Sweet Lamb of Heaven (47)
I DON’T WANT to see my Anchorage friends, because to see them again now would bring them into this queasy distortion of my life, the fake alliance with Ned. It makes me ashamed, even though I’m looking down the barrel of his gun.
Some know about the kidnapping, some don’t; others know about how it resolved, others don’t. I can’t stand to do the mental accounting of who knows what, can’t bear to revisit the ordeal—it was hard enough writing it down for myself. I don’t need to listen to sympathy or indignation on my behalf.
And from the few calls I made while I was panicking, I have the lingering feeling that most of them don’t believe I was trapped into making this deal with Ned. None of my friends here seem to understand the urgency of my fear. They live in a personal world where rules are followed and fairness reigns; they’re mostly white and mostly middle-class, meaning they feel entitled to justice for themselves and expect it for all the other people in their lives. Corruption belongs elsewhere, other countries, Wall Street or Congress, lobbyists.
They tried to be sympathetic when I talked to them, as people have to in the face of a missing child, but I felt, behind their commitment to sympathy, a steady seep of disbelief as though they suspected I was exaggerating or dramatizing. I was failing to stay normal, so either my perceptions were biased or I’d mistaken the facts of the case.
Because their take is that Ned’s a good guy, basically. Too handsome and too charming, one of my friends wrote me, and sometimes you resent him for that. But as soon as you see him again you forget the resentment—you like him again the moment he speaks to you. He’s maybe a bit of a playa, she wrote. There’ve always been rumors, but there are always going to be rumors when a man’s that HOT-HOT-HOT [sic]. Men aren’t monogamous anyway, they’re just not built that way, and I’m sure it was hard to live in the shadow of the light he sheds . . .
That was the kind of email I got from my Anchorage friends about Ned. He’s not a credible kidnapper to them. They figure he probably just missed his kid. Maybe he missed her desperately.
The first time we saw him was an hour before the press conference to announce he was running. We sat in his campaign office, waiting to go into the room with the small stage and podium where the reporters were going to be; Lena was in modified pageant gear, only half as gaudy as the outfit they’d first put her in, and no ringlets. I was in a suit that made me look like a first lady, and they shellacked my hair with spray so that it was big on top and swooped up at the bottom. The makeup artist gave me pink lips.
Ned came in while they were working on us, making his usual pretense of jocular fatherhood—bending to hug Lena, then grab her face and say “Got your nose!” (She jerked back at this, banging into the hairdresser standing behind her.) He acted as though he’d already greeted me, as though we’d spent hours together earlier that day—for the benefit of the staff, possibly, he squeezed my arm as he passed—preparing himself, maybe, for the public embraces we’d been asked to perform.
We hadn’t seen each other since the day he showed up in Maine. Since before he took my daughter.
“My girls ready?” he asked.
My girls triggered my gag reflex, surprising me, and I fled to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, in that closet-sized half bath full of rolled-up campaign posters and yard signs, but it was close.
Once we were up in front of the flashbulbs and digital recorders, my nausea turned to a stunned thoughtlessness. When Ned spoke I barely registered the content of what he was saying. Everything but Lena, who held my hand, was scenery, and when I embraced that I felt less nervous.
When people say “scenery” they can mean either a stage set or the beauty of the natural world—the two are interchangeable, in the word scenery. In that strange word the entire landscape, up to and including mountains and the moon, is only a background, probably two-dimensional, for the human figures in front of it. But it helped me, in those minutes, to think we were just playacting.
The press didn’t ask many political questions; mostly the reporters there were interested in giving Ned opportunities to talk about his success at business, to brag about his companies, of which the room seemed to be full of boosters. There was one timid question from someone at the back about a drillship that had almost run aground in Unalaska Bay, but the other reporters moved on quickly when Ned waved that one away. The room was stacked with his allies.
Just when I thought we’d got off scot-free and things were winding down, a reporter waved at Lena.
“What do you have to say about your daddy running for office, honey?”
Lena blinked and said nothing, and then, as the silence lingered: “He’s my daddy.”
Her tone was confused, almost questioning, but because she’s a kid and her voice is high and thin, this bland remark gave the room an excuse for aw-shucks laughter. People shuffled out, grinning and shooting the breeze.
WE NEEDED TO be seen out on the town together, so Ned made reservations at upscale restaurants for all our dinners on this trip, except for the very first night when he took us to a pizza place that’s a local favorite.
The “narrative,” as he calls it, meaning the group of fabrications we give out for public consumption, is that I have a dying parent back East, and Lena and I are staying there to help my mother suffer through the time of decline and hospice. My father gets to be the one who’s dying.