3

HIGHLY EDUCATED, MODERN PROFESSIONALS

AFTER TEN DAYS AT MY PARENTS’ HOUSE WE’VE COME BACK TO THE motel. Snow has fallen and lies in the evergreen branches in perfect white tufts. Meanwhile another three rooms have been filled.

Since it’s a small place, rooms numbering one to ten, this means we’re close to capacity.

“Business is booming!” I said to Don with forced cheer.

I felt put-upon, since the motel is supposed to be my personal refuge.

He nodded and smiled warmly.

“We’re glad to have you back,” he said.

Don’s elderly father is among the new tenants, so not every new guest is a paying one, I guess. He totters around in faded plaid shirts, leaning on a cane, and smiles apologetically. When his arthritis is bad he lives here so Don can take care of him. There’s also a pair of mannish, gangly sisters from Vermont, whom I haven’t seen up close but who give an impression of short hair and protruding teeth.

The fourth new resident is a guy not too many years out of college who seems an unlikely person to land alone at an obscure motel on the coast of Maine in early December. He’s handsome, with a five o’clock shadow, and unlike Kay—not far from him in age—has an arrogant manner. Maybe he’s a drug dealer seeking shelter or a day laborer whose work has disappeared with the cold; maybe he has a trust fund but is aimless and deranged.

But I haven’t met the new guests yet, save for sightings of Don Sr., because as soon as we got back from Thanksgiving Lena came down with the flu. Since we went to see the doctor in town she’s been confined to her bed. She sleeps for most of the day; I stay with her, I read to her and I write this account. Occasionally, feeling stir-crazy, I emerge for a few minutes, locking the door behind me, and stroll to the lobby or amble to the edge of the bluffs and stare out over the ocean. I leave the picture-window drapes open so I can check on her.

WHEN WE FIRST got here, months ago now, I went over the clutch of notes I’d made during Lena’s first year—some from the time of belief in hallucination and some from afterward, the uncertain time.

After the fact it was easy to find a thread that ran throughout them, a thread that reinforced my idea that the voice had said “Phowa,” that it might have referred, on Lena’s first day, to the transmigration of souls. I patched together pieces of text and saw a story there, I thought—did I imagine it, or was it real? I read the pieces as a story of consciousness, believing the voice had always known it would fade when its host began to speak on her own.

I uncovered references to the human brain, to “Broca’s area” and “Wernicke’s area,” which at the time I’d assumed were geographic but which an online search told me had to do with the capacity for speech. There were terms like remote insult and neural plasticity. Yet there was also a lexicon of religious terms, of Hindu words like jiva, mentions of the Sikh brotherhood, the passing along of the soul from one body to another until its liberation.

There were allusions to Jainism and to African faiths—Àtúnwá, I was even able to decipher: a Yoruba belief in the rebirth of the ancestors.

KAY OFFERED to babysit Lena tonight while I went to the café to grab some dinner, to give me time out of the room. Lena was already sleeping when I got back after the meal and Kay and I talked in hushed tones, standing near the doorway.

She told me she was a med student and volunteered in a neonatal intensive care unit. There, she said, one of her tasks was “cuddling”—their name for holding babies, just as Lena had said. These were sick babies, some born without a chance of lasting, and they liked the touch of skin. Incubators and other machines weren’t enough.

“My shift was late-night,” she said. “You know, when the mothers were sleeping. Or some of the NICU babies didn’t have mothers who could hold them, they’d be addicts or occasionally they’d have died in childbirth.”

She’d hold one of these fragile infants and her next shift, if the infant had gone, she never followed up—it was the policy and she tried to observe it. But this part of her work had proved too much for her. Eventually it had driven her to antidepressants that didn’t work and she’d spun out and taken a leave of absence.

She was unfit to be a doctor, she said, shaking her head, but she’d wanted to be a doctor all her life.

“I don’t have much longer to decide, the program will give my place to someone else,” she said, and looked down at the floor to hide the fact that her eyes were filling.

She’s just a girl, I thought with a pang, grown up thin and sad. I wondered where her parents were, if they knew how miserable she was. Since I had Lena I see my own child in any young woman; before that they were only adults, but now they’re former children.

How did a young girl come to be alone in a cold motel, I thought, a row of rooms, because she was deemed mature enough? Not long ago she’d lived safely, I imagined, in her parents’ home, and now here she was, wretched. Alone.

Not everyone, really hardly anyone, is suited to the job of constant dying babies, I said to her as gently as I could. Most doctors wouldn’t be equal to that particular task . . . she nodded but I could tell she’d heard this before and it was useless to her, though she was too polite to say so.

