Sweet Lamb of Heaven (23 page)

Trying to be polite, I think, she pointed at a sculpture on Charley's mantel and asked if it was “done by an Eskimo.” When Charley said no, it was a Chinese Buddha, she went on to say
Oh
with a round, pretty mouth, frozen in wonder. The words were blank as paper: that lovely child was so slow to make connections that it almost hurt to listen to her talk. Maybe she was
sixteen
, not nineteen or twenty-two, I thought, and it was simple childishness.

Ned bringing her was of course, given his PR focus, his obsessive commitment to the slick campaign, startling. It seemed needlessly risky and certainly meant to be needling. He may have thought I was still capable of jealousy. But I felt only pity for her as she sat, nestled into his side on Charley's deep sofa, long legs drawn up.

Charley, who cared as little for what Ned thought as he cared for her, asked her outright how old the girl was at one point, but Ned intercepted the question and asked Charley how old she
thought
the girl was.

When Charley said “Too young for
you
,” he smiled and trailed his fingers along the gazelle's spaghetti-thin upper arm. With her furs off she wore only a tight dress sparkling with gold flecks, and the arms were full of holes made to look like knife slashes.

They didn't stay long, only long enough to accept Charley's offer of coffee with disinterested shrugs and then leave before it was finished brewing. The two of them stood briefly at the big bay window, from which Ned—one arm strung over the young gazelle's shoulders—watched Lena run across the snow for a few seconds while his girlfriend looked down at her phone, texting with lightning speed. When it came to texting she wasn't slow at all.

“Place hasn't changed one little bit,” he said to Charley as they were leaving, in a clearly insulting tone. He turned, smirked and pointed at me. “We'll pick you up at six. Cocktail dress in the master bed.”

Charley looked at me for a long time after the door closed, shaking her head. Meanwhile Lena was still playing in the back by herself; she'd never noticed they were there.

8

BONES THAT FED OUT THEIR COLD

M
Y BROTHER'S APARTMENT IS SMALL. HE MAKES DECENT MONEY
for a young guy working at a start-up, but this is Manhattan—where he was lucky to get five hundred square feet in a building with roof access.

So he sleeps on the couch and Lena and I take the bedroom. He wakes us up by coming in to open his closet; Solly's a sluggish awakener and every morning he stands there tousled and half-asleep, swaying faintly and staring at his row of shirts on their hangers. The shirt indecision paralyzes him.

I promised we wouldn't stay for long, this is a quick visit, but he waved away that promise when we arrived and said we could stay forever, if we wanted to. Lena nodded solemnly.

“For
ever
, Uncle Solly,” she agreed.

Forever means two weeks. I feel safe in this prewar ziggurat with its thick walls and overheated air. I don't love the city at this time of year—the way white snow turns to gray slush, how the freeze of the sidewalk reaches right through your boot soles. But it's good to see Solly, and I need a break before we go back to Maine.

Whenever I call Will he brings up his worry about Ned, his fear that Ned's going to have me hurt or killed. It makes the conversations strained. I was so pleased by his quiet bearing when I first met him, his calmness that had an almost mystical quality. But now that quality is gone, its glassy surface has been broken and doesn't seem to be smoothing out again. He's still soft-spoken and kind, but there's wariness when he talks to me. I know he feels he should be here—whether he wants to or not, he believes he should be near enough to guard me, that it's somehow his responsibility, which is preposterous.

Conspiracy theories are a mostly male hysteria, it seems to me. That style of paranoia isn't my own—it has a self-importance I don't relate to. Even now, when I know for a fact I've been conspired against, it's hard for me to believe in conspiracies.

Ned acted against me not because of who I am but because of who he is—I'm just the one he happened to marry. And the kidnapping was only a conspiracy in that he hired some people and used others.

Without Will in front of me, though, the attraction is more abstract. Was it only a wishful idea? It was
my
idea, I know that, I asked him out and brought him in—but the newness of knowing him and Don makes them feel less like fixtures in my life and more like bystanders. Only the Lindas, with their earthiness, seem concrete and reliable.

