Kept Animals Read online

  Vivian moved closer as if to comfort her, but then she took Rory’s hand and brought it to the curve of her own waist and the thread of Rory’s wanting suddenly cinched. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Can’t what?” Vivian asked. “You don’t like this?”

  “What about Wade?” Rory said.

  “He’s just a boy,” Vivian said. The faint pleasure in the corners of Vivian’s mouth, the way she was looking up into Rory’s face, it was almost dismissal enough. And then she said, “I like you, Rory Ramos. I like that you’ve been watching me. That you stole that magazine. That I catch you staring at me sometimes.”

  Rory was searching Vivian’s face. “I don’t want to get hurt.”

  Vivian smiled. “Nobody does.” She ran her hand down the length of Rory’s braid, pulling away the elastic band, then running her fingers through her hair.

  Rory put her hand back on the curve of Vivian’s hip. “This is okay?” she asked.

  Vivian touched her lips to the end of Rory’s nose, then to her cheeks, brushing over Rory’s skin as if her mouth were a feather. Then kissing her. Rory kissing back. Her eyes were closed and her body was untethering from the earth, not falling, but rising, lifting into the trees, a bird, surrounded by rustling leaves—an up kick of wind—and against her body, Rory felt, as if it were her own, the pronounced pounding of Vivian’s heart. She focused on it, steadying her breath, and there, between the beats, was the smallest of murmurs. An imperfection. A fragility. These were the things that made Vivian Price so beautiful, the things no one else knew.

  “Tomorrow, I want you to take my picture,” Vivian said, as if reading Rory’s mind.

  * * *

  GUS WAS STEPPING toward the door, about to give up, when the curtains blew back, lifting into the room, and he thought, Of course she’s sitting out there, sneaking a cigarette. He moved in heavy deliberate steps, ready to reprimand her, to remind her how parched and brittle everything had become and here were the first winds of fall—not the Santa Anas, not yet, but the cooler, whispery ones, the winds that tricked everyone, lulling them into complacency. “Hey, kid,” he started. “You know as well as I do—”

  She wasn’t there. Only a jam jar on the corner of the grating, full of damp cigarette butts—good girl—and the dark hillside. And beyond the branches was the lit rectangle of the Price family pool. Sarah, he thought.

  At any moment, he told himself, she would step outside and take in the night air. She was there. She had to be. He could sense her. There, on the chaise, there was a woman—yes. No, a girl. The feline apathy of her movements, the teenager. The teen version of Sarah Price. And another girl he saw now, lying down beside her. Who was this? He leaned out over the railing, trying to be sure. The grating beneath him went unstable. It was Rory. Rory and Vivian Price, who was pulling Rory’s hair through her fingers. He knocked the jar of butts over and it fell between the railings, dropping and cracking open on the hillside. He looked back. They hadn’t heard it fall, hadn’t heard it break. He was that far away. And they were turning toward one another, one disappearing into the other, a twisting embrace. Kissing. Rory was kissing Vivian Price? His Rory. No, Mona used to say. She’s just your little tagalong. Rag-tag-tagalong.

  He had lost all hold on his life.

  LITTLE SNAKE, WYOMING JUNE 7, 2015

  IN THE BOX of Mama’s things, I found a description of a dream—not exactly a journal entry, but a scribbling on pages torn from a notebook. There’s an urgency to the handwriting, like she had to get out from under the memory of the dream. A nightmare, really.

  I dreamt it again, same as always. Me and Mona moving around the house, cleaning up, straightening the magazines on the table, refolding blankets on the couch. We haven’t been arguing. There’s no tension in the air. There’s even this soft music playing in the background and then Mona smiles at me, like she’s satisfied with what we’ve done, like she likes me, and she goes to sit in the chair under the window and opens a book. I can’t see what she’s reading, but I know it’s a Bible—which Mona doesn’t read, but in the dream, I know she believes what it says, that she’d like me to listen to her read it. Outside it’s night and I can see myself reflected in the window above her head and my hair has come undone and I know if she looks up and sees this, everything will change. I move closer to the glass to watch myself rebraid it and it’s then that I can see past my reflection and into the darkness—what should just be the dirt turnaround, the trailer there—but instead everything is moving past the glass like a landslide. We are sliding down the hill. I feel it under my feet then. The bounce and roll of the floorboards. We’re plummeting. I look at Mona, terrified, and she just looks up at me with this slapped-on smile, like a doll, stupidly content.

