Lynn stands in her kitchen squinching her eyes shut tight, patting a screaming baby slung over her shoulder—the boy, tiny in a blue T-shirt and diaper. The baby girl is in her carrier, the one on the scarred wood table, also screaming, and on the counter are two dirty bottle feeders, their milky clouded plastic liners squeezed empty. Lynn pats the wailing boy’s back and looks at the screaming girl. She says, “I’m coming for you,” but it is hopeless. There is no picking up the girl with the handle of the carrier in the way, and anyway what would she do with the baby she has? How does Vivian do it? To Lynn the little girl looks stockaded. She lowers a hand to feel along the sides of the handle—“How on earth?”—and leans sideways as far as she can without dropping the boy to see if there is something—a handle? a button? a lever? What would it be?—to free this little girl from the safety seat where she lies crying.
Then the phone starts to ring.
“Crap,” she says. “Crap, crap, crap.”
She keeps searching along the sides of Emmaline’s carrier, ignoring each ring, which mixes in anyhow with the louder racket of the babies’ screaming. She cups the little girl’s hot red cheek, and in the voice she reserves for dogs, she says, “I’m sorry, baby girl.” Then she moves her hand to the back of Sebastian’s head to support it while she bends over farther, hoping to see something—anything!—and finally she spots a release.
She rights herself and takes her good hand from the boy’s head to squeeze a red trigger, pushing on the handle of the carrier with the elbow on her other arm, the one holding the boy, and when the handle buckles, it jostles him in her arms so suddenly and violently he windmills his arms in panic and screams even louder, but—ah! there we go!—the handle clicks out of place and down.
“There now,” she says in her dog voice. “Everything is going to be fine.”
The phone is still ringing, though, and when it finally stops, Lynn doesn’t even seem to notice. She is staring at Emmaline, whose face is almost purple now with fury. Lynn stands right against the table and slides the carrier toward her body as she’s seen Vivian do and cups her right hand under Emmaline’s thigh, but instead of lifting her neatly into the crook of her arm, she only rolls on her side in the carrier, a final injustice that makes Emmaline kick and hold her breath, purpling further, so for a moment Lynn thinks the girl might never breathe again. “Come on now,” she says, patting her on the arm, shaking her gently. “It’s not over yet, give me a chance,” while Emmaline stretches out farther and farther, like a tiny dark board of wood, and then finally—thank whoever made us!—buckles over in her safety seat to take a breath before she starts screaming again.
Lynn takes a pacifier from the pocket of her sweater and puts it in the baby girl’s mouth, but the girl spits it out so forcefully it clears not just her seat but the edge of the table and bounces once on the seat of the spindle chair before clattering onto the floor. Lynn decides they both need a minute—a little breather—before trying again, and she raises the handle on the seat and hefts it off the table and begins to swing it, making a pendulum of her right arm, while in her left she still jiggles Sebastian. Both babies are still crying, and now she tries dancing a little jig. She backs through the door to the side yard, and for a blessed moment both babies stop crying, surprised by the fresh air. But they start in again soon enough, first with little whimpers, almost matching each other noise for noise, building up again to full angry wails while the dogs freeze in their tracks and cock their heads this way and that at the sound, which builds up in no time to the racket she’d been getting in the kitchen.
She looks from one to the other, blinking in wonder.
Then the phone starts ringing again.
This time Lynn takes the babies inside and sets them down, fitting Sebastian back into his safety seat. She grabs the receiver and steps alone out into the fresh and closes the door on the crying.
It is fainter now, but still clear through the open kitchen windows.
She presses a button to answer.
“Vivian?”
“No.” It’s a woman’s voice. Lynn raises a hand to her mouth but says nothing.
There is a long pause.
The voice says, “No, Mom. It’s me.”
Lynn lets her hand slip down to her heart.
Jessica says, “Is that a baby crying?”
Lynn’s lips tremble. Tears come to her eyes, but her voice is even. “Two, actually.”
“I called at a bad time then.”
“No, no—” Lynn bites her lip to steady her voice. “They’ll be all right.” And sure enough already something in there is slowing. Lynn peers through the window and sees that the girl is sucking her fist and the boy has caught sight of the ceiling fan.
In her car Jessica sits back and looks at the horizon. There is nothing out there, only scrub and sky. Jaya’s red shoes sit beside her. She stares for a minute or more, and her mother says nothing, but the baby sound grows a little more muffled. Finally she says, “I have a favor to ask you.”
