Dana has, as she told Ian, always loved motels, but her passage through a side door into this one is not the comfort it has always been. Grace’s nails make a ripping sound on the hallway rug—a nubby brown industrial carpet with an acrid plasticky smell—and the fluorescent lights tremor slightly in a way that makes the hallway pulse. Theirs is the first door, and when Dana opens it and flips on the lights, right away the dog begins growling. Dana has to nudge her a little and tug at the leash to get her to cross the threshold, and when she tries to close the door she has to grasp Grace’s tail to keep it from getting caught in the jamb. Then the dog stumbles and throws her weight against the door, slamming it shut, and when Dana releases her leash, Grace stays there, pressing her haunches up against the door in the corner and digging her nails deep into the carpet.
Dana adjusts her plan for the night. There will be her conversation with Ian, but there will also be the till-and-plow work of caregiving tasks and unthreatening gestures she undertakes to soften Grace to her surroundings so that ultimately, sometime, perhaps close to midnight, the dog can stop whining long enough for the two of them to sleep. Beyond all evidence and reason, Dana does still from day to day hope for the ability to sleep.
Step one is water. She flips on the harsh white light of the bathroom. She pulls the beveled plastic sink knob and fills one metal bowl and then sets it on the floor of the bathroom to minimize the mess. Right away, though, she sees that for now at least it is hopeless. Grace is still cowering by the door to the room, folded up on the threshold in a cartoonish way, in a small contorted shape it is hard to believe her big body can even make. Dana steps into her room and sets her heavy backpack on the bed, making a crater in the center of the polyester spread reminiscent of models of gravity fields. If you set something along the bed’s edge—a marble, or a dinner roll, or even an infant—it would roll inexorably toward Dana’s densely packed backpack.
Then Dana begins. She takes out her BlackBerry and types this message to Ian:
In my motel room. I can talk anytime now. Call or text when you’re ready.
And she reaches across the perfect gravity-scape of the bed, and from an outer compartment in her backpack she withdraws a thin laptop and a file of sample insurance letters. The backpack wobbles a bit on the soft mattress and resettles, its zippered compartment of stiff black ballistic nylon hanging open like a door or a mouth. She looks around the room. Navy and red and brown, with a dark peeling presswood dresser topped by a television with wood veneer siding and shiny chrome knobs you have to twist. Above the bed there is no picture, only a blank wall. Dana decides to sit not on the bed but in a wood-framed armchair in the corner where she can see both the door and the dog. She takes out the folder and opens it, and the letter she took from Ian’s kitchen is on top, a phone number in crayon scrawled next to the stick figure with arms embracing rays of light.
She opens her laptop.
While she works, Grace alternates between growling and that panicky high-pitched rhythmic whine she began in the car, and she is still standing with one whole side of her body leaning against the door. It is such a strange and difficult posture to maintain that from time to time her muscles seem to spasm, and she pauses in her growling and slips and repositions herself with a surprisingly loud scrabble of her collar metal against the door. Dana presses on, drafting her letter, tapping out with a blank face phrases like, “in reference to your letter,” and “copies of any expert medical opinions,” and “treating physician may respond to its applicability to,” ignoring the growl and scrape, growl and scrape, until she hears a banging on the wall.
It comes from just behind the bed that bears her backpack.
Not a headboard knocking. Not a hammer nailing.
A fist pounding.
A neighbor complaining about the noise of the dog.
Dana thinks about her options. It is, after all, a motel that accepts pets. The dog’s growl and collar scrape is no louder than a television at regular volume, but perhaps more annoying because it is intermittent. She turns the television on and flips through the channels—news, cell phone commercial, cartoons—and picks something fairly loud, something with a car chase, but leaves it at polite volume. Grace does not even flinch at the sound, but when Dana crosses the room to set a treat on the floor at the dog’s feet, the growl deepens and the fur between her shoulder blades stands on end. Dana retreats, past the strangely forbidding gravity field of her backpack, and settles again in the straight-backed chair.
She types “please furnish the credentials” and “essential treatment.” She makes use of boldface and italics. She paragraphs frequently. She clarifies antecedents. She divides independent clauses into two sentences, and backs up frequently, saving and resaving the file, IanAppeal.doc, and then rereading it again and editing further until she has eliminated all traces of ambiguity and emotion, has spell- and grammar-checked, has compared and reverified the mailing address against the paper copy she took from him, and then she opens a small pocket inside her backpack and withdraws a tiny blue thumb drive.
The dog does not lie down, but she does change from growling again to that strange keening noise, a squeak with each quick shallow breath. She is almost hyperventilating, and Dana is glancing at the clock on the nightstand so frequently (8:20, 8:25, 8:45) that when there is a knock at the door it is synchronized with one of these glances, as if her preoccupation with time itself has caused it.
Dana stands and checks the gun in her ankle holster, and then she steps to the vestibule. She has to lean over the growling dog to peer through the eyehole. A heavyset man in a bathrobe. Empty hands. Big loose pockets, though. No shoes.
