Other People's Pets

by R. L. Maizes

  A vision of her dancing distracts him, and he barely sees the rest of the neighborhood sites.

  In the theater, he leans away from her, his ribs pressing into the opposite armrest. She smells like herbal soap, the fragrance lighter than the rose perfume Elissa wore. The movie is slow, but Julia seems engrossed. Zev wonders what she was like as a therapist. How many of her clients’ secrets she learned, and whether she held them close or shared them.

  After the movie, they drive to a steak house Julia recommends, Zev thinking about the cost, not knowing if he’s expected to pay for her. At the restaurant, Zev orders a double Scotch to settle his nerves. Antlers, rifles, and photographs of an African safari hang on the pine walls. Placards read “Vegetarian” is an Indian word for “bad hunter” and Vegetarians eat for free. La La wouldn’t approve, but Zev points them out to Julia, who laughs while shaking her head, having it both ways. She sips her gin and tonic and says how much she enjoyed the movie.

  “That makes one of us.” Zev lays a napkin on his lap.

  “What didn’t you like?”

  “A woman falling for a homeless man, taking him in, and rehabilitating him? Especially an older woman? Please.”

  “Especially an older woman?” Julia’s ears flush.

  Zev tears into a roll, scattering crumbs onto the table. He sweeps the crumbs into a pile and pinches them onto his plate. Julia glares at him, her eyes blue and green with a sprinkling of yellow, like opals. He regrets telling the truth about the movie and tries to explain. “The only thing a homeless guy would make an older woman feel is afraid.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You asked what I thought,” he says.

  “Maybe an older woman would be confident in her ability to read someone’s character. To see the diamond in the rough.”

  “More like a cubic zirconia.”

  She examines the menu, though she told Zev on the way over that the porterhouse was the thing to get.

  “I didn’t mean to insult you,” he says.

  “No, you just said what was on your mind. Unfortunately, what was on your mind was an ageist, sexist stereotype.”

  Zev is sure whatever he says will be wrong, so he signals the waiter for another drink, and they order dinner.

  Julia sets down the menu. “Do you think your daughter will visit?”

  “She’s pretty busy. How about your kids?”

  “They were here for Easter with my grandkids. They won’t be back until Christmas. When they’re young, they turn to you for everything. I know some people think that’s bad, but I loved it. Now they’re grown and I spend six months pining for them, only to have them visit for a long weekend that feels like it’s over before it begins.”

  “My daughter didn’t turn to me for everything. I sometimes wish she had. But I know what you mean about them growing up.” La La has probably discovered his disappearance by now. His and Mo’s. Perhaps she’s hurt, which wasn’t his intention.

  The waiter brings their salads. Zev picks out the red onion and tomato and coats the rest in Thousand Island dressing. Julia splashes hers with oil and vinegar.

  Zev offers her the rolls, but she refuses. “You don’t need to worry about your weight,” he says.

  “What makes you think I’m worried about my weight?”

  From her tone, he gathers he’s made another misstep, but he doesn’t have any idea what it is. “It’s just that you’re not having bread. And you could have it. You’re not fat.”

  “Thanks for giving me permission. I have celiac disease. I can’t eat gluten. And if I were fat, as you say, it wouldn’t be any business of yours, would it?”

  “I guess not.” Zev looks around. Pleasant, easy conversations drift his way. He wipes his mouth with his napkin. “I’m not very good at this.”

  “You’re about average. At least you didn’t insist on driving or suggest I have a glass of wine instead of gin and tonic. I’ve been on dates that made me wish I were gay.”

  Zev doesn’t know what to say to that, so he busies himself once again with the rolls.

  A server brings platters of bloody steak, potatoes overflowing with sour cream and chives, and mushrooms and string beans sautéed in butter. They eat, sharing sounds of satisfaction, grunts and sighs. Their plates empty, Julia orders a glass of port, and Zev does the same, trying something new.

  “So much of my life I was a mother and a therapist,” Julia says. “Those jobs felt important. Now I swim and read, play golf, go out to dinner with a nice man if I’m lucky. Sometimes I ask myself why I’m still here.”

