Carla says, “I want to tell you—you need to know his lawyer will try to seem nice, but the aim of his questions won’t be nice. He’ll be standing where I am, as close as I am to you, trying to make you seem like your memories aren’t clear, but even if some are foggy you can just keep coming back to the ones that aren’t. We can talk about that, and I can help you learn how to show the jury that no matter what he says about what you don’t remember, there’s plenty that you do. What you remember is enough.”
Vivian’s eyes are still on the chair.
The woman says, “He’ll probably also try to make it seem like you might have a reason to make things up. He’ll ask you about your life now, so next you and I should sit down in a room with some tea or hot chocolate for a few minutes and you can tell me as much as you can about what has happened to you since you left your dad’s house. I can give you advice about how to describe it. But let me make this easy for you. No matter what you tell me, no matter what you’ve done since you left home, none of it can be the reason he did what he did to you, can it? You didn’t cause it after you left, right? So we can just tell the truth, and I can tell you how to do that so the jury will not forget which thing happened first. That your dad chose to hurt you when you were just a little girl.”
Vivian looks at her, finally, her big purse weighting her down in the chair. “You know what he used to say every time when he finished?”
“I surely don’t.”
Vivian’s face screws up, staring at the empty chair. Her eyes fill. Then she says, “ ‘I know you’ll never tell.’ ”
“Oh, honey.”
She wipes her nose with her hand, her eyes still fixed on the chair where she knows now her father will sit and see her.
Later Vivian sits in a small room with a small conference table. A big plate glass window behind her shows the city laid out flat and glinting under the lowering sun—the normal parts and then the strip with the black pyramid, a castle with a roller coaster, and the big flat building of shiny gold that says MANDALAY BAY across the top. She has her back to all this. She is making small tears like battlements in the rim of a Styrofoam cup.
When Carla comes in, she looks up.
She has papers in her hand. “You’re a very patient girl to wait for this. I wish I could have gotten them to you sooner, but I had a trial. I typed up all my notes. You can call and tell me if you think I got anything wrong.”
The little white bits lay strewn around her elbows. “That’s not why I wanted them.”
“I didn’t think so, but you still can if you notice things. I want you to.”
Vivian puts the papers in Lynn’s big purse. “Okay.” She tidies the Styrofoam into a little pile and scoops it into her hand.
The woman reaches out a cupped palm, and Vivian looks at it a second and then dumps the bits into it carefully. The woman empties her hand into a waste can behind her, her blouse rippling in an invisible shaft of air from the vent above.
Vivian slings the bag strap over her shoulder. “Well …” She blinks and stands up. “I think I should get going now. If that’s okay.”
“Of course, Vivian. You were always free to go.”
“I wanted these papers, though.”
“I would too, if I were you. You’ve been brave. You’ve done something important already, and in a few weeks you’re going to do more. You should be very proud of yourself.”
“Can you tell me?—Where is he now?”
“He still lives in the same place. He’s free until he comes here to court.”
“Does he know he’s going to see me?”
“Not yet. But he will. I’ll have to tell his lawyer I spoke to you.”
“Okay.”
“I could imagine you might worry about that. I could imagine you might worry he’ll try to contact you.”
Vivian shrugs.
“Do you feel safe where you are?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because you’re right that he could. It wouldn’t be wise of him, but we can’t keep him from trying.”
“It’s all right,” Vivian says. “I’m ready, I mean.”
In her little brown car, in the parking lot outside the big courthouse, Vivian locks the doors. The sun is sinking low in the sky, making something creamy orange of the clouds behind the palm trees along the center median. She slips the papers out of Lynn’s big purse and holds them on the steering wheel:
PRE-TRIAL INTERVIEW WITH VIVIAN LOUISE ABLE
She scans through the Q and A lines until she reaches one on the second page:
Q: And I understand you have twin four-month-old babies?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us about the father of those babies?
A: I don’t know for certain who he is. When I ran away from my dad, I mostly paid for food by washing dishes at the Denny’s on Tropicana. But I also got mixed up in prostitution.
Q: Mixed up?
A: A man told me I could stay with him. Then he wanted me to be his girlfriend. And then he said he needed my help doing a favor to some people he owed money to. It sort of snuck up on me what he was doing.
Q: And did you use birth control?
A: Yes. Condoms. But it didn’t work this one time.
Q: Do you still work as a prostitute?
A: No. I quit so I could take good care of the babies.
On the road home she listens to music—something heartfelt and twangy again with a girl’s voice and a lot of guitar. She has it turned up loud, and she has the transcript on the seat beside her. She looks at it at stoplights.
Q: How old were you the first time he climbed in your bed?
A: Eleven.
Q: The same year your mother died?
A: Yes.
And at the drive-through when she gets a Frosty at Wendy’s:
Q: Did you ever ask him to stop?
A: Yes.
And again when she pulls in at Copley’s to fill the tank on her little brown car with the gas money Lynn gave her.
Q: What did he say when you asked him to stop?
A: He said if I hushed he could finish faster.
