Traps

by MacKenzie Bezos

  “That’s why it’s so loud. I’m on a chair right now trying to pry the top off.”

  She listens to it scream, and underneath that, a little rattling sound of metal against plastic. Then it stops.

  “Phew!” he says. Then: “The best! I love that you called me back. You must really like me.”

  “There was something else I wanted to tell you before.”

  “What was it?”

  “You were right about something else the night of your avocado party.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know it at the time or I would have told you. I only figured it out after I left, and then you were having your party and I thought I should wait and tell you alone, which I was going to do at the wedding, and then I got called for travel duty and I didn’t want to text it so I had to wait for a break.…”

  He laughs. “It can’t be that bad. What is it?”

  Dana clears her throat. “I was pregnant.”

  “What?! No way! That’s fantastic!”

  “No. I’m trying to say—I was pregnant. I bought a test at the drugstore after I left your apartment and tested positive. And then last night I went into the bathroom and my period had started, which means I miscarried.”

  “Oh. Well … shoot. Um … so you’re probably happy about that, though, right?”

  Dana looks around the bark-colored room, at all its dark, closed, straightened elements. The pillows are plumped and square, but there is that sag in the middle of the bed that reveals that people have slept there—many people, and for years and years. She looks at her legs in the too narrow chair. And her shoes aligned in the gold shag.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Marry me!” he says.

  She laughs, a kind of snorting explosion that also releases tears she reaches up to wipe immediately with the back of her hand. She is smiling again. “Shouldn’t I try sleeping a night in your bed first?” she says.

  “Is that a yes?”

  She starts to cry.

  “Dana?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? Is that—are you crying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy smokes!” There is some clear sympathy in his voice, but also a delight he can’t repress. “What does it mean?”

  “I just—” Her head tips back and she looks at the ceiling. It is covered in plaster with the texture of cottage cheese. She closes her eyes. “Uch. It’s so awful.”

  “Try me.”

  “I feel so sorry for you.”

  “I like you, Dana. Remember? I like you.”

  “I can tell I need to think about this alone. Without you listening and waiting for my answer there. And it just seems so sad, for me even, but especially for you, that I’m a person who is better at everything—working, training, thinking, feeling, everything—alone. Isn’t that tragic? Who wants to marry that? Isn’t that your worst nightmare?”

  “We’ll see, sweet girl,” he says gently, and he hangs up the phone.

  Day 4

  13

  And So On

  Lynn latches the gate on the little run next to the dog yard. Grace is lying on a pad there under the shelter, her stitches a long black line at her neck, and Sweetie Pie is lying in the dog yard with a little Jack Russell terrier who barks to let her know Lynn is passing.

  Watching from the turnaround, Vivian has Emmaline asleep on her shoulder, her pink cheek flattened against the nap of her white sweater. Jessica is holding Sebastian, rocking him back and forth and saying, “Tell me something, sir.” The empty baby carriers rest on the ground between them. When Vivian came home late last night, Lynn had already warned her by phone about the cars in the driveway, thinking they might scare her. She was waiting with tea, and she told Vivian that her babies were sleeping upstairs and that in the big bedroom below, her own daughter too was sleeping. That’s all she’d said about her, and nothing more about the extra car, and because Vivian had traded enough with Lynn to feel safe now, she didn’t ask. When she came into the kitchen the next morning she had understood. Jessica was sitting alone at the kitchen table drinking coffee, and Vivian recognized her right away but pretended not to, just refilled her cup, because everyone deserves to feel known for the things they choose to offer up themselves.

  It is almost noon now, and the three black Suburbans are lined up behind them. Lynn crosses back through the dog yard, a tangle of dogs around her legs, laughing and leaning to pat their heads and saying, “Come on now” when they cause her to stumble.

  After she latches the gate behind her, she rinses her hands under a hose bib by the shed. Dana is there, picking up the tailgate mat from her Suburban, propped dry and clean now against the shed wall. The plastic Petco bag is looped over her wrist. She holds it open for Lynn.

  “Can you use these?”

  Lynn peers into the bag at the silver bowls and treats Dana used to care for Grace on her journey here.

  “Sure.” She wipes her hand and loops on the seat of her jeans. “Why don’t you bring them here to my rescue assistant?” She leads Dana to Vivian and Jessica holding the babies in the center of her circle. “Have you met Vivian?”

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t,” Dana says. And to Vivian: “I’m Dana—I won’t try to shake your hand.” Vivian still has a sleeping baby, and Dana herself has the Petco bag in one hand and her car mat in the other. “I just wanted to offer these extra bowls and treats. I’ll lay them on the ground here.” She sets the bag down. It rustles in a breeze almost too slight to feel and settles against Emmaline’s empty car seat.

  “Thank you,” Vivian says.

  Dana nods, still holding the car mat. No trace of Grace’s blood remains.

  Then, as if etiquette requires that they acknowledge their convergence, the four of them stand there a moment in silence, as if they might stay together; as if they are not about to continue on their separate paths. Because it is morning, the shadows their legs cast are long, fanning out like rays. The dogs know, though. They are barking like crazy. Dogs can always sense a departure.