Lynn swallows. Her hand is over the mouthpiece of the phone, and she is looking at the dogs. They are digging around the hose bib again—a big trough exposing the pipe. There is a five-gallon bucket of sand on a dolly in the garage, and every day she wheels it out and refills the hole. She peels back her fingers from the phone and says, “Anything.”
“It’s nothing big.”
“Okay.”
“Nothing personal. It’s just a dog.”
“All right.”
“She’s just injured and needs some stitching.”
Lynn holds very still.
“Anyway, I was wondering if you could do it for me.”
“Where are you?”
“Not far. A suburb of Vegas.”
Tears roll down Lynn’s cheek. She clears her throat. “Absolutely I can. I’ll be ready for it when you get here.”
When Jessica pulls in, Lynn is standing on the porch in her vinyl apron. She steps down the stairs, out of the shadow of the eave and into the sun, and watches three dark Suburbans roll down the gravel drive, and her eyes scan between them, waiting to see which of them bears her daughter. The second car pulls off to the side to let the third pass so that just two come through the neck of the driveway into the big open circle of dried mud. When the door on the lead car opens and Jessica steps out, Lynn folds her left arm beneath her chest and covers her mouth with her hand.
Jessica stands in her bloodstained sweatshirt with one hand on her open car door. Lynn takes a quick swipe under each eye with her fingers.
Twenty feet of dry earth stands between them.
Finally Jessica gestures over her shoulder with her left thumb. “She’s bleeding pretty badly.”
Lynn nods. “I’m ready for her,” she says, and points to the dark open garage and waits to see what her daughter will do.
Neither of them moves.
It is the bridge of etiquette with a stranger that finally closes the gap between them. When Dana steps out of her Suburban and walks forward to Jessica’s side, Lynn crosses the turnaround to meet her. Their three bodies make a single shadow on the ground.
Jessica says, “Mom, this is Dana. Dana, this is my mother, Lynn.”
Back at the motel, holding the bleeding dog, Jessica had told Dana she would lead them to her mother’s dog shelter for medical treatment, and in this simple statement a full set of possible threats and privacy issues of import made themselves as plain to Dana as pockets large enough for weapons in the folds of civilian clothes. In the security procedures log for Jessica’s property, there are fifteen full pages devoted to the handling of calls or visits from her father, and not a single mention of a mother. After a count of two seconds Dana had said, “Certainly. I’ll be available for any help you specify when we arrive on-site. Barring any instruction from you, would you prefer a default of body accompaniment or surveillance from a distance?” “From a distance,” she’d said.
Dana shakes Lynn’s hand, but she does not tell her it is a pleasure to meet her. Instead she says this: “Would now be a good time to help you two move the dog?”
Lynn blinks.
Dana doesn’t wait for an answer. She leads mother and daughter silently to the back of her armored car and pops the tailgate to show them Grace waiting: white, muzzled, tethered to the tie-down by a leather lead, lying still on the bloody mat. The cut on her neck is ragged and long, and the basket muzzle is slick with her bubbly drools.
Dana takes the two corners of the tailgate mat beneath Grace’s head to make a stretcher of it, and Lynn and Jessica look at the corners beneath her tail. Right away it is clear to all three of them what will need to happen. Jessica reaches in with her uninjured hand to grab the back corner, and Lynn takes the other corner with hers, each woman trying as best she can to give the other space, not quite touching, not even facing each other really, trailing the dog behind them as they face forward and lumber toward the garage and pass out of the bright light and into its cool dark concrete-scented shade. It is an awkward business, but they manage to get the dog up onto the sheet, still lying on the bloody car mat but finally there at least, on a white sheet in the sun from the window. Without saying a word Lynn picks up a needle and begins, and Dana retreats to the center of the turnaround, watching their backs from the distance Jessica had requested. Lynn’s elbow rises with each long pull of the thread, and Jessica stands beside her resting her hand on the dog’s flank, and neither of their heads move with talking. They are both watching the dog, Grace scrabbling a bit with each pull and her head straining toward the wall and her black lips curled inside the cage of the muzzle at the pain of mending.
When Lynn ties the knot and snips it, she steps to the sink to wash her hands. Her stitching is tight and even, the flesh mounded in places and bristling with white fur. Jessica keeps a hand on Grace’s flank and watches her mother’s hands at the sink, her good hand and her bad one, soaping and rinsing more than is probably needed.
Lynn turns to her when she’s clean, but she doesn’t say anything.
Jessica says, “Thank you.”
Lynn looks at her, blinking, considering the different replies she might make.
Jessica says, “Should she rest here?”
