Sweet Lamb of Heaven

7. SOUL IS A UNIVERSAL FEATURE

NOT MANY TOURISTS FLY INTO ANCHORAGE IN WINTER. IN SUMMER there are backpackers galore: the small airport is full of tower-like packs with attachments dangling from them and duffel bags lumped on the floor in archipelagos of nylon and canvas. Among them you see hippies milling, hikers, hunters, fishermen, naturalists and wilderness fans of all stripes, talking excitedly about their planned itineraries as they wait for their car rides or small-plane connections. They crowd beneath the terminal’s fluorescents in a fug of B.O. and patchouli and bug spray, headed for Denali and other points west or north.

But January is quiet in Alaska. When we flew in, the airport was almost deserted. It had that peculiar desolation of an empty public space, and in the silence our roller-bags squeaked and our footsteps rang out. Lena squealed at the sight of a rearing grizzly in a glass cage, which a placard claims is the largest bear ever shot. Paws raised, it looms over the polished expanse of floor in a perfect embodiment of overkill. She stood beside me and gripped my hand as she read aloud the sign at the bottom of the case: WORLD RECORD KODIAK BROWN BEAR. The bear’s reared-up stance was upright, almost gentlemanly.

Ned wasn’t there to meet us, happily, only a driver at the curb. Everything had been choreographed by his staff; there was a schedule with places, times, and tasks listed: 4:30 p.m. Consultant Appt. 1: Wardrobe. He’s as disinclined to be in my company as I am to be in his. No good words will ever pass between us now.

We had an appointment with his lead media person right off, in his campaign office; we were instructed today, before the first press conference tomorrow. There are even clothes I have to wear, looks custom-designed for me as though I’m Sarah Palin. Clothes have been picked for Lena, too, apparently. Really? I thought. Even for the small time?

Ned has to do everything with corporate shine, he needs to be at the top of his game from the start. And he requires similar performances from his associates.

So we met with them and tried on the clothes. It was tedious standing around as they recorded our sizes and made adjustments, trying to keep Lena in one place. A hair and makeup person came and practiced painting our faces, taking pictures of us colored in different palettes. Lena was turned out like Shirley Temple at first and looked like a beauty pageant contestant, so I said no. The media consultant trotted out a second outfit, slightly less frilly, and agreed not to curl her hair into ringlets.

I know I won’t be able to stand Ned’s platforms and opinions, much less concur with them, so I’m doing my best to learn nothing more than I have to about what I’m shilling for. This is a farce I’m acting in. Except for one dinner with some women’s church group, I don’t have any conversations on my to-do list. I hold Lena’s hand whenever I feel doubt, press her to my side when I find I’m quizzing myself on how I could have been so easily brought to heel.

But I’m not willing to take risks: I stay close to her all the time. I was given a second chance, I was rescued after a shipwreck, and my goal isn’t ambitious. It’s just to keep our heads above water.

After the meeting with the wardrobe consultant we were driven to the house, once our home. I felt anxious walking in, not sad or nostalgic; the abduction had erased even the vestigial possibility of that. But I did feel off-kilter entering the place. Lena was merely intrigued and ran around trying to identify what she remembered.

Ned has a housekeeper so everything is neat, and he’s replaced the furniture I chose with items that are new and more generic. There’s beige upholstery and beige drapes, a bland beige background everywhere; there are cut flowers on mantels and tables, as though the premises are being kept at the ready for a meet-and-greet. Behind shining cabinet doors there’s a huge flat-screen TV, and photographs of snow-covered mountains have been placed on the white walls, no doubt by a decorator connected to his media team. They’re Alaskan mountains, of course — discreetly labeled at the bottom lest anyone doubt Ned’s loyalties. Chugach Range. 2008. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Wrangell-St. Elias, I remembered telling Ned once, was larger than Switzerland. He’d shrugged: to him national parks were a waste of rich mineral and timberland.

But now he has pictures of them.

“Where’d my room used to be?” asked Lena. “Did I have my own room?”

