Traps (23 page)

She looks from one to the other, blinking in wonder.

Then the phone starts ringing again.

This time Lynn takes the babies inside and sets them down, fitting Sebastian back into his safety seat. She grabs the receiver and steps alone out into the fresh and closes the door on the crying.

It is fainter now, but still clear through the open kitchen windows.

She presses a button to answer.

“Vivian?”

“No.” It’s a woman’s voice. Lynn raises a hand to her mouth but says nothing.

There is a long pause.

The voice says, “No, Mom. It’s me.”

Lynn lets her hand slip down to her heart.

Jessica says, “Is that a baby crying?”

Lynn’s lips tremble. Tears come to her eyes, but her voice is even. “Two, actually.”

“I called at a bad time then.”

“No, no—” Lynn bites her lip to steady her voice. “They’ll be all right.” And sure enough already something in there is slowing. Lynn peers through the window and sees that the girl is sucking her fist and the boy has caught sight of the ceiling fan.

In her car Jessica sits back and looks at the horizon. There is nothing out there, only scrub and sky. Jaya’s red shoes sit beside her. She stares for a minute or more, and her mother says nothing, but the baby sound grows a little more muffled. Finally she says, “I have a favor to ask you.”

Lynn swallows. Her hand is over the mouthpiece of the phone, and she is looking at the dogs. They are digging around the hose bib again—a big trough exposing the pipe. There is a five-gallon bucket of sand on
a dolly in the garage, and every day she wheels it out and refills the hole. She peels back her fingers from the phone and says, “Anything.”

“It’s nothing big.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing personal. It’s just a dog.”

“All right.”

“She’s just injured and needs some stitching.”

Lynn holds very still.

“Anyway, I was wondering if you could do it for me.”

“Where are you?”

“Not far. A suburb of Vegas.”

Tears roll down Lynn’s cheek. She clears her throat. “Absolutely I can. I’ll be ready for it when you get here.”

When Jessica pulls in, Lynn is standing on the porch in her vinyl apron. She steps down the stairs, out of the shadow of the eave and into the sun, and watches three dark Suburbans roll down the gravel drive, and her eyes scan between them, waiting to see which of them bears her daughter. The second car pulls off to the side to let the third pass so that just two come through the neck of the driveway into the big open circle of dried mud. When the door on the lead car opens and Jessica steps out, Lynn folds her left arm beneath her chest and covers her mouth with her hand.

Jessica stands in her bloodstained sweatshirt with one hand on her open car door. Lynn takes a quick swipe under each eye with her fingers.

Twenty feet of dry earth stands between them.

Finally Jessica gestures over her shoulder with her left thumb. “She’s bleeding pretty badly.”

Lynn nods. “I’m ready for her,” she says, and points to the dark open garage and waits to see what her daughter will do.

Neither of them moves.

It is the bridge of etiquette with a stranger that finally closes the
gap between them. When Dana steps out of her Suburban and walks forward to Jessica’s side, Lynn crosses the turnaround to meet her. Their three bodies make a single shadow on the ground.

Jessica says, “Mom, this is Dana. Dana, this is my mother, Lynn.”

Back at the motel, holding the bleeding dog, Jessica had told Dana she would lead them to her mother’s dog shelter for medical treatment, and in this simple statement a full set of possible threats and privacy issues of import made themselves as plain to Dana as pockets large enough for weapons in the folds of civilian clothes. In the security procedures log for Jessica’s property, there are fifteen full pages devoted to the handling of calls or visits from her father, and not a single mention of a mother. After a count of two seconds Dana had said, “Certainly. I’ll be available for any help you specify when we arrive on-site. Barring any instruction from you, would you prefer a default of body accompaniment or surveillance from a distance?” “From a distance,” she’d said.

Dana shakes Lynn’s hand, but she does not tell her it is a pleasure to meet her. Instead she says this: “Would now be a good time to help you two move the dog?”

