Kept Animals Page 17

  Rory kept her eyes on Tomás, willing him to put the damn key in the ignition already. Through gritted teeth, she said, “This car has an engine, doesn’t it?”

  “Okay, okay,” Tomás said, getting the car started and putting it in reverse.

  “Adios,” Johnny said, waving the gun in the air like a handkerchief.

  * * *

  THE FRONT OF Hawkeye’s Tavern had been repainted cactus green, and a makeshift patio, with plastic chairs and tables stuck with orange umbrellas, was now eating up part of the parking lot. Sitting inside his truck, Gus remembered Mona having said that Hawkeye was putting more money into the place on account of the new condominiums that were going up across the street.

  Hawkeye had been Hawkeye ever since losing an eye as a boy, and supposedly as compensation his remaining eye was exceedingly strong. He was a mean pool player, a loyal friend and boss, and had a sense of humor, too, wearing a flesh-colored patch with a bigger eye painted on every Halloween. But Gus had also seen Hawkeye swat a customer’s hand away when he tried to take his change. If it weren’t for his small stature—he was a pony of a man—Gus might have even been intimidated. When he’d started dating Mona, Hawkeye took him to lunch, letting Gus know that Mona was like a daughter to him, though they were roughly the same age.

  Mona’s Chrysler was two cars over, with its dented fender. Maybe Mona was here covering for Becky. Maybe everything was right with the world. But if he went in and he saw Mona playing pool, her body focused down the length of the cue with another man’s hand at her hip, breathing instructions in her ear, some chump she’d fooled into believing this was her first game of 9 Ball, well, what then? Was he gonna beat the guy with his cane? Was that, maybe, what she wanted? Was she even thinking of him at all? Or just hoping he’d fall prey to a bone infection and drop dead, leaving her … leaving her what? A horse. One fucking horse, which wouldn’t even come close to covering their debt.

  What hurt were you trying to numb, Mr. Scott?

  A man can get used to anything.

  He slouched in his seat and there was Mona, appearing in his rearview mirror. She was wearing a paisley dress he’d bought her years ago. It still fit, still hugged her breasts. She had raised her arms, squeezing herself between the fenders of parked cars, her stomach sucked in, shimmying toward the parking lot. Gus turned around to wave, ready to get out and go in for a ginger ale, when he saw the flash of her smile as she turned back, taking the hand of the man coming behind her. It was Hawkeye. Gus shut his eyes, meaning to change the picture, but when he opened them again the energy between Mona and this man was as overwhelming as a swarm of bees. Not a manager and an employee, not an old friend, or a father figure, but two people who’d just had a fuck.

  * * *

  THE SUPRA MADE an uneasy noise through a few turns, but it seemed to be running well enough. Tomás had the driver’s seat all the way back, so his grasshopper legs would fit. “I’m really sorry about all that,” he said.

  “I just wish you’d told me before I got in the car,” Rory said.

  “About Johnny?” Tomás asked. “Or the gun?”

  “Jesus,” Rory said. “Do you hear yourself? Either one, honestly.” As relieved as she was to be away from Johnny, from the maddening feeling of that gun, there was an added exhilaration in driving toward Vivian’s house. Even if she couldn’t exactly ask Tomás to drop her off outside.

  “He got me parts for cost,” Tomás said in a voice intended to make her laugh, a singsongy voice that was part question.

  “Still not worth it.” Rory smiled. It was nice to see Tomás out in his car.

  “You know, I’ve never been invited in for pozole.” The wind was pulling hair loose from her braid and she wiped it from her face.

  Tomás feigned surprise. “I didn’t know you liked pozole.”

  Rory shrugged. “I guess Johnny’s just a better friend.”

  “Well …” Tomás stole a look at her backpack. “You still haven’t taken my picture, so …”

  Rory unzipped her bag. “You want me to?” She hadn’t taken a picture in days. The sun had yet to set, a heavy orange slipping from the cupped hands of the canyon walls. “I don’t have the best lens for light this low, but …” She adjusted her f-stop to 2.8, as wide as it would go and brought the camera to her eye.

