Other People's Pets

by R. L. Maizes

  * * *

  “I thought you needed the money.” Tank stands in La La’s doorway, sweating though it’s thirty degrees out.

  His visit is a surprise, and La La hesitates to invite him in and prolong a conversation she wishes he never started. But she doesn’t want to talk where they could be overheard, either. She motions for him to enter and closes the door behind him. “I tried to steal the medications. But I couldn’t. I kept imagining someone having a crisis.”

  “Jesus. You’re already robbing them.”

  “It’s different.” Her phone buzzes against her palm.

  I went to buy a phone, writes Elissa. The one I want costs two hundred dollars. I don’t have that, and they won’t give me a payment plan, because I still owe fifty dollars on the old phone.

  “What is it?” Tank says.

  “Nothing.”

  “If it’s nothing, why do you look so upset?”

  La La scans the e-mail again, ignoring Tank’s question.

  “Is it from Zev?”

  “You better go,” La La says.

  Tank leans against the door, his pallor gray. “Some of the drugs are for me.”

  La La puts the phone in her pocket. She wonders if Nat knows. “How would Nat feel if I helped you?”

  “You’d be taking care of me.”

  “She wouldn’t see it that way.”

  A bead of sweat drips down the side of his face. “Fuck Nat.”

  Surprised by the bitterness in his voice, La La backs up.

  “I’m not asking anymore.” When he steps toward her, the dogs growl and bare their teeth, and he stops. “If you don’t get them, the police will get a tip about a veterinary student burglar.”

  After Tank leaves, La La curls up on the bed. The dogs press themselves to her, but despite their presence, which would normally reassure her, she can’t seem to banish the thought of Tank’s threat. She glances at her phone. She knows it isn’t smart to send money to Elissa even before they’ve talked. But the woman isn’t a Nigerian scammer. La La contacted her.

  For the first time in years, La La dreams Elissa is rocketing away, but this time, La La follows in a smaller ship. When she wakes, she still hasn’t caught her mother.

  In the morning, La La shows the house to a couple interested in subletting. The man’s hand lingers on the woman’s back, teasing her hair as they walk through the rooms, discussing whether their furniture will fit. When the woman remarks on the size of the yard and how it will seem like the grounds of a castle to their Pomeranian, the man laughs. They tell her they’ll take it, starting February first, two weeks away.

  When the couple is gone, La La e-mails Elissa, Where should I send the money?

  To the Dallas Western Union. The one on Kiest Blvd.

  La La wires funds she set aside for O’Bannon. From the sound of things, her mother won’t be able to help with Zev’s legal bills. But now that she’s found Elissa, La La doesn’t care if her mother helps or not.

  Sunday morning, La La and Nat make their way around the reservoir, clomping on packed snow. It still feels odd to walk without the dogs. Like she’s forgotten something. La La considers telling Nat about her mother but decides to wait until she and Elissa have talked. “How’s school?” La La asks.

  “School’s fine. It’s Tank I’m worried about.” Nat hugs herself, feeling the cold or perhaps anxious about the direction her marriage is taking.

  “Why?” La La won’t be the one to tell Nat about Tank. Her friend might blame her, as though La La’s crimes have given Tank license to commit some of his own. Tank might find out she told Nat and make good on his threat to inform on her. It’s Nat’s fault Tank is blackmailing her. Nat never should have shared with Tank that La La was stealing.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there,” Nat says.

  La La looks away from her friend toward the surface of the reservoir, where a fresh coating of snow conceals the bumps and ridges beneath. “Once he finds work, I bet things will get back to normal.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Thanks.”

  For nothing, La La thinks.

  Later that day, La La scours online listings until she finds a rental house she can afford that allows pets. She arranges to tour the place and when she gets there, the owner lets her in and then returns to her car. La La wanders through the house alone, no need to hide her disappointment. The carpets are so stained, little remains of their original pink color. Black mold streaks the tiles in the shower, and hard water deposits coat the fixtures. There’s a hole in the kitchen wall the size of a man’s fist. La La has just about decided it won’t work when the backyard, silver maple towering over a snowy lawn, comes into view through a window. She pictures the dogs napping under the tree in the summer or chasing squirrels who dash along the top of the chain-link fence. A dog door opens to the yard from the bedroom. La La goes out to the owner’s car. When the woman opens the window, La La tells her she’ll take it.

