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