Traps (20 page)

“Jess, are you still there?”

She sniffs and wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her wrist.

He says, “Have you thought about calling anyone for help with all this?”

“What do you think I’m doing here?”

“I mean—anyone else?”

She looks out the window. The gull is back, but farther from the window, rising and falling, rising and falling in that same place.

Akhil says, “You know—someone who might have experience that could help you? With your dad or with dogs?”

“Don’t you dare!” she snaps. “Don’t you dare mix her into this.”

“I just—”

“This isn’t about her!”

“Okay—”

“We’re going to leave her right where she asked to be left!”

“I just—”

“Don’t try to fix me, Akhil. Don’t get out your trauma flow sheet. Don’t start eyeing me for secondary and tertiary conditions.”

“Forget it. Forget I said that—”

Her mittened hand floats, shaking crazily, to her forehead. “This trip is over. The hospital has my number, and they’re going to call me before they make any changes. I’m going to go to my car. I’m going to e-mail Larry and ask him to set up a quarantine kennel for my angry dog somewhere the girls can’t see her. I’m going to go get some Chinese food. I’m going to eat it on my bed in my motel room and watch Pay Per View until I fall asleep. Then I’m coming home.”

I
t is dusk outside the hospital, and Dana is still waiting for the message from Velasquez. What she will do when she gets it is easy for her—it will take minutes; she has done it a hundred times before. What she dreads is what will happen afterward, when she is alone in her motel room, and there is no excuse not to call Ian and tell him what she knows. He will want something from her she cannot give him. He will be hoping she is on the fence, but she is never on the fence. He will be hoping she is just afraid, but she is never afraid. He will be hoping she is full of hidden feeling, and instead, mostly, she feels nothing. Dana is a woman who always knows what she wants, and although at first people like this, later (she knows; has learned this in the handful of times she has tried to get close to people) they do not. Dana is going to get an abortion, and it is going to disappoint him, and she is going to miss him when he is gone.

Because her work now is helped by looking at her BlackBerry, making the boy wonder what tips she is reading, she continues to use the time to prepare. If she is going to lose Ian (and she knows she will now, as she has always guessed she would), she can at least help him. She can protect him a bit. She can do the things for him she is actually well designed to do.

She opens another file:

Ian has said he will appeal, but she guesses he has not yet done so because he believes (some people really believe this) that something good may happen to him without his effort or planning. She guesses that although he says he has taken action, he has not done research or written a letter. Dana understands that outside her office and other small pockets of the world like it, few people ever do these things, while Dana herself always does them. She cannot skip these steps. She can never not do them. She would have liked to be able to give Ian the letter she will draft before she tells him about her pregnancy and her abortion, but she has modified her plan. She will give him her appeal advice over the phone, and she will wait for him to absorb it. She will draw the moment out, reading the letter slowly, letting him interrupt with comments, likely something unreasonable and surprising that will make her heart lift. Then she will tell him about the abortion.

He will be amazed. He will say things like “Is that it?” (people often say things like this to Dana, as if word volume were a meter for depth of feeling; as if confusion and evasion and the inability to express oneself succinctly were correlated with capacity for love), and her failure to think of more words to say will add to his dawning feeling that she is cold. And then he will forget all about the appeal letter that might help him get treatment for his cancer. To guard against this possibility, Dana will deliver a thumb drive containing the letter when she gets home. She can fit it beneath his door in a Tyvek envelope so that fruit and wet birdseed hulls do not damage the drive. He will find it when it crinkles beneath his bare feet, and however he feels when he sees it, ultimately he
will open it because he is curious. Most people are at least curious. And then it may still do some good. This is Dana’s plan. She will follow it to the letter. It is the best she can do.

Now a text pops up on her screen, this one from Velasquez:

And Dana stands, and the boy looks up at her. She slips her BlackBerry in her back pocket and slings her camera strap around her neck, not meeting his eyes. The light all around them is gray, but for the city in the distance casting its lurid yellow glow on the sky, obscuring any sunset. She grabs her backpack and heads for the automatic doors.

It is as easy as she expected it to be.

She is not inside a full thirty seconds before the boy shows up behind her. She is already at the registration desk, smiling politely at a sour-faced gatekeeper with plucked eyebrows raised above her reading glasses and her chin lowered in disapproval.

“I have an appointment with Dr. Lamb,” Dana says.

“Well, I’ll need your name first, dear.”

“Dana Bowman.”

The woman squints and clicks away skeptically on her keyboard and then pauses for it to respond. She asks for Dana’s ID and examines it closely and then slides a clipboard across the counter. “Sign in here, and then head to second-floor registration. You’ll need to check in there as well.”

“Thanks,” she says, and she glides along to the elevators, leaving the boy behind. Like every good warrior Dana knows there are so many barriers in the world—doors, gates, officious receptionists, rivers, angry dogs, bouncers. If you only know how to position yourself on the opposite side of them you can conserve so much energy; there is so little need to fight.

“I’m headed to the second floor too,” he says.

“I’ll need you to sign in first,” the woman says.

“But I just want to visit someone.”

“Well, I need to know whom, young man,” she says, making herself taller in the chair. “And I’ll need your name as well.”

And then the elevator doors slide shut.

Alone inside, Dana removes the hour’s disguise. She takes the lens cap from her pocket and snaps it on. She removes her camera and puts it gently in her backpack. She takes out her shirt and buttons it on over her tank top. She takes a tissue from a neat little plastic dispenser and wipes off the black lipstick as the door slides open on two, and then she walks down a long hallway toward the stairwell, past the ICU waiting area where paper cups litter the side tables and half a dozen people are thumbing their phone keys and flipping through magazines alone and waiting for the sick and fragile people they love, and she hustles down, hustles down, a plainer version of herself, neutral, not sexy or distracting, her usual costume of inscrutability, her easiest one.

