Kept Animals Page 15

  LITTLE SNAKE, WYOMING MAY 29, 2015

  THE HILLS HAVE gone purple with lupine and the air is thick with the stiff smell of fresh-cut alfalfa. We have four foals in the pasture, still young enough that they keep tightly to their mares. The trees and the underbrush are bustling with new hatchlings: magpie, meadowlark, mourning doves. All of this made Mama’s funeral feel that much more peculiar.

  There are people in New York, her friends, I was told, having a service for her there, a celebration of her life. The part of her life that I did not know. These friends are her colleagues, all people who run toward danger. We didn’t invite them here, but this is where Mama asked to be buried. A thirty-seven-year-old woman who’d already prepared a will.

  Our friends from neighboring ranches came in their coveralls, their jeans and bandannas, leaving cold pasta salads and casseroles in the kitchen, before standing with us as she was lowered down into a plot beside my great-aunt Joy, who rests beside Mr. Traden. I guess it’s a family funeral ground, of a sort.

  We called Mona to let her know what had happened. Grandad had kept up with her some over the years, updating her on Mama and me, I guess, but when she said she wasn’t well enough to travel, Gus hung up and looked at me, disappointed. “I’m a creature of habit,” he said.

  A month from now, the four foals will have to be weaned from their mothers. Grandad was dreading putting Chap down without Mama, but I realize now it is the wean that I don’t want to do on my own. Maybe I’ve always stretched it out, every year, every herd, always waiting the extra days or weeks, however long it took for Mama to come home. Mama always did it gradually, patiently, easing the foals into their independence. First, moving them to a neighboring corral, just in the daytime, so that they could see their mares, but only touch noses. A day or two gone by this way, she’d separate them into neighboring stalls at night, so that they could still smell one another. Then two stalls apart. And so on. There is irony in this, of course. This consideration from a mother who herself would up and leave me, sometimes in the dead of the night.

  After everyone left the house, Grandad, in his suit and tie, lumbered up the stairs, still in his boots, still caked with the softened earth from around her grave. I heard him rooting around and I was figuring he’d come unraveled, that he was finally going to break twenty-two years of sobriety. Mama had warned me, saying I had to tell her the minute I smelled alcohol on him. But then there he was, taking his slow, snap-pop steps back down the stairs, one knee doing the bending for two, and balancing a box in his arms. “She wanted you to have this,” he said. It was an ordinary filing box. The kind with a handled lid that lifts off easily, that suggests the contents are artfully arranged in lateral files, but when I lifted the top away, it was a jumble of negatives and empty negative sleeves, black-and-white proofs, dodging and burning tools, newspaper clippings. Mama shot most of her work digitally, but she had made a darkroom out of the kitchen in the old homestead cabin, and she’d carried a little black Leica with her wherever she went.

  I pushed the box back toward him. “I don’t want it,” I said, assuming I’d be looking through more images of famine and war.

  “No, no,” Grandad said, understanding. “These are from before you were born.” He held the handles of the box and rocked it back and forth like he was panning for gold, and the piles of negatives shifted, revealing more clippings, pages of handwritten notes—some folded up, some torn from notebooks. “All of it’s from 1993.”

  I let myself have the thought, My father, and picked up a black-and-white proof sheet, searching the tiny images, nearly all faces I didn’t know. “This is you?” I asked Grandad. A man heavier than Grandad is now, his face fuller, younger, and a horse leaning into him, the white star on her head unmistakable. “And Chap,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I knew it was the fire of 1993 that made them leave, that they’d gone before it was even contained. And that only a week later, as Mama and Grandad were settling in with my great-aunt Joy, rains hit the canyon, washing away the burn-loosened earth, destabilizing the hillsides and the houses only barely spared by the fire. All that and then the Northridge quake in January of ’94. So they considered themselves lucky, despite Mama’s and Chap’s burns, despite the loss of their home, even as Mama realized I was with her then, that she was pregnant at fifteen.

  “Why would she have wanted me to have this?”

