THE TRAP Read online

  On his last trip home but one, he had found out. He had come in from the road and despite his best intentions, no doubt because he was exhausted and jet-lagged and strung out, launched into a recitation of all his vexations and troubles with the movie.

  Liv sat at the table in the kitchen, as the clock ticked toward midnight of a day that must have been as long for her as it was for him, and with little prospect of sleep that night, and sipped some herbal tea that smelled like wet weeds from the side of the road, and listened patiently. Or seemed to. She cocked her head to one side, her eyes stayed on him, she nodded now and then, but she didn’t say anything. She seemed drawn, but it was late. He noticed her look at the clock once and then a few minutes later, glance at it again.

  Boring her, he thought, boring her titless. But she surprised him.

  She stood up abruptly and crossed to the sink, drew water, and tapped aspirin from the bottle she kept on the windowsill, and knocked back the tablets.

  It hit him then that she had been waiting for it to be time, sitting there holding on, waiting. When the bottle said take the medicine every four hours, the pharmacist’s daughter never took it until every minute of the four hours had been counted off.

  He saw as if for the first time the depth of the smudges under her eyes, as dark as the woods in which the gingerbread house-studio stood, the gauntness, the tension in her jawline, and knew everything he had said had flowed over her like a cold rain. Maybe she had absorbed some of it through her pores, enough to make her shiver uncomfortably, but she had not actually heard a word. She had just endured it. She had been waiting. That was all she could do just then.

  He had shut up then, and put his arms around her, and she had cried, his woman who never cried. And he had it out of her, how the goddamn tooth hurt all the time so she couldn’t sleep or eat or do anything, and it had been root canalled a half dozen times and been anesthetized to a faretheewell, and it still hurt, her whole face and head hurt past thinking around or about. He shouted at her out of his own unspeakable guilt, so she had stopped crying, which made him feel even worse. And the next day he had made her promise to have the goddamn tooth out and had gone back to the movie set because he had to, and with guilty relief because he couldn’t look at her without feeling like a total shit.

  And then when he was supposed to be working, he couldn’t think about anything else except Liv, and every night he called home and then he called the airlines to book a flight home, and then didn’t take it, and when he did come home again, she was visibly recovering, and he was so relieved, he stayed an extra day, and went back to work half-convinced it had never been as serious as it seemed.

  The heat of the late summer day is as ephemeral as summer itself. All of a sudden it was getting colder as well as darker, and he was hugely empty. Pat ground out the cigarette with his heel and started back to the house.

  Clearly, they had been apart too much. He would have to try to make it up. Liv was getting stronger, she was working again, she would be all right, but it would be an enormous relief to have her back in Portland, with her family to keep her company and keep an eye on her. It wouldn’t be long now and the movie would be finished, would make it or fail on its own, and they would all be back together again. It was just a matter of a lot more hugging and kissing so both Liv and Travis knew how they stood with him.

  When he glimpsed the light of the house through the trees, he stepped up his pace as much as he dared through the unreliable undergrowth, thinking of how a little icy gin would set him up. They would all feel better with charred red meat and Liv’s Caesar salad and some baked potato in their stomachs. A prescription of which both his late mother, the everloving Ellen Russell, and both of Liv’s parents, Doe the pharmacist and Marguerite the smiling dragon, would have approved.

  “ ‘And that was the end of him,’” read Liv, and closed the book.

  Travis shuddered a long, satisfied sigh. Bedclothes clutched tight under his chin, he pressed his head back into the pillows.

  Liv kissed his tear-swollen eyelids in quick succession. Giggling, Travis curled up against the sudden onslaught of affection.

  The bedroom door opened. Pat peered around its edge. “Ready, babe?”

  Liv glanced up at him. “Right with you,” she said.

  The door closed.

  It was too much to hope that Travis hadn’t noticed his father hadn’t even looked at him, much less said goodnight. The boy flopped onto his belly to hide his face in his pillows.

  Liv smoothed Travis’ hair. Gradually, he relaxed.

