Traps (8 page)

“I’ll just give you a minute,” Lynn says turning.

“No, no—” It rings again. “It’ll stop soon and go to voice mail, I promise.” The babies are winding up again, whimpering and fussing. “Uch. I’m so sorry for all this noise.”

Lynn points a thumb over her shoulder at the porch, backing up. “No worries. I’ll just—”

“They’re good sleepers, I swear. They’re not usually like this.”

“I’m just going to leave you alone and go—”

Another ring. “I can switch my phone to vibrate as soon as it goes to voice mail. It’s been that same caller for days now. I wish they’d stop calling, and they never do.”

“I’ll just give you some privacy and fix us some—”

“Wait!” The babies begin to cry in full. “This isn’t turning out at all like I planned. I meant to be no bother and here my phone is ringing and the babies are crying.”

“I’m just going to make coffee,” Lynn says.

“But you don’t understand. They’ll never settle down outside here. They need to eat. You’ll come back out with a coffee for me and they’ll be screaming and my phone will ring again and then you’ll never take
me as your boarder, and I’m wondering which is worse—set them down and let you hear them scream even louder so I can make them bottles, or put you to work toting my backpack and mixing the formula yourself so I can keep them a little quieter.”

Lynn blinks. The girl is not more than seventeen years old and frank-faced. No streaks in her hair or piercings or dark eyeliner—no costume shows of boredom or sophistication. No armor at all on this girl.

Lynn says, “Better go with me toting and mixing so we can hear each other to talk about the job I have for you. My name’s Lynn Doran.”

“I’m Vivian Able.”

“And the little lady and gentleman?”

“Sebastian and Emmaline.”

The phone stops ringing.

“Pleased to make your acquaintances,” Lynn says. She circles to the passenger side of the hatchback and reaches in for the girl’s black-and-yellow backpack. It beeps as she lifts it.

“Another voice mail,” the girl says mournfully, and Lynn turns away from her to lead her inside.

The dogs are still barking, hurling themselves against the chain-link with clangs and sharp reports at random intervals that make the girl flinch, but the babies begin to quiet as she follows Lynn up the porch steps into the house.

Inside, the girl has to walk sideways with her load to pass through doorways—porch to hall, hall to kitchen—and the babies start to whimper again.

Lynn sets the backpack on the counter. “You may have to talk me through the steps,” she says.

“The can of powder is in that big main pocket there?”

“You want me to bring it to you?”

“You can just open it.”

Lynn stares at the backpack. The weave of the yellow fabric is worn so thin at the bottom she can see the dark shapes of the things inside. There is a stain above the pocket—a dribble of something purple—and
near the zipper a slash of ballpoint pen. She swallows thickly. Then she clamps a strap with her two loops and with her ringed fingers slowly unzips it. The contents shift and settle even as the two sides part along the zipper. She looks down inside. A magazine and a glittery little pink cell phone. A pink Velcro wallet. A little zippered pouch with flowers. She glances uncomfortably at the girl. “Looks like it might be under a few things.”

“You can pull them out of the way.”

“I could hold the babies for you if you’d like to fish it out yourself.”

“Just lay them on the table, why don’t you?”

Lynn looks back in the bag. Then she does as the girl suggested. She lowers her hand down in and pulls out the magazine and phone. Then the zippered pouch and the wallet. Then the white-noise machine. Then a whole pile of crumpled Kleenex—enough for a whole night of crying—so many the girl laughs. “Sorry about that.”

But even then Lynn pretends not to notice, just keeps drawing out the knotted wads of tissue until finally she unearths two empty nursers and the formula can. She eyes the tiny print. The fussing grows stronger, especially the little girl, whose dark eyes blink and squint in the bright.

Vivian says, “First you just heat a kettle of water.”

Lynn lights the stove with a long-handled lighter, and Vivian tries to find a spot to pivot, but the kitchen is small, and this places her elbows in the path of the sink and the stove, where Lynn is trying to pass now with the kettle. She holds it high and shimmies past.

Vivian says, “Now you just put one scoop in each bottle and fill them with cold water to the six line on the side.” She watches Lynn clamp the rim of the canister with her metal loops. “Is it hard doing things with that hand?”