  Grandad took off his hat and ran his hand over his head. “I know she was meaning to give it to you, to show it all to you, at some point—” He stopped. Something in the box had caught his eye. “Sarah Price,” he said, picking up an envelope, a letter addressed to him.

  “Sarah Price?” I asked. His face blanched white. “Price?” I repeated.

  Price. I had heard this name, whispered between them, easily misunderstood as the cost of a thing.

  After Grandad went to bed, I walked out to Chap’s corral and I started in on the hole we will need for her. She is too uncomfortable for us to move her any closer to Mama and she is wasting, refusing feed. I dug just outside the corral so that we’ll only have to take down the fence between where she stands and where she ought to fall. Once the ground was opened, I lay down on the slip of earth between the hole and the fence. Chap’s eyes are gray, blind in the night, but she smelled the air, knowing I was there. Eventually her breath grew even beside me, her body slacking into sleep, and the earth, turning, folded us into the darkest embrace of night.

  * * *

  Before you shoot a horse, you have to draw an X across their forehead with your eyes. Two lines, each running from one ear to the opposite eye. But when you fire, you aim just slightly above center, to get around the bony ridge of the forehead. When the shot rings out it will echo through the valley, the birds will scatter from the trees, the neighbors pause their work, and the caribou and the coyotes will freeze, ears pricked. It is a silence that is equal parts shock and hope. I’ve been living in that kind of silence for a long time.

  Our family has always had secrets: that Mama smoked, that she hid her packs behind the darkroom door, that Grandad took antidepressants, that we sometimes bred grade mares. Even Aunt Joy’s cancer was a kind of secret, another thing we didn’t discuss. The same brand of silence there was about Mama’s being gay and the fact of my father having had to have been someone, once upon a time, somewhere. There’d never been reason for me to suspect that I was named for a dead boy, never any kind of clue, but as Grandad spoke and my eyes grew tired reading the clippings from the newspapers, the magazines, that same uncanny feeling was coming over me, the sense of having known all along.

  “I always assumed,” Grandad said, refolding the crease-thinned pages of Sarah Price’s letter, “that this had burned up in the fire, same as everything else.”

  TOPANGA CANYON, CALIFORNIA LATE SEPTEMBER 1993

  Dear Mr. Scott,

  Have you ever slept in a car? It is oddly invigorating.

  I have been thinking about you, about our brief time together in your hospital room. Do you remember? There are certain memories of that night that are alarmingly clear, but my memory of sitting with you has a haziness that I fear might be lending me a fondness for you I should not possess. You were asleep when I came in—your leg in a system of pulleys that I spent some time trying to figure out how, if at all, it was attached to your bed. When you woke, you started pressing the morphine button and you kept looking toward the door. They told me that you had been taken to a different hospital. I hadn’t asked, so I knew they were lying. I sensed, even before I read your chart—before I knew that you had been drinking—that you and I had something in common, a shared culpability for my son’s death, at the very least. I have never enjoyed alcohol, but I think I have been living my life with the same kind of willful passivity that is brought on by drinking. Do you remember what I told you that night? How I put Charlie down and ran to answer the phone, thinking it was Everett, that everything else could wait if he was finally returning my calls… .
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  Mr. Flores was trying to follow you home that night, wasn’t he? He knew how drunk you were and felt duty bound, didn’t he? Subservience will be the death of each and every one of us. It has not gone unnoticed that you have refused all interviews. You, too, are uncomfortable with this kind of freedom we’ve been left, aren’t you? Tell me, Mr. Scott, what hurt was it that you were trying to numb?

  Five days ago now, it was decided that I am no longer a danger to myself or others and I was set free, dismissed back into society. Maybe you heard about my suicide attempt? In actuality, I only put my hand through a glass door. A perfectly logical response, but Everett saw an opportunity. Maybe I have only ever been an opportunity to him, a means to an end, my own needs—my Charlie—an inconvenience. This is to say, I am not going home. Not now.

