Traps

by MacKenzie Bezos

  Jessica does as she’s told. She hangs back in the shade of the pink stucco wall while Dana unlatches the gate and passes through it with the dog, out across the raw soil to the curb, where a compact elderly woman in a gold velour warm-up suit stands next to a teenage girl in cutoff shorts and a halter top. The girl pulls a purple cell phone from her back pocket and raises it up in front of her face at arm’s length between her and Dana. Dana turns her back and walks toward her car.

  “Well, wait,” the old woman says, walking after her. “Who are you?”

  “Just here for the dog, ma’am.”

  “Are you with Animal Control? That is a famous woman’s dog, I’ll have you know, and she is on her way here to take care of it. You could have yourself in a spot of very bad PR. DeeDee, are you getting all this?”

  “Dang. Hang on a minute. I didn’t know there would be anything YouTubeable.”

  Dana is already across the street. She opens her tailgate and, with unbelievable briskness, slides the makeshift bite sleeve off her arm, hoists the old dog up onto the deck, lowers the door shut with a click, and locks it with the remote in her pocket. The girl scurries across the street and holds the little cell phone up to the window, but with the dark tinting and the reflected light the little screen on her phone shows nothing.

  “Burn! Do you think she’ll still come, Lulu?”

  “Of course she will!”

  “I had Mindy and Paco and them coming for pictures and autographs. Mindy made three hundred dollars last year on eBay, and Paco’s got a photo credit on Gawker.”

  The old woman turns to Dana. “Won’t you wait a few minutes?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible, ma’am.”

  “I think it’s very unprofessional of you not to wait. She had to drive all the way from Los Angeles, you know. She’s going to be just sick over this, she is a very conscientious woman and her father is ill in the hospital. She doesn’t have time to be chasing that dog all over creation.”

  “My apologies, ma’am.”

  “Let’s go inside, DeeDee. We’ll call her right now on her cell phone. We can offer to meet her at the hospital.”

  She puts a hand at the small of the girl’s back and ushers her across the raw front yard, right by the gate behind which Dana instructed Jessica to stand waiting. Dana hears the big mahogany door open and shut. Jessica hears it too. As soon as it latches, the brown gate opens and she hurries out and down one block to her own car, parked at an inconspicuous distance where Dana knew from experience to leave it.

  On the way to the hospital, Dana leads. Grace is whimpering in the back of her Suburban—a high, rhythmic whine like a squeaky pump—but Dana keeps her eyes on the road, and on her rearview mirror, where she can see Jessica at the wheel of the Suburban behind her. When the hospital rises into view, Dana swings in at the far end of the lot near the Emergency Room portico, past Velasquez nodding Jessica into a parking spot he has waiting for her, and Dana continues on alone, slowing as she passes the benches at the big front entrance, where a young man with mutton-chop sideburns and low-hanging jeans cranes his neck and visors his eyes to see her, a tripod hidden clumsily in the azalea bushes behind him.

  She parks at a distance between a silver minivan and a dark maroon Cadillac. She leaves the engine idling, getting out and making a show of looking at him before she crouches out of his sight line to find that Velasquez has done exactly as she instructed. Behind the left front tire of the minivan is a Petco bag, and inside it are two stainless-steel bowls, a bag of chicken-flavored treats, a black plastic muzzle with a leather strap, a nylon leash, and a plastic card key for the Holiday Inn Express with “Rm 105, North Entry” written in black marker above the magnetic strip. It is one of the things that Dana loves about her job—that her coworkers are by requirement predisposed to reliability, to procedure and preparation.

  She is still relishing these assets when Grace gives her the first hint that with her they may be useless. When Dana gets back in her car, the dog does not stop whining. Not after Dana climbs over the seats and opens the pouch of treats. Not after she fits the muzzle gently over her nose and clips the cable ties with a pair of blunt-tipped bandaging scissors she brings up from some unknown recess in the backpack from Ian’s dreams. Not after she fills a bowl with water from her cooler and sets it down in front of her, splashing a bit to make her take notice. Dana dribbles a bit through her muzzle with a cupped hand and even then Grace holds still, whining, holding her head at a dispirited cant.

