Sweet Lamb of Heaven (5 page)

Sometimes there were brief flickers of foreboding, brief intimations of the voice's departure, but I tried not to invest too much in those. I didn't want to be disappointed so I didn't hope too hard. When I caught a glimpse of a future leave-taking, a tiny slip of possibility, I didn't trot out the streamers or confetti or whistles, the bejeweled gowns and conical party hats, the jeroboams of champagne.

I waited quietly, holding my cards close to the vest.

CURIOUSLY TWO MORE
guests have arrived at the motel right on the heels of Kay. By the standards of this place, it's a madding crowd.

They're two middle-aged men, a couple, and I can't help but feel that they, like Kay, are in some state of dismay. Maybe it's conjugal, a conjugal problem, but I feel like it's something else. One of them seems to be consoling the other half the time, he has a steadying hand on the other guy's shoulder practically whenever I see them.

They checked in at the cocktail hour—I have a glass of wine before dinner most days, while Lena and I play “Go Fish” or “War”—and shortly after that we heard a knock on our room door. When I opened it there was Don, the two men standing behind him, politely waiting, and Don peered past me and asked Lena if she wanted to conduct a tour. Typically she has to pester him for that; she'll run along the row of room doors to the lobby as soon as she sees a car pull in and beg to be the tour guide, and Don will check with the new guests to see if they're sufficiently captive to her charms. But this time Don sought her out, and it thrilled her, of course.

So we set out, the four of us—Don peeled off toward the lobby again—and I talked to the balder of the two men while Lena kept up her monologue with the other, a gaunt, handsome blond called Burke who seems to need consolation. The balding one, Gabe, said they wanted to take advantage of the off-season rates, they don't go in for tanning anyway, the cancerous harm of the sun's rays; winter beaches are just fine. Nor do they like to swim, he said, except in pools that are very clean. They also do not fish, surf, parasail, or favor any other ocean-related activities.

It became clear to me—as we stood near the ice machine and I listened to Gabe rattle on about bikini- and Speedo-clad crowds lying on beaches, the rude spectacle of this—that the two men
knew
Don, that Don was a personal friend of theirs, and that was why he'd felt all right bringing them back to our room.

At that moment I saw Don coming out of the lobby again, this time with Kay; they walked with their heads inclined toward each other, talking low. And it struck me with certainty that Don knew
Kay
, too. In fact it could well be that
everyone
else staying here already knew Don; that Lena and I were now the only guests who had not known Don before we came to stay at his motel.

I felt a little jarred.

And now I couldn't remember how I'd found the place, when we first came to stay. Had I driven past a billboard? Had I sorted through online reviews of budget motels? But I couldn't remember a billboard or a review. All I recalled was driving up the long gravel road in an exhausted reverie, hardly thinking, and turning into the small parking lot, shaded with pine trees. I'd liked the peeling wooden sign.

Welcome to
T
HE
W
IND AND
P
INES
.

I had a feeling of unease, flashing back to the movies I'd watched when the voice was first with me, a vision of black-clad people leaning over a baby carriage. I thought of a sedate old apartment building that was in truth a hive of sinister insects, where behind the ornately carved doors, in sleepy luxury, the neighbors quietly worshiped some dark beast.

I wondered, if I asked Don how he knew them all, whether he would tell me a simple story about how he'd gotten to meet them or would avoid answering my question. I felt a temptation to try this, to confront Don shockingly, demanding information.

But my misgivings are absurd, I realize that. The motel is Don's home, and motel managers can have friends to stay like anyone else.

WHEN THE VOICE
fell silent relief washed through me like bliss. I know everyone has reliefs as the days run their course: the feeling of relief is as familiar as a hiccup or jolt of fear. But this relief was the swiftest joy of my life.

Lena said her first word early in a day, so indistinctly that at first I took it for a murmur. She crawled across the rug and began idly banging on my shoe with a red sippy cup. I was skimming the news on my computer, a mug of coffee at my elbow, when she repeated the word,
Ma-ma
,
Ma-ma
, until I pulled out of my reverie and looked down.

