Sweet Lamb of Heaven

5. HURT, YOU WERE A CHILD AGAIN

I DIDN’T STOP BURKE FROM LEAVING, DIDN’T DO ANYTHING BUT watch as he headed off down the walkway. When he stepped into his own room I closed the door without noise and sat down on the bed.

Lena had her sheep on her lap and had found a buttoned opening in its stomach. Out of the opening, while I sat looking at her in a daze, she pulled a white-plastic box.

“That’s how she talks,” she said, and pushed a large, flat button on the box, which obligingly bleated out its eerie, falsetto prayer. “See? When you press the tummy she talks. It’s for babies. Mommy. I’m six. Can I throw away the talking part?”

“Of course,” I said feebly.

The strength had been pressed out of me; I was breathless and flat.

She turned a small screw neatly with her fingernail, impressing me, and extracted two batteries, which she placed neatly on her bedside table. She marched over to the trash can and dumped the box without ceremony.

“It’s not the lamb’s fault,” she said. “When she talks it makes me think how they took off her skin.”

“Oh, honey,” I said, reaching. “Don’t worry about that. OK? It’s sheepskin. No reason to think it’s from a baby. Maybe that sheep lived a long and happy life. Maybe it died of old age.”

“Maybe,” said Lena doubtfully.

“Can I see her for a minute?” I asked. It was occurring to me that the lamb could be a nanny cam, hold some kind of tracker. I’d been paranoid, this was paranoid, but then again in broad strokes I’d also been correct.

I held it and stared into its glass eyes, squeezed the face, inspected the nose and mouth.

With Lena in front of the TV I poured myself the glass of wine I’d been wanting. The people who’ve heard it, I thought. It had to mean what I thought it meant. So this wasn’t a random selection of winter travelers in Maine.

It was an enclave.

But I’d never told anyone about the voice — no one. That was what made my hands shake as I drank my wine.

“I’m going to take a bath, honey,” I told her, and carried my glass into the bathroom with me, leaving the door open. I thought the soak might calm me.

I’d have to ask Don, I thought as the water ran, it was the only course of action, I’d ask him now, and this time he’d have to tell me. Or I’d ask Burke how we came to be here, how it was that someone had known and how they’d summoned me, if that was what had happened.

Probably the voice wasn’t anything supernatural, you credulous primitive, I thought. I sat there in the hot water and finally leaned out to set the empty goblet on the floor, heard the slight scratch of its circular base on the tile.

Probably it was sound waves, radio waves, technology: that was the best idea I’d had. I’d been so childish to think of magic when it was likely the product of science — some manipulative brainchild of one of these peripatetic characters.

Maybe it had been one of them all along.

I ALMOST FORGOT Ned that evening, preoccupied by what Burke had said. I debated whether to go to dinner and face that crowd. We could always make food in our kitchenette or even drive to town.

But Lena wanted to go because another child was coming, the boy with the robot. She knew this and planned to sit with him. I was worried about the emotional effects of Ned’s sudden appearance, although she seemed to have taken it in stride. I wanted to watch her closely and give her the small assurances she asked for, so I said yes.

And when we entered the café it felt homey. We sat down with the little boy’s family, at their invitation, and as I exchanged small talk with his parents I studied my fellow guests, wondering who among them was in Burke’s club and who was not. The Lindas? The chic couple? Kay? The angry young mogul?

The mogul, yes. I’d heard him on the telephone that night, yelling; and now I thought, That’s what it was about. He’d told someone what he’d heard, the person on the other end. I watched him and Kay at their table alongside the wall, leaning close as they confided in each other. Maybe they were discussing it right now, I thought.

The mogul’s name was Navid, Kay had told me. It meant good news.

And Kay: Kay with the babies at the NICU. Had she heard it from one of them?

I’d accepted the voice, then gratefully dismissed it when it ceased. Once it had loosed me from my moorings so that I had to tread water in a fluid world; finally, when it fell silent, I’d stepped onto solid ground again. But now there was a new unknown, of how and why I’d got to the motel and how the others had, and the earth was shifting beneath my feet again. How much I hated that jarring movement, the rush of fear! I’d tucked it all behind me and moved on; I’d adapted to it as best I could and concentrated on bringing up my girl.

Surely there was nothing else I could have done.

IT HAPPENED THAT I didn’t have to buttonhole Don. With his customary placidness he stopped by our table. The family from town had left and Lena was picking at a berry cobbler. He had a tray of cobbler dishes in his hands, which he set down on the table next to us before he placed his hand on the back of my chair; I studied the waves of whipped cream on top of the pie.

