Sweet Lamb of Heaven (52)

It was hard to see their faces, both of their features in shadow. The tops of their heads were blurred in front of a sconce that haloed white light.

“There are plenty of ways to make a contract irrelevant,” went on Don. “Say after the election you had an accident. Then Ned could be a grieving widower and loving father rolled into one. He’d have Lena as a permanent prop. It would look very nice on him, in terms of electability.”

“But I’m not going to die after the election. That’s . . .”

“It’s really easy to die.”

“Don. I was married to this guy.”

“Look,” said Will urgently. “You don’t think, once he’s elected, that he’ll want to be a divorced guy, do you? That title won’t be his first choice.”

“Well—”

“And he likes to have his first choice. He really likes it. Right? We know that about him.”

“But you’re—but he’s not physically violent. He never even hit—”

“He drugged you. And Lena. No reason to assume he’s not capable. He wouldn’t have to do it personally.”

“You don’t have any—I mean, there’s no proof of any of this, though, right?”

“Clearly we don’t have Ned bugged,” said Don. “He has you bugged. All we have for evidence is our familiarity with him. His record.”

“Life’s not a TV procedural,” said Will. He sounded stiff and almost condescending—unusual for him. “We don’t live in a place with instant forensic identification of every killer. It’s common for murders to go unsolved.”

I didn’t know them that well, I thought, I barely knew them. Don seemed more than ever to have entered my life under a guise, leaked into it through a minor opening I hadn’t known was there. This slumping man with his womanly hips, I thought. I still didn’t understand him. Was I even supposed to know him, was it even right that we were familiar, or was it part of some dimly occluded design that might hurt Lena or me? Indeed, had it already? And Will—there I felt soft-centered, the pull of attraction and fondness and gratitude, but he was new, and I hadn’t shown good judgment in the past.

Pointedly I should be the last person to trust someone because I wanted to sleep with him.

But maybe they weren’t the sketchy ones after all—I was the one who’d married a man devoid of emotion. I might be the one who couldn’t be trusted. I’d caved to Ned, and in my weakness I’d brought them in too—into something that shouldn’t involve them at all.

“You need to get away from him,” said Don.

After the blobby icon replaced their faces on the screen I walked back to my former patio and stood there shivering, imagining the dark shapes of bears in the woods behind the house. Many times in the past I’d spotted them there, humped figures barely distinct under the interwoven shadows of branches—except for once when a mother and cub lumbered into the backyard looking for garbage scraps. They must be hibernating now.

Around me on the patio were some plants that used to be mine, shriveled brown threads I couldn’t identify anymore, though I remembered picking out their pots in a big box store. I remembered patting down the soil around the green seedlings. I should have taken them inside or given them away . . . they’d lived for years while I was in this house, growing, flowering, then suddenly been abandoned out here on the flagstones when I left. They would have died in the first frost.

I thought of all the green surrounding the house in summer, the green in the woods, long trailing banks of green, great oval storms of leaves, how despite that huge green outside I’d pored over and tended these small green outcroppings. But then I’d walked away from them.

What could I take care of?

I went inside the house, annoyed.

But despite my annoyance—he’s never been physically violent, I repeated to myself several times, walking around the house in my sock feet—I found myself hesitating as I took a fresh bottle out of the brushed-stainless wine cellar, letting the heavy glass-and-stainless door close with its small suck.

I don’t know that much about Ned’s life before me, actually. I know he started working at age twelve, I know the story of that: he ran errands for petty criminals, then not so petty. At last he scammed his way into a prestigious university, but dropped out after two years, switching to a business school with a degree he finished online. All that was the tip of the iceberg, the part he pretty much had to tell me, but the rest of it was a blank.

He’d always been closemouthed. No matter how gently I asked, he wasn’t interested in rehashing ancient history.

It occurred to me, looking at the bottle, that he’d never been a wine drinker. He’d only ever accepted a glass of wine when there was no liquor or beer available. And wine wasn’t likely to be part of his image makeover; it was too bourgeois for the image he was cultivating, bearing rumors of Europe or at least California. This was Alaska, where Europeans were fags and Californians were too. He might as well drink espresso and drive a Volvo instead of his hulking Ford truck.

Maybe the wine had been selected for me.

I’d drunk one before, so far with no ill effects, but still.

I put the bottle back.


Some cultural and religious traditions see mind as a property exclusive to humans, whereas others ascribe properties of mind to animals and deities. —Wikipedia 2016