Traps

by MacKenzie Bezos

  “Ouch!” she says. She steps right up to Jessica, standing almost between her knees, and takes her hand by the fingertips. “So much for man’s best friend. Wiggle for me.” Jessica wiggles. “Good. Can you make a fist? Nice. And flex out like this? Okay, good.” She clicks across the room to the counter where Velasquez is standing. She opens a jar on the counter and takes out a long wood-shafted Q-tip. She leans back against the counter, crosses her ankles, and snaps the Q-tip in half neatly. She points a thumb at Velasquez. “Husband?”

  “Friend,” Jessica says.

  The doctor narrows her eyes at Jessica in her sunglasses, and then at Velasquez. “If you say so. Okay, pop quiz, bosom buddies. There were zero cases of human rabies in Nevada last year, and only one in the whole country, and that one wasn’t transmitted by a dog, it was a bat, which is typical. Mostly these days it’s bats. And what’s the number-one risk factor for death from a bat bite? You first.” She looks squarely at Jessica.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “Guess anyway.”

  “Um …”

  The doctor rolls her eyes and turns to Velasquez. “Your turn, big boy.”

  “Not seeking treatment,” he says.

  The doctor raises her hand toward him for a high five, still looking at Jessica, still leaning against the counter with her thick ankles crossed and her polished shoes gleaming. Velasquez waits to see if she will give up, and when she does not he meets her palm without enthusiasm, and she lowers her hand.

  “Top shelf of the carny booth! Get this boy a jumbo monkey! Yes—the damn things move so fast, and the bites are tiny and painless, so mostly people don’t even know they’ve been bitten. Bottom line is, if you’ve spent any time with a bat, you need help. Code red. Inside there’s a chance you’re already dying. Stand up and take off your hat and sunglasses for me.”

  For a moment Jessica does not realize this is not part of her lesson on bat bites. But when the doctor stares at her, waiting, she slips off the table and removes her hat with her left hand. With her injured one she pulls off her sunglasses, keeping her head bowed and staring down at the dark lenses as if they are somehow important.

  It makes the doctor look at them too. “Chanel—nice! Check out my shoes.”

  She holds one shiny leopard-print toe out and turns her thick ankle this way and that, and Jessica nods appreciatively. She lowers her foot and meets Jessica in the center of the room to take her by the wrist. “With dogs, not so much. If they hurt you, they make it extremely clear. They warn you with growling, give you a good hard bite, no secret poisons. Here, let me hold those for you a minute so I can test that hand.” She takes the glasses and slips them in the patch pocket of her lab coat. “Now: do me a favor and turn your palm up but don’t look at it, look only at my eyes.”

  Jessica raises her head.

  “Rice and beans! You’re Jessica Lessing!”

  Jessica gives her a tight smile. The doctor’s face is so close to hers she can smell the coffee on her breath.

  “Your dad’s on two. Everyone’s switched from talking about last night’s Dancing with the Stars to talking about whether you’ll come visit him. Have you seen him yet?”

  Jessica looks down at her hand, and the doctor’s fingers encircling her wrist. “No.”

  “He’s a real piece of work. I’ve got one just like him, so I feel for you. Total bilker. First-class flimflammer. Grade A deceiver. Coldhearted snake.” She holds her left fist out above Jessica’s wounded hand. “Blow it up for epically shitty childhoods.”

  After a startled second Jessica holds her left fist up to meet it, and the doctor pops open her fist and shoots her fingers waggling in victory toward the fluorescent ceiling, and then lowers them to rest on her hip. In her other hand she still has Jessica by the wrist.

  “So is Arjawal your married name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s hubby from?”

  “Orange County. But his parents are from Mumbai.”

  “Computer scientist? Lab scientist? Doctor?”

  “Doctor. An ER doctor, actually.”