  She heard the screen door slap shut behind Pat and then the suck of his lighter from the stoop. In the dark beyond Travis’ screened window, she could see the flame flare in Pat’s face before it went out. The occasional red coal of his cigarette marked his position as he loitered restless in the yard, waiting for her.

  Liv tucked in the bedclothes, picked up Travis’ discarded jeans, T-shirt, socks, and Underoos, and dropped them into the laundry bag in his closet. Not the night to hassle him about picking up his clothes. She switched off the bedside lamp, leaving only E.T.’s heartlight glowing from his nightlight. She bent over Travis to kiss him again.

  “Goodnight, baby,” she whispered.

  He was asleep.

  Hand on the door, she was startled by the perfume of marijuana coming in through his window.

  Suddenly her teeth hurt. She ducked into her bathroom. The top shelf of the medicine cabinet was lined with prescription bottles of narcotics. She hardly even noticed them anymore. She took two extrastrength aspirin. Gripping the basin with both hands, she tried to relax the reflexive tensing of her facial muscles against the pain. There was nothing she could do about the pallor that yellowed her skin to the color of a faded bruise. At least it was dark of night and everyone would be drunk. She picked up her cardigan on the way out.

  In the living room, Sarah was ensconced in front of the TV, watching a taped movie while listening to Bruce Springsteen through the earphones of her new Walkman. Liv knew it was Springsteen even though only Sarah could hear the music. Since Pat had given her her first Springsteen record the previous Christmas, she had listened to no one else. Pat had grown so bored with “Born to Run,” he had composed an obscene parody to sing along with it. With the Walkman, Sarah could listen to Springsteen by herself. It was a coming home present as much to Pat from Pat, as to Sarah from Pat.

  Liv touched Sarah’s shoulder so as not to startle her, and then pressed the mute button to make herself heard over the music.

  Sarah blinked at her.

  “Trav’s out,” Liv told her. “We’re going.”

  Sarah nodded and blinked again: Message received. Over and Out. Her eyes glazed over.

  Liv released the mute button, feeling disconcertingly as if she were turning herself off.

  It was only necessary, of course, that Sarah be able to hear Travis and the telephone. Liv couldn’t be sure Sarah would hear Travis if he cried out for her, but there was no doubt she could hear the phone ring over the sound of the Walkman. It was actually unwise to stand between her and a ringing telephone. Off to camp at the beginning of the summer still just a big kid, she had come home two weeks previous a full-blown teen. And since then, the phone had jangled constantly for Sarah, rarely for anyone else. Boys with voices that ranged two octaves in three words, girls who could hardly talk for giggling. They all used to be cute little kids. Now they were like some species of visiting aliens.

  Liv picked up a flashlight and fled.

  Pat jumped up from the lawn chair he had come to roost in, tossing away the end of the joint. The roach flew like a miniature falling star, scattering an arc of bright ash over the lawn.

  Liv bit her lip. It was not the time to brace him over smoking dope around Sarah.

  “Trav okay?” Pat asked.

  Liv looked back at the summer house. It was a child of the fifties, a crackerbox on its side, the victim of a series of do-it-yourself-ers. The original back porch ha
d been enclosed to make a new kitchen; the master bedroom, bath, and study tacked on and new decks built on the lake side of the house. Without character or recognizable style, it was comfortable, just the right size, like the Three Bears’ house. Its one point of beauty was the fieldstone fireplace in the living room. Travis’ window showed a dim rosy glow set like a jewel into the shadowed clapboard siding. From the backdoor spilled a tall, bent oblong of yellow light onto the porch. Tinted by the TV, a bluer light from the glass-walled living room that overlooked the lake backlit the house, rendering it shallow as a facade. Trees loomed over it like big, dark ghosts.

  “Sure.”

  While she tied the cardigan around her waist by its sleeves, Pat shook a cigarette, a legal one, from a crumpled pack. He didn’t seem particularly stoned, or even very mellow.

