Sweet Lamb of Heaven

4. IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE

B.Q. WASN’T IN THE OFFICE; BEEFY JOHN WAS ALONE. HE HUNG UP the phone as I went in stamping slush off my boots, shuffling them back and forth on the black rubber mat and making the electronic doorbell chime.

“Enjoying your weekend?” he asked.

I leaned over and scanned the bill on the counter, trying to pay attention to the line items as he explained what had been wrong with my car’s workings.

As usual when a mechanic talks to me I put considerable effort into looking interested, even respectful. I was intent on that effort, though it warred against my instinctive dislike of John, when I detected someone behind me, felt or heard the brush of thick, expensive fabric against itself. I registered that the doorbell hadn’t chimed this time and there was a scent, subtle but clear, which I had to identify — much as I wished not to — as a familiar cologne.

Beefy John, still talking about the car, looked steadily over my shoulder; I turned.

“Hey there, honey,” said Ned.

THERE WERE THREE thinly padded, black folding chairs along the wall, beside a fake potted plant with dusty leaves. I sat down on one. The fake plant was two times a stand-in, I thought, as a fake plant it stood in for a real one, and then the dust on it, the full neglect, made it seem so purely symbolic that it became an imitation not only of a plant but of an imitation plant.

I wished I could stare at that homely fake plant forever, and never, ever look upon Ned’s face.

I was ignoring Beefy John too, or ignoring the blank space left by him, because he must have retreated into the private recesses of the establishment. I felt a vacancy in the space over the counter. Had he given me back my car keys? It was as though I’d lost time, I’d skipped some minutes and found things changed. Instead of looking up I was staring at the fake plant and at myself — but from a great lunar or stellar distance, across a reach of airless space. I might have been a pushpin on a map, a piece on a board game, any tiny, manufactured item on a wide background.

I couldn’t choose a direction for my attention. I failed to assimilate.

“Relax, sweetheart, it’s all good,” said Ned.

His presence and the vapid words were separate — the words, I thought as I gazed at a streak in the plastic leaves’ dust, an impressively hollow comfort. In the instant when I turned from the counter I’d caught a flash of his handsome face, enough to register his features; but now I was insanely reluctant to raise my gaze to him again.

It was insane, I realized that — some kind of rapid breakdown. But I couldn’t change the angle of my head. I sat heavy in the chair, sack-like. After a minute he lowered himself into a squat in front of me.

And even squatting he stayed graceful, not subordinate the way a squat can make you. I kept my head bowed as long as I could, avoiding the solid offense of his beauty. Before me rose an immaculate camelhair coat, unbuttoned; a well-cut dark-blue suit beneath it, complete with downy-white shirt and silver tie; crisp, businesslike wrinkles on each side of his knees where the cloth was stretched taut. Yes: even the wrinkles in his slacks possessed a symbolic efficiency. They bracketed his sculpted knees concisely, minutely telegraphing competence, even mastery.

I remembered being in bed with him, in bed where he’d always been so perfect that it disguised his lack of emotion. It didn’t occur to me to wonder about what wasn’t given.

Ned was still exactly the man he intended to be.

Inevitably I found myself looking into his face. He had a light and pleasant tan that must have looked as out of place in the Alaskan winter as it did in Maine. I tried to calm myself by picturing him in a sunbed at Planet Beach, slathering lotion onto his body, arranging the little goggles onto his face. I remembered how the fatless musculature of his torso was maintained with daily bouts of grunting resistance training. But it was no use, no matter how hard I tried to belittle him I couldn’t reduce the feeling of beauty and threat he imparted.

Except for the anxiety of his nearness, though, I found I was less susceptible to his looks than I remembered being. I could see him impersonally by placing the barrier of my dislike between us. As I did this, his looks became less the features of a living person and more a formal structure — less animal than mineral, transmuted into a polymer that encased him in its petrochemical sheen.

