Sweet Lamb of Heaven (29 page)

I looked behind me and saw a black dress laid out on the second bed.

“I'll see you outside,” he said. “Be on your good behavior, now. You see what I can do.”

His face went gray and for some reason I reached out and touched the screen softly. But it wasn't warm, and fine dust came off on my fingertips. The laptop wasn't even on. I raised my face: Lena and Will were standing in the doorway. Will wore a suit and Lena's eyes were puffy.

We weren't in the motel at all but in my parents' house; I stood in my old bedroom. There was a rush of confusion that was almost a thrill, almost velocity. Then it stilled. Here was my corkboard with its colored pushpins and ribbons. P
ARTICIPANT
. The air was humid and close; my parents had never had central air. I heard my father's voice: they never “held with it.” I was wearing the black dress now, I saw, glancing down—no memory of changing into it—and toe-pinching black shoes with heels so high I could barely walk on them. I'd never have picked out those shoes.

I wouldn't struggle. Don't fight it, Ned had said sleazily. But it
did
hurt more if you struggled.

Prey animals had the sense to play dead.

So I leaned down and picked Lena up, though her weight made me stagger on the too-thin heels. But she was real and solid. I knew from her red eyes that she'd been crying and I squeezed her hard, maybe too urgently. Had all of us been frozen there? Had we all been suspended on Ned's whim, or only me? I tried to see if Lena looked older . . . I was flailing. It was possible, faintly possible that her face was more angular suddenly, but whatever slight change I might imagine wasn't obvious like my long talons. I tried to keep them from scraping her back as I held her; I'd rip them off. They were like parasites on me.

“Mommy, I'm hot,” complained Lena.

I put her down and as I turned away bit at the longest nail, ripped the white edge of a thumbnail off with my teeth. But then—they weren't long anymore.

And the hairs on my legs? I leaned down to look beneath my tights. They were black tights, semi-sheer, and I could see no hairs through them. The skin on my calves was smooth. I straightened up again and was holding out my hands, looking at them dazedly, when Ned appeared behind Lena in the hall. He wore a black suit, true to his word, and a silver-gray tie, and looked like he'd stepped off the pages of a magazine.

“My
father
,” I said, and it hit me whose death this was—I wasn't the ghost after all.

It had happened without me. He was all gone, and I'd missed him. I'd been absent. There was a picture in one of my mother's photo albums: my father as a tiny boy in a white suit, sitting on the back of a horse. Or maybe it was a donkey. It was a blurry, black-and-white picture.

That little boy, I thought.

How would my mother ever forgive me for missing it? How would my brother?

Had my father lain in bed, had he grown thinner, the way the dying do? He might not have missed me. I hoped he hadn't but I would never know.

“You were always a daddy's girl,” said Ned.

“You were a rotten son-in-law,” I said, as though it was news.

He kept smiling, as always. His smile never wavered now. It was a rictus.

“You took his money and you even took his dying,” I said.

“Mommy?” said Lena. It was as though she hadn't heard me; I was glad and ashamed, ashamed for speaking that way in front of her. “Can we go now? Nana says they're going to play a pretty song for Grumbo at the funeral. She said they're going to play ‘The Skye Boat Song.'”

“Take my arm, kiddo,” said Ned, bowing his head in Lena's direction.

She clung to Will for a second, she would much rather have walked with Will, it was awkwardly obvious, but finally she lifted her hand up to Ned's.

I walked right behind them, fearfully close; as I stepped into place at their heels, I clutched Will's arm for a moment where she'd let go of it.

“Let go of that thing right this fucking second,” said Ned through gritted teeth. But he was facing away from us. As though he had eyes in the back of his head. “You're
my
wife. You remember it.”

“How did you know how sick my father was?” I asked weakly. “How did you know before we did?”

“Whatever you
need
to know, I'll fucking tell you,” ground out Ned. Then he turned and whispered over his shoulder, almost tenderly, “Bitch.”