Lynn blinks.

Dana doesn’t wait for an answer. She leads mother and daughter silently to the back of her armored car and pops the tailgate to show them Grace waiting: white, muzzled, tethered to the tie-down by a leather lead, lying still on the bloody mat. The cut on her neck is ragged and long, and the basket muzzle is slick with her bubbly drools.

Dana takes the two corners of the tailgate mat beneath Grace’s head to make a stretcher of it, and Lynn and Jessica look at the corners beneath her tail. Right away it is clear to all three of them what will need to happen. Jessica reaches in with her uninjured hand to grab the back corner, and Lynn takes the other corner with hers, each woman trying as best she can to give the other space, not quite touching, not even facing each other really, trailing the dog behind them as they face forward and lumber toward the garage and pass out of the bright light and into its cool dark concrete-scented shade. It is an awkward business, but they
manage to get the dog up onto the sheet, still lying on the bloody car mat but finally there at least, on a white sheet in the sun from the window. Without saying a word Lynn picks up a needle and begins, and Dana retreats to the center of the turnaround, watching their backs from the distance Jessica had requested. Lynn’s elbow rises with each long pull of the thread, and Jessica stands beside her resting her hand on the dog’s flank, and neither of their heads move with talking. They are both watching the dog, Grace scrabbling a bit with each pull and her head straining toward the wall and her black lips curled inside the cage of the muzzle at the pain of mending.

When Lynn ties the knot and snips it, she steps to the sink to wash her hands. Her stitching is tight and even, the flesh mounded in places and bristling with white fur. Jessica keeps a hand on Grace’s flank and watches her mother’s hands at the sink, her good hand and her bad one, soaping and rinsing more than is probably needed.

Lynn turns to her when she’s clean, but she doesn’t say anything.

Jessica says, “Thank you.”

Lynn looks at her, blinking, considering the different replies she might make.

Jessica says, “Should she rest here?”

“We should lower her to the floor. She might try to stand when we leave, and fall.”

They can manage just the two of them this time, each taking two corners of the big white sheet in one hand and lifting it like a hammock and lowering it gently to the floor Vivian mopped clean the day before. Grace’s eyes are closed, and her red-soaked chest rises and lowers visibly with her breaths. They stare at her as if it is needed, both of them wondering what to say.

Finally Lynn works up her courage. “Can I fix you a cup of tea?”

Jessica goes on looking at the dog. She stares at it so long Lynn thinks of asking it again, and then finally Jessica says, “I guess that would be all right.”

Lynn leads the way to her kitchen, and Jessica follows. They pass
in through the living room, stepping over the baby gate and crinkling past the mama dog with her puppies wrestling alongside. They pass in through the dark front hall and on into the kitchen. Lynn takes the kettle from the stove and fills it standing at the sink, the yellow-curtained windows with the mountains in the distance and the bright blue sky framing her there. Jessica lays a hand on the chair and glances at her mother’s back at the sink. A pair of baby bottles and nipples sit clean in the drying rack beside her.

“Where are the babies?”

“Upstairs sleeping,” her mother says without turning. “I wore them out, I guess, with my rusty handling.”

“Whose are they?”

Lynn puts the kettle on the stove and lights the burner with the long-handled lighter, holding the stove knob in. It clicks a few times before it catches. She says, “They belong to a girl who’s staying here and helping me out with the dogs. She needed to be gone today, and I told her I’d watch over them.” She turns and faces her daughter. Jessica is picking at the gauze on her wounded hand.

Lynn says, “What happened there?”

“The dog bit it.”

“Do you know if she’s had her shots?”

“I don’t. I got the bite checked by a doctor, though. She said it was fine and I should just keep an eye on the dog for the next ten days to make sure her behavior doesn’t seem rabid.”

“I could do that for you.”

“Could you?”

“I’d like to.”

