Kept Animals Read online

  “You’re just hungry,” she said, and then she was in the kitchen building him a turkey sandwich, dumping chips into a bowl. She set it all on the table beside the couch, handed him a glass of water, then reached into her pocket to retrieve the pill bottle.

  “Would you still be going back if I’d answered their questions?” Why had he told her he could do this himself, that he’d be fine? “The magazines?”

  She looked at him, mouth sour. “It’s a little late for that.” She was struggling with the cap to the pills.

  “I know,” Gus said. He hadn’t been fine alone, not a single day since they’d met.

  The cap popped free in her hand. “You’re still my cowboy, Gus,” she said, shaking out a green-and-white pill. “My cowboy on Prozac.”

  * * *

  TOMÁS WAS LOADING feed, forking bales and swinging them up onto the tractor bed with hay hooks.

  “I brought you these,” Rory said. He didn’t stop to see. “It’s a new pair of gloves.”

  “They’re nice,” Tomás said, only stealing a glance. “But they aren’t for me.”

  “Oh, come on,” Rory said, “I’m trying to make amends.” But it was true, the gloves were far too small for him. They weren’t the show gloves, but the tan work gloves Rory had gotten for herself, the tag still attached. She’d been wrong, thinking he’d remember—that he’d recognize the joke. The very first time he’d forked bales, he’d done it without any gloves, Sancho ribbing him the whole time. The soft pads of his hands had blistered and gone slick with pus, but he’d only shown Rory—she was maybe ten—and she’d gotten the first aid kit and helped him wrap his hands. She was gonna say something about how wise he’d grown, believing that that, at least, was old history, a day they could’ve laughed about.

  “How about you get me a pair that fits then?”

  “Maybe I will,” Rory said. She’d grabbed the gloves on a run to the Feedbin with Robin, charging Carlotta’s account, a detail she knew Tomás wouldn’t approve of. She lifted her camera up over her head and set it down on the tractor seat, going to help him load. “Or I could take your picture?”

  He’d been looking at the camera, but he pulled his baseball hat lower now. “No, thanks.”

  Of course not. Tomás was reserved, quiet, preferring the music in his Walkman to small talk with the boarders, despite the girls who tried.

  Rory ripped the tag that held the gloves together and pulled them on. “You all right?” she asked. He’d barely looked at her.

  “I’m fine,” he said, his voice betraying him.

  Rory scrambled up on top of the loaded hay, reaching down for the next bale, hooking it, then saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t come last night.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, tossing a second bale fast and high enough that she only had time to step out of the way.

  “Did your mom come home?” she asked.

  Tomás and Sonja had moved into the house on the grounds six years ago, and Rory recalled being annoyed at Gus’s assumption that she and Tomás would be friends, as if the four years between them weren’t a lifetime then. Had Gus always been trying to find her friends? Thinking her lonely? Well, she didn’t feel lonely anymore.

  When Rory turned back for the next bale, Tomás had taken his hat off and was wiping his face dry. “Are we done already?” Rory asked. If Tomás hadn’t dropped out his sophomore year, they’d have overlapped for a year at Polk.

  He had his hands on his hips. He was gangly, his body boyish, but his face had the angles of a man’s—a concave sweep between his cheekbone and jaw, a strong, almost blunt nose—but he only grew a whisper of a mustache and his forehead was often broken out in acne where the band of his baseball cap sat. He had Sonja’s deep-set, dark eyes and thick black hair, but in the sun his fairer skin went red. Manuel and Adriano had teased him when he was younger, calling him Rosita or Thomas. Jorge had put a stop to that. “She’ll be home tomorrow,” Tomás said.

  Rory swung down, pulling her gloves away. “I’m sorry she missed it, too.”

  “I asked her not to come.” He reached out and touched the gloves in her hand, pulling away the last of the plastic tab that she’d missed. “I wanted her to stay in Chino. I wanted her to stop him …” He had always called Jorge Papi, but his voice slid away now.

  “Stop him?”

  “He pled no contest,” Tomás said, looking at her.

  “No contest?”

  “It means he won’t fight. He won’t have a trial. It means he won’t have to tell anyone anything else that—”

  “Stop,” Rory said.