“You did,” I said. “But mostly you slept in the bed with me.”

We stood at the door of the very small room that had been the nursery, which now contains an exercise bike and free weights.

“It doesn’t look like my room,” objected Lena.

“Your daddy likes to stay fit,” I said.

THE NEXT CONSULTANT made her practice standing beside me in front of a video camera. She showed us the footage on her laptop, showed Lena how she was fidgeting and playing with her hair. Lena should stand still and smile and keep her hands clasped together, she said, or at least let them hang by her sides. She shouldn’t move around, said the consultant, because it would distract from Ned.

“Your daddy’s going to make a little speech, and then he’ll answer questions.”

“What if I have an itch?” asked Lena.

The consultant smiled and said the whole thing would be over before she even knew it.

The initial response to an anomaly is typically to ignore it; this is how the scientific community has responded to the seeming anomaly of consciousness.

Then, when the anomaly ceases to be ignored, the common reaction is to try to explain it within the current paradigm. . to date, no such effort in any discipline — be it chemistry, quantum physics, chaos theory, or computing — has proved fruitful.

No matter what theory is put forward, the central question remains: How can immaterial consciousness ever arise from matter?

When it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. —Peter Russell, huffingtonpost.com 12.2013

I DON’T WANT to see my Anchorage friends, because to see them again now would bring them into this queasy distortion of my life, the fake alliance with Ned. It makes me ashamed, even though I’m looking down the barrel of his gun.

Some know about the kidnapping, some don’t; others know about how it resolved, others don’t. I can’t stand to do the mental accounting of who knows what, can’t bear to revisit the ordeal — it was hard enough writing it down for myself. I don’t need to listen to sympathy or indignation on my behalf.

And from the few calls I made while I was panicking, I have the lingering feeling that most of them don’t believe I was trapped into making this deal with Ned. None of my friends here seem to understand the urgency of my fear. They live in a personal world where rules are followed and fairness reigns; they’re mostly white and mostly middle-class, meaning they feel entitled to justice for themselves and expect it for all the other people in their lives. Corruption belongs elsewhere, other countries, Wall Street or Congress, lobbyists.

They tried to be sympathetic when I talked to them, as people have to in the face of a missing child, but I felt, behind their commitment to sympathy, a steady seep of disbelief as though they suspected I was exaggerating or dramatizing. I was failing to stay normal, so either my perceptions were biased or I’d mistaken the facts of the case.

Because their take is that Ned’s a good guy, basically. Too handsome and too charming, one of my friends wrote me, and sometimes you resent him for that. But as soon as you see him again you forget the resentment — you like him again the moment he speaks to you. He’s maybe a bit of a playa, she wrote. There’ve always been rumors, but there are always going to be rumors when a man’s that HOT-HOT-HOT [sic]. Men aren’t monogamous anyway, they’re just not built that way, and I’m sure it was hard to live in the shadow of the light he sheds. .

That was the kind of email I got from my Anchorage friends about Ned. He’s not a credible kidnapper to them. They figure he probably just missed his kid. Maybe he missed her desperately.

The first time we saw him was an hour before the press conference to announce he was running. We sat in his campaign office, waiting to go into the room with the small stage and podium where the reporters were going to be; Lena was in modified pageant gear, only half as gaudy as the outfit they’d first put her in, and no ringlets. I was in a suit that made me look like a first lady, and they shellacked my hair with spray so that it was big on top and swooped up at the bottom. The makeup artist gave me pink lips.

Ned came in while they were working on us, making his usual pretense of jocular fatherhood — bending to hug Lena, then grab her face and say “Got your nose!” (She jerked back at this, banging into the hairdresser standing behind her.) He acted as though he’d already greeted me, as though we’d spent hours together earlier that day — for the benefit of the staff, possibly, he squeezed my arm as he passed — preparing himself, maybe, for the public embraces we’d been asked to perform.

We hadn’t seen each other since the day he showed up in Maine. Since before he took my daughter.

“My girls ready?” he asked.