  “You will?” the owner says. She unlocks the passenger door, and La La gets in. Rather than having La La fill out an application, she pulls a lease and a pen from a messenger bag, as if she doesn’t want to give La La even the briefest chance to change her mind. La La wasn’t expecting to sign right away. She tells the owner she’ll have to come back the next day with cash for the first and last month’s rent. (The woman doesn’t have the nerve to ask for a security deposit.) Using the money from the next day’s job will put her further behind with O’Bannon, but what choice does she have? She signs on one of the two lines marked “tenant,” the other remaining depressingly empty.

  8

  SPRING 2005

  When she’s fifteen, La La accompanies her father to a mall one Sunday afternoon. A group of girls her age roams the long corridors without their parents, clutching frozen drinks. While her father buys shoes, La La waits on a bench and watches the girls wander in and out of a too-bright Hallmark store, then try on earrings in a jewelry shop, gazing at themselves in countertop mirrors, holding their long hair back in their fists. La La rubs her earlobe, as smooth as if Zev himself polished it.

  When Zev returns, La La drags him to the jewelry shop and begs to get her ears pierced. Elissa’s were pierced, and she wore dangly beads and dream catchers. “Why don’t you wear what I got you instead of that cheap crap?” Zev once complained.

  “What you got me came from fences in exchange for—never mind,” Elissa said. At the time, La La didn’t understand what her mother meant, but now she does, and she understands, too, that her mother would disapprove of her life.

  Zev peers into the shop. “The place isn’t clean. You could get an infection.”

  “Those girls,” La La says, pointing, “don’t have infections.” She presses her fists to the window. A girl waves, and La La opens her hand, surprised to have been noticed. She often feels invisible.

  “You don’t know what they have. I’ll buy you clip-ons.”

  “Why does everything we do have to be so weird?”

  “What’s weird?” Zev says.

  “Oh my god, you’re serious. We make a living robbing houses.”

  “LA LA!”

  “Sorry.” The girls pay for their jewelry. As Zev hurries La La away, she waves to them again though their backs are turned. In a department store, her father selects clothes for her, baggy carpenter pants and button-down shirts in browns and tans, colors that fade into the landscapes of the homes they rob. It’s barely spring, but girls are wearing short skirts in pink and purple with matching high-heeled sandals.

  Returning from a job the next day, her father stops at a light. At the corner, a long-necked boy presses a freckled girl against a brick building and kisses her, his hand disappearing beneath the girl’s sweater. La La’s chest flushes. Back in her bedroom, she reaches under her shirt, pushing her fingers beneath her bra. She longs to experience what the girl felt, but her own flesh is too familiar, and like a book she’s already read, empty of surprises.

>   Tiny watches with curiosity, scratching his ears, and Mo dozes on the bed. They’re getting on her nerves. With Tiny’s allergies acting up, La La’s skin itches. Nocturnal like all cats, Mo is sleepy during the day, and La La can’t stop yawning. Over the years, she’s learned to control the effects of Dr. Bergman’s patients on her, to amplify their symptoms when diagnosing a problem and otherwise to quiet them. Visiting his clinic, she’s been able to stay longer and to help with more patients before tiring. But La La is too attached to her pets to tune them out. It does little good to eject them from her bedroom because she can sense them throughout the house. Nevertheless, she herds them through the bedroom door and slams it shut, nearly catching Mo’s paw. They whine to be let in, and though La La feels the pain of their exile, she refuses to comfort them, ignoring them well past dinnertime, when their confusion turns to hunger.

  When La La started high school, Zev hired a college student, Deja, to teach La La subjects Zev himself never managed to learn, but now the studious college junior begins to aggravate her, too. La La doesn’t see the point in calculating the area of shapes, how it will help her treat animals, or how the woman can describe math solutions as elegant with an airy grin on her face. The novels she gives La La are even more useless, the hunting of whales in Moby-Dick cruel and unnecessary. La La’s excited to read Animal Farm, but then angry to find pigs and sheep maligned to illustrate political systems invented by people. If that’s satire, she can do without it. Only biology interests her. They study the cellular structures of humans, who are after all just a type of animal. Not an animal La La admires particularly, nor one whose inner life she can read. Why that is, she doesn’t know.

