Sweet Lamb of Heaven (9 page)

The falling snow made me want to shore us up snugly for the winter and brought a pang of homesickness for our house in Alaska, which had always been more mine and Lena's than Ned's, for all the time he never spent there.
Ned
should have gone, I thought,
Ned
should have left.

But I myself had chosen otherwise, no one had chosen my course of action for me, and so Ned had not left the house—rather I was the one who fled. I forsook my existence, my local friends, the belongings I'd slowly and carefully amassed over the years of my life up till then, most of which would mean nothing to him . . . I left it all, except for some file cabinets of photos and documents, a few boxes of books and a handful of childhood keepsakes I'd stowed in a small storage unit. I'd given up everything to keep Lena close to me and get us clear: nothing else had mattered.

This was still true, I reflected, still perfectly true, my intent remained the same, it was my decisions that were questionable.

In our old house in suburban Anchorage—a city where every street was suburban except three or four downtown blocks—I'd kept us warm through several Alaska winters, Lena and myself, I'd cooked soup and stews and lasagna and other hearty foods in a kitchen shining with copper pots and brimming with heat . . . I'd loved it there, I'd arranged all the spaces exactly the way I wanted them. It had been a golden burrow.

All we had now was a small microwave, its walls cool and thin. People we hardly knew, though they were nice enough. The motel's walls were thin too. I
had
no solid walls, I thought. Would a wind rise around us this winter?

A wind
would
rise, I could feel it already, rise off the gray ocean and howl at the thin motel walls.

And then there was my parents' home, far nearer than the house in Anchorage, with its solid brick, wooden floors, and soft throw rugs, vines dormant on their trellises till spring. My mother would welcome us, I thought, if only I could shake this phobia of Ned, if only I could just face Ned and stand up to Ned, if I was willing to call Ned's bluff.

Instead we were living in a room like a cardboard box, with no source of warmth except the wall heater. We were socked in, I thought, perched on the rim of the frigid Atlantic—unknown in a group of other itinerants passing through, their lives as opaque to us as ours must be to them.

This cold, flimsy box was where my irrational impulses had brought us, I thought, my formless certainties.

I HEARD THE YOUNG
mogul pacing along the walkway outside the rooms this evening, pacing and talking on his cell phone. Lena was sitting in the bathtub blowing bubbles—she luxuriates in long baths, though without nagging she doesn't bother to ply a washcloth—and I was reading a magazine in one of our two armchairs, the bathroom door cracked open between us. We'd had dinner early because of her bedtime, but most of the other guests were at the café.

The windows of our room weren't open, since the temperature was below freezing; the heater thrummed, so at first I didn't hear his words. But his voice got louder; he grew agitated as the call went on.

“That's not fucking
relevant
,” he snapped. “Can we not do this analytical bullshit? If I wanted an analyst I'd lie on a couch and jerk off for two hundred bucks an hour. Hell, put me in a Skinner box. Fix me! . . . I couldn't give a fuck.”

I glanced at Lena to see if she was paying attention. But the bathroom was farther away from the door than I was, in my homely armchair backed up to the heater, and bobbing in front of her was a waterproof MP3 speaker shaped like a yellow duck and playing sea shanties. She was impervious to the young mogul's call, dipping a rubber whale toy in and out of the water as it consorted with the duck.

“It has nothing to do with that crap. I'm telling you. My mother was fine. My father was fine. They were both fucking
fine
. They're
still
fucking fine. Everyone should have such fucking decent and doting parents . . . no pervert uncles! Jesus
Christ
.”

I swept a drape aside to look out, making a sour mother-face that went unseen. If he moved off before Lena caught on I'd be relieved—and it wasn't so much the swearing that annoyed me as the force of his anger. He stalked by in his elegant leather coat and kicked one of the square wooden posts that was holding up the overhang.

“Well yeah. I told you that already. Not so much now. Before. Doing coke raises your chances of that shit. Plus oxy . . . what? Harvard. Aren't there brain scans? Some other radioactive shit?”

