Sweet Lamb of Heaven (14 page)

“People ask questions to know each other better,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Are you mad at my father?”

“Hmm. Well, that's a good question.”

“You don't like him.”

“I wouldn't put it that way.”

“How would you put it, then.”

At that moment she sounded over forty.

“I'd say . . . well, I'd say we turned out not to have as much in common as I first thought we did.”

“I don't know if I like him either. I love him, because everyone loves their father.”

“Right. Of course you do.”

“We used to live with him.”

“Yes. We certainly did.”

“He never gave me a present before. Even though it's not Christmas. Did he give me a present ever before this?”

“Hmm. He must have, mustn't he?”

“I like my sheep.”

“That's good. It's a nice sheep.”

“I like living here. With you and me.”

“I know you do. I do too.”

“We live at Don's motel.”

“For now. But not forever, sweetie. You know that.”

“I know. One day we have to go. That's why they call it a motel. It's not a house or apartment.”

“No.”

“One day we have to live in one of those.”

“I expect so. We'll have neighbors, I bet. You'll like that, too.”

“OK. I'm going to go to sleep now.”

“I'm glad to hear it.”

I COULDN'T SLEEP
, so I wrote down that exchange, figuring it might give me needed insight, further on, into my failings as a parent.

Then I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was a good enough parent to try to keep account of those failings.

I lay in the other bed, letting the TV play muted in front of me, laptop on my knees. Don had to be some kind of counselor, some kind of advisor to those who'd heard . . . but now that I wasn't the only one who spoke of “hearing,” the word seemed cultish to me and I didn't like it, not at all. The word
hearing
had an unpleasant ring suddenly—now it was a matter for shame, almost, rather than one of the senses—and “the voice” wasn't the plain and straightforward moniker I'd taken it for but a worshipful honorific.

Now it was the Voice.

I wondered if what the other guests had heard was different from what I had—assuming it wasn't just Burke, of course, assuming he spoke for more of them. Not all of the guests had babies, in fact none of them did. As far as I knew, only Kay had necessarily had regular contact with infants. So maybe they'd encountered it, as she had, in the infants of others.

I went over the guest roster, as on TV a pretty woman was murdered with a knife. I knew the voice's life cycle, or I thought I had. But I knew
nothing
. You don't even remember how this supposed knowledge came to you, I told myself—it was never spelled out. If the voice had brought me here, how? What had driven us from old friends' welcoming houses to these Maine bluffs, with this peculiar group?

Maybe Don was onto something, maybe the migration
was
encoded in my genes
.

Many mechanisms have been proposed for animal navigation: there is evidence for a number of them, including orientation by the sun, orientation by the stars and by polarized light, magnetoception, and other senses such as echolocation and hydrodynamic reception . . . investigators have often been forced to discard the simplest hypotheses.
—Wikipedia 2015

How could the other guests have heard the voice? I tried to recall exactly when they had seemed upset. Burke was the only one who'd showed emotion to me, aside from the angry young man on his cell phone and Kay talking about the NICU.

I picked up my computer and scrolled back in this document to what I'd written about Burke. Talking to Lena about giants and beanstalks: that was when he'd lost it. And now I saw it, and it was obvious. His dismay had been brought on by something he himself had said, that Lena didn't have to worry about giants saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” from beanstalks—a voice, talking down from the clouds.

There was my evidence, right there.

I heard a text alert on my cell phone and rose from the bed to fumble in my bag.
I missed you tonight,
it read. And then another:
Did I get the date wrong?

I'd entered his name and number into my contacts list, and there it was: Will Garza. I'd forgotten my first date in almost a decade.

I apologized in a low voice, with the door to the bathroom closed so that I wouldn't wake Lena, and found myself relaxing as I listened to his deep and pleasant tone. I talked a bit about Lena, for whom he'd once suggested a book about a donkey named Sylvester who found a wishing pebble and got turned into a boulder. She liked it almost as much as
Ferdinand
. I told him my husband had followed us here. I told him almost every material fact about our situation, leaving out the part where I used to hear a voice.

He said he had never been married, that he had most often lived alone, that he preferred books to people. His parents had been from Argentina but he had grown up in New York before he moved to Maine and had relocated here when the rest of the family had returned to Argentina. They ran a small bakery there, and his father cultivated oak trees.

But he'd stayed here because this, he said, for better or worse, felt more like his country.

His given name was Guillermo but he'd always gone by the shortest Anglicized version, Will, not liking the initials G.G. as a boy and living among Anglos. He used to be a feral librarian, he said, before he went back to school.

That was what they called them, he said, librarians without a master's degree.

Olfactory cues may be important for salmon, which return from the ocean to spawn and die in the very streams where they hatched. Some scholars believe they use their magnetic sense to navigate within reach of the stream, then their sense of smell to identify the river at close range.
—Wikipedia 2015

THIS MORNING I
woke up simple-minded, as though a dream had narrowed my focus. I had to ask Don the question, the large question was all I was interested in, and now I would take him by the shoulders and shake him and ask it.
Don! Don! Don!
Who was it? Who was speaking to us?

But the urge passed. I guess I couldn't handle an answer, an answer would be too unsettling. I don't want to be part of some enclave of believers, some marginal sect. I've always avoided joining. I don't even have one of those plastic grocery-store cards that make the food cheaper. I haven't enrolled in any frequent flyer programs; though I can't fix a flat tire I've never paid dues to Triple A; even my friend's book club in East Anchorage, which mostly involved eating and drinking, was of little interest to me.