Don’s friendly, familiar slump suggested nothing too significant was happening; and yet he knew.

“The others found us through a website,” he said. “Call it a support group.”

“But I didn’t,” I said.

Lena wasn’t listening but waving her spoon and making faces at Faneesha, who sat across the room making them back at her. I thought of the Hearing Voices Movement; I thought of support groups in general, and how I’d never been drawn to them.

“Well, you needed something else,” said Don. “You recovered and they’re still struggling. You needed a different kind of assistance.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Thank you so much for today. Your timing was perfect.”

“No trouble,” said Don. “But we’re still worried about you.”

“What you just said, though, it doesn’t explain how I knew where to come.”

“You could think of it like salmon,” he said, cocking his head. “Or migrating birds. They know where to go, but no one really knows how they know.”

“Ducks fly south in winter,” said Lena, who’d put down her fork. She had no idea what we were discussing, but lack of context has never stopped her.

“That’s right, Lena,” said Don solemnly. “That they do.”

“Except Lucky Duck,” said Lena. She patted him on the chair next to her. “This guy’s lazy.”

“But ducks and geese and salmon migrate in groups,” I said to Don. “They have other ducks and salmon.”

“Mostly. But not always,” said Don lightly. “Individuals of many species engage in solitary migrations. Humpback whales, for instance. Young songbirds often make their first trips alone. Scientists say direction and distance are written into their genes.”

“They travel for food or breeding, don’t they?” I said. “But I didn’t travel for those reasons.” Because Lena was there, I couldn’t be more specific and I wanted to keep it casual.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Don, and took a bowl off his tray before he picked it up to move on. “Have some cobbler. It’s on the house.”

BACK IN the room I went online briefly.

In some butterfly species, for example the monarch, no single individual completes a migratory journey, which is spread over a number of generations. Instead the animals reproduce and die while underway, and it is left to the next generation to complete the next leg of the journey. —Wikipedia 2015

“Are you mad at Don, Mama?” asked Lena when I was putting her to bed.

She clutched both the duck and the sheep.

“What? No, I’m not mad at him,” I said.

“Don’s too nice to be mad at.”

“Don’s definitely nice,” I said. “And we’re getting to know him better, aren’t we.”

“People ask questions to know each other better,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Are you mad at my father?”

“Hmm. Well, that’s a good question.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“How would you put it, then.”

At that moment she sounded over forty.

“I’d say. . well, I’d say we turned out not to have as much in common as I first thought we did.”

“I don’t know if I like him either. I love him, because everyone loves their father.”

“Right. Of course you do.”

“We used to live with him.”

“Yes. We certainly did.”

“He never gave me a present before. Even though it’s not Christmas. Did he give me a present ever before this?”

“Hmm. He must have, mustn’t he?”

“I like my sheep.”

“That’s good. It’s a nice sheep.”

“I like living here. With you and me.”

“I know you do. I do too.”

“We live at Don’s motel.”

“For now. But not forever, sweetie. You know that.”

“I know. One day we have to go. That’s why they call it a motel. It’s not a house or apartment.”

“No.”

“One day we have to live in one of those.”

“I expect so. We’ll have neighbors, I bet. You’ll like that, too.”

“OK. I’m going to go to sleep now.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

I COULDN’T SLEEP, so I wrote down that exchange, figuring it might give me needed insight, further on, into my failings as a parent.

Then I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was a good enough parent to try to keep account of those failings.

I lay in the other bed, letting the TV play muted in front of me, laptop on my knees. Don had to be some kind of counselor, some kind of advisor to those who’d heard. . but now that I wasn’t the only one who spoke of “hearing,” the word seemed cultish to me and I didn’t like it, not at all. The word hearing had an unpleasant ring suddenly — now it was a matter for shame, almost, rather than one of the senses — and “the voice” wasn’t the plain and straightforward moniker I’d taken it for but a worshipful honorific.

Now it was the Voice.

I wondered if what the other guests had heard was different from what I had — assuming it wasn’t just Burke, of course, assuming he spoke for more of them. Not all of the guests had babies, in fact none of them did. As far as I knew, only Kay had necessarily had regular contact with infants. So maybe they’d encountered it, as she had, in the infants of others.

