Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

KAY OFFERED to babysit Lena tonight while I went to the café to grab some dinner, to give me time out of the room. Lena was already sleeping when I got back after the meal and Kay and I talked in hushed tones, standing near the doorway.

She told me she was a med student and volunteered in a neonatal intensive care unit. There, she said, one of her tasks was “cuddling”—their name for holding babies, just as Lena had said. These were sick babies, some born without a chance of lasting, and they liked the touch of skin. Incubators and other machines weren’t enough.

“My shift was late-night,” she said. “You know, when the mothers were sleeping. Or some of the NICU babies didn’t have mothers who could hold them, they’d be addicts or occasionally they’d have died in childbirth.”

She’d hold one of these fragile infants and her next shift, if the infant had gone, she never followed up — it was the policy and she tried to observe it. But this part of her work had proved too much for her. Eventually it had driven her to antidepressants that didn’t work and she’d spun out and taken a leave of absence.

She was unfit to be a doctor, she said, shaking her head, but she’d wanted to be a doctor all her life.

“I don’t have much longer to decide, the program will give my place to someone else,” she said, and looked down at the floor to hide the fact that her eyes were filling.

She’s just a girl, I thought with a pang, grown up thin and sad. I wondered where her parents were, if they knew how miserable she was. Since I had Lena I see my own child in any young woman; before that they were only adults, but now they’re former children.

How did a young girl come to be alone in a cold motel, I thought, a row of rooms, because she was deemed mature enough? Not long ago she’d lived safely, I imagined, in her parents’ home, and now here she was, wretched. Alone.

Not everyone, really hardly anyone, is suited to the job of constant dying babies, I said to her as gently as I could. Most doctors wouldn’t be equal to that particular task. . she nodded but I could tell she’d heard this before and it was useless to her, though she was too polite to say so.

I felt low after she went away and curled up next to my daughter in her bed.

DURING LENA’S BOUT with the flu I was more solitary with my thoughts than I am usually, and I don’t think it was healthy. I started to wonder if Ned did know where we were, if he’d known for ages, if I’d been wrong to think we were on our own the whole time. I felt more and more paranoid and I made up theories — he was watching us using satellites and GPS, he’d turned my laptop camera into a spy device.

In the movies it was easy.

The paranoia’s still with me, exaggerated and ridiculous as paranoia has to be. I live alongside it the way I would an unpredictable roommate. A suspicion rises that we’re not as far away from him as I assumed we were, that Ned hovers unseen. Then I reassure myself, which works mildly: the nervousness subsides, until it rises again.

He’s always known my parents’ telephone number — it’s the same number they’ve had since I was a child, I say to myself. So what if he called while Lena and I were there? It was Thanksgiving and I knew he might call, or worse. Our material circumstances haven’t changed, I tell myself, I have no real evidence of his proximity here at the motel.

It’s only that his voice — a warm South Carolina drawl that’s alluring until you detect the insincere overtone — and his manipulative conversation with my mother have infected me, exactly as he intended. It’s me realizing, hearing that voice for the first time in two years, that I’ve gone from what I thought was love to neutrality to dislike to open hostility. I’m contaminated by the discord between loathing Ned now and once having adored him: I remember my adoration acutely and wince. I don’t know how much is shame and how much is confusion. My former, deluded self was a loose construction of poorly angled mirrors and blind spots, I can see that now.

But Lena’s better. She woke up smiling and full of energy yesterday morning with no fever, and we’ve started lessons again. I’m relieved but out of sorts anyway, because besides my paranoia about Ned I’m also grappling to understand the staying of the guests.

In Lena’s and my case I know why we’re lying low. We have two scarce commodities: disposable income and my willingness to spend it on a dingy motel in Maine in December. I hold my willingness to pay for this cold privilege to be an idiosyncratic feature. But here are the other guests, also apparently willing and able to pay and stay.

They can’t all be in hiding from estranged husbands; they can’t all be, say, drug dealers on the lam. And even if they are all friends or relations of Don’s, that fails to fully explain their presence, short of a simultaneous eviction from their homes. It’s disorienting and is preoccupying me. Technically it’s none of my business, though, and I’m reluctant to broach the subject with Don.

And the college drug dealer with the five o’clock shadow has been making overtures to Kay. He approached her in the café this morning and offered small talk about genres of orange juice.

“Who likes the kind with orange pulp?” he asked. “Where are these orange pulp drinkers? I don’t want to drink the pulp. Do you want to drink the pulp?”

There was a certain expectant force to his approach that I recognized with curiosity. Pick-up lines have changed since the advent of Seinfeld ; now they often take the form of one person asking another about a mundane detail, a baffling social or consumer habit. Maybe the idea is to forge an alliance in the face of seemingly senseless choices made by others. Anyway Kay shrugged at the orange-juice pulp opener, but she smiled at him.

Later she told me he isn’t a college drug dealer but a guy who makes and spends fortunes selling Hollywood movies to foreign markets. His youth combined with his skill in this realm makes him a prodigy at profit, a producer or studio executive or other dealmaker, I can’t recall the title she gave me. So he is rich, but not aimless or deranged, and his wealth, combined with the youth and good looks, makes it even more unlikely that The Wind and Pines would find itself by chance at the top of his list of winter vacation spots.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked her. “I mean, why here ?”

I wanted to ask, Why are any of us here? Why here? But it was too pointed.

“Not sure,” she said, as though it was all the same where he was.

“Well, how about you?” I asked. “I don’t mean why aren’t you in Boston, I understand that. I mean how did you end up at this motel?”

Again she looked indifferent to the question but passingly curious about why it had been asked, the way a person might look if you asked them, with intense and focused interest, where they bought their toothpaste.

“I was here last summer,” she said, flipping through a magazine about trout. “I came back for the rest. It’s restful. You know. And Don’s such a nice guy. Isn’t he?”

“Don’s great. But last summer,” I persisted — because it was gnawing at me, the casual presence of everyone, their unlikely presence, their stubborn persistence—“how’d you find it in the first place?”

“Just the website,” she said, and put down the trout magazine in favor of a yellowing copy of Cat Fancy .

As she reached for it one of her long sleeves rode up, and I saw a red scar along the wrist.

BURKE CAME TO HELP with Lena’s lessons; he’s her tutor in botany. They planted seeds in a doll-sized greenhouse we put together from a kit, Burke bent over beside her, avuncular and kindly. The greenhouse has rows of light-green pots maybe two inches in diameter, a line of small lightbulbs and transparent plastic walls. It sits on our windowsill.