“We should lower her to the floor. She might try to stand when we leave, and fall.”
They can manage just the two of them this time, each taking two corners of the big white sheet in one hand and lifting it like a hammock and lowering it gently to the floor Vivian mopped clean the day before. Grace’s eyes are closed, and her red-soaked chest rises and lowers visibly with her breaths. They stare at her as if it is needed, both of them wondering what to say.
Finally Lynn works up her courage. “Can I fix you a cup of tea?”
Jessica goes on looking at the dog. She stares at it so long Lynn thinks of asking it again, and then finally Jessica says, “I guess that would be all right.”
Lynn leads the way to her kitchen, and Jessica follows. They pass in through the living room, stepping over the baby gate and crinkling past the mama dog with her puppies wrestling alongside. They pass in through the dark front hall and on into the kitchen. Lynn takes the kettle from the stove and fills it standing at the sink, the yellow-curtained windows with the mountains in the distance and the bright blue sky framing her there. Jessica lays a hand on the chair and glances at her mother’s back at the sink. A pair of baby bottles and nipples sit clean in the drying rack beside her.
“Where are the babies?”
“Upstairs sleeping,” her mother says without turning. “I wore them out, I guess, with my rusty handling.”
“Whose are they?”
Lynn puts the kettle on the stove and lights the burner with the long-handled lighter, holding the stove knob in. It clicks a few times before it catches. She says, “They belong to a girl who’s staying here and helping me out with the dogs. She needed to be gone today, and I told her I’d watch over them.” She turns and faces her daughter. Jessica is picking at the gauze on her wounded hand.
Lynn says, “What happened there?”
“The dog bit it.”
“Do you know if she’s had her shots?”
“I don’t. I got the bite checked by a doctor, though. She said it was fine and I should just keep an eye on the dog for the next ten days to make sure her behavior doesn’t seem rabid.”
“I could do that for you.”
“Could you?”
“I’d like to.”
Jessica looks down at her lap, and Lynn looks outside at her dogs still digging around the pipe. They are quiet so long the water in the kettle begins to make that hushing sound it will make before it boils.
Finally Jessica says, “It’s Dad’s dog.”
Lynn regards her. She has never in her life felt so careful about what she might say.
Jessica says, “He’s in the hospital, and his neighbors were complaining about the barking so his landlady called me.”
Lynn holds very still while Jessica says this, her eyes on Jessica’s face and her own face neutral. In the pause that follows she finally nods—an infinitesimal movement of her chin. Then she takes out two blue enamel cups and sets them softly on the table. And she takes out the paper box of teas and sets this there too. Then a squeeze bottle of honey shaped like a bear. She pours the water into each cup and puts the kettle back on the stove. She sits down in the second chair, across from her daughter. Jessica sifts through the bags and selects one—Apple Cinnamon—and after she withdraws her hand, without looking Lynn takes one herself—Lemon, it turns out to be. Lynn pinches the bag between her metal loops and tears with her fingers, and Jessica fumbles a moment in her lap under the table and then grips hers in her mouth and tears with her left hand.
Lynn says, “Do you need anything for it? Tylenol or Advil or anything?”
And Jessica says, “What were you calling to say all those times?”
“What?”
“What were you calling to say—all those times you tried calling me through the studio?”
Lynn swallows, the dry tea bag still in her hand. She holds it there, watching her daughter busy herself, looking down, setting her tea bag in her cup and trailing the string out onto the table; pinching the white paper tab on the end of her tea bag string and folding it.
Lynn says, “First just ‘I love you and I’m sorry.’ ”
Jessica pleats and re-pleats the little white paper with her fingers. “Something different after that?”
“Yes. Later it was also ‘I stopped drinking and I know how I hurt you. And if you’re willing to hear it I’d like to list all the ways so I can make amends.’ ” She is looking down now, trying to stand her dry tea bag on the wood table. “It was part of my twelve-step program.”
“How long ago did you stop drinking?”
“Four years and twenty-seven days.”
Jessica’s lips tremble and her eyes well up. She picks up her cup and takes a small sip and sets it down, looking off to the side, at the sink, or the window while her mother regards her, still not brewing her own tea. Jessica swipes under her eyes and then looks down at her tea. “That’s good. That must be, I mean.”
Lynn nods.
“I’m sorry I didn’t let you tell me.”
“I was a scary person—a person who loved you and also hurt you. That’s what you knew.”
She sets her tea bag on the surface of the water in her own cup finally. They both watch it darken and sink.
Lynn says, “I’d like to say it still, if it’s okay with you.”
