by Lydia Millet
I wrote down the address of our house in Anchorage, where as far as I knew Ned still lived. I had no idea where he’d been staying locally—there weren’t other motels nearby, said Don, you had to drive at least half an hour for the closest lodgings open this time of year.
“Or he could be staying with local contacts,” said Will. “That mechanic, maybe? John something … Pruell, maybe,” he told the police.
“Ned—my husband isn’t the type to sleep in his car,” I mumbled. “He never stays in hotels under four stars.”
The policemen looked at each other.
“That narrows it down,” said one. “He ain’t in Maine.”
I had a tin ear. My sense of humor had left with Lena.
We were surprised at how soon the cops went away again. I’d thought they would stay near, I thought there’d be a task force, something—in movies policemen walked around the house or apartment of the kidnapped child’s family, tapping phones, watching at windows. But in fact the two policemen left after their brief interview of me and an even briefer search for the concealed microphone (they found nothing). Their expressions were mild.
“We’ll do our best to find your daughter, ma’am,” said one. But I didn’t like how he said it—casually, as though it wasn’t life or death.
In the silence after the lobby doors swung shut Don said Ned had to have got to them, that their placid demeanor was unnatural. He said we should assume they weren’t going to move quickly and I had to just call the FBI. But I wasn’t so sure, I was more afraid of Ned’s capabilities than they were, so instead I went online and then I borrowed Will’s phone, distrusting my own. I hired a private investigation company based in Portland.
They’d assign a team right away, they said.
I called my parents next. My mother seemed shell-shocked, as though Lena’s abduction was a sheer unreality, and offered to help with money. Her voice was so faint that I could barely hear her.
I COULDN’T SIT in the motel, I found, waiting for someone else to look for my daughter. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone who didn’t already know what had happened.
So Will and I got into his truck, a beater with worn Mexican blankets over the seats, and at my request he drove slowly up and down the icy streets, up and down, back and forth, prowling. The streets were fairly empty of traffic, only the silence of blinking Christmas lights on house fronts and in yards. There were teams of reindeer pulling sleighs, yellow outlines of bells.
Now and then someone would honk behind us or angrily pass, swerving to make a point. It felt as bleak as it looked, the houses spread out, the odd signal flashing the white walking figure to an empty corner. But I had it in my head that I needed to drive every street, and Will was willing to humor me, likely knowing I was on the edge of hysteria.
There was a worn map in the glove box, there was a half-dried-out pink highlighter in the armrest compartment, and Will pulled over and showed me how to mark the route we’d already driven. Even though it signified nothing, since we weren’t knocking on doors or looking in windows, I colored furiously. As he drove I stared out the window, checking driveways for black SUVs, trying to imagine the potential of each business or house to be harboring her. I tried to intuit Lena’s presence. Would I feel it? Would the other animals’ senses come to my aid now—detection of the Earth’s magnetic field, navigation by smell?
When we stopped at a stop sign or rare traffic light I’d trail the highlighter down the map, along the road we’d driven, which gave me a brief, businesslike feeling. Then I’d raise my face from the map. The next moment, I thought, the next moment it will be … I willed myself to see a face at the window, to see her small figure in the puffer coat.
“We need to stop now and go home,” said Will after a while. He said it bluntly but kindly.
I was a child myself now: as soon as you were a victim, as soon as you were deeply hurt, you were a child again.
Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.
IT WASN’T CLEAR what Ned wanted to accomplish. He’d ordered me to cancel the divorce filing, sure, but that could easily be restarted once Lena was returned. And any contract would have been signed under duress, and not binding.
After his first texts I heard nothing for days. Christmas passed without anyone seeming to celebrate it. Or if they did, I didn’t see. It passed and faded and never was.
I went over and over how my girl must be feeling, alone with someone she barely knew, whether her father loomed as a threatening figure or had made himself charming and likable to reassure her. I worked to craft this kind of picture for myself, Ned as a babysitter, performing an imitation of affection—I sculpted this image painstakingly, smoothing my fingers along the edges, pushing it into a shape I could live with. But it collapsed whenever I wasn’t vigilant and I wondered what he was telling her, what particular architecture of lies she was living in and what part of them she believed.
I couldn’t help recalling Ned’s phone conversation with my mother, his sly undermining of me, whether he was doing the same with Lena. But it was her relation to the whole world I feared for most, the way she might be changed. I got a prescription for tranquilizers the day after she was taken and tried, with Will’s help, to make a routine for myself around the investigators’ progress reports, which they gave to me twice a day.
Not even the voice had affected me like this, made my whole body weak with terror or my knees buckle whenever the knowledge of it struck me. It was my abject state that took me to Don’s meetings. Between the kidnapping and the first meeting I attended there was only one exchange with Don about the hearing of voices—one moment when he bowed his head to me and apologized for having kept me out.
“You’ve been in recovery longer than most of them,” he said. “You’ve done far better with it. For them it’s still new. They didn’t bring you in before because they weren’t ready.”
