by Lydia Millet
Now he was relaxed in the chair, facing me, while I was in a defensive posture, backed up against the counter of our kitchenette as far from him as I could be. My hands were braced against the edge.
“I need time to think,” I said. “And while I think, I need you to not be here. And not spend time with Lena, either.”
He shrugged. “The clock’s ticking.”
“Why? Isn’t the election a whole year away?”
“Primary’s in August. My party controls the governor’s office and the House; the Senate’s a 10–10 split, but with redistricting we could take over there too, come November. We’ve been low-key till now, but it’s time for a higher gear.”
“You’re not going to start campaigning before Christmas, are you?”
He picked up Lena’s Lucky Duck from where it lay, studied it for a few moments, and then dropped it.
“Getting my ducks in a nice little row.”
There was a knock on the door, so I crossed the room and opened it. The Lindas stood there, smiling pleasantly, waiting. Ned rose from his chair and smiled too, at them first, then at me.
“Well, got to be getting back,” he said. “You mull it over, honey. So great to see my girls again. Ladies? A pleasure.”
The Lindas moved aside for him, and just like that he was gone.
I DON’T HAVE confidence we can run away again. For one thing it would clearly look illegal, now that he’s sought us out. And for another he’s obviously better at stealth than I am, and he does have friends. Whether Beefy John tipped him off or was only a witness, he has sources of information and I’m clearly not equipped to detect them.
The Lindas told me Lena was helping Don in the café; they sat and listened while I explained. I told them what my position was; they were sympathetic. And I didn’t have to persuade them Ned wasn’t the charmer people always think he is—maybe, as post-reproductive women, they were outside the field of his pheromones.
Almost as soon as Ned was gone the guests seemed to come out of the woodwork: the motel returned to life, with movement and light in the rooms, people talking and walking between them, breath visible in the cold. Don brought Lena back, and Kay and Burke were with them and made remarks about Ned’s shining car, his bodyguard/driver, his tailored coat and even the lamb, which lay abandoned in a corner of the room atop its pile of bright wrapping.
Laughter and conversation echoed from the walkway into our room. The day had passed quickly; before I knew it late afternoon was casting its long shadows.
Burke stayed a while after Don and Kay left, helping Lena tend to her bean plants in the miniature greenhouse. Some of them had sprouted; one was growing fast, already too tall for the container, and this they moved into a small pot he’d brought with him.
Eventually he got up to go and I thanked him for coming by, for all he did for Lena. As he was going out the door he turned and looked at me.
“You know, we have to look after each other,” he said quietly. “The people who’ve heard it.”
5
HURT, YOU WERE A CHILD AGAIN
I DIDN’T STOP BURKE FROM LEAVING, DIDN’T DO ANYTHING BUT watch as he headed off down the walkway. When he stepped into his own room I closed the door without noise and sat down on the bed.
Lena had her sheep on her lap and had found a buttoned opening in its stomach. Out of the opening, while I sat looking at her in a daze, she pulled a white-plastic box.
“That’s how she talks,” she said, and pushed a large, flat button on the box, which obligingly bleated out its eerie, falsetto prayer. “See? When you press the tummy she talks. It’s for babies. Mommy. I’m six. Can I throw away the talking part?”
“Of course,” I said feebly.
The strength had been pressed out of me; I was breathless and flat.
She turned a small screw neatly with her fingernail, impressing me, and extracted two batteries, which she placed neatly on her bedside table. She marched over to the trash can and dumped the box without ceremony.
“It’s not the lamb’s fault,” she said. “When she talks it makes me think how they took off her skin.”
“Oh, honey,” I said, reaching. “Don’t worry about that. OK? It’s sheepskin. No reason to think it’s from a baby. Maybe that sheep lived a long and happy life. Maybe it died of old age.”
“Maybe,” said Lena doubtfully.
“Can I see her for a minute?” I asked. It was occurring to me that the lamb could be a nanny cam, hold some kind of tracker. I’d been paranoid, this was paranoid, but then again in broad strokes I’d also been correct.
I held it and stared into its glass eyes, squeezed the face, inspected the nose and mouth.
With Lena in front of the TV I poured myself the glass of wine I’d been wanting. The people who’ve heard it, I thought. It had to mean what I thought it meant. So this wasn’t a random selection of winter travelers in Maine.
It was an enclave.
But I’d never told anyone about the voice—no one. That was what made my hands shake as I drank my wine.
“I’m going to take a bath, honey,” I told her, and carried my glass into the bathroom with me, leaving the door open. I thought the soak might calm me.
I’d have to ask Don, I thought as the water ran, it was the only course of action, I’d ask him now, and this time he’d have to tell me. Or I’d ask Burke how we came to be here, how it was that someone had known and how they’d summoned me, if that was what had happened.
Probably the voice wasn’t anything supernatural, you credulous primitive, I thought. I sat there in the hot water and finally leaned out to set the empty goblet on the floor, heard the slight scratch of its circular base on the tile.
