FOR A WHILE LENA AND I ARE GOING TO STAY WITH WILL. I DON’T want to move back into the motel—memories of the kidnapping give the place an edge of chilled hardness for me, replacing the clean sea air, the pine needles I loved for their scent and sharpness, with an atmosphere of dread.
Will wants to be my bodyguard, and if he had his way I’d never be out of his sight. This has a cloying aspect, but more and more, during our last days in New York, I found myself hugging the sides of the buildings as I hurried down the sidewalk. I’d catch myself glancing around to make sure that no one was following me, no one was looking at me too purposefully.
I may not be any safer in Maine, but I want to see trees again that weren’t planted by city planners. I’d like to take Lena sledding. I remember Will’s house as neat and tasteful, floor lamps instead of fluorescents, old rugs and a lot of bookshelves. And next to Solly’s apartment it’s the Taj Mahal.
I’VE FOUND a replacement for the hypnosis sessions and this afternoon, our first of three days with my parents in Providence, tried it for the first time. Lena was sitting at my father’s feet putting on a show with puppets she’d made out of paper bags; Will was fixing a broken step on the porch. So I retreated to my childhood bedroom, which still bore the dusty traces of my teenage self—the pocked bulletin board that had held printouts of pop-star faces, snapshots of me with my arms around friends, a stray ribbon or two.
One ribbon that’s been pinned to my corkboard for twenty years says just PARTICIPANT.
I lay down carefully on the bed on my back, stuck in my earbuds, and cued up a twenty-minute hypnosis track downloaded from a website: “Goodbye to Stress.”
All it did was put me to sleep, but I’ll try again tonight.
Later Will and my mother cornered me in the kitchen; she plied me with peppermint tea and announced she wanted to have a serious talk about “personal security.”
Somehow Will had convinced her I need protection. At least, she said, I could agree that there was a risk and humor her by letting Will install a home security system. Then she could rest easy, she said (and here she looked careworn and shaky—more elderly, I realized, than she ever had before). She already had my father to worry about; she didn’t want to have to worry about Lena and me too.
I pictured a couple of sluggish rent-a-cops pulling up fifteen minutes too late, shooting the breeze about their personal lives as they casually dismounted from a company car whose doors were emblazoned with a bogus-looking shield. I don’t like the idea of being guarded by electronics, of being sealed off from the world outside. More surveillance, I was thinking—all it’s done in the past is harm us. It was surveillance that allowed my daughter to be taken from me.
But my mother looked drained. Resistance was futile.
“It’s already being set up,” said Will gravely.
Panic welled up: I’d done everything Ned asked, everything I could possibly do to meet his demands, and still maybe it wasn’t enough.
My mother advised me to carry mace whenever I go out.
“Or maybe pepper spray, dear,” she amended. “I think it’s better. For their health. The criminals’, I mean.”
Hypnosis is “. . . a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state.” —Encyclopædia Britannica, 2004
It was a quiet and uneventful visit to Kay, who lay, much as you’d expect, motionless on a stainless-steel bed hooked up to machines. We had her to ourselves, as her parents had just gone to get lunch, a nurse told me. Kay’s face was a ghostly shell, but Lena sat beside her bravely and held her hand. She only cried later, as we were walking out. I’d told her Kay took too much medicine by mistake.
The private room didn’t bear much resemblance to the one I’d envisioned under hypnosis—no surprise there—but one thing struck me as we were leaving: a pile of knitting, two needles sticking out of it, on a low shelf on her beside table.
The yarn was blue-gray.
WE HAD a car accident today.
Or almost had an accident, I should say. We avoided an accident, but it was close.
We were maybe half an hour northeast of Boston on the freeway. It was my turn to drive and I was fiddling a bit with the radio when abruptly the car started weaving back and forth across the lanes, fishtailing. My right hand flew back to the wheel as I felt the loss of control in the pit of my stomach and tried to keep the car straight. I almost hit someone on my left but veered away just in time, and then the car almost crashed into a guardrail on our right.
