Kept Animals Read online

  * * *

  GUS WAS ONE blind curve from passing the Price family gates. His mind skidded from the possibility of a deer jumping out onto the road to the way Mona had taken to sleeping, curled up and facing him with her hands balled to fists.

  The car lights behind him were closing in again. He was aware of the enormous concrete wall of the Price estate, of the impossibility of an animal’s dash from behind that eyesore, but then he blinked and there was a boy.

  A coppery glint. Then clearly, a boy. In the road.

  His body as white and haloed as the moon in fog.

  Gus hit the brake. And turned the wheel. He turned the wheel then hit the brake. His high beams lanced a rock wall, a tree trunk. The boy’s red hair.

  He would remember the boy’s red hair as being near enough to touch. If he just reached out his open window, he could have touched him. It was like a roller coaster he’d once ridden, a thing that hurtled people toward one another and then, just as quickly, whipped them away from one another again.

  The truck spun and spun, dancing toward a reinforced wall, and then the hood buckled in a metallic roar. Gus was against the wheel, wedged so deeply that he could not see the maroon Honda Civic that had been following him. Or how it had to swerve to avoid the back of his wrecked truck, but he could hear its tires, their shrieking attempt to stop. And the impact. The world was an echo of that impact, followed by a salvo of shattering glass echoing off the canyon walls, before the hiss of escaping air began—a tire, a radiator hose—followed by a woman screaming. Gus’s head dropped to the wheel. He was unaware of the multitude of fractures in his left leg, unaware that the boy he had turned to avoid, whose hair he might have touched, was Charles Leon Price, nineteen months old, or that it was Jorge Flores in the maroon Honda Civic. Jorge, who had been following him, hoping to see his boss—mi amigo, he had said—safely home, only to be the one who struck and killed the boy. The boy who, two minutes earlier, had gotten away from Sarah Price, just long enough for him to find his way out the front door and through the half-open gates while she ran to answer a phone that wasn’t ringing.

  LITTLE SNAKE, WYOMING MAY 3, 2015

  MOST OF THE roads around here run straight and flat, no blind spots to speak of, with everything there is to see visible from a half mile out. But when you turn off I-70 and head up Savery North, our place briefly appears as if pressed right up against Battle Mountain; a trick of the eye, a deceitful compression of distance that reveals itself as soon as the pavement stops and you head up our dirt road. The mountain falls away and the house, the two barns, the old homestead cabin, all rise up against the backdrop of the foothills, swelling and spreading as if the land beneath them were taking a big deep breath. That’s how Mama describes it, anyway, how it looks to her when she’s coming home; returned to us worn out from wherever she’s been, but never wanting any help with her bags, each one weighed down with her beloved cameras.

  For me the thing most worth noticing about our acreage in the Little Snake River Valley isn’t the trickling clear water of the creek to our west or the blooms of lupine that paint the foothills purple all spring, but rather a fact, a fact that—without the balsa wood sign I hand-carved as a twelve-year-old girl—could easily go unnoticed.

  My sign sits at the peak of the foothill to our east, and it reads,

  Put one foot to the west

  and one foot to the east

  and

  you will be a bridge over

  the Great Continental Divide

  I remember, back when I staked that sign, I talked my grandad Gus into coming up the hill to see it and he stood there, rubbing at his bad leg, then snorted, “You will be a bridge? Could’ve just called it what it is. Saved yourself some injuries there.” The two of us looked at my bandaged hand. That sign had taken me a year of afternoons and nearly as many bloodied fingers—but I hadn’t taken the project on as an easy thing to do so much as something I could do on my own.

  It was his sister, my great-aunt Joy, who first told me about the Continental Divide and how it touched the edge of our backyard. And she was the only one that I took up there to see it who followed the sign’s instructions to the letter, putting one foot left, her other wide to the right. She set her hands on her hips then, her headscarf snapping in the breeze, her eyes mischievous, but her voice deadly serious. “It’s right here, Charlie, that a girl can take a piss in two oceans at once.”

