Sweet Lamb of Heaven (3)
Of all the actions I’ve taken, leaving Alaska was the hardest. Not because I enjoyed living there, though I did, but because it’s a bold move to take a child so far away from the man who’s her father. Even when he doesn’t accept the position.
I did have his approval at first for our departure. The part of the split he resented was financial: he didn’t like that I took half the value of our savings account and our CDs with me. (I left the stock, I left the mutual funds, but still.) Aside from money quibbles he was glad we’d left, at first; for more than a year he didn’t mind at all. He’d been indifferent to me for a long time, as he’s indifferent to most people who aren’t of use to him.
As for Lena, he hadn’t wanted her in the first place and he never warmed to her. Our leave-taking gave him the same liberty it gave us—namely the open-ended chance to be who we were, instead of trapped.
I’d send him the occasional email telling him what she’d learned, what she was doing, an anecdote here or there to keep her real. I clung to the belief that any father would want that, and more than that I felt I owed it to her, to try to keep him existent as a father, however marginal. He rarely responded to these, and his occasional replies were brief and rife with hasty misspellings.
But over the past few months he’s decided to make himself a candidate, and candidates want family since family looks reassuring on them. So now we’re useful again and he’s searching for us. I think he wants a moving snapshot for the campaign trail, two female faces behind him as he stands on the podium.
When I first met Ned he claimed not to have any politics. I should have known enough to be wary of that, but instead I made excuses to myself. Politics were for crooks, he said. But later politics grew in him like metastasis, branching into a network threaded throughout his veins and nerves and bones. It’s not that he’s left the business world behind, it’s just that he now believes politics are a sector of his enterprise.
His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which “values the sanctity of every human soul,” and also “believes in the greatness of the American family.” The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren’t you. Ned believes in “the American family” the same way processed food companies do, companies that make products for cleaning floors or unclogging toilets—the kind of easy code that makes public speech moronic.
But even if he’d been a genuine family man, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of his platform.
Once he nearly caught up with us, before I understood that emails can be traced. It was stupid of me and caused a close call and as a result I’m wiser now—or craftier, in that I don’t send emails anymore. We move, we don’t use credit cards, I don’t write my own name when I sign things. I bought a fake driver’s license from a computer-savvy teen in Poughkeepsie. If a cop pulled me over I’d have to use the real one, which matches my registration, but I drive cautiously and keep the car in good repair and so far that hasn’t happened.
I’m not in any system, that I know of, I’m not a fugitive. Ned wouldn’t report me. It would make him look bad, defeat his whole purpose in reclaiming us.
The only authority I’m running from is him.
EVEN THOUGH it’s cold out, we spend a lot of time on the beach, the rocks and pebbles and sand. At dawn we take the first walk, following a narrow path down the face of the cliff. I carry a thermos of coffee and she carries a basket divided into one section for treasures, another for litter. Not every form of litter is welcome: she can’t pick up medical waste, newly broken glass, rotting food, or old, yellow-white balloons.
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.