I felt low after she went away and curled up next to my daughter in her bed.

DURING LENA’S BOUT with the flu I was more solitary with my thoughts than I am usually, and I don’t think it was healthy. I started to wonder if Ned did know where we were, if he’d known for ages, if I’d been wrong to think we were on our own the whole time. I felt more and more paranoid and I made up theories—he was watching us using satellites and GPS, he’d turned my laptop camera into a spy device.

In the movies it was easy.

The paranoia’s still with me, exaggerated and ridiculous as paranoia has to be. I live alongside it the way I would an unpredictable roommate. A suspicion rises that we’re not as far away from him as I assumed we were, that Ned hovers unseen. Then I reassure myself, which works mildly: the nervousness subsides, until it rises again.

He’s always known my parents’ telephone number—it’s the same number they’ve had since I was a child, I say to myself. So what if he called while Lena and I were there? It was Thanksgiving and I knew he might call, or worse. Our material circumstances haven’t changed, I tell myself, I have no real evidence of his proximity here at the motel.

It’s only that his voice—a warm South Carolina drawl that’s alluring until you detect the insincere overtone—and his manipulative conversation with my mother have infected me, exactly as he intended. It’s me realizing, hearing that voice for the first time in two years, that I’ve gone from what I thought was love to neutrality to dislike to open hostility. I’m contaminated by the discord between loathing Ned now and once having adored him: I remember my adoration acutely and wince. I don’t know how much is shame and how much is confusion. My former, deluded self was a loose construction of poorly angled mirrors and blind spots, I can see that now.

But Lena’s better. She woke up smiling and full of energy yesterday morning with no fever, and we’ve started lessons again. I’m relieved but out of sorts anyway, because besides my paranoia about Ned I’m also grappling to understand the staying of the guests.

In Lena’s and my case I know why we’re lying low. We have two scarce commodities: disposable income and my willingness to spend it on a dingy motel in Maine in December. I hold my willingness to pay for this cold privilege to be an idiosyncratic feature. But here are the other guests, also apparently willing and able to pay and stay.

They can’t all be in hiding from estranged husbands; they can’t all be, say, drug dealers on the lam. And even if they are all friends or relations of Don’s, that fails to fully explain their presence, short of a simultaneous eviction from their homes. It’s disorienting and is preoccupying me. Technically it’s none of my business, though, and I’m reluctant to broach the subject with Don.

And the college drug dealer with the five o’clock shadow has been making overtures to Kay. He approached her in the café this morning and offered small talk about genres of orange juice.

“Who likes the kind with orange pulp?” he asked. “Where are these orange pulp drinkers? I don’t want to drink the pulp. Do you want to drink the pulp?”

There was a certain expectant force to his approach that I recognized with curiosity. Pick-up lines have changed since the advent of Seinfeld; now they often take the form of one person asking another about a mundane detail, a baffling social or consumer habit. Maybe the idea is to forge an alliance in the face of seemingly senseless choices made by others. Anyway Kay shrugged at the orange-juice pulp opener, but she smiled at him.

Later she told me he isn’t a college drug dealer but a guy who makes and spends fortunes selling Hollywood movies to foreign markets. His youth combined with his skill in this realm makes him a prodigy at profit, a producer or studio executive or other dealmaker, I can’t recall the title she gave me. So he is rich, but not aimless or deranged, and his wealth, combined with the youth and good looks, makes it even more unlikely that The Wind and Pines would find itself by chance at the top of his list of winter vacation spots.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked her. “I mean, why here?”

I wanted to ask, Why are any of us here? Why here? But it was too pointed.

“Not sure,” she said, as though it was all the same where he was.

“Well, how about you?” I asked. “I don’t mean why aren’t you in Boston, I understand that. I mean how did you end up at this motel?”

Again she looked indifferent to the question but passingly curious about why it had been asked, the way a person might look if you asked them, with intense and focused interest, where they bought their toothpaste.

“I was here last summer,” she said, flipping through a magazine about trout. “I came back for the rest. It’s restful. You know. And Don’s such a nice guy. Isn’t he?”

“Don’s great. But last summer,” I persisted—because it was gnawing at me, the casual presence of everyone, their unlikely presence, their stubborn persistence—“how’d you find it in the first place?”

“Just the website,” she said, and put down the trout magazine in favor of a yellowing copy of Cat Fancy.

As she reached for it one of her long sleeves rode up, and I saw a red scar along the wrist.

BURKE CAME TO HELP with Lena’s lessons; he’s her tutor in botany. They planted seeds in a doll-sized greenhouse we put together from a kit, Burke bent over beside her, avuncular and kindly. The greenhouse has rows of light-green pots maybe two inches in diameter, a line of small lightbulbs and transparent plastic walls. It sits on our windowsill.