  “He’ll get seven years, Rory. Then they’ll deport him. Nobody is saying this, but I know.” His jaw was set, resigned. “That’s what will happen.”

  Rory had known that Sancho and Manuel had no papers, but she had thought that Jorge … He had worked for Carlotta longer than Gus. Why hadn’t she sponsored him? When Rory had come to the ranch after the accident, the gates had been padlocked shut and Tomás, after opening them to her, had said it was to keep the television crews from coming, trying to interview them, but it was also for INS, she understood now, for fear of them using the opportunity. “No,” Rory said. “We won’t let it happen. Robin, Carlotta—they can help. He’ll work here again.”

  “Why would he want that?” Tomás said, his voice flat.

  “Because,” Rory said.

  “You know Papi was following him, Rory.”

  “That night,” she said dumbly.

  Tomás nodded. “But what I didn’t tell you is how he came to our house asking for food. Or that Papi gave him coffee and told him to stay. Sleep on our couch, he said. But Gus wouldn’t listen, so Papi insisted on following him.”

  Rory flashed on the red banner that had run across the bottom of the television screen: Actor’s Son Killed by Drunk Driver. By the time Gus was wheeled back from surgery it had been revised: Drunk Immigrant Kills Movie Star’s Infant Son.

  That was when she’d gone to the barn, June driving her, taking her back through Calabasas, avoiding the floodlights they’d seen on the news, illuminating the crime scene, but casting hard shadows. June had left her at the gate, having to get home, her father already freaking out about her having been in the canyon that night. It wasn’t until Robin returned her to the hospital that Rory saw the footage of Gus’s truck being towed away, dragged from the retaining wall, the newscaster declaring that the driver of this truck, Gus Scott—“unable to comment at this time”—was a “near hero.” She went on to describe how they had learned from crime scene analysis that he had turned, sparing the boy, and subsequently sustained life-threatening injuries himself. “If only this other, this intoxicated, Hispanic man hadn’t been speeding down the road behind him.” If only this other … The sun had come up by then and the glare was so great Rory thought everything in the room could blister and melt away like a strip of film exposed too long.

  There was no such thing as a near hero.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Rory asked, feeling as if her heart were suspended within her by a flimsy string. “What am I supposed to say?”

  Tomás tucked his hat back on. “June’s calling for you,” he said.

  Rory heard her, but she couldn’t move. She was staring at his Dodgers hat, so tattered and faded she’d never really registered it before. He wasn’t looking at her. She looked down at the suede gloves in her hand, still satiny and new.

  “Go on, Rory,” Tomás said. The horses in the L barn had started stomping the ground, nickering, impatient with the wait. “I can finish here.”

  Her mouth had gone dry. It was a hundred degrees out, only slightly less insufferable than the day before.

  “Rory.” Tomás stopped her.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s good, actually—that you didn’t come.”

  “To your party?” Rory asked, surprised.

  “It wouldn’t have been the same.”

  * * *

  IT WAS A sharp left off PCH and
down a narrow road to visit Mommy in Malibu. The shrubbery was densely planted to obscure the estates, but it also hid any view of the water. When at last there was a glinting wedge of Pacific Ocean, they turned, following the stucco wall painted the same golden green as the coastal grass (a brush fire beige). Carmen punched in the visitor’s code Daddy had written out for them and the gate retracted. The parking lot was thinly populated: two Mercedes, two BMWs, three Porsches, and a Lexus. On their very first visit, seeing the cars, Everett had said, “I told you it was nice.” As if they’d been on a waiting list. The only signage was outside the main door, a demure gold-plated placard that read, CLIFFSIDE REFUGE (it’s a spa, a wildlife sanctuary, it’s rich folks on the brink!).

  Daddy wasn’t coming because he had “meetings.” Paramount, Sony. Meetings meant calls. But calls at least meant he wasn’t out “antiquing” (a.k.a. fumbling through yard sales in a pathetic disguise) but was pacing the halls of the house in his bathrobe, trying to sound like a man wizened by his struggles rather than undone (though undone he was).