  Tomás took his hat off and turned himself in the seat, pressing his hair back, keeping his eyes on the road, but smiling. “Can you get a little bit of the car in it? For Papi?”

  “I’ll have a shallow depth of field.” She was looking at him through the lens now, seeing him the way she thought he would want Jorge to see him. Click. “Hold as still as you can,” she said. “But keep smiling.” Click. For the last six years, they had grown up together, but some days she felt as if she barely knew him. Click. Wind. “I think I got a good one,” she said.

  “You’ll print it for me? So I can give it to him?”

  “Of course.” She wondered about Jorge often, but asking about him risked shattering the veneer of normalcy everyone had worked so hard to polish. “How is he?” They were on the curve of road that was framed by enormous outcroppings of white sandstone, as if they were driving into the jaws of a mythical creature. Seven more curves and they would be just beyond the gates of Vivian’s house. Rory didn’t want to get all the way home.

  Tomás shook his head. “I don’t know how he does it, living like that.” Tomás and Sonja went to see Jorge on Sundays, visiting day, but only when Tomás could spare the hours. “But he’s upbeat. Or at least he acts that way for us. He told me to go on this trip, you know? He said we have to be open to new experiences, take the chances he can’t. He’s been going to services is what I think. You know, he never left this canyon, not since 1970, when Mrs. Danvers hired him.”

  “Really? Why?” Tomás had put his hat back on, its brim putting his eyes in deep shadow. “Because he felt safe here,” Rory said, realizing. “How did he meet your mom, then?”

  “Oh, they knew each other when they were kids. In Veracruz.”

  “Really?” Rory asked. “I didn’t know, but—”

  “They lost track of one another for a while,” Tomás said, answering her confusion. “I think it’s kind of romantic,” he said, shrugging. “He’s my Papi. Only one I need.”

  They had already passed the Price gates, the wall scored with the mark of that night, and Rory had not looked; she was just listening to Tomás, thinking of this, two people finding each other in another country, after a lifetime. It was romantic. Rory was starting to understand how much this road had taken from everyone and what it wasn’t ever going to give back. Except maybe to her? Was that possible? She had a sideways thought then about Mona and Gus, how Gus was her only father, but if they ever split up—as they should—Rory wouldn’t be able to stay with him; Mona wouldn’t give her that choice. Mona made her feel like she didn’t have a choice about anything; she was like a bell jar—not protective, just suffocating.

  “Stop,” Rory heard herself say. “Stop the car.”

  Tomás turned, his new tires spinning onto the dirt shoulder, the Supra coming to a jerky halt.

  “What’s going on?” Tomás asked. “What is it?

  “I’m sorry,” Rory said, turning to look through the rear window. The house was well out of sight.

  “You scared me,” Tomás said. “Are you all right?” He put a hand on the back of her seat, studying her face.

  She wanted to tell him, she wanted to tell somebody, because just thinking about Vivian—about the way she had pressed her nose and mouth against Rory’s neck, about how Rory was comforting her by staying behind—it felt worth telling. “There’s just, there’s something. …” She was pointing vaguely toward a sycamore, a balloon listing there, its helium depleted. She raised the camera, suggesting she wanted a picture.

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay. I’ll wait, then.”

  “No,” she said. “I can walk from here. I’ve done it before. I want the walk. Tomorro
w, wrap Chap’s legs for me? For the trailer? Don’t let Wade or Gus do it, okay?” Tomás was nodding, but in the last scrap of daylight, she could see how confusing she was to him, yet he had already understood her better than she had herself—she was in love, and with a girl. She touched his arm, and when he looked down at her hand she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, saying, “Thanks,” before getting out of the car. She waited until he was gone before she crossed the road.

  * * *

  GUS REFUSED TO leave for Colorado without talking to Rory one more time.

  He came home from Hawkeye’s with this one thing decided and he climbed the stairs, believing that the sight of her sleeping—he was imagining the little knot of a girl he’d first seen, sound asleep on her mother’s bed, under the flicker of a television—would release him from this fury in his head.