Lena had said she wanted to grow a beanstalk, so Burke brought her several kinds of beans to plant. He cautioned her the stalk might not be large enough to climb on; it might not reach the sky. She nodded and told him that was just as well, because she didn’t want to meet a giant or a giantess, she didn’t want to hear a cannibal giant say “Fee, fi, fo, fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman.”

She isn’t an Englishman, she said to Burke, but she still thought the giant might want her, even if she’s a girl and an American. She didn’t want to hear that giant talk about smelling blood.

Burke patted her head.

“I promise, sweetie,” he said, “there won’t be any giants speaking to you from this beanstalk.”

As soon as he said it his face went pale. He stood there for a few seconds and sat down heavily on my bed, leaned over and stuck his head between his knees.

I was taken aback—Burke had seemed more solid and self-assured lately, seemed to require less comforting.

“Are you OK?” I asked, leaning over him, laying my hand against his back and taking it off self-consciously.

He looked up and nodded.

“Sorry,” he said. “Panic-attack type . . . sorry. I’m fine. Heading back to my room.”

Lena cocked her head, confused; I watched the door close behind him.

“Here,” I said, picking up a library picture book on plants, “let’s read this part about how seeds germinate. Most seeds contain an embryo and food package . . .”

IT OCCURRED TO ME, reading about the transmigration of souls, that my early assumption of some kind of nonhuman power or supernatural omniscience had been impressively unfounded. It might have been just a person’s thoughts that had got loose, the memories or knowledge base of, say, some overeducated, possibly unhinged individual whose stream of consciousness flowed along carrying the debris of a lifetime. Could be that Lena caught the ruminations of a scientist or scholar.

Maybe this is a ghost story after all.

Or maybe the information that’s now carried by so many frequencies just caught in her as it passed, lodged in her body—the live feed of a humble taxpayer somewhere, erudite but alive. Maybe some unseen field around my infant simply filtered particles from the immense cloud of content carried by those millions of waves that pass through us all the time.

THE SISTERS FROM Vermont, it turns out, aren’t sisters from Vermont: I’m bad at pegging guests’ identities. Their teeth aren’t even protruding, just large and blocky, and they’re cousins from somewhere on the mid-Atlantic coast near Baltimore. Both of them are named Linda, a name that’s common in their extended family; they’re in their early fifties, friendly, good-natured and hearty. One is an administrator at a university while the other is retired from her career at a famous aquarium in Florida where marine animals do tricks for crowds.

When the Lindas went to town for groceries today we hitched a ride with them. They dropped us off at the library so Lena could exchange her picture books—one of which is too young for her, about a bear who’s a splendid friend, the other of which turned out to feature cows rising in armed revolt. (They hold roughly drawn Uzis in their hooves; this puzzled Lena’s literal mind due to the cows’ lack of opposable thumbs.) To answer the question of the guests who don’t leave I have to be more outgoing than I have been until now, so I’m trying.

The Lindas, being friendly, are helpful in this chore. Big Linda, as Lena calls her, told us about someone she knew who was bitten by a bull sea lion. “Right on the keester, kiddo. And let me tell you it made a mighty broad target,” she chortled. She told Lena that performing seals at zoos and aquariums are not seals at all but sea lions; that some sea lions work for the U.S. Navy, finding things in the ocean; and that male sea lions can be four times the size of the females—weighing, put in the other Linda, up to one thousand pounds. That’s half a ton.

Lena calls the other one Main Linda because she met her first. Main Linda goes swimming in very cold water, Lena said to me, once every year to help raise money for the Special Olympics. Lena’s resolved to join her in one of these polar bear plunges, as she calls them. I have to restrain her from practicing.

The Lindas have embraced their nicknames.

When the two of us finished at the library we walked over to the local diner to have lunch. A beefy middle-aged man sat down beside us at the counter—beside Lena, I should say, with me on her other side. He ordered a Reuben, introduced himself as John and proceeded to engage her in a conversation about her gold and silver metallic markers. He was inoffensive, on the face of it, a neighborly fellow patron, yet I thought I detected something off-color in his expression as he glanced over the top of her head at me, a hint of a leer, some glint of beady self-interest.

So I hurried Lena at her lunch a bit. We shared a piece of sickly-sweet cherry pie for dessert, leaving bright jelly smears on the plate. Then we left, with the beefy man smiling after us as the door swung to.

Big Linda was waiting for us in her bulky car; Main Linda, who was buying birdseed in the hardware store down the block, remained to be picked up.