Probably it was sound waves, radio waves, technology: that was the best idea I’d had. I’d been so childish to think of magic when it was likely the product of science—some manipulative brainchild of one of these peripatetic characters.
Maybe it had been one of them all along.
I ALMOST FORGOT Ned that evening, preoccupied by what Burke had said. I debated whether to go to dinner and face that crowd. We could always make food in our kitchenette or even drive to town.
But Lena wanted to go because another child was coming, the boy with the robot. She knew this and planned to sit with him. I was worried about the emotional effects of Ned’s sudden appearance, although she seemed to have taken it in stride. I wanted to watch her closely and give her the small assurances she asked for, so I said yes.
And when we entered the café it felt homey. We sat down with the little boy’s family, at their invitation, and as I exchanged small talk with his parents I studied my fellow guests, wondering who among them was in Burke’s club and who was not. The Lindas? The chic couple? Kay? The angry young mogul?
The mogul, yes. I’d heard him on the telephone that night, yelling; and now I thought, That’s what it was about. He’d told someone what he’d heard, the person on the other end. I watched him and Kay at their table alongside the wall, leaning close as they confided in each other. Maybe they were discussing it right now, I thought.
The mogul’s name was Navid, Kay had told me. It meant good news.
And Kay: Kay with the babies at the NICU. Had she heard it from one of them?
I’d accepted the voice, then gratefully dismissed it when it ceased. Once it had loosed me from my moorings so that I had to tread water in a fluid world; finally, when it fell silent, I’d stepped onto solid ground again. But now there was a new unknown, of how and why I’d got to the motel and how the others had, and the earth was shifting beneath my feet again. How much I hated that jarring movement, the rush of fear! I’d tucked it all behind me and moved on; I’d adapted to it as best I could and concentrated on bringing up my girl.
Surely there was nothing else I could have done.
IT HAPPENED THAT I didn’t have to buttonhole Don. With his customary placidness he stopped by our table. The family from town had left and Lena was picking at a berry co
bbler. He had a tray of cobbler dishes in his hands, which he set down on the table next to us before he placed his hand on the back of my chair; I studied the waves of whipped cream on top of the pie.
Don’s friendly, familiar slump suggested nothing too significant was happening; and yet he knew.
“The others found us through a website,” he said. “Call it a support group.”
“But I didn’t,” I said.
Lena wasn’t listening but waving her spoon and making faces at Faneesha, who sat across the room making them back at her. I thought of the Hearing Voices Movement; I thought of support groups in general, and how I’d never been drawn to them.
“Well, you needed something else,” said Don. “You recovered and they’re still struggling. You needed a different kind of assistance.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Thank you so much for today. Your timing was perfect.”
“No trouble,” said Don. “But we’re still worried about you.”
“What you just said, though, it doesn’t explain how I knew where to come.”
“You could think of it like salmon,” he said, cocking his head. “Or migrating birds. They know where to go, but no one really knows how they know.”
“Ducks fly south in winter,” said Lena, who’d put down her fork. She had no idea what we were discussing, but lack of context has never stopped her.
“That’s right, Lena,” said Don solemnly. “That they do.”
“Except Lucky Duck,” said Lena. She patted him on the chair next to her. “This guy’s lazy.”
“But ducks and geese and salmon migrate in groups,” I said to Don. “They have other ducks and salmon.”
“Mostly. But not always,” said Don lightly. “Individuals of many species engage in solitary migrations. Humpback whales, for instance. Young songbirds often make their first trips alone. Scientists say direction and distance are written into their genes.”
“They travel for food or breeding, don’t they?” I said. “But I didn’t travel for those reasons.” Because Lena was there, I couldn’t be more specific and I wanted to keep it casual.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Don, and took a bowl off his tray before he picked it up to move on. “Have some cobbler. It’s on the house.”
BACK IN the room I went online briefly.
In some butterfly species, for example the monarch, no single individual completes a migratory journey, which is spread over a number of generations. Instead the animals reproduce and die while underway, and it is left to the next generation to complete the next leg of the journey. —Wikipedia 2015
“Are you mad at Don, Mama?” asked Lena when I was putting her to bed.
She clutched both the duck and the sheep.
“What? No, I’m not mad at him,” I said.
“Don’s too nice to be mad at.”
“Don’s definitely nice,” I said. “And we’re getting to know him better, aren’t we.”
“People ask questions to know each other better,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“Are you mad at my father?”
“Hmm. Well, that’s a good question.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it, then.”
At that moment she sounded over forty.
“I’d say … well, I’d say we turned out not to have as much in common as I first thought we did.”
“I don’t know if I like him either. I love him, because everyone loves their father.”
“Right. Of course you do.”
“We used to live with him.”
“Yes. We certainly did.”
“He never gave me a present before. Even though it’s not Christmas. Did he give me a present ever before this?”
“Hmm. He must have, mustn’t he?”
“I like my sheep.”
“That’s good. It’s a nice sheep.”
“I like living here. With you and me.”
“I know you do. I do too.”
“We live at Don’s motel.”