Lena and I need relief from the closeness of the small apartment, so we do her lessons in a coffee shop. After the morning rush has subsided the place is colonized by mothers and their goggle-eyed toddlers, who stagger around banging plastic toys on the backs of chairs and gumming them; the women chatter to each other, brooding on nests of scarves and coats. Lena takes the roaming toddlers under her wing, holding their hands and showing them colorful objects. She's popular with the mothers for this.

Most days when Solly gets home from work the two of them go out to a nearby playground; she doesn't mind the creaking freeze of the swings, the burn of the icy slide. Sometimes I walk out of the lobby with them, wave goodbye as they cross eastward to the park and then veer west myself. I walk to the Hudson River, past a bagel shop, bodegas, some kind of pretentious cigar lounge, and an opaque window whose neon sign reads
HYPNOSIS
.
QUIT SMOKING / LOSE WEIGHT / MANAGE GRIEF
.

YESTERDAY IT WAS
the Lindas first on Skype, then Kay. When Lena and Kay had finished singing together, a tuneless song about a mermaid, she ran off to build a LEGO castle and I slid into Solly's desk chair in her place.

I was dismayed at how Kay looked. She had the same hollow-eyed face she'd had when she first arrived at the motel—ghostly pale. She and Navid hadn't reconciled; after her meeting with the linguistics scholar Navid had spun off, his behavior erratic. He said he couldn't trust her again because she had concealed too much.

But we don't
know
how much we know, she said unsteadily, or we don't know how
little
other people know. None of us ever possess this knowledge. We can't know what others are thinking.

“It's like a kind of instinct we go on, right? After we get reassured we're not crazy. You know what Don told me?” she asked.

It was hard to hear her so I raised the volume on the laptop's speakers.

“He told me there are crowds of people who never get to that point, they never cross that barrier. People who hear and never stop thinking they're just insane, spend their whole lives on Thorazine or getting ECT. Living their lives all alone. And sad. We're just this small fraction of people who, basically, refused to believe in our insanity.”

She hadn't meant to keep secrets, she just hadn't talked enough, she guessed. And now Navid was gone, flown back to Los Angeles. If all this was, he'd said, was some kind of off-brand encounter group, he might as well bite the bullet and do the real twelve steps. And when it came to AA, he had said, or NA or GA or CA, L.A. was the nation's capital.

“I'm sorry,” I said, watching her cock her head to one side in the jittery connection. I had the fleeting illusion that she was preparing to keel over sideways in slow motion.

But she didn't say anything, just gazed at me, so I kept on talking.

“I don't think you were holding out on us, but I still want to know everything you know.”

“There are so many words for it,” she said.

I felt alarmed as I gazed at the fuzzy image of her face, the brown half-moons beneath her eyes. She always looks pretty, with the waifish delicacy of a ballet dancer, but there was a distraction to her expression.

She's not paying attention to her own welfare and no one else is, either. She has no one to take care of her yet I suspect she needs help. I want to call her mother; I wish I had her mother's telephone number.

It can't be my job, though, to look after Kay as well as Lena—not now, especially, when I've failed so dismally with my own daughter. I'm not equipped.

“It
is
language,” she said. “The same kind that makes your body work without you telling it to. You know how the brain runs your kidneys, say, or tells an embryo how to grow in a pregnant woman? What's the difference between that kind of implicit, like, limbic OS for our biology—and for the biology of all animals—and just a miracle?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“It's part of deep language that runs these operating systems for us. You see? It's not the language we
speak
. I mean our language comes from it, like all language, but our own specific language is like the surface of the ocean, the very top line of the water. Just the
line
. Deep language—I mean I happen to call it that, but there are other names—it's the rest of the ocean beneath, see, Anna? It's the rest of the water below, and it's everything the rest of the ocean holds, that makes that thin line of surface possible.”