I went over the guest roster, as on TV a pretty woman was murdered with a knife. I knew the voice’s life cycle, or I thought I had. But I knew nothing. You don’t even remember how this supposed knowledge came to you, I told myself — it was never spelled out. If the voice had brought me here, how? What had driven us from old friends’ welcoming houses to these Maine bluffs, with this peculiar group?

Maybe Don was onto something, maybe the migration was encoded in my genes.

Many mechanisms have been proposed for animal navigation: there is evidence for a number of them, including orientation by the sun, orientation by the stars and by polarized light, magnetoception, and other senses such as echolocation and hydrodynamic reception. . investigators have often been forced to discard the simplest hypotheses. —Wikipedia 2015

How could the other guests have heard the voice? I tried to recall exactly when they had seemed upset. Burke was the only one who’d showed emotion to me, aside from the angry young man on his cell phone and Kay talking about the NICU.

I picked up my computer and scrolled back in this document to what I’d written about Burke. Talking to Lena about giants and beanstalks: that was when he’d lost it. And now I saw it, and it was obvious. His dismay had been brought on by something he himself had said, that Lena didn’t have to worry about giants saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” from beanstalks — a voice, talking down from the clouds.

There was my evidence, right there.

I heard a text alert on my cell phone and rose from the bed to fumble in my bag. I missed you tonight, it read. And then another: Did I get the date wrong?

I’d entered his name and number into my contacts list, and there it was: Will Garza. I’d forgotten my first date in almost a decade.

I apologized in a low voice, with the door to the bathroom closed so that I wouldn’t wake Lena, and found myself relaxing as I listened to his deep and pleasant tone. I talked a bit about Lena, for whom he’d once suggested a book about a donkey named Sylvester who found a wishing pebble and got turned into a boulder. She liked it almost as much as Ferdinand. I told him my husband had followed us here. I told him almost every material fact about our situation, leaving out the part where I used to hear a voice.

He said he had never been married, that he had most often lived alone, that he preferred books to people. His parents had been from Argentina but he had grown up in New York before he moved to Maine and had relocated here when the rest of the family had returned to Argentina. They ran a small bakery there, and his father cultivated oak trees.

But he’d stayed here because this, he said, for better or worse, felt more like his country.

His given name was Guillermo but he’d always gone by the shortest Anglicized version, Will, not liking the initials G.G. as a boy and living among Anglos. He used to be a feral librarian, he said, before he went back to school.

That was what they called them, he said, librarians without a master’s degree.

Olfactory cues may be important for salmon, which return from the ocean to spawn and die in the very streams where they hatched. Some scholars believe they use their magnetic sense to navigate within reach of the stream, then their sense of smell to identify the river at close range. —Wikipedia 2015

THIS MORNING I woke up simple-minded, as though a dream had narrowed my focus. I had to ask Don the question, the large question was all I was interested in, and now I would take him by the shoulders and shake him and ask it. Don! Don! Don! Who was it? Who was speaking to us?

But the urge passed. I guess I couldn’t handle an answer, an answer would be too unsettling. I don’t want to be part of some enclave of believers, some marginal sect. I’ve always avoided joining. I don’t even have one of those plastic grocery-store cards that make the food cheaper. I haven’t enrolled in any frequent flyer programs; though I can’t fix a flat tire I’ve never paid dues to Triple A; even my friend’s book club in East Anchorage, which mostly involved eating and drinking, was of little interest to me.

When I was alone I could accept, with difficulty, having heard what I heard, but to find myself among others who might confess and describe it, impute their own meanings — it makes me claustrophobic. And who is Don, even, to hand down high knowledge to me? I like him, I do, but when it comes to the greatest mystery of my life I have no reason to privilege a motel owner’s beliefs over my own.

I do want to ask why, if several of them are in on this, they hid it from me until now. Why didn’t they let me in before, if this is why we’re here? When I asked how they came to be at this motel, why didn’t anyone answer me?

Ned called and I let it go to voicemail, to which I listened promptly. He said he needed a decision, and followed this with an amicably phrased threat to show up again if he didn’t hear from me right away. He’s always been restless; after all, it’s why he married me.

I struggled under the pressure of his impatience, trying to shrug it off as I made toast and spooned out yogurt for Lena. I wondered if I could put him off. I wasn’t ready to see him again so soon, much less decide my course of action. This might be a subject, I decided, I could safely broach with Don, possibly Don would have some solid counsel for me, with his background defending wives under duress.

I’d table the other conversation for now, I’d focus my energies on fending off Ned.

So I called the Lindas, who like any excuse to go for a walk, and asked if one of them had time to take Lena down to the beach. I called the front desk and asked Don if he could meet to discuss my situation. I still needed help, I said.