  “I didn’t mean to make him cry. I was just teasing.” And then, hopeful of exoneration, “Is he going through some kind of crybaby stage or something?”

  Liv flicked on the flashlight, catching the cat, under the station wagon, in its sudden beam. They had named her The Poor for her tenacious adoption of them, after the biblical class that is promised always to be with us. Her eyes were luminous ectoplasm reflecting the light. Liv swung the flashlight hastily away, feeling as if she had inadvertently surprised someone naked.

  “You’ve been away,” she said. “Trav’s gotten used to a different status quo. Your coming home means a readjustment.”

  Pat’s lighter sucked the air repeatedly, angrily. “That makes me feel great.”

  Liv shrugged. “Nobody’s trying to make you feel guilty. That’s just how it is.”

  She played the light over the driveway, picking out the brush at its shoulders and the woods around them, in patches like the cutouts hidden behind little doors in Travis’ favorite storybooks. It was her idea to bring the flashlight. Pat would have felt his way along by memory and the borrowed light of houses and cottages along the way. But she didn’t feel that brave. It was not anything in the dark she feared, but a misstep, a twisted ankle, wrenched knee, or fall.

  “Travis needs some time to get used to you being home again,” she said.

  “Well, he’ll get that,” said Pat. He blew smoke between them in an angry stream. “You cried, too,” he accused her. “You went into his room with him and you cried, too.”

  Liv said nothing. She was very close to tears again, and she could not allow herself to give way, not now. There had been too much crying.

  “That means you don’t want me home, either,” Pat said. “I’m just upsetting you all.”

  “No,” she cried. She hugged herself tightly. “We do want you home. For Christ’s sake, don’t take it all so personally. It’s just a readjustment, that’s all.”

  She hated the tremor in her voice and felt a sudden flash of anger. She was trying to make it easier and he wouldn’t leave it alone. How could he possibly expect to walk back into things exactly as he had left them? He wanted Father Knows Best. Everything hunky-dory in thirty minutes. Not an unhappy four-year-old, a self-involved adolescent, and a sick wife.

  Pat put an arm around her shoulder and drew her close.

  “Okay,” he said, but he sounded weary of it and as if he were reassuring himself.

  They started up their driveway. In the quiet of the summer night their sneakers rattled the gravel. The cat stalked them soundlessly. By daylight, The Poor was a staggering derelict that no amount of overfeeding, vitamins, or expensive consultations with the vet would ever make sleek and elegant. By night, she came into her own; she was a spook, a killer, lurid death in the dark. They hardly noticed her, not because she was so seamlessly a part of the night, but because they had grown used to her. She hunted each and all of them ceaselessly, as if she were afraid of being abandoned in the forest, which she had been, of course, when they took her in. They reached the cottage road that served their house and their neighbors, connecting them with Dexter Road, which led to Route 5, the main road through Nodd’s Ridge.

  “Listen, babe,” Pat said. “If this is a real horror show tonight, we’ll come home early. We can always say Trav wasn’t too happy about our going out the first night I’m home.”

  It bothered her that he didn’t seem to realize the convenient social lie was true: Travis had been disturbed to find out they were going out, even if it was after his bedtime. Or else Pat attached no importance to it. Nor did she want to respond to the hint of sexual approach in an early home. It seemed perfunctory on his part.

  “I really wouldn’t mind an early night,” he said. He looked at her closely. “You okay? You look great.”

  Liv nodded absently. The aspirin had silenced the pain in her teeth. “Thanks,” she said.

  “You really do,” Pat insisted. “A lot better than the last time I was home.”

  She gritted her teeth. It was past and done with. Talking about it wasn’t going to change anything.

  “Thank God you finally had that fucking tooth out,” he said. “Should have made you have it out months ago. I could kill that fucking dentist.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” she said automatically. He was confessing, she knew, asking forgiveness, but managed to sound offensively proprietary. She had not done a proper job of taking care of herself, and because she was his, his responsibility or his property, it amounted to the same, it had rebounded on him. The absentee landlord—who didn’t care enough to do the job himself but was mad as hell when somebody else didn’t. “It’s done, anyway. It wasn’t fatal.”

