Traps (2 page)

As she struggles to right herself, the dog grabs her by the back of her coat, trying to shake her whole body now, but Dana can just reach it, stretching her fingers out of the end of the tapered sleeve and flicking open the tiny metal lid. And this, right now, this moment is what Dana loves. She feels almost serene, seeing the key there in the ashtray and knowing just how she will grab it, just how she will pull it back into her fist and then into the sleeve of her armor, just how she will crouch before she explodes upward to throw the dog back into the closed barn doors. He doesn’t let go of her jacket when she does it, but it doesn’t matter. When she ends up on her back on the van floor, for the tenth of a second it takes him to right himself and land with his front paws
on her chest, Dana does absolutely nothing. She waits for him to come, his teeth clattering against her face guard, wild, glistening, enormous, a child’s nightmare. It should be terrifying, but she has the key tight in her right hand and she is working a boot up under his belly, and Dana shoves, catapulting him against the spare tire. It gives her all the time she needs to roll onto one knee and dive for the steering column. As he lands on her back and bites down on the fabric at her neck, he crushes her against the parking brake, and her helmet bounces on the bucket seat, but she can just reach now, and on her second fumble she slides the key into the ignition. She turns it and the engine rumbles on, and at the sound of it, like magic—like something from a cartoon, really—the dog lets go of her jacket and lies down on the floor of the van, as if ready for a nap, or a pat.

As soon as Dana’s examiner opens the doors, the nausea returns. She hops out and takes off past him at a trot. She types a code into a keypad next to the building door and pulls it open, rushing past the big young man eating soup from a bowl at the table and into the tiny bathroom, shutting the door on our view of her.

We are out in the break room, where the big young man has paused over his bowl of soup and the examiner is just stepping in through the fire door, clipboard in hand. Velasquez is another of the firm’s agents—he has worked protective shifts with Dana a hundred times—and Corey Sifter coached her through a high-speed-emergency driving course and an evacuation simulation in a smoke- and flame-filled room, but neither man has ever been shown a photo on her BlackBerry or heard her describe a movie she saw over a weekend or watched her drink a beer. Through the hollow-core door to the bathroom now comes the clear sound of retching and coughing. Velasquez looks down at his food, and Corey Sifter at the statistics before him. They steal glances at the door as the sounds from within change. A toilet flushing. The rattle of a paper-towel dispenser. Running water. And finally the door clicks open and Dana emerges, her face dry and pale and her hair glistening with
sweat or sink water, in her damp tank top and running shorts, the heavy bite suit draped over one arm and the helmet under the other.

She heaps them onto the break table next to the empty equipment bag and peers down at Corey Sifter’s clipboard.

“How’d I do?” she says to him.

He coughs. He looks at her wristband and then back at the clipboard. “Five beats down on pulse and about a minute faster than your best speed.”

Even as he speaks she is stepping around him to her locker, and he turns, watching her. He runs a hand through his buzz cut.

She unzips the top of her backpack and takes out a hooded sweatshirt and pulls it on over the tank she fought in.

“Where you headed?” he says.

“Home.”

“What’s your hurry? How about you stop by Shannon’s office before you go? Let her check your vitals.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Just heart rate and blood pressure. She’ll have you out in five.”

“I appreciate your concern, sir—”

“Corey, Dana. We’ve been working together for seven years.”

“I appreciate it, I do. But I don’t think it’s necessary.”

“Sometimes the heat gets to people in there—”

“It wasn’t that, sir—Corey.”

“Or the adrenaline buildup.” He picks up the receiver on the break-room phone. “She’ll check you out real fast.”

Dana shoulders her backpack and shuts her locker, leaving it empty. “I was queasy before I tested. Velasquez saw me take something for it before I came out.”

Corey Sifter looks at Velasquez in his place at the table.

The big young man nods, gesturing with his spoon, his mouth full. He swallows. “True story.”

“Something I ate, maybe,” Dana says.

He sets down the phone. “I’ll have to note it in your file.”

“Of course.”

He shakes his head. “And you’ll have to be sure to report it in the Protective Asset Inventory on your next duty check-in.”

“Certainly,” Dana says, turning.

“And, Dana?”

She turns back to him.

“We like a pilot who can fly without a wingman. We do. But not if she won’t keep her radio on.”