  “Ha! Well you can tell him you won the Podunk ER doctor lottery on this one. I graduated 4.0 from Johns Hopkins, and I vaccinated a hundred and seventy-five bat-bite victims for rabies on a Doctors Without Borders trip to Peru. I only picked Summerlin for the sun, spas, and the low-date-frequency bachelors—gamblers, golfers, comedy clubbers. I love a man who’s only in town to love me once a month. Now: tell me whether each of these touches feels sharp or dull. But no peeking. Look only at me.” Jessica looks up at her, and the urge to look away is almost irresistible. She quells it by making a study of her irises, which are so dark they are almost indistinguishable from her pupils. It is ironic how much she hates a closeup. But when she is acting she is someone else. The pain she might feel or cause in any exchange is not hers. There is nothing to regret. The first part she read for was in high school. She had just that week extracted herself from her father’s apartment by moving into a spare bedroom she saw advertised on a handwritten flyer on the bulletin board in the cafeteria, and the only rent turned out to be child care her landlords summoned by knocking on her door at odd hours and handing her their toddler so they could go in the kitchen and fight. The audition manager asked her to read something from a book of monologues, Alison’s lost-baby speech from Look Back in Anger, and when she cried onstage at the end, the boy reading Jimmy for her cried too, and so did the director in her folding chair below, but afterward instead of apologies and averted glances, there was only applause.

  Staring into the doctor’s eyes she feels unnerved and vulnerable in a way that she never does in front of a camera or onstage. The doctor presses the broken tip to the pad below her thumb.

  “Sharp,” Jessica tells her.

  “Good girl.” She flips the tip around and presses below her index finger.

  “Dull.”

  The doctor moves along this way, testing her, looking frankly into Jessica’s pale blue eyes, and then says, “Bingo.” She taps the pedal on a step can with the toe of her shoe and drops the broken swab inside. “Your nerves are fine. Now—about Cujo. Where’d you find this cuddle bunny?”

  Jessica tries to keep her face neutral. “About half a mile from here.”

  “Have you called Animal Control to report it?”

  “No.”

  “We should do that.” She pulls a cell phone from her pocket. “We’re required to report bites by loose animals.”

  Jessica says, “Wait.”

  The doctor raises her eyebrows.

  Jessica says, “She’s not a stray.”

  “I thought you told the intake nurse you were worried about rabies.”

  “I just thought it was worth checking.”

  “Isn’t she current on her shots?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did you ask the owner?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s call them, then.” She holds out her iPhone, but Jessica hesitates. The doctor’s face is smooth and unblinking. The diamonds wink in her ears. She is frank-faced and sharp-eyed, scanning Jessica like some kind of animal herself, alert for clues, and so quick that before Jessica can even compose a response, she says: “Holy crap, it’s your dad’s dog isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s like your own personal Book of Exodus, this guy.”

  A puff of nervous laughter escapes Jessica. She clears her throat.

  The doctor says, “No worries.” She slips her phone back in her pocket. “I can figure it out without a shot record. Was the bite provoked or unprovoked?”

  “I wasn’t mistreating her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “This isn’t Hard Copy, Pretty Woman. ‘Provoked’ for a dog is anything that involves a biscuit. Were you feeding her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay: provoked. And how’s she now?”

  “All right. Lying m
uzzled in a friend’s car.”

  “What are friends for?” She glances at Velasquez with a tucked smile and then looks back at Jessica and winks. “So that’s plenty. You should quarantine her for ten days. If she gets sick or acts strange before the days are up, we should test her to see if she’s got rabies so we know whether to treat you.” She takes a roll of gauze from a drawer and begins wrapping Jessica’s hand, standing close. Jessica reads the ID badge dangling from a lanyard around her neck: Lisa Kim.

  “Can’t we test her now?”

  “Sure, but we’d have to cut off her head and send it to a lab.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “That’s what everybody says—‘Poor Cujo! We mustn’t harm Cujo!’ ” She finishes the bandage, almost a mitten now, and tapes it off. “But if she starts acting weird, don’t go all Jain monk on me. At that point you definitely have to call and take her in for the ax. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She finds herself smiling.

  “Because your symptoms would be next, and by the time they show up, it would be too late for you. There’s no treatment after the onset of symptoms, it’s just final makeup for you and everyone else that bitch bites, so there’s no wait-and-see. Any questions?”