When I was alone I could accept, with difficulty, having heard what I heard, but to find myself among others who might confess and describe it, impute their own meanings—it makes me claustrophobic. And who
is
Don, even, to hand down high knowledge to me? I like him, I do, but when it comes to the greatest mystery of my life I have no reason to privilege a motel owner's beliefs over my own.

I do want to ask why, if several of them are in on this, they hid it from me until now. Why didn't they let me in before, if this is why we're here? When I asked how they came to be at this motel, why didn't anyone answer me?

Ned called and I let it go to voicemail, to which I listened promptly. He said he needed a decision, and followed this with an amicably phrased threat to show up again if he didn't hear from me right away. He's always been restless; after all, it's why he married me.

I struggled under the pressure of his impatience, trying to shrug it off as I made toast and spooned out yogurt for Lena. I wondered if I could put him off. I wasn't ready to see him again so soon, much less decide my course of action. This might be a subject, I decided, I
could
safely broach with Don, possibly Don would have some solid counsel for me, with his background defending wives under duress.

I'd table the other conversation for now, I'd focus my energies on fending off Ned.

So I called the Lindas, who like any excuse to go for a walk, and asked if one of them had time to take Lena down to the beach. I called the front desk and asked Don if he could meet to discuss my situation. I still needed help, I said.

I met him in his back office.

“You have a few options, as I see it,” he said. “One, you can leave the country. But that wouldn't be wise, legally. Two, you can hide somewhere, the way you've been doing, but better. On that choice I could help with logistics. But that's complicated legally too, since you're not alleging abuse. He could use it against you, certainly. Three, you simply file for divorce now. Maybe he makes good on his threat, maybe he doesn't. He could be bluffing.”

He stopped.

“That's all?” I said.

“Or four, you can do what he says. Sign the papers first, with your lawyer, and then do what he wants you to.”

“Isn't there a five?”

“I don't trust him,” said Don. “Four's a more dangerous option than it may seem.”

“But so is three,” I said. “He could try to get custody. Having her with me trumps everything.”

“I know.”

Don studied me, waiting.

I CALLED A COUPLE
of friends, pacing my room while Lena and the Lindas wandered up and down the beach. You shouldn't be rushed in this decision, they said, tell him you need a week. They were kind, but their support didn't help me, beyond the warmth of reassurance.

It seemed to me I had weak information about my choices, so I made more calls. I asked Don for a family lawyer's number, he had a personal friend who would take my call even today, he said, so back in my room used his name to get her on the phone. But she didn't tell me much more than I already knew, and while I was half-listening another call came in—Ned's voicemail had said he'd love to have lunch with “his girls,” it'd be no problem for him to “swing by.”

When I called him back my call went to
his
voicemail, which pleased me. I said I'd need till Tuesday, but don't come for lunch. Ease up.

I was wary of calling a lawyer in Anchorage. Ned knew so many people in the city that I couldn't be sure of steering clear of his contacts or friends. When I thought of lawyers there I saw two faces of lawyers he'd slept with, a young blonde and a middle-aged hardbody who ran marathons. A few other lawyers were investors of his. But Juneau, at least, wasn't his territory yet—maybe I could find a lawyer there, one who wasn't beholden to him. So when Lena came back from her walk I assigned her some reading and scanned search results.

Then I remembered Will Garza. He was intelligent, I thought, and kind and easy to talk to. I let Lena watch television, since it generates more background noise than reading, and stepped outside to make my call. We barely knew each other, of course, so I hadn't asked anything of him. But now it struck me that maybe I
could
ask his advice, and he, unlike my distant friends, was here.

We decided to meet; it needed to be someplace warm, someplace Lena would play hard and ignore us. Will remembered an outlet mall in the hinterlands, a mall with an indoor playground you paid for. It sounded to me like the worst place in the world for a first date, but I needed someone to talk to more than I needed to set a scene, at that moment, and I said yes.

The place was full of inflated slides and bouncy houses, with tinny pop music playing and bright lights shining and the red, blue and yellow decor of fast-food restaurants and clowns; it smelled like sweat and dirty socks and off-gassing vinyl. For me there was nothing to like, for Lena there was everything. She'd put her shoes in a cubby before I finished paying and was off climbing, running between the machines, making friends: not two minutes had passed before she was holding hands with an older girl as they tumbled down a wide blue slide.

I sat self-consciously under the fluorescents on a sticky chair and waited, following Lena with my eyes as she pulled the older girl from one puffy structure to the next. I wondered if my face was clean but was too self-conscious to check it in the cell phone's camera. I'd seen that a few times: people trying to look as though they were doing something else on their phones when it was clear from the angle of their head, sometimes a set of pursed lips or a hair toss, that they were studying their faces.

Then he got there, carrying a cardboard tray of drinks—a hot chocolate for Lena and a coffee for me, which he handed over without saying anything. There was a little milk in the fourth cup, he said, did I take my coffee with milk?

He brought with him a microclimate of calm. I was drawn to it, his warm calmness that set the stage for trust.

African ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the sun, the moon, and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile . . . this finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom.
—Abstract, “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Dack, Baird et al.,
Current Biology
, Volume 23, Issue 4

I'VE DECIDED TO
call Ned's bluff, though I have no idea how he'll react. I'm afraid, but I took a couple of Valiums, dredged up from the bottom of my cosmetics bag, and thought of how he's never had a genuine wish to be in the same room with Lena. He's never wanted to be near her, listen to her, keep her safe—never.

It makes me angry to think of this, makes me feel a burning anger. Remembering his disinterest I can't believe a court will ever side with him when it comes to my little girl, I can't believe it's a realistic possibility. Even if his constituency were to believe him, I think, even if he did successfully paint himself as a victim in the eyes of electors, surely a court would not, I tell myself.