“Yes, well, that was a mistake.”
“Did my husband make it a rule? Is that why no one on the grounds looks me in the eye, says more than a few polite words?”
“What do you think?”
Stung, Kacey bit her lip, but then Amara continued. “I do not mean to be rude. I want to know what you think.”
Slowly, Kacey said, “I think yes, he did.” She understood, then, why Amara had pressed her to this answer, because of the obvious logical consequences of it: he wanted her to be isolated, to make him the center of her world. “Will you get in trouble?”
“Oh, me. I am always in trouble. We all are. Ever since we began working for him.”
“Can’t you quit if you don’t like it here?”
“It is not so easy.” The lamb on her shoulder struggled, nuzzling Amara’s cheek. “It wants milk. I need to work.”
She started to walk away when Kacey stopped her again. “Yesterday,” Kacey said, “you admitted that you followed me. Why?”
“I will tell you,” Amara said, “if you help me with this lamb.”
Kacey had no idea what she could do to help, but the lamb was adorable, so she said yes and followed Amara to the barn. It was lambing season, and there were many new mothers, their woolen bellies distended, pairs of lambs nursing at them in their pens. One sheep stood alone in her pen, bleating. With a grim look, Amara set the lamb in the pen next to her. On wobbly legs, the lamb picked its way over the straw and tried to nudge its head under her belly. The sheep shied away. Again the lamb tried to nurse. Again the sheep wouldn’t let it. “I thought so,” Amara said, and took a pocketknife from her pants and opened it. Kacey cried out, unsure what Amara might do to the lamb or sheep, but Amara just shook her head at her, pointed to a corner of the pen, and said, “Bring that to me.”
It was a dead lamb. Kacey saw it now, a creamy lump in the straw. Horrified, she refused.
“Listen to me. Kacey. Can you listen? You see all those flowers, all his riches, and you think,What a wonderful life. No. It is a trap. That is not a life.Thisis life. This stillborn lamb, whose mother is right here, full of milk. This livinglamb, whose own mother is in another pen and rejected her. This living lamb needs a mother, and this mother needs a lamb. But she needs to think the lamb belongs to her. Help me fool her.” Amara’s face lost some of its gruff impatience. More gently, she said, “We will do a good thing. It is not nothing to do a good thing in this world.”
So Kacey brought her the dead lamb and watched, stomach clenched, as Amara skinned it. Then Kacey held the living, motherless lamb in place as Amara, hands bloody, settled the pink skin of the dead lamb over the living lamb’s head, its body. Like magic, when the little lamb with its grisly coat toddled up again to the milk-full ewe, she bent her nose to it, breathing in and out, and let the baby nurse.
Kacey’s hands smelled. They were bloody, too. The lamb drank and drank.
Amara said, “I followed you because I was curious. You are lasting longer than his previous wife.”
Her husband had never mentioned an ex-wife. Kacey didn’t feel jealous, but worried, because what else might he be hiding from her if he had omitted this fact? “Why did you call meprey? Did he treat his ex-wife badly? When was the divorce?”
Amara rubbed her throat as though it hurt. “I have already said more than I should.” A smudge of lamb’s blood marked the base of her throat.
“Why did you say anything at all?”
Amara’s dark eyes considered her, and it seemed as if she might explain, but then, with her bloody hand, she flickedthe braid over her shoulder so that it hung straight down her back. She left Kacey in the pen with the bleating mother, the skinned carcass of the stillborn lamb, and the milk-full lamb who finally stopped nursing, flopped to the staw, and fell asleep, eyes blissfully closed.
Kacey walked back toward the main house. The staff, as usual, moved around her but did not look her in the face. It was as if they were sleepwalking. Kacey remembered the story of Sleeping Beauty, how the entire castle and its city and all its denizens slept while the princess slept, and woke only when she was roused from the evil spell.
Kacey passed her husband’s studio. An ex-wife. What other secrets did he hide? She set one hand on the doorknob. It turned beneath her pressure. The door was unlocked. Yet she snatched her hand back from the doorknob, as if scalded, and did not open the door.
Sam must have seen her walking down the road to the guesthouse from a window. Before she was even close to the driveway, he flung open the door and barreled down the drive into her arms. “Where have you been?” he accused. He pulled her inside and showed her his room with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, pale in the midday sunshine, and an assortment of toys, all brand new: Lego bricks and Playmobils and magnetic building blocks that hadn’t existed when she was his age. “A chauffeur takes me to school every day.” His brown eyes widened—in imitation, she thought,of how other kids saw him when they drove up, or how he imagined they saw him. “In afaaaancycar.”
Kacey’s mother was watchingThe Bacheloron a flatscreen TV with such high definition that the people on it looked real. Kacey’s mother looked up with a smile. Kacey wished she were little again, small enough never to question that her mother could protect her. “Did you forget about us?” her mother said.
Kacey sat beside her and rested her head on her shoulder, breathing in the mom-scent of Dove soap and Jergens lotion. “No,” she said. “I missed you.”
“I want to see your house!” Sam said. “Let’s walk there right now.”
Kacey’s mom patted her head and shifted away. “I’m watching my show.”
“That show is boring! I’m bored! Can we go, Kacey?”
Her husband had forbidden her family to visit... but only when he was there, right? Well, no. He had said he didn’t want her family at the main house. But he said it was because they would be loud and distract him from his work, so his reason couldn’t hold true at the moment.
“Yes,” she told Sam. “Let’s go, you and me.”