  Aunt Joy gave me the biggest laughs I ever knew, but she also said it wasn’t her place to answer my questions. Everybody says I was born asking questions. Chatty Charlie, Grandad called me.

  School was a thirty-minute bus ride into Baggs (population 423), but by the sixth grade not a single teacher had thought to mention the Continental Divide, so what else wasn’t I being told? I’d been particularly displeased with school that year. Day one, we’d been assigned a family tree and there was nobody in my house who could help make mine look like anything but a stick. Everyone else had branches like a cottonwood, twiggy with lines back to the earliest homesteaders, the Ute, or the Arapaho, and everyone—everyone except me, that is—turned out to be a fifth fucking cousin to Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid.

  In all my life, I’d never lived anywhere else, had hardly ever been anywhere else, but that year I understood I was an outsider.

  Maybe twelve’s just a bad year as years go. But by the time school let out, I had shot up three inches, and when Mama came home she was looking up at me like I was someone she hadn’t been expecting. I started slouching, trying to hide my changing chest—its resemblance to the teats of our collie was a daily horror to me. And the worst wasn’t even the bleeding, when it began. It was my voice—the new rumble of it in my throat, the way it came out silly from my mouth. I didn’t want to know the woman it was inviting in.

  * * *

  We run a breeding barn of seven broodmares, one stallion, and a goat we keep as a comfort animal for the mares when they’re in labor. When a broodmare gives birth to a foal, we don’t say that foal was born, we say it was thrown. Four to six months after a broodmare throws that foal, we wean it from her milk, making it reliant on us, on the human hand, for feed, and when that trust is well established, when that foal’s a yearling, we break it in, making it an animal in our service. I suppose the year I turned twelve was the year I was broken in. I stopped talking so damn much and I gave in to what this ranch needed of me. I rose early and worked late, completing any and all manual labor without complaint, listening more than whistling—that was how Aunt Joy put it. I wanted to be of use, to her especially, but I also hoped the work would keep me lean, even sinewy, like she’d always been. I didn’t know then that we weren’t blood. I wouldn’t know that until after she was dead and gone.

  I forked stalls in the morning, helped with the feed before feeding myself. And after school, I brought the cattle in from the hills, brushed out the pastured mares. I watched and learned whenever Joy was working with a foal. What time remained, I worked on my balsa wood sign, sitting on the porch of the old homestead cabin, only moving inside when the first frost came. Inside, the sound of my knife scoring that wood mixed with the patter of mice in the rafters, their footpaths a lacework above me, the musk of their feces and Mama’s old chemicals for film developing mixing in the air. Aunt Joy would come and look in on me, the same way she’d checked on the foals at night, making sure a wilier animal hadn’t come through hungry.

  I remember missing Mama more that year than I have any other.

  * * *

  That was ten years ago. I’m no kid anymore. And Mama still travels more often than she is home.

  “What’re you writing there?” Grandad asked me earlier, standing in the doorway to my room. He’s taken to seeking me out. Used to be he thought I talked too much and now he chides me for keeping to myself.

  “I’m writing to Mama,” I told him.

  “It’s been too long,” he said. He meant since we’ve heard from her. Her birthday, that was the last
time we got a call through.

  Some days he asks me to check the papers, like Aunt Joy checking on the foals. But we both know that there’d be a call to us before it ever hit the AP. Least that’s what we’ve heard. Nothing I want to think about.

  “Make sure you tell her about Chap,” Grandad said, putting a hand to my windowsill to look onto the back pasture, out to where we keep Mama’s mare. The goat is with her now, though she hasn’t thrown a foal in years.

  “I already did,” I said, as if I really were writing to Mama, as if that weren’t a lie.

  “Someday,” Grandad said, “you’ll get to travel, too.”