  It is Dana who gets them started, retreating without a word of parting to her Suburban.

  Then Lynn clears her throat. “All right then.”

  “You ready?” Jessica says.

  “Oh yes.”

  She turns to Vivian. “You’ll be sure to call Ruth Ann if you need help?”

  “I promise,” Vivian says. “And I have your number too. But I’m going to be fine.”

  Lynn climbs up into the cab of her truck where a duffel bag sits on the passenger seat.

  Jessica lays Sebastian in his carrier. “They’re beautiful babies. Mom said you’re a wonderful mother, and I can see that she’s right.”

  “That’s kind of you to say.”

  “It’s the truth,” she says, and she steps away and climbs into her Suburban. Both women wave at the girl and shut their doors.

  Jessica pulls away first, then Lynn in her truck, then Dana behind her and Velasquez last, a procession of shiny black cars and Lynn’s battered yellow one rumbling down the rutted drive toward the road that cuts through the red valley and disappears off near the pale white morning horizon.

  Vivian picks up both carriers and goes inside. The bottles she made are sitting just misted in the pan of water on the stove, and this time she does not go to the couch to feed them. She takes them upstairs to Jessica’s old room and settles herself on the daybed and feeds them there. The shades are drawn almost all the way down, like sleepy eyelids, and through the yellow fabric the sun tinges all the pinks in the room with a dim, thick, sunset-colored glow like the inside of a seashell. Vivian hums, and the babies suck so hard they both make that squee sound from time to time on the rubber of their bottles, until they are so full and relaxed that first he and then she falls asleep sucking, their mouths relaxing until the nipples fall aside, and little dribbles of milk go down their cheeks and into the collars
of their sleepers. Vivian pulls her arms aside slowly, letting their weight settle onto the bed. They stir a little, Sebastian’s arm flinching up quick and then falling slowly, slowly, as if through water, onto a little lace-trimmed tooth-fairy pillow with a pocket in front, and Emmaline kicking, kicking, as if she is bicycling, before stretching her legs out, big toes tenting the feet of her yellow sleeper, and then going limp on Jessica’s old bed.

  Vivian scoots off now and leans to raise the rail Lynn had told her to look for. A little bronzed hook at each end swivels into an eye on the posts of the bed. There is a closet door in the room, and when Vivian opens it she sees that inside there is nothing on the hanging rod and nothing beneath, and this is where she sets the car seats, one next to the other, before she closes the door. Neither baby has stirred. They are both sleeping soundly on their backs in their new bed, and Vivian leaves the door open a crack and goes to her own room, where the liquor cartons full of her clothes lie at the foot of the bed. The dresser Lynn cleared is painted white, with little cut-glass knobs, and Vivian slides one open now and sees it lined with a pink shelf paper that curls a bit at the edges, and she sets about putting her own things away, emptying the boxes into the drawers.

  On the road in her truck, Lynn twists the radio dials for music that matches her mood.

  In her car, with her daughter’s red shoes still beside her, Jessica does the same.

  They do not stop, not when they pass Copley’s, or the sign that says, NEXT GAS STATION 90 MILES. The desert around them greens and softens in small starts and gives way to grassed hills, the road cutting a way between, and each of them from time to time changes stations, not often finding the same songs but covering the same range of spirit—calls to courage, and reflections on sorrows past, and tunes of pure celebration—and after a long while, there is the ocean beyond as they wind down from a high spot toward the city below, highways snaking and all the land quilted gray, with jewel sparks of swimming pools and grassy yards and windows the sun catches, and the ocean in the far, far distance. Cars join them in increasing numbers, but they manage to stay in a line, Lynn sandwiched in, and like this finally they eddy off down a ramp onto a crowded boulevard banked with tall buildings and billboards. At stoplights, tourists cross, a few heads turning to wonder about the procession they make—three black Suburbans and a battered yellow pickup between, and they move along, the buildings crouching lower, restaurants now with umbrella tables and white-fronted stores with mannequins posing, and then slender, smooth-trunked palms with a languid bloom of leaves impossibly high above waving in the slight breeze. Then just houses finally—trim green lawns and hedges and high gates with a clean, clean sidewalkless street cutting between, and at last a pair of big gates opening, and Jessica pulls into the circle drive in front of her house, and her mother’s truck rolls in behind her.

  It is afternoon, the white stucco so bright that both women visor their eyes with their hands to see what is coming out the big front door: two girls running out and across the bricks to hug Jessica around either leg. They turn their heads to the side to assess the stranger beside her, and before they can speak a question, there is their father.

  “Can I be the first one to hug you?” he says, and tears spring to the old lady’s eyes. She lets herself be hugged, but stiffly at first, and then her arms go up to his back as if they remember what to do.

  “Who is that, Daddy?”

  “It’s your grandma,” he says, still gripping her tight. Finally he lets her go. “It’s your Grandma Lynn.”

  The lady smooths the front of her sweater before she crouches down between them. Her boots are dusty. They even have whole pieces of mud dried on. And her soft cheeks are shiny with tears. “Hi there,” she says.

  “I thought you were dead,” Jaya says.

  “No she wasn’t,” says Prisha. “Remember? She just lived very very far away.”