“Big Linda?” said Lena hesitantly, as we pulled away from the curb. “Do sea lions have really sharp teeth?”

While we waited in the car again, this time outside the hardware store, the two of them discussed sea lion dentition, a subject that was, to me, of limited interest. I sank into the warm seat in a half-dream, full of the sickly-sweet pie, grown even more sickly in retrospect, and mused on my attraction to the town’s librarian, who seems out of place here. He’s good-looking; his skin is a coffee shade but the geometry of his face seems less African than Eastern, maybe Malaysian or Indian, I don’t know. It’s noteworthy mostly because there aren’t too many colorful immigrants in this part of Maine—in some parts there are Somalis and Asians but around here most everyone I’ve seen is plain old white.

When Mainers rise up against immigration it’s often been Canadians they accuse of stealing jobs; once Maine loggers blockaded the Canadian border.

I stared out the window, which was fogged up and yielded no defined shapes, only hazy panels of white and gray. I realized I was thinking of sex, of the idea of sex or rather, to be precise, the idea of no sex—no sex at all. I mulled over my asexual existence as a mother, gazing at the foggy window, mulled over the asexual existence of many mothers, whose bodies, formerly toasted politely as sex objects when not worshiped outright, had been diverted from the sexual to the post-sexual. In the natural plumpness of motherhood they were summarily dropped by male society like so much fast-food detritus in a mall food court.

I wondered if it was impossible that I would ever be a sex object again, if I should embrace that impossibility or try to reclaim my status as a sex object—by, say, enrolling in pole-dancing classes as one of my old college friends had done after her divorce, enacting a middle-aged crypto-feminist stripper fantasy that seemed to keep her entertained.

I decided I wouldn’t enroll in pole-dancing classes.

After a minute along those lines I gave up thinking. As I swiped at the condensation on the car window I caught sight of the beefy man, John, walking toward us down the sidewalk from the diner. A light snow had just begun to fall and his slab of pink face was a blur, so I couldn’t tell if the small blue eyes were pointed in our direction; before the blur resolved he turned and disappeared through a door.

The falling snow made me want to shore us up snugly for the winter and brought a pang of homesickness for our house in Alaska, which had always been more mine and Lena’s than Ned’s, for all the time he never spent there. Ned should have gone, I thought, Ned should have left.

But I myself had chosen otherwise, no one had chosen my course of action for me, and so Ned had not left the house—rather I was the one who fled. I forsook my existence, my local friends, the belongings I’d slowly and carefully amassed over the years of my life up till then, most of which would mean nothing to him . . . I left it all, except for some file cabinets of photos and documents, a few boxes of books and a handful of childhood keepsakes I’d stowed in a small storage unit. I’d given up everything to keep Lena close to me and get us clear: nothing else had mattered.

This was still true, I reflected, still perfectly true, my intent remained the same, it was my decisions that were questionable.

In our old house in suburban Anchorage—a city where every street was suburban except three or four downtown blocks—I’d kept us warm through several Alaska winters, Lena and myself, I’d cooked soup and stews and lasagna and other hearty foods in a kitchen shining with copper pots and brimming with heat . . . I’d loved it there, I’d arranged all the spaces exactly the way I wanted them. It had been a golden burrow.

All we had now was a small microwave, its walls cool and thin. People we hardly knew, though they were nice enough. The motel’s walls were thin too. I had no solid walls, I thought. Would a wind rise around us this winter?

A wind would rise, I could feel it already, rise off the gray ocean and howl at the thin motel walls.

And then there was my parents’ home, far nearer than the house in Anchorage, with its solid brick, wooden floors, and soft throw rugs, vines dormant on their trellises till spring. My mother would welcome us, I thought, if only I could shake this phobia of Ned, if only I could just face Ned and stand up to Ned, if I was willing to call Ned’s bluff.

Instead we were living in a room like a cardboard box, with no source of warmth except the wall heater. We were socked in, I thought, perched on the rim of the frigid Atlantic—unknown in a group of other itinerants passing through, their lives as opaque to us as ours must be to them.

This cold, flimsy box was where my irrational impulses had brought us, I thought, my formless certainties.

I HEARD THE YOUNG mogul pacing along the walkway outside the rooms this evening, pacing and talking on his cell phone. Lena was sitting in the bathtub blowing bubbles—she luxuriates in long baths, though without nagging she doesn’t bother to ply a washcloth—and I was reading a magazine in one of our two armchairs, the bathroom door cracked open between us. We’d had dinner early because of her bedtime, but most of the other guests were at the café.

The windows of our room weren’t open, since the temperature was below freezing; the heater thrummed, so at first I didn’t hear his words. But his voice got louder; he grew agitated as the call went on.