My stomach flipped but Lena was looking elsewhere and waving at someone: she hadn't heard the tone or the words. Again she seemed to be immune. She was usually so observant—it was as though Ned had a wand.

We stepped out onto the front porch, where I saw my parents' grass was yellow and dry. There were flags flapping from porches down the street: it was Independence Day. Out past the awning, where the shade stopped, reigned a bright blank July heat, cicadas whining in the trees. A small group of photographers stood on the lawn. Had Ned hired them? Would a real news outlet spend money on pictures of a candidate's in-law's funeral?

Ned wore a solemn expression, making the occasion momentous—such was the power of his bearing—and curved a graceful arm around me in a supportive gesture. He was between Lena and me, seeming to shelter us both, there on the porch: the father of the family, presiding over a sad wife and innocent little girl.

Will had fallen behind somewhere—that he had even been allowed to come was surprising. Ned couldn't have liked it; maybe my mother had pushed. There were limousines at the curb, and my mother was getting into the first. We joined her there, Ned and Lena and I (I looked back and saw Will headed across the dry grass for limo number two). My mother slid in beside Solly and Luisa, already seated.

In the cool car with the air-conditioning blowing into our faces Lena sat between Ned and me and sang in a high little voice.

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward! the sailors cry;
Carry the lad that's born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.

Across from us my mother wore an expression both peaceful and relieved, maybe. Alone now, without my father, but probably also relieved. She avoided looking at Ned as though there was a blank space where he sat.

Lena, who only knew the chorus, sang it again.

I tried to discern from my mother's face, then from Solly's whether they were angry at me for being trapped by Ned this whole time as my father was dying.

But Solly wasn't looking at me at all: he was looking at Ned with open contempt, with raw hostility. Luisa nestled into his side, her eyes cast down. Miserable, I thought, and polite. My mother patted Luisa's knee and they smiled at each other sympathetically.

I turned my head toward Ned, slowly and slightly so that he wouldn't notice. He'd dropped his falsely protective arm off me when we got into the limo and also dropped Lena's hand; now he was looking down at his phone, as usual.

There was his neck, its even tan, the sweep of one lock of hair over his forehead, his perfectly clean ear. There was the faint scent of his cologne. I kept looking, I kept gazing at the graceful tendon of his neck, the clean shave along his jawline. And just when I was about to turn away—feeling my eyeballs throb dully from being rolled to one side too long—I saw a movement on the skin. Just for a second, just for an instant, I saw an L-shape made up of pink-and-white squares flash onto the skin before they disappeared.

I swear I saw him pixelate.

I didn't say anything, my tongue was stuck in my throat, but as we got out of the car I found myself scrabbling at his sleeve. Lena was walking ahead holding my mother's hand; I had Solly's and Luisa's backs in front of me. We were on display again as we stepped onto the cemetery's gravel footpath—I didn't see the photographers yet but there were mourners around us, others were parking and walking over to the gravesite—and so, again in the open air, Ned turned to me smiling. The smile was perfect, too: restrained, as though in grief, and yet compassionate.

“How are you
doing
it?” I asked, a bit pathetic. “What are you doing?”

“I'm playing with you, honey, that's all,” he said softly, and tapped one temple. “You let me in when you started ‘clearing your mind.' That New Age horseshit is good for one thing: access. Safer when you had the therapist in the room, but then you started to do it all by your lonesome, didn't you. With the little earbuds in, all walled off from other people and with your mind wide open.”

“The
hypnosis
tapes?” I squeaked.

“You threw open the doors and I walked in. So now I'm tinkering. I'm just tinkering around a bit with the little wife's thalamic nerve projections. I can do that now. I can make you see what I want you to see.”

He'd effected some kind of amnesia. If not a dream he'd given me, it wasn't far from it, I guess, a thought, an idea, a mental frame. Drugs, maybe? Could this be pharmacological, and his mind-control brags just a component of his intricate manipulation?

“But I don't know what you mean,” I said. “How can you—
anyone—?”