My girls triggered my gag reflex, surprising me, and I fled to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, in that closet-sized half bath full of rolled-up campaign posters and yard signs, but it was close.

Once we were up in front of the flashbulbs and digital recorders, my nausea turned to a stunned thoughtlessness. When Ned spoke I barely registered the content of what he was saying. Everything but Lena, who held my hand, was scenery, and when I embraced that I felt less nervous.

When people say “scenery” they can mean either a stage set or the beauty of the natural world — the two are interchangeable, in the word scenery. In that strange word the entire landscape, up to and including mountains and the moon, is only a background, probably two-dimensional, for the human figures in front of it. But it helped me, in those minutes, to think we were just playacting.

The press didn’t ask many political questions; mostly the reporters there were interested in giving Ned opportunities to talk about his success at business, to brag about his companies, of which the room seemed to be full of boosters. There was one timid question from someone at the back about a drillship that had almost run aground in Unalaska Bay, but the other reporters moved on quickly when Ned waved that one away. The room was stacked with his allies.

Just when I thought we’d got off scot-free and things were winding down, a reporter waved at Lena.

“What do you have to say about your daddy running for office, honey?”

Lena blinked and said nothing, and then, as the silence lingered: “He’s my daddy.”

Her tone was confused, almost questioning, but because she’s a kid and her voice is high and thin, this bland remark gave the room an excuse for aw-shucks laughter. People shuffled out, grinning and shooting the breeze.

WE NEEDED TO be seen out on the town together, so Ned made reservations at upscale restaurants for all our dinners on this trip, except for the very first night when he took us to a pizza place that’s a local favorite.

The “narrative,” as he calls it, meaning the group of fabrications we give out for public consumption, is that I have a dying parent back East, and Lena and I are staying there to help my mother suffer through the time of decline and hospice. My father gets to be the one who’s dying.

“Lymphoma on top of the ol’ dementia,” Ned said.

I hope my mother or Solly don’t see any of the coverage of Ned’s campaign, that none of it makes its way onto YouTube. I imagine how their faces would crumple, seeing my father used that way.

At dinner I had to talk directly to him at close quarters. I had to look closely at his smooth features, his deep-blue eyes that glance off me now, never resting for long, straying around whatever space we’re in as though even a table leg is more compelling than my face. I welcome it in practice, but it hits me how he used to work those eyes so hard to make me believe he was earnest.

The Moose’s Tooth was crowded as usual — there are always lines there — and our booth was sandwiched close between two others. Ned’s fake-Secret Service bodyguards took the nearest two-top, but still we were back to back with other diners and I could tell Ned felt everyone must be watching him, so the fake cheer of our conversation had to pass muster. It was surprisingly difficult to smile and nod and be a wifely mainstay.

I found I couldn’t eat. The restaurant’s pizza, which I used to love, reminded me of egg salad. So I drank my one glass of white wine, picked at a salad and listened to Ned rattle off his campaign reports. My single glass of white wine was mandated by his staff, as it didn’t look feminine to drink beer, it didn’t look Christian to have a second glass, and red might stain my teeth. I drank my quota slowly, savoring it as I watched Lena doodle on a child’s menu and Ned reeled off a list of coming events, repeated sound bites about his exchanges with campaign donors, why they believed in him and his values “in their own words.” There were the usual anecdotes about small-town Americans, a farmer named Milt, a grandma named Pearl. He seemed to be running lines, rehearsing his material with a very small focus group.

After a while I looked up from Lena’s artwork and found myself staring at elements of his face and carefully detesting each. You’d think a facial feature in itself would tend to be inoffensive, particularly a well-formed one, but I discovered that if I concentrated even an earlobe could be invested with spite.

Lena spoke quietly, softly about the plot of a Disney movie while I stared at the earlobe and savored my distaste. There were a couple of moments when I felt deranged looking at him, considering my loathing, but mostly I relished it.

