Traps (5 page)

Jessica rubs her forehead again. She clears her throat. Down the hall the music has the dizzy sound of the tracks they play when cartoon animals discover they are falling. In the background on the landlady’s end of the line, the dog is still barking. She says, “Well then, um.… What seems to be the problem?”

“Oh yes. It’s just that the neighbors have been complaining about his poor dog.”

“His dog?”

“Yes. Grace Kelly has been out in the yard barking ever since he went to the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Yes. You don’t know? Oh for heaven’s sake, this makes much more sense now, you always seem like such a lovely person in your films. I was in Palm Springs visiting my sister, and when I got back I resumed my usual weekly property visits, and this time, when I came around, your father’s handsome white malamute was just barking in the backyard, and Mrs. Lippincott from next door comes rushing out into her driveway. Says an ambulance came to take him to the hospital shortly after I left town and the dog’s been outside ever since. I say, ‘Hospital?! Why, that’s Jessica Lessing’s father, you know. Have the papers reported a visit to town from her?’ No, she says, not hardly. She herself has been dropping food over the fence each day just to keep the poor dog from starving. I say, ‘That can’t be. She would never let that happen. Remember her in
Personal History
? Remember her in
A Passage to the Heart
? I’m going to call her the instant I get back to my house.’ ”

Jessica rubs her temples. Behind the multiheaded beast of her feelings about herself and her past as a girl and a daughter is a backdrop of yearning thrown up by this woman’s mentions of her films. She ignores it over and over, but a dozen times a day, every day, every week for five years, she has wished for a brief escape into the perfect satisfaction of using this mess—this crazy tangle of childhood memory and shame and self-righteousness and hope and fear—to create a character (utterly real but blessedly pretend) who can tell a story that will make others not just weep (she has done that before) but also understand.
Understand!
And (as if that in itself wouldn’t be enough) afterward clap, stand up, go home, and never think of her again.

“Are you still there, dear?”

“What? I’m sorry—”

“Mrs. Lippincott said she felt she had no choice but to call Animal Control. There’s a notice on the door now. They’re coming by tomorrow to pick her up unless somebody comes and claims her.”

Akhil’s palms are flat on the counter, as if to hold the whole kitchen in place.

Jessica says, “Do you know what hospital my father is in?”

“Summerlin, I should think. But if you don’t mind my asking, how could you not have known about this? Have you been on location somewhere, dear? Somewhere remote?”

T
he third is much younger, just a girl standing that night in a T-shirt and panties in front of an open refrigerator in North Las Vegas, eating squares of deli ham from a partitioned package—crackers, circles of turkey, stars of yellow cheese. The top shelf makes almost a halo behind her—a stick of butter, the blue-white ceiling above, a gallon of Sunny Delight. She brushes the blond hair from her damp forehead with the back of her wrist, chewing. The kitchen is small, with white-linoleum floors and chipped white formica counters, and through the dormer window above the sink, she can see the asphalt tile roof of another section of the same building. There are two sounds: from down the hall a din of rushing water—strangely amplified like the crash of some interior waterfall—and through the tiny open window, the metronome bark of another neglected dog.

This is Vivian.

She looks at a doorway at the end of a narrow neck of hall.

She looks at the clock on the stove: 7:15.

On the scratched surface of the metal folding table a pink cell phone studded with glittering rhinestones begins ringing. She closes the refrigerator
door and takes a
People
magazine from the counter behind it and tosses it over the ringing phone. The cover is divided into quadrants, each with a different movie-star mother playing with one of her children: at the top of a playground slide; running after ducks; reading under a tree; laughing over ice cream on a bench. On the stove sits an empty saucepan and a kettle beside it. She gives the kettle a little lift to check it for water, and turns on the burner underneath. Out on the roof a pigeon lands with an airy flap of wings, silent beneath the sound of rushing water from a room beyond the kitchen, and now the cell phone ringing, and still that bark, and bark, and bark of a dog. She watches the pigeon flap again, veering along the tiles to the ridge of another dormer, where it poops. The magazine jiggles a bit each time the phone rings. Finally the phone stops ringing and she eats a star of cheese, waiting, and when the phone chirps out its single beep she flips the magazine off it to look in the little window. “Vivian’s Phone.” One missed call and five voice mails.

Then a baby begins to cry.

She looks again at the hallway.

A second baby’s cry rises in concert with the first.

She is still holding the magazine when she enters the little room. It is a slant-ceilinged place with a swaybacked queen-sized bed and a milk crate for a nightstand with a box of condoms on top. On the floor at the foot of the bed are her own things—a little gray white-noise machine roaring a steady blanket of static, a pair of liquor cartons full of her clothes, and in the corner, in a small closet beneath a row of men’s track suits on hangers, tucked behind a collection of new-looking basketball shoes, two tiny slouch-spined babies in mismatched infant car seats on the cracked linoleum floor. Both babies are wailing—red-faced, bald but for a peach-fuzzing of white hair, one dressed in a pink T-shirt and the other in blue—but what draws Vivian’s eye, what grabs her attention despite all that movement and anguish, is the still figure of a large shiny black spider on the white plastic handle of the girl’s carrier.

The babies are too small to have feared or even noticed it, of course. They’re just crying, but as they cry and kick, they jiggle their carriers,
and the spider’s forward leg gives a slow exploratory twitch. Vivian reaches down and picks up one of the basketball shoes and very slowly and steadily, with her hand trembling as she reaches, she crushes the spider against the handle with the sole of the shoe.

For a few seconds she holds it there, frozen. The babies scream beneath her outstretched arm. Then she reaches the magazine out and slides it under the shoe, drawing it toward her between the babies, and flips the shoe over to see the mess that’s left—a tangle of crushed legs and a flattened black body with a red hourglass at its center.