In the end we veered away from that too, luckily, and somehow I steered us onto the first off-ramp, pulling over onto a wide shoulder without any more near-collisions.
It happened too fast for Lena—startled out of a nap by the car’s fishtailing motion—even to get frightened. When I’d pulled up the emergency brake I turned to look at her; she smiled at me uncertainly and rubbed her eyes.
Will and I got out and walked around the car: all four of the tires were flat.
The three of us rode in the tow truck to the car-repair place, where we hung around in a brown-tiled lounge area that smelled of disinfectant while they sprayed foam on the tires, performed some other tests. We were sure I’d driven over a spilled cargo of nails or other sharp objects—what else could have caused four same-time flats?—but finally they seemed to have exhausted their diagnostic tools.
Never seen anything like it, they said. There were no holes or slits, no punctures at all: the tires were perfectly good except for the fact that the treads on the rear ones were a bit too worn for comfort.
They wanted to sell us two new tires.
“Maybe these mechanics are in league with Ned too,” I said nervously. Lena was feeding coins into a vending machine, out of earshot, and I watched her as I spoke.
“I thought I was the paranoid one,” said Will. “Still. Maybe we should replace all four tires, huh?”
“I don’t want to be chickenshit,” I said. “But OK.”
Will drove after that while I tried to play a word game with Lena, thinking of animals whose names started with the last letter of the animal before. But she soon tired of it and asked to use my tablet for a game, making hairstyles on cartoon people whose faces looked like square potatoes.
When we got to his house I was relieved. I’d sat in the passenger seat with the muscles in my stomach clenched—sat forward the whole way, strained, unable to relax enough to lean back in the seat. The guy who’d installed the alarm system was waiting for us, his van idling in the driveway behind Will’s truck, now covered in drifts of hardened snow. Will warned me as we were driving into town, so I wouldn’t take fright, I guess—that’s what I’ve come to, apparently. I have to be warned about the presence of men in vans.
We all went up to the door, rubbing our gloved hands together in the cold, the installer chugging along beside us, a drunk-nosed man with a beard. He let us in and walked us through the system, whose electronic display looked out of place amid the weathered wood trim and old furniture. Lena was puzzled by the setup, asking why we needed to touch a display to come in. We hadn’t needed to before.
“It’s like Doug,” said Will. “Solly’s apartment building has a doorman to watch over it, right? But we don’t have Doug in my house so we’re using this little guy right here.” He rested his hand on the console.
She’d loved Doorman Doug, of course, who brought her puzzle books that featured the Mario Brothers, with a few of their yellowing pages scrawled over long ago by his now-teenage sons. Lena did not prefer the Mario Brothers. They were strangers to her.
But she liked Will’s explanation and named the alarm console New Doug.
ON OUR FOURTH afternoon back in Maine, while Will was off at the library, Lena wanted a nap; I was tired too so I lay down beside her on the double bed in Will’s guest room, which he’d given her for our time here. The walls, covered in antique wallpaper of faded but regal-looking lions, were festooned with her taped-up decorations, drawings she’d done of fairies and princesses, photos of Kay, Faneesha, Solly, herself standing with both Lindas beside her snow effigy, its head already half-melted.
I dozed off not long after she did and was only woken by a wrong smell. It was familiar, but still I took a minute to put a name to it: smoke. And it was too warm in the room, I realized—sweat had beaded on my forehead and under my arms.
Had I left something on the stove, maybe a kettle? I left Lena sleeping and started down the stairs.
But there was smoke at the bottom, enough of it to hide the view below, and a block of hot air hit me. I turned around again to get Lena—and where was my phone? Downstairs, damn it, somewhere past the smoke, I’d left it charging down there. Will’s landline was on the first floor too.
I shook her awake and bundled her into a thick sweater and we ran to the bedroom where Will and I slept, which had French doors that opened onto a balcony. I wrenched the doors open and stepped out onto the rickety wooden platform, which hung over the back of the house. The view was of the large and unkempt yard, brown grass mostly covered in thin patches of ice and crusts of snow. At the back of it were trees, over which rooftops were faintly visible, but not close enough to yell at.
