Traps (15 page)

So there on the bench in front of the hospital, Dana shifts the big camera between her legs and blows smoke toward the boy, and she tests and weighs, experiments and edits, typing out sterile, cautious phrasing after sterile, cautious phrasing—“Maybe” and “Let’s talk first” and “I’m not sure”—until finally she settles on this:

And Ian of course does not hesitate. As soon as she sends it, he answers back:

L
ynn parks her truck angle-in in front of the shelter in Winslow. It is a little low concrete building at the end of Main Street—just a long block of storefronts (barber, cleaner, diner) with a school at one end and a church across the street here at the other. She turns her engine off and sits there, looking at the sign to the left of the door:
WINSLOW HUMANE SOCIETY
. In her rearview mirror is the little reflected image of the church—a dirty white beadboard chapel on a plot of bare dirt. Someone has laid stones in the dirt for a path to its door, and to the left is a rusty swing set—two pairs of chains bearing white plastic seats and the third pair bearing nothing.

She gets out of her car and crosses the wide street toward the chapel—there are no cars passing to stop her—and heads not for the door but for the side of the building, the one facing out of town, where there is a metal handrail surrounding a cut in the earth with a set of concrete stairs leading down.

Lynn slips her hands into the big patch pockets of her barn coat. Then she takes the stairs down to a little wood door with a dented metal knob and she pushes it in and open.

The room is small, lit by a metal floor lamp and the light from a high
slit of a basement window, and in the center is a circle made by seven chairs and a plywood podium. In four of the chairs sit men and at the podium stands a woman (younger than Lynn) taking a sip of water from a clear plastic cup. More chairs sit folded up against the wall at the back. All the faces turn to her when she opens the door.

The woman with the cup of water clears her throat. “Welcome,” she says.

Lynn steps in and sits down.

The men turn back to look at the woman at the podium. She takes a sip of water, her throat making a little squirting noise as she swallows and sets the plastic cup on the plywood with a hollow, skittery sound.

“My name is Beth,” she says, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

Over the pulse in her ears, Lynn hears her tell a story of how she used to bake cookies with her six-year-old daughter. Beth does not look at her directly, but she can tell somehow that this is not the story Beth had planned to tell. It ends with Beth passing out and her daughter, who now lives with her ex-husband’s parents in Arizona, trying to take the burning cookies from the oven herself.

She sits down and smooths her wide sprigged skirt with her palms.

The men shift in their seats. One of them, a man in work boots and denim overalls with a white handlebar mustache, clears his throat. “I came to thirty-seven meetings before I said a single blessed word to anyone.”

Another, a handsome young Hispanic man in jeans and big white sneakers says, “That’s right, Vernon, you did.”

Vernon gives his knees a squeeze with his ruddy hands.

Looking at the floor between their feet, Beth says, “We’re glad you came again.”

The remaining two men are an elderly black man wearing a belt and polished shoes and a fedora, and a heavy baby-faced man with just wisps of hair on his shiny head wearing a T-shirt and running shorts. Everyone nods.

The black man in the hat says, “We’ll say the Serenity Prayer in a
couple minutes. We like to leave a space. In case anyone else wants to talk.”

“Sometimes nobody does, though,” Beth says.

“But other times they do,” Vernon says.

There are sniffs. Chairs creak. Lynn’s two dissimilar hands lie still in her lap, and she keeps her eyes on them.

Someone coughs.

Then the five of them say the Serenity Prayer without her.

In the dim garage Vivian is preparing bowls of food. It is two o’clock, and Lynn has not returned. So Vivian is thinking about the dogs and doing her best to remember how the older woman said it was done. She has forgotten the idea of doing it in the open, where it is brighter and already dirty, and she has the bowls lined up on the concrete floor, two rows of twelve, and she stands there in her flowered sundress and borrowed rubber boots and barn coat, can opener in hand.

Her babies are asleep again, and have been for hours. They woke briefly after the hunter’s visit, but Vivian could tell from the way they fussed on the porch that they were spent from the long night awake and crying in her car. So she stretched them a bit, heaping their bunchy bodies one on each shoulder and walking an invisible castle wall around Lynn’s keep—the dog yard and the shed and the barn in the distance that held a story the older woman didn’t want to tell—and then she prepared their bottles and fed them in the living room, Sebastian and Emmaline sucking in the same sleepy way, their tiny eyelids closed, while Vivian considered the old computer in the corner that sits covered in plastic on a little table next to the potbellied stove. The babies fell asleep eating, and she laid them to sleep in their seats and afterward played a game of solitaire—a real one with Lynn’s real cards instead of the game on Marco’s phone—still considering.

Now she sets the can opener on the top of the can and draws the little pink cell phone from her pocket. The counter along the window
where Lynn had prepared the vials of flea treatment has a row of high shallow windows above. It is the only natural light in the garage. Vivian draws a tiny scroll of paper from the pocket of her own sweatshirt and unfurls it on the scratched brown formica—a little two-inch scrap of torn yellow paper. She has to use two hands to roll it back against itself and make it lie flat. It is a phone number, written in handwriting that is round, almost puffy. She dials it and puts the sparkly little phone to her ear. One ring. Two. A woman’s voice answers: “Carla Bonham.”