She reaches down and pulls Grace as gently as she can by the collar, making her spring up wildly, banging her head clumsily against the door and resetting her claws in the carpet. Dana opens the door against the brass security latch and looks at her visitor through the crack. He looks down toward the sound of the growling, but he cannot see the captive Grace behind Dana’s door.
He wrinkles his brow. “Um, I’m sorry to bother you.”
Dana blinks.
“It’s about your dog,” he says, his eyes flicking down again. “The noise it’s making.”
“My apologies,” Dana says.
He has a sweaty forehead, and his eyes shift to the side now, down the hall. His lips are chapped, and his cheeks are red.
“I know this place takes pets. I would never complain about noise on my own so early in the evening, but my wife is—”
Grace hurls herself against the door at the man then, and it slams shut.
Dana muscles it back open.
The man’s eyes are wide and startled.
Dana talks over Grace’s high thin whine. “Sorry about that. And I apologize that you even had to—”
He says, “Not at all. It’s early. It’s just that my wife is—”
From the hall Dana hears a woman’s voice now. “Tell her we’ll call the front desk, Norman! Tell her we’ll file a formal complaint!”
“Janice, please,” the man says. And then to Dana: “I’m so sorry.”
“Not at all.” Dana smiles mildly. Her face is relaxed and unthreatening, a reflex from years of duties with protectees who need her to appear nonconfrontational, helpful, and unmemorable—to draw as little attention to them as possible. “You shouldn’t even have to ask.”
From her invisible place in the hall, the woman says, “Is she here with that dog group? Why did you book us a motel that takes pets?”
The man says, “Please, Janice.” Then: “Again, I’m sorry to make such a big deal.”
Dana says, “Really, it’s no problem. I’ll take care of it.”
She closes the door, and Grace skitters again up against it.
Dana knows what to do. Although she has sedatives in her backpack she could easily adjust for an animal, she will not use them. It is one of her tasks to take good care of the dog. She empties the water bowl into the toilet and flushes it. She
returns her laptop and files to her backpack and removes it from the spongy bed, leaving behind a trace of it, an impression that will disappear slowly, over minutes or even hours, but be gone before any new guests check in to the room, so that the only trace of her brief visit here will be the smell of the dog she could not calm.
Getting the door open and the dog out into the hall is an effort that involves more of that ripping noise, and more of that whining, but when they get out into the open air, the dog relaxes against the leash so suddenly that Dana stumbles. The sky is an oily blue, as dark as it will ever get in the skirtings of Las Vegas; there will never be any stars. And the birds have disappeared altogether. The air outside is still and silent. She lets Grace lead her a few yards’ distance from the motel to a thin strip of grass that runs around the perimeter of the parking lot, where Grace pauses again between a lamppost and a gold Lincoln Town Car and releases more of her pee, but there is not much of it, and in the grass it makes no sound. On the dashboard of the Town Car is a box of saltines.
Dana sets a metal bowl on the grass and reaches into the backpack Ian loves (Ian, who sleeps open-armed without covers in the center of the bed) and withdraws a bottle of drinking water. She pours it into the bowl, and Grace drinks long and messily under the smeary, starless night sky, making splashing and gurgling sounds and soaking her front paws. Then Dana takes out a little camp can opener and mixes food into the remaining water with her spoon, making a thin slurry the dog can drink through the basket muzzle, and Grace drinks this too and lies down then on the grass, as if to sleep.
Dana pulls the BlackBerry from her pocket. All around them are the dark silhouettes of nursery saplings whose leaves must be spring green and whose branches must be full of the birds they can no longer see. It is 9:05. She types a message to Velasquez:
Relocating to car for night. Dog noise in motel room disturbing adjacent guest. Use cell phone/text for communication.
Grace is making a sighing sound, and the air smells of meat, but Dana does not want her to fall asleep here in the open, where both of them will start at the comings and goings of cars and motel guests and birds. She wants to be alone in her armored car where she can lock the doors and, although the chance is of course slim, there is at least the possibility of drifting off. Maybe for a few moments here and there. She has her eye mask in her backpack. She has her sleep app. She has her white noise.
Dana tugs on the leash, and Grace resists, keeping her head low in the grass. Dana takes a bacon treat from the foil pouch and puts it in front of her nose to lead her, but she does not stir, and when Dana pulls again, she begins to growl. She decides for the moment to leave the bowls behind. She puts both arms through her backpack straps, and with both hands on the leash Dana drags her, skritching and resisting, growling and thrashing, across the pavement to the dark car and opens the tailgate. She lifts Grace into the car and the dog explodes, kicking and bucking against the walls of the car, and her tail thrashes out first on the right, then on the left. Dana pauses, watching in wonder. She tries to imagine the steps she might go through to even get the tailgate closed without risk of slamming it on the dog’s tail. She could circle around to the middle row and tie Grace’s leash to the handle on the back of one of the front seats, but in the few seconds it takes her to get there, Grace might fall out onto the pavement and run away. She could run away, and Dana could lose her. She could lose what she has been entrusted to protect altogether.