Most of the neighbors were probably at work, I thought, since it was the middle of a weekday.
“Honey, I think we have to climb down,” I said.
“It’s too slippery!” cried Lena, her voice squeaking. She touched the ice along the wooden rail.
But Lena’s a much better climber than I am, a climber who shimmies up to the canopy of trees and freely climbs rock faces I’d never try, and we got out safely, she first, me after, though I fell the last couple of feet. I twisted my ankle, scraped my elbows a bit. We went around to the front yard and still saw no fire, just smoke leaking out the crack at the bottom of the front door. We ran next door, knocking and waiting, and just as the neighbor’s door opened we watched the roof cave in.
THE HOUSE ISN’T a total loss. A fire engine pulled up not long after the neighbor called 911, siren shrieking, and we stood by shivering as the firemen plied the hoses, stood with our eyes smarting as smoke billowed out of a broken front window.
I picked up Lena and held her on my hip the whole time—she’s old for holding like that, but still light at forty-some pounds. She didn’t cry. She was openmouthed but not outwardly frightened.
Other than the section of roof that collapsed, only the kitchen and living room are badly damaged. Mostly they’re waterlogged. Will’s homeowner’s insurance will cover the repairs, but those repairs will take a while. It was an electrical fire, the cops told us when we met with them at the station. There’s no evidence of arson, they said.
I assumed it was Ned, somehow this too was Ned’s doing. But the firemen shrugged and said the house is old, its wiring is pre-code. One of them brought me an informational brochure, nodding helpfully as though the handout would fully explain everything.
On the front it has a picture of a fifties-style couple in their kitchen—she beside the stove, he sitting straight-backed at the table, wearing a suit and tie, with a cup of coffee and a plate of eggs in front of him. The man and woman are both slim and attractive, and smile at each other in a satisfied fashion. But sticking through the open door behind their backs, as though to peer in and wave, are plump, decorative tongues of flame, apparently unseen.
Each year, household wiring and lighting cause an estimated average of 32,000 home fires in the United States. On average, these fires result in 950 injuries and 220 deaths. They cause more than $670 million in property damage.
Even the insurance forensics guys who came to inspect the house shook their heads as though the fire had been inevitable—we’d been asking for it by being so brash as to live in the house at all.
So it’s back to The Wind and Pines, where Don has set us up with two adjoining rooms close to the lobby. He keeps the security system updated since the kidnapping: he gave himself a crash course in the software after it happened. So we’re still surveilled, and the homeowners’ insurance is paying for our rooms until the repairs are done.
There are other motels in driving distance, of course, but Don is Will’s friend and Lena’s so fond of him, and besides the Lindas are still here, the sole holdouts of the group, still setting out on their beachcombing walks every morning, still not ready to part ways from each other and go home.
In the end, coming back here, it seems we didn’t have much choice.
WE ALL ATE in the motel café tonight, Will and Don and the Lindas and Lena and I. Somehow it felt like we were trying too hard to have a regular meal. No one from town was there; the café’s first emptiness had returned.
Don and I were left alone together after dinner, when the Lindas went to show Lena some video clips of kittens who were friends with tortoises; Will headed back to our rooms to unpack. We’d maybe had a couple too many glasses of wine, Don and I. Or at least I had. Don was drinking whiskey.
“At first, when it began,” he said, “I did worry. I knew there were antagonists who might also be attracted, antagonists like your husband. We’re a magnet for them.”
“You mean—a magnet? How?” I asked.
“Some people, historically, have heard the voice when—let’s say when danger is already near. But after a while, this year, I relaxed my vigilance because no one showed up. No one to worry about. And then they did. I’m sorry I wasn’t better prepared, Anna.”
“You did your best,” I said.
We sat in silence, likely both wondering if that was true.
“Kay sent you some emails,” said Don after a minute. “Didn’t she?”
