Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

“The same way money gives you everything, so does power. It’s like one of them math curves, rising steeper and steeper. That’s how power grows once you grab it. How’d you get through thirty-some years without even knowing that much? Stupid . I can make things happen without even being there. I kept you on your toes. The subway, right? The freeway. And the house. It’s nice for me, watching.”

“But not — that isn’t possible.”

“Not only possible. Easy . With neurons so much is easy. Didn’t your little Hearing Voices club tell you that? Haven’t you learned anything?”

“So you’re saying you can get into my—”

“I have the keys to the kingdom.”

“What kingdom?”

“I can slide my fingers,” and he leaned over and whispered close, “right into the holes in your head.”

His breath was moist and stale on my ear and a sight flashed before me, a black pit. Out of it climbed naked people in stuttering, stiff movements, herky-jerky. I’d seen that movie, I thought, a Japanese horror movie, I’d seen it and it scared me. They were like puppets pulled and released on unseen strings, and their thin limbs were hairy and banded as the tails of rats.

“Like I did with the little doctor girl,” he said. “You can’t let people like that just keep going. She saw way too much. And then she opened her little bitch mouth. So she had to go. Didn’t she.”

I turned and stared at his smile. Then I bolted ahead, my stiletto heels biting into the turf, until I was near enough to grab Lena’s hand and use the contact to steady myself. I walked forward holding that little hand tightly, my mother on her other side, and looked down at her face that I love so much, trusting and bright.

I gazed at her face that banished fear and thought of not looking back — no matter what, I said to myself, no one can make me look back now.

AT THE RECEPTION (carefully steering clear of Ned, who was at the far side of my parents’ house glad-handing the mourners) I took Will’s arm and pulled him into the kitchen with me, where we could talk. I watched Lena through the open door, carrying a tray of food with my mother at her side. I felt cracked and hollow.

Drinking wine didn’t make me less parched but at least it loosened the tendons on my neck. I was living in a half-life, I thought, a life of distorted lenses where I couldn’t trust anymore that a man’s skin wouldn’t pixelate beside me. Even my thoughts weren’t my own, and without them I wasn’t myself. Alone had been free, I saw that now — alone had frightened me but the air was clear there. Now I was in prison, without the privacy of my mind. With those claws in my thoughts I wasn’t myself — I wasn’t anyone.

Will and I stood and gulped from our goblets beside the trays of brought food, the donated lasagnas and plates of brownies crowded onto the island. I made myself focus on the practical and asked him what had happened over the past weeks.

I didn’t say months. I was trying to test the waters.

“You mean — in the news?” he asked.

“I mean with us,” I said. “What have we been doing?”

“Besides your father — helping take care of him? Besides the illness?”

“We’ve been here at the house for a long time,” I repeated, tentative. “Just here with my parents.”

I saw in his face: Of course. Yes.

So it had been a nightmare, I’d been here, where I needed to be, with them. That motel room and fluttering fast-forward of days and weeks and months had been a memory Ned implanted when he took away the rest.

“Is he threatening you again?” asked Will urgently. “Did he say something threatening?”

“It’s not what he threatens ,” I said. “He said — he said he did it to Kay. He said she saw t-too clearly. Somehow he did it, Will. She d-didn’t do it to herself.”

I was starting to stammer, a habit I thought I’d gotten rid of as a child. Will reached out and held my shoulders.

“And now I don’t have the right memories. This — it’s like I wasn’t here till today. I don’t remember anything since March. Right after the fire, after Kay. And he says it was him. In my head. He did it to her and he can do it to me.”

“You don’t have the right memories,” repeated Will.

I mumbled what Ned had said — his fingers, the holes in my head. My hands had started shaking. “You were reading Goodnight Moon . I had this — I thought my hair was growing just, just fast—”

“Anna,” said Will, and moved his hands onto my own to hold them still.

“That’s all I have since then, all I have since March , since we moved back to the motel — it was the week after your house burned, remember? Listen. He robbed me of this time. These months . His face talked to me from the computer. . ”

I looked down at my nails, my nails on the fingers held by his fingers, wanting some evidence to show for all of it, but the evidence was gone. It was my interior life Ned commandeered, that was all. Not time. He couldn’t do that. I was half-comforted.

“My fingernails were never long,” I said dimly.

Will was looking into my eyes intently, but I couldn’t describe it any better. As he stared at me, waiting worriedly for me to explain myself, I thought of checking this journal — I’d open this document, see what I’d recorded. Maybe, in the real months that had been taken from me, I’d written real entries. I’d check tonight, I decided.

“I have to tell Don,” said Will. He was patting his jacket pockets, searching. “This has to be it. This is what we expected. He wants you to look fucked up. Depressed and grief-stricken. After your father’s death, you’re going to. . he’s going to do it. Maybe just pills, like Kay, but he’s going to make you — he’s down in the polls. He could actually lose this. He and his people are desperate. He needs the sympathy vote.”

He found his phone and dialed it.

“Sympathy?” I asked. I noticed I was holding the stem of my wineglass too hard. I set the goblet down on the countertop, then picked it up and drained it. “I don’t understand it, Will. Do you?”

But then he was saying he couldn’t get cell service in here and headed out the kitchen door, slipping his phone against his cheek. “Stay here, stay right here,” he called back. “OK? Don’t get near him.”

Lena, I thought: Where was she? Still offering her tray of food to guests? I’d forgotten to watch her for maybe five minutes by then and my mother might not be vigilant enough. She knew Ned had taken my daughter before, but she didn’t know this new Ned, this Ned phase-shifted into pixels and a grin that was a rictus. This one who said bitch instead of honey , whose skin had pulled back from his face to reveal bone and metal. . I looked down the hallway at the milling people, pushing away the fact that Will had asked me to stay here: it didn’t include panic over having to look for my girl. Then I was out of the kitchen, rushing to get to the living room.

There was my mother, talking to an old woman with a walker, and there was Solly, there was Luisa.

I couldn’t see Lena. I didn’t see her.

I pushed my way through the people, made it to the front door, and hesitated. There was a ringing in my ears and my hands felt too numb to turn the knob.

But then I was outside, and I must have left my heels behind because I was standing on the front porch in nylons, feeling the rubber nubbins of their welcome mat against my soles. Closest to me were Main and Big Linda, right there on the path from the street, and Lena was holding Main Linda’s hand and picking with a stick at the sole of her shoe — it seemed to have a piece of gum stuck to it. She waved the stick when she saw me, grinning.