  I can see my car from inside this diner where I sit, writing to you. It’s a good car. Japanese, I believe. I drove it on empty for nearly twenty miles and it never gave out, despite my invitation. I am full of precarious desires, but beneath them all is a wish for distance.

  Do you think it is possible to leave one’s hurt behind? I want to leave it, bit by bit: a little beside this bowl of untouched soup, more in the mailbox with this letter. Tomorrow, I will wake up somewhere in Illinois and hope that my burden will be lighter still. What do you think New Hampshire is like this time of year?

  I hope this finds you moving on—Gus, if I may.

  S.

  In the past week, he had read Sarah Price’s letter a dozen times, but it wasn’t the letter that had him dry. He had remembered telling her, in the hospital, that she should go, that she didn’t want to be sitting there with him, and she had answered, “you’re absolutely right,” but then not moved, the two of them silently staring at one another as if through a glass partition. He wished she had been a product of the morphine.

  No, he was sober now because of the drive ahead, his livelihood trailing behind him, meeting Mark Adler in Craig, Colorado, and having to make a good impression. He’d gotten Rory on board with taking Chap there, after her initially lackluster response, which he chalked up to childish squeamishness over the actual breeding. With his bum leg, he would need good help to haul two horses that far. Wade, of course, would be flying separately. A fact that had given Rory visible relief.

  All week long, Gus had been sleeping on the couch, thinking that if he stayed there he’d hear Mona come home, that she’d jostle him awake and the two of them would pad back to the bedroom together. But it was always Rory waking him, on her way out the door for school, morning light cutting under the curtains. Tonight he’d called the bar and gotten a busy signal. No matter, he would just wait up for her. He cracked open a Coke. He’d know when she got home.

  He turned on the nightly news: Lakers down by ten, temperatures spiking in the valley. He called the bar again and a man answered, a voice Gus didn’t know. “Mona’s not on tonight.”

  “She hasn’t been in at all?” He dropped a painkiller on his tongue.

  “Who’s asking?” the man said.

  “Her husband,” Gus said, choking back the pill.

  * * *

  VIVIAN HEARD McLEOD push the bolt on the garage door as soon as he’d heard her voice (the missus clearly home). “Go on,” he said.

  She recounted her climb up the hill that night, telling McLeod about the girl she’d found, the view from her window onto her pool and patio. She told him everything without mentioning the stepfather’s involvement in the accident, unsure of why she was withholding it. “She walked me home,” she said. “In the dark.”

  They’d shared a joint, Rory steering her over paths that led to the main road, only dimly spotted by streetlights.

  “But what can she see?” McLeod asked. An envy in his voice that amused Vivian.

  It hadn’t been such a spectacular view, no way to see inside unless the curtains were open, but through the branches of the trees there was a clear view of the pool, the surrounding gardens, the sliding glass doors off her room. She stepped outside, talking to McLeod, hoping Rory was looking now.

  Along the main road, they’d had to walk single file each time a car came whizzing past, the headlights barely a warning around the blind curves. After a Ford Mustang had whipped their hair back with its speed, Vivian had said, “Wouldn’t this be a hell of a way to die?” Rory had turned around, her face knit in concern. But Vivian had actually come to think that Charlie must have been the most alive anyone can possibly be in the moment before he died. He had to have been so unaware of the finality facing him; pure animal mechanism must have filled his body with adrenaline, his child mind thrilling at the sight of one automobile after another careening toward him. That was the kind of kid he was. Her brother. Vivian said none of this to Rory, taking her hand instead. Rory didn’t pull away until they were outside the gates of her house. “I should go back now,” she said, turning, fully intending to walk those same roads, over the same coyote-thick paths, alone. “You’re pretty brave.” Vivian smiled. Asking her to come inside seemed too easy, leaving no lingering mystery. She wanted to see her again. “I’m not afraid of the dark,” Rory said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “I drove her home,” Vivian said to McLeod. He knew that her Land Cruiser had been taken, an added insult to her academic probation the year before. “I took my mom’s BMW.” The time capsule of Mommy’s car no longer felt necessary.