“She was so upset. And with her diagnosis—I didn’t know what to make of them,” I said.
“You can credit them. She knew,” said Don softly.
I met his gaze for a moment, but there was something too plain or too frank there and I had to look away.
“She knows,” I corrected, a little halfhearted.
“If you pay attention to the culture,” said Don, “you can see these threads of recognition. There are interferences and smokescreens all over, but the threads are perceptible if you know where to find them. Kay was right. And she’s sick, yes. She suffers from an illness of long standing. She’s struggled very hard against it. But she also has rare insight. These years are decisive, Anna. We’re in the midst of a great acceleration and a great implosion. These years are our last chance.”
I sat there sipping my wine and wondering if Don was, finally, a crank. I think like that when bold pronouncements are made; I wonder if both sides are nothing but cranks, with one simply more powerful than the other. Ned’s Bible-thumping friends think they’re right and all others are wrong—their powerful fear of other groups that turns to hatred and plays into the hands of the profiteers. But the profiteers themselves, with their millions of tentacles sunk deep into every crack in the earth, don’t give a shit about being right. They’re powerful. When you have enough power, right or wrong is for kids. Then there’s Don, with just us, this small crowd of overeducated, confused liberals who also believe the other side is dead wrong, his small stable of adherents to the Hearing Voices Movement.
“No,” Don said into the silence.
I guess I’d spoken out loud, though I could have sworn I hadn’t. But I was drunk enough not to worry about it.
I probably still am.
And I did know what he was talking about, I knew what he meant by last chance. He meant what Kay had written to me in her rambling and half-coherent email. He meant the world that had evolved over millions of years, the mass of living things through which all forms of intelligence cycle, through which a billion variations move and express themselves, the ark of creation over eras and eons. He meant the spirit and expression of all creatures and all people, their cultures and tongues and arts and musics, from the vaunted to the unknown; he meant what was organic and alive, the broad, branching tree of evolution that was history and biology and all kinds of astonishing bodies full of ancient knowledge.
He meant that it was on its way out.
THE PUSH IN FRONT of the subway train, all four tires going out on a fast road, the house fire while we were fast asleep—they seem too multiple for sheer coincidence, but they don’t add up to an understandable pattern. Also, after the subway push someone had grabbed me and pulled me back. That was the first attempt, if I want to see it that way. The second: our tires went out on the Interstate, but in the end we hit no other cars—not the car so close on our left, not the dinged-up, rusting gray guardrail on the right. And the third: Will’s house burning. But I woke up and I smelled the smoke, and ten minutes later Lena and I were standing safely outside in the snow, watching an empty building burn.
Will barely believed in the fire when I called him at work. He’s seemed to be in a mild state of shock ever since, a man who’s been pushed too far: many of his dear old books were destroyed, all the books on his living room shelves.
I want to tell him: Really, Will. You don’t have to be in this with me. I’m grateful. And I don’t know the difference anymore between gratitude and love. But I’m willing to cut you loose.
I know he wouldn’t go.
I wonder what’s more important, the fact that all these events occurred in the first place or the fact that they were only close calls, that in each case none of us have succumbed.
So far.
Since the fire I’m obsessed with when the next “accident” will occur, when the new onslaught will begin.
The subway episode was ten days ago. The car accident was less than a week. The fire was the day before yesterday. They fall closer together now.
I lie awake thinking of Lena, of what will become of her if something happens to me, or if she is also a target. She was there two out of three times, after all. I harbor wild thoughts, such as: Maybe I should have fallen in front of the subway train, because at least then I was alone. At least she might be safe right now. But I fear what would become of her if I die, so there’s cold comfort there.
I lie awake worrying about Ned having custody. It’s Solly I’d want to raise her, I guess, but since Ned and I aren’t even divorced I’m pretty sure there’s no way to legally exclude him. If he wanted guardianship, regardless of his craven reasons, he would get it. And I lie awake berating myself for my lack of leverage. I’ve brought this down on our heads, but I cast bitterness in Ned’s direction too. I blame myself but I also know hatred.