Jessica looks down at her lap, and Lynn looks outside at her dogs still digging around the pipe. They are quiet so long the water in the kettle begins to make that hushing sound it will make before it boils.

Finally Jessica says, “It’s Dad’s dog.”

Lynn regards her. She has never in her life felt so careful about what she might say.

Jessica says, “He’s in the hospital, and his neighbors were complaining about the barking so his landlady called me.”

Lynn holds very still while Jessica says this, her eyes on Jessica’s face and her own face neutral. In the pause that follows she finally nods—an infinitesimal movement of her chin. Then she takes out two blue enamel cups and sets them softly on the table. And she takes out the paper box of teas and sets this there too. Then a squeeze bottle of honey shaped like a bear. She pours the water into each cup and puts the kettle back on the stove. She sits down in the second chair, across from her daughter. Jessica sifts through the bags and selects one—Apple Cinnamon—and after she withdraws her hand, without looking Lynn takes one herself—Lemon, it turns out to be. Lynn pinches the bag between her metal loops and tears with her fingers, and Jessica fumbles a moment in her lap under the table and then grips hers in her mouth and tears with her left hand.

Lynn says, “Do you need anything for it? Tylenol or Advil or anything?”

And Jessica says, “What were you calling to say all those times?”

“What?”

“What were you calling to say—all those times you tried calling me through the studio?”

Lynn swallows, the dry tea bag still in her hand. She holds it there, watching her daughter busy herself, looking down, setting her tea bag in her cup and trailing the string out onto the table; pinching the white paper tab on the end of her tea bag string and folding it.

Lynn says, “First just ‘I love you and I’m sorry.’ ”

Jessica pleats and re-pleats the little white paper with her fingers. “Something different after that?”

“Yes. Later it was also ‘I stopped drinking and I know how I hurt you. And if you’re willing to hear it I’d like to list all the ways so I can make amends.’ ” She is looking down now, trying to stand her dry tea bag on the wood table. “It was part of my twelve-step program.”

“How long ago did you stop drinking?”

“Four years and twenty-seven days.”

Jessica’s lips tremble and her eyes well up. She picks up her cup and takes a small sip and sets it down, looking off to the side, at the sink, or the window while her mother regards her, still not brewing her own tea. Jessica swipes under her eyes and then looks down at her tea. “That’s good. That must be, I mean.”

Lynn nods.

“I’m sorry I didn’t let you tell me.”

“I was a scary person—a person who loved you and also hurt you. That’s what you knew.”

She sets her tea bag on the surface of the water in her own cup finally. They both watch it darken and sink.

Lynn says, “I’d like to say it still, if it’s okay with you.”

Jessica’s hands rise to the sides of her face, not quite covering her ears. She laughs nervously and crosses her arms and then uncrosses them, settling her hand and the big mitten of gauze together in her lap. “All right,” she says.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.” Lynn stands and reaches up onto the high shelf and behind the bottle and she withdraws the piece of lined paper, folded and folded and folded again so that it can hide there, long and thin. She sits back down. She unfolds it first lengthwise and then crosswise again and again and again. It is pleated so heavily it curls in on her hand. The tiny scrawl is water-stained and full of crosshatches and arrows and seemingly intentionally illegible besides, but she knows what it says. She looks at it and then up again at Jessica’s eyes.

“I was your only parent, the one who tucked notes in your lunches and talked you to sleep from bad dreams, and I also hurt you. I have a list here of the ways I did it if you’ll let me read it.”

Jessica nods.

Lynn looks down again at her paper and reads, pausing for a long while after each one to give it its due:

She looks up at Jessica and sees the tears streaming down her face. “Is this all right? Should I keep going?”

Jessica nods again, firming her lips, her chin trembling.

Lynn looks down. The paper is quivering in her good hand, like a husk of something.

She flips the paper over to see the last one on the other side:

“You were drunk, Mama.”

“I chose to be.”

Jessica wipes under her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Then she takes a sip of her tea.