IN A SUDDEN acceleration they started holding the meetings twice a day. I built the meetings into my routine, though I always had my cell phone ringer on high waiting for Ned to call. Part of me lived only for the second when he’d call again, or even better—a perfect ending—the investigators would call and tell me everything was solved, Lena was there with them, safe and sound and beyond excited to see me.
My limbic brain waited for that, the call that would effect reanimation, while the rest of the neural circuits were dedicated to not feeling alone while Will worked, marking time as I listened and watched at the meetings. I abandoned this journal. I had no wish to think, I had no wish to record. Until I found her I would distract myself with whatever this was, some talk-therapy hunt for God or even more ominous possibilities—none of it frightened me anymore. That was the difference: the second-worst thing (not the worst: I blocked the worst) had already happened. Whatever phenomenon they were painstakingly trying to uncover, there in the cafeteria beside the folding table of cookies, it was easier to consider than Lena.
Once I would have paid through the nose for a cogent explanation of the voice; now I sought that understanding mostly to stop agonizing over what I couldn’t do or was not doing to find her. Part of me stubbornly refused to believe I couldn’t just walk until I found her—treading through snow, knocking at doors—and felt a rotten guilt. Part of me couldn’t believe she wasn’t still neatly indicated, as I was, by a small blue dot on the map on my phone, moving as I did, going where I went.
I grilled myself over my incompetence, how I had come to let myself be roofied. Nights when I wasn’t with Will were the worst, but I couldn’t ask him to take care of me every minute so I pretended to need “time alone” some nights, whenever I could stand to. I often passed the time by retracing my steps in the hours before she was taken, seeing a simple blueprint of our room from above. In bird’s-eye view I moved around performing mundane actions, the oval of my head between the knobs of my shoulders, the tips of my shoes beneath. There was Lena, a smaller oval, the same shapes in miniature.
I tried to reframe each movement to determine how the drug was introduced, think of myself brushing my teeth—was it in the toothpaste?—or brushing my hair. Maybe it hadn’t been a pill at all, maybe it was some kind of narcotic that was absorbed through the skin. I played back that hour before I went to bed, when Lena was already sleeping. It couldn’t have been the toothpaste because she uses a different one—a children’s flavor called Silly Strawberry—and she must have been sedated, as I was, otherwise she would have woken up as they carried her out, she would have kicked and screamed.
Sedated or not, I told myself, I would have been woken by a scream. Since she was a year old I’ve jerked awake at the slightest sound, a murmur or one-word whisper of sleep talk.
The cops had taken away the half-empty wine bottle and the plastic motel cup I’d drunk from, claiming they were going to test them; the wine was all I remembered eating or drinking, after our restaurant dinner one town over.
But they didn’t report any results. They were useless, Don said, they’ve been bought off or distracted or co-opted, he had no idea how but it seemed to be the case.
There was also the possibility of a needle, that I was injected while I slept and never found the pinprick hole. I couldn’t figure it out no matter how many times I set up that blueprint in my mind’s eye. No matter how often I took us through the paces, I could never narrow it down.
We never found Ned’s recording device, and together the two unknowns obsessed me.
WHAT IF ONE of the aspen trees was cut down, while the rest of the organism remained? Did the remainder grieve?
TRYING TO AVOID images of how Lena was living in that moment I lay on top of the neatly made motel bed and stared at the ceiling. I thought how, in our normal, middle-class circumstance, we almost relish the idea of dark forces that lurk in the shadows. We watch movies, read books made glamorous by black-and-red palettes of horror, the hint of an otherworldly malice running like quicksilver through the marrow of our bones. We like to call the dark rumors demonic, like to have monsters to fear instead of time, aging, the falling away of companions.
Even people who scoff at the supernatural can embrace the demonic with a gothic fervor, hold in themselves an abiding fascination with that beauty of darkness and blood.
BIG LINDA HAD been working, she said—her work for decades had been training orcas like Shamu. She’s pursued that vocation for most of her adult life.
She hadn’t been doing the shows for a while, though, she’d gotten middle-aged and taken on more of a supervisory role, because to get in the pool with the animals you had to be in peak physical form. There’d been human deaths, of course, she said, maybe you read about them, saw them in the news, and trainers knew the real story, that it wasn’t trainer error that caused those deaths but rather psychosis, because the great, predatory whales lived captive lives of aching, maddening frustration, shut up in their small cement tanks.