  Lynn smiles. “Both things are kind of true.”

  “You were dead?” Jaya says.

  “Only like a car battery can be.”

  “Oh, that kind.”

  Prisha looks at Jessica, whose cheeks are also shiny wet. “What happened to your hand?”

  “A broken dog bit it,” she says.

  “Not a mean one?” says Jaya.

  “No.”

  “And what about your hand?” Jaya says.

  Lynn laughs. She wipes her eyes and smiles at her. “Same thing.”

  Behind the house, in the little cottage at the bottom of the pebble drive, Dana hands over the keys to the armored Suburban and walks back outside to get into her Jetta. She passes the avocado tree, and in this sharper light of midday, the tire swing reveals the cloaked figure with the pike to be lying on his back, afloat in two inches of rain water the sun never reaches, his red eyes regarding a firmament of worn black rubber bisected by the rope from which, to him, everything seems to hang. She stands him up in the water, looking out into the wider yard.

  On the drive home, how is she different? She drives the speed limit, but we can see from how often she checks the speedometer that this is hard. And when she pulls up in front of the white horseshoe-shaped building, she parks not in the garage but out front, where she can see that his curtains—not charred but bright, colorful, ridiculous—are still flapping in his open window like flags. She gets out of the car and kicks the door closed, and she tries to walk, but no, she can’t really do it. She laughs at herself, and Dana starts to run. She takes the stairs two at a time and hurries down the hall—a right turn, a right turn again, because already she can hear his music.

  When she comes in the door, the room smells like citrus, and the counters are a-jumble with squeezed fruit and papers and that box of needles, and Dana sees that, well, yes, of course, Ian is sitting on the floor with both parrots on the Astroturf, feeding them peanuts he is shelling from the cow skull that spilled the spider plant from his window. She sets her backpack on the floor beside him, and the birds flap and fly up, up onto the couch cushions, while she herself sits down on top of him, in his lap, and he explodes with laughter. “Well, hello to you too,” he says.

  And she has to hug him, and that is when she says it, with her cheek pressed up against the ridge of scar on his neck, looking past him, over his shoulder, out his open windows.

  “Yes,” she says.

  He pulls back to meet her eyes with his. “Yes?”

  “Yes,” Dana says, nodding, smiling, crying again just a little bit, thinking who is she all of a sudden? Where did she come from? Where did she go?

  “Yes, I said. This is yes.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people made it possible for me to complete this book through generous donations of time, expertise, and kindness. Some did it by patiently sharing technical information from their respective professional domains, understanding no doubt that I might get some of it wrong in spite of all their care. Others did it by reading (over and over) full drafts and excerpts of this story and sharing their honest impressions and thoughtful suggestions. A few shepherded it through the publishing process and played parts in making it into a beautiful book. I am grateful to all of them: Fred Appelbaum, David Byrd, Karen Karbach, Chip Kidd, TJ Klomp, Jordan Pavlin, Melanie Rehak, Becky Roe, Richard Shugerman, Chandler Tuttle, Amanda Urban, and Cassian Yee.

  In the greatest number, people helped by encouraging and supporting me in an inspiring variety of less direct ways, and among these I count my siblings (the homegrown variety and those acquired in adulthood), my parents (again, of both types), my friends, and anyone who, in the years I was writing this book, was kind or helpful to me or to my children, a subgroup which is in itself heart-swellingly large.

  In a special category are Preston, George, Henry, and Emmy, who teach and rescue me daily with their love and ideas, and Jeff, who is ever my most devoted reader and friend.

  A Note About the Author

  MACKENZIE BEZOS was born and raised in northern California and studied creative writing at Princeton U
niversity. Her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, was published in 2005.

  For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

  MacKenzie Bezos, TRAPS

  The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enrich your discussion of MacKenzie Bezos’s novel Traps.

  About the Book

  MacKenzie Bezos’s engrossing novel tells the story of four very different women whose paths intersect—briefly, but significantly—in ways that will transform each of their lives forever.

  Dana is a beautiful young security guard trained in special ops. She can disarm a bomb and perform emergency surgery, but is terrified of committing to the man she loves. Jessica is an Oscar-winning actress whose father keeps selling her out to the paparazzi. Vivian is a seventeen-year-old prostitute who will do anything to protect her twin babies. Lynn is a recovering alcoholic living in isolation on a ranch in Nevada. How their fates collide—and how that collision offers each of them a chance at redemption and renewal—is the subject of this emotionally powerful, finely crafted, richly textured novel.

  Author Biography

  MacKenzie Bezos was born and raised in Northern California and studied creative writing at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, was published in 2005. She lives in Seattle.

  Questions

  1. In the novel’s opening scene, the narrator describes the sensation Dana feels each time she lowers her thick protective helmet over her head at the start of a mission. “It muffles her hearing, but right away (she will never understand this about herself, but she will continue to crave it) her heart rate slows and her focus sharpens.” How does this relate to your understanding of Dana’s character in the first chapter? Look also at her conversation with her supervisor about her heart rate and her performance during the exercise with the dog. What is it that eludes her understanding, and what is it that she craves?