I couldn’t believe we’d make it out of the restaurant without running into someone I knew. Ned had instructed me to prepare my Anchorage friends on the specifics of the narrative even if I didn’t plan to see them; he’d sent me a list of talking points as an attachment to one of his blank emails, including a timeline: when my father became terminally ill, when we were notified of the diagnosis, when we left Anchorage to help my mother take care of him.

The timeline projected forward, even stipulating when my father would enter hospice. These would all occur, of course, in the months before the election, explaining our absences from Alaska.

So I’d emailed my friends and bcc’d Ned as he instructed, putting the talking points into a “personalized letter.” Partly because of this, the prospect of actual in-person encounters dismayed me. As we were rising to go — Ned had, to my relief, spent half the meal talking into his phone’s headset — we were intercepted by a group of people from city government, civil servant types who were mainly Ned’s contacts but whom I’d spoken to a few times at parties. Their faces betrayed a certain hesitation at my presence, which made me wonder who Ned was sleeping with these days, whether these people knew the marriage was a sham. I wondered how it was possible that everyone didn’t know, since Lena and I had been away two full years. Yet they acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary and I reminded myself that Ned took care of business, Ned kept his ducks in a row. For the past few months we’d been staying with my terminally ill father. . the narrative, unbeknownst to me, has been in place for some time.

I made my excuses and led Lena away, Ned grabbing his jacket and glad-handing behind us.

WHILE LENA AND I sleep in the house that used to be ours, Ned’s supposedly staying at a B&B tucked away in the foothills of east Anchorage. He thought we’d be noticed coming and going from a hotel, whereas he can move around discreetly. I’m not sure why, since he’s the public figure with the striking face and still lives full-time in the city. On the other hand, so far no one has found out that we’re sleeping separately, so maybe he’s correct in his calculations.

He has a “house,” these days, not a house, much as he has a “family.” His car, driven by the chauffeur, had dropped us off and pulled away quietly in the dark: entering the building I felt stealthy, though it’s hard to feel stealthy in puffer coats and mukluks.

Lena and I have been sharing the master bedroom, which feels like a hotel room — as though no one familiar has slept there before, certainly not me. Along with the rest of the place, its redecoration was drastic. There’s the skin of a polar bear on the wall — Ned must have bought it from a native, I thought, or possibly on the black market — a bold choice, given the politics. Maybe it signals his radicalism; in the bedroom, maybe he reveals his radical anti-government core. But it doesn’t quite ring true, since the king bed’s piled high with satiny showroom cushions that only his interior decorator could have chosen. They do feature masculine colors.

Lena fell right to sleep despite the bearskin, curled up with Lucky Duck, and I went back to the living room, where I flicked on the gas fire in the fireplace. I took a bottle of wine out of Ned’s new wine refrigerator, poured myself a glass, and sat on the sofa with a blanket, feet tucked under me, to call Main Linda.

She said the mood among the motel guests has changed, it’s gone from a support group to the scene of a dispute. Navid and Kay were a couple, and now they’re estranged. Navid says Kay kept her understanding of the voice from him—“intentionally, privately kept her knowledge to herself,” as he apparently put it, like a “hoarder of information.” Kay’s hurt by this and says she never hid anything.

Meanwhile Burke and Gabe argue that Kay’s assertion that the voice is language, the language of sentience, is unimportant. Of course it’s language, that’s a truism, Burke wrote in an email to me. Words. Yeah. We know. The question is where that language is coming from.

“Do you realize how Regina heard?” said Main Linda in her gruff voice. “The whole time I thought she was talking about a kid, when she talked about Terence, I honestly thought it was a retarded kid, sorry, developmentally disabled. Turns out that Terence was one of those little, yappy dogs. Probably wore ribbons. And miniature vests. She heard the voice of God from a Pomeranian! Or maybe a shih tzu. She showed us a picture on her phone. She used to carry him around in a Fendi handbag.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. I thought of a curly dog trotting around at Regina’s heels, speaking the way the voice had spoken to me.

“It died,” added Main Linda.