  Cliffside consisted of a broad green lawn, spotted with single-story “resident bungalows” and two main buildings, all clay brown with Spanish terra-cotta roofs. Down a gentle slope was a man-made pond so clear that it had to be chlorinated, ringed with pearly white Adirondack chairs. The sound of croaking frogs and the titter of birds was ever present, as if looped over a sound system.

  After they’d signed in, Carmen sat down on a bench outside the main building and reached into her shoulder bag, withdrawing knitting needles and yarn. Vivian stood, watching her mother’s bungalow, waiting for her to be led out.

  Click, click—Carmen’s needles—click, stitch. “This place, Vivian. I can smell the crazy.”

  In the days they’d spent alone, Vivian asked Carmen to stop calling her Ms. Vivian, a formality Mommy had grossly insisted on.

  “That’s just the lilies,” Vivian said to Carmen.

  An orderly approached and motioned for them, but Carmen did not stop knitting.

  “You don’t want to come?” Vivian asked, trying to remember if Carmen had spoken to Mommy at the funeral—the first they’d seen of one another in weeks.

  “That’s right,” Carmen said. Of course. She wasn’t paid well enough for any of this.

  Vivian followed the orderly to the pond, where Mommy must have been sitting all along.

  Vivian took a seat in the neighboring Adirondack.

  “I was gathering myself,” Mommy said. “I’d assumed your father was coming.”

  “He has meetings,” Vivian said. “Well, phone calls.”

  “He’s getting work again, then.”

  “I suppose,” Vivian said, and then, “Honestly, Mommy, he’s a mess. He sleeps on the couch and he lives in his bathrobe, except when he’s antiquing, that’s what he calls it, but he’s just buying all this shit—” Vivian stopped. Had she cursed in front of Mommy before? She couldn’t remember anything anymore; her memories were all projected underwater, the audio garbled, her eyes stinging. She wanted to tell Mommy about the fence men and Daddy’s crying, but that might have been cruel. For Mommy she would tuck her cruelty in a back pocket.

  “What kind of shit?” Sarah asked.

  “Flea market shit. Yard sales. Old, smelly, mildewed: books, furniture, pillows. Other people’s pillows! Lamps and ashtrays? I don’t even know. It wasn’t what I meant, not at all.”

  “What you meant?” Mommy kept rubbing the hem of her shirt (her new compulsion?).

  “I told him I missed our old furniture. But just the one recliner. The Easter egg blue?”

  “I remember it. You spilled something on the seat and it soured—that’s why I left it. That was two houses ago, Vivian.” Mommy closed her eyes. Vivian hadn’t spilled, not once. “That was before your Grandad died.”

  Grandad. Leon. Leon of the Two Watches, as Vivian thought of him. A wire-thin man who wore a watch on each wrist, one set to local time, the other to China, who never cared for Everett and who treated Mommy like an exotic plant he’d grown to show off. His funeral had been an infinity of limousines, followed by a sudden, incomprehensible wealth. Nearly overnight. It was as if they had been standing beneath a trickle of a spring waterfall—Daddy’s steady work, small indulgences here and there, the old chipped dishes replaced with new—and then it was a torrent, the force of it blinding. Two new cars, a new stone set in her mother’s ring. Whatever shoes Vivian desired. Get two pair! A new house with a kidney-shaped pool. The Jamaican cook who also cleaned, until Mommy found her wearing one of her necklaces.

  “I wasn’t ready for all this,” Mommy said. Vivian wasn’t sure if she meant the money or Charlie’s death. “You’ve always handled things better than I have, Vivian.”

  “That isn’t true,” Vivian said.

  “Who’s the one doing the visiting here?”

  Vivian didn’t know what to say and Mommy rested her head on the back of the Adirondack, her eyes closing, her face turned up into the sun. The skin of her neck and around her eyes had gone soft, the wilting petals of a flower. Mommy had never been like other Hollywood wives. She didn’t like being photographed, the upkeep and injections. She didn’t want to be seen. “You like it here, don’t you, Mommy?” Vivian was playing back all the previous visits, from the first catatonic, shock-riddled days to her stoic posture and Valium-glossed eyes at the funeral, to now, this—resolution?

  “I might as well,” Mommy said. “A caged bird and all that. Though this isn’t, it could be worse. Do you ever think about the man?” Her eyes were still closed.