Jessica’s hands rise to the sides of her face, not quite covering her ears. She laughs nervously and crosses her arms and then uncrosses them, settling her hand and the big mitten of gauze together in her lap. “All right,” she says.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then.” Lynn stands and reaches up onto the high shelf and behind the bottle and she withdraws the piece of lined paper, folded and folded and folded again so that it can hide there, long and thin. She sits back down. She unfolds it first lengthwise and then crosswise again and again and again. It is pleated so heavily it curls in on her hand. The tiny scrawl is water-stained and full of crosshatches and arrows and seemingly intentionally illegible besides, but she knows what it says. She looks at it and then up again at Jessica’s eyes.
“I was your only parent, the one who tucked notes in your lunches and talked you to sleep from bad dreams, and I also hurt you. I have a list here of the ways I did it if you’ll let me read it.”
Jessica nods.
Lynn looks down again at her paper and reads, pausing for a long while after each one to give it its due:
I passed out and let you worry I would never wake up.
I slapped your face when we argued.
I shoved you down the stairs.
She looks up at Jessica and sees the tears streaming down her face. “Is this all right? Should I keep going?”
Jessica nods again, firming her lips, her chin trembling.
Lynn looks down. The paper is quivering in her good hand, like a husk of something.
All your life I told you your father was dead to protect
you from what he was.
Then, when you were sixteen, when I could see that the
person he’d become in your mind was a better parent than
I’d managed to be, I told you the truth and dared you to
go see for yourself if you weren’t better off with a mother
who broke your arm by shoving you down the stairs.
She flips the paper over to see the last one on the other side:
And I failed to find you when you took me up on it.
“You were drunk, Mama.”
“I chose to be.”
Jessica wipes under her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Then she takes a sip of her tea.
Lynn lays the paper on the table, curved and ribbed from years of folding and unfolding, and does the same.
They set their cups down but hold on to them.
The static on the baby monitor hisses.
Jessica says, “I’m sorry I left.”
“You needed to.”
“I’m sorry I went to him.”
“Are you, though?”
“Of course.” Jessica blinks. “I could have skipped it. All the grief he’s caused me and my family.”
Lynn shrugs. “Apparently not.”
“What?”
“Apparently you couldn’t just skip him. Me neither, by the way.”
She stands and opens a drawer with a clatter. She takes out two teaspoons, and from the cupboard she gets a little saucer. She sets a spoon in front of Jessica and uses the other to pull the tea bag from her water and wrap the string around and around, squeezing it against the bowl of the spoon. Then she sets it on the little plate between them.
Jessica lets her tea keep steeping. She says, “But just think how much better life would be for both of us if we had.”
Lynn shakes her head. “I don’t know about that. If I’d skipped him, you wouldn’t even be here.”
She takes a sip, and Jessica watches her.
Lynn says, “Life is full of things that feel like traps. Our own weaknesses and mistakes. Unlucky accidents. The violence done to us by others. But they’re not always what they seem. Sometimes later we see that they led us where we needed to go.”
Jessica straightens. She shakes her head bitterly. “No—”
“I’m not saying they’re not awful—”
“No way—”
“I’m saying they can be both. I’m saying it gets used.”
Jessica gives her head another fierce little shake and then looks up at the ceiling and bites her lip to keep the tears from spilling over.
Lynn waits a second, watching her.
On the ceiling where she is looking there is nothing at all to see. Just plain white plaster and a bowl of frosted glass diffusing the light from a single bulb.
Lynn says, “That farm accident I lost this hand in? It was an accident he rigged for money, and I can’t even say for sure that wasn’t some kind of gift to me.”
Jessica lowers her chin. An incredulous puff of air escapes her. “How do you figure that?”
“It made it just a hair too hard to drive a car when I was drunk. It’s what forced me to ask those girls to board with me and help me out. Who knows? I might be dead if I had two hands.”
Lynn looks at her over the top of her cup, elbows on the table, her good fingers and her bad holding her cup suspended. She shrugs. “Would anything be different for you if you’d skipped him? The kind of job you picked? The kind of husband you picked? The kind of mother you’re turning out to be?”
She watches her daughter’s face change, thinking about that.
Jessica presses a finger to the bowl of the spoon her mother gave her, tipping it up, and then lets it settle.
Lynn says, “Maybe you’ve got the whole mess with him to thank for some of what you love.”
Jessica shakes her head again, looking down, crying finally.
Lynn says, “Maybe he’s not our devil, but our angel instead. Or mirror. Maybe it’s only ever ourselves we have to fight or forgive.”