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.