Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

“Mommy, I’m hot,” complained Lena.

I put her down and as I turned away bit at the longest nail, ripped the white edge of a thumbnail off with my teeth. But then — they weren’t long anymore.

And the hairs on my legs? I leaned down to look beneath my tights. They were black tights, semi-sheer, and I could see no hairs through them. The skin on my calves was smooth. I straightened up again and was holding out my hands, looking at them dazedly, when Ned appeared behind Lena in the hall. He wore a black suit, true to his word, and a silver-gray tie, and looked like he’d stepped off the pages of a magazine.

“My father ,” I said, and it hit me whose death this was — I wasn’t the ghost after all.

It had happened without me. He was all gone, and I’d missed him. I’d been absent. There was a picture in one of my mother’s photo albums: my father as a tiny boy in a white suit, sitting on the back of a horse. Or maybe it was a donkey. It was a blurry, black-and-white picture.

That little boy, I thought.

How would my mother ever forgive me for missing it? How would my brother?

Had my father lain in bed, had he grown thinner, the way the dying do? He might not have missed me. I hoped he hadn’t but I would never know.

“You were always a daddy’s girl,” said Ned.

“You were a rotten son-in-law,” I said, as though it was news.

He kept smiling, as always. His smile never wavered now. It was a rictus.

“You took his money and you even took his dying,” I said.

“Mommy?” said Lena. It was as though she hadn’t heard me; I was glad and ashamed, ashamed for speaking that way in front of her. “Can we go now? Nana says they’re going to play a pretty song for Grumbo at the funeral. She said they’re going to play ‘The Skye Boat Song.’”

“Take my arm, kiddo,” said Ned, bowing his head in Lena’s direction.

She clung to Will for a second, she would much rather have walked with Will, it was awkwardly obvious, but finally she lifted her hand up to Ned’s.

I walked right behind them, fearfully close; as I stepped into place at their heels, I clutched Will’s arm for a moment where she’d let go of it.

“Let go of that thing right this fucking second,” said Ned through gritted teeth. But he was facing away from us. As though he had eyes in the back of his head. “You’re my wife. You remember it.”

“How did you know how sick my father was?” I asked weakly. “How did you know before we did?”

“Whatever you need to know, I’ll fucking tell you,” ground out Ned. Then he turned and whispered over his shoulder, almost tenderly, “Bitch.”

My stomach flipped but Lena was looking elsewhere and waving at someone: she hadn’t heard the tone or the words. Again she seemed to be immune. She was usually so observant — it was as though Ned had a wand.

We stepped out onto the front porch, where I saw my parents’ grass was yellow and dry. There were flags flapping from porches down the street: it was Independence Day. Out past the awning, where the shade stopped, reigned a bright blank July heat, cicadas whining in the trees. A small group of photographers stood on the lawn. Had Ned hired them? Would a real news outlet spend money on pictures of a candidate’s in-law’s funeral?

Ned wore a solemn expression, making the occasion momentous — such was the power of his bearing — and curved a graceful arm around me in a supportive gesture. He was between Lena and me, seeming to shelter us both, there on the porch: the father of the family, presiding over a sad wife and innocent little girl.

Will had fallen behind somewhere — that he had even been allowed to come was surprising. Ned couldn’t have liked it; maybe my mother had pushed. There were limousines at the curb, and my mother was getting into the first. We joined her there, Ned and Lena and I (I looked back and saw Will headed across the dry grass for limo number two). My mother slid in beside Solly and Luisa, already seated.

In the cool car with the air-conditioning blowing into our faces Lena sat between Ned and me and sang in a high little voice.

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,

Onward! the sailors cry;

Carry the lad that’s born to be King

Over the sea to Skye.

Across from us my mother wore an expression both peaceful and relieved, maybe. Alone now, without my father, but probably also relieved. She avoided looking at Ned as though there was a blank space where he sat.

Lena, who only knew the chorus, sang it again.

I tried to discern from my mother’s face, then from Solly’s whether they were angry at me for being trapped by Ned this whole time as my father was dying.

But Solly wasn’t looking at me at all: he was looking at Ned with open contempt, with raw hostility. Luisa nestled into his side, her eyes cast down. Miserable, I thought, and polite. My mother patted Luisa’s knee and they smiled at each other sympathetically.

I turned my head toward Ned, slowly and slightly so that he wouldn’t notice. He’d dropped his falsely protective arm off me when we got into the limo and also dropped Lena’s hand; now he was looking down at his phone, as usual.

There was his neck, its even tan, the sweep of one lock of hair over his forehead, his perfectly clean ear. There was the faint scent of his cologne. I kept looking, I kept gazing at the graceful tendon of his neck, the clean shave along his jawline. And just when I was about to turn away — feeling my eyeballs throb dully from being rolled to one side too long — I saw a movement on the skin. Just for a second, just for an instant, I saw an L-shape made up of pink-and-white squares flash onto the skin before they disappeared.

I swear I saw him pixelate.

I didn’t say anything, my tongue was stuck in my throat, but as we got out of the car I found myself scrabbling at his sleeve. Lena was walking ahead holding my mother’s hand; I had Solly’s and Luisa’s backs in front of me. We were on display again as we stepped onto the cemetery’s gravel footpath — I didn’t see the photographers yet but there were mourners around us, others were parking and walking over to the gravesite — and so, again in the open air, Ned turned to me smiling. The smile was perfect, too: restrained, as though in grief, and yet compassionate.

“How are you doing it?” I asked, a bit pathetic. “What are you doing?”

“I’m playing with you, honey, that’s all,” he said softly, and tapped one temple. “You let me in when you started ‘clearing your mind.’ That New Age horseshit is good for one thing: access. Safer when you had the therapist in the room, but then you started to do it all by your lonesome, didn’t you. With the little earbuds in, all walled off from other people and with your mind wide open.”

“The hypnosis tapes?” I squeaked.

“You threw open the doors and I walked in. So now I’m tinkering. I’m just tinkering around a bit with the little wife’s thalamic nerve projections. I can do that now. I can make you see what I want you to see.”

He’d effected some kind of amnesia. If not a dream he’d given me, it wasn’t far from it, I guess, a thought, an idea, a mental frame. Drugs, maybe? Could this be pharmacological, and his mind-control brags just a component of his intricate manipulation?

“But I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “How can you—

anyone—?”

“I have the skills,” he said. “Ever since I took the kid. Added bonus. You just take what you want. You know that, sweet thing? The more you take, the more you get. It just starts to pour in. Talk about miracles.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I don’t. .”