  “No.” Jessica shakes her head and smiles more fully. She feels lightheaded around this woman suddenly, almost tipsy. “Thanks for helping me.”

  “No problem,” she says. She takes the iPhone back out of her pocket. “Free with insurance copay and a photo for my tabloid blog.”

  Jessica feels herself tighten again, and Velasquez takes a step forward.

  “Kidding!” she says. “Give me a cell phone number, and I’ll go upstairs and do a little recon for you. Check around your dad’s room and make sure there aren’t any orderlies hanging around with their cell phone cameras.”

  Velasquez gives her a number, and she types it in.

  “Got it.” She looks at Jessica. “It was a pleasure meeting you. Keep up the Advil. And look up quarantine guidelines on the Health Department website. Don’t mess around. The odds are super low, but starting an epidemic of rabies would be a lot of years of bad juju.”

  “And an Us Weekly cover besides,” Jessica says, surprising herself, and Dr. Kim explodes with laughter.

  “Damn, I’m a good doctor.” Then she looks at Velasquez. “Okay. So you know Dad’s room number already, I assume.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll call you in two,” she says and she clicks out the door.

  Only after she is gone does Jessica realize Dr. Kim still has her sunglasses. The urge to put them on is an instinct that doesn’t die easily. She thinks next to put on her hat, but instantly she recognizes that threading her ponytail through its hole is something she can’t manage with her bandaged hand. At last she moves to put her hands in her pockets, but she has the hat to hold and the bandage Dr. Kim gave her is much too large, and she is left to hold her arms at her sides like Dana and Velasquez, exposed but ready for whatever might come next.

  Through the open door she hears water running. A tray clattering. Sneakers squeaking from one room to another. Velasquez’s phone rings.

  He presses a button and listens for a few seconds. “Thanks,” he says. Then he presses a button again and slips it back in his pocket. He looks out the door and up and down the hallway and nods at her before going out so she knows she can follow. And it turns out the hat and sunglasses weren’t needed after all. They move quickly down the empty hall, past an empty gurney and a rack of bedpans and boxes of surgical gloves and a row of IV stands and into an empty stairwell. She follows him up, watching his eyes pan up and down and around corners, everywhere but on her, and he opens a door on the second floor and checks in both directions and nods again, leading her down another empty hallway to a blond wood door with a brushed stainless-steel handle. The door is very smooth. The handle is the kind you push down on. This is what she will have to do to go in.

  “This is it,” he says. His brown shaved head shines in the fluorescent light. His face is friendly in a neutral way that strikes her as so kind and tactful she feels a lump in her throat. Akhil was wrong. Into his absence has stepped one surprising ally after another, like a path of stones.

  She says, “Do you know if it’s a shared room or private?”

  “Private,” he says.

  Jessica pushes down on the door handle, releasing the latch with a click, and Velasquez nods. He will not try to follow her here. She pushes open the door just enough to slip through, and she disappears inside.

  The room is small, suffused with light from a south-facing window, and so full of cords and tubes and monitors with blinking lights that it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust and narrow her focus to the center of the room and see that her father is sleeping. Overweight beneath the sheet, his jaw slack, his skin powdery pale, his orangey-brown dyed hair looking brittle against the pillowcase and revealing its silvered roots. Two little circles of buff-colored tape on his collarbone and two on his forehead, both with wires coming out and hooking him up to a machine. The open neckline of a peach-colored cotton dressing gown he must hate. The window behind him shows a broad swath of blue sky. She looks at him breathing shallowly, his big belly rising and falling beneath the sheet, and feels a strange sense of anticlimax. She had been bracing herself for his attack, armoring herself, talking herself up. Now she has to wait. She looks at her watch. She thinks about touching him and shaking him, and then she sees the chart at the end of his bed.

