Sweet Lamb of Heaven (31)
Laughter and conversation echoed from the walkway into our room. The day had passed quickly; before I knew it late afternoon was casting its long shadows.
Burke stayed a while after Don and Kay left, helping Lena tend to her bean plants in the miniature greenhouse. Some of them had sprouted; one was growing fast, already too tall for the container, and this they moved into a small pot he’d brought with him.
Eventually he got up to go and I thanked him for coming by, for all he did for Lena. As he was going out the door he turned and looked at me.
“You know, we have to look after each other,” he said quietly. “The people who’ve heard it.”
5
HURT, YOU WERE A CHILD AGAIN
I DIDN’T STOP BURKE FROM LEAVING, DIDN’T DO ANYTHING BUT watch as he headed off down the walkway. When he stepped into his own room I closed the door without noise and sat down on the bed.
Lena had her sheep on her lap and had found a buttoned opening in its stomach. Out of the opening, while I sat looking at her in a daze, she pulled a white-plastic box.
“That’s how she talks,” she said, and pushed a large, flat button on the box, which obligingly bleated out its eerie, falsetto prayer. “See? When you press the tummy she talks. It’s for babies. Mommy. I’m six. Can I throw away the talking part?”
“Of course,” I said feebly.
The strength had been pressed out of me; I was breathless and flat.
She turned a small screw neatly with her fingernail, impressing me, and extracted two batteries, which she placed neatly on her bedside table. She marched over to the trash can and dumped the box without ceremony.
“It’s not the lamb’s fault,” she said. “When she talks it makes me think how they took off her skin.”
“Oh, honey,” I said, reaching. “Don’t worry about that. OK? It’s sheepskin. No reason to think it’s from a baby. Maybe that sheep lived a long and happy life. Maybe it died of old age.”
“Maybe,” said Lena doubtfully.
“Can I see her for a minute?” I asked. It was occurring to me that the lamb could be a nanny cam, hold some kind of tracker. I’d been paranoid, this was paranoid, but then again in broad strokes I’d also been correct.
I held it and stared into its glass eyes, squeezed the face, inspected the nose and mouth.
With Lena in front of the TV I poured myself the glass of wine I’d been wanting. The people who’ve heard it, I thought. It had to mean what I thought it meant. So this wasn’t a random selection of winter travelers in Maine.
It was an enclave.
But I’d never told anyone about the voice—no one. That was what made my hands shake as I drank my wine.
“I’m going to take a bath, honey,” I told her, and carried my glass into the bathroom with me, leaving the door open. I thought the soak might calm me.
I’d have to ask Don, I thought as the water ran, it was the only course of action, I’d ask him now, and this time he’d have to tell me. Or I’d ask Burke how we came to be here, how it was that someone had known and how they’d summoned me, if that was what had happened.
Probably the voice wasn’t anything supernatural, you credulous primitive, I thought. I sat there in the hot water and finally leaned out to set the empty goblet on the floor, heard the slight scratch of its circular base on the tile.
Probably it was sound waves, radio waves, technology: that was the best idea I’d had. I’d been so childish to think of magic when it was likely the product of science—some manipulative brainchild of one of these peripatetic characters.
Maybe it had been one of them all along.
I ALMOST FORGOT Ned that evening, preoccupied by what Burke had said. I debated whether to go to dinner and face that crowd. We could always make food in our kitchenette or even drive to town.
But Lena wanted to go because another child was coming, the boy with the robot. She knew this and planned to sit with him. I was worried about the emotional effects of Ned’s sudden appearance, although she seemed to have taken it in stride. I wanted to watch her closely and give her the small assurances she asked for, so I said yes.
And when we entered the café it felt homey. We sat down with the little boy’s family, at their invitation, and as I exchanged small talk with his parents I studied my fellow guests, wondering who among them was in Burke’s club and who was not. The Lindas? The chic couple? Kay? The angry young mogul?
The mogul, yes. I’d heard him on the telephone that night, yelling; and now I thought, That’s what it was about. He’d told someone what he’d heard, the person on the other end. I watched him and Kay at their table alongside the wall, leaning close as they confided in each other. Maybe they were discussing it right now, I thought.
The mogul’s name was Navid, Kay had told me. It meant good news.
And Kay: Kay with the babies at the NICU. Had she heard it from one of them?
I’d accepted the voice, then gratefully dismissed it when it ceased. Once it had loosed me from my moorings so that I had to tread water in a fluid world; finally, when it fell silent, I’d stepped onto solid ground again. But now there was a new unknown, of how and why I’d got to the motel and how the others had, and the earth was shifting beneath my feet again. How much I hated that jarring movement, the rush of fear! I’d tucked it all behind me and moved on; I’d adapted to it as best I could and concentrated on bringing up my girl.