Outside she steps through a small corrugated metal door in a corrugated metal wall into a street of locked-up warehouses and garbage-choked gutters. Down at the corner a few men sit on the curb outside a taqueria, but other than that the street is empty. Just a lunch bag blowing, and a few parked cars, including Dana’s white Jetta, and a big black crow sitting on her roof. He could almost be looking at her, she thinks, and in fact, as she gets closer, she sees that he is. He cocks his head, his black eyes staring, and only when she takes out her key to open the door does he fly away, wheeling up and off over another razor-wire fence to a place she can’t see and never will. She gets in her car, locks her door, and sets her big backpack on the seat beside her. Behind her, hanging down from the hook and bending at the waist against the seat like a passenger, is a white cotton dress with peach-colored flowers still in the clear bag from a department store.

The drive out of that valley into Los Angeles is long. And silent for Dana. She does not turn the radio on. She watches the road. And at stoplights her eyes catch on the out-of-place and the furtive: a woman sitting on a suitcase; a boy opening a bag in a dark doorway; a man in a parked car outside the high-fenced play yard of a school. She passes from the narrow streets of those closed-up blocks, to the stoplighted boulevard of the flat valley, up onto a highway that bears her between brown hills until she can see the beach and ocean, and then off and down to more stoplighted streets that draw her into her own neighborhood, Culver City,
with its streets of single-story houses just big enough for an arched front door and two flanking windows, well kept every one. Neat streets. With clean gutters and sidewalks and tiny squares of clipped lawn, and then a tidy little alley alongside her own street’s one apartment building, white and U-shaped around a courtyard of vinyl-strap lawn furniture, with windows overlooking, all of them closed, save for three at the top with scraps of curtain each cut from a different patterned bedsheet, billowing out in the breeze like flags. Dana pulls into the little alley and through a garage door and down into the low-ceilinged parking area underneath.

Dark and cool and low, the garage is mostly full at this hour, but she finds a slim space. Her shoes make a gritty sound in the echoey dim as she crosses, beetle-backed in her big backpack and carrying the dress high to keep it from dragging. It trails behind her a bit at the hem, like a ghost. They ride up in the elevator together and emerge into the third-floor hallway, brown doors receding into the distance like beads on a string, and she stops in front of number three-twenty-four.

It is dim inside, all the louvered blinds drawn flush to the windowsills against the late afternoon sun, and Dana flicks on the lights to reveal an expanse of white wall-to-wall carpeting broken only by a white couch, a glass-topped coffee table, and a computer desk with a closed laptop. On the wall to the left of the couch, a bicycle hangs from a pair of hooks. Above the desk is an Escher print of infinite stairs. The silence inside this room is thick, almost cottony.

She shuts the door.

On the clean floor of the hall closet, beside two pairs of neatly aligned running shoes, there is a space for her backpack. Above it she hangs the peach-flowered dress. The bedroom beyond has a light blue blanket and a smooth fold of white topsheet beneath another Escher print—this one of triangle tiles that row by row part and change just slightly, until at the top they fly away as birds. She showers in a small clean bathroom where all the personal items hide secreted behind a mirror, and dresses in jeans and a white T-shirt and afterward steps to her living room window,
where, with a slow pull of a cord, she draws the blinds half open, filling the white room with light. She cracks the window, and flamenco music drifts to her from across the way.

Then her phone rings.

Dana looks through the half-lowered eyelid of her metal blinds at the curtains luffing out across the way. On the windowsill, a green plant growing from the skull of a cow. She picks up the phone.

That same music and a man’s voice: “You’re home! I’m on the other line with my mom! Save me!”

Then a click and a dial tone.

Dana smiles. Although this trip is just down the hall, she puts on her sneakers. She slings her backpack over her shoulder. She locks her door behind her. She walks down the long gray carpet. Beige walls with brown doors. A welcome mat. A wreath of hay and dried flowers. A right-angle turn to the right, and more doors, and another right turn, and then the sound of Latin music draws her to a door where a pair of muddy sneakers lies untied and discarded, toes pointing in opposite directions on the threshold of a door that is half open.