She sets the papers on the seat and gets out, pulling the sweater down over the bunched waist of Lynn’s long skirt. The lot at Copley’s is full like it was the night she first came here. She can see people leaning over their food at the tables in back. There are two trucks pulled in at the pumps, one of them a semi and the other a white pickup. Once she gets the nozzle in and sets the trigger, she takes a step back from the pump and reaches inside her car to pull the little zippered pouch with flowers out of Lynn’s big purse. She sets it on the seat and removes a cigarette. She lights one up, her hands shaking, and takes a long drag, blowing smoke up toward the high ceiling of the shelter. There’s a bird’s nest up there, and she can see it. She watches to see if any birds peek their heads out while she smokes, listening to the rattling of the gas through the tube into her car.
Then she senses someone—a figure stepping around and standing on the other side of the nozzle to look at her—and she lowers her head to see.
It is the hunter.
“What’s shakin’?” he says.
Vivian takes another drag.
He says, “I was about to grab lunch with my buddy. You want to join us?”
Vivian looks into the passenger seat of the white pickup and sees another man like the hunter, another middle-aged man looking down at her.
“No thanks,” she says.
“ ‘No thanks,’ eh?” He leans back against the side of Vivian’s car, grinning.
Vivian doesn’t say anything.
“Well, maybe I’ll just wait a minute with you then,” he says.
Vivian looks at the numbers speeding by on the tank dials. They always have such a frantic look. It’s almost steadying for her somehow in a way she doesn’t understand.
The hunter snorts. He looks over his shoulder at his friend in the truck. Then he makes his voice louder so his buddy can hear it: �
��Maybe I’ll just wait so I can watch you pull out that hose when your tank is full.”
“No, you won’t,” Vivian says.
“What?”
“No, you won’t wait with me.”
He snorts again. “Or what?”
Vivian taps her ash and then rests her other hand on the gas pump trigger. “Or maybe I’ll pour gas on you and light you on fire.”
He takes a step back.
Vivian keeps her hand steady on the pump nozzle.
“Crazy bitch,” he says. He skirts around the front of her car toward his truck. “You better remember I know how to get to you.”
“You do not,” she says.
“Sure I do. Out at Lynn’s place on Route 95.”
There is a click, and the gas flow shuts off. Vivian takes the nozzle out and hangs it back on the pump. “That’s where I live now, but you have no idea how to get to me.”
12
Emotions
It is six p.m. and dusky, and Dana is sitting in the front seat of her Suburban watching the house. Through the window into the kitchen, she can see Jessica’s mother handing her a baby. Then Lynn takes one up herself and they stand facing each other, talking, first Lynn, and then Jessica, and then Lynn again, and at the same moment, as if playing a mirror game, each of them reaches her free hand up absently to cup a tiny fine-hair-covered head.
Dana is hungry. She thinks she might finally be ready to eat.
The dogs bark when she gets out of her car and walks across the hard-baked lot toward the other Suburban. A circle of the low sun reflects off the dark driver’s-side window and sets as Velasquez rolls it down.
“Why don’t you go find a motel close by,” he says. He smiles at her. “It’s my night to sleep in a car.”
“What if she doesn’t decide to spend the night?”
“Then I’ll call you and you can meet up with us.”
“Okay. Can I get you anything? Dinner?”
“I’m good. I’ve got plenty in my cooler.”
“All right.” Dana nods. “Thanks,” she says.
In the gray light along the state highway, the yellow neon sign on the roadhouse catches her eye from far away. COPLEY’S. There are plenty of cars in the lot, and it’s crowded inside, but Dana is alone, so it is easy to find a single seat at the counter in back, where the waitress has to raise her voice over the sizzling from the big griddle behind her. Dana orders what she thinks her stomach can handle. French toast without syrup. And a plain baked potato. And ice water.
“If you say so,” the woman says.
When she sets it down, Dana eats the French toast methodically, sipping the ice water between each bite, and then she lets the potato sit, watching the waitress fill coffee at all the tables until she can catch her eye and ask for a piece of aluminum foil and the check.
Dana drives along the road they traveled this morning. The potato wrapped in foil rolls on the seat beside her when she pulls into the lot of the motel next to the gas station. The Searchlight Inn, it is called. The lobby is just some metal office furniture in a room with brown curtains, and when she asks for a room, the old man behind the desk hands her a real key.
Dana’s room is small, with a brown bedspread that matches the brown curtains and a threadbare industrial carpet the color of corn chips.
She sets her backpack on the bed and next to it her BlackBerry and the foil-wrapped potato. On the wall above the headboard is a small black-and-white picture of the motel in a black plastic frame, and the window overlooks the vast flat rock- and dirt- and weed-covered valley that stretches out to snowcapped mountains in the far, far distance. Dana stands there looking at that. She stands there a long time, not really moving, and then she turns and takes her cell phone off the bed. There is a chair in the corner—a narrow upholstered chair with wooden arms—and she sits down in it. She has to sit up unnaturally straight in it, but she doesn’t seem to notice this, and she types a number into her cell phone, her face a calm nothing as it so often is, and listens to it ring. It only rings once.
