by Lydia Millet
I do want to ask why, if several of them are in on this, they hid it from me until now. Why didn’t they let me in before, if this is why we’re here? When I asked how they came to be at this motel, why didn’t anyone answer me?
Ned called and I let it go to voicemail, to which I listened promptly. He said he needed a decision, and followed this with an amicably phrased threat to show up again if he didn’t hear from me right away. He’s always been restless; after all, it’s why he married me.
I struggled under the pressure of his impatience, trying to shrug it off as I made toast and spooned out yogurt for Lena. I wondered if I could put him off. I wasn’t ready to see him again so soon, much less decide my course of action. This might be a subject, I decided, I could safely broach with Don, possibly Don would have some solid counsel for me, with his background defending wives under duress.
I’d table the other conversation for now, I’d focus my energies on fending off Ned.
So I called the Lindas, who like any excuse to go for a walk, and asked if one of them had time to take Lena down to the beach. I called the front desk and asked Don if he could meet to discuss my situation. I still needed help, I said.
I met him in his back office.
“You have a few options, as I see it,” he said. “One, you can leave the country. But that wouldn’t be wise, legally. Two, you can hide somewhere, the way you’ve been doing, but better. On that choice I could help with logistics. But that’s complicated legally too, since you’re not alleging abuse. He could use it against you, certainly. Three, you simply file for divorce now. Maybe he makes good on his threat, maybe he doesn’t. He could be bluffing.”
He stopped.
“That’s all?” I said.
“Or four, you can do what he says. Sign the papers first, with your lawyer, and then do what he wants you to.”
“Isn’t there a five?”
“I don’t trust him,” said Don. “Four’s a more dangerous option than it may seem.”
“But so is three,” I said. “He could try to get custody. Having her with me trumps everything.”
“I know.”
Don studied me, waiting.
I CALLED A COUPLE of friends, pacing my room while Lena and the Lindas wandered up and down the beach. You shouldn’t be rushed in this decision, they said, tell him you need a week. They were kind, but their support didn’t help me, beyond the warmth of reassurance.
It seemed to me I had weak information about my choices, so I made more calls. I asked Don for a family lawyer’s number, he had a personal friend who would take my call even today, he said, so back in my room used his name to get her on the phone. But she didn’t tell me much more than I already knew, and while I was half-listening another call came in—Ned’s voicemail had said he’d love to have lunch with “his girls,” it’d be no problem for him to “swing by.”
When I called him back my call went to his voicemail, which pleased me. I said I’d need till Tuesday, but don’t come for lunch. Ease up.
I was wary of calling a lawyer in Anchorage. Ned knew so many people in the city that I couldn’t be sure of steering clear of his contacts or friends. When I thought of lawyers there I saw two faces of lawyers he’d slept with, a young blonde and a middle-aged hardbody who ran marathons. A few other lawyers were investors of his. But Juneau, at least, wasn’t his territory yet—maybe I could find a lawyer there, one who wasn’t beholden to him. So when Lena came back from her walk I assigned her some reading and scanned search results.
Then I remembered Will Garza. He was intelligent, I thought, and kind and easy to talk to. I let Lena watch television, since it generates more background noise than reading, and stepped outside to make my call. We barely knew each other, of course, so I hadn’t asked anything of him. But now it struck me that maybe I could ask his advice, and he, unlike my distant friends, was here.
We decided to meet; it needed to be someplace warm, someplace Lena would play hard and ignore us. Will remembered an outlet mall in the hinterlands, a mall with an indoor playground you paid for. It sounded to me like the worst place in the world for a first date, but I needed someone to talk to more than I needed to set a scene, at that moment, and I said yes.
The place was full of inflated slides and bouncy houses, with tinny pop music playing and bright lights shining and the red, blue and yellow decor of fast-food restaurants and clowns; it smelled like sweat and dirty socks and off-gassing vinyl. For me there was nothing to like, for Lena there was everything. She’d put her shoes in a cubby before I finished paying and was off climbing, running between the machines, making friends: not two minutes had passed before she was holding hands with an older girl as they tumbled down a wide blue slide.
I sat self-consciously under the fluorescents on a sticky chair and waited, following Lena with my eyes as she pulled the older girl from one puffy structure to the next. I wondered if my face was clean but was too self-conscious to check it in the cell phone’s camera. I’d seen that a few times: people trying to look as though they were doing something else on their phones when it was clear from the angle of their head, sometimes a set of pursed lips or a hair toss, that they were studying their faces.
Then he got there, carrying a cardboard tray of drinks—a hot chocolate for Lena and a coffee for me, which he handed over without saying anything. There was a little milk in the fourth cup, he said, did I take my coffee with milk?
He brought with him a microclimate of calm. I was drawn to it, his warm calmness that set the stage for trust.
African ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the sun, the moon, and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile … this finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom. —Abstract, “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Dack, Baird et al., Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 4
I’VE DECIDED TO call Ned’s bluff, though I have no idea how he’ll react. I’m afraid, but I took a couple of Valiums, dredged up from the bottom of my cosmetics bag, and thought of how he’s never had a genuine wish to be in the same room with Lena. He’s never wanted to be near her, listen to her, keep her safe—never.