When she pushes it wide, she is face-to-face with a red macaw on an open perch plucking a grape from a bowl of sliced bananas and oranges. Birdseed is scattered everywhere on the little square of white linoleum that marks the vestibule, and in the tangle of sneakers and boots and sandals below, cracked peanut shells and little pellets of millet line the insoles and fill the crossed laces.

The room beyond is similar in shape to her own, but larger. The white rug is covered with a big raggedly cut rectangle of bright green Astroturf, and the couch, on which a second parrot (blue and gold) sits preening, is draped with a Spider-Man bedsheet. In the corner a huge wooden Buddha sits cross-legged and delighted next to a terrarium crisscrossed with branches and bejeweled with tiny frogs. A sudden breeze pushes the curtains into the room like streamers and knocks the cow skull full of soil and green tendrils onto the floor. Standing in the kitchen in swim trunks and a yellow T-shirt, holding a cordless phone to his ear,
the man who summoned her here does not notice this, though. He only notices her. His eyes widen at the sight of her standing behind his parrot. This is Ian.

“Mom, I have to go! I’ll see you tomorrow, Dana’s here!”

He turns on the water and tries to rinse his hand. “Yes, I’m bringing her with me this time so you can finally meet her.” He wipes his dripping hand on the seat of his shorts, leaving a trace of green. “She’s a volunteer EMT, I said, remember? I saw her in her uniform, and I asked her to teach me to do my Sylatron injections.…” He is rolling his eyes now and grinning. “Her regular job is in security services, yes.… Yes, it’s crazy and appalling that you have to ask after we’ve been dating almost a year.…” He raises his eyebrows and runs a hand through his messy blond hair. “Yes, we plan to continue living in sin for a while.… No, actually that’s a common misconception, sin only gets better with age.…” He winks at Dana. “Tomorrow, yes, and I have a perfectly good suit, yes. I know that weddings start at a specific time, yes. And in this case it’s seven o’clock in San Marino, yes. I love you, yes. Okay, gotta go.”

When he hangs up, his hands shoot into the air. He takes two big strides, cradles her head between his hands, stamps a kiss on her mouth, and pulls back grinning. Then he fingers her backpack straps and pulls them off—one, two—eyeing her slyly, as if they were straps on lingerie.

“Hi,” she says, and her eyes flit (she can’t help it) to the ridge of scar tissue in a patch of reddened skin just below his left ear.

“Any oozing?” he says.

“No.” She shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut a second. “Sorry.” She opens her eyes. “What are you making over there?”

“I was at the Venice Market, and there was this beautiful Puerto Rican woman with ice blue eyes and six little kids running around and two Colt 45 cartons, one full of Rottweiler puppies and the other full of ripe avocados marked ‘Whole box, fifteen dollars.’ I figured you’d be happy I came home with the avocados.”

“Instead of the Puerto Rican woman?”

He laughs (gigantic; explosive; a joyous gunshot) and says, “Instead of one of the puppies, I meant.”

“A puppy I wouldn’t have minded.”

“Aha! ‘Minded,’ though! That’s the key word. I don’t want anything to jeopardize my slow and steady, make-moving-in-with-Ian-easy-and-attractive plan.”

She eyes the birds and the frogs. “I don’t think a puppy would have tipped the scales much.”

“Is that a yes?” He grins, and before she can answer he grabs her by the back of the neck and plants another kiss on her forehead. “So I tweeted about the avocados, and now I might have as many as four hundred and eighty-nine people showing up in an hour for guacamole and this drink I found on the Internet that’s blue, and I need you to taste everything because I still can’t taste.”

“What’s in the drink?”

“Rum and blue Kool-Aid mostly, with green sugar on the rim. I just wanted it to be blue and green, like the Sylatron box. Here, taste the guacamole, would you?”

He has mashed it in a large frying pan with a scuffed black plastic handle. He dips a finger in and offers it to her and she takes a tentative lick. She squeezes her eyes shut again, smiling and wincing at the same time. “So salty!”

“See! That’s what I need you for! Or one thing, anyway. I was seasoning it while I was talking to my mom and I got distracted. Help me add more avocados.”

Dana washes her hands at the sink, soaping them so thoroughly it makes him grin. She holds her dripping hands upturned like a surgeon, looking around his counter at the crumpled hand towels, the box of hypodermic needles, and the pile of mail, and finally takes a paper napkin from a plastic bag lolling in the mash of green.