I decided to join Lena in the bathroom, where I shut the door behind us and ran in some fresh water to rinse the shampoo from her hair. I was thinking the young mogul would be bad news for Kay, if she submitted to the sitcom pickup tactics.

I don't know if Kay needs an angry young mogul.

ON TV THERE
were numerous “exposés” of small children remembering past lives. One two-year-old boy was born with the memories of a fighter pilot shot down in World War II, they said, and repeatedly enacted scenes of the pilot's fiery cockpit death. He showed a high level of competence at identifying bombers used on the Western Front. A girl of four painted watercolors apparently based on her great-aunt's early life as an orphan in Minneapolis, although the two had never met before the great-aunt perished of cirrhosis.

Their parents had been skeptical at first, the voice-overs told viewers, but over time had clearly seen no other explanation fit the bill.

“Young Alex's parents are highly educated, modern professionals,” intoned one narrator. “They did not wish to accept the evidence that past lives are real.”

A FEW DAYS
before Christmas my car stalled out so I left Lena with the Lindas and got into the cab of a tow truck, where I sat beside a driver who pulled my car into the only car-repair place in town. Imagine my displeased surprise—although I shouldn't have been surprised, since after all the town is small—when I was greeted by the beefy man from the diner.

He was the owner, apparently, since he wore a button-down collar shirt while the other, thinner man behind the counter wore polyester-mesh with the name of the franchise appliquéd. The beefy man—John—reclined with his arms crossed in a posture of managerial ease; I stood across the counter and smiled wanly. I felt the discomfort I always feel in car-repair places, the low-level dread of condescension followed by cost inflation, and wished to call upon my considerable expertise on the workings of internal combustion. Unfortunately I had none.

Waiting for the man to finish typing and Beefy John to finish watching him, I looked around at the walls, at ugly posters for automotive service packages, tires, motor oils.

One poster was markedly different: it was for something called American Family Radio. I peered closely at it, an airbrushed-looking photo of a plump, pink-faced man in headphones, shining smugly. Inscribed beneath his face and what I guessed was the name of his radio show were the smaller words
The AFA Works to: (1) Restrain Evil by Exposing the Works of Darkness
. . .

“Ma'am?” said Beefy John, finally.

I tore myself away from the fine print.

“Hey there, and how's that pretty little girl of yours? What can we do you for today?”

“My car keeps stalling out,” I said. “A Honda. It's a Civic hybrid—getting a little old, maybe. But it's always been pretty reliable. I can leave it overnight.”

“A Honda, huh? Well sure, we can take a look at that rice burner for you,” said Beefy John, and his smile said he was bestowing a favor. “B.Q. here will help you with the paperwork.” He smiled again before he clapped the underling on the shoulder, tapped his forehead in my direction in a mock salute and disappeared into the back office.

“B.Q.?” I asked.

“ 'At's me,” said the underling, typing.

“What does the Q stand for? If you don't mind the question.”

“Quiet,” he said.

“Quiet?”

“Be Quiet. Always saying that to me when I was a kid.”

B.Q. looked up from the keyboard and grimaced. His teeth were a rotting brown from the gums up, old-bone yellow and tobacco brown.

Handing over my keys I realized Don wasn't due to pick me up for almost half an hour; it was bitterly cold outside and I needed to be warm while I waited. But Beefy John in his satisfied recline, his crossed arms, the words
that
pretty little girl
of yours
, the jagged mossy teeth of B.Q.—they made me uncomfortable. The words
land shark
came to me as I signed the work order, B.Q. leaning forward unnecessarily from the other side of the counter, so close that I could smell the residue of cigarettes. B.Q. wasn't a shark, surely, he seemed more ruined than fierce, but the teeth . . . I considered whether his meth use was current or past, whether teeth ravaged by meth could be reclaimed. Then I pivoted and walked out into the winter, pretending to have a goal.

Once I was on the sidewalk I slowed down and ambled, watching my breath fog and feeling the cold on my cheeks until I fetched up in front of the library and went in. I hadn't had that goal in mind, of all the thousands of possibilities offered by libraries no single one presented itself to me, but there, right away, was the librarian I was attracted to. I had nothing to say as he looked up from the front desk, nothing at all. And yet I felt better already.