Had he already sent his guys to the motel? Henchmen, I repeated silently, henchmen, a comical word I’d never thought I’d have a use for. Was Lena already with them? Had her babysitters been pushed aside or persuaded?

I felt a twinge of panic. What should I do? What was the right course of action? Call the Lindas? Don? 911? My cell phone was in my bag, on the counter; there were my car keys beside it. I could grab them and run.

I couldn’t decide. I was useless. I tried to stall.

“A suit and tie? On Saturday?”

He smiled at me indulgently, as though what was coming from my mouth was empty breath. There was no need for him to acknowledge my speech.

“Look, honey, you and me just need a little face time. We need to put our two heads together and be reasonable here, figure out what’s best for everyone.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

In fact I did not know what I meant: he was terrifying me. I shook my head. I wasn’t in charge of myself, just flustered and stuck. It was exactly what I’d been afraid of since the day he started pursuing us. He’d never laid a finger on me in anger, Ned had never been violent physically. He’d only been false and cold.

Despite this nonviolent history he chilled me to the bone.

“I know you want to come home,” he said.

The arrogance of it flummoxed me — as though he was speaking to a third party, a cameraman, maybe, who was watching and evaluating our performances and knew nothing whatsoever about us.

“I don’t want to at all,” I rushed. “I don’t have a home with you and I don’t want a home with you. You know what I want, don’t you, Ned? I just want a divorce.”

“Oh now. Listen. You’re getting yourself all in a bunch, aren’t you? Relax! We’ll go down the street and get a bite. John here tells me y’all have a diner in this town that serves Mexican Coke. All the way up here in the pine-tree state. Go figure. You like that Mexican Co-cola, don’t you? Cane sugar, not corn syrup? We need to bring that old-style Coke back to the U. S. of A. I’ll put a bill in Congress, on down the road when I get there.”

He’d ramped up his Southern accent several notches, the Southern manners of speech he’d partly suppressed in his first flush of adulthood. Maybe he’d raised the good ol’ boy quotient for electability — Alaska has a certain kinship with the South, a redneck commonality without the heat or black people. Southern accents may be a bankable asset, I thought. Ned had always considered Alaska a frontier, the main reason he’d asked me to move there in the first place — not that he cared about the wild and scenic aspects, not that he was attracted to the state’s unpopulated beauty. It was the mythology of fortune-seeking that he liked, the small but abundant niches in various markets in the state that called to him.

Because while it was true that Alaska had glaciers and polar bears, albeit melting and starving/drowning, it was a frontier in other ways too — a colony still in development, into which, therefore, generous moneys pour from oil companies and Washington. Ned had been right, I guessed, to see his future in a place where men loved both their guns and their government and corporate handouts. He liked the cojones of Alaskans, was what he always said, the way they swaggered like lone cowboys and professed to hate all vestiges of government but at the same time clung fiercely to the coattails of that government — both to their own small government and its big, rich uncle in D.C.

Anyway he’d rediscovered his Southernness. And he was on a first-name basis with Beefy John.

“How’d you know I was here?” I asked.

All of it hung at the margins, all was fuzzy irrelevance except for Lena — where was she, who had her right at this moment? I struggled to think of anything else, stalling until I saw clearly what I should do. I expected a decision to come: presently I would render a decision, a decision would descend and land on me.

I waited for it.

“I make friends easy, honey,” Ned said smoothly. “You know me.”

“ ’Fraid I got to close up, folks,” interrupted Beefy John, emerging from the back office, grinning broadly. The pink skin on his nose and cheeks shone under the fluorescents. “Don’t keep Saturday hours, normally.”

That was how I came to scrape my keys toward me on the counter and follow Ned out into the parking lot. Trudging through the slush I considered the fact that Beefy John had opened the shop on Saturday and then Ned had been there. Conspiracy, I thought, conspiracy, I’d been stalked, I’d been tracked, I hadn’t been paranoid at all.

Could Don help me?

