Sweet Lamb of Heaven

by Lydia Millet

  There’s an imbalance of generosity.

  Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, the view that mind or soul (Greek: ψυχή) is a universal feature of all things, and the primordial feature from which all others are derived. —Wikipedia 2016

  ON THE WAY to our potluck dinner with the church group Lena sat bolt upright in the back of Ned’s Town Car holding Lucky Duck. She doesn’t relax around her father since the kidnapping—her rigid stance stops just short of afraid, bespeaks reserve and attentiveness.

  In what I felt was an egregious lapse in taste on the part of the consultants, we were made to wear matching dresses. Sitting there in the Town Car in my dress that was the same as a six-year-old’s, I felt beyond foolish but hadn’t bothered to protest. Also it was too cold for dresses by far; there was slushy snow on the ground; dresses don’t look too good with puffer coats atop them.

  But of course Ned couldn’t have cared less about my discomfort or opinion. And Lena was pleased, saying the twin dresses reminded her of dolls you can order from a catalog in “lookalike” form, with features custom-selected to mimic your own hair and eyes and skin. It was one of those dolls that Ned had offered her during the kidnapped period.

  “You didn’t bring the lamb I gave you?” he asked from the passenger seat, texting rapidly, not bothering to turn.

  “Lamb got sick,” said Lena gravely, a doctor delivering the bad news. “She had to go in koranteen.”

  “Quarantine,” I said.

  “Quarantine,” said Lena. “She got a cancer in her tail.”

  “Sounds serious,” said Ned.

  “Uh-huh. She’s almost dead,” said Lena.

  Ned did turn and look at her. I was surprised too.

  “I see,” he said.

  It piqued his interest for a second, but then he went back to pushing buttons. He was holding the phone at a different angle now, and I could see he wasn’t texting about business or the campaign; no, he was playing Angry Birds.

  Once we pulled up at the church, though—it was a potluck in the basement—he snapped into his public mode, his face suddenly animated. The light of Ned’s personality has an ON/OFF button, which when he’s alone with us now is typically set on OFF. It’s fine with me, in fact I prefer it since he’s nearly a robot when the switch is off, far easier to tolerate shut down. The ON switch makes me anxious with its vibrant, fizzing current.

  When he’s switched off I can almost ignore him.

  “Hey Mom. Lamb’s not dying,” she whispered to me, as Ned was getting out of the front seat. “Lamb’s fine.”

  My instructions for this more fluid assignment were to avoid all topics of conversation except the shortlist Ned had specifically allowed: food, weather, his qualities as a good husband, and, if additional content was absolutely needed, I could reminisce about the times when Lena “did cute things. IE u can take out phone, show Haloween bunny fotos” [sic].

  Only Lena made any waves, as it turned out, and even those were small ones.

  “Do you like my dress?” she asked, as she and I stood awkwardly near a food line, trying to be nice to some middle-aged ladies in the congregation after Ned pronounced a blessing that was also a stump speech.

  “Why yes! I do!” said the woman.

  “My daddy made me wear it.”

  “I see!”

  “My mommy doesn’t like matching dresses,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I do. They have them in a catalog. You can order your own doll to look like you and even order the same dress. Like not in doll size but for a real person. My mom said matching outfits might be OK for dolls but not for real people.”

  The women eyeballed each other, smiles faltering.

  “Oh, now, I like the dress fine,” I hurried. “I just think it looks better on you, honey.”

  I set a hand on her shoulder as I turned to the ladies. The penalty for poor performance will be, Ned had written in an email, and left the sentence unfinished.

  “She’s very fond of those dolls,” I made myself say, trying to pass. “She studies the catalogs as though they’re the greatest story ever told.”

  “My daughter had one of those dolls, too,” said the first lady. “I still have it in her bedroom! In a little bitty chair.”

  “Girls just love them,” agreed a second.

  “I don’t know,” said a third, shaking her head. “I think that company’s liberal. Don’t they sell Jew dolls too?”

