Her name is Juteau, although I don’t know if it’s her first name or last. With a name like that, one would think that she was from France or Quebec or Indochina, although I’m not certain if anyone from Laos still speaks French. Not that it matters, really, since she was born in San Diego and grew up by the ocean in Carmel. She’s a friend of one of Bez’s long-dispatched boyfriends, so in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sort of way, she’s also my friend as well. This is why she’s spending a few weeks in my home while she’s in town visiting a dying uncle.
Juteau likes to sleep until past noon, which is perfect for me, as these days I am doing the same thing, and neither one of us is awake and rustling through the house, disturbing the other prematurely. Whichever one of us wakes first puts the kettle on, and the whistle of boiling water rouses the other from her dreams.
She was sleepwalking the other night, padding naked through the hallways of my house. I woke when she walked through my bedroom and opened my window. She said something, something like, “You don’t know when it is, April,” and then she slipped back out into the hallway. I wasn’t sure if it being bad to wake a sleepwalker was just a myth or not, so I let her be, although I did get out of bed and follow her at a distance to keep an eye on her. Once, when I was a child, I sleepwalked into my parents’ room, which woke my father, and he followed me through the living room, out the front door, and into the street, where I woke, barefoot on the pavement, and completely unaware of how I’d gotten outside. He picked me up and carried me back to bed, and then he spent the next week sleeping on the living room sofa, just in case I started wandering again.
Juteau has wandered in her sleep twice that I am aware of so far, and when I mention these walks to her in the mornings, she never remembers doing them. I think she is traveling in her dreams, and whenever she gets to where she is going, she’ll stop getting out of bed in the middle of the night. I’m not sleeping on the sofa like my father. I trust that wherever she’s trying to get to, it doesn’t involve going out my front door.
I hope that once she gets to where she is traveling, she’ll send me a postcard, even if it’s only in my dreams.
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