I got into my car and of course couldn’t stop Ned from following in his own — a rented SUV driven by someone else, some kind of bodyguard or other employee — in a dutiful procession to the diner a block down, a procession that made me feel like a condemned person. The diner served beer and wine, at least. . and what could Ned do to me there, in broad daylight? I didn’t care how early it seemed to be; it was a zero hour for me, the time of reckoning. I had to stay clearheaded for Lena, but also I desperately needed to calm down.

I ordered a beer.

STRANGE THINGS EXIST, astonishing oddities — transparent butterflies, three-foot-wide parasites that look like orange flowers, babies born pregnant with their own twins. There are fish like sea serpents, fifty-five feet long, lizards whose species are all female; there’s the mysterious roar from outer space, the contagiousness of yawns, the origin of continental drift.

What I want to know is whether the unknowns in nature are only unexplained phenomena or whether there are genuine anomalies — whether a true anomaly exists. I doubt that it’s possible for an event to occur only once, to one person, and as I look and look for an answer the more it seems to me that what are called anomalies aren’t unique but only symptoms of gaps in understanding. Some of them are just exceptions to the systems people have invented, showing the limits and biases of those invented systems. Or, in physics or astronomy, anomalies are names for states or forces that haven’t been figured out.

It was always improbable that whatever happened, way back then, happened only to Lena and me.

a·nom·a·ly [uh-nom-uh-lee] noun, plural a·nom·a·lies.

1. deviation from the common rule, type, arrangement, or form.

Synonyms: abnormality, exception, peculiarity.

I CAN’T RECALL the pattern of our conversation at the diner. Ned, when he wants to, can have a way of saying nothing specific, conveying only a broad intent. And that intent was exactly what I’d been afraid of: he wanted Lena and me back with him, he wanted us to be his TV family.

His position, as far as I could tell — or his pollster’s — was that he was much too good-looking to run as a bachelor or divorced man. And the fact that he was married was already public, so now he had to produce the wife.

No emotions were summoned to build a case for this, no passionate declarations or rhetorical flourishes; Ned simply projected his plan. He has the knack of power, I thought as I drank my beer and picked at the corner of a limp grilled-cheese sandwich, intermittently wiping my fingertips on a napkin. It was undeniable. No wonder he’s running for state senate. This first race may be small-time but at some point it’ll be a governorship or a senate seat, he’s in that forum now, and then probably Congress, just as he’d said.

I wondered how I’d ever become connected with such a man, much less married to him — a person who’s mechanistic in his view of others, an individual streamlined to exploit them.

We’d met through a woman I’d only half-liked who had a history at prep schools like Choate and a new, expensive silver-blue car, a brand of car I felt should never be owned by an undergraduate. She’d been a student of mine while I was working toward my PhD, a student in a class I taught as part of my grant package.

This woman had thrown a dinner party the summer I finished grad school, while I was still living in Providence and working as a cashier in a gourmet food store, after the assistant teaching gig had ended. (My family money wasn’t given to Solly or me to spend as we saw fit; our parents expected us to work like everyone else. Much of the money Ned took came to us at our wedding, by which time my parents were apparently convinced I wouldn’t become a wastrel. Now, of course, I wish they’d never handed it over.) I’d gone to the party because I was lonely and needed to feel like a guest for once instead of a cashier, needed to say something to someone else other than Did you find everything you were looking for today?

Ned was at the party too, Ned the frat-boy Boy Scout, and somehow not a year later I married him. It must have been partly the setting that carried the evening: a rambling green garden with flowers on trellises and weeping willows and ponds arranged around a house with a colonial aspect, columns, wraparound porches, shining wood floors and chandeliers. I’d had no one to talk to there while my hostess was busy; I hovered awkwardly on the porch, looking out at the garden with my wine in hand, till Ned approached.