  She no longer looks forward to Dr. Bergman’s visits. She’s sick of being invaded by the trauma of each animal he brings. She has her own problems. The doctor talks endlessly about her responsibility to animals. Who’s responsible for me? she’d like to ask. The next time the doctor calls Zev to say he’s coming, La La sneaks out before he arrives.

  In the early spring warmth, children whiz by on bikes and skateboards, their jackets unzipped and flapping behind them. Robins peck at gray lawns. Months of snow potholed the streets and fissured the sidewalks. La La levers her foot into a crack and sprays out rubble, widening the hole.

  * * *

  A year later, the last of the snow melting and fuzzy gray buds appearing on aspens, La La refuses to go out with Zev anymore. She needs to study if she hopes to get into college and veterinary school, she says. She tells him to fire Deja. She can learn what she needs to know from textbooks, and he should save his money. But when he leaves the house, La La seeks company a mile away, in the alley behind a 7-Eleven, where she often finds the same crew.

  Tamara first spotted La La in the store, shoplifting two packs of gum. Outside, she motioned for La La to accompany her around back, where she held out her hand for one of the packs. “You’re lucky the owner didn’t see,” she said. “He always calls the police.”

  If Tamara hadn’t dropped out of high school, she would be a senior. She wears black jeans to match her boots and a giant black sweatshirt that swallows her fragile hands. Her hair is black in the shade and purple in the sun, shaved on one side. Leonard is older—La La doesn’t know how old—with round plugs in his earlobes and a spiked chain around his neck. He sits on the asphalt, Tamara on his lap, leaning her head back when they kiss.

  Max is La La’s age. He’s always texting his friends in school, even when he talks to La La, and she wonders why he bothers being a truant. His fingernails and wrists need cleaning.

  They’re all broke, so La La suggests robbing a house. Leading them through the neighborhood, past warped shake roofs, and bikes and plastic toys on yellow lawns, she comes to a garage that’s open and empty of cars. At the end of the block, a garbage truck raises a plastic bin in its metal claw. La La herds the group into the garage, uncertain if the operator of the truck has seen them. Standing before the door leading into the house, she pulls a tension wrench and a pick from her pocket. She pokes the wrench into the keyhole and turns, the play in the lock allowing the cylinder to move slightly. She inserts the pick and rakes the descending lock pins, bumping them up and trapping them above the cylinder. When she traps all the pins, the lock releases.

  Leonard whistles. “Nice.”

  La La lifts a finger to her lips and points toward the street. The garbage truck nears the house.

  “Whatever,” Leonard says, without bothering to lower his voice. He takes Tamara’s hand and pulls her inside.

  For once Max has put his phone in his pocket. “This way,” La La whispers, leading him through an overheated hall to a master bedroom that smells like dirty laundry. Sheets pretzel on an unmade bed. It’s mid-morning and the sun shines through the window. Water rings dot a dresser. Shoving aside stockings and thongs in the top drawer, La La doesn’t find any valuables. Then she notices a tube sock bulging at the toe and holds it up. “People are idiots,” she says. Max laughs. She passes him the sock.

  Drawing out a velvet box, he opens it to find a sapphire engagement ring. “Cool.” They gather a laptop, too, and an Xbox.

  The phone rings, startling La La. When a machine answers, a man’s voice tells the caller to leave a message. After the beep, the same voice says, “I thought you’d be home by now. I’ll try your cell.”

  “Let’s go,” La La says.

  In the dining room, Leonard holds a portable CD player and discs in one hand and a bottle of Dewar’s in the other. He swigs the Scotch and hands it to Tamara, who takes a sip.

  “We should get out of here,” La La says.

  “Tamara wants to see if there’s any lingerie she likes,” Leonard says.

  “She likes or you like?” Max says.

  “Same difference.”

  “This isn’t a department store. The owner’s on her way home.” La La’s neck stiffens. Committing a crime with people she hardly knows is starting to seem like a bad idea. “Leave that,” she says to Tamara, indicating the bottle, “and let’s go.”