The kettle in the kitchen begins to scream now too, but Vivian walks steadily toward the kitchen and sets the shoe and magazine on the table. She pours the kettle water into the saucepan, quieting it. Then she opens a cupboard and takes out a can of formula and a pair of nursing bottles.

Later the bottles sit empty on a coffee table in a tiny, steepled living room, and the babies lie happily on a pink fleece blanket on the linoleum floor. The water sound is gone, and without it the sound of barking is louder. Vivian is sitting on the back of the sofa with her arm out the dormer window, smoking. She has a short yellow satin robe on now over her T-shirt, and with each bark she flinches. Then she hears a key in the door.

The man who comes through it is a little older, but young too, dark-skinned, lean, wearing a shiny red track suit and silver basketball sneakers. He has a plastic grocery bag and from it he pulls a fresh pack of cigarettes and a box of Twizzlers and tosses them on the coffee table.

“For you,” he says. “How’s my lady?”

“Marco—”

“Hold up. There’s more.” He reaches down into the bag and pulls out a black waxed-paper box, the kind restaurants use for leftovers, and a bottle of nail polish the color of cotton candy. He kneels down on the linoleum in front of the sofa. “Let me fix you up. Then you have some steak. I know how my lady love steak.”

He unscrews the long black cap on the bottle of polish. In the shadow of the upturned white collar on his jacket is a track of five scars, pale and
small and round such as the tip of a cigarette makes, so evenly spaced they look strung there, like beads.

“Marco,” she says.

“This pink looked just like you,” he says. He draws the brush out and strokes it along the nail on her big toe.

“Marco, I have to show you something.”

“What is it, baby?”

“It was in the bedroom. There was a spider.”

“Aw. I wish I been here to get it for you. That’s no job for a lady.”

“The poisonous kind.”

“You needed your man around to get it. Isn’t that what I told you I’d do when I found you?”

“It was a black widow, I think.”

“All puff up and scared and lonely in your bitty car in the parking lot at the mall?”

“The kind with the red shape on its back.”

“I said, ‘Come back with me, I change my mind, no way do I care you’re pregnant. Backseat of a Pinto no place for a lady to live. I’ll take care of you.’ Next time you save the spiders for Marco, baby. I’ll get them for you.”

“I think we should call the exterminator.”

“Sure thing,” he says, drawing the brush out of the bottle. “Anything for my girl.”

“Do you know one?”

“You just leave it to Marco. I’ll take care of everything.” He applies the polish to the smallest toes, one by one, with careful fingers.

She says, “Or I could look one up in the phone book? I could call myself?”

“That’s no job for a lady like you. It my job to take care of you. Didn’t I say so?” He blows on her toes. “Now, how about those babies? They need anything? I’m about to go out again.”

“Some more formula maybe.”

“Diapers?”

“Sure,” she says.

“You got it.” He blows again on her nails. “You stay here and play games on that pretty sparkly phone I got for you. I just be gone a couple hours. I got to meet two business associates of mine tonight. Then I’m going to bring them back here with me, and I need to ask you one more time to do me a favor.”

He blows again, gently.

Vivian is looking at the top of his head. There is a thin spot near the crown where she can see one more of those long-ago burns. She says, “Those same guys who own this building?”

“No, that was just for once with them. These guys are just business associates. I got to do business, baby. Where you think I get money to buy those fancy chairs your babies sleep in?”

Vivian taps her ash out the window. “Okay,” she says.

“Be about midnight probably.”

“Okay.”

“So maybe you have those babies out of the bedroom then.”

“Sure.”

“They not always quiet even in this room, so you see what you can do. Maybe put them out on the flat part of the roof like I did before.”

“Sure, Marco.”

Then he opens the door and shuts it behind him.

Vivian puts out her cigarette on a roof tile and climbs off the couch. In the kitchen cupboard, next to a formula can, a bag of potato chips, and a bottle of Cutty Sark, is a very old phone book. She takes her little pink cell phone from the table next to his white shoe on the magazine and she pages through it: Eviction, Excavating, Extermination: see Pest Control.

By the time she hears the knock on the door, she has put on more clothes—a white sundress with peach-colored flowers, red flip-flops, and a navy blue zip-up sweatshirt with a hood. The babies are drifting off on her two shoulders, one in pink-footed pajamas and the other in blue, and she is doing a soft jiggle step until she can be sure they are fully asleep.

She dances to the door and crouches down almost to kneeling to keep her torso upright as she turns the dead bolt. “Come in,” she says.

The door opens and there stands a white-haired man wearing a blue work jumpsuit, leaning over to slide a heavy-looking black duffel bag through the door. “You called Animal Control yet about that dog?”

“It’s my boyfriend’s.”

“He ever take it for a walk?”

“He got it as a guard dog.”

“You ask me, a man ought to take care of the things he uses,” he says, still struggling with the bag, and then he stands upright and gets a first full look at her in her flowered sundress and rubber sandals, a baby sleeping on each shoulder. He coughs, bringing a fist to his mouth. “Twins?” he says.

She nods.

“My sisters were twins. They lost the same teeth within hours of each other for every blessed tooth in their mouths. In their teens, just before the phone would ring, one would say, ‘Answer the phone, Ma. It’s Kara calling to get picked up early from band practice.’ Magic. You’ve got twenty pounds of magic there sleeping split between your shoulders.”

Vivian’s heart lifts. Before she can think what to say, he cocks his head and wrinkles his brow again. “You forget some water running somewhere?”

“It’s white noise. To help them sleep through the barking.”

“I see.” The patch on his jumpsuit says “Harold.” He picks up his bag. “So. Where’s your crawl space?”