Sweet Lamb of Heaven (10 page)

Years after high school was over, when I was home from college on vacation, I ran into her on the street. We stepped into a nearby bar for a drink. I had an awareness of being only half there, as though the other half of me had continued along the sidewalk without acknowledging her presence. But we
had
caught each other's eyes, we hadn't flinched and glanced away in time—so there we were, perched on adjoining barstools with little in common.

We quickly ran out of old friends to mention and teetered on the brink of leaving, but we eventually succumbed to inertia and ordered more drinks. On the third she told me the key to men was that they always wanted sex but rarely had the luxury of expecting propositions. And they were
tired
of always having to be the ones to ask, she said. From the day they hit puberty they wanted to lay that burden down, so all you had to do, she said, was suggest sex and they would take you up on it. This applied equally with most married men, she said—to be honest, with any of them. Failure was rare, she said, and tipped back her glass all the way.

It was admirable, the ease with which she approached the question. It didn't change my own behavior, however, which in that arena was passive; possibly this was part of why I found myself married to Ned.

In fact, looking back, you could say my passivity in that arena was the start of my greatest failure.

But seeing her unremarkable face in the bar mirror, I felt awed by her attitude, part aggression and part simple confidence. I believed someone should shake her hand or pin a medal on her lapel, but that someone would not be me: for I, even as I was impressed, felt a lucid dislike.

Then the librarian said yes, and I was grateful to the girl from high school.

STILL, THOUGH, EVEN
if the bogus exposés and hair-sprayed New Age gurus hawking their bestselling books about past lives had a point, there was no explanation I could find for
my
having heard the voice. There was no reason I should have had to hear anything at all, if little Lena had contained a reborn soul.

It wasn't as though she herself had spoken, like the little boy with his encyclopedic knowledge of Mosquitos and Messerschmitts. She'd painted no old-fashioned watercolors depicting orphanage memories from 1934.

“I'VE BEEN WONDERING
,” I said to Don as he drove me back to the motel, his backseat a neat row of paper grocery bags. “I was thinking this place would be quiet over the winter. I don't get the draw for all these people in the off-season. I thought you only ever had a full house in the summer, but now it's almost Christmas. Did you—I mean, just out of—were you planning on all of them arriving?”

Don was silent for a few moments as we ascended the long, slow road that leads up to the bluffs, changing from pavement to gravel as it goes. He reached out a gloved finger and scratched the side of his nose, shrugging lightly as he spun the steering wheel with the other hand.

“I'm trying to help them out,” he said.

On the expanse of ground beside the parking lot Lena was playing, wearing her hot-pink earmuffs. She appeared to be piling the previous day's graying snow onto a grim effigy vaguely suggestive of a snowman. Around the dumpy figure was a large impact crater where she'd scraped snow off the dead grass.

Main Linda watched her from the doorway to her room, her hands around a steaming mug, ensconced in a parka with a fur-lined hood like she was Peary at the North Pole.

I realized the light was leaving: a long, knife-thin shadow was falling toward the sea from the dirty pillar of the snowman, which had frayed sticks for hands, pieces of trash stuck on its torso for decoration and what appeared to be a rusty zipper for a mouth.

I didn't like the look of it.

She ran to greet me when I stepped out of Don's car, her nose red and running profusely above her scarf, bundled-up arms flung wide. She's always excited to see me again—though if I'm being honest, as long as she has someone else to talk to, she's almost equally excited to watch me go.

Though the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country . . . 24% of the public overall and 22% of Christians say they believe in reincarnation—that people will be reborn in this world again and again.
—Pew Research/www.pewforum.org

AT DINNER
in the motel café I took a census of the guests. Lena was making the rounds; having lost interest in her food quickly—for her, food is never the point of a meal—she was stopping at every table, talking to each guest, leaving me alone to watch her progress and consider the obliqueness of Don's answer.