  “Sounds to me like you earned your retirement.”

  “What about you? When do you plan to retire?”

  Zev sips his port. “As long as people keep getting locked out, I guess I’ll keep working.”

  “Do you play golf or tennis? I could always use a partner.”

  “Never learned either one. I was always busy working or helping my daughter.” He refolds his napkin.

  “I bet you were a good father.”

  “I did the best I could. She used to think it wasn’t good enough.”

  “Kids expect you to be perfect. They tell you when you’re not. Until they have their own kids. Then all of a sudden you’re a parenting guru.” She motions for the waiter and asks for dessert menus. Zev doesn’t say a word. “What happened to your wife?” Julia says.

  “We split when my daughter was pretty young. She never wanted kids. How about your husband?”

  “All the things he admired about me when we were dating, my dedication and how I nurtured people who weren’t related to me, became sore spots as soon as we were married. He went crazy after we got divorced. Broke into the house just to mess with me. I thought it was a burglar at first, but then I realized he only took things that had sentimental value.” She lifts the glass that held the port to her mouth though it’s empty. “I had to get a restraining order.”

  Afraid if he looks at her, he’ll betray himself, Zev busies himself with the check, calculating how many more dinners like this he can afford. “That’s awful,” he says.

  After dinner, they drive to Julia’s house. She doesn’t have a pool, she says, so she uses the one at his apartment and no one complains. Zev isn’t surprised. A nice-looking woman, why would anyone complain? It would be different for someone like him. He escorts her to the door.

  Brushing his bangs from his eyes, she says, “How about salsa Friday night? We could stop for an early-bird special first, say five o’clock. My treat this time.”

  It’s a day he plans to work, and he’ll probably be tired. “That sounds nice.”

  He walks back to his apartment beneath a sky full of stars that pulse just for him and a full moon that throws shadows in his honor, surprised that a woman like Julia wants to see him again. Pretty enough to be an actress in a TV commercial, shouting across a tennis net about her worry-free retirement. Perhaps it’s because she’s lonely. Or, who knows, maybe it’s the haircut. He’d like to tell La La but will have to settle for sharing his news with Mo.

  14

  At Zev’s house early Saturday morning, La La searches for something to lead her to Elissa. The police seized the ankle monitors, the train setup, and the screwdriver. Otherwise, the place looks as it always has, if a bit dustier. Her father didn’t take much with him. His down coat hangs in the closet—a shiny indentation where his neck rubbed the collar—and his dresser drawers are nearly full.

  She leafs through his file cabinets. Zev kept receipts for just about everything: groceries, appliances, paint. He saved the yellowing slips well past their usefulness for returns, as if he were marshaling the proof that whatever else he might have done, he provided for his family. Instructions for two dishwashers, the refrigerator, five vacuum cleaners, and three hot water heaters are filed alphabetically by manufacturer name. But in all of Zev’s papers, La La finds no evidence of her mother.

  After Elissa disappeared, Zev held on to her belongings for a few months, perhaps hop
ing she would return. A pair of her mother’s cowboy boots stood at attention in the front closet for a single season, and La La would slip her feet into the stiff leather and clomp around the dining room. Though her mother’s wool hat slid down over her eyes, La La wore it and felt her way around the kitchen, touching the cold metal sink and Formica counters sandy with Borax residue. “Take it off!” Zev would yell, and La La did, pressing it to her nose to smell Elissa’s orange blossom shampoo.

  A mysterious clock having run out one day, her father bagged all of Elissa’s possessions: wool coats and sweaters with stray brown hairs clinging to the shoulders; corduroy pants, the nap worn at the knees; bottles of lotion clogged at the nozzle; pill containers that bore her name; the books she had bought, which were most of their books, and included titles that puzzled La La, such as The Second Sex, The Women’s Room, and The Bell Jar. Zev got rid of Elissa’s cassette tapes, CDs, and the art she’d chosen, the empty walls mirroring how La La felt. Using a sewing scissors, he sliced Elissa’s image from every photograph. Of all the things associated with Elissa, only the barbed rosebushes, the flower box, and the tulips were spared. He put the bulging garbage bags out on the curb, crows circling overhead.