  She takes it off its hook and examines it:

  Name: Gabriel Fletcher

  Date of Birth: April 20, 1950

  Condition: Subdural hematoma, 14 days unresponsive

  At first she imagines it is within his power to fake this too. She puts a hand on his powdery white arm with its pale gray hairs, and nothing inside him stirs. Not even a twitch behind his eyelids. She shakes him, gently at first, and then enough to make his big belly move. She reaches up finally and opens one wrinkled eyelid with her fingertip, and the ice blue iris stares up at the ceiling like the eye of a fish.

  She jerks back her hand, and the lid slides shut slowly. You could say it sinks.

  Jessica shakes her head. She wrinkles her forehead, and her lip trembles. She puts her mittened hand on her hip, scowling, watching his belly rise and fall. Then her eyes grow glassy. She looks back out the window, at the empty blue sky. She looks at him again. There are tiny spots on his skin, larger and more misshapen than freckles, from age. The skin on his jaw and beneath his nose shows a peppering of gray stubble, and the skin at his neck is so slack that it pools a bit to either side on the pillow, like the neck skin of certain lizards. She opens his eye again with her fingertips and looks at the cold blue iris. She notices that there is a thin limn of color at the border, almost green, like weathered copper. Tears stream down her cheeks. She looks at his mouth and sees that there is a rim of pearly pink inside, and that the lips themselves are so dry they are cracked, flaked with spittle at both corners. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her chapstick. She uncaps it, her own lip trembling, and with her big bandaged hand reaches out and puts it on him, his mouth collapsing a bit, the lips crumpling and slipping off to the side as she pulls, but she doesn’t withdraw. She does both lips, coating them thickly with the waxy balm, and then she recaps it.

  There is a knock at the door then, and Jessica starts and slips the chapstick in her pocket, as if she has been caught at something illicit. The door opens, and Velasquez admits a man not much younger than her father. His hair is white and his tan hands, sticking out from the sleeves of his lab coat and gripping a clipboard, are wrinkled and corded like the root of a tree. “Excuse me,” he says, and Velasquez lets the door close behind him. Jessica braces herself, although she is not sure for what kind of blow, or from what point of view she expects him to deliver it. As a doctor, a reprimand for applying chapstick? As a tabloid reader, brusque treatmen
t for being so spoiled and cold? As an old man, a tone of disappointment for being less attentive than the daughter he’d want at his own deathbed? He is fit and wiry, like Akhil’s father, so perhaps she is merely bracing herself for some of Akhil’s father’s oblivious frankness; he stumbles over people so frequently with his observations and advice that his wife and children have developed deep stores of eye-rolling good humor and skins the enviable thickness of bark. The doctor starts to raise a hand to shake Jessica’s, but when he sees her enormous bandage, he lowers his hand and smiles. “I’m Dr. Stern,” he says. “I’ve been treating your dad for the last week.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jessica blurts.

  The man’s brow knits sympathetically. “What for?”

  So many things. But what she says is: “I was probably supposed to ask before coming in here.”

  Dr. Stern shrugs. “It’s not that uncommon. It’s not a moment in life when people think about asking permission. I’d probably do the same myself,” he says. “Even without your complications.”

  After the pictures her father took of her children appeared in People magazine, there was an episode of Hard Copy where he pleaded on-screen for her to pick up the phone and call the studio so he could explain. After that even reviews of her films devoted at least a paragraph to the spectacle of her family life. Jessica feels a rush of gratitude toward this man. She thinks with relief of her sunglasses in Dr. Kim’s pocket, not just an acceptable loss now but a lucky accident, as if she has narrowly missed stumbling into a mosque in a tank top. She wants to thank him for all the ways in which he has just been kind (empathy, candor, tact …), but she is afraid if she tries to name them she’ll start to cry. She swallows. “Thanks,” she manages finally.

  Dr. Stern says, “Do you have any questions?”

  Her throat clots again with tears at the magnitude of this opening. He puts on a pair of reading glasses, just to prepare to look at her father’s chart, of course, but in the context of this moment it makes him look so like the magical wise old man from a fairy tale, her mind swims with inappropriate questions: Why doesn’t my dad love me? How long before I ruin my daughters? What am I doing wrong? She looks out the window to collect herself, and after a few seconds something small enough to ask occurs to her.