Kept Animals Read online

  “Fuck me,” Everett said under his breath, leaving the pieces, and going for the door.

  Mommy’s bloodied hand was the reason Vivian had dialed 911 that night, not yet knowing about her brother. Mommy standing there with her head thrown back, howling in apparent agony, glass shards at her feet, and blood running down her arm and onto the floor.

  She could hear Daddy and the voices of two other men in the cavernous entryway of their house. And then the front door closed again. This house was an echo chamber.

  “The gates!” Vivian yelled. “Make sure you fucking close them!” She was facing the yard, but she saw Daddy’s approaching reflection in the glass of the remaining sliding door. “I hate this house,” she said now. “I hate this house.” She sat up, putting her feet against the black plastic fragments on the carpet. “I hated that phone. I fucking hate this white carpet. I hate everything about the way Mommy did this house.” She put her hand to the cold marble surface of the table. “I hate this table. This settee is a slab of rock. It’s like an airport terminal in here. There’s nothing to lean on, nowhere to really sit. No wonder you’re never here—”

  “No,” Everett said weakly.

  “You know what I miss? I miss the blue lounger, your armchair, Daddy. An Easter egg blue. You remember.” He had to remember (Klonopin and all). As a little girl, she had sat on the arm beside him as he did the crossword. “You remember, don’t you?” she asked, but he wasn’t there—his eyes the glossy stones of someone gone inward. “Who was that at the door, Daddy?”

  “Your mother ordered a fence.” He motioned behind him. “They were here to install the fence.” He refocused his eyes, dropping back to her, a tired, red-rimmed look. “They apologized for being late.”

  “A fence?” Vivian said. “But we have a fence. Concrete walls, even.”

  Everett nodded. “This was for the pool. For around the pool.”

  “Around the pool?” But he didn’t have to clarify. She understood. A fence for the pool, to prevent Charlie from drowning. At last, Daddy began to cry.

  * * *

  THE REGISTRATION FOR the three-day event in Fresno had eaten half of Rory’s savings and there was still a long list of things she needed, never mind wanted.

  “Don’t think you’re getting any money out of me,” Mona said.

  “I’m using my own money,” Rory said. Two-thirds of her wages at Leaning Rock went to pay for boarding and care for Chap, and the rest went into a savings account, at Gus’s insistence.

  “And those are our debts,” Mona said, waving a potato peeler toward the stack of bills. Not my debt, Rory thought. Those were Gus’s medical bills. There were new ones daily, the pile so high it was leaning against the wall, an expectant guest. “And you think you can run off like a barn brat, have a holiday, eatin’ out and sleeping in a fancy hotel room?”

  “Motel,” Rory said. “And I’m competing.”

  “She’ll stay with Robin,” Gus groaned from the couch. He was home from the hospital, but lame, his leg held together by a dozen screws and a cast that went to his thigh. Rory could hardly look at him, seeing only the black stitches in his face, the lingering swelling around his eyes. Eyes the size of plums. Such a fool.

  Robin Sharpe had taken over the management of Leaning Rock and all of the upper-level lessons. She had offered to let Rory share her motel room.

  “Right,” Mona said. “You don’t think she’ll be shacking up with her new pothead friend?”

  June had taken Rory by the hand that night, pulling her past Mona on the stairs, and the two of them had gotten out the front door before Mona removed one of her kitten heels and tossed it at them, the shoe hitting the door just as the first sirens came screaming up the canyon.

  Gus lifted himself up higher on the couch, looking out the window to see what car was coming over the bridge. He lived in fear of Sonja coming back from Chino, where she’d gone to be nearer to Jorge, whose trial date had still not been set. They were charging him with involuntary manslaughter. Gus hadn’t been to the barn since the night of the accident, and if it weren’t for June and Robin, if they hadn’t talked Rory into training for Fresno, Rory probably wouldn’t have been able to show her face again either.

