Sweet Lamb of Heaven (51)

The women eyeballed each other, smiles faltering.

“Oh, now, I like the dress fine,” I hurried. “I just think it looks better on you, honey.”

I set a hand on her shoulder as I turned to the ladies. The penalty for poor performance will be, Ned had written in an email, and left the sentence unfinished.

“She’s very fond of those dolls,” I made myself say, trying to pass. “She studies the catalogs as though they’re the greatest story ever told.”

“My daughter had one of those dolls, too,” said the first lady. “I still have it in her bedroom! In a little bitty chair.”

“Girls just love them,” agreed a second.

“I don’t know,” said a third, shaking her head. “I think that company’s liberal. Don’t they sell Jew dolls too?”

Lena gazed at her.

“You must be starving, sweetie. Let’s go and scoop you up a plate of food,” I said, as smoothly as I could.

“What’s Jewdolls?” said Lena as I steered her away.

“Honey, these people aren’t your daddy’s friends,” I said in an undertone as I plunked potato salad she’d never eat onto a paper plate. Technically it was true, after all. “They’re more like people he needs to impress. And it’s our job to help him because we’re his family. It’s not for long. For now we have to just smile, OK?”

“I think that lady might be mean,” said Lena.

“We can talk about all of it later,” I said. “We’ll talk it through. For now, though, would you do me a favor? Just try to smile and be friendly?”

“If you’re nice to mean people, Faneesha says you’re mean too.”

All in all I was surprised at how down-homey the church event was, with its paper tablecloths and deviled eggs whose yoke-ridges had gone crusty. There must have been someone in the congregation to whom Ned owed a personal favor. We got away finally with Lena sulking, face screwed up into a mask of resentment, but no open conflict.

Her father talked about sports to his driver as we headed over to the magazine shoot, where, in high-tech outdoor gear, he would run and throw a Frisbee across a field of snow to be caught by the dog he had rented.



LENA LOVES VIDEO chats and I’d promised her she could do one with our Maine friends, so we opened my laptop in Ned’s living room and hooked up to my cell phone’s hotspot. She talked first to Kay and then the Lindas and Don.

When she got tired of talking and settled down with a TV show I carried the open laptop into the bedroom, panning around at the dead polar bear and the pictures of snow-covered mountains.

“Why don’t you take that outside?” said Don.

“It’s freezing,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

“You don’t have privacy in the house. Which you’d do well to keep in mind—I hear you had a sensitive conversation with Linda recently. And possibly Will?”

I’d registered when we first walked in that the house was probably set up for surveillance, I had no reason to think otherwise, but then I’d conveniently forgotten. I still have the habit from my old life of not feeling watched, somehow, a habit that’s been hard to cast off even after I was roofied and had my child stolen—I can be paranoid one minute and the next relapse into my lifelong, previous routine of feeling unwatched.

But my conversation with Linda hadn’t been too revealing, I told myself: the part about the voice would have been of no interest to Ned, at least, though he or his proxy would have heard me exclaiming over the faked pictures.

“OK,” I said.

I stepped onto the small back patio, gloves on, a blanket over my shoulders. It was getting dark, the sky indigo already and not overcast at all. A few stars were out. If I turned to my left I could see through a large picture window into the living room, where Lena sat on the couch watching her TV show, her face small and expressionless in profile. The scenes of the television screen flashed their varying colors over the room.

I grabbed the laptop and strolled away from the building, into the expanse of dried grass.

“So it turns out your husband’s bankrolled by a major PAC,” Don said. “This isn’t going to be a local or state career, if he succeeds. It’ll be the governor’s race next or a Senate seat. He’s going national.”

“I’m not surprised at all,” I said. “That’s what he has to want. He’s always been ambitious.”

“I have a friend with D.C. connections. He said big plans may be in the works for your man Ned.”

“I’m not surprised at all,” I repeated.

The angle of the picture changed, with Don’s head sliding beneath the bottom frame and jumping back into view. Behind him I could see Will.

“So are you thinking that after the election he’ll smile and let you walk away into the sunset?” said Will. “Is that what you’re hoping?”

“I mean, there’s a contract. Don, your lawyer read it.”

“The contract lays out the terms of the divorce, custody and so forth,” said Don. “But it’s only a piece of paper. It’s not a guarantee of a happy ending.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not feeling so great about your safety.”