  “The man?”

  “What do you think about letters, Vivian? You know, in the mail?”

  The way Mommy spoke sometimes felt as if it required a secret code and Vivian’s failure to crack it could result in an explosion. Silence often seemed safer. “Letters?” Vivian braved.

  “I wrote one to him, to Jorge Flores.”

  “The man who killed Charlie?”

  “Oh, Vivian,” she said, shaking her head the same way she did at the end of laughing. “I killed Charlie, now, didn’t I?” Her voice was light and easy.

  “You’re scaring me, Mommy. You didn’t kill Charlie. It was an accident. A horrible accident.”

  “See. That’s why I wrote to him.”

  “Mommy. Why? He was drunk. Point zero seven. That’s basically the limit.”

  “Yes, basically,” Mommy said. “Sleep deprivation is as dangerous. Yet here they’re happy to give me drugs to help me sleep. I do feel rested, finally. What were you doing that night, Vivian? Do you remember?”

  “Stop, Mommy.” Of course she remembered (Mickey McLeod, Bill Clinton, Powell, Rachtman, Charlie calling). “Mommy, someone might read that letter. They might give it—”

  “To the press?” Mommy asked. “Perhaps. Let them. But it’s divisiveness that sells magazines, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. I guess. I don’t know. Have you sent it already? Does Daddy know?”

  “I have. And your father can clutter up that house all he wants. I’m not sure I can ever set foot in it again.”

  “You want to move us? Again?”

  “No,” Mommy said.

  “No what?” Her mother could induce bewildering panic in her. Vivian only wanted clarity (say what you mean!). One of her earliest memories was of her mother handing her a kite in a city park, her mother’s hair blowing in the wind (hence the damn kite) but she carefully, methodically molded Vivian’s hand to the kite’s handle and then, clear as day, she said, “Now let it go!” and Vivian did. She let go and the entire kite (body, string, tails, and handle) darted into the sky, its bright colors a blurred rainbow and then only a pinprick against the sky. The sight of it left Vivian breathless, joyful, astounded—she had launched a rocket! But when she looked back at them to share her pleasure, it was Daddy who said, “What the hell did she do that for?” and Mommy’s face went pale and woeful. This was them (nuts plus shell).

  “No,” Mommy said now.
“These birds aren’t real at all. There isn’t a tree anywhere in sight—” She painted her hand across the landscape. “Yet it sounds as if we’re in a rain forest.”

  Vivian closed her eyes. The birds got louder. “Maybe it’s meant to be relaxing?”

  “Or maybe it’s meant to make us all go insane,” Mommy said, laughing a laugh that Vivian wished didn’t sound so much like her own.

  * * *

  GUS HAD MONA by the wrist, asking her for one more kiss. She was leaving for a double shift this time, but before her lips met his, her eyes went to the window and there were the creaking axles of the van, crossing the bridge. “Who is it?” he asked, already knowing.

  “You’ll have to talk to her on your own,” Mona said, hurrying toward the door. “I’m already late.” The screen door slapped shut, the springs gone slack.

  Mona’s Chrysler started up, her tires spraying back pebbles.

  Maybe, he was hoping, she would go up to Carlotta first. But then there she was, obscured behind the screen door, not knocking.

  “Sonja,” he said, his voice cracking over her name. Her eyes seemed to be adjusting to the darkness of the house, trying to find him inside. “Come in,” he said, not getting up, knowing every move he made from then on was only going to confirm his cowardice. “You headed up to see Carlotta?” Like they were neighbors making small talk.

  “No,” Sonja said, stepping inside. She looked smaller, reduced somehow. She had an envelope in her hand. “She has the help she needs.” She was avoiding looking at him.

  “I know she prefers your help,” Gus tried.

  “You’ve been to see her?”

  “Well, no.” Only Rory had. “But those nurses—” He’d lost steam, unhooked from any straightforward train of thought. He tried to push himself up on the couch then, to establish some dignity or—more likely—to show her his injuries. Like a dog rolling over to expose its belly, declaring itself harmless. He hadn’t meant any harm.

  “I didn’t want to come here,” Sonja said. She was looking at the burls of dust at the edges of the wood floors. “I’ve never been inside your house before.”