“If you’d hold that a minute,” she says, “I’ll let you know when I need it.”
Then Dana kneels. The leather-covered armrest on the door presses against her side, and she can feel the grit of the asphalt through the knees of her pants.
“Okay,” she says. “This is going to be easy. There are no mistakes you can make. I can see the top of your little girl’s head, and I’m going to put my hand right here to support it as it comes out. When you feel the next contraction, you’ll feel like pushing, and you just go ahead and push. She’s going to come right out easy.”
The woman screams again with the next push, and the baby’s head starts to turn, and Dana can see the eyes, squeezed tight shut, and the damp red nose, and the mouth, and she takes her left hand and sweeps it under the nostrils to clear them, and then there are shoulders for her to hold, and a bottom too, and she puts her hand underneath and stands a little, squatting, to set the baby on the bare space on the woman’s chest. She looks over her shoulder and reaches out a hand then, and the husband gives her his shirt, warm and flannel, which seems just right to Dana, and she wraps it around the back of the baby and begins to rub. The second stroke does the trick, and the baby wails once and coughs, and Dana can’t see her little face, but she doesn’t need to.
“She’s okay,” she says. “She’s good. Your little girl is fine.”
Behind the sound of the baby’s cries now, and the sound of the mother crying a little, there are no other sounds. The dog is still sleeping.
She turns to the man. In the parking lot lights his bare chest is very white. She says, “Now all you have to do is drive her. She’ll be fine. Don’t worry about the cord. They’ll take care of it at the hospital, which isn’t far from here. They’ll clean the baby and take care of your wife.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You should probably get going. Do you know how to get there?”
“I have no idea.”
She opens her backpack and looks at the little tabs she made. “Motel to Hospital” one of them says. She removes it and hands the directions to the man.
“How on earth … ?” he says.
“The Emergency Room is at the south end of the parking lot. That’s where you should go. I’ll call ahead to let them know what I’ve done.”
“Do you have a card? So I can get in touch with you to thank you?”
“That’s not necessary,” she says. “You should really get going.”
But he is fumbling in the pocket of his pajama pants.
“If I give you my card, will you contact me then? So we can at least send you a picture of the baby?”
He looks almost desperate, and Dana knows accepting the card will make him go. “Sure,” she says.
The wallet he withdraws is black leather, and stuffed so full of cards and bills and little chits of things that he has to thumb the edges clumsily for several seconds before he gets one free. Beside them in the open car, the baby and the woman are still crying together; the woman has tucked her bloody legs in and under, making a sort of nest. Dana shuts the car door gently and accepts his card without looking at it.
“Congratulations,” she says, and he gets in the car and closes his door. She dials the hospital on her BlackBerry and watches him pull back, revealing Grace still sleeping peacefully in the strip of grass by the lamppost. She asks for the Emergency Room, and then she waits a moment, looking at the dog under the blank, flat sky, almost the color of a moth wing now. Dawn is breaking. Grace is so still, Dana wonders briefly if she has died in her sleep.
Then she hears the ER operator on the phone.
Dana says, “I’m an EMT from Los Angeles County and I delivered a baby in a car five minutes from you. They are on their way to you now. Mother and baby are both fine. Umbilical cord still attached, uncut.”
“Name?”
Dana looks away from the dog, at the card. The card is very white, and on it is a little blue figure with upraised arms filled with rays of yellow light and this: NORMAN REITMAN, SENIOR CLAIMS EXAMINER, AETNA INSURANCE.
The sky is lightening now. Along the horizon over the eastern hills is a thin limn of red, and then a pale haze just above it. The air around her is gray and thick with moisture. The operator asks her again for the name and Dana gives it to him, and then he thanks her, and she hangs up, and right away her phone beeps to indicate a new voice mail waiting, one from Ian that she listens to there in the misty parking lot next to Jessica’s sleeping dog.
“Dana! I just got your message. I stayed at the wedding till everyone was gone, and then I stayed up in the lobby talking to Darius and Leslie all night, and they’re driving me home right now. We’re on La Cienega. I would love to talk to you about anything! Call me!”
