Kept Animals Page 21

  “Funny,” Wade said. “I thought you’d be happy. June and I’ve been riding there our entire lives. Place has to go to someone either way. Might as well be someone you like, right?”

  Gus closed his eyes.

  “I mean, any other buyer would be twice as likely to let you go.”

  “Watch yourself, young man,” Joy said.

  The vet took his bifocals off, letting them drop on their own beaded chain. “Yep, I’ve seen better days in the shed.” He was shaking an enormous pill bottle. “In a bran mash,” he said. “For discomfort. Shouldn’t affect her odds.”

  “Thank you,” Joy said.

  “Oh, I’ll be sending a bill,” the vet said, opening the stall door. He looked back at the mare. “Keep an eye on her when she goes to stand. Leave her room.” The mare groaned.

  Adler was coming up now, Wade laying his arm onto Adler’s shoulder. Adler gave Gus an apologetic smile and turned to Wade. “Everything all right here?”

  Whatever fortitude Gus had mustered was draining from him like sand. A red-hot neediness filling in the empty spaces. “All right, then,” he said. The door stood open between him and Wade. The mare blew a blustery breath.

  “It’s gonna be fine,” Wade said, sweeping his hand as if at a fly.

  “She’s waking up,” Adler said.

  The mare was taking to her feet, pulling herself up behind him. He heard Joy say, “Gussy,” but he was looking at Wade.

  “See there,” Wade said. “No harm done. She’s good as new.”

  And then Gus said, “Wade,” so he’d be facing him, so he’d see it coming, clean and straight: the bridge of Gus’s fist meeting the bridge of his nose, the bone breaking like clay, the blood coming like water.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T A choice so much as a cellular dictation, to go up the hill to Carlotta. She was like a grandmother, or what Rory imagined a grandmother could be. It wasn’t until Rory had reached the top and saw the front door slapping back and forth on the wind that she was filled with trepidation. But she had left Vivian below, with Sonja. Stepping inside seemed easier suddenly.

  Carlotta was in the dining room, on the floor, her leg turned oddly out, eyelids half-drawn, the rug around her darkened, the stench of urine woven into the rotting milk and mothball smells that had come to haunt the house in the last few years. “Carlotta? It’s Rory.” No response. The room was lit only by the chandelier casting a web of light around the table, leaving the corners of the room dark. Rory felt as if something or someone were watching her from there. “Can you hear me? We’re getting help.” As soon as she said this, she hoped it was true. Surely one of them had called for an ambulance, however baffled they’d been by the other one being there; Sonja’s taking in the emptied bottle of vodka, the wine, too. The cigarettes on the counter. Rory felt like such a child. Maybe Sonja wouldn’t say how she knew who Vivian was, maybe—

  Was Carlotta even breathing?

  Rory lowered her palm in front of Carlotta’s mouth, finding a subtle but steady breath. “Help is coming,” Rory said, the light of the chandelier breaking into prisms. She was crying for Carlotta, but also for Vivian, for that story, and for herself. Here was Carlotta, the woman who had hugged her as a little girl, and—was she dying? Was this what the end of a life looked like? She wanted to move her, to bring her to dry carpet. She put her hand to Carlotta’s arm, but it was so cold and so heavy. And what if she hurt her? “They’re coming,” she exhaled. “Someone is coming. I can hear sirens.” She let the lie of this briefly pad her from the truth, that she didn’t know what was going to happen next.

  Just then a draft of wind came through the house, sending papers from the dining table scattering to the floor. Rory wiped her face dry. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light and she saw then what she had felt watching her: The curio cabinets that had always lined the walls of this room were no longer full of only trophies and photographs, but now held animals. The animals that Gus had boxed up all those years ago. The taxidermied raccoon, the crow, the owl—she had wanted to keep the owl, as well, but she had realized the bird was too big to go unnoticed, how disgusted Mona would be. Gus. She felt a sudden duty to him. She started gathering the papers that had fallen, as if more order, tidiness, would help keep Carlotta alive. In the dim light, on these papers, she saw Carlotta’s full name and that of her daughter and the words power of attorney shall be granted …

  Carlotta’s spine was visible beneath her shirt, a string of pearls lifting and falling. “Do you want me to keep talking?” Rory asked, her voice low. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right here.”