A linguistics scholar had been called in, she said, an expert who’d been talking to Kay. He seemed, said Main Linda, to be somewhat outside the mainstream of linguistic studies, though still (she’d looked it up) fairly well published in peer-reviewed journals. He had theories about grammar genes, about animal communication systems.

“The FOXP2 gene,” said Linda. “This English family, I guess, has this speech defect down through the generations? And it ends up they have a defective copy of one gene. Or maybe it’s a protein, but anyway, I guess the idea is language is maybe genetic. I only half-listened. Don reached out to this linguistics guy because Kay, I guess, does a speaking-in-tongues thing. Like, she can spew out a bunch of languages she isn’t supposed to know. Stuff she supposedly heard from Vasquez. Plus she can do insanely complicated chemistry diagrams. Idiot savant shit. All Greek to me. Hey. Can we talk about normal crap?”

“We have consultants who pick out our clothes for us,” I told her lightly. “And there’s a family photo shoot for some glossy local rag, basically a real-estate brochure. Tomorrow. Ned’s using someone else’s dog. Can you believe it? A dog-for-hire!”

“That’s low,” said Main Linda. “A trophy dog? Is that even legal?”

“A golden retriever.”

“Hope God doesn’t talk through it.”

“Do you believe Don knows more than he says?” I asked, pouring my second glass of wine.

I’d gotten restless sitting and was cruising through the rooms, taking a closer tour of Ned’s model home. There was a picture of him fishing, the standard fishing photo with a giant salmon dangling from one hand. Kenai Peninsula, read the caption. Ned never fished. He hated the smell of fish and never ate it. A guide must have taken him and he must have learned some lingo to be able to shoot the shit with other fishers and hunters. Everyone fished in Alaska, practically, in season salmon falls from the skies here like rain and everyone has a smoker in their backyard, but Ned hadn’t allowed fish in our kitchen.

“Don wants to keep things friendly, that seems to be his role, you know?” said Main Linda. “Moderator.”

“I don’t see how any of this can be proved or not proved,” I said. “It was a phenomenon. But it’s not as though any of us were given instructions. It’s not like we have a task to do. Is it?”

I stopped in the hallway. Beyond the standard fishing photo, the standard hunting photo (deer on truck), the photo of Ned in crampons hiking up a glacier (looking down from the heights, smiling), there were numerous family photos. Some of them looked like upscale versions of mall shots while some were “candid” action shots: Ned, me, and Lena. All of us together, in different variations. Lena was a baby on a rug, Lena was a toddler in Ned’s arms, all three of us stood beside a Christmas tree; there we were cross-country skiing, with Lena standing on a pair of junior skis, poles held in snowflake-mittened hands.

Except that none of the scenes, with the exception of Lena sitting on the rug all by herself, were real.

Ned had never done any of those things with us.

“Oh my God,” I said.

I set my wineglass down on a table and flicked on the overhead light, leaned in to look closely. The pictures looked authentic. They were carefully framed and artfully staggered on the wall. Some seemed recent; they featured Lena’s face pretty much the way she looked now. Ned must have taken the photos from my phone and used those images.

While I was sleeping a drugged sleep, when he was taking Lena.

Or he had open access to my phone.

“There’s a whole wall of family pictures,” I said. “They never happened at all. Family vacations, skiing — there’s us on matching snowmobiles and us fishing. There’s Ned with a dead buck and a truck and rifle. Redneck wholesome. They’ve been messed with to put us together when we never were. I don’t believe it.”

“Brazen,” said Main Linda. “That guy’s got some big ones on him, you gotta admit.”

After we hung up I took pictures of the pictures, sat on the couch and scrolled through looking at them, comparing the faces in them to the faces already on my phone’s camera roll: Lena with her snowman, Lena on the beach, Lena with Faneesha the UPS driver. I texted a couple of matches to Will, nearing the bottom of the wine bottle, and then called him.

He communicated his reserve with few words. He wasn’t happy that we’d gone up to Alaska, wasn’t happy with anything concerning contact between Ned and us. Ned is probably sociopathic, he has suggested. He feels no empathy.

