar pain in my stomach, like someone’s taking a meat grinder to my insides, turning my organs to chum.
“The most famous is the case of Kenneth Parks,” he continues. “For the murder of his mother-in-law and attempted murder of his father-in-law in 1987.”
“What did he do?”
“Drove fourteen miles, let himself into their house with his key, and bludgeoned her to death with a tire iron. Then he tried to strangle his father-in-law before getting back in his car and driving away.”
