Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

I leaned in as though I wanted to kiss him, and though I don’t think he believed or wished for that anymore he must have been surprised for a moment. He’s always assumed I’m harmless, pathetically harmless, and that gave me a couple of seconds’ grace to slam my hands against his chest. I was feeling nothing for him then but a pity that stretched all the way back to his childhood, all the way back to before he was him.

At the second of contact I saw how the guests had been drawn together, dots gathering around a node or birds flocking to a flyway. I saw Ned and his ominous host converging on us like a machine army — even the child in the subway train, even the air in the tires of my car, even the fire that had burned the house, all these were his armaments. I saw in every granule and wave how my husband’s power had seemed impossible, how it had borne the sheen of dark magic for me but was constituted of energy, energy subverted.

And when the heels of my hands came off him again, the images faded.

But it wasn’t easy to send him over the rail. I didn’t have enough weight behind me or enough leverage; maybe the angle of my approach was weak. I felt the bulk of his chest against my hands, the shock of his unyielding body as he leaned back. The chest was the wrong place to hit, a mistake that almost cost me my life: he was well-balanced with the rail against the backs of his thighs. Instead of toppling backwards he grabbed me and steadied himself — a strong man as well as a beautiful one. With his disciplined allegiance to fitness he’d always had strength. Discipline equals strength, though the coldness of the equation is depressing — unfair, it seemed to me as I felt instantly shocked and made foolish by the feebleness of my attack.

I’d felt its prospect tingle on my skin and seconds later that prospect had ebbed. My chance had passed. Why does strength hold itself so stubbornly away, why can’t it be that we can summon it out of feeling or impulse, out of just wanting to? Fear made my legs weak. I couldn’t move.

One hand grabbed my right shoulder and the other dug into my left wrist like a claw, and then it was twisting me there, by the wrist, and I don’t know if I gasped or shrieked.

But all the time he was smiling.

Then he raised his hand from my shoulder and, still smiling, punched my face with it, sideways and hard. I felt my nose crunch and the pain was blinding; my eyes squeezed shut and now he was punching me again. And again. My tongue felt a loose molar and my mouth was full of blood.

I was willing to fall with him if I had to. I feared being crippled, but dying I could stand, as long as I could hold a picture of Lena in safety as I fell, Lena in Solly’s care, Solly and Luisa keeping her safe from harm. Before I could push myself forward and topple us both there was a rush of others around me, a cluster of people, and it’s hard to say what the geometry was. Ned must have known I wasn’t alone, but only then did his smile flicker. Or so I believe. I couldn’t see much by then, was blinded by the blood in my eyes.

I know there were others all around me but I couldn’t say if we made noise, I couldn’t say how our hands moved or our feet, couldn’t say much about who did what, whose bodies pushed or pulled, all I can say is that at a certain point I swiped at my eyes and saw we were by ourselves.

Ned was gone.

And when we looked around us — after we leaned over the rail and stared down into a pool of black that didn’t tell us anything — we found the crowd seemed to have ignored our scuffle. But I wasn’t paying attention, I was preoccupied by the pain in my face, the blood dripping down my chin. My nose made a high wheezing noise when I breathed. Will took my hand, Navid was squeezing my shoulder, and then we turned and in a rush we pounded down the stairs — other than me it was all men, Will and Gabe and Burke and Navid and Don; Lena was away from all of it, back in the seats, deep into the row surrounded by the Lindas.

We pounded down and out and around, running hard until we got to the right stretch of pavement. In the dark I breathed my fast, wheezing breaths, tried not to faint from the acuteness of the pain. There wasn’t a floodlight anywhere near us and I couldn’t see his face. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to.

Finally someone found a penlight — I think it was hanging off a keychain — and its weak light was dancing over Ned’s head and shoulders, a small spot unequal to the task, lighting the planes of his face in a piecemeal way. I clenched my hands into fists so the pressure would anchor me against unreality.

But he looked as real as anything lying there, real and even alive, his magnetism intact despite the white polo shirt that should have left him looking like an out-of-place golfer. His jacket was spread open at his sides like wings, his arms were flung out, eyes nearly closed, well-shaped mouth just a bit open. The skin of his face was stainless, almost without a pore, its same delicate hue of salon gold.

Only the pebbly asphalt around his head was stained.

NEWS OF HIS death ran in Alaskan media outlets: heroically trying to save a fellow climber, he’d lost his footing in the mountains and plummeted. On the main street in Anchorage there were altars of flowers and photographs. People held candlelight vigils, although (said Charley) they were notably more modest than for fallen celebrities.

There are cameras at the stadium but maybe it was too dark for them to capture what had happened: in any case none of us were ever contacted, none of us were questioned. I have to conclude this was intentional — that it wouldn’t have jibed with the narrative.

We stayed in my parents’ house for two weeks after the Fourth. I had to have my nose reset and the bruises around my eyes are still fading; the tooth I lost was at the back so the gap doesn’t show.

Lena asked about the nose and the bruises, of course. I thought about not telling her, but then I thought again and I did. “I pushed your daddy,” I said. “Listen. I’m not proud of it. It’s not the way to solve problems. But then he hit me back. Harder. Men shouldn’t ever hit women.”

“He should have only pushed you back,” said Lena, pragmatic. “It’s not fair. I’m glad I don’t like him.”

“Lena,” I said, holding her hands, “your daddy’s not coming back. We won’t see him again.”

“That’s good,” she said.

I’VE BEEN HELPING my mother with the funeral aftermath. Solly had to go back to work, so we said goodbye to him and Luisa and waved to them from the front porch as they drove off.

After they left we moved at our leisure through tidy rooms, curating the many vases of cut flowers as their rotting stems sloughed off into the clouding water. We sorted clothes and shoes into boxes for donation, read and acknowledged condolence cards; we cleaned out my father’s desk, his chest of drawers, the file cabinets and high-up shelves at the back of his closet. I drove my mother to the bank to fill out forms, went online to switch her utilities and other services out of his name, made sure she filed a claim with the life-insurance carrier.

While we were going about these dull tasks, Will walked with Lena to a nearby park, a nearby pool. He took her to the movies, to a beach in Connecticut, and once to a state fair, where they went on a Tilt-A-Whirl, ate funnel cakes with powdered sugar and, by shooting a water gun, won her an orange stuffed giraffe.

Those public places, open to the world, the two of them were able to wander through in liberty.

For me it was a melancholy, dreary time with a curious softness. I kept waiting — I wait even now — but so far I’ve found no moral torment in being a murderer.

None at all.

IF WHAT SLIPS through to us from the deeper language is filtered and textured by our own interests and affections — our ties to babies or animals or trees — maybe I heard only what I could.