And I have to admit, when I find a list on some website of the behavioral characteristics of a sociopath, there’s only one box I wouldn’t check for my husband.

Superficial charm and good intelligence

Absence of delusions

Absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations

Unreliability, untruthfulness, and insincerity

Lack of remorse and shame

Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior

Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love

General poverty in major affective reactions

Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations

Sex life impersonal and poorly integrated

Failure to follow any life plan

We have no control over his actions, Will reminds me, no one does, possibly not even him. Much of a sociopath’s game is aimed at controlling people and outcomes, Will says. All you can do about a sociopath is steer clear of him. Ned’s a time bomb, Will has insisted since the abduction, and we don’t know that it’s finished exploding.

Still, neither of us was able to come up with another course of action for me — not one that wouldn’t risk Lena being taken again or hinge on police cooperation.

So here I am.

Now almost every piece of information I give Will about Ned seems to escalate his anxiety, so I find myself trying to avoid mentions — from thousands of miles away there’s no use alarming him. He’s done too much to help already: I’m confused about why he has time for all this for us, for me. I wonder what I’ve ever done for him other than need his help.

There’s an imbalance of generosity.

Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, the view that mind or soul (Greek: ψυχή) is a universal feature of all things, and the primordial feature from which all others are derived. —Wikipedia 2016

ON THE WAY to our potluck dinner with the church group Lena sat bolt upright in the back of Ned’s Town Car holding Lucky Duck. She doesn’t relax around her father since the kidnapping — her rigid stance stops just short of afraid, bespeaks reserve and attentiveness.

In what I felt was an egregious lapse in taste on the part of the consultants, we were made to wear matching dresses. Sitting there in the Town Car in my dress that was the same as a six-year-old’s, I felt beyond foolish but hadn’t bothered to protest. Also it was too cold for dresses by far; there was slushy snow on the ground; dresses don’t look too good with puffer coats atop them.

But of course Ned couldn’t have cared less about my discomfort or opinion. And Lena was pleased, saying the twin dresses reminded her of dolls you can order from a catalog in “look-alike” form, with features custom-selected to mimic your own hair and eyes and skin. It was one of those dolls that Ned had offered her during the kidnapped period.

“You didn’t bring the lamb I gave you?” he asked from the passenger seat, texting rapidly, not bothering to turn.

“Lamb got sick,” said Lena gravely, a doctor delivering the bad news. “She had to go in koranteen.”

“Quarantine,” I said.

“Quarantine,” said Lena. “She got a cancer in her tail.”

“Sounds serious,” said Ned.

“Uh-huh. She’s almost dead,” said Lena.

Ned did turn and look at her. I was surprised too.

“I see,” he said.

It piqued his interest for a second, but then he went back to pushing buttons. He was holding the phone at a different angle now, and I could see he wasn’t texting about business or the campaign; no, he was playing Angry Birds.

Once we pulled up at the church, though — it was a potluck in the basement — he snapped into his public mode, his face suddenly animated. The light of Ned’s personality has an ON/OFF button, which when he’s alone with us now is typically set on OFF. It’s fine with me, in fact I prefer it since he’s nearly a robot when the switch is off, far easier to tolerate shut down. The ON switch makes me anxious with its vibrant, fizzing current.

When he’s switched off I can almost ignore him.

“Hey Mom. Lamb’s not dying,” she whispered to me, as Ned was getting out of the front seat. “Lamb’s fine.”

My instructions for this more fluid assignment were to avoid all topics of conversation except the shortlist Ned had specifically allowed: food, weather, his qualities as a good husband, and, if additional content was absolutely needed, I could reminisce about the times when Lena “did cute things. IE u can take out phone, show Haloween bunny fotos” [sic].

Only Lena made any waves, as it turned out, and even those were small ones.

“Do you like my dress?” she asked, as she and I stood awkwardly near a food line, trying to be nice to some middle-aged ladies in the congregation after Ned pronounced a blessing that was also a stump speech.

