Kept Animals Read online

  On campus, she moved through the halls. She heaped herself into a desk. She watched the teacher, his mouth moving, a fish in his tank. At the bell, maybe a little before or after, she drifted toward her locker. And there was Wade.

  He had one hand in the pocket of his Dickies and his head cocked like a toddler who’d done something wrong. What had happened to his nose?

  Was it Wade she was hungering for? Or had she been bracing for his return? Did it matter? She hadn’t seen Rory in days. But here he was, the game of him. She started to walk the other way, as if she didn’t know him at all. She heard him jogging after her.

  “No, no, no,” he was saying. “You can’t get away from me.” That brass, the audacity of his voice. Mommy would have called it cheek. “I know you missed me,” he said.

  “No,” Vivian said, not turning, but walking toward the library. She wasn’t answering his question so much as stating a general feeling. No. No. No. She wasn’t going to cry anymore.

  He got his hand on her shoulder and turned her around, just outside the library doors. He didn’t pull her in or try to kiss her, but leaned against the wall, as if she had shoved him backward. His eyes, the dark contrast of them above the white bandage, were darting over her face, looking for her betrayals (ha). There she was. She’d felt this before, at the end of long-distance swims, this emptiness, a kind of inner collapsing right as the shore arrives at your fingertips (catch me, please). She could write that down, repeat it later to McLeod (oh, McLeod).

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “You mean my nose?”

  Vivian nodded.

  “You know you look like hell,” he said.

  She pushed him then, her fingers to his sternum, feeling the flex of her arms. Some strength. She turned into the library (fucking asshole).

  She would disappear into this church of books, fall in between the mahogany carrels, and never be found again. How bad did she look? She had changed and for the worse. She’d let everything spiral out of control, telling people she hardly knew things about herself, the very core of her being—ripping it out and handing it over to Rory. And then Rory (who the hell was she?) had left her. It was as alone as she’d ever felt. Standing there, listening to the ramblings of the wife of the man who’d killed her brother. She had had the pleasure of never having to think about her. Or him. Until Rory.

  “Hey, hey. Come on.” Wade again. His voice a breathy whisper. “Don’t run away from me.” There was the faint crack of a book’s spine, someone turning pages on the other side of the carrel. “You don’t look so bad,” he said. He tipped his forehead toward her. Disarming, that’s what he was. She lost some piece of herself every time he touched her.

  “You’re the one with the broken nose,” she said.

  He’d stopped looking at her face. His hands were on her hips, eyes lowered there.

  “How did it happen?” She touched the bandage.

  “This guy. Gus Scott.” He pulled her toward him. “He’s a trainer, from the ranch. Was a trainer there, anyway.” He winked above the bandage.

  “He hit you—” She’d almost said, He hit you, too? She’d almost said, I know who he is. I know, I know, he’s Rory’s stepfather. She’d barely gotten a finger over the leak of it in time.

  “I might have had it coming.” Wade shrugged.

  “He really hit you?” Vivian blurted. A freshman passing at the mouth of the aisle—wearing knee-high socks—stopped and stared at Wade too hard. Vivian’s face burned.

  “Hey, hey. I’m all right.” He swung his hair back from his eyes in that way that he did and the smell of his shampoo reached her. “We’re all right,” he said, smiling. “Me and you, we’re good.” He brought his mouth down to hers, not fully kissing her, but letting his lips linger along hers. “When my dad buys the place, I get to fire the guy myself.” He cupped his hand to her butt and tucked her against his waist. She felt the grommets of his jeans. “I’ll be his boss.”

  “Your dad’s buying Leaning Rock?”

  He looked at her uneasily. What had he heard in her voice (play the tape back, please)?

  “Yeah,” he said. “I thought you’d be into that.”

  “I am,” she said. “I’d like to watch you fire everyone.” That woman Sonja, she had called the ambulance and then she’d gone rigid, judgmental, gathering their glasses, the empty bottles, explaining who she was, but saying in the very next sentence that Vivian should go. No apology. Just protective of Rory. Everyone loved Rory.