I never knew it before him.
I TOLD WILL I was going to turn in with Lena last night, that I was exhausted—because I was—and then I lay in bed wearing Lena’s earphones, which are large and shiny plastic discs in the shape of monkey faces. I thought of what Don had said to me, what Kay had written, of how I’d seen a city crumble beneath a cloud of dust.
Lena rolled away from me as I prepared to say Goodbye to Stress, and before long fell asleep clutching her duck.
The images didn’t feel like a dream. I was aware of the room as I lay there, the shape of the TV cabinet, the bathroom door slightly ajar, the mirror on the dresser showing glints in the dark. I lay in an indoor twilight holding those dim motel-room shapes in front of me as I began to sink under. Did I keep my eyes open?
Into the dark room came a thin, stooped man. My impulse was to fling my body over Lena, shielding her and keeping her safe with me forever. But I couldn’t move.
The thin man turned to look at me, and I recognized him. With his bloodshot eyes and tobacco-stained mouth, his gray, grubby mechanic’s workshirt with the franchise logo on the pocket, I recognized him instantly: B.Q.
I felt repulsion, then fear; I knew I couldn’t turn onto my side or cover her with my arms, I knew I had to lie just as I was, belly up and exposed. And she was exposed beside me. That was the worst of it.
But next I understood he was a weak and broken person. He had never been a threat to us. He worked for Beefy John, that was all—he drew a paycheck.
“She told you herself,” he said sadly. “But you didn’t listen, Mrs. Mrs., she sent me with a message because she can’t bring it. She can’t say anything anymore. So here it is. True language is the deep magic. As old as time. God of the hills and water. God of the sun and trees.”
He stood at the foot of the bed looking down at Lena, and as he reached out toward her I felt I had to stop him—but instead of touching her he swooped farther down and grabbed something else: Hurt Sheep, which had fallen off the bed and onto the floor.
He picked up the stuffed animal and kept on walking across the motel room, headed toward the window now, where he stood and drew the drapes open.
In the night sky there was a deep-blue light, a kind of royal blue out over the ocean, and stars twinkled in it, the four-pointed stars you might see in paintings. They made me think of the three kings, of the Nativity.
I turned my head and watched him leave by the window. After a couple of seconds I could see quite well, almost as though I was standing at the window myself. He walked out through the glass and into the air and kept going, the sheep tucked under one arm, to where Kay waited, standing on the furling crest of a wave.
“HEY. MAMA. WHERE’S Hurt Sheep?” asked Lena in the morning. “Hurt Sheep was right exactly here!”
“Maybe under the bed. There’s lots of space down there. Remember to check beneath things, when you’re looking,” I said, brushing my teeth.
Later I helped her and we looked everywhere.
No, I thought, no no no. Come on now.
“Maybe she’s gone. Oh! Yeah. I guess she went with Kay,” said Lena, and shrugged, cocking her head.
“What do you mean, love?”
“It’s a good place for Hurt Sheep. That’s OK, Mom. She went with Kay. I told you before. Remember? In the boat, to the white castle.”
We are sending this message to our daughter Kay’s friends, her fellow medical professionals and students, and others who knew her. This is to let you know with our deep sadness, that in the evening of this past Friday, we authorized the medical staff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to remove, Kay from her ventilator and other support equipment. This was the most difficult decision, a parent can ever make, but as she left a “Living Will” document on her Computer, we know for certain, that it is what she wished.
Please do not reply to this Email, because neither Kay’s father, nor I, will continue to use Kay’s Email address, which we would view as a violation, of her personal privacy. We used it only to access her many Contacts, which we could not find, in another way. Neither of us uses an Email, and this is the only time, we will send a message with Kay’s Email Account. However, regular mail can be sent to us at the address below.
Also below, is listed a charity that was close to Kay’s heart, for any gifts made in her memory.
Our deepest thanks to all of you for your visits, cards, flowers, and for the love, you also held for our beloved daughter.