There were Burke and Gabe; there were the Lindas, Main and Big. There was Kay, eating at a table with the angry young mogul who, less shaven every day, was leaning across the table to talk to her confidingly. Before long he'd be sporting a full mountain-man beard. There was Don's father, sharing a large table with Faneesha while Don cooked and the waitress served, and there were the newest guests of all, an arty couple from New York, maybe in their early forties, who had the room right next to Lena's and mine at the far end of the row. They dressed tastefully and didn't seem to talk to anyone.

And then there were the regulars from town, including a woman who dressed in multiple shades of blue and always ordered the chicken pot pie and an old man who, before Don opened the café, had eaten only frozen meals since his wife died, Lena said. But I was interested in the motel guests, the motel guests only and why they were here.

Don couldn't have meant to imply his help consisted of letting friends stay for free—the young mogul needed no such help and the chic couple had arrived in two separate gleaming cars, each of which had to have cost six figures. So that couldn't have been what he meant.

On the other hand Kay was distressed, Burke was distressed, the young mogul was distressed too.

Maybe Don offered some other form of assistance.

IT TOOK ME
till this morning to ask the Lindas. I asked while Main Linda was driving me to the auto shop; I asked her with no subterfuge.

“So why are you guys here?”

“My cousin took early retirement after some work-related stress,” she said briskly. “Down in Orlando, where she lives. She's on her own, mostly, her ex-husband lives in Vancouver, the sons have grown up and left the nest. I get a long winter break. The two of us have been close since we were ten. I brought her up to make her take a breather.”

“But why
here
?” I asked. “Specifically?”

Main Linda cocked her head.

“Our family used to have a house in the area. Not on the beach, inland. Came up every summer. We shared the place with the cousins. There was a candy store, we walked there every Saturday. Jawbreakers. Gobstoppers. You remember those? Giant round hard candies you could barely fit in your mouth, started out black and you went through all the colors as they shrank? Disgusting actually, kids taking the things out of their mouths all the time to look at the different rainbow hues, then sticking them in again. Filthy. Dyed tongues. Saliva. Yeah, we loved it though. Also, there were those Atomic Fireballs.”

“We had those.”

“Naming a candy after a nuclear mushroom cloud. Only in America, right?”

“Yeah. What I meant, though, was how did you choose this particular motel?”

“Liked Don from the beginning. And heck, the price was right,” said Main Linda. “I'm cheap as crap. Always have been, always will be.”

“Good to know,” I said, but I was disappointed in my weak powers of detection. People revealed little to me, and I couldn't even tell whether they meant to be evasive or were just uninterested in detail.

Maybe Don opened up his motel to those in need. But why disguise it?

I was at a dead end, I realized, falling silent as I sat in Main Linda's heated passenger seat, and how did you get out of a dead end? You had no choice. All you could do was give up, turn around and drive the other way, drive back where you'd come from.

I mean I don't want to leave the motel
or
the town, I want to keep my date with the librarian, for instance, a prospect that pleases me out of keeping with its likely outcome. But the sense I have of failing to understand the motel's gathering has started to disrupt my sleep: I lie awake nights distracted by my ongoing failure to grasp why these people are here. Maybe there's nothing to fathom in the first place but maybe there is, and the uncertainty doesn't sit well with me.

And I'm not so sure anymore I need to be hiding us. Increasingly my past interpretations strike me as arbitrary and I pick through them, second-guessing.

There's a chance I could stand up to Ned, I thought, sitting in the car, a chance he couldn't make Lena and me do anything we didn't want to do. Maybe I'm just a coward, I thought, hunkering here, as I was a coward about divorcing him. The line between cowardice and caution was blurred to me.

For a moment, Ned started to look less like a threat than an inconvenience and the future seemed almost simple.

Sitting in Main Linda's car I lapsed into a daydream of peaceful retreat—retreat to my parents' house, their quiet street where snow fell in pristine layers over the lawns. Only the few residents of the block drove down that street in winter, only the neighbors' footsteps marred the sidewalk; the snow lay pure and gently curved on the bushes and old trees of the neat gardens. There would be no cold cement catwalk stretching between the bedroom and dining room, as there was here—no questions to speak of, either, beyond the mundane questions of the design and order of days.