  “It could have been,” Pat said. “I feel guilty about that, too. If I’d been here, or you’d been on location with me, you never would have gotten so sick.”

  “Just what you needed,” Liv ran down the list of reasons, as much for her sake as his. “A sick wife. You didn’t have time for that, and you know it. And you had to be there, you had a contract. What would you have done with Trav?” And me.

  “Taken care of you,” Pat said, as if he had heard the unspoken part of her question. “I would have found a way.” He fumbled for her hand, found her wrist, and grasped it tightly, as if he feared her escape or sudden disappearance. “You should have told me.”

  She knew that now. But she hadn’t. And she had survived. They had all survived. The summer was over.

  “Water under the bridge,” she said.

  Pat let go of her wrist and flicked away his cigarette. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and looked around at the seemingly scenic dark.

  “I can’t believe I missed the summer here.”

  Me, too, she thought. I missed the summer, too. But she said, “It was just like every other summer.” What a lie.

  Still she deprecated it. “You’ll hear all about it at the party. The entire summer, condensed into pure gossip.”

  Pat laughed. “I doubt there’ll be anything very pure about it. Probably it’ll sound more scandalous than it really was. No-holds-barred, as soon as everyone’s loaded.” He put his arm around her waist. “You seem jittery. What you need is a drink. To start, anyway.”

  Chapter 2

  Light showed through the trees ahead of them. Faint party sounds, music and a babel of voices, were audible. There were vehicles parked on both sides of the road, late model Cadillacs and Lincolns, Mercedeses, BMWs, expensively outfitted four-wheel-drives like the Breens’ Ramcharger, and fat-assed station wagons, all bearing out-of-state licenses—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, even California. In silence they strolled down the narrow lane, between the parked cars, to the pair of wooden rain barrels planted with nasturtiums and the rustic sign nailed to a battered pine that marked the Winslows’ driveway. On each barrel a reflector glowed the same dim dirty orange as the nasturtiums. Plastic Japanese lanterns that had seen two decades of Labor Day partying hung like faded fruit in the trees. All the lights of the cottage were on so it glowed like a Hollywood spaceship taking off. A floodlight over the garage door provided additional outdoor lighting.


  The party had spilled out of the cottage and surged around an enormous barbecue pit presided over by Len Winslow, his saturnine face, red as the devil’s below a tall, white chef’s hat, glimpsed amid clouds of roast pig-flavored steam rising from the pit like steam from a volcanic vent. People clotted around improvised sawhorse picnic tables schooled on the levelest portion of the lawn, or at the bar, a regulation redwood picnic table forested with bottles, jugs, and plastic cups. The still night air was heavily laced with cigarette smoke.

  At the sight of new guests, Claire Winslow flushed like a quail from the cover of the party. Two small dogs that looked like Chinese temple dogs whipped around her small feet, which were crammed into even smaller, glass-stone studded sandals.

  “Pat! Liv!” Then she seemed to run out of things to say. Claire wrung her hands uncertainly. Worry moved the mask of her makeup in subterranean faults and waves. “I didn’t think you two would make it this year.” The dogs yapped and clawed at Liv’s legs.

  “Surprise,” said Liv, and laughed, surreptitiously kicking away the dogs.

  Claire seemed not to hear her or notice the bad manners of her pets. “Why, I haven’t seen you all summer.” The dogs bounced away, yipping.

  “I’ve been away,” Pat said. “Shooting a movie in Louisiana.”

  Claire’s eyes widened, threatening cracks at the corners. “Oh, my!”

  “Actually,” said Liv, “I’ve been here the whole time, with Travis. And Sarah’s been home from camp for two weeks.”

  “And I haven’t seen you anywheres about,” Claire exclaimed. “Isn’t that the oddest thing?”