  Lena gazed at her.

  “You must be starving, sweetie. Let’s go and scoop you up a plate of food,” I said, as smoothly as I could.

  “What’s Jewdolls?” said Lena as I steered her away.

  “Honey, these people aren’t your daddy’s friends,” I said in an undertone as I plunked potato salad she’d never eat onto a paper plate. Technically it was true, after all. “They’re more like people he needs to impress. And it’s our job to help him because we’re his family. It’s not for long. For now we have to just smile, OK?”

  “I think that lady might be mean,” said Lena.

  “We can talk about all of it later,” I said. “We’ll talk it through. For now, though, would you do me a favor? Just try to smile and be friendly?”

  “If you’re nice to mean people, Faneesha says you’re mean too.”

  All in all I was surprised at how down-homey the church event was, with its paper tablecloths and deviled eggs whose yoke-ridges had gone crusty. There must have been someone in the congregation to whom Ned owed a personal favor. We got away finally with Lena sulking, face screwed up into a mask of resentment, but no open conflict.

  Her father talked about sports to his driver as we headed over to the magazine shoot, where, in high-tech outdoor gear, he would run and throw a Frisbee across a field of snow to be caught by the dog he had rented.

  LENA LOVES VIDEO chats and I’d promised her she could do one with our Maine friends, so we opened my laptop in Ned’s living room and hooked up to my cell phone’s hotspot. She talked first to Kay and then the Lindas and Don.

  When she got tired of talking and settled down with a TV show I carried the open laptop into the bedroom, panning around at the dead polar bear and the pictures of snow-covered mountains.

  “Why don’t you take that outside?” said Don.

  “It’s freezing,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

  “You don’t have privacy in the house. Which you’d do well to keep in mind—I hear you had a sensitive conversation with Linda recently. And possibly Will?”

  I’d registered when we first walked in that the house was probably set up for surveillance, I had no reason to think otherwise, but then I’d conveniently forgotten. I still have the habit from my old life of not feeling watched, somehow, a habit that’s been hard to cast off even after I was roofied and had my child stolen—I can be paranoid one minute and the next relapse into my lifelong, previous routine of feeling unwatched.

  But my conversation with Linda hadn’t been too revealing, I told myself: the part about the voice would have been of no interest to Ned, at least, though he or his proxy would have heard me exclaiming over the faked pictures.

  “OK,” I said.

  I stepped onto the small back patio, gloves on, a blanket over my shoulders. It was getting dark, the sky indigo already and not overcast at all. A few stars were out. If I turned to my left I could see through a large picture window into the living room, where Lena sat on the couch watching her TV show, her face small and expressionless in profile. The scenes of the television screen flashed their varying colors over the room.

  I grabbed the laptop and strolled away from the building, into the expanse of dried grass.

  “So it turns out your husband’s bankrolled by a major PAC,” Don said. “This isn’t going to be a local or state career, if he succeeds. It’ll be the governor’s race next or a Senate seat. He’s going national.”

  “I’m not surprised at all,” I said. “That’s what he has to want. He’s
always been ambitious.”

  “I have a friend with D.C. connections. He said big plans may be in the works for your man Ned.”

  “I’m not surprised at all,” I repeated.

  The angle of the picture changed, with Don’s head sliding beneath the bottom frame and jumping back into view. Behind him I could see Will.

  “So are you thinking that after the election he’ll smile and let you walk away into the sunset?” said Will. “Is that what you’re hoping?”

  “I mean, there’s a contract. Don, your lawyer read it.”

  “The contract lays out the terms of the divorce, custody and so forth,” said Don. “But it’s only a piece of paper. It’s not a guarantee of a happy ending.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not feeling so great about your safety.”

  It was hard to see their faces, both of their features in shadow. The tops of their heads were blurred in front of a sconce that haloed white light.

  “There are plenty of ways to make a contract irrelevant,” went on Don. “Say after the election you had an accident. Then Ned could be a grieving widower and loving father rolled into one. He’d have Lena as a permanent prop. It would look very nice on him, in terms of electability.”