“Why yes! I do!” said the woman.

“My daddy made me wear it.”

“I see!”

“My mommy doesn’t like matching dresses,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I do. They have them in a catalog. You can order your own doll to look like you and even order the same dress. Like not in doll size but for a real person. My mom said matching outfits might be OK for dolls but not for real people.”

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.”

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

OUR LAST COMMITMENT was today, a dinner with some of the donors and staff. We leave tomorrow and don’t have to come back till spring.

I’ve been torn since the call with Will and Don. Their theory of Ned as a murderer has set me half-against them. It’s irrational but I can’t help it — I’m set off at a new distance. Their conviction seems to skew them to outlier status. On one hand there’s Ned, for whom I feel fear and loathing, and on the other there are these men who’ve been kind enough to help me, given me time and care. But their murder thesis is an awkward weight on my shoulders I have to shrug off.

I float in isolation between Ned and them, not touching either of the shores.

In the morning I pulled my old belongings from storage, lugged them to the post office and sent them to my parents’ house, Lena tagging along with her face in a picture book. In the afternoon I visited my closest friend here, the only one who didn’t seem to think the reported kidnapping, or its poor resolution, was the result of my own weakness. Charley, who taught with me at the university and is soon to retire, has disliked Ned from the start, much as Solly did, and it relaxed me to be with someone I didn’t have to convince of anything — Charley has a serene bearing and little surprises her. From the trees in her garden hang bamboo wind chimes and homemade birdfeeders.

We sat in her sprawling house full of natural light and drank tea, watching out the big bay window as Lena made snow angels in the backyard.

It was during the snow angels that Ned showed up: his driver had dropped us at Charley’s, our whereabouts weren’t secret, but I hadn’t expected him to take an interest. He’d always dismissed Charley with her hand-knit sweaters, her chunky necklaces made of shell and rock; yet now he rang the doorbell and when she let him in he was with a beautiful girl, doe-eyed and long-limbed, draped in furs and wearing giant, shaggy boots that gave an impression of an adorable yeti.

She might have been twenty-two, she might have been nineteen. She would have been more usual in SoHo or Milan.

Trying to be polite, I think, she pointed at a sculpture on Charley’s mantel and asked if it was “done by an Eskimo.” When Charley said no, it was a Chinese Buddha, she went on to say Oh with a round, pretty mouth, frozen in wonder. The words were blank as paper: that lovely child was so slow to make connections that it almost hurt to listen to her talk. Maybe she was sixteen, not nineteen or twenty-two, I thought, and it was simple childishness.

Ned bringing her was of course, given his PR focus, his obsessive commitment to the slick campaign, startling. It seemed needlessly risky and certainly meant to be needling. He may have thought I was still capable of jealousy. But I felt only pity for her as she sat, nestled into his side on Charley’s deep sofa, long legs drawn up.

Charley, who cared as little for what Ned thought as he cared for her, asked her outright how old the girl was at one point, but Ned intercepted the question and asked Charley how old she thought the girl was.

When Charley said “Too young for you,” he smiled and trailed his fingers along the gazelle’s spaghetti-thin upper arm. With her furs off she wore only a tight dress sparkling with gold flecks, and the arms were full of holes made to look like knife slashes.

They didn’t stay long, only long enough to accept Charley’s offer of coffee with disinterested shrugs and then leave before it was finished brewing. The two of them stood briefly at the big bay window, from which Ned — one arm strung over the young gazelle’s shoulders — watched Lena run across the snow for a few seconds while his girlfriend looked down at her phone, texting with lightning speed. When it came to texting she wasn’t slow at all.

“Place hasn’t changed one little bit,” he said to Charley as they were leaving, in a clearly insulting tone. He turned, smirked and pointed at me. “We’ll pick you up at six. Cocktail dress in the master bed.”

Charley looked at me for a long time after the door closed, shaking her head. Meanwhile Lena was still playing in the back by herself; she’d never noticed they were there.