It makes me angry to think of this, makes me feel a burning anger. Remembering his disinterest I can’t believe a court will ever side with him when it comes to my little girl, I can’t believe it’s a realistic possibility. Even if his constituency were to believe him, I think, even if he did successfully paint himself as a victim in the eyes of electors, surely a court would not, I tell myself.
So while Don’s family lawyer made up the papers—I could file from Maine, as it turned out—I stalled, putting off Ned’s voicemails and texts with short texts of my own. I’d tell him on Tuesday, not a minute before I’d said I would, and meanwhile Lena and I spent time with the others at the motel and with Will; we weren’t alone much. We kept busy, went to a movie in the afternoon, to dinner in the motel café.
I envisioned a hard, bad conversation with Ned when the deadline came. Because of that I was constantly nervous, I almost trembled with a brimming anxiety. I picked at my food, I tried to keep busy so that I didn’t have time to succumb to fear, and on Sunday night I could barely sleep.
I had dreams of small, furry dogs being mauled by something they couldn’t see.
Don suggested Lena and I could switch rooms and stay right off the lobby. We could trade with Burke and Gabe, there was no difference between our room and theirs except for location, and that way we’d be near Don—near help, in other words, in the event that Ned started banging on our door Tuesday night. Lena was jubilant, when we told her about the change, at the thought of trying a new room—it might as well have been a trip to Disneyland. She fantasized about trying all the rooms, one at a time. “Then Don’s room, then Kay’s room, then the Lindas’ …”
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br /> We would move Tuesday morning, before I called Ned and told him I was filing for divorce; by Monday night, on the momentum of Lena’s excitement, we had our small bags neatly packed and waiting just inside the door.
But we didn’t move to Gabe and Burke’s room the next day, because I woke up Tuesday morning and Lena was gone.
IT WOULD BE futile to try to evoke the desperation I felt when I saw she wasn’t there.
My head was pounding—I’d been drugged—sharp pains like nails or tacks in my temples. Still that was nothing to what I felt, nothing, and I picked up the phone as soon as I saw her empty bed, the wrinkled sheets, as soon as I called her name and got silence, and then I sat up and saw her suitcase was gone too, Lucky Duck, her puffer coat. The chain on the door hung in two pieces.
All this took five seconds—less.
And then I was standing and running to the door, I was throwing it open and running up and down on the cement walkway in nothing but underwear and the long T-shirt I slept in, calling her name. Bare feet on ice, on the ridges in the pavement. I tore the pads on my toes, fell in a panic and scraped the skin off my knees, flailing.
I found Don in the lobby and I called Ned, hysterical, but of course he didn’t pick up. Don sat me down on a brown-and-orange couch with coarse upholstery, whose pattern I still remember well, how I picked at the threads as I sobbed … I’ll spare myself writing more about this. The point is she was gone, and the worst time in my life started.
I didn’t keep a written record during the days after she was taken, but it’s not those days anymore and it helps me to write now.
So Will came, Don was there, Kay and the Lindas, Burke and Gabe, even the well-dressed couple with two expensive cars. Everyone was around me after that, though I only half-noticed them. They were a blur of people who weren’t my little girl, the blur of irrelevance.
They said things, they called the police and the police were coming, they said, hovering—we’d stay right here and wait for them. A blanket? A heating pad for my feet? I was in shock, said one of them.
I registered goodwill but I hadn’t known what desolation was, before Ned took Lena, I’d never known what it felt like to be destroyed.
THERE CAME A TEXT on my phone while I was still almost catatonic. It was a text from Ned, I understood when Will held the phone up for me, though it didn’t have Ned’s name beside it, only a string of unfamiliar digits. Don said it was probably a prepaid.
The text bubble read Call off the lawyer.
“So he already knew she was filing,” I heard Don murmur to Will.
“Surveillance,” nodded Will.
“And sedation to make them both sleep through it,” said Don. “How? The bottled water in the room? Something I cooked?”
He was on edge: everyone was.
There were security cameras, of course, the motel had a camera aimed at the parking lot, one in the lobby, a couple more. But when Don tried to view the footage his software told him the files had been damaged and couldn’t be retrieved.
Beside me was an egg-salad sandwich on a paper plate. I remember it distinctly: the pores and craters of the beige whole-wheat bread, the fact that it looked nothing like food. I realized, seeing it, that there was no food for me—no food existed, in this world, nothing would ever be eaten.
The sandwich sat beside me, aging. I didn’t touch it, and though I did relent about food in general—evidently—to this day the sight of an egg-salad sandwich makes me queasy.
Someone got my laptop and at their request I managed to click through a number of frames, I clicked here and there, tears running down my face, until I was able to bring up a photograph of Ned. Don emailed it to himself, then went back into the motel office and printed it out, though everyone present remembered what Ned looked like.
A new text: No police.
“He’s got to be kidding,” said Will.