  “And you?” Wade asked. “What have you been up to?” Underneath his eyes were two fading blue moons. “Did you stay out of trouble?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” she said, not thinking of Rory, but of how these three words would sound to him (game back on). He put his hands on her arms, slid them to her wrists, and held her against the books. “Not at all,” she repeated.

  “So you missed me then,” he said (so sure).

  She gave him a particular kind of smile, thin and quick. Like the flash just before a star’s collapse (something like that).

  * * *

  MONA DROPPED RORY off at the top of the driveway, and U-turned, saying, “Find a ride home.”

  Rory scanned the parking lot, as usual. Robin’s truck was there, parked over the lines like she’d pulled in in a rush. It was already four o’clock and the late afternoon light was watery gold, the air arid and shifty, eddies of dust stirred up. At night it was hard to sleep. Rory tossed in and out of the same dream, waking less panicked and more itchy and irritated. In the office it was crisp and cool, the air conditioner properly working. The room had been cleaned, too. The competition photos dusted, the floor swept, the skin of dust wiped from the shelves and ribbons. Rory sat down at the desk and put her head back, enjoying the cool air before looking for her list, hoping it would be short.

  “Comfortable?”

  Rory snapped to. “June.” She was standing in the doorway to the back room, drying her hands on a paper towel. “I didn’t see your car,” Rory said, instantly regretting she had.

  “You look for my car,” June said, with a diminutive smile. Her shirt was buttoned up to the top, her Venus necklace hidden. “I drove in with Daddy today.” She brought her hand to her mouth, nibbling at her nails. Rory had never seen her do this before. “I quit smoking,” she said. “Horrible habit for a future doctor, right?”

  “I guess,” Rory said.

  “Daddy’s out walking the property lines with Robin right now. I got impatient, all the waiting for Bella Danvers to catch up. You’d think she was the invalid.”

  “She’s here?” Rory asked.

  “Mm, yeah.” She was thinner, her shoulders blunt within her clothes, her elbows sharper. “I heard you were really helpful with Carlotta the other day. That you stayed with her.”

  “I guess,” Rory said.

  “Well, she’s been moved to hospice, so I guess it wasn’t so helpful, was it?” She was making a joke, Rory sensed that, but even June was unamused. “She had a kidney infection. And her hip was broken.”

  “I heard,” Rory said.

  “Those are not easy things for an already sick woman to heal from. Sonja should’ve been paying more attention. She’s out of a job now.”

  “She was there every day,” Rory said. “What was she supposed to do?”

  “Sonja?” June said, glib. “That’s who you’re worried about? Gus is out of a job, too, you know.” Her nails were chewed to the quick.

  “Gus? What are you talking about?”

  “He broke Wade’s nose. Daddy had to reset it, says he can’t ride for a month.”

  “Wade’s home?”

  June nodded. “Gus hasn’t called you?”

  Rory got up, looking for her list. Robin always left it—a little piece of notebook paper—tossed in the Silver Cup trophy on the corner of the desk. With school back in session, she’d only been giving Rory three or four horses a day, always Mrs. Keating’s geldings, at least. Those horses nee
ded the hills, they needed to run.

  “Jesus,” June said. “You don’t know about Chap either, do you?”

  Rory looked at June. “What about Chap?”

  “It wasn’t so bad. It could’ve been worse, I guess. She went after Cosmo and he spun on her. Same way he did to Journey. A cut over her eye though. She got stitches.”

  There was a catch in Rory’s throat, the snag of a knot. She should have gone. She’d caused this. She had been so selfish to stay.

  Outside, a rush of wind sent the cypress trees along the front ring swaying, nearly bowing. One of Mrs. Keating’s geldings—someone had already gotten him out—went spinning, bucking with excitement, across the turnout corral.

  “Bella’s taking power of attorney,” Rory said.

  “How’d you know?” June said.

  “That’s why your dad’s out there with her. Walking the property lines of the ranch.” There it all was, like a turn in the road coming at her all too fast. “He’s going to buy Leaning Rock, isn’t he? Because Gus laid into Wade?”