“Sorry, just coming in from the cold,” I blurted.

“What we're here for,” he said.

I couldn't think of any more small talk so I wandered along the shelves looking at titles, plucking out books at random. I seemed to be in a section either for children or for adults who were childlike: true-life accounts of balloonists, explorers. Pictures of famous caves. Prehistoric animals turned to fossil—trilobites that looked like beetles, ammonites that looked like snails.
Real-life Monsters
.
Haunted Houses of New Orleans
. The more I looked at the variety of subjects, the more hopeful I felt.

Maybe we could travel, I thought. Not just in my small car—across the world. To the Himalayas, say, jungles, dormant volcanoes with crater lakes, those acid lakes that shimmer turquoise in the sun . . . we stood on the decks of ships, rode camels over Saharan dunes toward the pyramids, wandered the Prado, the Great Wall of China, treaded the paths of picturesque ruins. What, in the end, would keep us from the world? I'd planned to give her a solid, settled childhood, where she could have the same friends for years and run through the same backyards, a childhood much like my own. But maybe she didn't need that. Maybe we could sail away, out of this chill into a summer country.

I hadn't thought of the voice in a while, I thought (suddenly thinking of it). These days a memory of it will flash through me and what I notice is myself forgetting, the rarity of that flash. It's like sickness—the whole world when you're in its grips, but once gone, quickly dismissed. Within days you take good health for granted once again.

“We only have a fake log,” said the librarian, behind me. “It's not as warm as the real thing.”

Privately joyful that he'd spoken to me, feeling as though I'd performed a small but neat trick, I followed him to a reading room. In the hearth an electric log glowed orange behind its fiberglass bark. The chairs were overstuffed, the high ceilings dark, but still I noticed, trailing after him, peering with difficulty at the fingers of his left hand, that he wore no ring, and I was pleased. I felt like a cliché noticing, a woman who read glossy, man-pleasing magazines, a member of some predatory horde . . . he had broad shoulders, an elegant posture.

“I'm so glad there
is
a library,” I said. “In a town this small. With only one gas station and no fast-food chain.”

“The building was a gift from a wealthy benefactor,” he said. “He made his fortune in lumber. His wife died young and he never remarried. He died without anyone to inherit his fortune. Brokenhearted, they say.”

“Oh.”

“So he left his house to the town for a library. In short, his tragedy was our gain,” said the librarian.

“Oh,” I said again. “Yes!” I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Luckily he smiled at me.

When he went back to his desk I sat gazing into the glowing seams of the artificial wood and wondered whether to ask him out. I wasn't sure I could. It'd be a cold call; I had nothing.

And yet I might be restless enough to do it, I thought, I was bored and agitated at once these days. I was constantly aggravated by the open question of the gathering of motel guests, frustrated by the problem of their continuing presence—and then, bookended with that problem, there were the limitations of my existence and the tedious routine of our schedule. I felt drawn to the librarian but at the same time ambivalent about the prospect of not being alone, that is, not being alone with my daughter, the two of us a capsule . . . the two of us close together after the leave-taking of the voice and our running away from Ned.

Of course it was premature to speculate, I knew nothing about him, but still, I thought, why actually try to know someone if you don't wish to know anyone at all?

Still, in the end you seek out company again. After the noise has passed, after the great clamor's hushed and the crowds have thinned—then a silence descends upon your room.

And though at first the silence is perfect, the silence is thought and peace, after a while the silence passes too.

IT WAS EMBARRASSING
to ask him out and I had to buoy myself up with bravado: it didn't matter if he said no. I had nothing to lose. The worst that could happen was that my life would remain the same.

In the few moments after, waiting for him to decline the invitation as I rested my fingertips on the edge of his desk, I thought of a girl from high school: she'd been average-looking and not particularly good-natured—in fact she was manipulative, crude, and often picked on easy scapegoats, the poor kids with hygiene problems, the loners. Despite this she always had a boyfriend, and her boyfriends were kinder and far better-looking than she. Waiting for rejection, I remembered her clearly.