Traps (17 page)

Lynn watches the dog, and Vivian watches Lynn.

Sweetie Pie is sniffing along the ground now near the chain-link, at the nose of a Border collie. Their noses touch and press against each other and then separate, sniffing. The Border collie barks, and then they repeat it. Lynn goes on staring, although she can see now that Vivian is looking at her, watching her watch.

“I’m sorry he came here,” the girl says.

Lynn waves a hand to bat the thought away, keeping her eyes on the dogs.

Vivian says, “I didn’t ever think that would happen. I didn’t know he could find me. He did it from my cell phone, he said.”

Sweetie Pie is nosing along the fence line inch by inch now, turning the corner and continuing to sniff, getting her sightless bearings.

Vivian says, “How did you know he was my boyfriend?”

“I didn’t. But if I was wrong, then I was just an old crazy lady, which I’m perfectly willing to be.” She turns toward the house and starts walking. “You hungry?”

Vivian follows her. “Plus I probably look like just the type who would make a mistake like him,” she says morosely.

“Oh, well, ‘mistake.’ Who doesn’t make those? Do you like rice cakes?”

“I’m older than you said I was, too—seventeen. Old enough to know better.”

“Well, there’s no age cutoff for stumbling.” She starts up the porch steps and grabs her empty mug. “How about peanut butter?”

“And now he knows where you live.”

“Or chips and bean dip?”

“Even if I leave right now, that stays behind.”

“I have cereal too,” Lynn says, opening the screen door. “All kinds of cold cereal, but you have to tolerate soy milk. You just tell me what sounds good.”

In the kitchen Vivian flops down in a chair, and Lynn sets her coffee mug in the sink and opens all the cupboards. “Bean burritos?”

She doesn’t look at Vivian, who is holding her head in her hands at the table. She plows on, “Or I could do another shake if you liked it at all.”

Vivian says, “I’ve been enough trouble already.”

Lynn ignores her, pulling out a box of granola and another of corn flakes. She takes the sleeve of rice cakes and the jar of peanut butter from where she left it on the counter and sets it in front of the girl. She opens the refrigerator and sets out a Tupperware of what looks to be rice. Then a little bowl of berries. A half-gallon carton of soy milk. A jar of marmalade and a loaf of grainy bread. A bowl of lettuce and a little green plastic basket of cherry tomatoes. A can of olives from the cupboard. A can of black beans. A can of vegetable soup.

She is still heaping pantry items on the table around the girl’s bowed
head when Vivian’s cell phone rings. Lynn does not stop moving at the sound of it. She turns to the coffeemaker, her hands shaking, and refills the mug she had set in the sink. Then she stares down into it. She takes a spoon from the drawer and begins stirring. On the fifth ring she glances over her shoulder, and she sees that Vivian is crying.

Lynn says, “No way should you answer that phone. And don’t go calling him back later either. What I did will stick but not if you chat with him, not even one time to say stop calling. Like a dog he will just learn that the price of a table scrap is thirty-five unanswered phone calls. Next thing you know he’ll be working to figure a way to get you to meet him somewhere.”

Vivian’s head is bowed over the circle of her arms, tears spotting the sleeves of Lynn’s big coat, the food she does not want to eat arrayed all around her. She has not taken the cell phone from her pocket and when it stops ringing, she does not look up.

In all this time Lynn has not stopped stirring her coffee, and the tinkling sound of it seems ridiculous suddenly, and she makes herself stop. She stares at the girl.

There is a faint beep in the pocket of her borrowed coat.

Lynn says, “And you should erase those messages without even listening to them. It doesn’t matter what he said. They’ll just confuse you.”

Vivian holds very still over her tears, but Lynn can see they are still falling.

Then the phone starts ringing again, and the girl lets out a little moan of despair.

Lynn says, “He’ll stop. I promise you he will, but not if you don’t follow that advice.”

Vivian says, “It’s not Marco.”

Her voice is so small that Lynn can’t be sure she heard her correctly.

“What now?”

Vivian buries her head in her arms. “It’s not him, none of them have been. It’s somebody else.”

“You can use the same method with any of them.”

“It’s not a man. And it will be worse if she stops calling.”

Vivian buries her head and starts sobbing now, and Lynn takes a step forward and sits down across from her at the table. She pushes the food aside and lays her good hand on Vivian’s shoulder.

“There now,” she says. The girl’s shoulders are shaking. Lynn looks at the shining top of her head, the hair shifting. “I’m a pretty old lady, and I’ve had plenty of time to make mistakes of my own to learn from.” She briefly closes her eyes. She says, “What you asked about before—I was just a little older than you when I lost this hand.” She gives Vivian a pat. “I lost it trying to help a boy who was only pretending to love me.” Vivian stops sobbing. She holds very still but does not look up. Lynn pats her again. “Why don’t you tell me the whole story, and I’ll see if I can help you figure out how to set it right.”

It is dusk when Lynn walks up the narrow stairs with fresh sheets. She begins in the room she sleeps in herself, stripping the little twin bed along the wall and laying it with a clean white one and a new yellow blanket to replace the dark old corduroy spread that made it look like a couch. Although she had never done it for herself, she takes the sewing machine off the desk and sets it in the closet. She removes the dusty shoebox of spools. She runs her old pillowcase across the surface of the desk, felting it with gray dust, and lays a little vase of flowers on top, figuring the girl might put things there, like the girls before her did downstairs. Last she takes her puzzle books from the edge, and the empty juice glass and bottle from the drawer underneath, and finally the manila envelope, and she places them gently into the shoebox with the spools.