  “And?” McLeod pressed. “Have you seen this Rory since?”

  “Of course,” Vivian said, stopping there. She wasn’t going to give it all away.

  Wade was a determining factor for when she and Rory saw one another. But she’d come to recognize whether or not he’d be stopping by from the way he said goodbye at the end of school each day (a slap on the ass: see you later, a kiss on the mouth: that’ll tide you over for a day). Rory would call from the barn, then hike out Zuniga Road, where they’d meet at the bottom of the trail. She had taken Charlie’s car seat out of the BMW, but she’d left the shopping basket to skid across the backseat as they took the canyon’s turns, Rory jumping every time it hit the door.

  “I bet you make her nervous,” McLeod said.

  One night they drove down to the beach, after the sun had set, the sand still warm on the surface, then cool as their toes slipped deeper. The opal moon rose up, dropping its luminescence down the water toward them. Rory told her how she’d found out that she was seeing Wade, how she’d taken a magazine from the convenience store. “Why’d you steal it?” Vivian asked and Rory shrugged. She told her about a recurring dream she’d been having about her house being the flash point of a landslide. Your typical falling dream, except that Vivian’s house was in their path.

  Rory was a puzzle, yet Vivian felt no pressure to sort her out. Her presence was comforting, undemanding, quietly adoring.

  “But she doesn’t even drink,” Vivian said. “I told her she just hasn’t found her poison of choice, but she flat-out refuses anything I offer.”

  “You sound impressed by this.”

  “I’m not used to being refused.”

  Nearly three weeks had passed since Mommy had been missing. A fact Vivian had not told to anyone. “Not even a word to Carmen,” Cousin Everett had hissed, carting more junk (collectibles!) into the house, poor Carmen trailing after him, his shit-sorting assistant now.

  “McLeod,” Vivian said, stretching out a silence, growing his restlessness, “do you think it’s possible to love two people at once?”

  There was the spark of McLeod’s lighter, the thin inhale and huff of his exhale. This new habit pleased her so.

  At the end of the month, Everett was leaving, starting production on the film in Mexico. He’d joked, when he told Vivian, that maybe he’d run into Mommy there (ha, ha, fucking ha). And Wade, she’d since learned, was going away soon after that. “Two weeks,” he said, an apology in his voice. Fact was he had been of use to her, especially since school started; a necessary distraction from a year that began with timid condole
nces and teachers letting her out of assignments before they’d even been assigned. She preferred that the whispery speculations be about what she had let him do to her in the back of his Scout rather than how her family was faring (D-minus, thank you very much).

  “I suppose I’d need more clarity in terms of the scenario,” McLeod said. “But my gut response is yes.”

  “McLeod,” she said, swaying her feet in the pool. “I didn’t mean it as a hypothetical.”

  “Oh, Vivian,” he said. “I think about you, I do. I hope you’re going to call—” He stopped.

  “I know you do.”

  “But there are rules,” he said.

  “Too many rules,” Vivian mused.

  Wade was coming by today, but she would keep him inside, out of view. Tomorrow, though, tomorrow she would see Rory and she was sure Rory wasn’t going to refuse her anything.

  * * *

  RORY HAD MADE two sandwiches, packed water, and her camera, out of habit—nothing else—and left without waking Gus.

  “Wade won’t wonder where you are?” she asked, closing herself into the black BMW. She’d been surprised Vivian didn’t have her own car, but Vivian just smiled and said, “Bad girls don’t get to keep their cars.” Today they were both skipping school.

  “I told him I wasn’t feeling well,” Vivian said, driving away from where Rory’s bus would soon pull in. “Last night, on the phone.”

  Rory knew that wasn’t true, that it hadn’t been on the phone. She was aware of these small flourishes of Vivian’s. Vivian didn’t know she could see a car’s headlights when they left, illuminating the gates and then the road beyond.