He’d been washed in those August colors, a borrowed glow that took a long time to fade since, unlike him, I harbored romantic delusions — that pre-nostalgic filmmaking of the self that separates events into vignettes and montages, curates time into a gallery of sepia-toned images. What were the chances of meeting someone like Ned, a man with movie-star charisma at large among the civilians?

Even as inexperienced as I was then, I was foolish to overlook the indicators of his mercenary bent, blind not to notice his edge of narcissism — an edge that was leading. I must have been quite stupid, I reflected, sitting across from him over grilled cheese. The selfish stupidity of youth had been upon me.

For a minute I sat listless, not even attempting to remove myself from his slick enchantment. In one corner of the diner was the man who had to be his driver or bodyguard, with nothing in front of him on his own table but a cell phone and a glass of what looked like iced tea. He wore a wire in one ear like a Secret Service officer.

It was laughable, I thought, to have a man like that working for you when all you were doing was running for a Podunk state senate.

Lena. I knew the Lindas would still be looking after her, as long as they could. For an hour or two they wouldn’t even wonder where I was.

“Have you sent someone to find her?” I interrupted Ned after a while.

He was talking about television or radio, a program he’d been on or was going to be on, some anecdote to which I was incapable of listening. I wasn’t mentioning the motel, of course, in case he didn’t know where she was after all — in case the car-repair place had been his only touchstone.

“Did you send some of your guys over to where we’re living? Is that what you did?”

Ned raised one arm for the waitress, who had already fawned over him. She smiled hopefully, her lipstick bright as she rushed over to our booth, and this eager subservience allowed me to see her as he would: a worker bee possessing only the slightest shading of utility.

Still, no being with any utility, however slight, was undeserving of Ned’s charm when he was on active duty. He made small talk with the waitress while ignoring my question about our daughter. As he did so I weighed the advantages and disadvantages of running outside and jumping in my car and I decided that, on balance, I had little to lose. I had to get back to Lena anyway, sooner or later I would have to go to her and inevitably, if he hadn’t already found out where we were living, lead him there. I was impatient to be with her again, to see her and be near.

And so, abruptly — while Ned was holding the middle-aged waitress in thrall to his shining attention and I was hearing her say she’d been married to three different members of the same MC–I rose and hurried out the door, not looking behind me.

There was no flurry of activity back there, Ned didn’t ever tend to exhibit undue haste, but still it hadn’t been two minutes before I could see his rented car in my rearview mirror.

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding: a childish part of me had hoped to lose him by bolting, though realistically I knew better.

I DROVE TO the motel with mounting panic, knowing it wasn’t the best move. But I had to be with her. I talked to myself as I drove, tapping the steering wheel restlessly at the lone stoplight between the town and the motel. Of course he can’t take her from me, with all his concern about public relations. Calm down. Calm down, calm down, calm down.

Glass half-full, I said to myself, now you have to face up to the situation, iron it out. Maybe Ned’s not dead wrong after all, there’s no need to hyperventilate — be practical. Next steps. He said it himself, we just need to sit down and figure out what’s best for all of us. I agree for the most part, I told myself, nodding as I pressed down on the gas pedal again. For the most part I agree, right? We need to figure out what’s best for all of us.

Except him.

Ned’s election to a position of state power was what he wanted, but it wasn’t what I wanted — I felt it was against the interests of many, indeed most. It’s actually my obligation, I thought, not only to think of Lena and myself but also of how not to get Ned elected. He relies on an implicit system of beliefs I think are cold as ice, a system of assumptions more than beliefs that has nothing to do with either reason or kindness. Ned’s beliefs are like the programmed responses of a computer, I thought, they require no justification, in his view, beyond the fact that he has chosen to embrace them.

Maybe I could accomplish all these goals at once, protect my daughter and myself, try to weigh in against my husband’s election: File for divorce on grounds of adultery, as a spurned wife would on TV.