She goes to the bathroom next and takes her toothbrush from the cabinet, and a pale blue plastic hairbrush, and loads them in with the bottle and the spools. She takes a long strand of her gray hair from the soap dish. The rest of the bathroom looks clean enough, but she knows it must not be. So she makes it clean. She wipes the counter down and lifts the yellow bar of soap and rinses the dish out in the sink. From
the shelf above she takes a fresh towel and puts it on the bar next to the claw-footed tub.

Out in the narrow hall with her shoebox, she faces the white-painted door. It makes a sticking sound when she opens it, the paint of the frame sealed tight to the paint of the door. There is a desk long ago cleared, and on the wall is a bulletin board trimmed in white eyelet ribbon, bare but for a few pushpins stuck into the cork. The closet door stands open, and there are hangers there, but no clothes.

The room itself is mostly pink: a twin bed with a rosebud bedspread, pink-dotted walls. An old pink-painted doll crib is stuffed with animals and pink-dressed dolls. The bed is a daybed with white-painted iron rails on three sides, and Lynn stands for a moment looking down at its lace-trimmed pillows. There is dust on the spread. Dust on the floor. Dust on the dresser.

She steps to the window and slides the sash open, letting in the sound of barking dogs. The round rag rug on the floor when she hangs it out and beats it on the side of the house releases a cloud of dust so thick it looks almost celebratory, like confetti, and she does the same with the bedspread, and then rests them over the sill while she sweeps the floor, filling a dustpan with dust and emptying it out the open window. Then she puts everything back into place, taking time to make it neat and square.

Downstairs Lynn sets the shoebox on the kitchen table. Then she goes to get the girl. The two nursers lie empty on the side table by the couch under the one lit lamp, and Lynn finds her standing in the far corner, in the dark of the bedroom, patting the girl on the shoulder to burp her while she rocks the boy in the car seat on the floor with her foot. Lynn just watches for a moment, the baby girl watching her with shining eyes over Vivian’s shoulder, and when she finally bends to lay her too into the other car seat, Lynn steps forward to help.

“Upstairs,” she whispers. “I have a better place.”

She picks up one of the car seats herself, the girl’s, and Vivian picks up the boy’s and follows. The stairs creak as they rise. She points to the
sewing room as she passes and says, “You’ll sleep in there, so you can be close enough to hear them,” and then she takes a step farther, to the end of the hall, and into the room with the white-painted door.

When Vivian steps in behind her she sees that Lynn has nestled the girl’s car seat among the pillows on the daybed. And she is saying, “When they’re ready for it, this bed has a side rail that can flip up and latch to make it more like a crib.” But Vivian is not really looking there yet. She is taking in the room.

“You had a girl of your own.”

“Yes,” Lynn says.

The baby girl is making a winding-up noise. Vivian sets the boy’s seat on the floor and goes to lift her.

“I’ll leave you to tend to them your own way,” Lynn says. “You let me know if you need anything, though. I’ll be downstairs.”

“Where is your room?”

“Next to the mama dog’s, where you had them before.”

“That’s your bedroom?”

“It was a long time ago.”

Lynn doesn’t wait for her to object. She goes down the stairs. She goes into the kitchen and picks up the shoebox. Then she goes to the living room and steps over the rail, crinkling over the plastic, and over the baby gate again into the dark beyond, where she reaches for a wall switch and turns on a lamp on either side of the big queen bed with a wooden footboard carved with leaves and grapes. She takes the puzzle books from her box and lays them on the nightstand. Then she sets the manila envelope in her lap.

It is furred along its edges, like felt, with age, but it is clear that it has not been opened. The flap is held closed with a metal clasp, and also sealed, and straddling the seam of the seal is her own signature from long ago. She pinches open the metal clasp. Then she works her thumb under the flap and tears it open slowly, inching, as if the tearing sound itself is painful, and then she sets her hand on the bedspread to gather herself.

She firms her lips.

Above her she can hear the creak of floorboards as Vivian walks about, settling herself in the spare room.

Finally she grasps the envelope again and stands it on its end in her lap and looks down at the edge of the papers inside. Some of them are thick, like photographs, some have the narrow cream edges of stationery paper, and some the pulpy gray of newsprint.

Her fingers tremble as she withdraws the stack and sets it in her lap. On top is an obituary page from the
Southern Nevada Gazette
dated October 29, 1972.

She smooths a fold at the bottom edge of the clipping with her thumb. And another along the side.

The floorboards creak again above her.

A puppy whimpers in its sleep in the next room.

She decides it’s enough for now—a start. She fits the papers back in the envelope and closes it again with just the clasp and sets it inside the box. Then she takes a marker from the drawer below and along the box of spools with her empty bottle and juice glass she writes “Lynn” and opens the closet door, and sets it on the top shelf with the others.

Now she sits down on the bed. The posters are of three boys standing shoulder to shoulder and a girl alone with a guitar. She looks at them a moment. Then she stands and one by one she takes each tack out of the wall to remove them. They make a crashing sound as they fall, like cartoon thunder, all folding up on the floor, and the puppies stir on the plastic sheet, scrabbling to see, and Lynn knows as they do not that it is like going back in time, each layer recalling a different set of practice dreams: the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift, Madonna and Matt Dillon, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

When they have all fallen away, underneath there are just a few photos tacked there. One of herself in a wedding dress next to a man with shining eyes and dark hair combed slick with a product of some kind. Another of her in a hospital bed, laughing and surrounded by roses. A third of a little girl crouching over red earth and drawing in it with a stick. The breath Lynn draws in and pushes back out is firm, like a decision. She takes off her necklace. She takes off her sweater and the plastic and metal hand. She removes her pants and slips under the covers with her puzzle book and pen and looks around the room she used to sleep in.