  I licked the tip of my pencil. “Do tell! Where is it you think I ought to go?”

  Grandad made a gesture toward my weatherworn sign, as if I only needed to walk up and over the Great Divide to be ushered like the rain into a different set of tributaries, to a new ocean, another life. But he didn’t say that. He just made the gesture.

  Aunt Joy died three years after we staked that sign, living a dozen years longer than any of the cancer doctors said she would, being the best kind of stubborn. When she died, that was when I knew what it was to really miss somebody, to know they’d never be home again. Mama will be home soon enough, then gone again; more apparition than mother. And Grandad knows as well as I do that even if I wanted to leave, even if I had somewhere to go, I can’t. Maybe he could take care of himself, fry his own eggs and wrestle his laundry into the machine, but there are fifteen other heartbeats on this ranch, all relying on me for their feed and clean stalls. With my mother away, I am the only able-bodied person here. So here is where I am for as long as there are places in the world that require my mother’s attention.

  In all her years of leaving, I have never asked if I could go with her. Not once. And not because I knew she would say no, or because I’d seen the photographs of where she’s been, but because long ago I recognized the look that she comes home with. It’s the same look a horse has after it’s been spooked, eyes alive to the peripheries, to what hides in the shadows, the ghosts beyond my view.

  “I’m fine right here,” I told Grandad. “Sometimes it’s best to keep to what you already know.”

  TOPANGA CANYON, CALIFORNIA EARLY AUGUST 1993

  IT HAD TAKEN two weeks for all of them to go, the photographers and the newscasters with their microphones and lights; no longer waiting outside the house, no longer feigning a respectful distance while trampling the flowers left at the roadside. Vivian missed the cameramen (and their fucking apathy) least of all. They’d been beastly shouldered men, hoisting their equipment with callused hands. Vivian had spit on one of them and all the others had scrambled to turn their cameras on, too late (ha, ha). She’d swung her hair back, put a solemn smile on her face, and escaped being that night’s news clip, to be recycled on the morning shows, a segment loosely structured on Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief … denial, anger (cue the spitting Price girl), bargaining, depression. Stage: a neat little word. But there had been no denial (how could there be?), and anger wasn’t right (connoting a logical frustration), or bargaining (for her baby brother?). Charlie, Charles. Vivian had held him the day he was born, and when Mommy had to be whisked away into emergency surgery (hemorrhaging), they had let Vivian keep Charlie, with Carmen beside her in the room, a nurse yelling back, “We’re still trying to get ahold of your father.” Ha; Daddy had been gone the day Charlie was born and the day he died. It was rage. Yes, rage! That was all there was: unwieldy, roving, and thick-as-tar rage, seeping into the cracks of anything else she felt or pretended to feel. Since Daddy had come home there was a whole lot of pretending going on. And a fair amount of dipping into his Klonopin prescription.

  Today, for instance.

  They’d just gotten back to the house after Charlie’s much-delayed funeral, and Vivian was lying on the settee, replaying the brief service, still in the dress that Mommy had deemed too sheer—her sole remark to any of them the entire day. Carmen had cried the loudest, but she was the least medicated of them all. Vivian had yet to see Daddy cry, even once.

  “You said I could grow it! You said, reinvent yourself!” Daddy was yelling into the phone, yelling at Bobby Montana, his agent, and rubbing at his offending beard. He’d been growing it since he got home, despite the heat.

  After the accident, it had taken Daddy three whole days to get on a plane to LAX and come home, and that was only after Vivian told him about hocking that loogie at the union grunt, narrowly missing being the human-interest story for Connie Chung. Daddy loathed bad PR more than bad reviews. In all fairness, he had tried to bring Vivian to him, sending a limousine and a first-class ticket, arranging for a PA to pick her up at Pearson International. But Vivian had refused the limousine, refused to pull herself up off of Charlie’s bedroom floor. So Daddy lingered in Toronto for another sixty-eight hours, as if not showing up to the set of his own life would halt production, stop the dead son story line. Somehow Bobby had kept this episode to a minimum in the tabloids, demanding the family’s grieving process be respected (tear-free absence included).