  When I told Grandad about the dream, asking if Mama ever told it to him, he just shook his head. “They never got along.” Meaning Mama and Mona, as everyone has always called her. She lives in Lancaster, California, now, on her own. I told Grandad that what Mona meant when she told him she wasn’t well enough to travel alone is that she wasn’t well enough to mourn alone, that she is sad about Mama, in her own way. But he said it was just her emphysema.

  We had a broodmare once who wouldn’t let her first thrown colt suckle, so we had to coax her into letting him latch, keeping watch, so she didn’t get hostile. First-time mothers do this sometimes, insecure, their instincts slow to kick in. Usually, eventually, they settle in and grow fond, trotting off with their babies at their sides, but I have heard stories of mares who turn their teeth on each and every foal they throw, their babies having to be reared by adoptive moms, broodmares who can’t help but love on whatever gangly legged foal you throw in the pasture with them. Still, a first rejection like that, it lingers.

  “She was hard on your mama. Calling her Rag-Tag, for always tagging along with me. Never a compliment. Told her she looked like a boy so she wouldn’t let her cut her hair. Wasn’t about her hair, of course—” Grandad bats his palm at the air.

  “It was about Mama’s being gay,” I said, no longer having the strength to play along.

  I can feel the boulders rumbling against the house and outside the windows whole trees are being ripped from the ground, and I am suddenly certain of one thing—the kind of certainty only given to us in dreams—that I cannot let Mona know what is happening. That if I keep her from knowing anything, then we will be saved from the impact, allowed to continuously fall.

  I asked Grandad if he wanted me to be the one to put Chap down, but he said it was his to do and I didn’t disagree with him.

  I don’t care for the computer much, the way it sends you down rabbit holes you never intended to find, but I turned it on today and went through Mama’s old emails, reading them through the lens of what I’ve learned since she died. In a message from Baghdad, the year I went into the ninth grade, she wrote to me, I don’t talk about you very much. I can’t. Not here. No one else has children—none of the journalists, I mean. The soldiers do. But not the rest of us. Yesterday, I slipped, talking to a writer from Reuters. We were talking about home, about what we were going back to and I was explaining how things ran there now, with Joy gone, and I said, “my daughter,” and she looked at me as if I’d told her I was a spy. I don’t usually talk about home. These things weaken me. I have to forget in order to be here and I have to be here. So sometimes I have to forget about you. Please forgive me, Charlie.

  I heard the shot from the field, felt my body lurch, and only after the silence had begun to fill in again—the chitter of a nuthatch, a magpie chiming in—did I inhale, as if not breathing were going to keep her here with us. When Grandad came back the shot came back in with him, his body like a tuning fork. He sat down hard, not looking at me. He wiped his brow and bent to unlace his boots.

  “You want help, Grandad?” I asked. Sometimes the bad leg makes even small things harder than they need to be, but he didn’t respond. Surely his ears were still ringing.

  Mama won awards for her pi
ctures. Sierra Leone, Syria, the Congo. She captured shots of abandoned storefronts and children playing jacks in vacant streets, postapocalypse, but the images that she was known for are images of people looking back at her. “She was a portraitist,” they wrote of her in The New York Times, “within a sea tide of commotion.” They honored her “unjustly short career” with three images. From Aleppo, Syria, September 2012: amid the aftermath of a barrel bomb, a child, nine or ten, the soot on his face marked by the dried rivulets of old tears, and what you think—at first glance—is a bag under his arm, what is left of his possessions, is actually the body of a dust-covered dog. From the Kunduz province of Afghanistan, 2010: a group of villagers are gathered around sheet-wrapped bodies, men killed in a clash between the Taliban and Afghan forces. Their backs are to the camera, except for a woman in hijab who is looking at Mama’s lens with a mix of contempt, helplessness, and resolve. The last is from Istanbul, 2013. She wasn’t on assignment but had gone to the U.S. Embassy just before a suicide bomb detonated. Of course, she had her camera and she started shooting. A yellow taxi came speeding past, fleeing, and in the back window a woman is gripping the driver’s headrest, her eyes forcefully shut by the guttural determination of her own screaming. “I got lucky,” Mama told me when that image was first published, not referring to the fact that she had survived the blast, but that she’d accidentally captured this woman inside the car.