  He even excluded Elissa’s parents from their lives. When Ruth called on La La’s tenth birthday, La La overheard Zev say, “If she wanted her daughter to know her family, maybe she should have stuck around.”

  Sitting in the twice-abandoned living room, La La looks through photo albums from which Zev excised even the faintest reflection of her mother in windows and lakes. The albums are like rotten smiles, filled with holes.

  In a cardboard box in the attic, La La finds her old stuffed animals. She pulls out the lion, stuffing leaking from its seams, and sets it aside to take home. A plastic storage container yields a Popsicle-stick boat with a gap in its hull, a one-eyed sock puppet, and a homemade candle without a wick, remnants of art projects she made with her father. Another container holds cymbals, a bell, and maracas, their muted percussive sounds as sad as a funeral dirge. Zev gathered the instruments for a music class, he and La La accompanying Elvis Presley and Alabama with more enthusiasm than skill. For years, La La resented her father for keeping her from school. She put it near the top of a long list of ways her father had neglected her. But now she sees how hard he worked to give her experiences other kids had, going so far as to make Popsicle-stick boats with their messy glue and candles with their drippy wax, projects that must have driven him crazy, though he never showed it. Maybe she wasn’t as neglected as she thought.

  Zev must be settled in his new place, wherever that is. Even Mo will have started to feel at home. She wonders if one or the other is thinking about her.

  La La combs the musty room for something with her mother’s address—a letter she sent or divorce papers. Coming across a box labeled ELISSA’S COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS, La La imagines a transcript shoved between pages. La La could contact the college and try to get a recent address. When she grasps the box, it’s disappointingly light, but she doesn’t give up. Even a single book could do the trick. Opening the box, she finds rolled streamers, uninflated balloons, and a folded sign—HAPPY BIRTHDAY LA LA—supplies Zev dug out once a year, the misleading label a remnant from an earlier move. She crushes a roll of brightly colored streamers in her fist.

  It takes two weekends to go through the house and brings La La no closer to Elissa. Outside the kitchen window, a boxer samples new shoots of grass, but to La La the season feels more like an ending than a beginning.

  In the spring, Elissa boiled matzo balls for Passover. Once, as steam from the pot coated her face, she told La La about the neurotic animals she worked with: a beagle who howled when left alone, an African parrot who picked out his feathers, a kitten afraid of her own reflection. Later that day, standing in the hall, La La overheard Elissa and Zev arguing in the kitchen about adopting a pet.

  “So many are homeless,” Elissa said. “I grew up with animals. I miss having a dog or a cat around.”

  “You don’t even like taking care of La La,” Zev said.

  La La’s cheeks tingled. She pressed the side of her face against the wall to cool it.

  “It would help me relax,” Elissa said.

  “Isn’t that what your pills are for?”

  Her mother sighed. “Fuck it. I don’t know why I bother.”

  La La covered her ears. Though she was thirsty, she returned to her room empty-handed, closing the door behind her.

  Without Zev in it, the kitchen seems to have shrunk. The castle drawing still hangs on the refrigerator. Odd that her father never put it away. Though La La has looked at it a thousand times before, this time she thinks she sees writing on the back. Perhaps it’s just a trick of the afternoon light. Pinching a corner, she teases the drawing away from the refrigerator, the cellophane tape coming away cleanly. On the back, the name “Elissa” is written above a column of phone numbers, all but the last—which has a different area code—crossed out.

  La La sits down, the list in her hand. Zev had Elissa’s phone number all these years, and yet he kept it from her. “Why?” she cries out in frustration, though there’s no one to hear. He’s almost as bad as Elissa. Did her mother and father talk? They must have, or why keep the number? She removes the tape, gingerly. Folds the paper and sticks it into her pocket. At least she finally has a way to reach her mother. Maybe Elissa just needs to hear La La’s voice to realize how much she misses her daughter.

  * * *

  That night, La La calls the number, but gets voice mail. “You’ve reached Elissa and Chloe Roberts. Sorry we can’t come to the phone. Leave a message, and we’ll get back to you.” When she hears the beep, she hangs up. Elizabeth Roberts. No wonder she couldn’t find her. And who the hell is Chloe? She paces the length of the kitchen. Did her mother have another child? A child she actually loved? With a man named Roberts?