  “But I’m not going to die after the election. That’s …”

  “It’s really easy to die.”

  “Don. I was married to this guy.”

  “Look,” said Will urgently. “You don’t think, once he’s elected, that he’ll want to be a divorced guy, do you? That title won’t be his first choice.”

  “Well—”

  “And he likes to have his first choice. He really likes it. Right? We know that about him.”

  “But you’re—but he’s not physically violent. He never even hit—”

  “He drugged you. And Lena. No reason to assume he’s not capable. He wouldn’t have to do it personally.”

  “You don’t have any—I mean, there’s no proof of any of this, though, right?”

  “Clearly we don’t have Ned bugged,” said Don. “He has you bugged. All we have for evidence is our familiarity with him. His record.”

  “Life’s not a TV procedural,” said Will. He sounded stiff and almost condescending—unusual for him. “We don’t live in a place with instant forensic identification of every killer. It’s common for murders to go unsolved.”

  I didn’t know them that well, I thought, I barely knew them. Don seemed more than ever to have entered my life under a guise, leaked into it through a minor opening I hadn’t known was there. This slumping man with his womanly hips, I thought. I still didn’t understand him. Was I even supposed to know him, was it even right that we were familiar, or was it part of some dimly occluded design that might hurt Lena or me? Indeed, had it already? And Will—there I felt soft-centered, the pull of attraction and fondness and gratitude, but he was new, and I hadn’t shown good judgment in the past.

  Pointedly I should be the last person to trust someone because I wanted to sleep with him.

  But maybe they weren’t the sketchy ones after all—I was the one who’d married a man devoid of emotion. I might be the one who couldn’t be trusted. I’d caved to Ned, and in my weakness I’d brought them in too—into something that shouldn’t involve them at all.

  “You need to get away from him,” said Don.

  After the blobby icon replaced their faces on the screen I walked back to my former patio and stood there shivering, imagining the dark shapes of bears in the woods behind the house. Many times in the past I’d spotted them there, humped figures barely distinct under the interwoven shadows of branches—except for once when a mother and cub lumbered into the backyard looking for garbage scraps. They must be hibernating now.

  Around me on the patio were some plants that used to be mine, shriveled brown threads I couldn’t identify anymore, though I remembered picking out their pots in a big box store. I remembered patting down the soil around the green seedlings. I should have taken them inside or given them away … they’d lived for years while I was in this house, growing, flowering, then suddenly been abandoned out here on the flagstones when I left. They would have died in the first frost.

  I thought of all the green surrounding the house in summer, the green in the woods, long trailing banks of green, great oval storms of leaves, how despite that huge green outside I’d pored over and tended these small green outcroppings. But then I’d walked away from them.

  What could I take care of?

  I went inside the house, annoyed.

  But despite my annoyance—he’s never been physically violent, I repeated to myself several times, walking around the house in my sock feet—I found myself hesitating as I took a fresh bottle out of the brushed-stainless wine cellar, letting the heavy glass-and-stainless door close with its small suck.

  I don’t know that much about Ned’s life before me, actually. I know he started working at age twelve, I know the story of that: he ran errands for petty criminals, then not so petty. At last he scammed his way into a prestigious university, but dropped out after two years, switching to a business school with a degree he finished online. All that was the tip of the iceberg, the part he pretty much had to tell me, but the rest of it was a blank.

  He’d always been closemouthed. No matter how gently I asked, he wasn’t interested in rehashing ancient history.

  It occurred to me, looking at the bottle, that he’d never been a wine drinker. He’d only ever accepted a glass of wine when there was no liquor or beer available. And wine wasn’t likely to be part of his image makeover; it was too bourgeois for the image he was cultivating, bearing rumors of Europe or at least California. This was Alaska, where Europeans were fags and Californians were too. He might as well drink espresso and drive a Volvo instead of his hulking Ford truck.