  Sometimes June helped Rory with her to-ride list, the two of them just riding up the Leaning Rock Trail or all the way to Calabasas Peak—Rory had to ride other people’s horses at the hottest point in the day now, when she didn’t have a dressage or jumping class. She always brought a bottle of water from the office freezer, and when they’d reach the peak only a thin core of ice remained. Once, Rory dropped that ice into her mouth and chewed and June had teased her—“Chewing ice is a sign of sexual frustration”—but that was as flirtatious as June had been since that first night.

  Gus settled back into the couch. “It’s just another nurse,” he said, saying it to Rory, as if she’d been worried with him. But she would have been happy to see Sonja. These nurses clearly came from some scattershot care agency that Carlotta’s daughter, Bella, had chosen. In the days after the accident, Rory had been the one to check on Carlotta, filling Sonja’s absence, but now that these nurses came, and Gus was laid up on the couch and Mona spent half her waking hours prefixing meals and freezing them and the other half trying to talk Gus into an interview with a magazine—“a paid interview,” she always corrected—Rory wanted to be anywhere but here.

  Most days, after they left the barn, June would pull into the market parking lot, and they’d drop their seats back and stare up into the trees and share a joint. June had stories about acid trips and mushrooms, pills with names like Dancing Shoes, Black Sunshine, Final Daze. In the market, she bought them American Spirits and sandwiches. Sometimes they didn’t talk at all, just listened to Morrissey, the Violent Femmes, and other days they were barreled over in laughter about things they couldn’t recall later, lost in the black velvet of their high. A few times, Wade had met them, jumping out of his Scout and into June’s backseat, lying back there like it was a hammock. June disappeared a little when Wade was around.

  “Robin already paid for the room and she asked for a double room, so that I can stay with her.” Gus hated Robin when Carlotta hired her, believing she’d only been hired for being Bella’s friend, having more connections than actual skills. But Robin had been proving him wrong, as only the underappreciated can. “And,” Rory went on, venomous, “she’s lending me her coat and tails.”

  “All right, all right—” Gus and Mona said, nearly in unison. They both smirked, amused by this unexpected camaraderie.

  “Thanks,” Rory said.

  In the living room, Gus turned on the television. He’d begun to brave the television again, images of that night finally usurped by new tragedies.

  “So that’s it,” Rory said. “We’re done talking about Fresno?”

  From the other room, Gus moaned. “A pill, Mona. Are you holding out on me?”

  Mona looked at her watch. “Another hour, Cowboy. No sooner.”

  On the TV, Rush Limbaugh came on, surrounded by copies of his books, his face on every cover.

  “Turn that up,” Mona said. “I like him.”

  June’s car was coming across the bridge. She took it faster than anyone else. But Gus lifted himself again, craning at the window. “June,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  Mona lit a cigarette off the burner, beneath the pot of boiling potatoes, squinting at the heat.

  “I probably won’t be home for dinner,” Rory said.

  Mona smiled. “You don’t say.”

  * * *

  “Come on already,” June was hollering out the car window. “We can’t be late.”

  Rory was already running for the car, one hand against the bouncing body of her camera. She’d been bringing the Canon with her everywhere, taking pictures at the barn: the lower-level lessons, trail ride views from between Chap’s ears, Chap in her stall, June, and Wade, but only because he was always coming at her, grinning at the lens.

  It
was their dressage lesson June didn’t want to be late for, dressage with Ema, the new instructor Robin had poached from L.A. Equestrian. People said Ema looked like Sharon Stone but with dark pixie hair. On Ema’s first day, June said, “German women are my new thing,” with a salacious lift of her eyebrows. Ema wore black suspenders. And now, apparently, so did June. “You are such a suck-up,” Rory said, snapping the elastic at the top of June’s shoulder.

  “Come on, I really like these,” June said. “They’re practical and oddly erotic.”

  “Isn’t the box of pastries enough?” Every day, June bought a variety box of pastries and left them in the office for Robin, Ema, and Adriano, who had taken over as head stable hand. Rory reached into the back and took a lemon poppy muffin for herself.

  “I believe that if you suck up consistently, it eventually appears sincere. Besides, we aren’t all wowing Ema like you are, Scott.”

