Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

I’d like for us to settle down and live a steady life, so she can go to school and have friends. Lena begs not to go to school and claims she wants our life to stay the same forever.

She’s six years old. She doesn’t know better.

It seems to me that if we can escape his grasp till after the election, we may have a fair shot at an undisturbed existence. If he wins he won’t need us.

On the other hand, if he loses and decides to take another shot in another cycle, he may search harder. He may get more determined.

When we discuss her father, who’s only a vestigial memory for her, I rely on platitudes like “Our lives took different paths,” or “Sometimes people decide to stop living in the same place.” The matter of the separation, unlike the matter of the voice I used to hear — on which I hope always to keep my own counsel — will one day require unpleasant conversation, but so far she’s satisfied with generalities. She’s not overly interested, since she never saw much of him. Much as she never caught his interest, he never seemed to capture hers either. When we did share an address he seldom came home: he traveled, he worked late, he cultivated his casual friends and many acquaintances. He never read bedtime stories or sat down with us for meals.

He was a sasquatch in a photograph, a fuzzy obscure figure moving in far-off silhouette.

DON, WHO’S BEEN so good to us, is a pear-shaped man. This feature endears him to Lena, whose favorite stuffed animal is a plush, duck-like bird with a small head and giant baggy ass. Don has a shuffling gait, seems erudite by hospitality-industry standards, and like us appears to be hiding here — not hiding from one person but from crowds of people, possibly, or from a faster pace. He has a job that involves people, true, but seldom too many at one time, and when people do show up they’re in his territory, his cavernous and dimly lit domain.

I imagine he keeps the motel ramshackle so as not to attract too much traffic — so as to keep the trickle of company thin. His family owns the business and seems to accept the small returns.

When a stray overnight guest comes through, Don’s civil but hardly overjoyed. Lena, by contrast, is always excited. She acts as though she, not he, is the owner: she’s the mistress of all she surveys, with the hosting duties this brings. To her the motel is first-rate; she sees no mildew or cigarette burns. Because I can’t leave her with strangers, this means I meet many guests too, tagging along in the background as she gives them the tour.

Most are highly tolerant of her — eager children receive a plenary indulgence, especially dimple-cheeked girls — and her exuberance is contagious. She explains the rules about clean towels with gusto, as though the rules, if not the towels, are sacrosanct; she showcases the antique ice machine with pride of ownership.

“This ice is only for people’s drinks,” she says sternly. “So don’t pick it up and put it back, OK? And don’t stand with your hands stuck in the ice, even if you like the shiver.”

WHEN NED CAUGHT up with us we were staying at a cabin in New Hampshire near the summit of a low mountain. It was a large, wooden cabin with a dozen bunk beds for hikers and three caretaker-cooks. Only a few dozen feet from the porch was a waterfall with a flat-topped boulder at its edge, where Lena liked to sit trailing her hand in the water and basking in the sun. The water wasn’t deep.

We only got away that time because Ned made a mistake; he did a flyover. Maybe he wanted to preside from the air while his employees cornered us; maybe not. I still don’t know if he was personally there.

But helicopters were rare along that part of the Appalachian Trail, coming in only with major equipment or for medical emergencies. I was on the porch with one of the cooks when that one chop-chop-chopped overhead and she looked up and said, “Huh, a private helicopter. It’s not the local guy.”

That was all I needed to pull Lena off her sunny rock and leave our sleeping bags behind. I did it only because my stomach twisted when the cook said what she said: I followed my instincts and we bushwhacked down the mountainside — I said it was a game, going off-trail, and the one who made it to the bottom with no scratches on her legs or arms would win a double-scoop cone. When we reached the road I had some light scratches on my forearms while Lena had none; new mosquito bites itched and swelled around my ankles, and our shoes were soaked from slogging through a stagnant creek.

Still, Lena was gleeful at the prospect of her ice cream reward.

The car wasn’t parked in the trailhead lot most of the hikers used but in a shaded pullout I’d found. After a short walk on the shoulder of the road we got in and drove off.

And I knew we’d been right to run when the cook, who had become a friend, called me. She said four men had come, two from each direction since the trail stretched out on either side of the cabin. They converged on it fifteen minutes after we’d left. They weren’t dressed for hiking: their shoes were shiny leather ruined by mud. So she told them only that we’d left the day before, and after some unhappy muttering and some prowling around the grounds and questioning of other guests, the four men went away.

NED MARRIED ME for my family’s money, because he had none of his own and wanted some; I married him because I thought it was love. I was wrong too, it wasn’t love — I don’t mean to pin it all on him. I had a crush, if I’m being honest, and I didn’t know the difference.

Ned’s a very attractive man, a man many people use the word handsome or magnetic to describe. Even straight men have said this of him, the same way they’ll concede it, often grudgingly, of famous actors or athletes. Both before and after we were married, men and women alike would confide in me about their attraction to Ned. He makes people covet him, inspires a desperate greed. And he knows this all too well — it’s key to his strategy for gathering investors. Ned is his own asset, his own front man, a property that sells itself. Both men and women want to own him or sleep with him, but failing that they’re just grateful to be part of his enterprise.

It goes far beyond standard-issue good looks.

He always had a talent for captivating an audience. From the first moment he meets you he establishes eye contact, and he doesn’t relinquish it easily. But he’s not only a mesmerist. He can embody audience convincingly as well, when listening is called for. When he receives a personal disclosure he seems to listen intently, even adoringly.

In fact he isn’t listening but intently, tactically appearing to listen — no mean feat in itself.

He’s humorless, though, which for me proved slowly deadening. Ned always laughs when others laugh, taking the social cues, but laughter doesn’t come naturally to him. And while he could occasionally say a funny thing, back in our early days together, it wasn’t intentional.

There were other, more minor details of Ned that should have been red flags for me too — his allegiance, for example, to a certain brand of cologne. Before Ned I’d never been with any man who wore cologne. The smell of it didn’t bother me: this particular cologne was inoffensive, even subtle. But once, when a bottle of it was knocked off a bathroom counter and broke on the tile floor, I saw a strange edge of rage in him.

In general I had no eyes for red at all in the infatuated months before we got married. Any flags of bright color were lost in the hills and dales of a hazy, indulgent country.

And my feelings were irrelevant, in the end, since he had close to none for me. I was surprisingly late to this realization. We tend to believe what we wish to, and I was no exception. I hoped that Ned loved me, and hope shaded into assumption without me recognizing it.