“Dana! You’ll never guess what happened after I left you that message this morning!”
“What?”
“Guess!”
“But you said I’ll never guess.”
“I know, but try!”
There is music in the background of his apartment. The Latin music again. She can hear his bird squawk. She can also hear water running.
“Are you cooking?” she says.
“I’m making rice. For rice pudding! I haven’t tried that yet in my marathon of soft foods; isn’t that a good idea? But wait! What’s your guess?”
Dana looks around her room from her position in the straight-backed chair. At the brown-filtered light and the backpack and the shiny potato on the bed. She says, “You decided you don’t love me.”
“What?! No, crazy chica! What would make you guess something like that?”
“I was trying to think of something ironic.”
“Wait, why would that be ironic?”
“Tell me what happened first.”
“Okay—I got in a car accident!”
Dana blinks.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. But here’s the amazing part.”
“No injuries?”
“No, I’m fine, but get this—”
“Did you go to a doctor?”
“Yes, but get this—I was on my way to buy more Boost!”
“But I bought you Boost.”
“I know, but I didn’t know that yet. Darius and Leslie and Dino drove me to the wedding in their rental car so I hadn’t been to the garage, and then on the way home it was four a.m. and we stopped at Denny’s for pancakes; that’s where I got the idea for rice pudding by the way, although theirs was plain and mine is going to have a flavor—piña colada!—and then on our way home from that we were driving along La Cienega and I saw RiteAid and I said, ‘Turn left! Turn left! I need Boost!’ and he did, and we got hit by a Babies’R’Us truck.”
“A Babies’R’Us truck.”
“Yeah. He wasn’t going very fast though, luckily.”
“So everybody’s okay?”
“Yeah. I spent the rest of the morning in the ER. They brought in an oncologist too just to make sure everything was all right with my treatment, but he said he didn’t expect any adverse effects.”
Dana stares at the shiny potato.
“Dana?”
“I’m here.”
“Isn’t that amazing?! We were just talking about that!”
“But you were talking about you dying in a car accident.”
“True! So I’m glad it’s not a total coincidence. Maybe somehow it was the fact that I didn’t actually need the Boost that saved me. This pineapple smells funny; maybe I’ll just make it coconut rice pudding. Okay, so what did you want to tell me?”
Dana looks again at the potato.
“Dana?”
She clears her throat. “I met someone from Aetna last night.”
“Weird!”
“I did him a favor—before I knew he was from Aetna—and he gave me his card and asked me to think about what he could do to thank me.”
“What kind of favor?”
“I delivered his wife’s baby in the back of a car.”
“Hot damn! Your job is nutty.”
“It wasn’t part of my job. I was on break, sort of. I was just—there.”
“Have you ever delivered a baby before?”
“No, but it was part of EMT training.”
“You’re like a superhero. You’re like Elastigirl. You need to get back in town so I can summon you.”
“He’s a senior claims examiner.”
“Excellent. Life is excellent.”
Dana smiles. “So you’re always saying.”
“Hey, do you think I cook the rice in cream, or add the cream after the rice is cooked?”
“I think you add it after.”
“I wonder what would happen if I cooked it in cream too. Maybe
it would be even creamier. Even better.”
Dana smiles again.
He says, “So why would it be ironic if I’d decided I’d stopped loving you?”
“I’ve just been thinking about you a lot. I’ve been really missing you.”
“Ha! More excellent. This sharing my superhero with the masses thing isn’t all bad. I told you this trip might turn out to be good news for me.”
“But you got in a car accident.”
“Exactly. Good or bad, Grasshopper, you never know.”
“Then I met the Aetna claims manager.”
“Exactly! Warning: Jumbo load of shit may contain pony. For example”—there is a sound of metal striking metal in the background—“I think this cream is burning.”
“I’m not sure you’re supposed to boil cream.”
“On the other hand, maybe it will just taste caramelized.” Another clang. “Should I be watching those sexy Venetian blinds of yours for action anytime soon? You’ll probably be back tomorrow, right? To your little Clark Kent lair?”
“We’ll see.”
“Ta-da! You’re getting it.”
She laughs. “We’ll see.”
Dana hears a shrill beeping in the background through the phone.
“Oh shit!” Ian says. “That’s the smoke detector. I’ve got to go. Okay, mine will be the apartment with the charred curtains across the way. Bye!”
Dana continues listening a moment. Then she takes the phone from her ear and presses the red button and rests it on her pant leg, holding it there with one hand. She looks around the room, at the potato and the backpack. The room is so brown. The light is so dark and thick through the heavy curtains. The bed is bowed in the middle from the sleeps of people she will never know. And there are no sounds at all. There is a hushing noise from the passage of cars on the highway in the distance, but nothing individual, no evidence of coming or receding, just the white noise of it all.
Dana picks up the phone and calls him back.
The smoke detector is still wailing in the background, except louder now. Dana smiles.
“Hold on!” he says. “I still haven’t got it.”
“Can I just wait? Are you going to take the battery out?”
Traps Page 19