  It’s all she has time for. Dana glances out the back window and sees Jessica and Velasquez pass into the far end of the building while the boy with the camera sits on the stone bench by the door, his eyes fixed on her own car instead. This portion of the mission, at least, will go exactly as she plans. She drops a treat on the surface of the water bowl, hoping the scent might draw the dog’s attention later, and she begins unbuttoning her black shirt, leaning forward to remove it. She has to stretch her arms out behind her to do it, and when she wiggles out of it, she reveals a black tank top beneath, a military tattoo on her left bicep, and a pair of shiny aluminum dog tags on a stainless-steel chain. She removes her hip holster, slides up the leg on her khaki pants, slips the gun into an ankle holster on her boot, and pushes the pants back down. She opens an outer pocket on her backpack. Between a bag of cable ties and a clear film canister of safety pins is a cheap pink plastic travel soap case which she snaps open to reveal a selection of lipsticks. She checks the stickers on the bottom and finally uncaps a blackish color and cranks the rearview mirror toward her to put it on. Then she repacks her backpack, cracks all of her windows an inch, and switches her engine off.

  The boy sees her coming from a long way off, of course. He squints, shading his eyes under a purple-and-yellow Lakers cap turned sideways. Dana walks differently now, with more sway in her hips, and when she gets close, she sits on the bench opposite without even looking at him and takes a pack of cigarettes out of a side pocket of her backpack. All the while she can see out of her peripheral vision that he is watching her closely. Dana lights her cigarette and takes a drag, blowing it out to the side between her dark lips. Then she unzips her backpack and leans over, moving things around inside, her dog tags jingling, and draws out the camera. It has a wide canvas strap, and she slings it around her neck.

  The boy raises his eyebrows. “Who you here for?”

  “My grandmother,” she says.

  The boy snorts.

  Dana sets her cigarette on the concrete bench and makes a few adjustments to her camera settings, sighting through the lens at the automatic doors before letting it rest again in her lap on the concrete bench. She leans over her backpack and takes out a small padded zip bag with a different lens in it and removes it from its case. She twists the old lens with a series of tidy clicks, like a soldier disassembling a rifle, and she swaps it out for the longer lens and re-sights on the door.

  All the while the kid in the baggy jeans is watching her.

  “How long you been doing this?” he says.

  Dana says nothing. Instead she picks up her cigarette and takes another drag. Then she takes her BlackBerry out of her backpack.

  “Ooh, that’s cold,” the kid says.

  Dana thumbs the keys. Nothing yet from Velasquez. Nothing work-related at all, in fact, but the boy is watching her, and Dana needs him to believe she is corresponding with someone who knows more than he does. So she opens Ian’s text.

  And above his “We’ll see,” she types:

  Please provide examples of the lucky turns of fate that might flow from my standing you up at your sister’s wedding.

  Right away he texts back:

  Didn’t you say motel rooms are magical for you? Maybe you’ll come home full of pent-up energy from two excellent nights’ sleep and need to burn it off.

  She smiles.

  It works perfectly. “Good tip?” the boy says.

  Again Dana ignores him, staring at her screen.

 
; “Your loss,” the boy says. He takes out his own cell phone. “I got a girl tipping me about an A-lister.” He makes a show of leaning over to check his texts. “I thought we could help each other out.”

  Dana hits Reply again, but already the burst of pleasure that comes from any communication from him has been replaced by a familiar ache.

  She types:

  I’ll try to call you on one of my breaks because there’s something I need to tell you.

  For a long time the ache has been born of something abstract—just that sense from experience that she cannot long hold on to anyone who gets to know her well enough to be disappointed—to discover that there is not more inside her, something she is holding back, some source of warmth or freedom they can uncover or thaw. More recently it has also flowed from something more concrete but still unscheduled—his death, which could be so much sooner than most; it could be anytime; it could be tomorrow. But the ache seems to be taking its final shape now. The object of her dread is more immediate. Dana can see now exactly how she will lose him. She even knows some of the words that will be spoken. And she knows when. It makes her want to hurry. It gives her project a deadline.

