He says, “At least let me come with you.”
She shakes her head.
He says, “I can be dressed in two minutes. It’s perfect. I’m not on duty until Wednesday.”
“I might not be back by then.”
“I’ll catch a flight if that happens.”
“What about your class for the residents?”
“Not until Thursday.”
“But you have all those articles to read! And a recertification exam on Friday!”
“I can prep in the car while you drive.”
She opens her mouth to raise another objection, and before she can speak he adds, “And the girls will be fine; my mother is probably already awake in her bed reading John Grisham and munching a bag of Kashmiri mix.”
“Okay, you’re right.” She blinks, looking baffled, or caught, or both. “I guess I just don’t want you to come.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I want to face him on my own. All these layers of protection!—”
When Akhil opens his mouth to object, she waves her fork impatiently; “I don’t mean Security. I’ve already talked to Larry. He’s assigning two people to come with me.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“You were right about the unread scripts. You were right about me hiding in here for the last four years. But it’s not just the house. It’s you and the girls I’m hiding behind. You know me. I like the version of me you see. It feels so safe. All the lousy distorted things people say—even nice people! Even people who think it’s a compliment!—none of it confuses or depresses me when you’re with me. I need to learn to do that for myself.”
He watches her stand and take a silver travel mug from the cupboard and fill it with coffee. As much as he’d like to go with her, he will not try to argue her on this. She had once laid out a collection of her red-carpet photos from the days before she met him, and although she looked stunning, right away he knew what she was trying to show him. There was a sad, tense look in her shoulders and mouth that was absent in the pictures with him at her side. In the manic strobe-lighting of camera flashes, under the cacophony of pleas (“Over here, Jessica!” “Give us those eyes, Jessica!” “Jessica, tell us who you’re wearing!”) he’d taken to whispering his own in her ear (“Mommy, cut my crusts!” “Jessica, who did your epic bedhead!”). It’s true it would be good for her not to need him.
“You get how bad it could be, though, right? A whole team of photographers with telephoto lenses in his neighbor’s yard to watch you with the dog. If there is a dog. His hospital room bugged so he can sell the conversation to Hard Copy. If he’s in the hospital. Have you called the hospital?”
“No. I don’t want to draw a bigger crowd by tipping anyone off that he’s getting a visitor. But I do get it. Paparazzi. Unfair headlines. Heartbreaking betrayal. I get it, Akhil, and I want to go anyway.” She clips the lid on the cup with a hard snap.
He studies her face. The wet lashes and the pinked skin and the set jaw.
“Okay, but why, though?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want that dog? If there is a dog.”
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head, looking first at the tree of photos on the wall and then all around the room. The dirty socks and the struggling Chia pet and the bin of broken toys. “Because it’s someone from my family I can take care of? Because it’s someone from my childhood I can share with the girls? Because it’s something he took from me that I can take back from him?”
Akhil reaches out and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. He smiles. They have been married ten years, and still it fills her with relief to see how he accepts this about her—her fathomless depths of uncertainty. He is the only mirror she can stand to look in. “Okay,” he says.
She picks up her duffel bag, and he follows her into the garage then, its walls lined with shelves of baby gear and old clothes and games they’ve outgrown, things she is almost ready to give away. She moved these items first to bottom shelves and then into boxes in a hall closet and then here, and on any given day they waver and change in her eyes from keepsakes to junk and then back again. Akhil could sort through them in an hour and never regret (never even remember!) any of his choices. He sheds things so easily, and just as easily he decides what to acquire and what to keep. His mother is the same. Every night she cleans out her purse sitting at the kitchen table, discarding, discarding, but on her bureau she still has a ticket stub from a Zubin Mehta concert she went to as a girl. On shopping trips she never holds an item aloft for long minutes, or circles back on it after she has moved on, or decides to return it as soon as she gets home. She knows her heart, just as Akhil knows his. Their keels are so deep. When Jessica expresses envy over this, he shrugs or kisses her ear or smooths her hair. The primer of his early life was simpler than hers, he says; when she sorts out what to trust from a textbook as convoluted as her childhood, she will know it even more deeply. Maybe so, but until then the ease they feel in the world seems like a magic trick to her. When Akhil first brought Jessica home to meet his parents it was for Lakshmi Puja dinner, and she imagined an arctic front of prejudices would chill their introduction (famous girl, not Indian, higher income, no parents for them to include), but instead his mother stepped forth from the throng of cousins and siblings and aunts and uncles in her sari with her arms outstretched. “Can I be the first one to hug you?” Jessica had tried to invent reasons for such an unconditionally warm greeting in her mind (a love of celebrities, deference to Akhil, a cultural custom), but over the next few years she saw his mother say the same to each new girl- or boyfriend one of her children brought home to her. It was that simple. The people her children loved were people she opened her heart to. They were on the list of things to acquire and keep.
Jessica reaches over an old high chair and a stack of LPs and presses a button on the wall. There is a great cracking and whirring sound, and the garage door begins to draw up and back on its track, filling the garage with the soft gray light from outside, and Jessica opens the door of her Suburban to toss her bag on the passenger seat. When she turns back to say good-bye to him, she sees Jaya standing by his side in her pajamas, holding her stuffed dog and wearing her sparkly red shoes.
