Traps (4 page)

S
ix miles from Dana’s apartment, a second woman stands shoulder to shoulder with her husband at the kitchen sink, setting down a bread plate for him to wash. He reaches around to press a hand to the side of her head and pull her in and kiss her above the ear, on her dark golden hair. Then she walks to the table to get more. Cut strawberries and a wooden bowl of salad and the last of the salmon steaks he’d made. Two mugs of milk half empty. Two glasses of wine. Their kitchen is big—with a butcher-block island and a clay pizza oven—but so clotted with clutter it does not seem so. On the windowsill an avocado pit balances over a coffee mug next to a wilting Chia pet in the shape of Shrek’s head. On the floor three hairy dog beds and stainless-steel water bowls flank a milk crate of wheels and popsicle sticks and doll arms marked “Broken Things.” On a wall of shelves, picture books have been crammed in at every odd angle, and a clear bin of toys bears a stuffed elephant, a Mrs. Potato Head, and an Oscar statuette in a Barbie dress. And here on the counter, lying still and small and seemingly harmless among the dirty dinner plates and the unfinished homework assignments and the baskets of dog medication and overripe fruit, is a cell phone this woman looks at each time she passes to and from the sink. When she has cleared the
whole table—when she is passing back with a yellow sponge to work at the drips of ketchup and coins of carrot on the vinyl bench cushion—it rings.

Her husband looks at her. She is kneeling on the bench, not looking up from her work, a beautiful woman in a bulky sweatshirt and threadbare man’s slippers with a face contorted by sorrow and tension. This is Jessica. She lets the phone ring, and he steps to the counter and glances at the number flashing in the display—a number with a 702 area code. She is pinching up the carrot pieces with her fingers, and when she backs off the bench, he sees that her eyes are welling.

He says, “Don’t forget why you’re doing it.”

It stops then, and she crosses to dump the carrot pieces in the sink. He kisses her again on the hair just as two dark-haired girls enter the kitchen in matching pajamas. The younger one wears a pair of sparkly red party shoes, and she has a stuffed dog tucked under her arm. Each of her steps leaves behind a ghost of glitter on the Mexican tile.

Jessica wipes under her eyes with thumb and forefinger before she turns to them.

“Guess what I have for dessert—s’mores!”

“The puffy kind?”

“Yes!”

“Lucky ducks,” the husband says.

He is a fit Indian man in striped pajama pants and a T-shirt that says UCLA, and although he grew up in Orange County, an agnostic ER doctor who would have been content with a courthouse wedding, she had wanted to marry him in Mumbai in front of his enormous family. She had wanted him to arrive on horseback and walk with her seven times around a circle of fire. She had wanted to stand at the threshold to his mother’s home and dip her feet in a paste of red powder and milk before stepping inside. He keeps working on the dishes, rinsing and setting them into the open dishwasher while she takes out the marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate and sets them on the kitchen table next to two white china saucers haloed with tiny yellow flowers.

The older girl opens the box of graham crackers and draws out the waxed-paper sleeve. The smaller girl sets her dog on the table and they each stack a marshmallow on top of a cracker, and then the older girl makes a minute, unnecessary adjustment to her sister’s work before placing the plates in the microwave and closing the door. They watch through the window, their heads pressed together and silhouetted against the light as the table inside turns, and Jessica watches them, and her husband watches her watching. He is the seventh of eight children, self-reliant, unruffled by drama, comfortable on the sidelines, accustomed to sharing. Until he met Jessica it did not occur to him that he might find in romance the deep fulfillment he found in his work in the pediatric ER, where with his friendly unassuming ease and decisive competence he could perform countless acts of salvation without fanfare or domination. A big family, self-acceptance, emotional simplicity, anonymity, a sense of humor, an upbringing in an ethnoculture of forgiveness—Akhil is stinking rich, a tree hung to bough-breaking weight with fruit Jessica starves for, while she herself, without intention or awareness, is the gigantic megawatt center of their family universe. Her purposeful photo collages, her ever-lengthening roster of arduously observed traditions, her midnight vigils of idealistic worries and questions—every day he forgets afresh how dim his own heart can grow until she lights it up again with her industrious, furrowed-brow ruminations. The girls feel it too, leaning toward her when her voice takes on that earnest tone retelling their little family stories, webbing their lives with nostalgia and meaning. She makes everything beautiful. If Akhil is her hero, Jessica is the closest he has to any religion—a savior to him just the same. Watching her now he knows without asking that she is worried to the point of sweating that the phone will ring again with the girls in the room; behind her is a corkboard wall covered floor to ceiling with family photos (all his) that she has arranged in the shape of a tree.