  Her camera was still strapped to her back. She’d grown so used to having it there; putting her hands on it again now calmed her. Though Foster, looking at her negatives, had not been encouraging: lacking technical precision, overly precise in composition. She’d shown him Gus with Chap, the two of them a centaur. Cute, he’d said. Then the few she could show of Vivian, the more abstract: the curve of her shoulder framing the pool in the background, her feet dangling from the end of the lounge chair. Safe, he’d said. Kind of commercial. In other words, bullshit.

  Carlotta did not register the first click of Rory’s shutter. Or the next. The wind through the trees was so loud, a disarming sound. But by the fifth frame, the sirens had grown near and Rory felt her purpose in taking these photographs solidifying. How do you feel in the world, Rory Ramos? Foster had asked. Show me.

  She wasn’t taking pictures of Carlotta, but of the empty space around her, her hand at the edge of the frame, the netting of light across the chairs, pictures of the room itself, a room that seemed full of morbid anticipation and she was taking pictures as objection, firing against the unspoken assumption that this was all going to end horribly wrong.

  LITTLE SNAKE, WYOMING JUNE 9, 2015

  “DID YOU LOVE her?” I asked Vivian Price.

  “That was twenty-two plus years ago,” she said. We had only been on the phone for a short time, but there was an urgency to our conversation. Like one of Mama’s photographs: the two strangers running toward one another after a blast. “I was just a kid. I wasn’t capable of love.” She laughs, melancholy. “Not like that. Certainly didn’t love myself.”

  “She loved you,” I said.

  “Did she?”

  She doubts this, even now, coming from the girl who bears her dead brother’s name.

  * * *

  There is a picture of me as a baby, framed, on the living room wall. I am sitting on the floor in Grandad’s old cowboy hat. My eyes are concealed beneath the brim, but my smile is obvious. Mama is sitting to one side of me and on the other side is Vivian. I had not recognized her before, had apparently never thought to ask who she was, just someone in a four-by-five in the corner, but now I know from going through Mama’s old negatives that Vivian has always been here, in our living room.

  “She was only here for a few months,” Grandad said. “She came for your birth and she stayed for a stretch then.”

  Given everything I’ve heard, I assumed something must have pulled Vivian’s attention elsewhere.

  “Are there others?” I asked. “Other pictures from then?”

  Grandad shook his head. “I took that one.”

  “But Mama took others, didn’t she? When I was a baby?”

  “After the fire, she didn’t pick up a camera for a long time. Not until you were four or five, I think.”

  In the framed photograph on our wall, Vivian’s attention is on my smile, her pleasure clear. But Mama’s eyes are on Vivian, unsmiling, unmoved, her expression one of defeat.

  “Your mama asked her to go,” Grandad said, touching the picture so it hung straight.

  “Mama asked her to leave? But—wasn’t Mama in love with her?”

  “Being in love with somebody doesn’t mean you can trust ’em.”

  * * *

  “One day you have a mother,” Vivian said on the phone. “And the next you do not. I should know.” I could hear the
bitter way she held her mouth.

  “Where is your mother now?” I asked.

  There was a long pause. Ice slid the length of her glass, rattled against her teeth. “She lives in New Hampshire. She bought this old house there, very quaint. She lives with a nobody, some guy who runs a garden nursery, but she refuses to divorce Everett. She’s gone but won’t go away. Her retribution, I guess. He lives in Italy with this French actress. A half-decent one at least.”

  I was picturing Vivian, alone in her apartment in New York, sitting in an overstuffed chair, still slender, but hunched from years of self-abuses, flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine that deemed her irrelevant long ago. I know from Gus that Sarah Price called Vivian, but only after the fire, wanting to know if the house had burned down—it hadn’t. Vivian retrieved the incoming number from the operator. New Hampshire, and not far from where her mother had gone to boarding school. Vivian lived with her a little while, after staying here with us. “You and your mother,” I asked. “You aren’t in touch?”