“Nah,” Lynn says. She scoops the powder with her good hand, and Vivian improvises a new rhythm behind her with the babies, dipping one down and then the other, like an oil derrick, taking up less space.

“How did you lose it?”

“Farm accident.” She puts the scoop back in the bin. “Now what?”

“Just shake them to mix it a bit. I put a finger over the top of the nipple so it doesn’t spray.” When Lynn gets this right Vivian says, “What kind of farm accident?”

“Dairy.”

“What happened, I meant.”

“Crushed it between some broken boards on a platform above the slurry pit,” she says, and waggles a bottle at her. “Now I heat these somehow, I guess?”

“That’s right. I do it in a pan,” Vivian says. “How long ago was it?”

Lynn pours some water from the kettle into a pan and sets the bottles in. “I bet they like quiet when you feed them. Is a bed good?”

“Oh, anywhere, but a big armchair or a couch would be better.”

“Let’s get you set up while those finish.”

Lynn leads her into the living room, where the mother dog is sleeping with her six pups nestled in, and she turns on one soft lamp, bringing in a dim circle of yellow over the flowered seat of the couch. Before she sits, Vivian crouches all the way to kneeling to pinch a yellow throw pillow with the thumb and forefinger on one hand. Using some quick calculus that takes no measurement or reckoning, she drops it a third of the way along the seat cushion and then eases down so that her elbows fall exactly on the pillow and the arm of the couch. The babies open their eyes now and stare at Lynn, and—as if she has disappointed them—begin fussing in unison.

Vivian says, “If you maybe could bring me those bottles now? I bet they’re just ready. They get a misted look, and you can test by dribbling a bit on your wrist.”

Lynn goes to the kitchen. There in the pan of water, the bottles are just misted as the girl had said they would be, and Lynn tests them and finds they are right. When she brings them back, Vivian simply opens her two hands, the babies still nestled in her arms and whimpering, and Lynn leans to meet her open hands with the two warm bottles. In another trick
of competence, Vivian shifts her arms slightly toward center, so that the babies’ legs rest on her thighs, the soles of their pajamaed feet almost touching, and she tilts her wrists way back, just reaching their tiny rosebud lips with the bottle nipples. Both babies open their mouths like birds and close their dark eyes and begin to suck. For a few seconds the spell and spectacle of this girl’s ease with the babies holds the older woman transfixed. But then perhaps the history behind that, or the intimate privacy of what they are doing, making little sucking sounds, or her own dumb idleness there standing between her and the mama dog nesting her pups—something makes her retreat to the kitchen.

She stands by the window and scoops coffee into a paper filter with her back turned to the tableful of Kleenex and the girl’s private things. The walls are papered with twin cherries on pale yellow, darker in places where pictures used to hang, the nail holes still there above them. On the counter next to the coffeemaker is a big black and clear blender and a basket of fruit, and behind it, in the shadow of the cupboard, a set of puzzle books and the dark neck of a bottle. The coffeemaker comes to life, bubbling and sighing steam and a trickle of brown into the pot below, and Lynn reaches into the dark corner and takes a sudoku book and lays it on the counter, fat, with pages curled at the corners from use, and she opens it to halfway through where a pencil marks her place and begins to figure.

When the coffeemaker makes a last series of spitting noises and quiets with a gasp, Lynn fills the blue-and-white mug to the brim. She takes a spoon and stirs, although she has added nothing. The yellow backpack lies empty on the table, and what must be most of what the girl calls important still sits arrayed on Lynn’s table by Vivian’s own invitation, in a cloud of tissues she had done nothing to try to hide. The zipper on her little pouch is open, plainly exposing the cigarettes inside. Her wallet is the kind with a window on the front, and her pure face stares up at Lynn from the driver’s license, smiling in an open way no one ever does at the DMV. Vivian Louise Able. Born June 27, 1995. Seventeen: as young as she had looked to Lynn, but no longer seemed. Lynn clamps
the coffee cup in her metal loops and sips at it, returning to her puzzle book, writing numbers in the squares with her shaking hand, and forcing any glances past Vivian’s possessions out the window at her dogs, a few sniffing the air for traces of the girl and the babies, others tracing tight circles to lie down again and finish their sleeps, and some still barking their gunshot barks at the memory of her arrival.

