Sweet Lamb of Heaven (6 page)

His lack of paternal feeling was unsurprising, in the end, since he'd never promised anything else. And it was true I'd forced him into parenthood by having Lena instead of getting a D&C as he wanted me to. I'd told myself that when the baby was born he'd come around a bit. I never expected him to be a candidate for Father of the Year, but maybe, I hoped, part of a circle would be described, a slow curve into warmth. Surely a real, living child would thaw his chill. It was what happened, I believed.

Now I'm not sure where I got that belief—maybe from a TV movie. I committed a cardinal error of women, by which I mean an error to which women in particular seem prone: the error of expecting someone else to change
toward
them, to grow into alignment. I expected love, change, and alignment from Ned, and all these expectations were baseless. The category of children was as alien to him as if he himself had sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. His own dim trailer park childhood had ceased to exist after he emerged from it—in his mind, despite the odds, nearly a perfect man.

It didn't help that around that time he was nurturing his budding interest in politics. He wasn't a candidate yet, he wouldn't be for a while, but he was angling, forging careful alliances. Though he'd never professed religious faith, he started attending church “for the connections.” He gathered new opinions around him like sacks he was hefting—sacks that bulged ominously, misshapen sacks full of hidden, gross things. Tired catchphrases would spring from his conversation in passing: “No handouts for welfare mothers,” say, but also, a fetus was sacred.

It was hard not to take his remarks personally when they concerned, as they often did, categories such as motherhood or women. But at the same time the remarks felt like objects to me—prefabricated items he had purchased quickly in a store, items he was busily stuffing into his shopping cart without close scrutiny.

“BURKE'S BUYING DRINKS
for everyone,” said Kay, twisting in her chair to talk to me from the next table. “It's his birthday. We only have beer or wine, but Don's serving a pretty good Shiraz.”

I accepted the pour of wine into my glass and raised it; we toasted Burke, Gabe saying something I didn't catch about rare hothouse flowers (Burke is a horticulturist). There was a rowdy crowd from town that night, some large-bodied, friendly-looking women out celebrating a remission; one of them had a tumor that had responded well to treatment. Everyone drank on Burke's dime and I embraced once again the sentimental illusions offered by wine—what was wrong with them, after all? I'd clearly been hasty.

“You know what they say about horticulture, right?” Gabe was saying, still on his long-winded toast. “Dorothy put it best: ‘Well, you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.' ”

I watched Burke laugh and raise his glass; I recalled a half-joke the voice had told.
Have you heard the one about the Buddhist fly?
It was a lovely iridescent fly, ran the riff, that flew through a room buzzing
I am one with the universe,
I am one with the universe
. The fly felt the descending peace of its enlightenment, the liberating lift of air beneath its gossamer body. How beautiful it was! How beautiful the very air! How blessed was its flight!

The swatter fell.

You were not one with the universe
,
my
friend,
said the voice.
But
now
you are.

But Don
was
serving a good Shiraz. In its flow I decided Lena and I
should
go see my family, we
should
sit at the table with them and be thankful for what we had. I recalled our dusty old centerpiece of orange-and-red silk leaves and decrepit Indian corn, which my mother always trots out with an enthusiasm that borders on the poignant.

I HAVEN'T FILED
for divorce and custody yet, though I could and probably should—partly because I know it would hurt Ned's career and therefore anger him, partly because it also presents complications for me, since I removed our child from him without a written agreement.

It took me years to leave, years of deciding and planning—far longer than it had taken me to get married in the first place—and by the time I was ready it was past Lena's fourth birthday. I should have divorced him before we left, when he had no legal leverage over me. I don't know why I didn't—ineptitude. I must still have been spellbound, and I didn't know how serious his politics would get, I didn't anticipate a fight. I expected a quiet, long-distance divorce about which he would be indifferent, as he was about me, as long as he got to keep a lot of money.