  Daddy was pacing a groove into the living room carpet, listening to Bobby now. Then exclaiming, “Because I like vodka, that’s why.”

  The service had been small, intentionally, with enough security to shoo away the few photographers that showed up, but now that she thought about it, Vivian had felt the eye of a camera lens days before, in the parking lot of the Trancas Market in Malibu, just up the road from the loony bin where Daddy had sent Mommy (“It’s a recovery center!” he kept saying). There was a certain sensation to having your picture taken, the bloodletting warmth of a leech on your skin. But she’d let her guard down; they both had. Daddy forgoing a bag in the store, carrying the bottle of vodka out, tucked under his arm. It was true what they said about Daddy, that looking like Gregory Peck almost made up for his lack of complexity (on-screen, anyway).

  “Jesus Christ,” Everett said. “The cover?” He sat down on the end of the settee, ignoring Vivian’s outstretched feet. “Star? Star magazine? Was it a slow day in the Menendez trial?” He started picking at the cardboard Carmen had duct-taped over the ragged edges of glass that remained in the sliding door.

  The irony was that they’d delayed the funeral long enough to let Mommy’s injuries heal, knowing that the bandaging of her hand and wrist would be too open to tabloid conjecture (god forbid it be correct), but now they had an image of Daddy looking like a lush, and so near the upscale sanatorium where Sarah Price was known to be convalescing.

  Vivian pictured it: the two of them, Daddy a stride behind her, grappling with the change he’d just been handed, trying to push his sunglasses back up his nose with the hand of the arm awkwardly cradling the vodka. Reinvent yourself ! Bobby had said this when he visited, said it to both of them and then turned to Vivian and cupped her face in his hands and told her, “From great tragedy, springs great talent!” Followed by his hot breath leaning in, “I could have work for you tomorrow, say the word.” Her response had been laughter, a wild, barking laugher. Daddy had offered her her first sedative then.

  “Can you believe this?” Daddy had his hand over the receiver, talking to Carmen, who had come into the room to say she was making dinner early. “What are we having?”

  “Spaghetti,” Carmen said, no longer asking what he wanted, but declaring (amen).

  “She was fine,” Daddy said, talking into the phone again, talking about Mommy, clearly. “No, no. I’m not saying that. Just—just that she held up.”

  The doorbell chimed and a pot clattered to the floor, water sloshing. Carmen had jumped at the sound of that particular chime, as it meant someone had made it past the gates (how, exactly?). “You okay?” Vivian called to her.

  “Sí,” Carmen lied. “It’s okay.”

  Again, the chime. Of course Daddy had left the gates open when they drove back in, his new MO of carelessness. “You left the gates open?” Vivian hissed.

  But Daddy was listening intent
ly to Bobby, his captain through this newest of PR storms.

  Carmen had gone to the door—not opening it but asking what it was they wanted.

  Vivian was suddenly very tired, lying back on the stupidly hard settee. She braided her hands atop her chest and closed her eyes. It was a memory of Charlie—they took over like this, holding her in their grip. He was in the garden, running from her, his arms waving, his eyes wet with tears of laughter.

  “Señor Price.” Carmen was standing on the top step of the sunken living room.

  “No, no. I’ve got to go, Bobby,” Everett was saying into the phone. “I know we’ll get through it. Yes, of course, it could be worse. Thanks a million, Bobby.”

  “He says it’s about the pool, Señor Price,” Carmen said, holding her hands in front of her, one tucked into the other, like little spoons. Vivian loved her for tolerating them.

  Daddy clicked the cordless off and threw it onto the marble-topped coffee table. As it hit, the back of the phone broke off, the plastic splintering, and the battery dropped to the floor.