  A bead of blood had sprung up at the edge of June’s cuticle and she stopped to look at it before sucking it away. “Actually, you’re close. But that’s not why Daddy is buying the place. It was after Fresno, Daddy told Robin that he’d be interested, that he recognized the investment, the potential of this place. You know the barn in Fernwood has Shannen Doherty boarding her horse there? Well, Robin talked to Bella. And Bella talked to Sonja, just asking her questions. It’s been a long time since Carlotta was right in the head.”

  In the dream that Rory had been having there was always a moment when she was looking at herself in the dark reflection of the glass, her hair wildly undone, and in the soft flesh of her clavicle she would feel a slipping sensation, the meaning of which now seemed so obvious: It was everything that held her together coming undone. She brought her hand to her throat, feeling that blithe tug—as easy as a shoelace drawn clear from its hole. The Santa Anas, they say, can make you feel as if you’ve been skinned, every inch of you a raw nerve ending. Gus, she thought. Wade. Vivian. Her mare. The edges of her vision were pricked with light.

  “Rory?” June asked. “Are you going to faint?”

  June had her hand on Rory’s knee. She’d sat her down on the couch and now she was crouching in front of her.

  “Are you okay? Should I get someone?”

  “No,” Rory said.

  “I’m sorry,” June said. Her familiar smells: the White Musk, the weed. “I’m sorry I was the one to tell you. Shit—” She was looking out the window.

  Robin and Preston Fisk were outside now, looking at Mrs. Keating’s gelding in the turnout. Preston had his suit jacket hanging from one finger, his shirtsleeves rolled up beyond his melon-size forearms, his foot up on the railing as if posing for an ad. A disgusting display of health and grooming. Robin pointed toward Leaning Rock, then turned to the hillside behind the office, beyond Sonja and Jorge’s house. A fresh dust cloud whirled, and they shielded themselves.

  Another woman was coming up the driveway in a sleeveless blouse and an ill-fitted skirt that was blustering about her legs, her arms thick and soft as custard. Bella Danvers. A watercolor version of Carlotta, in wide, washed-out strokes. Her hair was gray and unkempt, the look of someone assigned to worry over things that might never happen.

  And then all three of them were coming into the office and June was up and bouncing on the heels of her boots. “Well, Daddy? What did you think?”

  Rory stood. Preston’s mouth was the same crude shape as Wade’s, and Rory knew, feeling his aloofness, his icy formality, that he hadn’t bothered to touch the horses.

  “Rory,” Robin said, sidetracked by her being there.

  “I came for my list,” Rory said.

  Bella came in and sat, disappearing into a corner of the old leather couch.

  “Bella,” June said, “this is Rory. My friend that waited with your mother.” Her voice an upticked question, though there wasn’t one.

  My friend. Rory looked at Preston. He was rearranging himself to accommodate June’s proximity, looking everywhere but at her.

  Bella lifted her hand from her lap in a motion that registered more annoyance than thanks. Of course she wasn’t grateful. Gus had always said she would sell the ranch off as soon as she inherited it.

  “We’ll have to redo the office, won’t we?” Preston had his eyes on the ceiling fan. “Maybe tear it all down.”

  “Be my guest,” Bella grumbled.

  “Rory, I’m sorry,” Robin said. “We actually have some paperwork ahead of us here, if you don’t mind?”

  She was being excused. “But—is there a list for me?”

  “Well, no,” Robin said. “I guess—not today. But there’s plenty of tack to clean.”

  “Awful,” Bella Danvers said. “This wind.”

  * * *

  THE MARE WAS back at Joy’s. Gus wasn’t sure when she’d returned. That morning or maybe the morning before. Who fucking knew anymore?

  From where he was lying on the couch, he could see her in the pasture. The bandage over her eye was gone. He remembered Joy saying something about her having been hard to load. He saw Adler’s men coming at her with a whip, finding a new use for their hobbling straps.

  He smelled coffee and when he rolled over, Joy was setting a mug down on the table. “It’s three o’clock,” she said. “You’re going to get up and help me feed.”