I met him in his back office.

“You have a few options, as I see it,” he said. “One, you can leave the country. But that wouldn’t be wise, legally. Two, you can hide somewhere, the way you’ve been doing, but better. On that choice I could help with logistics. But that’s complicated legally too, since you’re not alleging abuse. He could use it against you, certainly. Three, you simply file for divorce now. Maybe he makes good on his threat, maybe he doesn’t. He could be bluffing.”

He stopped.

“That’s all?” I said.

“Or four, you can do what he says. Sign the papers first, with your lawyer, and then do what he wants you to.”

“Isn’t there a five?”

“I don’t trust him,” said Don. “Four’s a more dangerous option than it may seem.”

“But so is three,” I said. “He could try to get custody. Having her with me trumps everything.”

“I know.”

Don studied me, waiting.

I CALLED A COUPLE of friends, pacing my room while Lena and the Lindas wandered up and down the beach. You shouldn’t be rushed in this decision, they said, tell him you need a week. They were kind, but their support didn’t help me, beyond the warmth of reassurance.

It seemed to me I had weak information about my choices, so I made more calls. I asked Don for a family lawyer’s number, he had a personal friend who would take my call even today, he said, so back in my room used his name to get her on the phone. But she didn’t tell me much more than I already knew, and while I was half-listening another call came in — Ned’s voicemail had said he’d love to have lunch with “his girls,” it’d be no problem for him to “swing by.”

When I called him back my call went to his voicemail, which pleased me. I said I’d need till Tuesday, but don’t come for lunch. Ease up.

I was wary of calling a lawyer in Anchorage. Ned knew so many people in the city that I couldn’t be sure of steering clear of his contacts or friends. When I thought of lawyers there I saw two faces of lawyers he’d slept with, a young blonde and a middle-aged hardbody who ran marathons. A few other lawyers were investors of his. But Juneau, at least, wasn’t his territory yet — maybe I could find a lawyer there, one who wasn’t beholden to him. So when Lena came back from her walk I assigned her some reading and scanned search results.

Then I remembered Will Garza. He was intelligent, I thought, and kind and easy to talk to. I let Lena watch television, since it generates more background noise than reading, and stepped outside to make my call. We barely knew each other, of course, so I hadn’t asked anything of him. But now it struck me that maybe I could ask his advice, and he, unlike my distant friends, was here.

We decided to meet; it needed to be someplace warm, someplace Lena would play hard and ignore us. Will remembered an outlet mall in the hinterlands, a mall with an indoor playground you paid for. It sounded to me like the worst place in the world for a first date, but I needed someone to talk to more than I needed to set a scene, at that moment, and I said yes.

The place was full of inflated slides and bouncy houses, with tinny pop music playing and bright lights shining and the red, blue and yellow decor of fast-food restaurants and clowns; it smelled like sweat and dirty socks and off-gassing vinyl. For me there was nothing to like, for Lena there was everything. She’d put her shoes in a cubby before I finished paying and was off climbing, running between the machines, making friends: not two minutes had passed before she was holding hands with an older girl as they tumbled down a wide blue slide.

I sat self-consciously under the fluorescents on a sticky chair and waited, following Lena with my eyes as she pulled the older girl from one puffy structure to the next. I wondered if my face was clean but was too self-conscious to check it in the cell phone’s camera. I’d seen that a few times: people trying to look as though they were doing something else on their phones when it was clear from the angle of their head, sometimes a set of pursed lips or a hair toss, that they were studying their faces.

Then he got there, carrying a cardboard tray of drinks — a hot chocolate for Lena and a coffee for me, which he handed over without saying anything. There was a little milk in the fourth cup, he said, did I take my coffee with milk?

He brought with him a microclimate of calm. I was drawn to it, his warm calmness that set the stage for trust.

African ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the sun, the moon, and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile. . this finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom. —Abstract, “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Dack, Baird et al., Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 4

I’VE DECIDED TO call Ned’s bluff, though I have no idea how he’ll react. I’m afraid, but I took a couple of Valiums, dredged up from the bottom of my cosmetics bag, and thought of how he’s never had a genuine wish to be in the same room with Lena. He’s never wanted to be near her, listen to her, keep her safe — never.

It makes me angry to think of this, makes me feel a burning anger. Remembering his disinterest I can’t believe a court will ever side with him when it comes to my little girl, I can’t believe it’s a realistic possibility. Even if his constituency were to believe him, I think, even if he did successfully paint himself as a victim in the eyes of electors, surely a court would not, I tell myself.

