Sweet Lamb of Heaven (33)

Now it was the Voice.

I wondered if what the other guests had heard was different from what I had—assuming it wasn’t just Burke, of course, assuming he spoke for more of them. Not all of the guests had babies, in fact none of them did. As far as I knew, only Kay had necessarily had regular contact with infants. So maybe they’d encountered it, as she had, in the infants of others.

I went over the guest roster, as on TV a pretty woman was murdered with a knife. I knew the voice’s life cycle, or I thought I had. But I knew nothing. You don’t even remember how this supposed knowledge came to you, I told myself—it was never spelled out. If the voice had brought me here, how? What had driven us from old friends’ welcoming houses to these Maine bluffs, with this peculiar group?

Maybe Don was onto something, maybe the migration was encoded in my genes.


Many mechanisms have been proposed for animal navigation: there is evidence for a number of them, including orientation by the sun, orientation by the stars and by polarized light, magnetoception, and other senses such as echolocation and hydrodynamic reception . . . investigators have often been forced to discard the simplest hypotheses. —Wikipedia 2015

How could the other guests have heard the voice? I tried to recall exactly when they had seemed upset. Burke was the only one who’d showed emotion to me, aside from the angry young man on his cell phone and Kay talking about the NICU.

I picked up my computer and scrolled back in this document to what I’d written about Burke. Talking to Lena about giants and beanstalks: that was when he’d lost it. And now I saw it, and it was obvious. His dismay had been brought on by something he himself had said, that Lena didn’t have to worry about giants saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” from beanstalks—a voice, talking down from the clouds.

There was my evidence, right there.

I heard a text alert on my cell phone and rose from the bed to fumble in my bag. I missed you tonight, it read. And then another: Did I get the date wrong?

I’d entered his name and number into my contacts list, and there it was: Will Garza. I’d forgotten my first date in almost a decade.

I apologized in a low voice, with the door to the bathroom closed so that I wouldn’t wake Lena, and found myself relaxing as I listened to his deep and pleasant tone. I talked a bit about Lena, for whom he’d once suggested a book about a donkey named Sylvester who found a wishing pebble and got turned into a boulder. She liked it almost as much as Ferdinand. I told him my husband had followed us here. I told him almost every material fact about our situation, leaving out the part where I used to hear a voice.

He said he had never been married, that he had most often lived alone, that he preferred books to people. His parents had been from Argentina but he had grown up in New York before he moved to Maine and had relocated here when the rest of the family had returned to Argentina. They ran a small bakery there, and his father cultivated oak trees.

But he’d stayed here because this, he said, for better or worse, felt more like his country.

His given name was Guillermo but he’d always gone by the shortest Anglicized version, Will, not liking the initials G.G. as a boy and living among Anglos. He used to be a feral librarian, he said, before he went back to school.

That was what they called them, he said, librarians without a master’s degree.


Olfactory cues may be important for salmon, which return from the ocean to spawn and die in the very streams where they hatched. Some scholars believe they use their magnetic sense to navigate within reach of the stream, then their sense of smell to identify the river at close range. —Wikipedia 2015



THIS MORNING I woke up simple-minded, as though a dream had narrowed my focus. I had to ask Don the question, the large question was all I was interested in, and now I would take him by the shoulders and shake him and ask it. Don! Don! Don! Who was it? Who was speaking to us?

But the urge passed. I guess I couldn’t handle an answer, an answer would be too unsettling. I don’t want to be part of some enclave of believers, some marginal sect. I’ve always avoided joining. I don’t even have one of those plastic grocery-store cards that make the food cheaper. I haven’t enrolled in any frequent flyer programs; though I can’t fix a flat tire I’ve never paid dues to Triple A; even my friend’s book club in East Anchorage, which mostly involved eating and drinking, was of little interest to me.

When I was alone I could accept, with difficulty, having heard what I heard, but to find myself among others who might confess and describe it, impute their own meanings—it makes me claustrophobic. And who is Don, even, to hand down high knowledge to me? I like him, I do, but when it comes to the greatest mystery of my life I have no reason to privilege a motel owner’s beliefs over my own.

I do want to ask why, if several of them are in on this, they hid it from me until now. Why didn’t they let me in before, if this is why we’re here? When I asked how they came to be at this motel, why didn’t anyone answer me?

Ned called and I let it go to voicemail, to which I listened promptly. He said he needed a decision, and followed this with an amicably phrased threat to show up again if he didn’t hear from me right away. He’s always been restless; after all, it’s why he married me.

I struggled under the pressure of his impatience, trying to shrug it off as I made toast and spooned out yogurt for Lena. I wondered if I could put him off. I wasn’t ready to see him again so soon, much less decide my course of action. This might be a subject, I decided, I could safely broach with Don, possibly Don would have some solid counsel for me, with his background defending wives under duress.