Dana breathes out and in sharply—a sort of laugh—and she covers her mouth with a hand still smeared with blood.
When she dials him back she can hear her own heart beating, a pulse in her ears speeding up with each ring, but he doesn’t answer. She gets his voice mail finally: “This is Ian; leave your number so I don’t have to clean my apartment to find it.”
“Ian!” she says. “I don’t know how I missed you, you just called me!” Her voice is shaky. “Shit.” She laughs at herself and rubs a bloody hand through her hair. “I don’t know what to say. Just call me,” she says, and she presses a button.
She kneels in the space where the gold sedan had been and repacks her backpack then. She puts her hand sanitizer away and draws out the ziplock bag of ziplock bags and puts the card inside one. To be safe she thumbs her code into her BlackBerry and opens her contacts and types the name in, and the phone number too, and double-checks it and saves it and also e-mails it to herself before secreting the card in the bag in the pocket of her backpack. There is a new text from Velasquez now: “Principal requesting departure in ten minutes. You ready?”
“Ready,” Dana types.
When Dana goes to the lobby bathroom to wash up, she takes Grace with her. The dog stirs at the smell of Dana’s boots beside her in the grass, but does not startle, just stands up slowly, as if her joints hurt a little, and then follows easily, across the lot, through the automatic doors, past the pump carafes in the coffee-scented lobby, and into a white-and-black room where they are once again alone. Grace sits patiently while Dana washes her hands first, and her forearms too, soaping generously, up to a frothy bubble. Her hair is damp with sweat, and she splashes her face to clean it and looks at herself in the mirror, blinking. She shakes her head. Then she goes into the bigger bathroom stall, the handicapped, so that Grace can fit in there with her, and she sets the leash and her backpack on the floor, and Grace lies down as she had in the parking lot grass, a white shape breaking up the pattern of tiles on the floor, a pattern of triangles, black and white, like the tiles in the print above her bed that turn, row by row, into birds. Dana stares at the tiles, her clean hands on the waistband of her pants, ready to unbutton them but hesitating. She laughs again, the same short airy laugh of surprise at herself she laughed during her disjointed message to Ian, someone else’s voice really, and then she unbuttons her pants and pulls them down, crouching to sit, until she sees the blood.
It is not a huge amount, but of course, it does not have to be for Dana to understand what has happened. She sits down on the hard white seat and stares at it, peeing, an almost musical sound, and when she is done, she goes on sitting. Two or three minutes pass, and Dana holds perfectly still, her boots on the triangle tiles and her pants bunched around the gun still hidden underneath on her boot, staring at this smear of blood in her underpants, her face a dull nothing. Finally she opens a zipper pouch in her backpack and withdraws two ziplock bags—one full of panty liners and the other of tampons, and she takes care of things briskly, and flushes, and zips the pack and washes again, and without looking again at her face in the mirror, she walks out into the parking lot.
Where it is dawn finally, the sky pale, but light enough to cast dim shadows—the long
T of the Holiday Inn sign on the asphalt.
She goes to her car, and sees that Jessica and Velasquez are just crossing the blacktop with their overnight bags. Jessica’s eyelids are puffy, and her lips are chapped. She steps forward and smiles at Dana in her nervous way. “How is Grace this morning?”
“She seems to be fine, ma’am.”
“Did she keep you up?” The question makes her blush.
“Not at all. She slept right through.”
“We should let her walk before we go, then,” Jessica says. “I’ll do it. I’d like to. My hand feels much better this morning. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore.”
“Certainly.” Dana hands her Grace’s leash, and despite what she claimed, Jessica takes it with her left hand. She leads her dog haltingly toward the open field beside the hotel—a field of grasses.
Dana is alone with Velasquez.
“So,” she says, “what’s the plan?”
“Head back to L.A. She wants help quarantining the dog out of sight at home. I called ahead to Larry. We’re thinking of the greenhouse storeroom. It has a concrete floor with a drain.”