So while Don’s family lawyer made up the papers — I could file from Maine, as it turned out — I stalled, putting off Ned’s voicemails and texts with short texts of my own. I’d tell him on Tuesday, not a minute before I’d said I would, and meanwhile Lena and I spent time with the others at the motel and with Will; we weren’t alone much. We kept busy, went to a movie in the afternoon, to dinner in the motel café.

I envisioned a hard, bad conversation with Ned when the deadline came. Because of that I was constantly nervous, I almost trembled with a brimming anxiety. I picked at my food, I tried to keep busy so that I didn’t have time to succumb to fear, and on Sunday night I could barely sleep.

I had dreams of small, furry dogs being mauled by something they couldn’t see.

Don suggested Lena and I could switch rooms and stay right off the lobby. We could trade with Burke and Gabe, there was no difference between our room and theirs except for location, and that way we’d be near Don — near help, in other words, in the event that Ned started banging on our door Tuesday night. Lena was jubilant, when we told her about the change, at the thought of trying a new room — it might as well have been a trip to Disneyland. She fantasized about trying all the rooms, one at a time. “Then Don’s room, then Kay’s room, then the Lindas’. .”

We would move Tuesday morning, before I called Ned and told him I was filing for divorce; by Monday night, on the momentum of Lena’s excitement, we had our small bags neatly packed and waiting just inside the door.

But we didn’t move to Gabe and Burke’s room the next day, because I woke up Tuesday morning and Lena was gone.

IT WOULD BE futile to try to evoke the desperation I felt when I saw she wasn’t there.

My head was pounding — I’d been drugged — sharp pains like nails or tacks in my temples. Still that was nothing to what I felt, nothing, and I picked up the phone as soon as I saw her empty bed, the wrinkled sheets, as soon as I called her name and got silence, and then I sat up and saw her suitcase was gone too, Lucky Duck, her puffer coat. The chain on the door hung in two pieces.

All this took five seconds — less.

And then I was standing and running to the door, I was throwing it open and running up and down on the cement walkway in nothing but underwear and the long T-shirt I slept in, calling her name. Bare feet on ice, on the ridges in the pavement. I tore the pads on my toes, fell in a panic and scraped the skin off my knees, flailing.

I found Don in the lobby and I called Ned, hysterical, but of course he didn’t pick up. Don sat me down on a brown-and-orange couch with coarse upholstery, whose pattern I still remember well, how I picked at the threads as I sobbed. . I’ll spare myself writing more about this. The point is she was gone, and the worst time in my life started.

I didn’t keep a written record during the days after she was taken, but it’s not those days anymore and it helps me to write now.

So Will came, Don was there, Kay and the Lindas, Burke and Gabe, even the well-dressed couple with two expensive cars. Everyone was around me after that, though I only half-noticed them. They were a blur of people who weren’t my little girl, the blur of irrelevance.

They said things, they called the police and the police were coming, they said, hovering — we’d stay right here and wait for them. A blanket? A heating pad for my feet? I was in shock, said one of them.

I registered goodwill but I hadn’t known what desolation was, before Ned took Lena, I’d never known what it felt like to be destroyed.

THERE CAME A TEXT on my phone while I was still almost catatonic. It was a text from Ned, I understood when Will held the phone up for me, though it didn’t have Ned’s name beside it, only a string of unfamiliar digits. Don said it was probably a prepaid.

The text bubble read Call off the lawyer.

“So he already knew she was filing,” I heard Don murmur to Will.

“Surveillance,” nodded Will.

“And sedation to make them both sleep through it,” said Don. “How? The bottled water in the room? Something I cooked?”

He was on edge: everyone was.

There were security cameras, of course, the motel had a camera aimed at the parking lot, one in the lobby, a couple more. But when Don tried to view the footage his software told him the files had been damaged and couldn’t be retrieved.

Beside me was an egg-salad sandwich on a paper plate. I remember it distinctly: the pores and craters of the beige whole-wheat bread, the fact that it looked nothing like food. I realized, seeing it, that there was no food for me — no food existed, in this world, nothing would ever be eaten.

The sandwich sat beside me, aging. I didn’t touch it, and though I did relent about food in general — evidently — to this day the sight of an egg-salad sandwich makes me queasy.