She was doing something with her hands behind her head—scooping her hair into a ponytail as wings of the hair fell forward around her face. She kept talking faster and faster and shook her head as she did this, making it hard for me to hear; the volume was already at maximum. I wondered if she was manic.

That has to be it.

“See Western medicine doesn't come close to understanding the body, that's part of what I learned in med school and my residency, for doctors, we have to act like we know things, ‘project an air of competence,' is what they said to me”—here she used air quotes—“but let's be serious, it's a crapshoot, with anything in the least rare, whether you can get to a diagnosis that works and maybe jury-rig a cure for it. Medicine's more guesswork than the AMA wants patients to even
think
about, if they knew how much of a gray area there is they wouldn't believe a thing we said—”

“Mama,” said Lena, behind me. “I can't
find
it.”

“Shh, honey. Just for a minute. I'm trying to hear Kay.”

“We'd never be able to tell our brains how to manage the body's systems, so much more sophisticated than our self-awareness,” went on Kay, and now she was fiddling with an earring and in the process turning her face away from the computer's microphone. “. . . colonies of microbes—billions! Not to save our lives! What I got from Infant Vasquez, what I didn't have time to tell Navid, is
that
system . . . one aspect of deep language . . . the other—”

“Mama
,
”
repeated Lena, apparently deciding Kay's desperate monologue was background noise. “I can't find the
bottom LEGO piece
, you know the one you make into the floor? I can't find that big flat green piece to even
build
them on,
Mom
. I swear, I looked
everywhere
!”

“In a minute, honey, just a minute, OK?” I said, flapping a hand at her impatiently, but I'd already missed what Kay was saying.

Then Solly and his new girlfriend burst in the door stamping snow off their feet, his girlfriend whom I'd never met before was smiling at me expectantly, so I made my excuses to Kay and got up from the computer.

Language extinction has occurred quite slowly throughout human history, but is now happening at a breakneck pace due to globalization and neocolonialism—so rapidly that, by 2100, 50 to 90 percent of languages spoken in today's world are expected to be extinct.
—Wikipedia 2016

LUISA WAS SITTING
with Solly and me in his kitchen/dining room/living room (Lena had gone to bed) when we got the call from my mother.

Solly put her on speakerphone.

Our father had been losing weight and sweating at night, she said—so much that he soaked the sheets. They'd gone in to see the family doctor and the doctor had sent them to a specialist, where he'd been biopsied.

“Why didn't she tell us this before?” asked Solly, after punching the mute button. “A biopsy?”

“I didn't want to bother you, in case it wasn't anything,” she said.

I guess the mute button doesn't work.

“Sorry,” muttered Solly, but he was already distracted by the import of that.

“I'm afraid it did come back positive,” she said. “A fairly common cancer of the blood. ‘Hematological malignancy,' they said. We don't have the staging on it yet, but we should know soon and I don't want you to get too worried just yet. OK? It's not necessarily a dire prognosis, depending on the staging, of course, whether it's metastasized—it doesn't have too low a five-year survival rate. More than half of all patients pull through. Maybe even three-quarters, we'll see. So your father's chances aren't so bad.”

Luisa squeezed Solly's hand, her dark eyes glittering. Solly and I looked at each other steadily.

“Do they have a treatment plan yet?” asked Solly.

“There
will
probably be chemo,” said my mother. “Possibly radiation, possibly surgery. I'll share all of that with you as soon as I know more, dear.”

“Blood cancer,” I said, after a silence. I'd begun to feel uneasy—beyond even the facts of the case I felt a creeping apprehension. “That's where . . . isn't that . . .”

“It's where the white blood cells divide faster than normal cells, or live longer than they're supposed to,” said my mother. “He has at least a couple of primary tumors, which they tell me is a common presentation. With this kind of a lymphoma.”

AFTER WE HUNG UP
I told Solly what Ned had said to me before: lymphoma. I described it to him before he left for Luisa's place for the night, right before I took out my laptop and began typing this.