  “She left me,” Vivian said. “She walked away.”

  Talking to Vivian, I realized how endlessly forgiving Mama was, how she never believed one bad decision, even five, was all a person was. With everything she witnessed, she still believed people are inherently good.

  I watched the films that Vivian went on to act in, and there were moments when I saw the same raw beauty Mama captured in her photographs, but I’d hoped to like her more.

  “I’m sorry,” Vivian said. “About your mom. I’m sorry it happened how it did.”

  “Were you there?” I asked her then. I had been waiting for an opening to ask what Grandad couldn’t answer. “When the fire started? Were you there, at the ranch with her?”

  Whenever I ask Grandad how the fire started, he gets this look on his face, like I slapped him gently, like he isn’t surprised so much as embarrassed for us both. Like I had something to do with it. So I tried this out on Vivian. “My grandad told me you had something to do with it.”

  She laughed. “I had everything to do with it, didn’t I? Go on,” she said. “Ask away, Charlie. I’m the one who can answer your questions. Right up until I stole Wade’s car, anyway.”

  TOPANGA CANYON, CALIFORNIA LATE OCTOBER 1993

  INDIAN SUMMER HAD arrived and the windows in Foster’s classroom were so high up they required a pole to open, a pole that had gone missing. Not that there was any sign of a breeze. This was the stillness that preceded the Santa Ana winds.

  Foster kept grinding his knuckles against his temples as the slides rotated: Arbus, Shore, Cartier-Bresson. They were studying portraiture. Mary Ellen Mark.

  Waving the class into the darkroom, Foster announced, as he always did, the next week’s assignment, “a portrait of someone who’s not your best damn friend. Somebody you have to do a little work to put at ease.” Rory thought of Gus, who had still not called. A portrait of Robin, maybe?

  In the red-lit room, beneath her enlarger, Rory lined her negatives up on the photo paper, making a proof sheet of the last roll she’d shot: Vivian in her kitchen, posing, tears on her face, then the dining room of Carlotta’s house; the progression of that night made plain, right up until the ambulance arrived. Vivian had already left by then. The paramedics said only one person could go to the hospital with Carlotta and Sonja had gotten in. Later, Vivian didn’t answer the phone. And hadn’t since. When Rory asked Sonja what had happened, she kept walking, only shaking her head, saying, “That girl can’t be your friend.”

  Rory moved her proof from the developer to the stop bath.

  Instead of his usual hands-behind-his-back pacing, Foster pulled up a stool in the corner nearest the curtained door, fanning himself with a discarded print. Rory looked at him and he said, “Fighting a headache.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  Foster shook her off. “Leonard,” he said. “Go find me a fan.”

  Pete Leonard drooped, but went off to do it.

  Rory made a series of proof sheets, feeling safe enough with nosy Pete Leonard gone. And the proofs were all small enough that it would take looking through a magnifier to know it was Vivian Price.

  “A print of your self-portrait today, Ramos?” Foster said.

  “Right,” Rory said. He’d let her into the darkroom because she was so behind, but then she hadn’t printed that very first assignment, now weeks late. She held her negatives up to the red bulb. One of these strips held the pictures she’d been shooting in the mirror the night Vivian had walked in. There. Found. She had time to print this and another, from Carlotta’s dining room: the rug, its gradation of stains, bisected by Carlotta’s awkwardly twisted leg—her hip had been broken.

  Rory was watching her self-portrait materialize in the developer when Leonard returned with what he clearly hoped would be an enthusiastically received table fan. But Foster only said, “Put it there,” indicating the floor. He was standing next to Rory, inspecting her process.

  “Take it out now,” he said, and she lifted the paper with the tongs and dropped it into the fix. “I like this,” Foster said, following its progress to the stop bath. “I like it very much.”

  “How so?” Leonard said, leaning in. “It’s blurry,” he said, challenging their teacher. “There’s nothing in focus.”

  “Except the bird,” Foster said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, then he lifted his head to the room. “Okay. I heard the bell.”