“That’s not fucking relevant,” he snapped. “Can we not do this analytical bullshit? If I wanted an analyst I’d lie on a couch and jerk off for two hundred bucks an hour. Hell, put me in a Skinner box. Fix me! . . . I couldn’t give a fuck.”

I glanced at Lena to see if she was paying attention. But the bathroom was farther away from the door than I was, in my homely armchair backed up to the heater, and bobbing in front of her was a waterproof MP3 speaker shaped like a yellow duck and playing sea shanties. She was impervious to the young mogul’s call, dipping a rubber whale toy in and out of the water as it consorted with the duck.

“It has nothing to do with that crap. I’m telling you. My mother was fine. My father was fine. They were both fucking fine. They’re still fucking fine. Everyone should have such fucking decent and doting parents . . . no pervert uncles! Jesus Christ.”

I swept a drape aside to look out, making a sour mother-face that went unseen. If he moved off before Lena caught on I’d be relieved—and it wasn’t so much the swearing that annoyed me as the force of his anger. He stalked by in his elegant leather coat and kicked one of the square wooden posts that was holding up the overhang.

“Well yeah. I told you that already. Not so much now. Before. Doing coke raises your chances of that shit. Plus oxy . . . what? Harvard. Aren’t there brain scans? Some other radioactive shit?”

I decided to join Lena in the bathroom, where I shut the door behind us and ran in some fresh water to rinse the shampoo from her hair. I was thinking the young mogul would be bad news for Kay, if she submitted to the sitcom pickup tactics.

I don’t know if Kay needs an angry young mogul.

ON TV THERE were numerous “exposés” of small children remembering past lives. One two-year-old boy was born with the memories of a fighter pilot shot down in World War II, they said, and repeatedly enacted scenes of the pilot’s fiery cockpit death. He showed a high level of competence at identifying bombers used on the Western Front. A girl of four painted watercolors apparently based on her great-aunt’s early life as an orphan in Minneapolis, although the two had never met before the great-aunt perished of cirrhosis.

Their parents had been skeptical at first, the voice-overs told viewers, but over time had clearly seen no other explanation fit the bill.

“Young Alex’s parents are highly educated, modern professionals,” intoned one narrator. “They did not wish to accept the evidence that past lives are real.”

A FEW DAYS before Christmas my car stalled out so I left Lena with the Lindas and got into the cab of a tow truck, where I sat beside a driver who pulled my car into the only car-repair place in town. Imagine my displeased surprise—although I shouldn’t have been surprised, since after all the town is small—when I was greeted by the beefy man from the diner.

He was the owner, apparently, since he wore a button-down collar shirt while the other, thinner man behind the counter wore polyester-mesh with the name of the franchise appliquéd. The beefy man—John—reclined with his arms crossed in a posture of managerial ease; I stood across the counter and smiled wanly. I felt the discomfort I always feel in car-repair places, the low-level dread of condescension followed by cost inflation, and wished to call upon my considerable expertise on the workings of internal combustion. Unfortunately I had none.

Waiting for the man to finish typing and Beefy John to finish watching him, I looked around at the walls, at ugly posters for automotive service packages, tires, motor oils.

One poster was markedly different: it was for something called American Family Radio. I peered closely at it, an airbrushed-looking photo of a plump, pink-faced man in headphones, shining smugly. Inscribed beneath his face and what I guessed was the name of his radio show were the smaller words The AFA Works to: (1) Restrain Evil by Exposing the Works of Darkness . . .

“Ma’am?” said Beefy John, finally.

I tore myself away from the fine print.

“Hey there, and how’s that pretty little girl of yours? What can we do you for today?”

“My car keeps stalling out,” I said. “A Honda. It’s a Civic hybrid—getting a little old, maybe. But it’s always been pretty reliable. I can leave it overnight.”

“A Honda, huh? Well sure, we can take a look at that rice burner for you,” said Beefy John, and his smile said he was bestowing a favor. “B.Q. here will help you with the paperwork.” He smiled again before he clapped the underling on the shoulder, tapped his forehead in my direction in a mock salute and disappeared into the back office.

“B.Q.?” I asked.

“ ’At’s me,” said the underling, typing.

“What does the Q stand for? If you don’t mind the question.”

“Quiet,” he said.

“Quiet?”

“Be Quiet. Always saying that to me when I was a kid.”

B.Q. looked up from the keyboard and grimaced. His teeth were a rotting brown from the gums up, old-bone yellow and tobacco brown.