Outside in the parking lot, there is a bird chirping in a tree, and one motor idling in the distance. Dana knows that minutes ago Velasquez and Jessica passed the bench where the boy had been sitting, escaping the hospital unnoticed to get in their cars and drive to the motel as planned. She will not see them tonight unless something goes wrong. Already she is alone again. Already it is almost time for her to lose him. Only the dog stands between her and the tasks that will bring her to that loss.

She strides across the lot, and as she approaches the dark Suburban, she can hear Grace whining—a long high squeak punctuated by pauses at random intervals for her to return to feverish panting. Although Dana cracked the front windows for air, the glass is so cloudy with the dog’s condensed breath that she has to wipe the inside of her windshield with a towel before she can even see. She drives with a map marked “Hospital to Motel” on the seat beside her, her jaw set as Grace continues to keen behind her, and she follows its bullet-pointed instructions to a stucco building thinly reminiscent of a mission, with a bell at the top and an incongruous set of automatic sliding glass doors at the front. She rolls
the windows up and grabs her backpack and the empty Petco bag and gets out of the car, shutting her door, freeing herself for just a moment from the manic sound of the dog. It is replaced by the happy sounds of splashing and calling from a swimming pool she cannot see and will not go to investigate. Her task tonight is clear: (1) be available for emergencies; (2) be well rested for duty tomorrow; (3) care for the dog.

When she opens the tailgate, there is Grace—big and blind, tied and muzzled. Her water bowl is empty, but the carpeted floor around her is soaked, and she is panting so hard and fast it is like the sound of someone scratching at a wall, an endless frantic repetitive clicking, like panic itself. The breeze gets her attention, and she turns her muzzle toward the open door and skitters her feet as much as her tether will allow. Dana picks up the overturned bowl and puts it in the thin plastic bag and loops this over her wrist. Then she unties the leash and lifts her, whimpering and thrashing, and sets her on the asphalt before her. And Grace keeps whining, even when she pauses in her own shambling to pee, not crouching, just letting her waters dribble out onto her long shadow on the blacktop, and run back toward the wheel of Dana’s armored car.

Dana has, as she told Ian, always loved motels, but her passage through a side door into this one is not the comfort it has always been. Grace’s nails make a ripping sound on the hallway rug—a nubby brown industrial carpet with an acrid plasticky smell—and the fluorescent lights tremor slightly in a way that makes the hallway pulse. Theirs is the first door, and when Dana opens it and flips on the lights, right away the dog begins growling. Dana has to nudge her a little and tug at the leash to get her to cross the threshold, and when she tries to close the door she has to grasp Grace’s tail to keep it from getting caught in the jamb. Then the dog stumbles and throws her weight against the door, slamming it shut, and when Dana releases her leash, Grace stays there, pressing her haunches up against the door in the corner and digging her nails deep into the carpet.

Dana adjusts her plan for the night. There will be her conversation with Ian, but there will also be the till-and-plow work of caregiving tasks
and unthreatening gestures she undertakes to soften Grace to her surroundings so that ultimately, sometime, perhaps close to midnight, the dog can stop whining long enough for the two of them to sleep. Beyond all evidence and reason, Dana does still from day to day hope for the ability to sleep.

Step one is water. She flips on the harsh white light of the bathroom. She pulls the beveled plastic sink knob and fills one metal bowl and then sets it on the floor of the bathroom to minimize the mess. Right away, though, she sees that for now at least it is hopeless. Grace is still cowering by the door to the room, folded up on the threshold in a cartoonish way, in a small contorted shape it is hard to believe her big body can even make. Dana steps into her room and sets her heavy backpack on the bed, making a crater in the center of the polyester spread reminiscent of models of gravity fields. If you set something along the bed’s edge—a marble, or a dinner roll, or even an infant—it would roll inexorably toward Dana’s densely packed backpack.

Then Dana begins. She takes out her BlackBerry and types this message to Ian:

And she reaches across the perfect gravity-scape of the bed, and from an outer compartment in her backpack she withdraws a thin laptop and a file of sample insurance letters. The backpack wobbles a bit on the soft mattress and resettles, its zippered compartment of stiff black ballistic nylon hanging open like a door or a mouth. She looks around the room. Navy and red and brown, with a dark peeling presswood dresser topped by a television with wood veneer siding and shiny chrome knobs you have to twist. Above the bed there is no picture, only a blank wall. Dana decides to sit not on the bed but in a wood-framed armchair in the corner where she can see both the door and the dog. She takes out the folder and opens it, and the letter she took from Ian’s kitchen is on top,
a phone number in crayon scrawled next to the stick figure with arms embracing rays of light.

She opens her laptop.

While she works, Grace alternates between growling and that panicky high-pitched rhythmic whine she began in the car, and she is still standing with one whole side of her body leaning against the door. It is such a strange and difficult posture to maintain that from time to time her muscles seem to spasm, and she pauses in her growling and slips and repositions herself with a surprisingly loud scrabble of her collar metal against the door. Dana presses on, drafting her letter, tapping out with a blank face phrases like, “in reference to your letter,” and “copies of any expert medical opinions,” and “treating physician may respond to its applicability to,” ignoring the growl and scrape, growl and scrape, until she hears a banging on the wall.