Then she stopped saying it, her mouth falling open as she gazed at me. And in the wake of her utterance a new silence fell around us like a sheath.

I sat in startlement for a few seconds—it seemed to me that the silence had its own soft, rising hum.

This was it, this was how it happened: this was its departure. Her first word had supplanted the voice. And suddenly I knew, in a rush, what had been suggested to me, what had been hinted at opaquely in the preceding weeks—the voice had a life cycle. It passed through those who were newly born, in the time before they spoke, and when they spoke it moved on, displaced by the beginning of speech. It lived in the innocence before that speech, the time that was free of words.

The end,
the end,
I thought:
the beginning
.

I picked her up and laughed, bouncing us both around.

For a while, after she said that first word and the voice fell silent, I was worried it would return. This reflexive, ritual worry recurred whenever I found myself in an anxious frame of mind.

But the voice didn't return, and by and by I persuaded myself to stop fearing.

And during the new silence I spent weeks, even months in an altered state—the euphoric state of a lottery winner, as I imagine it, or maybe a newly minted Nobel laureate, a state of incredulous rapture. I've never won a lottery, I've never been given a prize, but I had this. I floated wherever I went, my baby in the stroller ahead of me or on my back—my tiny girl toddling contentedly beside me, holding my hand. I smiled a lot, people said, shone like a bride.

Ignorance
is
bliss, few sayings are so demonstrable, and I was blissful without the voice, I drifted on thermals. I loved the freshness of the new quiet and sometimes sat deliberately in a hushed room, picking out faint noises from the street. And the opposite too—I played favorite songs loudly, held Lena and danced with her. Excitedly I prompted her to speak, I asked for repetitions of the word
Mama
, for other words, whatever. I would lean down over her little face with such joy in the movement!—lean close to her, lean eagerly—no one between us, nothing but sparkling air.

Since the voice fell silent I've often been able to put the whole episode behind me. There've been many days, many nights, whole weeks when I've been able to forget the untenable aspects of that time, the first year of my daughter's life.

I've frequently been successful in my denial strategy, and it's probably this success that has allowed me to live a life that, aside from my domestic problems and our flight, could almost be called normal.

SINCE GABE AND BURKE
arrived, the routine has changed. Actual maids come now, since the linen laundry is more than Don can handle by himself. They're a couple of teenagers from town who do their work with earbuds in and haven't introduced themselves to us.

Plus Don has opened up a spare room off the lobby and begun to cook. The food he offers is simple and good—special dishes for Lena, a children's menu with pancakes or cinnamon rolls in the morning, macaroni and once bite-sized hamburgers at night. These didn't tempt Lena since she doesn't eat meat and never has; she feels too sorry for killed animals.

The motel guests have been gathering in the café for breakfast and dinner, and since Don keeps limited hours—as befits a chef with a base clientele of five—we're usually all there at the same time. And it's not just the guests anymore; stragglers from town have also been appearing here. First there were two or three old people wanting a break from microwave dinners, then a portly state trooper; Faneesha, the UPS driver, came at the end of her rounds and was instantly commandeered by Lena. Every night there are a couple more customers.

The first evening it felt strange to dine in the room off the lobby. I hadn't realized how much of a restaurant's mood comes from an illusion of permanence. The place seemed like an oversize supply closet, despite the flowers and candles and checkered tablecloths. But already by the second dinnertime it didn't seem preposterous to call it a café—even the lighting seemed altered, though the lamps and candles were in the same places. It had gotten more welcoming overnight.

Lena was intent on the patrons, and on the fourth night she hit the jackpot: a kid came in who was only a year older. He was with his father, whose attention was captured by a cell phone, and the boy too had an electronic toy, a glossy plastic robot that emitted tinny music and recorded the children's voices to play back. The two of them traded it to and fro, giggling at the senseless insults they made the robot pronounce. Lena got so enraptured she forgot to eat.