“They’re puffing!” the smaller girl says.

Jessica opens the microwave door and carries their plates back to the table, the marshmallows as big as baseballs now, high and wobbling.
Both girls know what to do. They grab squares of chocolate and second crackers to set on top, pressing, watching the big marshmallows spread and fall. Then they stand at the table eating, the melted marshmallows sliding and sticking whitely to their lips and the corners of their mouths, while behind them their mother resumes cleaning. Their father is putting away what they have not eaten, wrapping it in plastic, while Jessica wipes around the little white plates and the stuffed dog on the table with a sponge.

The cell phone rings again.

The girls see their father look at their mother, but she keeps wiping.

The older girl says, “Mom. Your phone.”

“It’s a wrong number,” Jessica says.

The little girl says, “Why don’t you answer, Mommy?”

“Because it’s a wrong number,” their father says. He refills their mother’s wineglass. The phone keeps ringing.

“But they’ve been calling all day,” the older girl says. “If she just answers, she could tell them.”

“They’ll figure it out,” he says.

“How? She doesn’t even have voice mail.”

“They’ll give up eventually.”

“Somebody should tell them.” She licks her fingers briskly. “I’ll do it,” she says, and as she takes a step toward the counter, Jessica turns from the sink and snatches up the phone in her damp hand.

It stops ringing.

“See there,” their father says.

“They’ll just try again,” the big girl says.

He claps his hands together. “Who’s for a movie?”

The older girl says, “Okay, but I’m holding the remote this time.”

The little girl gives her a pleading look, but the big girl stands firm. “You did it last time and all we watched was the Munchkins over and over.”

She clutches her dog to her chest. “The witch is scary, though!”

“You can tell me to pause if you want, but I’m sick of that stupid Lollipop Guild.”

They stuff the last bites in their mouths and run off.

Jessica puts the phone in her sweatshirt pocket and takes a sip of her wine, her hand shaking.

From down the hall comes the sound of Judy Garland singing.

She says, “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“It feels terrible, Akhil. It feels like someone else’s life.”

“You didn’t pick this; he did. Some things we don’t get to pick.”

She sips her wine again, her lashes damp.

He gestures with his head toward the desk in the corner. A two-foot stack sits next to the computer—a mix of padded mailers and loose stacks of white paper bound with brads. “Are any of them good?”

She shrugs.

“Have you read any?”

“A few.”

He makes a quick circle with his glass on the counter and then watches the wine swirl and settle. For all his enjoyment of work in trauma, he draws his real satisfaction from his ability to help and to heal. And there is no escaping the diagnosis here. His wife is stuck. That when he met her she had a job she truly loved and under his care she has lost it and not found her way back sometimes chafes at him. It is beginning to seem to him that triage all those years ago in the months after her Oscar may have called for goading instead of patience.

“Jessica, tell me something. Just when do you think you’ll get back in the water?”

“Soon.”

“I know you miss it.”

“It’s nice to have all this time with the girls.”

“You could have both, though. I could help.”

“It’s only been a little while.”

“Four years, isn’t it? And all of them holed up and hiding?”

“I am not hiding! I’m more social than you are! I’m with people all the time! Diwali and Holi with your family, and Prisha’s Brownie camp-out, and the Pets with Disabilities fund-raiser, and Jaya’s end-of-season soccer party, and my Buddhist book club and yoga retreats.”

“You hosted all of that here.”

“So? I’m sharing what we have! I’m making this a place the girls can be proud of. A beautiful shared community with a huge homemade extended family.”

He slips her hand in his. “Jessica. I’m on your team. The life you’re building here is beautiful. I love it. I’m lucky to be part of it. I’m just saying I think there might be some things you’re avoiding.”