Someone got my laptop and at their request I managed to click through a number of frames, I clicked here and there, tears running down my face, until I was able to bring up a photograph of Ned. Don emailed it to himself, then went back into the motel office and printed it out, though everyone present remembered what Ned looked like.

A new text: No police.

“He’s got to be kidding,” said Will.

We were still in the lobby. I think guests must have been coming and going by then, no longer crowding near. Will and Don and I sat on the couches while Main Linda kept busy making tea in the café. The yellow-beige sandwich had gone away — good riddance to it, unappetizing forever. Instead a coffee cup sat next to me on an end table, the surface of its cold, weak coffee as still as stone.

“. . are there people outside action movies who’d actually agree to that condition?” Will was asking.

“Where are the cops? I’m going to call them again,” said Don.

Another text came in.

If you call the cops again [end of text bubble] I’ll call my FBI friends [end of text bubble] and make a counterclaim of kidnapping.

“He can hear us,” said Don, and stood up hastily. “Still listening, aren’t you?”

Big ears to hear you with.

We gazed at each other, Will and Don and I. They looked round-eyed. I don’t think I did. I wasn’t surprised. I was on a plateau, the final plane of hell, I thought, a flat, dry place.

“He does know someone in the FBI,” I said.

There’d been this asshole from the Anchorage field office. A couple of times he and Ned had driven to a rifle range called Rabbit Creek — I remembered because I thought of small rabbits running scared as the two men fired their weapons. They went for drinks afterward at some sports bar, where Ned stayed sober and the FBI guy got sloppy drunk. I hadn’t understood what Ned wanted with him, some kind of “ASAC,” Ned had said, assistant special agent — a sullen man with pitted cheeks, a spare tire and a comb-over.

I’d expected him to look like Mulder from The X-Files, I realized when they stopped by the house once, Mulder had been my main teenage exposure to an FBI idea and it lingered.

But he didn’t look like Mulder at all. Sadly unlike Mulder.

And surely they’d had precisely nothing in common, I thought now, nothing but the FBI guy’s future utility. Ned was a bet hedger, a fortifier and consolidator, effective at building networks and circuits. They met at a boxing gym and the FBI guy had apparently been drawn to Ned, as so many people were — as I had been.

Considering this I started to feel a spur of practicality again, my ruined center cauterized for a time so that it stopped infecting the rest of me. I could keep it together as long as I didn’t think of Lena being alone or afraid. It was her emotions I feared for when I let myself fear, her trust of the world being damaged, eroded bitterly as I sat there with my hands tied, unable to reach her.

I didn’t even consider physical harm. I couldn’t stand to: that possibility was walled off in me.

Quickly all of us stood up and started searching for the microphone. There sat the laptop and my cell phone, which seemed the most likely, so Don called in the angry young mogul to inspect my devices. Apparently Navid knew about electronics. He came in, scruffy in his mountain-man beard and plaid shirt, and took my computer apart piece by piece. He seemed attentive, not angry at all, and I felt grateful and guilty for not liking him before; I would like him from now on, I would like anyone who helped me get Lena back, more than that I would love them abjectly, I’d be abject, I thought.

At some point I noticed I was digging my fingernails too deep into the heel of one hand. They were too short to draw blood, but the bruises would be there for weeks.

Navid took apart my phone, making me agitated — it was my only link to Lena, and what if it got broken? — but he put it back together again without finding anything.

Was the mike on my person? I didn’t wear jewelry and I had no buttons, even, except for the one on my jeans. Don and Navid inspected my shoes — by this time a pair had been brought to me, along with a pile of clothes, and I’d dragged myself to the bathroom beside the café and put them on, the jeans and woolen socks and a pair of worn sneakers — but they found nothing there either. I didn’t have my purse in the lobby so the bug, we figured, had to be elsewhere. We switched to inspecting the furniture.

It was confusing, since Ned wasn’t likely to have heard about my plan to file for divorce through a microphone in the lobby.

After a fruitless search we trailed out of there, Don and Will and I, and into Don’s office, but I was still nervous, I couldn’t know when Ned was listening since we hadn’t found the bug. I felt conflicted about calling the police again, we couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t arrived yet, so I insisted we go analog for a while, talking to each other by writing things down on a pad of lined paper and passing it among us.

Don and Will thought Ned must have got to the local police somehow, they suggested he wouldn’t be able to do more than delay them and we should call again, get someone different on the phone. If that failed we should try another jurisdiction — the feds, probably, since none of the Mainers believed Ned’s threats about the FBI could possibly amount to much.