  The lights were on in Rory’s room, the bed made, the room’s vacancy made worse by the rotation of a metal fan blowing the heat and emptiness around, the pictures tacked up on her walls lifting and dropping. “Rory,” he said, as if he’d found at least some piece of her, seeing these photographs on the wall: a black-and-white of two small children in Guangzhou. Protests in Liverpool. A Walker Evans. He put his hand—the knuckles already swelling—to a portrait of a woman with dark hair, hair like Rory’s, and the same knowing seriousness to her eyes. The caption: “Mary Ellen Mark, on the Set of Apocalypse Now, 1979.” Maybe she’d be a film major, he thought. They had no money for that. “You are a fool,” Mona had said to him when he was still in the hospital, before the story makers had twisted the narrative of what he’d done. She never let him forget that Rory wasn’t his daughter, but she was family to him. He knew her, he understood her, they shared commonalities, beliefs, in that entrenched way one does with real family. “Rory,” he said again, still believing he would find her.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE HERE!” VIVIAN shrieked, vodka breaching the martini glass she was holding. “At last,” she said. Rory had heard the slur in her voice through the intercom outside the gates. She was wearing a T-shirt with a green silk screen of pine trees framing a waterfall and the words CAMP WASHITA written in log-shaped letters. She wore only the threadbare yellow shirt and teal bikini bottoms, despite the sun having gone down. “Come in already, come in! I really need to sit down …”

  As impressive as the outside of the house was, there was nothing orderly to the inside. It was as if the whole estate had been picked up and shaken: things everywhere, tipped over, clustering together, haphazard islands of things, picture frames, a table on its side, as if floating in the expanse of the foyer. The ceilings were so high, so clear and open, that they begged Rory to look up and through the skylights. And then, with some alarm, Rory registered cardboard boxes throughout the mess—packing boxes. “Are you moving?” she asked, knowing this made perfect sense. Of course people as rich as the Prices could build a house and then turn on their heels as soon as circumstances became less than favorable.

  “Moving?” Vivian said, looking around. “We probably should, given this mess, but then you and I wouldn’t be neighbors.”

  “I saw the boxes and I thought—”

  “Whatever you do, do not try to think in this house. Trust me, leave logic at the door.”

  There were three chairs in the foyer, all of them blue.

  “I’ll give you a tour,” Vivian said, her mouth loose around the words.

  Vivian pulled Rory through the chaos, steering her past an open bathroom, an office, and an alcove with waxen plants clustered on the floor. The door handles, the windows, the art on the walls, all shone as if polished, and there were hints of expensive furniture, flashes of marble and leather. But it was all buried beneath a flow of yard-sale rubbish. Vivian was rambling on about the symptoms of hoarding, how Everett had not grown up with money and they’d not really been well off until her grandfather died, and that this mess he’d created was the manifestation of a kind of long-term panic. “He even stopped paying the pool cleaners. But no matter, Carmen and Bobby and me, we’re planning this divine intervention. Eventually,” Vivian said, going quiet as she turned down another hallway and ran a finger over one of the doors, the letter C embossed there, in the wood.

  And then they were in Vivian’s room, a room predominantly pink and white, the furniture of a girl smitten with fairies and princesses: a white four-poster bed, a matching desk with curved wooden legs, matching gingham cushions and duvet, but then there were Tibetan prayer flags strung behind the bed and a poster of a shirtless Jim Morrison. Tucked between a side table and the bed was a hookah.

  “You ever use one of those?” Vivian asked, flouncing down on her mattress. Rory shook her head. “No? Well, Everett brought it home and I told him it was a crazy cool vase, so he let me keep it.” She laughed and sipped her martini again.

  The desk sat on a shaggy rug and atop the desk was a lava lamp and a small statue of a Hindu god. Shiva, Rory thought. “I’m so glad you aren’t leaving,” Vivian said. She’d stretched out on top of the checkered duvet. “Enough with the leaving.”

  “Have you heard anything?” Rory asked. “About your mom?”

  Vivian hiccuped. “I’m pretty sure that PI is just another aspiring actor.”

  “Has he called?” Rory was leaning over the desk, looking at the Polaroids tacked to the corkboard there, finding Vivian in a few, her arm slung around … people Rory didn’t know.