  Leonard takes the bottle and tilts it back again. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “What about the flat-screen TV? I could use a new TV.”

  “You think we might look suspicious carrying that around?” La La says. You don’t have to grow up robbing houses to understand certain things. A car alarm shrieks, jangling La La’s nerves. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m leaving.”

  “What the fuck. Let’s go,” Leonard says, planting the bottle on the table.

  They exit through the back door. The garbage truck is gone, but the car alarm continues to wail. When did the neighborhood get so busy? A silver-haired woman wearing a visor pushes a baby carriage. A man in an ill-fitting suit drags a wheeled sales case. A skinny teenager hops out of a laundry van and glances at them before turning up a walk with a box of shirts.

  La La wishes she had worn sunglasses and a baseball cap. She sweats through her shirt, the cotton sticking to her back, a clammy second skin. Robbing homes with her father, they always had the car as cover.

  After they duck behind the 7-Eleven, she suggests selling everything at a nearby cleaner’s that she’s heard runs a fencing operation out of the back. It’s a place Zev uses as a last resort, preferring not to work so close to home, but she doesn’t tell the others that. She insists on going alone.

  “We’ll kill you if you rip us off,” Leonard says.

  “Easy,” Max says. “She doesn’t want the guy to get nervous, dealing with a crowd.”

  “Thanks,” La La says to Max. He’s looking up, his eyes yellow and green. Cat’s eyes.

  When La La enters the store, Erik is behind the counter. A skin condition paints his cheeks with a permanent blush, as if he’s ashamed, though La La’s never seen any other evidence of that. He looks past her, expecting Zev.

  “My father sent me,” she says. The place smells of chemicals. Clothing entombed in plastic hangs from a motorized rack. On a chalkboard, someone
has scrawled in green, Happy Spring—Comforters Dry Cleaned $19.99. He leads her to the back, where giant washers and dryers spin. A woman who’s ironing doesn’t look up. The room always appears exactly as the back of a cleaner’s should. La La wonders where the fence keeps the merchandise he buys.

  “I’ll give you one sixty for the lot,” Erik says, after examining the stolen items. It’s ridiculously low.

  Back at the convenience store, La La says the fence paid one twenty and hands the others thirty each.

  “Doesn’t seem like much,” Leonard says, fanning out the bills. “You sure that’s all he gave you?”

  La La shrugs. “What do you think you get for a used CD player?”

  From the 7-Eleven, Leonard purchases two six-packs. La La, Max, and Tamara buy plastic-wrapped pastries. They sit in the alley, pulling apart cheese Danish, chocolate horns, and jelly donuts, filling their mouths and washing down the sticky dough with beer.

  La La’s on her second beer when Max presses a donut, painted with white icing, into her mouth. After she swallows, he leans over and licks her lips, setting them abuzz. She feels aroused, but greater than that is the pleasure of being wanted.

  When the food and beer are gone, she and Max walk to her house. Alone with him, La La doesn’t know what to say. She shoves her hands into her pockets to keep them from trembling.

  Max looks at his phone, a string of texts rolling across the screen. “It’s all bullshit,” he says, but he doesn’t look up.

  La La is counting on Zev not being home yet and is relieved to see the driveway empty. She can’t imagine introducing Max, with his torn white T-shirt and spiked hair, to her father.

  Fresh cat droppings glisten in the litter box in a corner of her room. Books about wild and domesticated animals fill shelves. She once pored over them, preparing to become a veterinarian. Mo hides under the dresser, only the tip of her tail showing.

  “Do you like animals?” La La asks.

  “I like other things more.” Max pulls off his T-shirt, revealing an ivory chest and nipples pierced by silver rings. He sits on the bed. “You can lick them if you want.” The metal is cold and strange against La La’s tongue, but it doesn’t matter. She gladly takes them in her mouth to feel she belongs to someone other than Zev. Max unbuttons La La’s shirt and unclips her bra. He cups her small breasts, his fingers dry. When his lips replace his hands, she forgets to breathe, and freezes for fear of interrupting the warm rain of sensations now on, now underneath her skin.