But now the motel sign was up ahead of me, here came the parking lot, and I felt despairing. I’d never gathered evidence while we still lived together because once I knew the marriage was lost I assumed Ned wanted out of it too. So I had no proof of his many affairs. Most likely he was certain of this. I’d known some of their names and faces, but he would have covered his bases and I couldn’t believe those women would help me. Of the two of us, Ned is by far the more persuasive. And — except for the one instance I knew of when a woman broke it off with him — he tended to let them down easy. He wasn’t a bridge-burner; on the contrary. Even the one who’d been disgruntled had to be in his pocket now.

Don, I thought again. Could Don help me?

I didn’t want Lena to see her father yet; I wanted to prepare her. I didn’t know what to do. He’d park as soon as I did, he’d be right behind me.

She wasn’t in front, anyway, wasn’t playing in the snow this time, though her snow effigy remained, lumpish, melting. She might be in the Lindas’ room, I figured. Maybe they would help me. Although — what could they even do? Ned wasn’t a wife-beater. Ned wasn’t a clear and present danger. Ned wore a camelhair coat and shone like the noonday sun.

I couldn’t sit in the car thinking, I had to press forward. I’d call and tell them to keep her in the room — so I ran to the lobby, Ned’s car somewhere behind me, headed up that long gravel road. I ran to the lobby, but Don wasn’t there: the front desk was unattended. I looked behind me, out the glass door, then ducked into the café room and closed its door. It was empty. I took out my phone and dialed Main Linda’s cell, butterfingers. I got her outgoing message and left a voicemail. I asked her to keep Lena in her room, not to come out until I called again, could she please do me this favor? Please?

I hung up, still trembling.

Lena could be anywhere, exposed. . I’d go around the back, look in the picture windows. . what if the Lindas didn’t have their cells with them? I snuck back into the kitchen looking for a back door: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, with a metal bar. I pressed the bar and it ka-thunked, no alarm. Then I was outside, crunching along the dead grass and snow behind the building, along the rear windows of the rooms.

But all the curtains were closed.

When I turned the corner of the building I saw Lena walking beside Big Linda, wearing her pink puffer coat — they’d just come up from the beach, because Lena was carrying her basket. And a few feet away from her, leaning relaxedly back against the hood of his parked, black SUV — there stood Ned.

He held a large, gift-wrapped box topped with an explosion of professional ribbons. The wrapping was covered in silver glitter and festooned with candy canes.

“Baby girl,” he said, and the teeth had never been whiter in his head.

I TRIED TO appear gracious after that, to the extent I could — that was my tactic, for lack of better. I pretended calm as I reintroduced Lena to her father, then introduced him to Big Linda and Main Linda when she, too, appeared huffing and puffing at the top of the staircase down the cliff. Lena did remember him from two years before, though she’d been four when we left, but she didn’t greet him with the exuberance she’d shown her grandparents. She gave him a restrained embrace, clearly struggling to understand his sudden presence in our midst.

“A surprise visit,” I said, trying to deliver a cheerful smile.

“You’re so big,” Ned said to her, and to the Lindas, his Southern drawl in full effect: “She’s like a little doll version of her beautiful mama! Isn’t she?”

An off-base gambit, since Lena’s skin is lighter than mine, her hair gold instead of brown; in fact she looks more like Ned. She didn’t preen under this particular praise either, just waited patiently.

“She does have those high cheekbones,” said Main Linda politely.

I could tell the Lindas were wary of Ned and felt a rush of gratitude for that.

“Why don’t we go inside?” said Ned, looking from me to Lena. “Chilly out here, idn’t it? And you can open your present, honeypie! I bet you’ll like it a whole lot.”

I didn’t see a choice: it was cold, and getting colder all the time. The damage was done: he already knew where we lived.

“You take this?” he asked, and handed me the unwieldy gift before I could answer. He reached down and grabbed one of Lena’s hands, forcing her to struggle with the basket and have to kneel down to pick up fallen shells. The three of us began walking, me lagging beside them, hesitant, Ned moving slowly because, I guess, he didn’t know where our room was. After a moment I turned around. The Lindas hadn’t moved much; they were watching. I couldn’t read their expressions.