“For now. But not forever, sweetie. You know that.”
“I know. One day we have to go. That’s why they call it a motel. It’s not a house or apartment.”
“No.”
“One day we have to live in one of those.”
“I expect so. We’ll have neighbors, I bet. You’ll like that, too.”
“OK. I’m going to go to sleep now.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
I COULDN’T SLEEP, so I wrote down that exchange, figuring it might give me needed insight, further on, into my failings as a parent.
Then I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was a good enough parent to try to keep account of those failings.
I lay in the other bed, letting the TV play muted in front of me, laptop on my knees. Don had to be some kind of counselor, some kind of advisor to those who’d heard … but now that I wasn’t the only one who spoke of “hearing,” the word seemed cultish to me and I didn’t like it, not at all. The word hearing had an unpleasant ring suddenly—now it was a matter for shame, almost, rather than one of the senses—and “the voice” wasn’t the plain and straightforward moniker I’d taken it for but a worshipful honorific.
Now it was the Voice.
I wondered if what the other guests had heard was different from what I had—assuming it wasn’t just Burke, of course, assuming he spoke for more of them. Not all of the guests had babies, in fact none of them did. As far as I knew, only Kay had necessarily had regular contact with infants. So maybe they’d encountered it, as she had, in the infants of others.
I went over the guest roster, as on TV a pretty woman was murdered with a knife. I knew the voice’s life cycle, or I thought I had. But I knew nothing. You don’t even remember how this supposed knowledge came to you, I told myself—it was never spelled out. If the voice had brought me here, how? What had driven us from old friends’ welcoming houses to these Maine bluffs, with this peculiar group?
Maybe Don was onto something, maybe the migration was encoded in my genes.
Many mechanisms have been proposed for animal navigation: there is evidence for a number of them, including orientation by the sun, orientation by the stars and by polarized light, magnetoception, and other senses such as echolocation and hydrodynamic reception … investigators have often been forced to discard the simplest hypotheses. —Wikipedia 2015
How could the other guests have heard the voice? I tried to recall exactly when they had seemed upset. Burke was the only one who’d showed emotion to me, aside from the angry young man on his cell phone and Kay talking about the NICU.
I picked up my computer and scrolled back in this document to what I’d written about Burke. Talking to Lena about giants and beanstalks: that was when he’d lost it. And now I saw it, and it was obvious. His dismay had been brought on by something he himself had said, that Lena didn’t have to worry about giants saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” from beanstalks—a voice, talking down from the clouds.
There was my evidence, right there.
I heard a text alert on my cell phone and rose from the bed to fumble in my bag. I missed you tonight, it read. And then another: Did I get the date wrong?
I’d entered his name and number into my contacts list, and there it was: Will Garza. I’d forgotten my first date in almost a decade.
I apologized in a low voice, with the door to the bathroom closed so that I wouldn’t wake Lena, and found myself relaxing as I listened to his deep and pleasant tone. I talked a bit about Lena, for whom he’d once suggested a book about a donkey named Sylvester who found a wishing pebble and got turned into a boulder. She liked it almost as much as Ferdinand. I told him my husband had followed us here. I told him almost every material fact about our situation, leaving out the part where I used to hear a voice.
He said he had never been married, that he had most often lived alone, that he preferre
d books to people. His parents had been from Argentina but he had grown up in New York before he moved to Maine and had relocated here when the rest of the family had returned to Argentina. They ran a small bakery there, and his father cultivated oak trees.
But he’d stayed here because this, he said, for better or worse, felt more like his country.
His given name was Guillermo but he’d always gone by the shortest Anglicized version, Will, not liking the initials G.G. as a boy and living among Anglos. He used to be a feral librarian, he said, before he went back to school.
That was what they called them, he said, librarians without a master’s degree.
Olfactory cues may be important for salmon, which return from the ocean to spawn and die in the very streams where they hatched. Some scholars believe they use their magnetic sense to navigate within reach of the stream, then their sense of smell to identify the river at close range. —Wikipedia 2015
THIS MORNING I woke up simple-minded, as though a dream had narrowed my focus. I had to ask Don the question, the large question was all I was interested in, and now I would take him by the shoulders and shake him and ask it. Don! Don! Don! Who was it? Who was speaking to us?
But the urge passed. I guess I couldn’t handle an answer, an answer would be too unsettling. I don’t want to be part of some enclave of believers, some marginal sect. I’ve always avoided joining. I don’t even have one of those plastic grocery-store cards that make the food cheaper. I haven’t enrolled in any frequent flyer programs; though I can’t fix a flat tire I’ve never paid dues to Triple A; even my friend’s book club in East Anchorage, which mostly involved eating and drinking, was of little interest to me.
When I was alone I could accept, with difficulty, having heard what I heard, but to find myself among others who might confess and describe it, impute their own meanings—it makes me claustrophobic. And who is Don, even, to hand down high knowledge to me? I like him, I do, but when it comes to the greatest mystery of my life I have no reason to privilege a motel owner’s beliefs over my own.