It is no more than five minutes before she can hear Vivian in the next room shifting. She rinses her mug in the sink and walks as softly as she can to the threshold where the girl holds the two babies, sleeping.

Lynn lowers her voice. “You can lay them down in there.”

“I can just use their carriers.”

“There’s a clean bed.”

“That’s nice of you really—”

“It’s no trouble.”

“It’s just—they’ve never slept anywhere but in those car seats.”

Lynn doesn’t comment on this. She steps outside onto the porch and down the stairs toward the girl’s car, squirrel-brown she sees now in the early morning light, with a bumper sticker on the rear chrome that says “Young Life.” The two padded buckets still sit there on the hard ground and she reaches for them, with her ring-covered hand and the metal loops opening, and heads back for the house. One or two dogs stand to look at her, but she is not anything to fuss over this early, they know, and she brings the seats inside and passes between Vivian and the mama dog into the darker dark of the bedroom she cleaned last evening, the sun pushing through between the drawn curtains just enough to shed a little light on the strata of posters left behind by the girls she has lost.

Vivian cups her hands beneath the babies’ little thighs and stands and brings them in and slides them in under each handle, their arms windmilling first and their toes straining against the pajama feet before they ease and settle into their curved sleep in the seats. From the pocket of her sweatshirt she takes two sets of plastic measuring spoons and sets them on their bellies for them to find when they wake. Then she follows Lynn to her kitchen.

•   •   •

Vivian sits at the table heaped with Kleenex, her feet in the red flip-flops hooked behind the spindle legs of one of the old woman’s chairs. The white-noise machine lies on its back among her things, its cord still wound tight around it. It is light now through the panes of glass, and she is watching Lynn at the counter stuffing leathery leaves of kale into the clear plastic blender. She steadies a bunch of spinach with her loops of metal and twists and tears off a handful from the pretty white roots and stuffs these in too. A cable pulls the metal loops open and closed. She pins an avocado to a wooden board and slices around it with a big knife and squeezes it free of its pit and then empties the mess of creamy yellow-green in on top. A handful of blueberries. A whole banana. And then she twists open a cloudy jug of apple juice and pours it in over everything. The brown juice trickles down as she lays the rubber lid on top and punches the button with her thumb, setting the blender whirring loudly and clouding with white and bubbles and little pieces that soon disappear. Vivian watches, sipping her coffee, and Lynn watches too, her back to Vivian under the cover of a noise too loud for talking over, until it shuts off on its own, silent now, and full to the brim with pale green.

“Breakfast,” Lynn says.

Lynn pours it into two glasses, so thick. When she sets one down in front of her, Vivian thanks her and watches her take a long drink and then set it down and wipe at the corners of her mouth with thumb and ringed forefinger, still standing. “I have to go off in a while to pick up a dog at a shelter about an hour’s drive from here. I’ll teach you a couple things before I go, and you can rest while I’m gone.”

“You mean I can stay?”

“ ’Course you can.”

Vivian’s eyes fill. She laughs nervously and wipes them.

Lynn turns her back and cranks the faucet on.

Behind her Vivian says, “I thought you wouldn’t want to take me with the babies.”

“You kidding?” She picks up a sponge and begins rinsing the blender. “You’re a better bet with them. There’s no harder worker than a single mom.”

“But I thought you’d have questions about me at least.”

“Lord, no.”

“You don’t want to know anything?”

“Not a bit of my business. And I’ll thank you not to ask me any more questions either. All we need to know about each other is who fed the dogs.” She is busying herself with the blender, soaping it to cut through the avocado and then rinsing it and setting it upside down in the drying rack. When she turns, Vivian is looking down into her full green glass.

Lynn says, “The diner in town serves burgers at lunch and bacon at breakfast.”

“This is better for me, I’m sure,” the girl says, still gazing at it.

Lynn reaches across the pile of used tissues to grab the glass. “I’ll put it in the fridge for you for later. We’d better get started outside.”

She loans the girl a pair of rubber boots and an old brown canvas barn coat then, and she leads her for the first time into the dog yard. The dogs rush them and crowd, barking and sniffing at their knees, a couple jumping up with their muddy paws on their coats.