“I’m not avoiding acting; I’m just taking a break.”

“I didn’t mean the acting,” he says.

The day she met him she had been rushing out of a Starbucks in Santa Monica. She had tripped on a tree root jogging in a baggy sweat-suit, hat, and dark glasses. A voice behind her on the sidewalk said, “You’ve got toilet paper stuck to your sneaker.” She stooped to remove it. “… and you’re bleeding,” the voice added. And when she straightened: “Uh-oh—also famous.” He was wearing scrubs and an ID badge with a background of teddy bears. “Famous and aggressively and insufficiently camouflaged.” He took a bandaid from his pocket and held it out to her. When she didn’t take it, he smiled. “That’s all I’ve got; the cut and the toilet paper are the only ones I can help with. My other pocket is just full of Elmo stickers.”

Everything she loved about him was in that. She had married him for that moment.

Now when she says, “You agree with me then. You think I should answer it. You think I should talk to him,” Akhil says, “God, no. I think you should change your cell phone number but stop letting the things they print in the tabloids keep you from leaving the house.”

She turns to the wall of pictures by the door. The girls at gymnastics with Akhil’s mother. At the playground with Akhil’s sister. Reading
books with Akhil’s father. Playing gilli-danda in the street with Akhil’s nieces and nephews on the annual visits they make to Mumbai. Twice a week he plays racquetball with an older brother who slept with his high school girlfriend. Every time they get together his father suggests that Akhil go back and do a residency toward a more prestigious specialty, and still Akhil calls him up once a week to meet him for coffee.

She says, “You would never do this.”

“Yes I would.”

“ ‘Life’s too short for grudges,’ you always say. ‘Forgiveness takes less energy,’ you always say. ‘Family members are no uglier than other people, it’s just that the lights in family rooms are so bright.’ ”

“All true, but beside the point in this case.”

“Oh, bullshit. Face it. You would never in a million years stop talking to your family.”

“But I won that lottery! My family is sane! I have no sociopaths or emotional blackmail artists in my family!”

“I don’t want to be this kind of person, Akhil.”

“Didn’t he say something like that in one of his letters?”

“This is not what I want the girls to grow up with.”

“That’s exactly what he said in one of his letters!”

She changes her voice, high and innocent: “I thought Mommy didn’t have a daddy,” and “How come we only have one grandpa?” and then low and stagy: “Estrangement More Popular than Kabbalah with Hollywood’s A-listers. Next on
Inside Edition
.”

The phone rings again in her pocket.

She takes it out and lays it on the counter for both of them to see: that same number.

For a few seconds they both stare at it together there on the counter. It slides and rotates slightly as it rings.

Finally she picks it up and presses a button.

“Hello?” she says.

“Jessica Lessing?” It is an elderly woman’s voice. Jessica can hear a dog barking in the background.

“Yes?”

“My name is Eleanor Babbage. I’m the landlady for the unit in Summerlin you cosigned.”

“Excuse me?”

“Outside Las Vegas? The house at Thirty-six Forty Villa Ridge? Rented to Gabriel Fletcher?”

“Oh.” Her face pales. “I’m afraid there must be some mistake.”

The barks of the dog are faint but consistent, almost like a metronome.

“But I’ve got your signature right here. You signed it in lovely purple ink and wrote this phone number right next to it.”

“I’m afraid that’s not my signature.”

“Oh, no, dear. He showed me pictures. Pictures of him next to you with your baby girls in pajamas at Christmastime.”

“Yes, yes. He is my father. It’s just …” Jessica rubs her forehead. Akhil watches her from across the counter. She says, “Is that what this is about? The rental obligation?”

“What? Oh no—he’s my favorite tenant. He even sent me flowers the day after I showed him the house! He was even willing to take a unit whose yard was still being landscaped! And the last month’s rent and the damage deposit are completely covered by my share of his stake in your next film.”

“What film?”

“He showed me the preproduction notes on the Internet. The costume sketches are divine. Is it the same girl who did the costumes for your Elizabeth and Mary movie? He wouldn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to oversell it, but I guessed!”