I was absorbed in the question of Thanksgiving, whether Lena and I should visit my parents. They're not too far from here, but on the other hand Ned knows the house. I was weighing the risks while the guests talked and laughed and Don carried food back and forth with the help of a teenage girl from down the beach. A song was playing in the background, a sad folk song about a love-struck, gunshot bandito dying alone in the hills, and I looked out over the ocean, reached to rest my fingertips on the cold window. I thought of other Thanksgivings, suffused in an amber glow.

When I turned back to the room again, my fingers still tingling, the guests all seemed familiar. It was one of those soft sinkholes of time when separate elements coalesce—we were a blur of sympathy, the air between us pockets of space in one great body, one saltwater being, unplumbed depths where the ancestors came from, primeval well of genes . . . the feeling stretched like a generosity, the gift of oneness. Who cared about those differences we had, those minor distinctions that kept us apart?

But then that lofty idea turned trivial, from second to second its shine faded. It's your
commonality
that's frivolous, I scolded myself, you want to think we're so many eggs under the down of a nesting bird—you want to be held there forever, sheltered in the warmth of a body that watches over you. You want it as almost everyone wants it, to
pretend
that we're one. To let the burden of our separation be lifted at long last.

That was all it was, I told myself: desire. Was it the case that every hopeful sentiment, each stir of communion and vision of eternity, is nothing but a projection of desire?

It's what we want that we see, not what
is
, I thought. Scraped bare, we're nothing but machines for wanting.

I felt a maudlin pity for us. Together now for the blink of an eye, I thought drunkenly, before we tread off into separate futures and one fine day, though motes of our bodies still persist, the last traces of our inner selves vanish. The private selves evanesce, the secret worlds that only
we
knew. The nameless company of ourself, that warm sleeve of being—goodbye, old friend.

With the voice, very rarely, I'd also felt these moments of loss, as though I was looking back at myself from somewhere past my death. At times I'd felt a cold freedom then, when my irritation faded and tears caught in my throat. The long view, the far distance of the stratosphere, clean and thin as high air. The axis where distance and closeness met, the axis on which the world spun.

But back then, at those rare times of elevation, the common ground had felt like truth. Now it was only a wish.

Drunkenness, I thought, could pass for a connection to God.

At my elbow Lena was making the plastic robot dance and laughing at it. There were plenty of people around. I should have felt content but I was distant, like an elder sitting apart, watching others that spun and shrieked, so busy in the midst of life.

IT WAS AT
the tail end of that golden summer when the voice went quiet, coming down off the high, that I realized we had to leave Ned. I had no more patience for his complete detachment, his reluctance to come home and rudeness when he did—a rudeness that positioned us as his unpleasant burden. In my own home I had to feel like someone else's dead weight, and I couldn't keep carrying it. We had to leave Ned and the string of young women in whose name he missed our weekly family dinners, who left their sunglasses in his spotless BMW, and after the BMW was gone, in his more electable Ford truck.

Neither the car nor truck ever contained a baby seat. Later I racked my brain trying to recall a single instance when Ned had driven the baby anywhere, but I came up with nothing.

I do remember, though, that one of his girlfriends wore lacy pink boyshort underwear, which found its way into the pocket of a jacket I took to be dry-cleaned—I hadn't checked the pockets beforehand and the panties were handed across sheepishly afterward by a drycleaner. They hung in their own plastic bag, a doll-sized scrap of fabric dwarfed by the hanger.

The drycleaner had cleaned them for free, he said to me shyly.

By then I'd known for a while that I didn't love Ned. But now, rather than existing in an amiable neutrality toward him which I'd tried, even before Lena was born, to cultivate and fit into the space where love should be, I'd come to actively dislike him. I turned the corner one day with nothing else to preoccupy me and caught sight of my own dislike, plain as day.

It couldn't be talked away, couldn't be handled in therapy (which Ned, in any case, would never have gone in for). It was as solid as a dining room table. His coldness toward me I might have tolerated for Lena's sake, had he been any vague semblance of a father, but his dismissal of her got more and more unbearable. I had the devotional urgency of new mothers and couldn't help feeling that a baby was a standing debt, a debt to a forming soul.