Or maybe I was afraid, just afraid to take a direct and final action. Maybe it was common cowardice.

When I told him we were leaving he never once objected: there was no tension around our departure. And I only decided to evade him later, when he started stalking us instead of asking for a visit. It was only in the White Mountains that I knew his motives were strong and impersonal, as, with Ned, any motives must be. It was then that unease crept into me.

But there's no proof I didn't spirit her away against his will, only a few emails after the fact that wouldn't bind anyone legally.

WHEN I DECIDED
to make the trip I hadn't told Don the details of our domestic situation. He only knew I wanted to keep a low profile at the motel—that much was obvious. So I finally took him into my confidence about Ned, I told him the story. I included Ned not wanting a child, his proven disinterest, until his Alaskan PR campaign, in a family reunion; I left out, needless to say, our visitation by the possibly divine.

To my relief Don didn't see me as a kidnapper. Rather he was alarmed for us, he tried to convince me to skip the dangers of a Thanksgiving in my parents' house and spend the day with him and the other guests. He promised to cook a prize turkey, with something vegetarian for Lena; he would bake pies, pumpkin, fake mincemeat, and pecan.

But I felt bad for keeping her from her grandparents so long, and from my brother Solomon, Solly for short, and others in her family she'd spent too little time with—only a rare Christmas, a few weeks' summer vacation she'd been too young to remember well. Alaska is far from Rhode Island. On Ned's side she'd never known relatives; even if he hadn't been estranged from his parents, he wouldn't have taken her to meet them since he never took her anywhere.

We had to go, I said. I was betting Ned wouldn't dare approach me in my family's presence—my family with whom he'd always played the part of a thoughtful, upright man, my family without whose financial gifts to us he never could have started his first business, from which all else had sprung.

I was more afraid, I told Don, that he would corner us afterward, because it was when we were away from my family that he could coerce me effectively. An in-person encounter between Ned and me is my main anxiety. The prospect fills me with the fatalistic certainty that I wouldn't be able to pull away from him right off, not with Lena's eyes on us. Somehow I'm certain of this despite its weakness, its irrationality, despite the fact that I know it would be wrong, dead wrong for me and for her too.

If Ned gets to us physically I fear he'll outmaneuver me. From the day I left him and felt the welcome release of distance the prospect of his presence has terrified me. Always since then, whenever I think of seeing him again, I'm a deer in the headlights.

If he was watching my parents' house for the holidays, some men in suits and leather shoes might follow us when we left.

“If you have to go, have someone in your family drive back with you,” suggested Don.

“But he could still follow us, and then he'd know we were here,” I said. “From then on. And we'd just have to move out. I don't want to go yet, and Lena doesn't either.”

Don nodded.

“If you want, I can meet you somewhere in my car. We can do a switch—you go into a store, you go through the back, we leave in my car. Whoever was driving your car could bring it back here once he'd given up and stopped following them.”

I was startled that he'd go to such lengths to help us.

“There are different ways to do it,” he said. “But the key is, you have to be careful. Don't think of complex dodges as ridiculous. It's worth it.”

He said he'd known a woman who was abused and had helped sneak her in and out of shelters. But always, sooner or later, she would lose patience and decide to make a generous gesture, she would throw caution to the winds and be caught and beaten again.

SOMETIMES I CONSIDER
wishfully whether, when she's grown up, it might be possible to tell Lena about the voice and stop being alone with it. I keep this record for that reason also: not to feel so alone.

Before I had Lena, when something upset me I talked to my friends about it in the standard way. But after she was born, when that ragged, uninvited disruption entered my life, I found I couldn't talk about it to my friends. Maybe we weren't close enough or maybe I was averse to risk. It can't be taken lightly, the rumor of mental confusion.