We were still in the lobby. I think guests must have been coming and going by then, no longer crowding near. Will and Don and I sat on the couches while Main Linda kept busy making tea in the café. The yellow-beige sandwich had gone away—good riddance to it, unappetizing forever. Instead a coffee cup sat next to me on an end table, the surface of its cold, weak coffee as still as stone.
“… are there people outside action movies who’d actually agree to that condition?” Will was asking.
“Where are the cops? I’m going to call them again,” said Don.
Another text came in.
If you call the cops again [end of text bubble] I’ll call my FBI friends [end of text bubble] and make a counterclaim of kidnapping.
“He can hear us,” said Don, and stood up hastily. “Still listening, aren’t you?”
Big ears to hear you with.
We gazed at each other, Will and Don and I. They looked round-eyed. I don’t think I did. I wasn’t surprised. I was on a plateau, the final plane of hell, I thought, a flat, dry place.
“He does know someone in the FBI,” I said.
There’d been this asshole from the Anchorage field office. A couple of times he and Ned had driven to a rifle range called Rabbit Creek—I remembered because I thought of small rabbits running scared as the two men fired their weapons. They went for drinks afterward at some sports bar, where Ned stayed sober and the FBI guy got sloppy drunk. I hadn’t understood what Ned wanted with him, some kind of “ASAC,” Ned had said, assistant special agent—a sullen man with pitted cheeks, a spare tire and a comb-over.
I’d expected him to look like Mulder from The X-Files, I realized when they stopped by the house once, Mulder had been my main teenage exposure to an FBI idea and it lingered.
But he didn’t look like Mulder at all. Sadly unlike Mulder.
And surely they’d had precisely nothing in common, I thought now, nothing but the FBI guy’s future utility. Ned was a bet hedger, a fortifier and consolidator, effective at building networks and circuits. They met at a boxing gym and the FBI guy had apparently been drawn to Ned, as so many people were—as I had been.
Considering this I started to feel a spur of practicality again, my ruined center cauterized for a time so that it stopped infecting the rest of me. I could keep it together as long as I didn’t think of Lena being alone or afraid. It was her emotions I feared for when I let myself fear, her trust of the world being damaged, eroded bitterly as I sat there with my hands tied, unable to reach her.
I didn’t even consider physical harm. I couldn’t stand to: that possibility was walled off in me.
Quickly all of us stood up and started searching for the microphone. There sat the laptop and my cell phone, which seemed the most likely, so Don called in the angry young mogul to inspect my devices. Apparently Navid knew about electronics. He came in, scruffy in his mountain-man beard and plaid shirt, and took my computer apart piece by piece. He seemed attentive, not angry at all, and I felt grateful and guilty for not liking him before; I would like him from now on, I would like anyone who helped me get Lena back, more than that I would love them abjectly, I’d be abject, I thought.
At some point I noticed I was digging my fingernails too deep into the heel of one hand. They were too short to draw blood, but the bruises would be there for weeks.
Navid took apart my phone, making me agitated—it was my only link to Lena, and what if it got broken?—but he put it back together again without finding anything.
Was the mike on my person? I didn’t wear jewelry and I had no buttons, even, except for the one on my jeans. Don and Navid inspected my shoes—by this time a pair had been brought to me, along with a pile of clothes, and I’d dragged myself to the bathroom beside the café and put them on, the jeans and woolen socks and a pair of worn sneakers—but they found nothing there either. I didn’t have my purse in the lobby so the bug, we figured, had to be elsewhere. We switched to inspecting the furniture.
It was confusing, since Ned wasn’t likely to have heard about my plan to file for divorce through a microphone in the lobby.
Don and Will thought Ned must have got to the local police somehow, they suggested he wouldn’t be able to do more than delay them and we should call again, get someone different on the phone. If that failed we should try another jurisdiction—the feds, probably, since none of the Mainers believed Ned’s threats about the FBI could possibly amount to much.
He was bluffing, Don said, it was highly unlikely his contacts in Anchorage could strong-arm agents in Boston.
But I still felt overheard. I couldn’t even trust my clothes, despite the fact that we’d inspected them: everything was suspect. Back in my room I stripped them all off; I stepped into the bathroom and made another 911 call—they transferred me to the sheriff’s office and I reported the kidnapping again—they said they were dispatching a car, they promised two officers would arrive within the half hour.
After I pressed the END button I stepped into the shower and let hot water beat down on my face.
What about those chips people implanted in pets, I thought—what about them? Could I have been implanted with a chip? Could I pick it out from under the skin, as I’d once seen in some otherwise forgettable movie?
Scratch, scratch, blood, and a loosened nub of metal dug out of the flesh.
IF I HAD been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five, some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know what for.
THE STATE POLICE finally got to us hours after we’d first called. It was two officers, polite and attentive in their note taking. We made them sit with us in the back office, where we felt Ned might not be able to hear, and I told them everything I could think of—about Beefy John, B.Q., Ned’s driver, his rented SUV. Black and American, was all I could say, and of course he might easily have switched it out. A couple of times I had to stop, and the cops waited patiently, their faces presenting sympathy.