He was bluffing, Don said, it was highly unlikely his contacts in Anchorage could strong-arm agents in Boston.

But I still felt overheard. I couldn’t even trust my clothes, despite the fact that we’d inspected them: everything was suspect. Back in my room I stripped them all off; I stepped into the bathroom and made another 911 call — they transferred me to the sheriff’s office and I reported the kidnapping again — they said they were dispatching a car, they promised two officers would arrive within the half hour.

After I pressed the END button I stepped into the shower and let hot water beat down on my face.

What about those chips people implanted in pets, I thought — what about them? Could I have been implanted with a chip? Could I pick it out from under the skin, as I’d once seen in some otherwise forgettable movie?

Scratch, scratch, blood, and a loosened nub of metal dug out of the flesh.

IF I HAD been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five, some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know what for.

THE STATE POLICE finally got to us hours after we’d first called. It was two officers, polite and attentive in their note taking. We made them sit with us in the back office, where we felt Ned might not be able to hear, and I told them everything I could think of — about Beefy John, B.Q., Ned’s driver, his rented SUV. Black and American, was all I could say, and of course he might easily have switched it out. A couple of times I had to stop, and the cops waited patiently, their faces presenting sympathy.

I wrote down the address of our house in Anchorage, where as far as I knew Ned still lived. I had no idea where he’d been staying locally — there weren’t other motels nearby, said Don, you had to drive at least half an hour for the closest lodgings open this time of year.

“Or he could be staying with local contacts,” said Will. “That mechanic, maybe? John something. . Pruell, maybe,” he told the police.

“Ned — my husband isn’t the type to sleep in his car,” I mumbled. “He never stays in hotels under four stars.”

The policemen looked at each other.

“That narrows it down,” said one. “He ain’t in Maine.”

I had a tin ear. My sense of humor had left with Lena.

We were surprised at how soon the cops went away again. I’d thought they would stay near, I thought there’d be a task force, something — in movies policemen walked around the house or apartment of the kidnapped child’s family, tapping phones, watching at windows. But in fact the two policemen left after their brief interview of me and an even briefer search for the concealed microphone (they found nothing). Their expressions were mild.

“We’ll do our best to find your daughter, ma’am,” said one. But I didn’t like how he said it — casually, as though it wasn’t life or death.

In the silence after the lobby doors swung shut Don said Ned had to have got to them, that their placid demeanor was unnatural. He said we should assume they weren’t going to move quickly and I had to just call the FBI. But I wasn’t so sure, I was more afraid of Ned’s capabilities than they were, so instead I went online and then I borrowed Will’s phone, distrusting my own. I hired a private investigation company based in Portland.

They’d assign a team right away, they said.

I called my parents next. My mother seemed shell-shocked, as though Lena’s abduction was a sheer unreality, and offered to help with money. Her voice was so faint that I could barely hear her.

I COULDN’T SIT in the motel, I found, waiting for someone else to look for my daughter. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone who didn’t already know what had happened.

So Will and I got into his truck, a beater with worn Mexican blankets over the seats, and at my request he drove slowly up and down the icy streets, up and down, back and forth, prowling. The streets were fairly empty of traffic, only the silence of blinking Christmas lights on house fronts and in yards. There were teams of reindeer pulling sleighs, yellow outlines of bells.

Now and then someone would honk behind us or angrily pass, swerving to make a point. It felt as bleak as it looked, the houses spread out, the odd signal flashing the white walking figure to an empty corner. But I had it in my head that I needed to drive every street, and Will was willing to humor me, likely knowing I was on the edge of hysteria.

There was a worn map in the glove box, there was a half-dried-out pink highlighter in the armrest compartment, and Will pulled over and showed me how to mark the route we’d already driven. Even though it signified nothing, since we weren’t knocking on doors or looking in windows, I colored furiously. As he drove I stared out the window, checking driveways for black SUVs, trying to imagine the potential of each business or house to be harboring her. I tried to intuit Lena’s presence. Would I feel it? Would the other animals’ senses come to my aid now — detection of the Earth’s magnetic field, navigation by smell?

When we stopped at a stop sign or rare traffic light I’d trail the highlighter down the map, along the road we’d driven, which gave me a brief, businesslike feeling. Then I’d raise my face from the map. The next moment, I thought, the next moment it will be. . I willed myself to see a face at the window, to see her small figure in the puffer coat.

“We need to stop now and go home,” said Will after a while. He said it bluntly but kindly.

I was a child myself now: as soon as you were a victim, as soon as you were deeply hurt, you were a child again.

Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.

IT WASN’T CLEAR what Ned wanted to accomplish. He’d ordered me to cancel the divorce filing, sure, but that could easily be restarted once Lena was returned. And any contract would have been signed under duress, and not binding.

After his first texts I heard nothing for days. Christmas passed without anyone seeming to celebrate it. Or if they did, I didn’t see. It passed and faded and never was.

I went over and over how my girl must be feeling, alone with someone she barely knew, whether her father loomed as a threatening figure or had made himself charming and likable to reassure her. I worked to craft this kind of picture for myself, Ned as a babysitter, performing an imitation of affection — I sculpted this image painstakingly, smoothing my fingers along the edges, pushing it into a shape I could live with. But it collapsed whenever I wasn’t vigilant and I wondered what he was telling her, what particular architecture of lies she was living in and what part of them she believed.

I couldn’t help recalling Ned’s phone conversation with my mother, his sly undermining of me, whether he was doing the same with Lena. But it was her relation to the whole world I feared for most, the way she might be changed. I got a prescription for tranquilizers the day after she was taken and tried, with Will’s help, to make a routine for myself around the investigators’ progress reports, which they gave to me twice a day.

Not even the voice had affected me like this, made my whole body weak with terror or my knees buckle whenever the knowledge of it struck me. It was my abject state that took me to Don’s meetings. Between the kidnapping and the first meeting I attended there was only one exchange with Don about the hearing of voices — one moment when he bowed his head to me and apologized for having kept me out.

“You’ve been in recovery longer than most of them,” he said. “You’ve done far better with it. For them it’s still new. They didn’t bring you in before because they weren’t ready.”

I said nothing to Will about the meetings, didn’t even intend to go myself — I only started to attend them because I’d been by myself in my room and, without Lena, was hit by the lightning bolt that had been striking me constantly since she was taken. It was a stupefaction that refused to diminish: as soon as I had a loose, idle moment I was scorched down the center by remorse, burnt black by the feeling of guilt. My fault. My fault.

At those moments I’d do anything for distraction, and so it happened that one time I left my room headed for anywhere — looking for the moving figures of people, the sounds they made, the industry of normal lives — and as I passed through the lobby I saw the café door cracked open.

The tables had been pushed back to the walls, chairs set out in a circle. I’d been to an Al-Anon meeting once keeping a friend company, and this had the same encounter-group feeling. There were baked goods and coffee arrayed on one of the tables, a hot-water container and a basket of tea bags. I settled myself on a chair a bit back from the rest — an outlier, satellite chair — and as the fog of panic receded, I took hold of myself and worked not to think of Lena. One minute, I said to myself, one minute first, then two; one minute at a time, one day was an eternity.

Navid wasn’t there, but the rest of the guests were accounted for.

“It’s been four months since I retired,” said Big Linda.

It didn’t grow clear to me then where they’d heard their voices or how, only that the content of their perceptions varied. They’d heard different sounds, drawn different conclusions and had different responses. Linda had heard a voice at work, somehow, and told no one until much later; Burke had told Gabe about hearing a voice immediately, and Gabe had believed him schizophrenic. . but in fact, that first day, I barely heard what was said. I drifted on the back of my Valium, lulled by the drone of voices.

And my fear of a cult, at least, was assuaged by the drabness of the plastic chair edge in front of me and the matter-of-fact trudge of Main Linda over to the snacks table. There was no grim power to be felt amid that mundane scene of guests selecting baked goods beneath the tube fluorescents. Main Linda piled sandwich cookies onto a paper plate printed with rainbows, then returned to her chair licking the powdered sugar off a finger.

Don didn’t address a single word to me at that initial meeting, just let me sit there behind the ranks, saying nothing.

Not for the first time I thought how groups of people had a habit of making even the exceptional banal. Was it a national characteristic or a trait of all humanity? Crowds could be grandiose, that was true, but small groups in small rooms. . it took me back to my parents’ church, where I’d sat bored and staring around, looking high and low for any object of interest. More often than not I’d failed to find such an object and ended up gazing at the dirty Kleenex wadded into someone’s sleeve. I remembered the backs of my legs sweating on the smooth wood of the pew, heard wet coughs off to one side, saw dandruff on shoulders and, in sandal weather, hoary toenails.

Still: there’d been hymns, and some of them were dull but many were beautiful and sad. Although I hadn’t felt that sadness till after, long after we had left the church.

It was remembered music that was beautiful.