  She opens the file she e-mailed to herself from her apartment the night before.

  Before you appeal, you may want to take some additional steps:

  Dana reads through the bullet-pointed recommendations. She reads them twice, even a third time for good measure, still fingering the dog tags between her breasts and taking drags from her cigarette, drawing the boy’s attention. She can do this in her sleep—better than she can sleep in fact—all these careful, planful, protective acts. She can perform them for Jessica and for Ian at the same time. Two at once. It is that easy. She has packed into her backpack and BlackBerry and heart everything she needs for an endless stream of defensive feats. Here outside the hospital Dana has disguised herself to appear like the boy—callous, cavalier, shortsighted, mercenary—and although Dana is none of these things, it appears to be working. He is watching her and trying to match her, adjusting his camera settings and eyeing the door and checking his own phone. He cannot know what Dana herself is really reading. He cannot know that Dana is preparing not to unleash pain but instead to try to contain it.

  She is on her fifth Sample Letter of Appeal when a text tumbles forth—not from Velasquez (not yet), but from Ian:

  Is it yes?

  And she is confused for a moment. As he knew she would be, apparently, because before she can parse it, or hit Reply to ask, he sends a second text:

  On the after-motel nooky, I mean.

  She smiles again, but she forces herself to hesitate this time, because above all Dana is careful. She watches the cursor blink, and knows that somewhere, probably in his breezy, messy, bird-filled apartment, he is waiting to know how she will answer. The answer that had welled up inside her was “We’ll see,” but she believes (Dana knows) it is not the right thing to say. It is not right because it will mislead him about her plans. The plans she will follow when she is off duty and can call him to tell him the truth about what’s inside her. She cannot type, “We’ll see,” because she will not see. Dana never waits to see. Dana decides and prepares. She decides and prepares based on what she already knows.

  So there on the bench in front of the hospital, Dana shifts the big camera between her legs and blows smoke toward the boy, and she tests and weighs, experiments and edits, typing out sterile, cautious phrasing after sterile, cautious phrasing—“Maybe” and “Let’s talk first” and “I’m not sure”—until finally she settles on this:

  I should leave that up to you after we talk.

  And Ian of course does not hesitate. As soon as she sends it, he answers back:

  Yes then. If it’s up to me it’s always yes.

  7

  Secrets

  Lynn parks her truck angle-in in front of the shelter in Winslow. It is a little low concrete building at the end of Main Street—just a long block of storefronts (barber, cleaner, diner) with a school at one end and a church across the street here at the other. She turns her engine off and sits there, looking at the sign to the left of the door: WINSLOW HUMANE SOCIETY. In her rearview mirror is the little reflected image of the church—a dirty white beadboard chapel on a plot of bare dirt. Someone has laid stones in the dirt for a path to its door, and to the left is a rusty swing set—two pairs of chains bearing white plastic seats and the third pair bearing nothing.

  She gets out of her car and crosses the wide street toward the chapel—there are no cars passing to stop her—and heads not for the door but for the side of the building, the one facing out of town, where there is a metal handrail surrounding a cut in the earth with a set of concrete stairs leading down.

  Lynn slips her hands into the big patch pockets of her barn coat. Then she takes the stairs down to a little wood door with a dented metal knob and she pushes it in and open.

  The room is small, lit by a metal floor lamp and the light from a high slit of a basement window, and in the center is a circle made by seven chairs and a plywood podium. In four of the chairs sit men and at the podium stands a woman (younger than Lynn) taking a sip of water from a clear plastic cup. More chairs sit folded up against the wall at the back. All the faces turn to her when she opens the door.

  The woman with the cup of water clears her throat. “Welcome,” she says.

  Lynn steps in and sits down.

  The men turn back to look at the woman at the podium. She takes a sip of water, her throat making a little squirting noise as she swallows and sets the plastic cup on the plywood with a hollow, skittery sound.

