by Lydia Millet
And from the few calls I made while I was panicking, I have the lingering feeling that most of them don’t believe I was trapped into making this deal with Ned. None of my friends here seem to understand the urgency of my fear. They live in a personal world where rules are followed and fairness reigns; they’re mostly white and mostly middle-class, meaning they feel entitled to justice for themselves and expect it for all the other people in their lives. Corruption belongs elsewhere, other countries, Wall Street or Congress, lobbyists.
They tried to be sympathetic when I talked to them, as people have to in the face of a missing child, but I felt, behind their commitment to sympathy, a steady seep of disbelief as though they suspected I was exaggerating or dramatizing. I was failing to stay normal, so either my perceptions were biased or I’d mistaken the facts of the case.
Because their take is that Ned’s a good guy, basically. Too handsome and too charming, one of my friends wrote me, and sometimes you resent him for that. But as soon as you see him again you forget the resentment—you like him again the moment he speaks to you. He’s maybe a bit of a playa, she wrote. There’ve always been rumors, but there are always going to be rumors when a man’s that HOT-HOT-HOT [sic]. Men aren’t monogamous anyway, they’re just not built that way, and I’m sure it was hard to live in the shadow of the light he sheds …
That was the kind of email I got from my Anchorage friends about Ned. He’s not a credible kidnapper to them. They figure he probably just missed his kid. Maybe he missed her desperately.
The first time we saw him was an hour before the press conference to announce he was running. We sat in his campaign office, waiting to go into the room with the small stage and podium where the reporters were going to be; Lena was in modified pageant gear, only half as gaudy as the outfit they’d first put her in, and no ringlets. I was in a suit that made me look like a first lady, and they shellacked my hair with spray so that it was big on top and swooped up at the bottom. The makeup artist gave me pink lips.
Ned came in while they were working on us, making his usual pretense of jocular fatherhood—bending to hug Lena, then grab her face and say “Got your nose!” (She jerked back at this, banging into the hairdresser standing behind her.) He acted as though he’d already greeted me, as though we’d spent hours together earlier that day—for the benefit of the staff, possibly, he squeezed my arm as he passed—preparing himself, maybe, for the public embraces we’d been asked to perform.
We hadn’t seen each other since the day he showed up in Maine. Since before he took my daughter.
“My girls ready?” he asked.
My girls triggered my gag reflex, surprising me, and I fled to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, in that closet-sized half bath full of rolled-up campaign posters and yard signs, but it was close.
Once we were up in front of the flashbulbs and digital recorders, my nausea turned to a stunned thoughtlessness. When Ned spoke I barely registered the content of what he was saying. Everything but Lena, who held my hand, was scenery, and when I embraced that I felt less nervous.
When people say “scenery” they can mean either a stage set or the beauty of the natural world—the two are interchangeable, in the word scenery. In that strange word the entire landscape, up to and including mountains and the moon, is only a background, probably two-dimensional, for the human figures in front of it. But it helped me, in those minutes, to think we were just playacting.
The press didn’t ask many political questions; mostly the reporters there were interested in giving Ned opportunities to talk about his success at business, to brag about his companies, of which the room seemed to be full of boosters. There was one timid question from someone at the back about a drillship that had almost run aground in Unalaska Bay, but the other reporters moved on quickly when Ned waved that one away. The room was stacked with his allies.
Just when I thought we’d got off scot-free and things were winding down, a reporter waved at Lena.
“What do you have to say about your daddy running for office, honey?”
Lena blinked and said nothing, and then, as the silence lingered: “He’s my daddy.”
Her tone was confused, almost questioning, but because she’s a kid and her voice is high and thin, this bland remark gave the room an excuse for aw-shucks laughter. People shuffled out, grinning and shooting the breeze.
WE NEEDED TO be seen out on the town together, so Ned made reservations at upscale restaurants for all our dinners on this trip, except for the very first night when he took us to a pizza place that’s a local favorite.
The “narrative,” as he calls it, meaning the group of fabrications we give out for public consumption, is that I have a dying parent back East, and Lena and I are staying there to help my mother suffer through the time of decline and hospice. My father gets to be the one who’s dying.
“Lymphoma on top of the ol’ dementia,” Ned said.
I hope my mother or Solly don’t see any of the coverage of Ned’s campaign, that none of it makes its way onto YouTube. I imagine how their faces would crumple, seeing my father used that way.
At dinner I had to talk directly to him at close quarters. I had to look closely at his smooth features, his deep-blue eyes that glance off me now, never resting for long, straying around whatever space we’re in as though even a table leg is more compelling than my face. I welcome it in practice, but it hits me how he used to work those eyes so hard to make me believe he was earnest.
The Moose’s Tooth was crowded as usual—there are always lines there—and our booth was sandwiched close between two others. Ned’s fake-Secret Service bodyguards took the nearest two-top, but still we were back to back with other diners and I could tell Ned felt everyone must be watching him, so the fake cheer of our conversation had to pass muster. It was surprisingly difficult to smile and nod and be a wifely mainstay.
