Traps

by MacKenzie Bezos

  “How did it happen?”

  “We’re not sure. A random person driving by his house called 911 from a cell phone. He was lying in his front yard. There was some trauma to his head. He may have tripped—I understand the yard was unfinished and full of holes.”

  The room has surprisingly little in it. A white vinyl stool on chrome wheels. That machine hooked to her father. A sink with a square foot of formica counter to the side of it and a cabinet above. The two of them and him. Jessica looks out the window. An airplane is flying by in the distance. Closer there is a gray-and-white gull dipping and rising slightly, like a pulse, not moving forward at all, revealing that outside it is windy.

  Jessica says, “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “That’s the difficult thing about comas. He could stay like this for a day or for fifteen years.”

  “There’s nothing to do?”

  “Monitoring, of course.… Minor adjustments to his care.… Unless he had a health-care directive of some kind suggesting he wanted it otherwise. A withdrawal of care.… Less than extraordinary measures.…”

  Jessica shakes her head. “Not that I know of.”

  The doctor looks tactfully at the floor.

  Jessica says, “Can I ask … Is he getting everything he needs? I mean, I don’t know what kind of insurance he has.…”

  “For a condition like this there aren’t really any choices at this stage. We do the same for everyone.”

  “So there isn’t anything I can do to help?”

  The doctor’s eyelids flutter the way they do when people know more about you than they should. “In a few weeks if there’s been no change we’ll get ready to transfer him to a long-term-care facility, and those vary in quality. I could have our care coordinator call you about that. About where you want him to go.”

  Jessica shakes her head miserably. She doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. She wipes under her eyes with the heels of both hands.

  Dr. Stern pulls a trifolded pamphlet from his pocket, and Jessica accepts it. Blurred to black-and-gray in the background is a photograph of the face of a smiling elderly woman and over it in big bright yellow letters is the title: “Reaching Out for the Help You Need.”

  Jessica blushes crimson, her heart beating wildly. She keeps her head bowed, studying it and waiting, certain that there is some kind of witchcraft at work; that Dr. Stern has seen inside her and that this offering is prelude to an oracular judgment and prophecy of the most grave and personal kind.

  But instead he says gently, “There’s a phone number on the back. They can refer you to counseling groups for people in your situation.…”

  And Jessica looks up finally—sunglassless, hatless, tearstained. The confusion and incredulity she feels must be all over her face, because the doctor’s eyes flutter again. “Families of coma patients, I mean.”

  Jessica flips over the pamphlet: “National Family Caregivers Association, Kensington, Maryland.”

  The doctor brings his fist to his mouth and clears his throat. “We try to limit visit length in the ICU, but I’m going to extend yours.”

  Jessica goes on staring down at the pamphlet.

  He adds, “There’s quite a bit of research that indicates coma patients can hear and process language, recognize voices,” and when he slips out of the room he closes the door with almost no sound.

  Jessica makes herself look at her father then, and she thinks about what the doctor said. His eyelids are wrinkled like crepe paper. The circlets of bandaid rise and fall with his breathing. She could say anything, deliver any rebuttal, and he would hear it and he would neither be able to respond nor to deliver a tape of her words to a tabloid to be cut and twisted in misleading ways. She can in fact declare anything—that he’s been wrong about her, and that the way he has profited from betraying her is also wrong. That she is a good daughter, a good wife and mother, a good person. That she is simply good. And she finds that although she can imagine the words she might use, without his skepticism to fight she is able to see for the first time that she herself does not believe them. It occurs to her finally in a rush of panic and discouragement that all these years she has been running from the wrong things. For here she is—her father can say nothing to confuse her and every single stranger she has encountered on this trip beyond the safety of her Beverly Hills gate has been unfailingly kind. She has no critics, and still she feels ashamed.

  She pulls out her cell phone. She presses one button and raises it to her ear.

  “How’s it going?” Akhil says.

  “He’s in a coma.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t a setup. He’s been unconscious for two weeks.”

  She’s crying again.

  He lets her do this for thirty seconds or so. Then he says, “How do you feel about that?”

  “At first I was pissed off, actually, because I didn’t get to do what I came for.”

  “What was that again?”

  “Seize the sword. Call his bullshit. Tell him I know I’m a good daughter no matter what he gets the tabloids to say. And then I—”

  “What?”

  “It’s so terrible.”

  “What?”

  “And then I thought—I really thought this, that’s how despicable I am—I thought, finally I can be in a room with him without worrying about him hurting me.”

  “That’s not despicable, it’s compassionate.”

  “I even put chapstick on him,” she says miserably. “I used his comatose body to play house: good daughter with sick father.”

  “It’s compassionate that you want to visit him and take care of him after what he’s done.”

  She shrugs, although he can’t see it. Then she says, “His dog bit me.”

  “What? Where?”

  “On the hand. Don’t worry, I got it treated. The doctor said to tell you she graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins.”

  “Was the dog vaccinated?”

  “By my dad? Who knows? But the doctor said the odds of rabies are extremely low anyway, and then with the way Grace is acting, almost nil. Does that sound right?”

  “Were you offering her food?”

  “Yes! That’s what she asked me. And Dana too. Since when is care-taking such a risk factor?! But yes, and she’s deaf and blind now she’s so old. She was just confused.”

  “She’s right, then, you don’t need to worry. We should watch the dog for ten days here at home though.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t bring home a dog that gets confused when you give her treats and sometimes attacks. How would it even work?! We’d have her in a fenced area of some sort where the girls could see her but not touch her, and they’d build up some fantasy in their minds about what it would be like if they talked me out of it and I let us keep her at the end of the ten days, and then what? I disappoint them and pack her into the car and take her where? Who’s going to adopt a dog that bites people who feed her? A dog who’s about to die anyway?”

  “You could euthanize her now.”

  She laughs, a weird, bitter laugh with a bit of spittle.

  “What?” he says.

  “I seem to be killing off inconvenient loved ones right and left here. Euthanize my childhood puppy. Grateful for my father’s coma. What a discovery! Permanent unconsciousness for all my difficult charges!”

  “Jess—”

  “If only we could get the dog into a coma, then everything would be perfect! No worries about her hurting anyone and I wouldn’t have to make any decisions—”

  “Sweetie—”

  “Maybe when one of our girls goes through a rebellious teen stage we can put her in a coma, too.”

  “Jessica, wait—”

  “Watch out! Watch out! Don’t cheat on me or I might be hoping for a coma for you, too. So much easier to explain to the children than a divorce. So much less complicated.”

  “You’re not being fair to
yourself at all.”

  She shakes her head and covers her mouth with her hand, crying silently.

  He says, “And I could never in a million years cheat on you. Not even if you daydreamed about inducing my coma.”

  She squeezes her eyes shut. She feels a flash of jealous anger. For him this would all be so simple. Kill the dog. Forget the con-man father. Welcome home his sad, lost, crazy wife. Can I be the first one to hug you?

  “Sweetheart?”

  She opens her eyes and looks at her dad. At his tubes and his brittle dyed hair.

  “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.”

  9

  Long Nights

  It 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:

  It is not unusual for some claims to be denied or for insurers to say they will not cover a test, procedure, or service that doctors order. If this happens, it is important to have a relationship with a customer service representative or case manager with whom you can talk about the situation.

  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:

  Finished at location 2. Exiting within view of your current position in 2–3 minutes.

  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 cos
tume 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.