“Where are you going, Mommy?”
Prisha was wary and sweet-smart even as an infant nursing in her arms, searching Jessica’s face for clues, and then along came Jaya, who nursed with her eyes closed and would drift off to sleep in anyone’s lap. To hear her ask a question is to learn for the first time that most questions are asked with a certain guarded skepticism of tone, as if evasion is expected in the answer. Jaya’s inflections are so cheerful and open they rise like the shoe-store balloon she once tagged and released with glee on their patio, certain it would drift on hospitable winds to the green yard of a Dutch or Ghanaian or Chinese girl just waiting to be her friend.
Jessica says, “To visit someone in the hospital.”
“Who?”
Jessica swallows. Behind Jaya, Akhil is watching her—not expecting her to fail; not expecting anything. The way he studies her face never changes. It is the only scrutiny that makes her feel safe.
“Someone I knew when I was a little girl.”
“Can I come with you?”
Jessica smiles at her sadly. “No, sweetie.”
“Why not?”
“He’s sick in a way that’s not safe for kids to be around.”
Jaya hugs her stuffed dog to her chest. “Is it safe for you, though?”
“Yes.” She bends to kiss her on the top of the head, but as she does so the girl herself bends to do something. When she straightens she is barefoot and holding out her red shoes, and tears spring to Jessica’s eyes. She laughs and wipes them away. “I don’t need those, sweetie.”
The girl doesn’t lower her arm. “How do you know?”
“It’s just a hospital. It’s not the kind of place you get stranded.”
“You might not know, though. I
don’t think Dorothy knew.”
“Okay,” she says. She takes the tiny shoes and sets them on the seat next to her duffel bag. “But don’t worry. Tell your older sister I’ll be back soon, will you? Tell her I said good-bye.”
The girl hugs her dog. “I’ll let Daddy tell her.”
“Why?”
“She’ll tell me something scary. She likes to scare me.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“Last night she said the witch was Dorothy’s neighbor. She said maybe Mrs. Lucas is one and we don’t know it yet.”
Akhil steps forward and lays his hands on Jaya’s shoulders. He winks at Jessica over her head. “Turns out witches aren’t as hard as they seem to get rid of, though. She turned back into a neighbor as soon as Dorothy splashed her with water, didn’t she? She was Dorothy’s to dissolve all along.” He leans over Jaya’s head to kiss Jessica on the cheek. He whispers, “Call me. I’ll call you if you don’t. I still think it’s crazy not to take an ally.”
Jessica gives a little nod toward Dana’s Suburban idling quietly just shy of the threshold. “I’m taking her, aren’t I?”
“Yes. And thank you. But that’s not the only kind of safe I want you to be.”
He pulls away and lets her go then, shutting the door gently and stepping back as she slowly backs out, looking at her with sad eyes but waving cheerfully until she turns, her rear bumper lining up with Dana’s, and they pull out together, picking a path among the tricycles and the balls, over the chalk drawings, all of them more brightly colored now with the first direct sun, and as the big gate halves swing open, Jessica glances at her rearview mirror for one last look at them behind her. Then she drives out through her gate into the street to begin her journey, fitfully at first, with traffic lights making her pause and watch strangers pass, until she crosses up over the green hills and down onto the long stretch of highway through Death Valley, dry and silent on either side of her for miles, with Jaya’s small red shoes sparkling on the passenger seat next to her, and Dana following behind.
After hours of parched flat desert, they come up over another small mountain pass, and Las Vegas appears in the distance, a weird emerald expanse of golf greens around a center of glittering buildings thrown up to look like the rest of the world’s wonders—marvels other cities shaped with time and trial. The last stretch of gray highway bears them around a bend over the barren sands and dumps them abruptly into that uncanny green valley, and Jessica follows her map to Villa Ridge, a wide curving clean street of lovely stucco houses, all of them with high arched windows and sparkling lanterns above their front doors. A palm tree sprouts from each jewel green front lawn, except for the last, where a yellow skid loader sits parked on a plot of fresh soil next to a giant hole and a small fan palm, its root-ball wrapped in burlap. Even with her car windows closed, Jessica can hear the barking.
She pulls up in front of it and turns her engine off. She reaches over Jaya’s red shoes for the bag of bacon in her duffel, and feels an upwelling of a familiar dread, not at the prospect of entering her father’s yard, or of being photographed by waiting strangers, but of something more immediate and more common—her smallest, most ridiculous fear—of greeting Dana. She suppresses it certainly (she is grateful every day for the protection they provide from the shadows her job has cast on her family—the predatory photographers, the stalkers, the few famous kidnappings of children of stars), but the truth is she does not go whole days or even whole hours at home without wondering what these kind people think of her. It’s embarrassing. It seems to her the pinnacle of vanity and self-absorption, this discomfort she feels around people who are paid to protect her privacy, people who in reality are probably bored by her. It is bad enough that she allows herself to be buffeted by magazines’ misleading snapshots and captions (Sex Symbol! Rich Bitch! Super Mom! Selfish! Icon! Bad Daughter!), but secretly she finds herself feeling insecure and self-conscious even in her own yard, where from behind a shuttered window she knows good people can see her. She has made her world so small trying to escape the judgments of strangers, drawing in and in, shopping online and hosting events, until she rarely leaves home, and they are the only strangers left to fear. And she finds that for her they are plenty. They, after all, have more pictures to piece together, and although of course all they see her doing is collecting sippy cups and pushing her girls on a swing, she finds herself haunted by a mystical idea of the composite they see on those four quarter screens—as if (crazy! she knows it!) they see more than she herself can, some kind of objective collage, a magical slide show of her life’s most telling details, a window to her past, herself, her soul.