  The day before Ema had said, “Rory is a puppeteer,” describing the way she and Chap moved together as if connected by invisible strings. Robin was letting Rory ride in the group lessons for free, and everyone’s surprise at just how capable Rory was—years of watching everyone and learning at her own pace—made this secret gift feel, somehow, earned.

  June pressed the lighter in and drew the American Spirits out of the glove box between Rory’s knees. She was smoking a lot, blaming her anxieties about Fresno—about having to beat Wade and what winning would mean for her state ranking. This was their go-to, most urgent topic of discussion. Rory insisted June only open the windows a crack and that she keep a can in the car for ashing. Rory had come to find this car’s smell—warm leather, the pong of stored weed and stale cigarettes, and the trace of the White Musk June was always putting behind her ears—comforting.

  “Journey’s not the galloper Pal is, but he is indestructible over fences, so all Wade needs is a descent dressage test and he could beat me.” They were turning up Old Topanga Canyon. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “He’s not indestructible,” Rory said, feeling scripted. She took the cigarette from June, inhaling and exhaling. “Robot horses malfunction, too.”

  “Journey is rather robotic, isn’t he?”

  “Mm,” Rory said, laying her head back, smoking with her eyes closed. There was no escaping this part of the drive, the turn past the Price gates, beside the wall with the long black, then white streak; the punctuation of Gus’s truck. She kept her eyes closed, but she always felt June steal a glance at her. Not until they were beyond the shoulder where they’d found the fox, when she felt the rise before the ranch, did Rory open her eyes again. As always, June smiled the same tight, apologetic smile at her. Rory reached into the backseat then and put a hand on the box of pastries, so they didn’t overturn as June steered them down the driveway and into the ranch.

  “So when you win,” Rory asked, “will you snap your suspenders at the ribbon ceremony?”

  “For sure,” June said. “You know it.” She parked in the last empty space, next to the school horse corral.

  Sancho was working there, his round frame hunched and pulling away at the cape ivy that had tapped into the water pipe that ran to the school horse trough. He looked up from behind the corral railing, his dispassionate eyes meeting hers. “Fuck,” Rory said, remembering. She had said she would help with that, days ago.

  “What?” June asked.

  “Nothing,” Rory said. “I just forgot something.”

  “You need to go home?”

  “No,” Rory said. “Not like that. Is today the tenth?”

  June nodded. She had said she would help Sancho, but she had also told Adriano that she would come up to the house for the party. The ninth had been Tomás’s birthday.

  In some ways, right after the accident had been easier, no one expecting anything in particular, her presence enough. She sat with Adriano, held Sonja’s hands while she cried, and she leaned into Tomás, his arms strung around her until they both pulled away to wipe their faces dry. She had spent more time with them there, at the barn, then with Gus in the hospital. But as time passed and she needed more hours to train—she hadn’t had the time to help in the way she used to, no longer mucking stalls, cleaning tack, or sanding and repainting the jump rails. Robin hadn’t seemed to mind; her paychecks hadn’t changed.

  “Una fiesta pequeña, nada más,” Adriano had said sheepishly, either afraid she’d tell Robin or embarrassed they couldn’t do more for Tomás; Rory couldn’t tell which. He’d handed her a card and she’d signed it, generically, thinking she’d find more words—better words—at the party, but then she’d forgotten about it altogether, going home with June, as usual, leaving everything else behind.

  * * *

  THE PILLS KEPT the pain at bay through the night, but during the day it inserted itself like a boot hook in Gus’s back. The bath settled it down some and the bath required Mona’s help.

  He would position himself on the tub’s rim and Mona would steady him by the elbow, helping him shimmy out of his boxers, the porcelain a cold pain against his bare ass. He’d watch her pull the black trash bag over his cast and he’d hold the end of the tape while she wrapped it around the top of his leg. She’d test the water and pull his shirt from him, stretching the collar away from the stitches. Those threads had spiders that ran off, back and forth over his cheekbone. He’d phoned the hospital, fed up, only to be told that that was what nerve damage was. “A small price to pay,” the nurse had said, as if she had his toxicology report right there.