Handing over my keys I realized Don wasn’t due to pick me up for almost half an hour; it was bitterly cold outside and I needed to be warm while I waited. But Beefy John in his satisfied recline, his crossed arms, the words that pretty little girl of yours, the jagged mossy teeth of B.Q.—they made me uncomfortable. The words land shark came to me as I signed the work order, B.Q. leaning forward unnecessarily from the other side of the counter, so close that I could smell the residue of cigarettes. B.Q. wasn’t a shark, surely, he seemed more ruined than fierce, but the teeth . . . I considered whether his meth use was current or past, whether teeth ravaged by meth could be reclaimed. Then I pivoted and walked out into the winter, pretending to have a goal.

Once I was on the sidewalk I slowed down and ambled, watching my breath fog and feeling the cold on my cheeks until I fetched up in front of the library and went in. I hadn’t had that goal in mind, of all the thousands of possibilities offered by libraries no single one presented itself to me, but there, right away, was the librarian I was attracted to. I had nothing to say as he looked up from the front desk, nothing at all. And yet I felt better already.

“Sorry, just coming in from the cold,” I blurted.

“What we’re here for,” he said.

I couldn’t think of any more small talk so I wandered along the shelves looking at titles, plucking out books at random. I seemed to be in a section either for children or for adults who were childlike: true-life accounts of balloonists, explorers. Pictures of famous caves. Prehistoric animals turned to fossil—trilobites that looked like beetles, ammonites that looked like snails. Real-life Monsters. Haunted Houses of New Orleans. The more I looked at the variety of subjects, the more hopeful I felt.

Maybe we could travel, I thought. Not just in my small car—across the world. To the Himalayas, say, jungles, dormant volcanoes with crater lakes, those acid lakes that shimmer turquoise in the sun . . . we stood on the decks of ships, rode camels over Saharan dunes toward the pyramids, wandered the Prado, the Great Wall of China, treaded the paths of picturesque ruins. What, in the end, would keep us from the world? I’d planned to give her a solid, settled childhood, where she could have the same friends for years and run through the same backyards, a childhood much like my own. But maybe she didn’t need that. Maybe we could sail away, out of this chill into a summer country.

I hadn’t thought of the voice in a while, I thought (suddenly thinking of it). These days a memory of it will flash through me and what I notice is myself forgetting, the rarity of that flash. It’s like sickness—the whole world when you’re in its grips, but once gone, quickly dismissed. Within days you take good health for granted once again.

“We only have a fake log,” said the librarian, behind me. “It’s not as warm as the real thing.”

Privately joyful that he’d spoken to me, feeling as though I’d performed a small but neat trick, I followed him to a reading room. In the hearth an electric log glowed orange behind its fiberglass bark. The chairs were overstuffed, the high ceilings dark, but still I noticed, trailing after him, peering with difficulty at the fingers of his left hand, that he wore no ring, and I was pleased. I felt like a cliché noticing, a woman who read glossy, man-pleasing magazines, a member of some predatory horde . . . he had broad shoulders, an elegant posture.

“I’m so glad there is a library,” I said. “In a town this small. With only one gas station and no fast-food chain.”

“The building was a gift from a wealthy benefactor,” he said. “He made his fortune in lumber. His wife died young and he never remarried. He died without anyone to inherit his fortune. Brokenhearted, they say.”

“Oh.”

“So he left his house to the town for a library. In short, his tragedy was our gain,” said the librarian.

“Oh,” I said again. “Yes!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Luckily he smiled at me.

When he went back to his desk I sat gazing into the glowing seams of the artificial wood and wondered whether to ask him out. I wasn’t sure I could. It’d be a cold call; I had nothing.

And yet I might be restless enough to do it, I thought, I was bored and agitated at once these days. I was constantly aggravated by the open question of the gathering of motel guests, frustrated by the problem of their continuing presence—and then, bookended with that problem, there were the limitations of my existence and the tedious routine of our schedule. I felt drawn to the librarian but at the same time ambivalent about the prospect of not being alone, that is, not being alone with my daughter, the two of us a capsule . . . the two of us close together after the leave-taking of the voice and our running away from Ned.

Of course it was premature to speculate, I knew nothing about him, but still, I thought, why actually try to know someone if you don’t wish to know anyone at all?

Still, in the end you seek out company again. After the noise has passed, after the great clamor’s hushed and the crowds have thinned—then a silence descends upon your room.

And though at first the silence is perfect, the silence is thought and peace, after a while the silence passes too.

IT WAS EMBARRASSING to ask him out and I had to buoy myself up with bravado: it didn’t matter if he said no. I had nothing to lose. The worst that could happen was that my life would remain the same.

