Sweet Lamb of Heaven (71)

I looked down at my nails, my nails on the fingers held by his fingers, wanting some evidence to show for all of it, but the evidence was gone. It was my interior life Ned commandeered, that was all. Not time. He couldn’t do that. I was half-comforted.

“My fingernails were never long,” I said dimly.

Will was looking into my eyes intently, but I couldn’t describe it any better. As he stared at me, waiting worriedly for me to explain myself, I thought of checking this journal—I’d open this document, see what I’d recorded. Maybe, in the real months that had been taken from me, I’d written real entries. I’d check tonight, I decided.

“I have to tell Don,” said Will. He was patting his jacket pockets, searching. “This has to be it. This is what we expected. He wants you to look f*cked up. Depressed and grief-stricken. After your father’s death, you’re going to . . . he’s going to do it. Maybe just pills, like Kay, but he’s going to make you—he’s down in the polls. He could actually lose this. He and his people are desperate. He needs the sympathy vote.”

He found his phone and dialed it.

“Sympathy?” I asked. I noticed I was holding the stem of my wineglass too hard. I set the goblet down on the countertop, then picked it up and drained it. “I don’t understand it, Will. Do you?”

But then he was saying he couldn’t get cell service in here and headed out the kitchen door, slipping his phone against his cheek. “Stay here, stay right here,” he called back. “OK? Don’t get near him.”

Lena, I thought: Where was she? Still offering her tray of food to guests? I’d forgotten to watch her for maybe five minutes by then and my mother might not be vigilant enough. She knew Ned had taken my daughter before, but she didn’t know this new Ned, this Ned phase-shifted into pixels and a grin that was a rictus. This one who said bitch instead of honey, whose skin had pulled back from his face to reveal bone and metal . . . I looked down the hallway at the milling people, pushing away the fact that Will had asked me to stay here: it didn’t include panic over having to look for my girl. Then I was out of the kitchen, rushing to get to the living room.

There was my mother, talking to an old woman with a walker, and there was Solly, there was Luisa.

I couldn’t see Lena. I didn’t see her.

I pushed my way through the people, made it to the front door, and hesitated. There was a ringing in my ears and my hands felt too numb to turn the knob.

But then I was outside, and I must have left my heels behind because I was standing on the front porch in nylons, feeling the rubber nubbins of their welcome mat against my soles. Closest to me were Main and Big Linda, right there on the path from the street, and Lena was holding Main Linda’s hand and picking with a stick at the sole of her shoe—it seemed to have a piece of gum stuck to it. She waved the stick when she saw me, grinning.

They were watching our suburban Fourth of July parade, whose route comes down our street every third year. There were floats and bunting that glittered red, white, and blue; there were some kids in an off-key marching band, a girl turning cartwheels. Up came a horse-drawn buggy decorated with stars-’n’-stripes and the name of a car dealership, and then, in the bed of a pickup truck, a human-sized blow-up statue of liberty with a big head. Its torch flames were made of yellow plastic streamers, blown upward from a small fan below in the truck bed. They snapped and fluttered in the breeze.

The Lindas were looking out at the street and didn’t turn. Nearby Don and his aged father stood near a waxy rhododendron bush, the father leaning on his cane; up toward the sidewalk, on the burnt July grass, were the other motel guests, Navid and the Dutch couple. There were Burke and Gabe, just getting out of a car parked at the curb. I thought maybe I should talk to them, thank them for coming, but they were watching the parade, all of their faces turned toward it. I would wait, I decided.

I walked down the sagging wood steps and went over to Lena, feeling the grass poke between my toes; I took the gum-stick from her gently and tossed it into a bush. With her hand in mine I turned to look at the parade.

But as I gazed at it—the high school marching band passing—the marchers changed. Their uniforms faded to drab brown and gray; some of them were wearing hoodies or hats, some dragged bags after them, scraping the street—their instruments were gone, and instead of the instruments they carried sacks full of trash, sacks leaking fluids I couldn’t make out, leaving brown-red streaks on the road. Their heads hung down. Their passage had a dreadful weight.

As I stared at them, all at once, they raised their faces to me. Hideous. Some seemed to be wearing gluey, primitive masks; some looked like burn victims and others were pimply teenagers, some were middle-aged with bad teeth and glasses. Some were diseased, their eyes red-rimmed, lesions that looked like eczema or leprosy splitting the skin of their faces. The worst were crones with thinning hair, clumps of ragged gray sticking to yellow scalps.

But they were all Lena.

“No,” I said out loud.

They were Lena old, young, wretched, in a hundred distortions. That’s why we have to die first, I thought, panicked: before they get so old. I shook off the urge to throw up.

Around me the motel guests were watching the parade and smiling. They didn’t see what I saw.

I had to be defiant. It wasn’t the time to play dead.

“Is this show all for me, Ned?”