  Maybe the wine had been selected for me.

  I’d drunk one before, so far with no ill effects, but still.

  I put the bottle back.

  Some cultural and religious traditions see mind as a property exclusive to humans, whereas others ascribe properties of mind to animals and deities. —Wikipedia 2016

  OUR LAST COMMITMENT was today, a dinner with some of the donors and staff. We leave tomorrow and don’t have to come back till spring.

  I’ve been torn since the call with Will and Don. Their theory of Ned as a murderer has set me half-against them. It’s irrational but I can’t help it—I’m set off at a new distance. Their conviction seems to skew them to outlier status. On one hand there’s Ned, for whom I feel fear and loathing, and on the other there are these men who’ve been kind enough to help me, given me time and care. But their murder thesis is an awkward weight on my shoulders I have to shrug off.

  I float in isolation between Ned and them, not touching either of the shores.

  In the morning I pulled my old belongings from storage, lugged them to the post office and sent them to my parents’ house, Lena tagging along with her face in a picture book. In the afternoon I visited my closest friend here, the only one who didn’t seem to think the reported kidnapping, or its poor resolution, was the result of my own weakness. Charley, who taught with me at the university and is soon to retire, has disliked Ned from the start, much as Solly did, and it relaxed me to be with someone I didn’t have to convince of anything—Charley has a serene bearing and little surprises her. From the trees in her garden hang bamboo wind chimes and homemade birdfeeders.

  We sat in her sprawling house full of natural light and drank tea, watching out the big bay window as Lena made snow angels in the backyard.

  It was during the snow angels that Ned showed up: his driver had dropped us at Charley’s, our whereabouts weren’t secret, but I hadn’t expected him to take an interest. He’d always dismissed Charley with her hand-knit sweaters, her chunky necklaces made of shell and rock; yet now he rang the doorbell and when she let him in he was with a beautiful girl, doe-eyed and long-limbed, draped in furs and wearing giant, shaggy b
oots that gave an impression of an adorable yeti.

  She might have been twenty-two, she might have been nineteen. She would have been more usual in SoHo or Milan.

  Trying to be polite, I think, she pointed at a sculpture on Charley’s mantel and asked if it was “done by an Eskimo.” When Charley said no, it was a Chinese Buddha, she went on to say Oh with a round, pretty mouth, frozen in wonder. The words were blank as paper: that lovely child was so slow to make connections that it almost hurt to listen to her talk. Maybe she was sixteen, not nineteen or twenty-two, I thought, and it was simple childishness.

  Ned bringing her was of course, given his PR focus, his obsessive commitment to the slick campaign, startling. It seemed needlessly risky and certainly meant to be needling. He may have thought I was still capable of jealousy. But I felt only pity for her as she sat, nestled into his side on Charley’s deep sofa, long legs drawn up.

  Charley, who cared as little for what Ned thought as he cared for her, asked her outright how old the girl was at one point, but Ned intercepted the question and asked Charley how old she thought the girl was.

  When Charley said “Too young for you,” he smiled and trailed his fingers along the gazelle’s spaghetti-thin upper arm. With her furs off she wore only a tight dress sparkling with gold flecks, and the arms were full of holes made to look like knife slashes.

  They didn’t stay long, only long enough to accept Charley’s offer of coffee with disinterested shrugs and then leave before it was finished brewing. The two of them stood briefly at the big bay window, from which Ned—one arm strung over the young gazelle’s shoulders—watched Lena run across the snow for a few seconds while his girlfriend looked down at her phone, texting with lightning speed. When it came to texting she wasn’t slow at all.

  “Place hasn’t changed one little bit,” he said to Charley as they were leaving, in a clearly insulting tone. He turned, smirked and pointed at me. “We’ll pick you up at six. Cocktail dress in the master bed.”

  Charley looked at me for a long time after the door closed, shaking her head. Meanwhile Lena was still playing in the back by herself; she’d never noticed they were there.