Sweet Lamb of Heaven (68)

They were at regular speed, I realized. But I was sped up.

“You’re growing old,” said Ned, and smiled again. “See?”

I looked down: new wrinkles on my hands. Old hands. Somehow I’d moved through time alone—and yet still I spoke at normal speed, or else I couldn’t have talked to Ned; I still thought normally. Didn’t I?

“It’s impossible,” I said, more to myself than him. “It’s just a bad dream.”

“That’s what you do with losers, right? Isolate them. You’re one of the losers, wifey.”

“But how—why are you doing this? I was cooperating, Ned. I did what you asked, didn’t I? I don’t get it.”

“I’ve got the primaries in a few weeks and I need my pretty wife where I want her. A mental case, alone and needy. Makes them do what they’re told. Obedient. And a nice little bereavement in the family. Sympathy vote’s the icing on the cake. I look good in black. Well. I look good in everything.”

“A bereavement?”

“I took your time from you. You’ve missed a whole lot. Just take a look.”

Outside the picture window the sun was bright. Gnats and flies hung in the air. There were bunches of grass near the edge of the cliff and they were full green, bowing and dancing in the breeze.

“Ain’t we got fun?” said Ned.

Doris Day was singing it in the background. Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun . . . There’s nothing surer: the rich get rich and the poor get children . . .

I had a cold feeling. I was brittle as bone.

Had he made me a ghost?

I’d disappeared—I’d gone, slipped out of being like water down a drain. Was my girl alone now? Was Will looking after her?

“Like I said, we’re going out today,” he said. “We have a public appearance. Believe me, darlin’, it’s easier if you don’t fight it. Don’t get yourself all bothered. You won’t get anywhere, I promise. You’re confused, sure. You’re a sick woman. You’re weak. But it won’t be forever. You don’t have to go on that much longer like this. Just do what I say. OK? Put on the gown.”

I looked behind me and saw a black dress laid out on the second bed.

“I’ll see you outside,” he said. “Be on your good behavior, now. You see what I can do.”

His face went gray and for some reason I reached out and touched the screen softly. But it wasn’t warm, and fine dust came off on my fingertips. The laptop wasn’t even on. I raised my face: Lena and Will were standing in the doorway. Will wore a suit and Lena’s eyes were puffy.

We weren’t in the motel at all but in my parents’ house; I stood in my old bedroom. There was a rush of confusion that was almost a thrill, almost velocity. Then it stilled. Here was my corkboard with its colored pushpins and ribbons. PARTICIPANT. The air was humid and close; my parents had never had central air. I heard my father’s voice: they never “held with it.” I was wearing the black dress now, I saw, glancing down—no memory of changing into it—and toe-pinching black shoes with heels so high I could barely walk on them. I’d never have picked out those shoes.

I wouldn’t struggle. Don’t fight it, Ned had said sleazily. But it did hurt more if you struggled.

Prey animals had the sense to play dead.

So I leaned down and picked Lena up, though her weight made me stagger on the too-thin heels. But she was real and solid. I knew from her red eyes that she’d been crying and I squeezed her hard, maybe too urgently. Had all of us been frozen there? Had we all been suspended on Ned’s whim, or only me? I tried to see if Lena looked older . . . I was flailing. It was possible, faintly possible that her face was more angular suddenly, but whatever slight change I might imagine wasn’t obvious like my long talons. I tried to keep them from scraping her back as I held her; I’d rip them off. They were like parasites on me.

“Mommy, I’m hot,” complained Lena.

I put her down and as I turned away bit at the longest nail, ripped the white edge of a thumbnail off with my teeth. But then—they weren’t long anymore.

And the hairs on my legs? I leaned down to look beneath my tights. They were black tights, semi-sheer, and I could see no hairs through them. The skin on my calves was smooth. I straightened up again and was holding out my hands, looking at them dazedly, when Ned appeared behind Lena in the hall. He wore a black suit, true to his word, and a silver-gray tie, and looked like he’d stepped off the pages of a magazine.

“My father,” I said, and it hit me whose death this was—I wasn’t the ghost after all.

It had happened without me. He was all gone, and I’d missed him. I’d been absent. There was a picture in one of my mother’s photo albums: my father as a tiny boy in a white suit, sitting on the back of a horse. Or maybe it was a donkey. It was a blurry, black-and-white picture.

That little boy, I thought.

How would my mother ever forgive me for missing it? How would my brother?

Had my father lain in bed, had he grown thinner, the way the dying do? He might not have missed me. I hoped he hadn’t but I would never know.

“You were always a daddy’s girl,” said Ned.

“You were a rotten son-in-law,” I said, as though it was news.

He kept smiling, as always. His smile never wavered now. It was a rictus.