I said nothing to Will about the meetings, didn’t even intend to go myself—I only started to attend them because I’d been by myself in my room and, without Lena, was hit by the lightning bolt that had been striking me constantly since she was taken. It was a stupefaction that refused to diminish: as soon as I had a loose, idle moment I was scorched down the center by remorse, burnt black by the feeling of guilt. My fault. My fault.
At those moments I’d do anything for distraction, and so it happened that one time I left my room headed for anywhere—looking for the moving figures of people, the sounds they made, the industry of normal lives—and as I passed through the lobby I saw the café door cracked open.
The tables had been pushed back to the walls, chairs set out in a circle. I’d been to an Al-Anon meeting once keeping a friend company, and this had the same encounter-group feeling. There were baked goods and coffee arrayed on one of the tables, a hot-water container and a basket of tea bags. I settled myself on a chair a bit back from the rest—an outlier, satellite chair—and as the fog of panic receded, I took hold of myself and worked not to think of Lena. One minute, I said to myself, one minute first, then two; one minute at a time, one day was an eternity.
Navid wasn’t there, but the rest of the guests were accounted for.
“It’s been four months since I retired,” said Big Linda.
It didn’t grow clear to me then where they’d heard their voices or how, only that the content of their perceptions varied. They’d heard different sounds, drawn different conclusions and had different responses. Linda had heard a voice at work, somehow, and told no one until much later; Burke had told Gabe about hearing a voice immediately, and Gabe had believed him schizophrenic … but in fact, that first day, I barely heard what was said. I drifted on the back of my Valium, lulled by the drone of voices.
And my fear of a cult, at least, was assuaged by the drabness of the plastic chair edge in front of me and the matter-of-fact trudge of Main Linda over to the snacks table. There was no grim power to be felt amid that mundane scene of guests selecting b
aked goods beneath the tube fluorescents. Main Linda piled sandwich cookies onto a paper plate printed with rainbows, then returned to her chair licking the powdered sugar off a finger.
Don didn’t address a single word to me at that initial meeting, just let me sit there behind the ranks, saying nothing.
Not for the first time I thought how groups of people had a habit of making even the exceptional banal. Was it a national characteristic or a trait of all humanity? Crowds could be grandiose, that was true, but small groups in small rooms … it took me back to my parents’ church, where I’d sat bored and staring around, looking high and low for any object of interest. More often than not I’d failed to find such an object and ended up gazing at the dirty Kleenex wadded into someone’s sleeve. I remembered the backs of my legs sweating on the smooth wood of the pew, heard wet coughs off to one side, saw dandruff on shoulders and, in sandal weather, hoary toenails.
Still: there’d been hymns, and some of them were dull but many were beautiful and sad. Although I hadn’t felt that sadness till after, long after we had left the church.
It was remembered music that was beautiful.
6
UNCLEAN SPIRITS ENTERED THE SWINE
THE INVESTIGATORS IMPRESSED ME WITH A SENSE OF COMPETENCE as I looked at their faces on the screen or scanned the neat pdf records of their efforts and expenditures, the rows of line items. I thought how easy I must be to fool—experience had shown this with sparkling transparence.
My questions were lame and I was often sedated. So I made Don and Will, and also the Lindas, ask questions for me. They huddled around and gazed into the laptop’s camera. The investigators’ clean, concerned faces stared back at us from a gray office only a couple hours’ drive away. Were they really present, I wondered, in an office building in Portland? Or were they a shallow illusion of service?
Absurd how all transactions had become talking heads, the whole culture a mass of flat images of heads with mouths moving: we barely needed our bodies. There were hardly even dialogues anymore, rather there were a million monologues a day, each head with its mouth, each mouth with its talk. Still I listened with obsessive attention as the investigators fielded the questions, tried to show us they were pursuing all possible avenues.
Whether or not they were skilled or diligent, they hadn’t found Lena by the next time Ned texted me.
He wanted to talk, he wrote.
Four days had gone by, the longest days I had lived.
WILL HAD TO DIAL the unfamiliar, prepaid number for me, my hands were shaking so hard, and when we finally got Ned on the line he wouldn’t talk long—maybe in case someone was trying to trace the call. I don’t know.
“I’munna need a photo op at the announcement, at least one TV show in Anchorage, down the road. Ads, maybe. Events availability. Magazine profiles, what have you. Like I said. And if I don’t get ’em, this is just what happens, honey. Kid’s just not with you anymore. She’s gone. There’s no cops out there gonna help you. It’s my call what happens. If you want to fix it, I need your full onboarding.”
Onboarding, I saw Will mouth silently, gazing down.
“Anything,” I said. I could barely breathe—I was taking shallow breaths, quickly, afraid I might hyperventilate. “Give her the phone. Please. Ned. Please.”
“She’s having a good time with her toys,” said Ned. His tone was indifferent.
“I need to hear her voice, Ned, and I need her back, please. I’ll do whatever. Today, Ned, please, I need her back today. You win. Completely, Ned, you won, you win. Please?”
There was a long silence. With my free hand I grabbed the fabric of my skirt and scrunched my fingernails into it, into the tops of my thighs.