I didn't relish the part where I, fully grown, would be choosing to live in my parents' house again, but they would be good to me and I could help my mother with my father, when she needed me. In that way I could do my part. We would stay there and Lena would go to school; I could get a new job, though I'd long since fallen off the tenure track—a community college might have me, or maybe a private high school. I could almost believe in a return to routine, an end to stealth.

I felt the wings of the normal touch my shoulders, ready to settle on me with a bland, insulating protection. I felt hopeful.

“Here you go, dear,” said Main Linda, and I saw we were already at the auto shop. There weren't many cars in the lot: Saturday. “You want me to wait here till you make sure your car's ready?”

“No, that's fine,” I said.

“You sure? It's no problem.”

“That's OK. I've wasted enough of your time already. He said it was all done. You go ahead, Linda, and thanks so much. I'll see you back at the motel.”

I regret those words.

4

IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE

B
.Q. WASN'T IN THE OFFICE; BEEFY JOHN WAS ALONE. HE HUNG UP
the phone as I went in stamping slush off my boots, shuffling them back and forth on the black rubber mat and making the electronic doorbell chime.

“Enjoying your weekend?” he asked.

I leaned over and scanned the bill on the counter, trying to pay attention to the line items as he explained what had been wrong with my car's workings.

As usual when a mechanic talks to me I put considerable effort into looking interested, even respectful. I was intent on that effort, though it warred against my instinctive dislike of John, when I detected someone behind me, felt or heard the brush of thick, expensive fabric against itself. I registered that the doorbell hadn't chimed this time and there was a scent, subtle but clear, which I had to identify—much as I wished not to—as a familiar cologne.

Beefy John, still talking about the car, looked steadily over my shoulder; I turned.

“Hey there, honey,” said Ned.

THERE WERE THREE
thinly padded, black folding chairs along the wall, beside a fake potted plant with dusty leaves. I sat down on one. The fake plant was two times a stand-in, I thought, as a fake plant it stood in for a real one, and then the dust on it, the full neglect, made it seem so purely symbolic that it became an imitation not only of a plant but of an imitation plant.

I wished I could stare at that homely fake plant forever, and never, ever look upon Ned's face.

I was ignoring Beefy John too, or ignoring the blank space left by him, because he must have retreated into the private recesses of the establishment. I felt a vacancy in the space over the counter. Had he given me back my car keys? It was as though I'd lost time, I'd skipped some minutes and found things changed. Instead of looking up I was staring at the fake plant and at myself—but from a great lunar or stellar distance, across a reach of airless space. I might have been a pushpin on a map, a piece on a board game, any tiny, manufactured item on a wide background.

I couldn't choose a direction for my attention. I failed to assimilate.

“Relax, sweetheart, it's all good,” said Ned.

His presence and the vapid words were separate—the words, I thought as I gazed at a streak in the plastic leaves' dust, an impressively hollow comfort. In the instant when I turned from the counter I'd caught a flash of his handsome face, enough to register his features; but now I was insanely reluctant to raise my gaze to him again.

It
was
insane, I realized that—some kind of rapid breakdown. But I couldn't change the angle of my head. I sat heavy in the chair, sack-like. After a minute he lowered himself into a squat in front of me.

And even squatting he stayed graceful, not subordinate the way a squat can make you. I kept my head bowed as long as I could, avoiding the solid offense of his beauty. Before me rose an immaculate camelhair coat, unbuttoned; a well-cut dark-blue suit beneath it, complete with downy-white shirt and silver tie; crisp, businesslike wrinkles on each side of his knees where the cloth was stretched taut. Yes: even the wrinkles in his slacks possessed a symbolic efficiency. They bracketed his sculpted knees concisely, minutely telegraphing competence, even mastery.