Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer Page A

Nothing can really help.”
    Ray stood up and put his arms around her. He did this at least once a day, as though to remind her that he was still there, still concerned, still grieving along with her.
    They went to the movie after dinner, driving in silence. Ray put on the radio, and static came in. There were no really good stations this far out on the island. Snow was starting to fall again. It had been snowing sporadically all evening, stopping every hour or so as if for a breath. Helen used to think it always looked so beautiful when it snowed on the ocean. The flakes landed and settled themselves for a moment, before disappearing under the surface.
    As they walked down the aisle of the theater, scanning the rows for two vacant seats near the front, a few people watched them, then looked discreetly away. Helen pretended not to notice. She held on to Ray’s arm and they kept walking. During the movie he leaned over and whispered into her ear, “How long can we continue like this?” It was not a new question. He asked it periodically and she always replied, “Until we drop dead.” He squeezed her hand hard. Their running dialogue had become a sort of private joke between them.
    Friends used to tell Helen that eventually she would start to feel better, that one day out of the blue she would wake up and begin her morning without thinking of her daughter. She believed this for a while—clung to it, in fact. One day, she thought, she would indeed get up and feel refreshed from her sleep. She would start teaching again. She would set up the badminton net on the beach and they would play for hours. She’d cook jelly omelettes for herself and for Ray, and they would both sit at the table and discuss the lectures they would be giving in their sections that day.
    When one year had passed, Helen knew this would not happen. She felt no better. There had been no major change. Friends ceased to be so optimistic about her state. They telephoned less often; they couldn’t bear to hear her cry anymore. There was something almost unnatural about overly long mourning periods, something almost indecent.
    Helen turned her leave from teaching into an early retirement. She stayed at home each day, sitting out on the back porch overlooking the water.
    “You shouldn’t let your child become the focus of your life,” a psychologist had told her and Ray many years earlier. This had seemed like unrealistic advice. What did he know? He was not even married, this expert. He knew nothing about what it meant to have a child.
    Some people had it easy. Some people could just drop off their child at an expensive summer camp in the Poconos and then knock around Europe by themselves until the close of the season. When they returned they could simply retrieve their daughter, who would be bronzed and happy and voted Best in Dodgeball.
    Not so with Helen and Ray Ascher. They had spent their time worrying and consulting professionals. Lucy had always seemed a space apart, locked in some very private world. She was overly sensitive when she was little; if you sneaked up behind her and tickled her, she jumped and turned very pale and could not be consoled for hours.
    “Where did we ever get her?” Helen used to say when Lucy was a child. It was as though Lucy had fallen from a star, so different was she. And then, when she was twelve, she had simply stopped talking for two months. They had never understood what went on inside her. In junior high school Lucy began to write poetry—complicated, elegiac things that neither Helen nor Ray could really grasp. The child of two marine biologists, two lower-power academics—two serious, practical people out on the windy tip of Long Island—was a poet. Go figure that out, Helen thought.
    “You’re a
poet
and you don’t
know it
,” Ray used to say to Lucy, chucking her under the chin.
    They never knew what she thought of them. Did she think them simple, unartistic? When she received an award from the New