They are not looking at each other but out over the field, where Jessica is knee-deep in grasses and the dog’s head is just visible. She is walking quickly, and at the same time, because some critical distance has been breached, both Velasquez and Dana begin walking to close the space between them. The dog and Jessica are speeding up now, the dog’s leash is taut, and Jessica’s arm is stretched out in front of her, the dog clearly pulling for something, and Dana and Velasquez break out in a run. They are nearing the far end of the field, where a wood-and-wire fence marks the boundary of the motel property, and the dog stumbles often in the grass because she cannot see the things hidden beneath, nor can she see the barbed-wire fence as she nears it and runs right into it, tearing open the white fur at her neck.
Day 3
10
Difficult Conversations
Lynn stands in her kitchen squinching her eyes shut tight, patting a screaming baby slung over her shoulder—the boy, tiny in a blue T-shirt and diaper. The baby girl is in her carrier, the one on the scarred wood table, also screaming, and on the counter are two dirty bottle feeders, their milky clouded plastic liners squeezed empty. Lynn pats the wailing boy’s back and looks at the screaming girl. She says, “I’m coming for you,” but it is hopeless. There is no picking up the girl with the handle of the carrier in the way, and anyway what would she do with the baby she has? How does Vivian do it? To Lynn the little girl looks stockaded. She lowers a hand to feel along the sides of the handle—“How on earth?”—and leans sideways as far as she can without dropping the boy to see if there is something—a handle? a button? a lever? What would it be?—to free this little girl from the safety seat where she lies crying.
Then the phone starts to ring.
“Crap,” she says. “Crap, crap, crap.”
She keeps searching along the sides of Emmaline’s carrier, ignoring each ring, which mixes in anyhow with the louder racket of the babies’ screaming. She cups the little girl’s hot red cheek, and in the voice she reserves for dogs, she says, “I’m sorry, baby girl.” Then she moves her hand to the back of Sebastian’s head to support it while she bends over farther, hoping to see something—anything!—and finally she spots a release.
She rights herself and takes her good hand from the boy’s head to squeeze a red trigger, pushing on the handle of the carrier with the elbow on her other arm, the one holding the boy, and when the handle buckles, it jostles him in her arms so suddenly and violently he windmills his arms in panic and screams even louder, but—ah! there we go!—the handle clicks out of place and down.
“There now,” she says in her dog voice. “Everything is going to be fine.”
The phone is still ringing, though, and when it finally stops, Lynn doesn’t even seem to notice. She is staring at Emmaline, whose face is almost purple now with fury. Lynn stands right against the table and slides the carrier toward her body as she’s seen Vivian do and cups her right hand under Emmaline’s thigh, but instead of lifting her neatly into the crook of her arm, she only rolls on her side in the carrier, a final injustice that makes Emmaline kick and hold her breath, purpling further, so for a moment Lynn thinks the girl might never breathe again. “Come on now,” she says, patting her on the arm, shaking her gently. “It’s not over yet, give me a chance,” while Emmaline stretches out farther and farther, like a tiny dark board of wood, and then finally—thank whoever made us!—buckles over in her safety seat to take a breath before she starts screaming again.
Lynn takes a pacifier from the pocket of her sweater and puts it in the baby girl’s mouth, but the girl spits it out so forcefully it clears not just her seat but the edge of the table and bounces once on the seat of the spindle chair before clattering onto the floor. Lynn decides they both need a minute—a little breather—before trying again, and she raises the handle on the seat and hefts it off the table and begins to swing it, making a pendulum of her right arm, while in her left she still jiggles Sebastian. Both babies are still crying, and now she tries dancing a little jig. She backs through the door to the side yard, and for a blessed moment both babies stop crying, surprised by the fresh air. But they start in again soon enough, first with little whimpers, almost matching each other noise for noise, building up again to full angry wails while the dogs freeze in their tracks and cock their heads this way and that at the sound, which builds up in no time to the racket she’d been getting in the kitchen.