  The only thing that ever changes in this dream is the animal that wakes me—a deer or a coyote, once a horse, all hoof and struggle—desperate to get out of the path of our falling house, and it turns to me watching in the window, looking at me with these pleading eyes, yet I know there’s nothing I can do, that one of us is going to die and that’s when I wake up, heart racing, as if I were the one trapped in the path of my own home.

  When Grandad finally spoke, he said, “She called for you this morning.” He hung his hat on the arm of the chair, raked his fingers over his sweat-shined head. “She left her number—if you wanted to call her back.”

  “Mona?” I asked, though we had her number already. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Vivian Price,” Grandad said. “She heard about your mother.”

  TOPANGA CANYON, CALIFORNIA EARLY OCTOBER 1993

  BEFORE RORY WAS even inside the screen door, Mona was yelling, “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried out of my mind, Rag. You can’t just disappear—”

  Rory had stayed two nights at Vivian’s, but Vivian had dropped her at the mouth of Greenleaf Road this morning, because Carmen was coming. Rory hadn’t expected Mona to be awake, let alone up and making breakfast. She was gesticulating with her cigarette in one hand, the other forking bacon over into popping grease, morning light cutting across the kitchen. A Nan Goldin image, sad and tough all at once.

  “Well?” Mona pressed, wiping her face with the back of her arm. The weather had turned static-dry. The two-horse trailer was gone, as expected, but there was a motorcycle pulled in where it had been. “You gonna say something?”

  “I—I stayed with a friend.”

  “For two nights?” Mona had yet to turn to Rory, yet to look at her.

  “I left a message. I didn’t think that—”

  “That I’d be worried? Well, I’ve been worried out of my fucking mind.”

  Mona’s face was usually readable—her diamond-cut eyes, the jut of her chin, the shift of her high-boned cheeks—but Rory saw now that one eye was pinched small by swelling. “Mom, what happened?” Rory stepped toward her, unconsciously raising her hand to touch the bruise.

  “He hit me.” Mona turned away, her own fingers going to her face, as if she’d just remembered. “That’s what happened.”

  “Gus?” Rory asked, disbelieving. She stepped back, her backpack sliding down her arm.

  “Obviously,” Mona said.

  I’ll kill him—the thought like a struck match, a flash of blue heat. She’d never seen Gus hurt anyone, not like this, not intentionally. He never even raised his voice. It was Mona who got loud, who threw things. Rory watched her crack one egg, then another, into a hot buttered pan.

  The bedroom door opened and Rory turned to see Hawkeye stepping into the living room, rubbing sleep from his one good eye.

  “Ask him,” Mona said. “He was there—”

  A hard, short laugh escaped Rory’s throat. Hawkeye was wearing Mona’s green satin robe, the length of it dusting the floor. Of course, the motorcycle was his.

  “Morning, Rory,” Hawkeye said. His hair was sticking up at the back of his head, white as dandelion fluff, his forehead red with sheet creases.

  “This is how fucking worried you were?” Rory asked. “So worried you couldn’t sleep alone, is that it?”

  Mona was edging the spatula under the eggs, setting them sunny side up onto a plate, a sour embarrassment visible on her face.

  “Now, now.” Hawkeye tsked at Rory. “Don’t speak to your mother like that. I think she’s been shown quite enough disrespect already.” He came and sat at their table and Mona poured him coffee and put the eggs and bacon in front of him.

  “Is this a joke?” Rory asked.

  “I’m not laughing,” Mona said, folding a piece of bacon into her mouth.