  “My name is Beth,” she says, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

  Over the pulse in her ears, Lynn hears her tell a story of how she used to bake cookies with her six-year-old daughter. Beth does not look at her directly, but she can tell somehow that this is not the story Beth had planned to tell. It ends with Beth passing out and her daughter, who now lives with her ex-husband’s parents in Arizona, trying to take the burning cookies from the oven herself.

  She sits down and smooths her wide sprigged skirt with her palms.

  The men shift in their seats. One of them, a man in work boots and denim overalls with a white handlebar mustache, clears his throat. “I came to thirty-seven meetings before I said a single blessed word to anyone.”

  Another, a handsome young Hispanic man in jeans and big white sneakers says, “That’s right, Vernon, you did.”

  Vernon gives his knees a squeeze with his ruddy hands.

  Looking at the floor between their feet, Beth says, “We’re glad you came again.”

  The remaining two men are an elderly black man wearing a belt and polished shoes and a fedora, and a heavy baby-faced man with just wisps of hair on his shiny head wearing a T-shirt and running shorts. Everyone nods.

  The black man in the hat says, “We’ll say the Serenity Prayer in a couple minutes. We like to leave a space. In case anyone else wants to talk.”

  “Sometimes nobody does, though,” Beth says.

  “But other times they do,” Vernon says.

  There are sniffs. Chairs creak. Lynn’s two dissimilar hands lie still in her lap, and she keeps her eyes on them.

  Someone coughs.

  Then the five of them say the Serenity Prayer without her.

  In the dim garage Vivian is preparing bowls of food. It is two o’clock, and Lynn has not returned. So Vivian is thinking about the dogs and doing her best to remember how the older woman said it was done. She has forgotten the idea of doing it in the open, where it is brighter and already dirty, and she has the bowls lined up on the concrete floor, two rows of twelve, and she stands there in her flowered sundress and borrowed rubber boots and barn coat, can opener in hand.

  Her babies are asleep again, and have been for hours. They woke briefly after the hunter’s visit, but Vivian could tell from the way they fussed on the porch that they were spent from the long night awake and crying in her car. So she
stretched them a bit, heaping their bunchy bodies one on each shoulder and walking an invisible castle wall around Lynn’s keep—the dog yard and the shed and the barn in the distance that held a story the older woman didn’t want to tell—and then she prepared their bottles and fed them in the living room, Sebastian and Emmaline sucking in the same sleepy way, their tiny eyelids closed, while Vivian considered the old computer in the corner that sits covered in plastic on a little table next to the potbellied stove. The babies fell asleep eating, and she laid them to sleep in their seats and afterward played a game of solitaire—a real one with Lynn’s real cards instead of the game on Marco’s phone—still considering.

  Now she sets the can opener on the top of the can and draws the little pink cell phone from her pocket. The counter along the window where Lynn had prepared the vials of flea treatment has a row of high shallow windows above. It is the only natural light in the garage. Vivian draws a tiny scroll of paper from the pocket of her own sweatshirt and unfurls it on the scratched brown formica—a little two-inch scrap of torn yellow paper. She has to use two hands to roll it back against itself and make it lie flat. It is a phone number, written in handwriting that is round, almost puffy. She dials it and puts the sparkly little phone to her ear. One ring. Two. A woman’s voice answers: “Carla Bonham.”

  Vivian doesn’t speak. The windows above her head are all clouds and sky, and they make a pool of gold at the crown of her pale yellow hair.

  “Hello?” the voice says.

  Vivian hangs up.

  She sets the phone on the counter in the sun and looks back at the cans of food. She walks back to the first can and picks up the opener and fits it on the rim. Click. A little juice spurts up through the first cut as she begins to turn. Her phone starts ringing on the counter, skittering a little with the vibration it makes, but Vivian does not look at it. She keeps twisting, the can opener making a cranking sound, shifting her feet and turning to rotate with it, the muscles in her hand working hard. When she has made it all the way around, she pulls back the ragged metal circle, revealing the pink-gray top of the loaf of meat.