No. She will have to go in through the back past Grace herself, so that she can keep hold of her tether, and this is what she does. She takes off her backpack to make herself smaller. Then she threads the needle of space to the left of the bucking dog, and Grace knocks her to the side as she goes, slamming her into the windows, and Dana squeezes past and ties the leash to the handle on the back of the passenger seat. She cinches it tighter, drawing Grace farther into the car. She double-knots it, and it is then that Grace begins howling.
Really howling. The first of this noise we have heard. Dana jumps out of the car as if scalded to slam the rear door before anyone can come out to complain about the racket. Grace’s tail is well in, and her paws are hiked up on the rear by the short tether at her neck, and Dana slams it, muffling and containing the noise.
She can still hear it, though. Nothing anyone else will complain about, but it is clear this arrangement will not work. Already the windows are clouding with the dog’s condensed breath, and there will be no calming her inside the car. There will be no sleeping. She takes her BlackBerry from her pocket: 9:40. Still no text or missed calls. Dana braces herself. She puts her backpack back on.
As soon as Grace is back out in the open air, she eases again. She lets herself be led, padding gently, not tugging at the leash, across the pavement toward the strip of grass where Dana left the dog bowls, and she settles right away into the meat-scented grass next to the gold sedan. Dana ties her leash to the lamppost securely, a double-constrictor hitch with a slip for morning, and by the time she is finished she sees, to her utter wonder and relief, that Grace has fallen asleep.
There may be no sleep for Dana in the open, but at least she can finish her work. She can get comfortable at least. She takes out her laptop and sets her backpack next to the gold sedan and lies back against it as if it were a pillow. She checks the gun in the holster on her boot. She checks her BlackBerry again in her pocket. Then she opens the lid of her laptop. The glow from the screen lights the darkened wheel wells and the fur on Grace’s snout inside the basket muzzle.
Dana rereads what she has:
As you know, Ian Freeman was diagnosed … Currently Dr. Ashcroft believes … Enclosed please find additional information documenting …
And almost as quickly as the dog, she falls asleep.
She sleeps more soundly than she ever does in her own bed, and when she wakes in the grass beneath the flat sky it is not to the noise of Grace (the dog remains sleeping) but instead to the sound of a man talking to his wife.
“Easy does it. Easy there. Easy, love.”
Dana sits up. She can see nothing of the parking lot from this low behind the gold sedan. There is only the dog, and the lamppost and the sky, and beyond them an anguished wail from the woman the man is coaxing: “You’re not listening to me!”
“I’ve got you. Almost there now.”
“I need to go to the bathroom, I said!”
Something clicks then in the gold sedan: the sound of doors unlocking.
Dana stands to see a woman doubled over in a nightgown, and guiding her by the elbow and shoulder is the man who knocked on Dana’s door to talk to her about Grace. When the woman straightens, Dana sees that she is enormous beneath her crossed arms, and her nightgown is soaked to transparency between her legs.
Dana picks up her backpack and steps over the sleeping dog. When she steps into the lamplight in front of his car, the man sees her.
“You?”
The woman says, “Who is she, Norman?”
“She’s the woman with the dog.”
“I’m a paramedic,” Dana says. “How far along is her pregnancy?”
“She isn’t due for two weeks yet! Our niece is getting married; we thought we could go if we drove.”
The woman says, “Why are you talking to her?! I need to go inside.” Then she folds and moans again.
Dana says, “That’s two contractions in a minute. Have you called an ambulance?”
“I was going to drive her to the hospital.”
“Just take me inside, Norman. I’ll be fast. I really need to go.”
Dana says, “Ma’am. If the contractions are that close together, and you feel a strong need to have a bowel movement, you are going to have your baby in that bathroom. I can deliver it here in the car and get you set up to drive safely to the hospital if you’ll let me.”
The man reaches down under the woman and picks her up beneath the seat of her sodden nightgown, and the woman screams.
Dana opens the rear door of his gold sed
an.
“Lay her down there on the seat,” she says. “Then take off your pajama top for me.”
“What?”
“I need something to cover the baby with.” Dana opens her backpack and takes out her little bottle of hand sanitizer. She squirts it along her forearms, and it glistens under the parking lot lights. She spreads it around, rubbing it, while the man lays his wife gently on the back bench and begins unbuttoning his shirt.
From inside the car the woman says, “Remember the sounds her dog was making, Norman?! It was horrible. Why do you trust her? You’re making a mistake.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry I disturbed you. I am. But I can help you if you let me. Do you know if your baby is a boy or a girl?”
The woman screams, drawing her legs up.
The man raises his hands to his head, wincing, and says, “They think it’s a girl.”
“Okay.” She raises her voice over the woman’s moan. “Ma’am, I’m going to ask your husband to take your underpants off. I’m also going to ask him to unbutton the top of your nightgown, so I can lay your little girl right on your skin when she comes out.”
The husband reaches into the car and pulls the woman’s underpants down. She starts to scream again, and he leans over and whispers something in her ear then as he unbuttons the front of her nightgown, and the woman stills and (there’s no mistaking it) laughs softly before she begins to cry. He stands up and takes off his shirt and tries to hand it to Dana.
Traps Page 16