“Linda, could you mention to Don that my husband is here?”

It was all I could do. Don was the only one who’d know what it meant to me that Ned had found us.

As we made our way along the walkway to the room Lena began to chatter, as she would with any new guest, telling Ned how the motel worked: how towels and clean linens were organized, that she knew how to slide the keycard into the slot herself. I was following them by then, looking at Ned’s back, Lena’s face turned sideways to him, and trying to figure out what it meant to her to be holding her father’s hand.

“I’ll show you, see?” she said, and slid her hand out of Ned’s to turn and hold it out to me. “Can I have the key, Mommy?”

Duly I handed it over, circling the gaudy gift with one arm while I rummaged in a pocket. I was too aware of Ned looming, his pheromones, or whatever the fuck, casting over me a vibrant net.

Lena clicked the door open, proud of her competence.

“Whoa,” said Ned, when he stepped inside. “Not exactly the Ritz, is it. You can do better, can’t you, Anna?”

“Ritz like crackers?” asked Lena.

“It’s grown on us,” I said lightly.

Ned tried to shut the door after I brushed in past him, but I propped it a few inches open with the rubber wedge.

“Let’s let in some fresh air,” I said.

“Fresh freezing air,” said Ned.

“How come it’s a Christmas present?” asked Lena, as I set the box down on our small table. “It isn’t Christmas yet.”

“You know that song, baby?” said Ned, sitting himself in the armchair with magisterial ease, crossing his legs. “‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’? On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me — you know that one?”

“A partridge in a pear tree,” said Lena.

“That’s right! Smart girl. But don’t worry, this isn’t a partridge.”

Lena approached the box shyly at first, then began to rip it open chaotically as I started to pour water into the carafe for the in-room coffee. Coffee didn’t appeal to me in the least, especially not from that little plastic-wrapped packet. But ours was a small room with not many options for looking busy.

“Look, a new friend for Lucky Duck,” said Lena, pulling out a fluffy white sheep. “Is it. . a goat, Mommy?”

She’d turned to me to ask, instead of asking Ned.

“It’s a lamb, baby,” he said. “And it’s made from real sheepskin.”

Lena was instantly upset. Ned couldn’t have known it was a misstep since he knew nothing of what she ate and didn’t eat, of her softheartedness.

She blinked away tears and said nothing, holding the sheep at arm’s length.

“Go on, give it a squeeze,” said Ned.

Reluctantly she did so, first one way and then another, until the lamb began reciting, in a high-pitched, childish voice, “Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

“Hey look, Ducky,” she said, gamely trying to make the best of a sheepskin tragedy. She picked up her ratty, baggy duck from the bed and pressed the two stuffed animals together. The duck was a dingy gray compared to the snow-white, fleecy lamb. “Be nice to her, Ducky. Her skin got cut off her.”

Ned raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not going to make her talk that much, OK?” she asked Ned. “It’s babyish. And I don’t like what they made her say.”

“Bit morbid, isn’t it?” I said to Ned. “I’ve always thought that prayer was cloying.”

“Well, that’s OK, sweetie,” said Ned to Lena, ignoring me. He didn’t look pleased, though, which made my spirits lift briefly, then just as soon worried me. “It’s yours. You do whatever you want with it. But listen, you didn’t read my card yet. I wrote it for you special.”

“I can read it. I can read a whole book,” said Lena.

Ned plucked a card from beneath the efflorescence of ribbon.

“Will you read it out loud to me, baby doll?” he asked.

He’d already achieved a proprietorial air with Lena, an air of ownership.

She took the card out of its envelope, revealing an airbrushed-looking kitten with eyes the size of saucers.

“Dear Lena, I — missed you — very much,” read Lena. “To my best girl ever, love x’s and o’s Daddy.”

