FOR A WHILE LENA AND I ARE GOING TO STAY WITH WILL. I DON’T want to move back into the motel—memories of the kidnapping give the place an edge of chilled hardness for me, replacing the clean sea air, the pine needles I loved for their scent and sharpness, with an atmosphere of dread.
Will wants to be my bodyguard, and if he had his way I’d never be out of his sight. This has a cloying aspect, but more and more, during our last days in New York, I found myself hugging the sides of the buildings as I hurried down the sidewalk. I’d catch myself glancing around to make sure that no one was following me, no one was looking at me too purposefully.
I may not be any safer in Maine, but I want to see trees again that weren’t planted by city planners. I’d like to take Lena sledding. I remember Will’s house as neat and tasteful, floor lamps instead of fluorescents, old rugs and a lot of bookshelves. And next to Solly’s apartment it’s the Taj Mahal.
I’VE FOUND a replacement for the hypnosis sessions and this afternoon, our first of three days with my parents in Providence, tried it for the first time. Lena was sitting at my father’s feet putting on a show with puppets she’d made out of paper bags; Will was fixing a broken step on the porch. So I retreated to my childhood bedroom, which still bore the dusty traces of my teenage self—the pocked bulletin board that had held printouts of pop-star faces, snapshots of me with my arms around friends, a stray ribbon or two.
One ribbon that’s been pinned to my corkboard for twenty years says just PARTICIPANT.
I lay down carefully on the bed on my back, stuck in my earbuds, and cued up a twenty-minute hypnosis track downloaded from a website: “Goodbye to Stress.”
All it did was put me to sleep, but I’ll try again tonight.
Later Will and my mother cornered me in the kitchen; she plied me with peppermint tea and announced she wanted to have a serious talk about “personal security.”
Somehow Will had convinced her I need protection. At least, she said, I could agree that there was a risk and humor her by letting Will install a home security system. Then she could rest easy, she said (and here she looked careworn and shaky—more elderly, I realized, than she ever had before). She already had my father to worry about; she didn’t want to have to worry about Lena and me too.
I pictured a couple of sluggish rent-a-cops pulling up fifteen minutes too late, shooting the breeze about their personal lives as they casually dismounted from a company car whose doors were emblazoned with a bogus-looking shield. I don’t like the idea of being guarded by electronics, of being sealed off from the world outside. More surveillance, I was thinking—all it’s done in the past is harm us. It was surveillance that allowed my daughter to be taken from me.
But my mother looked drained. Resistance was futile.
“It’s already being set up,” said Will gravely.
Panic welled up: I’d done everything Ned asked, everything I could possibly do to meet his demands, and still maybe it wasn’t enough.
My mother advised me to carry mace whenever I go out.
“Or maybe pepper spray, dear,” she amended. “I think it’s better. For their health. The criminals’, I mean.”
Hypnosis is “. . . a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state.” —Encyclop?dia Britannica, 2004
It was a quiet and uneventful visit to Kay, who lay, much as you’d expect, motionless on a stainless-steel bed hooked up to machines. We had her to ourselves, as her parents had just gone to get lunch, a nurse told me. Kay’s face was a ghostly shell, but Lena sat beside her bravely and held her hand. She only cried later, as we were walking out. I’d told her Kay took too much medicine by mistake.
The private room didn’t bear much resemblance to the one I’d envisioned under hypnosis—no surprise there—but one thing struck me as we were leaving: a pile of knitting, two needles sticking out of it, on a low shelf on her beside table.
The yarn was blue-gray.
WE HAD a car accident today.
Or almost had an accident, I should say. We avoided an accident, but it was close.
We were maybe half an hour northeast of Boston on the freeway. It was my turn to drive and I was fiddling a bit with the radio when abruptly the car started weaving back and forth across the lanes, fishtailing. My right hand flew back to the wheel as I felt the loss of control in the pit of my stomach and tried to keep the car straight. I almost hit someone on my left but veered away just in time, and then the car almost crashed into a guardrail on our right.
In the end we veered away from that too, luckily, and somehow I steered us onto the first off-ramp, pulling over onto a wide shoulder without any more near-collisions.
It happened too fast for Lena—startled out of a nap by the car’s fishtailing motion—even to get frightened. When I’d pulled up the emergency brake I turned to look at her; she smiled at me uncertainly and rubbed her eyes.