  “We have twenty more minutes,” Leonard whined. “I brought the fan.”

  “Ring-ring-ring,” Foster said. “Yep. That’s the bell. Class is dismissed. Leonard. Go.”

  Everyone stowed their materials and started out, the narrowness of the room herding them single file, then one by one, through the velvet curtains to the door.

  Rory was dawdling, wanting more time, one more print. She was looking at the blur of her own face, wanting to print the images that she’d shot just before, too. Thinking about sequencing, images as stories.

  “Ms. Ramos,” Foster said.

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” she said, gathering her things, the filters, the paper. She wanted to offer to close up.

  “It’s fine if you’d like to stay,” Foster said, without her having to ask. “If you’ve got more like that one, I’d like to see them. I’d like you to get caught up.”

  “I hadn’t realized how far behind I was.” She was speaking by rote, a sentence she’d said a dozen times to a half dozen teachers already.

  “Let’s have a look at these proofs that you’re so secretive about.” He was already pulling them from the drying line. She’d intentionally hung them backward, but he’d been watching.

  “You’ve shot so many rolls of film,” he said. And all of them, every single strip, held images of Vivian. “Ms. Ramos,” he said.

  She was woozy; the chemicals had gotten to her, the possibility of him recognizing Vivian. “Yeah?”

  “Those negatives that you showed me last week, I’m not sure I fully appreciated them.”

  “How so?” Rory said.

  “I mean, here, seeing them, like this.” His expression shifted. “Are these all the same girl?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess.” She wasn’t making any sense.

  “Yes. She’s quite comfortable with you, isn’t she?”

  Of course. Of course, he didn’t recognize Vivian. He didn’t know who she was. He cared about the larger world, about the variations of light, about how to make art. Rory envied him.

  “Is she a model? I ask because, well, she’s so posed in these here.” He pointed at a series from Vivian’s house, a roll they’d shot in the garden. “Are you directing her?”

  Rory shook her head. “She’s, yes, I think she’s modeled some.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “But then there are these …” He was looking at the images from inside the kitchen. Vivian in the crochet blanket, her red-rimmed eyes. “Much more vulnerable,” he said. He wiped a bead of sweat from his temple. He
had narrow-set eyes and thin lips that he covered with his palm when he was thinking, his forehead always furrowed. A face that had spent decades pressed up against a viewfinder, trying to make sense of the world.

  “What is it?” Rory asked. She was halfway worried he’d understood how intimately she and Vivian knew one another, why she’d gotten the kinds of images she had.

  “I can’t teach this,” he said, running his eyes back over the tiny boxes of her images. The exposures, she’d nailed nearly all of them. Was that what was impressing him? She had an urge to rip them from his hands, to go back to doing this on her own, in secrecy, but first she wanted to hear why they were good. “Having an eye—that expression we’re always leaning on,” he said. “It’s the difference between taking pictures and being a photographer.”

  When he looked at her again, she felt a magnetic drawing together inside of herself, an annealing of who she was, or who she wanted to be. “And … ?” she asked.

  Foster smiled. “And now you need to learn to trust it.”

  * * *

  CARMEN TRIED TO insist on driving Vivian to school, but Vivian dangled the keys to the BMW in front of her, promising that she wouldn’t go anywhere but school, if for no other reason than she pitied Carmen, her having to play parent like this.

  “They’ll fire me, Ms. Vivian.”

  “The irony,” Vivian said. She’d told Carmen not to call her Ms. Vivian. “You’re my auntie, Carmen. Mi tía. Please stop.”

  “Claro, Ms. Vivian.”

  Vivian pulled onto PCH. She was plagued by a desire she could not name. She turned on the radio, trying to distract herself with the news—Orange County skinhead pleads guilty to plot against synagogues, Russian cosmonaut makes ninth space walk—but it all spun off without reaching her. How had she become this way? Her inner monologue … (gone).

  The beach was empty and still, the line between the water and the slate gray sky sharp as a knife’s edge. Fire weather. That’s what this was. She drove on to school, but only because she was incapable of thinking beyond Carmen’s direction.