In the few moments after, waiting for him to decline the invitation as I rested my fingertips on the edge of his desk, I thought of a girl from high school: she’d been average-looking and not particularly good-natured—in fact she was manipulative, crude, and often picked on easy scapegoats, the poor kids with hygiene problems, the loners. Despite this she always had a boyfriend, and her boyfriends were kinder and far better-looking than she. Waiting for rejection, I remembered her clearly.

Years after high school was over, when I was home from college on vacation, I ran into her on the street. We stepped into a nearby bar for a drink. I had an awareness of being only half there, as though the other half of me had continued along the sidewalk without acknowledging her presence. But we had caught each other’s eyes, we hadn’t flinched and glanced away in time—so there we were, perched on adjoining barstools with little in common.

We quickly ran out of old friends to mention and teetered on the brink of leaving, but we eventually succumbed to inertia and ordered more drinks. On the third she told me the key to men was that they always wanted sex but rarely had the luxury of expecting propositions. And they were tired of always having to be the ones to ask, she said. From the day they hit puberty they wanted to lay that burden down, so all you had to do, she said, was suggest sex and they would take you up on it. This applied equally with most married men, she said—to be honest, with any of them. Failure was rare, she said, and tipped back her glass all the way.

It was admirable, the ease with which she approached the question. It didn’t change my own behavior, however, which in that arena was passive; possibly this was part of why I found myself married to Ned.

In fact, looking back, you could say my passivity in that arena was the start of my greatest failure.

But seeing her unremarkable face in the bar mirror, I felt awed by her attitude, part aggression and part simple confidence. I believed someone should shake her hand or pin a medal on her lapel, but that someone would not be me: for I, even as I was impressed, felt a lucid dislike.

Then the librarian said yes, and I was grateful to the girl from high school.

STILL, THOUGH, EVEN if the bogus exposés and hair-sprayed New Age gurus hawking their bestselling books about past lives had a point, there was no explanation I could find for my having heard the voice. There was no reason I should have had to hear anything at all, if little Lena had contained a reborn soul.

It wasn’t as though she herself had spoken, like the little boy with his encyclopedic knowledge of Mosquitos and Messerschmitts. She’d painted no old-fashioned watercolors depicting orphanage memories from 1934.

“I’VE BEEN WONDERING,” I said to Don as he drove me back to the motel, his backseat a neat row of paper grocery bags. “I was thinking this place would be quiet over the winter. I don’t get the draw for all these people in the off-season. I thought you only ever had a full house in the summer, but now it’s almost Christmas. Did you—I mean, just out of—were you planning on all of them arriving?”

Don was silent for a few moments as we ascended the long, slow road that leads up to the bluffs, changing from pavement to gravel as it goes. He reached out a gloved finger and scratched the side of his nose, shrugging lightly as he spun the steering wheel with the other hand.

“I’m trying to help them out,” he said.

On the expanse of ground beside the parking lot Lena was playing, wearing her hot-pink earmuffs. She appeared to be piling the previous day’s graying snow onto a grim effigy vaguely suggestive of a snowman. Around the dumpy figure was a large impact crater where she’d scraped snow off the dead grass.

Main Linda watched her from the doorway to her room, her hands around a steaming mug, ensconced in a parka with a fur-lined hood like she was Peary at the North Pole.

I realized the light was leaving: a long, knife-thin shadow was falling toward the sea from the dirty pillar of the snowman, which had frayed sticks for hands, pieces of trash stuck on its torso for decoration and what appeared to be a rusty zipper for a mouth.

I didn’t like the look of it.

She ran to greet me when I stepped out of Don’s car, her nose red and running profusely above her scarf, bundled-up arms flung wide. She’s always excited to see me again—though if I’m being honest, as long as she has someone else to talk to, she’s almost equally excited to watch me go.

Though the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country . . . 24% of the public overall and 22% of Christians say they believe in reincarnation—that people will be reborn in this world again and again. —Pew Research/www.pewforum.org

AT DINNER in the motel café I took a census of the guests. Lena was making the rounds; having lost interest in her food quickly—for her, food is never the point of a meal—she was stopping at every table, talking to each guest, leaving me alone to watch her progress and consider the obliqueness of Don’s answer.

There were Burke and Gabe; there were the Lindas, Main and Big. There was Kay, eating at a table with the angry young mogul who, less shaven every day, was leaning across the table to talk to her confidingly. Before long he’d be sporting a full mountain-man beard. There was Don’s father, sharing a large table with Faneesha while Don cooked and the waitress served, and there were the newest guests of all, an arty couple from New York, maybe in their early forties, who had the room right next to Lena’s and mine at the far end of the row. They dressed tastefully and didn’t seem to talk to anyone.