Vivian doesn’t speak. The windows above her head are all clouds and sky, and they make a pool of gold at the crown of her pale yellow hair.

“Hello?” the voice says.

Vivian hangs up.

She sets the phone on the counter in the sun and looks back at the cans of food. She walks back to the first can and picks up the opener and fits it on the rim. Click. A little juice spurts up through the first cut as she begins to turn. Her phone starts ringing on the counter, skittering a little with the vibration it makes, but Vivian does not look at it. She keeps twisting, the can opener making a cranking sound, shifting her feet and turning to rotate with it, the muscles in her hand working hard. When she has made it all the way around, she pulls back the ragged metal circle, revealing the pink-gray top of the loaf of meat.

The phone rings eight times before it stops. By then she has moved on to the third can, and she does not stop, not even after the phone makes a little beep to let her know she has new voice mail. She finishes opening the cans, and then she lifts one, tipping it, waiting for the food to slip out, shaking it a little and patting the side of the can when it does not. She sets the can down and looks around the room. There is a big stainless-steel scoop next to the kibble and Vivian does her best to use this, carving at the slick top of the meat and dumping the bits she carves free into the empty bowl. She looks down the row, planning, looking in the can to see whether she has served the right fraction, and then she moves on. Her way is messier than she’d like. She drips a little juice on
her dress and leaves little bits of the meat on the floor of the garage, and she eyes each bit she drops with a furrowed brow. But she keeps moving along, setting a finished can aside until all of the bowls are full.

Then she sets about cleaning, first setting a can top next to each scrap in dustpan fashion and pulling the meat bits onto it with bunched fingertips, next trying a sponge that comes back from each dab on the dirty floor the color of coffee, and finally disappearing and returning minutes later with a bucket and mop and swabbing every inch of Lynn’s garage, changing the rinse water six times, pouring it into the sink, a red-brown like bean liquor, until finally the whole floor is just a wet, dark gray.

She leans against the counter, wiping the sleeve of Lynn’s coat across her forehead where her hair is damp, and surveys her work—all the bowls full at her back and the empty cans lined up against the wall and the floor so clean. Then she takes the phone off the windowsill to listen to the new message.

Vivian slips the phone back in the pocket of Lynn’s barn coat and walks across the dark freshly washed floor and presses the big white button on the side of the garage. A crank above her rattles loudly, and the big double garage doors open, flooding the room by degrees with a bright white afternoon light. She can see all of Lynn’s outbuildings laid out around the hard-baked turnaround. The shed, the dog yard, and the barn and the big empty cistern in the distance. And the dog yard has exploded with barking. They are all gathered up near the fence as she sets the bowls under the chain-link flap, bringing them two by two, lining them up with a bit of space between as the dogs bark—hound dogs baying low and the smaller ones sharp and high-pitched, some of them flipping circles as they watch her. When she gets the last pair placed she closes the outer hatch and hoists the rope, moving as quickly as she can to raise the panel and give them access to the bowls. Some of them crowd the first section she opens, but a few are smart enough to wait by the last one. There are squabbles, but soon enough all of them are eating, some of them gobbling, some taking dainty little bites, one setting pieces on the dry ground before picking them up again to eat them.

Vivian smiles. She sighs and rolls her neck to stretch it in the sun. Then she trudges back to the house in Lynn’s boots and takes the last bowl from the garage and in the kitchen mixes puppy food in the blender like Lynn said to, reading the side of the milk-replacer can like she once had to for her own babies, and sets it on the clear plastic sheet in the dark living room. The mama dog heaves herself up and heads for it in the dim, the teats swaying below her, so many of them, and her puppies trotting and falling alongside her.

Her own babies are still asleep.

And her chores for Lynn are done.

She looks again at the computer in the corner. It has a layer of shaped plastic over it like some old people’s couches, and when she pulls the plastic up and away, the screen flickers and she finds it has a browser window open to a page that says “Three Paws Dog Rescue,” with pictures below of dogs she recognizes from the morning. Vivian’s mother used to say
that integrity means doing the right thing even when no one is there to see it, and right away Vivian closes that window because it is not hers, even though she guesses that it is just what Lynn puts up for all the world to see. It is the kind of thing kids at school made fun of her for. She couldn’t help it, though. And anyway it was easier that last year at home not to have friends to keep secrets from, and now not to have them to miss.

She opens a fresh search window, Google with an empty box and a cursor blinking, and she watches it a second, her heart speeding up, and when she feels that she pauses a second to think about what she is doing. To make sure it is okay. It has been a long time that she has wanted to do this and not done it, but Marco didn’t have a computer, and the phone he got her only had voice mail and a few games. That’s the only reason she hasn’t. Not because she felt it was wrong. She clicks on Images so what she’ll get is pictures, and then in a rush she types “Carla Bonham Las Vegas,” and the screen fills with a few different people but most of them a square-faced older woman with not very much makeup and soft brown hair smiling just a little bit. Closed lipped but nice-looking. Vivian scans through other pictures of people doing things—camping and bowling and a few in swimsuits—but those must be a different Carla. All she gets of Carla Bonham is her face.