I found I couldn’t eat. The restaurant’s pizza, which I used to love, reminded me of egg salad. So I drank my one glass of white wine, picked at a salad and listened to Ned rattle off his campaign reports. My single glass of white wine was mandated by his staff, as it didn’t look feminine to drink beer, it didn’t look Christian to have a second glass, and red might stain my teeth. I drank my quota slowly, savoring it as I watched Lena doodle on a child’s menu and Ned reeled off a list of coming events, repeated sound bites about his exchanges with campaign donors, why they believed in him and his values “in their own words.” There were the usual anecdotes about small-town Americans, a farmer named Milt, a grandma named Pearl. He seemed to be running lines, rehearsing his material with a very small focus group.
After a while I looked up from Lena’s artwork and found myself staring at elements of his face and carefully detesting each. You’d think a facial feature in itself would tend to be inoffensive, particularly a well-formed one, but I discovered that if I concentrated even an earlobe could be invested with spite.
Lena spoke quietly, softly about the plot of a Disney movie while I stared at the earlobe and savored my distaste. There were a couple of moments when I felt deranged looking at him, considering my loathing, but mostly I relished it.
I couldn’t believe we’d make it out of the restaurant without running into someone I knew. Ned had instructed me to prepare my Anchorage friends on the specifics of the narrative even if I didn’t plan to see them; he’d sent me a list of talking points as an attachment to one of his blank emails, including a timeline: when my father became terminally ill, when we were notified of the diagnosis, when we left Anchorage to help my mother take care of him.
The timeline projected forward, even stipulating when my father would enter hospice. These would all occur, of course, in the months before the election, explaining our absences from Alaska.
So I’d emailed my friends and bcc’d Ned as he instructed, putting the talking points into a “personalized letter.” Partly because of this, the prospect of actual in-person encounters dismayed me. As we were rising to go—Ned had
, to my relief, spent half the meal talking into his phone’s headset—we were intercepted by a group of people from city government, civil servant types who were mainly Ned’s contacts but whom I’d spoken to a few times at parties. Their faces betrayed a certain hesitation at my presence, which made me wonder who Ned was sleeping with these days, whether these people knew the marriage was a sham. I wondered how it was possible that everyone didn’t know, since Lena and I had been away two full years. Yet they acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary and I reminded myself that Ned took care of business, Ned kept his ducks in a row. For the past few months we’d been staying with my terminally ill father … the narrative, unbeknownst to me, has been in place for some time.
I made my excuses and led Lena away, Ned grabbing his jacket and glad-handing behind us.
WHILE LENA AND I sleep in the house that used to be ours, Ned’s supposedly staying at a B&B tucked away in the foothills of east Anchorage. He thought we’d be noticed coming and going from a hotel, whereas he can move around discreetly. I’m not sure why, since he’s the public figure with the striking face and still lives full-time in the city. On the other hand, so far no one has found out that we’re sleeping separately, so maybe he’s correct in his calculations.
He has a “house,” these days, not a house, much as he has a “family.” His car, driven by the chauffeur, had dropped us off and pulled away quietly in the dark: entering the building I felt stealthy, though it’s hard to feel stealthy in puffer coats and mukluks.
Lena and I have been sharing the master bedroom, which feels like a hotel room—as though no one familiar has slept there before, certainly not me. Along with the rest of the place, its redecoration was drastic. There’s the skin of a polar bear on the wall—Ned must have bought it from a native, I thought, or possibly on the black market—a bold choice, given the politics. Maybe it signals his radicalism; in the bedroom, maybe he reveals his radical anti-government core. But it doesn’t quite ring true, since the king bed’s piled high with satiny showroom cushions that only his interior decorator could have chosen. They do feature masculine colors.
Lena fell right to sleep despite the bearskin, curled up with Lucky Duck, and I went back to the living room, where I flicked on the gas fire in the fireplace. I took a bottle of wine out of Ned’s new wine refrigerator, poured myself a glass, and sat on the sofa with a blanket, feet tucked under me, to call Main Linda.
She said the mood among the motel guests has changed, it’s gone from a support group to the scene of a dispute. Navid and Kay were a couple, and now they’re estranged. Navid says Kay kept her understanding of the voice from him—“intentionally, privately kept her knowledge to herself,” as he apparently put it, like a “hoarder of information.” Kay’s hurt by this and says she never hid anything.
Meanwhile Burke and Gabe argue that Kay’s assertion that the voice is language, the language of sentience, is unimportant. Of course it’s language, that’s a truism, Burke wrote in an email to me. Words. Yeah. We know. The question is where that language is coming from.
“Do you realize how Regina heard?” said Main Linda in her gruff voice. “The whole time I thought she was talking about a kid, when she talked about Terence, I honestly thought it was a retarded kid, sorry, developmentally disabled. Turns out that Terence was one of those little, yappy dogs. Probably wore ribbons. And miniature vests. She heard the voice of God from a Pomeranian! Or maybe a shih tzu. She showed us a picture on her phone. She used to carry him around in a Fendi handbag.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. I thought of a curly dog trotting around at Regina’s heels, speaking the way the voice had spoken to me.
“It died,” added Main Linda.