And then there were the regulars from town, including a woman who dressed in multiple shades of blue and always ordered the chicken pot pie and an old man who, before Don opened the café, had eaten only frozen meals since his wife died, Lena said. But I was interested in the motel guests, the motel guests only and why they were here.

Don couldn’t have meant to imply his help consisted of letting friends stay for free—the young mogul needed no such help and the chic couple had arrived in two separate gleaming cars, each of which had to have cost six figures. So that couldn’t have been what he meant.

On the other hand Kay was distressed, Burke was distressed, the young mogul was distressed too.

Maybe Don offered some other form of assistance.

IT TOOK ME till this morning to ask the Lindas. I asked while Main Linda was driving me to the auto shop; I asked her with no subterfuge.

“So why are you guys here?”

“My cousin took early retirement after some work-related stress,” she said briskly. “Down in Orlando, where she lives. She’s on her own, mostly, her ex-husband lives in Vancouver, the sons have grown up and left the nest. I get a long winter break. The two of us have been close since we were ten. I brought her up to make her take a breather.”

“But why here?” I asked. “Specifically?”

Main Linda cocked her head.

“Our family used to have a house in the area. Not on the beach, inland. Came up every summer. We shared the place with the cousins. There was a candy store, we walked there every Saturday. Jawbreakers. Gobstoppers. You remember those? Giant round hard candies you could barely fit in your mouth, started out black and you went through all the colors as they shrank? Disgusting actually, kids taking the things out of their mouths all the time to look at the different rainbow hues, then sticking them in again. Filthy. Dyed tongues. Saliva. Yeah, we loved it though. Also, there were those Atomic Fireballs.”

“We had those.”

“Naming a candy after a nuclear mushroom cloud. Only in America, right?”

“Yeah. What I meant, though, was how did you choose this particular motel?”

“Liked Don from the beginning. And heck, the price was right,” said Main Linda. “I’m cheap as crap. Always have been, always will be.”

“Good to know,” I said, but I was disappointed in my weak powers of detection. People revealed little to me, and I couldn’t even tell whether they meant to be evasive or were just uninterested in detail.

Maybe Don opened up his motel to those in need. But why disguise it?

I was at a dead end, I realized, falling silent as I sat in Main Linda’s heated passenger seat, and how did you get out of a dead end? You had no choice. All you could do was give up, turn around and drive the other way, drive back where you’d come from.

I mean I don’t want to leave the motel or the town, I want to keep my date with the librarian, for instance, a prospect that pleases me out of keeping with its likely outcome. But the sense I have of failing to understand the motel’s gathering has started to disrupt my sleep: I lie awake nights distracted by my ongoing failure to grasp why these people are here. Maybe there’s nothing to fathom in the first place but maybe there is, and the uncertainty doesn’t sit well with me.

And I’m not so sure anymore I need to be hiding us. Increasingly my past interpretations strike me as arbitrary and I pick through them, second-guessing.

There’s a chance I could stand up to Ned, I thought, sitting in the car, a chance he couldn’t make Lena and me do anything we didn’t want to do. Maybe I’m just a coward, I thought, hunkering here, as I was a coward about divorcing him. The line between cowardice and caution was blurred to me.

For a moment, Ned started to look less like a threat than an inconvenience and the future seemed almost simple.

Sitting in Main Linda’s car I lapsed into a daydream of peaceful retreat—retreat to my parents’ house, their quiet street where snow fell in pristine layers over the lawns. Only the few residents of the block drove down that street in winter, only the neighbors’ footsteps marred the sidewalk; the snow lay pure and gently curved on the bushes and old trees of the neat gardens. There would be no cold cement catwalk stretching between the bedroom and dining room, as there was here—no questions to speak of, either, beyond the mundane questions of the design and order of days.

I didn’t relish the part where I, fully grown, would be choosing to live in my parents’ house again, but they would be good to me and I could help my mother with my father, when she needed me. In that way I could do my part. We would stay there and Lena would go to school; I could get a new job, though I’d long since fallen off the tenure track—a community college might have me, or maybe a private high school. I could almost believe in a return to routine, an end to stealth.

I felt the wings of the normal touch my shoulders, ready to settle on me with a bland, insulating protection. I felt hopeful.

“Here you go, dear,” said Main Linda, and I saw we were already at the auto shop. There weren’t many cars in the lot: Saturday. “You want me to wait here till you make sure your car’s ready?”

“No, that’s fine,” I said.

“You sure? It’s no problem.”

“That’s OK. I’ve wasted enough of your time already. He said it was all done. You go ahead, Linda, and thanks so much. I’ll see you back at the motel.”

I regret those words.