I was nervous that Ned was right on the edge of saying something to her I didn’t wish him to say.

“That’s really nice,” I said. “Lena, your father’s here for a quick visit.” I kept my voice easy as the coffeemaker started to burble. “I’m sure he won’t be able to stay for long. It’s so nice he brought you the lamb, isn’t it?”

“OK. Want me to read to you?” Lena asked him. She’d had a breakthrough in her reading and liked to perform her favorite book. “Want me to read Ferdinand?”

Ned arranged her atop his lap for the purpose, flicking on the lamp beside him. They made a Norman Rockwell picture sitting there, their hair burnished the same shade of gold — you’d think the man cherished the little girl deeply, looking over the top of her small head at the open book with his eyes down, his handsome, almost noble features and form arranged in a cast of paternal protection.

You’d think that unless you were me — or unless, maybe, you caught sight of one of his elegant feet jiggling minutely but rapidly under the armchair as he pretended to listen. He hadn’t seen his daughter for years, but there was his foot, shod tastefully in black leather, already impatient.

Lena read slowly and haltingly about the peaceful bull who only wanted to sit and smell the flowers, not travel to the big city and fight the toreador. But the men from the city came and took him away, forcing him into the bullring.

Ned took a leisurely glance at his watch and smiled when he saw me seeing him do it.

Would he go away soon? Please? I couldn’t even make a trip to the bathroom while he was here with her, I’d never leave them alone. What was his plan?

When she was done she jumped off his lap and scurried to the bathroom herself, announcing she was going to pee. Ned picked the storybook off his knees as though it was soiled, with two fingers, and deposited it on the table. Then he brushed off his slacks where she’d been sitting.

“That bull was light in the loafers,” he said.

“Ned. What are you doing right now?” I kept my voice low. “We’re not going to come back to you.”

“How ’bout a compromise?”

He pointed at the coffeemaker, meaning Give me a cup. I turned, feeling cold, and started to pour one. It was better than looking at him.

“I propose this, darlin’. Some photo shoots, interviews. Couple appearances. Then y’all can take a vacation. I’ll only need you now and then. It doesn’t have to be 24-7, if we manage it right. Anchorage is a big enough city.”

“But I don’t want to support your campaign, Ned.” I handed him the cup. “I don’t like what you stand for.”

“We may have policy differences here or there,” he said, shrugging, and sipped. “Now, that’s just foul.”

“It’s really not good,” I agreed.

He set down the bad coffee on the storybook. It slopped out and made a ring; I grabbed the book and wiped it.

“Bottom line is, we’re family.”

“As it turns out, that’s not my bottom line at all.”

Then Lena was out of the bathroom again, looking at us expectantly.

“Why don’t you go play, sweetie?” he said, barely glancing her way. “Let the grownups talk.”

“She doesn’t play outside by herself,” I said. “The motel’s on the edge of a cliff.”

He slipped his phone from a coat pocket.

“My driver can babysit.”

“No thanks,” I said firmly. “We don’t know him.”

“Hello?”

It was Don, knocking at the cracked-open door with perfect timing.

“Come in!” I said, relieved.

He stepped inside, nodded curtly at Ned without smiles or introductions, and held his hand out to Lena.

“I’ve got a job for you,” he said. “You want to help me?”

“I’m the assistant!” crowed Lena.

And Don towed her efficiently out of the room.

I was so grateful to see her go that I felt my shoulders unclench.

“Look, I’m not asking you to give any stump speeches, honeypie,” said Ned, stretching out a hand and pushing the door closed behind them. “You don’t have to say a word. You can be deaf, dumb and blind. Hell, I like you better that way. Just smile and hold my hand sometimes. And get the girl to do the same. You soldier through till the election, smiling all the time, I’ll give you a friendly, neat divorce as your very own victory gift. Plus full custody. With visitation rights, of course. Couldn’t be looking like a deadbeat dad.”