  La La runs a people-finder search on the name “Elizabeth Roberts,” and the results include a dozen women the right age, one with an e-mail address at the Mesa Animal Shelter in Arizona. On the shelter’s website, La La recognizes Elissa’s photo, though her mother has aged and her expression is more businesslike and less angry than La La remembers.

  The next night she calls again. When she gets the maddening greeting, she’s prepared. “This is La La. I know it’s been a long time, but I was hoping to speak to you. Dad was arrested. Well, that was a while ago. Now he’s a fugitive. Mom”—a word she isn’t planning to say, that just comes out—“please call me.” She leaves her number and hangs up, then sinks into the overstuffed chair. Her head lists forward. She wanted desperately to find her mother, but now that she has, nothing has changed. Clem is with Naomi, and it’s his weekend with the dogs. Mo and Zev are still gone. And La La’s alone.

  Visiting the One of a Kind blog, she leaves a post under the pseudonym orphan1234, with a new Gmail address she signed up for: You ought to have a One of a Cruel blog, she writes, because there’s so much more cruelty than kindness. Parents abandoning their children. Men abandoning their fiancées.

  As she’s getting ready for bed, she gets an e-mail from Clem: Are you okay? Call me if you want to talk. But stay off the blog, please.

  Two days later, no word from Elissa, La La tries again. “Please, please call me,” she says. And then, “It’s La La.” She hates herself for begging and for leaving her number a second time, knowing her mother might not have bothered to keep it.

  15

  From his BMW, Zev observes a row of adobe McMansions Friday morning. The sun burns a hole through his windshield, cutting below the brim of his newsboy cap and penetrating his sunglasses. A mud-colored roadrunner dashes across the street with a lizard in its mouth. Bright blue in the cartoons La La used to watch, its actual appearance surprises Zev.

  A woodpecker hammers at a saguaro. What magic the bird uses to avoid the cactus’s spines, Zev wants to know. Zev, too, needs to find a way to survive in the desert habitat.

 
At seven forty-five, an Acura pulls out of the garage of a split-level house. Down the street, a woman in a pink bathrobe picks up a newspaper from the end of the driveway. She checks out Zev’s car, and he pretends to fiddle with the radio. When she goes inside, Zev drives around the corner and down the block before parking. He returns to the split-level, ignoring the red-and-white security stickers on the window and the sign in the yard, which are sold as a set on Amazon for less than twenty dollars. Holding a clipboard, he rings the bell. He pokes around unsuccessfully for a spare key. Maybe he’ll have better luck around back. As he passes a bronze sculpture topped by a cow skull at the edge of the yard, he looks away. He doesn’t want to be reminded of death—Claude Thomas’s death, or his own death at the hands of police or a frightened homeowner. The backyard bumps up against the foothills.

  Pulling a wrench from his bag, he smashes a window. The sound seems to echo louder than it ever has before because the stakes of getting caught are so much higher now that he’s wanted for murder. He ties on a bandanna, concealing his face from any cameras inside, and climbs into a playroom. Toy cars park in a plastic garage and line up at the start of a miniature raceway. Beanbag chairs hold the impressions of small bottoms. Zev unlocks the back door and walks toward the front of the house.

  Low voices from the kitchen float into the hall, and he stops. How did they miss the window shattering? As he begins to retreat, a salesman offers to buy all cars, all cars no matter the condition. The sound is coming from a television. But is someone watching, or did the owner leave it on in his absence? Zev listens for a cup clinking against a saucer, a fork hitting a plate, water running in the sink, anything to let him know he isn’t alone, but hears only flat, recorded sounds from a TV speaker. He glances into the room, double-checking that it’s empty.

  Upstairs in the master bedroom closet, he collects gold and silver bolo ties, embedded with precious and semiprecious stones. Hundred-dollar bills fill the toe of a dusty Oxford. A gold rope chain and a Star of David hang openly on a hook, as if God will protect them.