  She gave him a look, then went back to the kitchen, talking over her shoulder. She’d been doing this all week, talking, almost constantly, and he hadn’t heard a word. Like the river over rocks, a near-persistent gurgling.

  “I gave her supplements again and the vet is coming to check her sutures day after tomorrow. Mighty generous of him,” Joy said. There was real water running. In the sink, he realized. She shut it off. “Stay another week and we could check her here, Gus.”

  “I’m not staying,” he said. Another week? It was sixteen days from cover to ultrasound before you could know. He’d been sleeping too much. “And you shouldn’t be wasting supplements. Won’t be a foal.”

  “You don’t know that,” Joy said.

  “Season’s wrong. You said it yourself.” He’d daydreamed up this scenario where back in the canyon, everybody was standing outside her stall, the vet inside with her would turn to Gus so he could be the one who broke the news, who saw their faces, the cheers going up. He’d pictured cheering. His hand was shaking; his knuckles still smarted. If he could change anything, he’d only change the fact that no one had hit him back. “This is just coffee,” he said. No whiskey yet. This was the twinge behind his eyes. He hadn’t had a drink.

  “Nope,” Joy said. “And you’re not going to. Not today, sir.”

  He’d said all of that out loud. Christ.

  A memory of the previous night: He’d been talking about Mona, talking, and trying to chew a sandwich at the same time. Or maybe he’d been crying, a mouth full of phlegm. His face was still puffy.

  “He should’ve hit me back!”

  “Agreed,” Joy said. “But he didn’t, so now you’re the fool.”

  He’d told Joy about Hawkeye. He remembered that now. And he’d told her he’d stay sober today. He’d fallen into a hole, and holes were dark and narrow and hard to crawl out of; some backsliding was understandable, maybe even impossible to avoid.

  Joy dropped a dish, cursing as it hit and shattered in the sink.

  “You a’ right?” Gus asked.

  “Yeah,” Joy said, looking at her palm. “I’m fine.”

  She grabbed a rag and wrapped it around her hand.

  “Mare looks better,” he said, feeling generous, like this balanced out her hand, maybe.

  Joy went to a kitchen chair and sat down backward, propping her arm on the back rail. He felt her fixing to talk to him, that she had something to say and she was going to be right, whatever it was. A way to move on with his life, advice on how to be a better man. She was a lonely, two-b
it horse breeder, making three bills per foal—four if she got a sucker—and now she was gonna tell him how to run his life and she was gonna be right.

  “I got cancer, Gus.”

  He put the mug of coffee down. It was as if a rat had run right across the floor, sending his thoughts scuttling after it.

  “Ain’t you gonna say nothing?”

  “That would be the same as not talking, so—”

  “Asshole,” Joy said, standing back up. “I got a year. That’s what they tell me.”

  “Doctors out here don’t know shit,” Gus said, feeling sure about this.

  “I went into Cheyenne, Gus. I got a year, I told you. Maybe two, with the drugs.” She unwrapped her hand and tossed the rag into the kitchen, just missing the counter. “It’s in my ovaries. Never used the damn things and they got mad, I guess. Spread it around to the rest of me. They say that’s what has me feeling so tired now. That I gotta start living like I mean to live. No more chew. Eatin’ right. I hate eatin’ right.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  She looked at him with an ache in her eyes. Jesus fuck. “Don’t do that, Joy. I just, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I wanted you to know. That’s all. I’m not asking you to stay. I’ve been doing this on my own plenty long. It’s just that—”

  “What?” She’d saved him. That was the truth of it. When they were kids. She used to get in between him and their father, hurry him into her closet, and then act like he wasn’t there when their old man came in asking, Where is that little sissy? He’d watch her, from behind the slatted doors, how she stared their father down. She was a killer in a dress, playing with dolls on the floor, and he could see Dad registering that she was bigger than him. Lionhearted. And now she was fucking dying.

  “Do you want me here?” He watched her pull a tin of tobacco from her pocket and thwack it against her palm. “Do you want me to stay?”