So this hybrid document is what I have instead, my journal entries mixed with thoughts that came to me later. I don't mean for Lena to read it—it's password-protected—because I understand that even if I fantasize about telling her, it would be the kind of unburdening adulterers sometimes do, a kind of selfishness dressed up as truth. The rules of sound parenting weigh against it. No, I write for myself or for no one. I have no stake in convincing an audience of my trustworthiness; my welfare isn't of general interest. I'm someone who was rained on for a period of months, rained on by word instead of water.

When it comes to my daughter, trustworthiness is the first thing I offer. I value it above all else.

BEING WITHOUT
a car made me nervous, but on the other hand I'm nostalgic for trains, and Lena, it turns out, loves them. For her a train is a social bonanza: a long container of possible friends with the added bonus of scenery out the windows. It's far superior to our sedan, where she's limited to my company.

Skipping down the aisle of the café car—where a drooping, whey-faced man looked at us glumly as he wiped down the counter in front of a near-empty display of potato chips—Lena said she wanted to live in the train forever. That's how she expresses approval, sometimes adding a touch of the morbid: “I want to eat ice cream forever and ever, till I'm even older than
you
are,” she's said to me before. “I want to stay in the motel that long, I want to walk on the beach.” At her age even a day has an eternal quality, so that
forever
and ever
is less a linear stretch of time than a form of reassurance. “I want to live on this
exact train
forever and ever till I die. Until I
die
, Mommy! Until I
die
!”

I told her about sleeping cars and she decided we needed
that
kind of train instead, where we would have curtains to draw across our bunks for privacy, supplies of chocolate bars and chips, warm sweaters for fall and tank tops for summer; we would ride in our train over green hill and dale, mountain and plain, bedazzled by the sights, enraptured by our fellow travelers.

We finally stepped out onto the platform of the old station near my parents' town. The sun was low in the dull-gray sky and a wind whipped our hair around. Lena was perfectly happy to forget about trains in favor of the reward of seeing her grandparents again. She clutched my hand and scanned the station wide-eyed, though she can only have half-remembered what my parents look like.

But she knew them right off, probably by their tremulous smiles. I was looking along a row of lockers, past restroom doors and soda vending machines, trying to cultivate the vigilance Don had urged. But all I saw was a couple of teenagers slumped on a bench beside their old-school boombox, belligerent sounds issuing.

“Nana! Grumbo!” cried Lena, and ran forward.

Her pet name for her grandfather, invented I'm not sure how, has always been redolent of a booze-soaked clown—ill-suited to the personage of my father, whose bearing afforded him, in the past, a quiet dignity. These days he doesn't know his name, he draws a blank equally on his history and the identities of his family, but still the mantle of that dignity hasn't entirely dropped from him. He holds fast to my mother when he walks, a dreamy look on his face suggesting a dim and lovely scene back in the recesses of his mind, a hidden spring from which he alone may drink.

Lena hugged them excitedly, ambassador of affection. Young children are the standard-bearers of visible love, I thought, watching. After we grow up and get sparing with our physical affection, children are sorely needed to bridge the gap. I love my parents but the urge to touch them seems to have mostly faded. Without Lena we'd be stranded in the lonely triangle of adulthood, the lovable child I ceased to be hovering sadly between us.

“Do you still have the kittens?” squealed Lena, who remembered kittens from a visit when she was three.

One day she'll separate herself with an adult coldness she'll be unable to control, uninterested in controlling; one day she'll probably touch me as rarely as I touch my parents now. She'll come and go, returning only for visits.

The thought is so acute, the outcome so near-certain I cringe, thinking:
This
is why parents want grandchildren. Really they want their own children back again, they long to feel that vanished and complete love.

I watched my parents' beaming faces as they bent to encircle her with their arms—my father doing so in a spirit of general camaraderie, not specific attachment. He doesn't recognize Lena across time but since his memory went he has learned to obey my mother; he simply believes her when she tells him that he knows or loves someone. He has agreed to go along with it. In a way this trust is the crowning glory of their lives, a final achievement. He knows my mother and through her he accepts the rest.