A linguistics scholar had been called in, she said, an expert who’d been talking to Kay. He seemed, said Main Linda, to be somewhat outside the mainstream of linguistic studies, though still (she’d looked it up) fairly well published in peer-reviewed journals. He had theories about grammar genes, about animal communication systems.
“The FOXP2 gene,” said Linda. “This English family, I guess, has this speech defect down through the generations? And it ends up they have a defective copy of one gene. Or maybe it’s a protein, but anyway, I guess the idea is language is maybe genetic. I only half-listened. Don reached out to this linguistics guy because Kay, I guess, does a speaking-in-tongues thing. Like, she can spew out a bunch of languages she isn’t supposed to know. Stuff she supposedly heard from Vasquez. Plus she can do insanely complicated chemistry diagrams. Idiot savant shit. All Greek to me. Hey. Can we talk about normal crap?”
“We have consultants who pick out our clothes for us,” I told her lightly. “And there’s a family photo shoot for some glossy local rag, basically a real-estate brochure. Tomorrow. Ned’s using someone else’s dog. Can you believe it? A dog-for-hire!”
“That’s low,” said Main Linda. “A trophy dog? Is that even legal?”
“A golden retriever.”
“Hope God doesn’t talk through it.”
“Do you believe Don knows more than he says?” I asked, pouring my second glass of wine.
I’d gotten restless sitting and was cruising through the rooms, taking a closer tour of Ned’s model home. There was a picture of him fishing, the standard fishing photo with a giant salmon dangling from one hand. Kenai Peninsula, read the caption. Ned never fished. He hated the smell of fish and never ate it. A guide must have taken him and he must have learned some lingo to be able to shoot the shit with other fishers and hunters. Everyone fished in Alaska, practically, in season salmon falls from the skies here like rain and everyone has a smoker in their backyard, but Ned hadn’t allowed fish in our kitchen.
“Don wants to keep things friendly, that seems to be his role, you know?” said Main Linda. “Moderator.”
“I don’t see how any of this can be proved or not proved,” I said. “It was a phenomenon. But it’s not as though any of us were given instructions. It’s not like we have a task to do. Is it?”
I stopped in the hallway. Beyond the standard fishing photo, the standard hunting photo (deer on truck), the photo of Ned in crampons hiking up a glacier (looking down from the heights, smiling), there were numerous family photos. Some of them looked like upscale versions of mall shots while some were “candid” action shots: Ned, me, and Lena. All of us together, in different variations. Lena was a baby on a rug, Lena was a toddler in Ned’s arms, all three of us stood beside a Christmas tree; there we were cross-country skiing, with Lena standing on a pair of junior skis, poles held in snowflake-mittened hands.
Except that none of the scenes, with the exception of Lena sitting on the rug all by herself, were real.
Ned had never done any of those things with us.
“Oh my God,” I said.
I set my wineglass down on a table and flicked on the overhead light, leaned in to look closely. The pictures looked authentic. They were carefully framed and artfully staggered on the wall. Some seemed recent; they featured Lena’s face pretty much the way she looked now. Ned must have taken the photos from my phone and used those images.
While I was sleeping a drugged sleep, when he was taking Lena.
Or he had open access to my phone.
“There’s a whole wall of family pictures,” I said. “They never happened at all. Family vacations, skiing—there’s us on matching snowmobiles and us fishing. There’s Ned with a dead buck and a truck and rifle. Redneck wholesome. They’ve been messed with to put us together when we never were. I don’t believe it.”
“Brazen,” said Main Linda. “That guy’s got some big ones on him, you gotta admit.”
After we hung up I took pictures of the pictures, sat on the couch and scrolled through looking at them, comparing the faces in them to the faces already on my phone’s camera roll: Lena with her snowman, Lena on the beach, Lena with Faneesha the UPS driver. I texted a couple of matches to Will, nearing the bottom of the wine bottle, and then called him.
He communicated his reserve with few words. He wasn’t happy that we’d gone up to Alaska, wasn’t happy with anything concerning contact between Ned and us. Ned is probably sociopathic, he has suggested. He feels no empathy.
And I have to admit, when I find a list on some website of the behavioral characteristics of a sociopath, there’s only one box I wouldn’t check for my husband.
Superficial charm and good intelligence
Absence of delusions
Absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations
Unreliability, untruthfulness, and insincerity
Lack of remorse and shame
Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
General poverty in major affective reactions
Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
Sex life impersonal and poorly integrated
Failure to follow any life plan
We have no control over his actions, Will reminds me, no one does, possibly not even him. Much of a sociopath’s game is aimed at controlling people and outcomes, Will says. All you can do about a sociopath is steer clear of him. Ned’s a time bomb, Will has insisted since the abduction, and we don’t know that it’s finished exploding.
Still, neither of us was able to come up with another course of action for me—not one that wouldn’t risk Lena being taken again or hinge on police cooperation.
So here I am.
Now almost every piece of information I give Will about Ned seems to escalate his anxiety, so I find myself trying to avoid mentions—from thousands of miles away there’s no use alarming him. He’s done too much to help already: I’m confused about why he has time for all this for us, for me. I wonder what I’ve ever done for him other than need his help.