“Some other time, darlin’,” said Ned. “I want you to recall exactly how this feels.”
“It’s killing me,” I said.
But he’d hung up.
YOU DIDN’T NEED a picture ID to take a six-year-old kid onto a plane, I said to Will, perched on a stool at his kitchen island, a bottle of wine open in front of me. The shaking had stopped and I was self-medicating. There had been a small, odd reassurance in Ned’s saying she was playing with her toys, maybe just that I was able to picture her. You didn’t even need a birth certificate—nothing. No piece of paper attesting to the child’s identity, the child’s relationship to you. Unless you were trying to leave the country, they didn’t ask for anything. You could walk onto a plane with any kid in the world, as long as that kid didn’t open her mouth and give you away.
And the country was endless.
Children have no identity here, I said, no one cares who they are. Although the same could be said of adults, I added. More or less, the only interest our country takes in our identities is as taxpayers, consumers or criminals, I said. They could be anywhere, the investigators had reminded us, anywhere in the country, they could be in Vegas or Boca—they could be back in Anchorage.
I couldn’t easily picture Lena standing quietly while Ned checked her in at a flight gate, but it was possible. He might have made threats. He might have threatened her. Or drugged her again.
Or she might be somewhere offshore, I thought. Ned might have a boat. She might be on the ocean.
“Don’t think along those lines,” said Will, and put his hand over mine. “You have to stop yourself going down that road. There’s nothing helpful there.”
I looked at him and felt flattened and paralyzed: depression weakened my limbs. My whole body felt inert with the exception of a core of fear that burned with its own perpetual energy like a star being born, born, and reborn.
“Come,” said Will.
I stood with difficulty, with lassitude, barely moving until he took my arm. He made me lie down on the couch across from his fireplace, covered me in a blanket.
“But I have to be at the motel,” I said. “In case he shows up with her.”
Will said nothing, because he didn’t need to: I could hear the words he won’t without anyone saying them. He only lifted the back of my head and set a pillow beneath it, smoothing a lock of hair from my eyes. He turned off the overhead lights, leaving only a table lamp or two, and sat down in an armchair somewhere behind me, where he began reading. I gazed at the fire, absorbed in its abstraction, and listened to the crisp cut of a page turning.
Most women probably wanted a man who acted more like a woman, I considered—more like a mother, even. You wanted to be taken care of. As long as he wasn’t womanish, I thought, as long as he had central masculine characteristics such as strength and confidence, in most other respects an ideal man was more like a woman.
Later I fell asleep.
MORE THAN BEFORE, with Lena gone I lost myself in research. Whatever was said in the meetings was a catalyst for my searches. There was something necessary in the order that research gave me, in the finding of lists, the recording of definitions. This is what x is. This is what y is.
Soothing.
A recent area of development is the discovery that … the ability to produce “sentences” is not limited to humans. The first good evidence of syntax in nonhumans, reported in 2006, is from the greater spot-nosed monkey (Cercopithecus nictitans) of Nigeria, showing that some animals can take discrete units of communication and build them up into a sequence that then carries a different meaning from the individual “words.” —The Times of London 12.2013
AT THE SECOND meeting I’d taken twice the usual dosage of my tranquilizers but I’d also been drinking coffee steadily.
I still sat back from the others, mug in hand, but this time I leaned forward on my chair, almost perched. I succeeded in sealing off my anxiety over Lena only by pretending that my life with her, my devoted focus on her, did not exist at all. Fortified in this way, holding an image in my mind of a wall placed between emotion and me, between my life and myself—by blocking out my life outside the room—I was able to listen with a manufactured singularity of purpose.
Regina spoke first. I’d barely heard her talk b
efore but now she was painfully eager. She has what I guess is a Dutch accent, and what she said corrected me: it wasn’t just preverbal infants. There too my assumptions had been unfounded.
I listened to what she said and it never struck me to disbelieve. She’d been exposed through someone named Terence, and though she didn’t describe him he clearly wasn’t a baby. She was an ad exec who began hearing the voice when Terence was with her in her corner office. At first it spoke to her only in ditties and slogans; whenever she was with Terence, these ditties and slogans were audible, though he didn’t seem to hear them. Almost right away it began happening when they were at home, too, she said, so now I assumed Terence was her husband—that they had worked together and gone home together too.
The man she’d come with sat across from her, nodding. But he couldn’t be Terence; the way she talked about the absent person was almost patronizing. She’d cycled through various fixed ideas, she said, one of which had to do with wires in the walls, the audio of her TVs, computers, and many other interlinked devices. In service to that idea she’d hired contractors to tear into the walls, looking for speakers, receivers, anything that could be transmitting—she watched the workers like a hawk to determine whether wires existed where they should not. She’d pretended to be opening the walls for other reasons, she’d actually pretended to want to renovate, she said, had her company pay through the nose to renovate her corner office. Then she renovated her home, where, as a pretext for opening the walls and having the electricians carefully inspect all wiring, she paid to install complex systems that controlled the house’s appliances, temperature, and lights.