She looks from one to the other, blinking in wonder.
Then the phone starts ringing again.
This time Lynn takes the babies inside and sets them down, fitting Sebastian back into his safety seat. She grabs the receiver and steps alone out into the fresh and closes the door on the crying.
It is fainter now, but still clear through the open kitchen windows.
She presses a button to answer.
“Vivian?”
“No.” It’s a woman’s voice. Lynn raises a hand to her mouth but says nothing.
There is a long pause.
The voice says, “No, Mom. It’s me.”
Lynn lets her hand slip down to her heart.
Jessica says, “Is that a baby crying?”
Lynn’s lips tremble. Tears come to her eyes, but her voice is even. “Two, actually.”
“I called at a bad time then.”
“No, no—” Lynn bites her lip to steady her voice. “They’ll be all right.” And sure enough already something in there is slowing. Lynn peers through the window and sees that the girl is sucking her fist and the boy has caught sight of the ceiling fan.
In her car Jessica sits back and looks at the horizon. There is nothing out there, only scrub and sky. Jaya’s red shoes sit beside her. She stares for a minute or more, and her mother says nothing, but the baby sound grows a little more muffled. Finally she says, “I have a favor to ask you.”
Lynn swallows. Her hand is over the mouthpiece of the phone, and she is looking at the dogs. They are digging around the hose bib again—a big trough exposing the pipe. There is a five-gallon bucket of sand on a dolly in the garage, and every day she wheels it out and refills the hole. She peels back her fingers from the phone and says, “Anything.”
“It’s nothing big.”
“Okay.”
“Nothing personal. It’s just a dog.”
“All right.”
“She’s just injured and needs some stitching.”
Lynn holds very still.
“Anyway, I was wondering if you could do it for me.”
“Where are you?”
“Not far. A suburb of Vegas.”
Tears roll down Lynn’s cheek. She clears her throat. “Absolutely I can. I’ll be ready for it when you get here.”
When Jessica pulls in, Lynn is standing on the porch in her vinyl apron. She steps down the stairs, out of the shadow of the eave and into the sun, and watches three dark Subur
bans roll down the gravel drive, and her eyes scan between them, waiting to see which of them bears her daughter. The second car pulls off to the side to let the third pass so that just two come through the neck of the driveway into the big open circle of dried mud. When the door on the lead car opens and Jessica steps out, Lynn folds her left arm beneath her chest and covers her mouth with her hand.
Jessica stands in her bloodstained sweatshirt with one hand on her open car door. Lynn takes a quick swipe under each eye with her fingers.
Twenty feet of dry earth stands between them.
Finally Jessica gestures over her shoulder with her left thumb. “She’s bleeding pretty badly.”
Lynn nods. “I’m ready for her,” she says, and points to the dark open garage and waits to see what her daughter will do.
Neither of them moves.
It is the bridge of etiquette with a stranger that finally closes the gap between them. When Dana steps out of her Suburban and walks forward to Jessica’s side, Lynn crosses the turnaround to meet her. Their three bodies make a single shadow on the ground.
Jessica says, “Mom, this is Dana. Dana, this is my mother, Lynn.”
Back at the motel, holding the bleeding dog, Jessica had told Dana she would lead them to her mother’s dog shelter for medical treatment, and in this simple statement a full set of possible threats and privacy issues of import made themselves as plain to Dana as pockets large enough for weapons in the folds of civilian clothes. In the security procedures log for Jessica’s property, there are fifteen full pages devoted to the handling of calls or visits from her father, and not a single mention of a mother. After a count of two seconds Dana had said, “Certainly. I’ll be available for any help you specify when we arrive on-site. Barring any instruction from you, would you prefer a default of body accompaniment or surveillance from a distance?” “From a distance,” she’d said.
Dana shakes Lynn’s hand, but she does not tell her it is a pleasure to meet her. Instead she says this: “Would now be a good time to help you two move the dog?”
Traps Page 17