  “Oh, he called. Thinks she’s in Illinois.”

  “So now what?” Rory asked.

  “Now nothing. She’s an adult. Walkaway mothers are apparently on the rise—that’s what they call them, moms who abandon their kids, though I hardly qualify as a child, right? I mean, here I am drunk on a Tuesday,” she said, adding a moment later, “I have the spins.”

  Rory came and took her by the hand, helping her sit. “I’ll get you water.” Vivian gestured to a door opposite the blue chair. “Walk away,” Vivian said in a near-shout. “Because of course women are expected to be cool, calm, and collected about everything they do.”

  The bathroom was white marble and mirrors, a Jacuzzi tub, a separate glass shower stall. There was a crystal drinking glass beside the faucet. Running the water, Rory avoided seeing herself in the mirror—she didn’t belong here.

  “Of course it certainly seems like she was calm and collected about it. It’s just, I don’t know.” Vivian paused, drinking the water Rory had brought her. “It would be nice if she’d said something, sent me a letter, or …” Vivian trailed off.

  “Not left,” Rory said.

  Vivian nodded. “Can we go outside?”

  The pool was larger than Rory had understood from her room and now she could see the green moss gathering at the bottom. The yard beyond the pool’s dull glow was dark, as if everything else had fallen away.

  “It’s there,” Vivian said. She was on one of the oversize lounge chairs, an Aztec-patterned blanket pulled up to her chin. “Can you see it?” Her eyes were on the tree line.

  “My window,” Rory said, turning to look. “No,” she said. “Where?”

  “It’s there, right there. It’s easiest to find when the sun is setting. It catches the light.”

  Rory kept looking, trying to orient herself.

  “Did you bring that camera of yours?” Vivian asked.

  Her words were less elastic, as if she were sobering up, and the question felt like a test, suddenly, as if Rory’s response would drop her into one box or another. She thought of the images she had seen of the Prices over the years: the posed kind, with automatic smiles, chins at unnatural angles, and then those that revealed their annoyance, their expressions of disbelief. “I did,” Rory said, a tremble in her voice that worsened when she tried to get some control. “I always have my camera.”

  “Come,” Vivian said, moving over and patting the space beside her. “You’re cold.”

  The lounge chairs were wider than Rory’s bed and the cushions nearly as thick. “Okay,” she sai
d, sitting down beside Vivian.

  “Come on, come on,” Vivian said. “Lie down.”

  Rory did and Vivian tossed the blanket out again so that it fell over both of them, then she rolled to her side, so that she was facing Rory, her knees up against the side of Rory’s thigh. “That’s where it happened,” Vivian said, gesturing over Rory’s shoulder to the sliding glass doors, the one boarded up in cardboard. Vivian had described the way the blood had pooled around her mother’s foot, the faint brown stain that remained. “That door is the first thing I’m going to get fixed,” Vivian said, dropping her head to Rory’s shoulder.

  “How long will your dad be gone?” Rory asked.

  “A month,” Vivian said. “A one-month shoot isn’t that long at all, really. And now the world is my oyster!” She swung a grandiose arm toward the shadowy yard, the dark stand of trees, then brought it back down to Rory’s arm. Her hand was warm. “What about you?” Vivian asked. “Is anyone going to wonder where you are?”

  Rory shook her head. She was sure Gus was asleep, given how early they were leaving, and if Mona came home at all, she wasn’t going to check on her.

  “So you can stay here, then? Tonight?”

  Rory didn’t respond except to sink deeper into the cushion. All she meant, Rory thought, was spend the night, but there was a thinness to the air. It seemed hard to catch her breath.

  “This is strange, isn’t it? Me and you,” Vivian said, her voice against Rory’s neck.

  “I don’t know,” Rory said, “Is it?” The bold new beat in her chest was vibrating throughout her body, threatening to become an uncontrollable shuddering.

  “You have pretty hands,” Vivian said and drew her finger up Rory’s arm. “I keep noticing that.” Rory was shivering. Her arms. Her shoulders. “You’re not cold,” Vivian said. “I just make you nervous, don’t I?”

  “No, no. I’m fine,” Rory said. Then, “Maybe a little.”