  “He saw the two of you together,” Rory said. “That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  “That’s no reason to hit your mother, is it?” Hawkeye said. He blew on his coffee. He had dry, ashy hands. Rory had some understanding of what had gone through Gus, how rage held the potential to breach the edges of all that you believed yourself to be. But why not hit him, hit Hawkeye?

  And then Mona said, “School called.”

  “Fuck,” Rory said. Not even under her breath.

  “They said you’ve been out the last three days. They wanted to know if you had mono.”

  Rory looked at her hands. “I don’t. Obviously.”

  “No shit,” Mona said. “You gotta kiss somebody to get mono, don’t you?’ ” But then Mona stopped, looking Rory up and down now. “Or am I wrong? Is that what’s going on with you? You actually found yourself some boy trouble. Is that where you’ve been?”

  “Wear protection, kid,” Hawkeye said, raising his fork as punctuation.

  “It’s—no,” Rory said. “I was with a friend.”

  “Is that whose clothes you’ve got on?” Mona came toward her and pulled at the hem of Rory’s shirt. It was Sarah Price’s old camp shirt, with the cracking silk screen of green trees, and a pair of Vivian’s denim cutoffs, the hems hand-stitched in a rainbow pattern of thread. “And your hair,” Mona said. Rory could see the black beach stone shine to the round of Mona’s cheek now.

  “Yes,” Rory said, still feeling Vivian’s hands weaving the one thin braid down the side of her face, saying, This is better. “This is better,” Rory repeated, touching the strand. “I like it like this.”

  * * *

  JOY HAD GREETED them on the cattle-crossing grate, waving them in like they were the Macy’s Day parade. She had hung an impressive eight-point elk antler on the line of birch-log fencing, but otherwise the barns, the house, the homestead cabin along the river’s bend, all appeared unchanged. It had been twenty years since Gus had visited, twenty-five since he’d worked sheep there. “You are a little worse for the wear,” Joy said, watching him limp around to open up the trailer. Beyond this he was hoping she’d spare him any real mention of the accident. He’d said all that needed to be said on the phone the week before.

  Inside she had stew waiting for them, the table set with mismatched bowls.

  “How far is Adler’s place from here?” Wade asked, poking around his food. He’d been unable to mask his distaste at hearing the meat he’d been enjoying was oxtail.

  “With a trailer it’s a little over an hour. Down 13 and over to 40,” Joy said. She’d gone for a third helping, always whip thin, no matter what she ate.

  “You call that neighbors,” Wade said, turning to Gus, incredulous.

  T
hey were crammed around Joy’s little round table, pressed up against the windowsill in the kitchen. Tomás, who’d spent the drive in the backseat, headphones glued to his ears, was staring out the window watching a grouse hen’s short-burst flight, the grasses parting as she erupted then dropped down again.

  “That is neighbors around here,” Joy said.

  “We’ll be down there first thing in the morning,” Gus said. He was eager to be rid of Wade. Tomás, too, not out of annoyance, but more a need to allay his own guilt. How different this might have been with Rory. Staying home for school, what a load of bullshit.

  Tomás got up and started stacking everyone’s bowls, despite Joy’s miming protests.

  Gus turned to Joy. “If the mare’s ready in the morning, could you make the trip down with us?”

  Wade interrupted, “Whaddya mean, if she’s ready?”

  “Temperature,” Gus said. “If it’s changed.” He’d explained it a thousand times.

  “Not always accurate,” Joy said, her mouth full. “I say we tease her. I’ve got a good old stallion, real gentle, and reliable as the sunrise, always knows which girls are ready.”

  “That’d be fine, I guess.”

  “Tease?” Wade asked. It was almost amusing how green he was.

  Joy wiped at the corners of her mouth. “If he takes an interest in her and she’s amenable to that interest, you know, shows him her backside, then she’s ready to go meet Adler’s boy. If not, we wait.”

  “So, like, tease tease—” Wade said, a hook to his smile.

  “Ain’t much difference between them and us,” Joy said. “She’s interested or she’s not.”

  “But we’ll go down first thing, either way? I am only staying here one night.”

  “Unless you’d prefer three?” Gus said, sharing a look with Joy.