She looks in the rearview mirror to adjust her cap and glasses and sees that Dana is already getting out of her Suburban and approaching, a tall thin woman with a blank pale face, khaki pants neatly pressed and her black polo shirt loose, hanging low over her belt to hide a gun.
She arrives at Jessica’s window. The scar on her upper lip is a bright spot in her face, which is so neutral it makes Jessica first nervous, and then ashamed in exactly the way she expected to be. She rolls her window down, resolving not to do it this time. She will not try to influence this woman’s opinion. She will not work to project what she wants others to see (Kind! Down-to-earth! Humble! Normal!). But even as she does so, she finds herself saying, “Thanks for coming on this trip. Dana, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Larry said really great things about you.”
“That’s nice to hear, ma’am.”
“Jessica.”
Dana just smiles. Jessica has to cut her eyes away for a moment, because of the frankness of Dana’s scrutiny, and because of the revealing strangeness of what she is working up to ask. “Anyway, thank you, really. I appreciate the help,” she says. Then into the long opening of her nervous hesitation Dana interjects:
“I think I should lead you around the corner, to park farther from the house.”
Jessica blushes and glances at her father’s raw yard, as if Dana has divined something about her just from looking at it. The dog’s barks are sharp and evenly spaced, as if they too are measuring something.
“We’ll attract less attention if the cars are not together,” Dana explains. “I thought I’d keep mine closer, in case we have to leave quickly.”
And the relief Jessica feels at this practical explanation shames her all over again.
“I’ll show you where,” Dana says, and jogs ahead of her. Jessica drives slowly, following the figure of her, this slim woman running along the sidewalk and around the bend to where more clean houses lie. The barking there is just as loud. It could be the same street, but for the missing spectacle of her father’s unfinished yard. She adjusts her cap and sunglasses again. She stuffs the bag of bacon into the patch pocket on her sweatshirt and looks at the shoes her daughter gave her. She gets out of the car.
Dana stands, waiting.
Jessica clears her throat. Although her own eyes shift toward the corner with every bark, Dana’s hold steady, watching her. In Larry’s travel-support summary, Jessica saw that in high school Dana was a decorated member of the Marine Corps Junior ROTC. That she speaks Arabic and served four years in the barren and bloody deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. What must she be thinking? And when will she, Jessica, ever, ever stop wondering what people are thinking? It is an advantage only in character acting, to indulge so compulsively in speculation about the private thoughts of other people. She closes her eyes briefly and pictures her two daughters on the swing set in her backyard. I am just a mother. I am just a mother who loves, like all mothers, to watch her girls swing. But she knows Dana is staring at her, waiting. No doubt wondering why she is so nervous around a woman whose job it is to keep her safe. Ridiculous. It’s ridiculous, this beating around the bush. Jessica tries again: “I need to ask you for something.”
“Certainly.”
“So I guess you know all about my dad. Read about him online or seen him on T
V or—”
“Larry briefed me this morning, ma’am.”
Jessica’s eyes cut off to the side and flutter uncomfortably. She crosses her arms and forces herself to look back at Dana’s eyes. This woman will not understand it, what she wants to ask for. Even Jessica does not understand it.
She says, “So I don’t really know what to expect here. I mean, I don’t know who might be waiting—”
“There’s currently no one in the yard with the dog, and the house itself is still empty to the best of our knowledge.”
Jessica’s forehead wrinkles in confusion.
“Velasquez did a pretext visit,” Dana says. “He left for the hospital just a minute before we pulled in.”
“He rang my dad’s doorbell?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who was he pretending to be?”
“A census taker.”
Jessica longs to be more like them. That is part of it, she remembers now—part of her shame around them. It’s not just physical danger they’re willing to face bravely—it’s everyday decision. It’s logistics and interpersonal nuance. Things are complicated; they’re imperfect; and they deal with it. They don’t lament and stall. They don’t get paralyzed or rush forward in a fog of generalized anxiety and confusion. They assess and act, breaking up a heterogeneous mass of problems into discrete chunks and pairing up often regrettable ends with the best of available means. It seems impossible that they wouldn’t be able to call upon these well-honed skills in the daily complexity of their own personal lives. Were she to undertake to play Dana in a film—say, a Dana with a con-man father and a beloved childhood dog condemned to impoundment—she would prep by making a list. She would method-act a set of specific goals and clear desires. She can’t imagine they would any of them set off on a journey without knowing what they wanted to find.
Traps Page 9