“I have the skills,” he said. “Ever since I took the kid. Added bonus. You just take what you want. You know that, sweet thing? The more you take, the more you get. It just starts to
pour
in. Talk about miracles.”

“I don't get it,” I said. “I don't . . .”

“The same way money gives you everything, so does power. It's like one of them math curves, rising steeper and steeper. That's how power grows once you grab it. How'd you get through thirty-some years without even knowing
that
much?
Stupid
. I can make things happen without even being there. I kept you on your toes. The subway, right? The freeway. And the house. It's nice for me, watching.”

“But not—that isn't possible.”

“Not only possible.
Easy
. With neurons so
much
is easy. Didn't your little Hearing Voices club tell you that? Haven't you learned anything?”

“So you're saying you can get into my—”

“I have the keys to the kingdom.”

“What kingdom?”

“I can slide my fingers,” and he leaned over and whispered close, “right into the holes in your head.”

His breath was moist and stale on my ear and a sight flashed before me, a black pit. Out of it climbed naked people in stuttering, stiff movements, herky-jerky. I'd seen that movie, I thought, a Japanese horror movie, I'd seen it and it scared me. They were like puppets pulled and released on unseen strings, and their thin limbs were hairy and banded as the tails of rats.

“Like I did with the little doctor girl,” he said. “You can't let people like that just keep going. She saw
way
too much. And then she opened her little bitch mouth. So she had to go. Didn't she.”

I turned and stared at his smile. Then I bolted ahead, my stiletto heels biting into the turf, until I was near enough to grab Lena's hand and use the contact to steady myself. I walked forward holding that little hand tightly, my mother on her other side, and looked down at her face that I love so much, trusting and bright.

I gazed at her face that banished fear and thought of not looking back—no matter what, I said to myself, no one can make me look back now.

AT THE RECEPTION
(carefully steering clear of Ned, who was at the far side of my parents' house glad-handing the mourners) I took Will's arm and pulled him into the kitchen with me, where we could talk. I watched Lena through the open door, carrying a tray of food with my mother at her side. I felt cracked and hollow.

Drinking wine didn't make me less parched but at least it loosened the tendons on my neck. I was living in a half-life, I thought, a life of distorted lenses where I couldn't trust anymore that a man's skin wouldn't pixelate beside me. Even my thoughts weren't my own, and without them I wasn't myself. Alone had been free, I saw that now—alone had frightened me but the air was clear there. Now I was in prison, without the privacy of my mind. With those claws in my thoughts I wasn't myself—I wasn't anyone.

Will and I stood and gulped from our goblets beside the trays of brought food, the donated lasagnas and plates of brownies crowded onto the island. I made myself focus on the practical and asked him what had happened over the past weeks.

I didn't say months. I was trying to test the waters.

“You mean—in the news?” he asked.

“I mean with us,” I said. “What have
we
been doing?”

“Besides your father—helping take care of him? Besides the illness?”

“We've been here at the house for a long time,” I repeated, tentative. “Just here with my parents.”

I saw in his face: Of course. Yes.

So it
had
been a nightmare, I'd been here, where I needed to be, with them. That motel room and fluttering fast-forward of days and weeks and months had been a memory Ned implanted when he took away the rest.

“Is he threatening you again?” asked Will urgently. “Did he say something threatening?”

“It's not what he
threatens
,” I said. “He said—he said
he
did it to Kay. He said she saw t-too clearly. Somehow he
did
it, Will. She d-didn't do it to herself.”

I was starting to stammer, a habit I thought I'd gotten rid of as a child. Will reached out and held my shoulders.

“And now I don't have the right memories. This—it's like I wasn't here till today. I don't remember anything since March. Right after the fire, after Kay. And he says it was him. In my head. He did it to her and he can do it to me.”

“You don't have the right memories,” repeated Will.

I mumbled what Ned had said—his fingers, the holes in my head. My hands had started shaking. “You were reading
Goodnight Moon
. I had this—I thought my hair was growing just, just fast—”