“And you’d actually put that in writing. Before the fact.”

“All official. With confidentiality agreements on the timing and conditions there, of course.”

“Even if you lose? You’d sign off beforehand on it, no matter how the election goes?”

“I won’t lose. Not with the friends I have and your two pretty faces beside me. But sure, I’ll sign.”

“Because I know you want more than the state senate. Won’t you want a wife and kid when you run for something bigger, too?”

“I’ll cross that bridge. Let me worry.”

I was asking questions, but I wasn’t seriously considering the request.

“Don’t you think I could get sole custody now?” I said. “I mean Ned. You’ve come to one of her birthday parties. Ever. And that was by accident, if I remember correctly.”

“You might could get custody,” said Ned, and smiled again. “But maybe not. Running off like you did.”

“You wouldn’t want that fight,” I said. “Publicly. You’d never want it. Especially not now.”

“You’d be amazed how I can spin things, when I need to. I might decide to play the victim. People do love their victims, in America.”

We gazed at each other across the room. That is, I looked past Ned, not wanting to look at him, so I don’t know if he really looked at me either. I tried to remember another time he’d been so direct, and all I could come up with was when he asked me to get married. It had been at a restaurant with white tablecloths and obsequious waiters — he likes being served by such waiters and I hate it. When waiters are too fawning I hear the falseness they’ve brought to it, possible snide remarks in the kitchen.

Now he was relaxed in the chair, facing me, while I was in a defensive posture, backed up against the counter of our kitchenette as far from him as I could be. My hands were braced against the edge.

“I need time to think,” I said. “And while I think, I need you to not be here. And not spend time with Lena, either.”

He shrugged. “The clock’s ticking.”

“Why? Isn’t the election a whole year away?”

“Primary’s in August. My party controls the governor’s office and the House; the Senate’s a 10–10 split, but with redistricting we could take over there too, come November. We’ve been low-key till now, but it’s time for a higher gear.”

“You’re not going to start campaigning before Christmas, are you?”

He picked up Lena’s Lucky Duck from where it lay, studied it for a few moments, and then dropped it.

“Getting my ducks in a nice little row.”

There was a knock on the door, so I crossed the room and opened it. The Lindas stood there, smiling pleasantly, waiting. Ned rose from his chair and smiled too, at them first, then at me.

“Well, got to be getting back,” he said. “You mull it over, honey. So great to see my girls again. Ladies? A pleasure.”

The Lindas moved aside for him, and just like that he was gone.

I DON’T HAVE confidence we can run away again. For one thing it would clearly look illegal, now that he’s sought us out. And for another he’s obviously better at stealth than I am, and he does have friends. Whether Beefy John tipped him off or was only a witness, he has sources of information and I’m clearly not equipped to detect them.

The Lindas told me Lena was helping Don in the café; they sat and listened while I explained. I told them what my position was; they were sympathetic. And I didn’t have to persuade them Ned wasn’t the charmer people always think he is — maybe, as post-reproductive women, they were outside the field of his pheromones.

Almost as soon as Ned was gone the guests seemed to come out of the woodwork: the motel returned to life, with movement and light in the rooms, people talking and walking between them, breath visible in the cold. Don brought Lena back, and Kay and Burke were with them and made remarks about Ned’s shining car, his bodyguard/driver, his tailored coat and even the lamb, which lay abandoned in a corner of the room atop its pile of bright wrapping.

Laughter and conversation echoed from the walkway into our room. The day had passed quickly; before I knew it late afternoon was casting its long shadows.

Burke stayed a while after Don and Kay left, helping Lena tend to her bean plants in the miniature greenhouse. Some of them had sprouted; one was growing fast, already too tall for the container, and this they moved into a small pot he’d brought with him.

Eventually he got up to go and I thanked him for coming by, for all he did for Lena. As he was going out the door he turned and looked at me.

“You know, we have to look after each other,” he said quietly. “The people who’ve heard it.”