  Once he was in the water, Mona sat on the lid of the toilet, flipping through a magazine, sometimes clipping recipes, sometimes reading him an article. When the water finally turned tepid she’d toweled him off. It was the best of her, this Mona, on the other side of the accident. Except when a reporter phoned her back and then she went hungry in her speech, coaxing. She’d already told him a thousand times how the butcher at the market in town had given an interview, recounting how he’d seen Mrs. Price and the boy in the store the afternoon before the accident, how he’d been paid five thousand dollars for answering four questions. “Only four. I asked him myself,” she said. “Five thousand. And every word of it true. That boy ran away from her in there more than once. She never had a hold on him. She’s the one to blame, you ask me.” He hated this most, Mona’s admonishing Sarah Price. Sometimes—in the harried space between his waking and sleeping—he heard Sarah Price talking to him, always as if they were old friends who’d just found one another at a party, huddled and whispering against the din around them. “We need the money,” Mona said, though the amounts the magazines were offering had dwindled. “I won’t,” he’d tell her and then she’d always say, “You aren’t the one who killed him,” because Mona’s world was black and white this way.

  Tonight, toweling him dry, she was hopped up not about an interview, but about going back to work at Hawkeye’s. “He still hasn’t covered my shift for tonight.” She’d worked at that bar for thirteen years, but now, after two and a half weeks off, there was risk of her being replaced altogether? She was rubbing the towel down his arms in a suppliant way.

  “Gimme that,” he said. “I can do this myself.”

  “You know he’ll hire some fresh young thing. And that’s the last thing we need.”

  “I told you,” Gus said, taking the towel from her. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine. You can go.”

  Mona looked at him, then put a hand to his knee and ripped the tape from his leg. The trash bag fell to the tile. “Well, all right, then,” she said.

  In 1982, when they’d met, Mona had been the fresh new thing at Hawkeye’s. Gus was returning from a jumpers’ clinic he’d taught in Temecula and he had a hankering to sit in a dark bar, with a basket of fried food, in the company of strangers. He’d never set foot in Hawkeye’s before and when he saw Mona behind the bar he’d had a religious kind of feeling. She was wearing a cut-sleeve T-shirt, her strong shoulders exposed, her dark brown hair hanging down her back like a shining cap
e. When he ordered a ginger ale, she leaned toward him—the twinkle to her eyes same as a calico cat—and said, “Come on, now. I can’t trust a man who doesn’t drink.” He checked her hand for a ring. “That’s a funny philosophy,” he said. “No, it’s not,” she said, straightening herself to pull a beer from the tap. “When a man doesn’t drink, it tells me his impulses are too dark for him to handle.” No man that’s not true of, Gus thought, but instead of saying so, he took the beer and asked for a bourbon chaser. He went home with Mona that night, to a one-bedroom apartment in a complex crawling with Cal State Northridge kids. Inside, Rory was asleep in their shared bed, her head buried beneath a pillow. Mona paid and dismissed the sitter and then she let him bend her over the kitchen counter, pans gently rattling on the stove. She fell asleep with her head in his lap, sitting on the couch, and he stayed that way, sitting up all night, stroking her hair and planning the breakfast he would make for her and the girl in the morning. A few months later, as they were walking hand in hand through Topanga State Park, he proposed and, after nodding yes, Mona had said, “Rory likes you. She never likes anybody.”

  But now Rory was never around and when she was, it was clear she wanted little to do with him. Despite his charitable overlooking of the marijuana smoke that rode in on her at night and his having talked Mona into letting her go to Fresno.

  “I haven’t been alone in weeks,” Gus said to Mona now, realizing.

  She was straightening her blouse in the mirror. “Well, it might be nice,” she said.

  It had been nice not to have to think of her at work, of the men who kept tipping higher, ordering chasers, about the cologne they left behind on her clothes.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. She’d put on a jean skirt and blown her hair out so it shined.