The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets (19 page)

He figured she was embarrassed she had been so thoughtless and ungrateful. “That's okay,” he said. He used his knife to cut the rope around her ankles. “We have to go. I have to get home.”

Oren smiled as he helped Winnie to her feet and to his car. He felt better than he had all day. Kidney was a big man both in size and in the world of reptiles. Oren had stood up to him. Carefully he helped Winnie into the front seat. “We have much to discuss.” That was the right way to say it.

She held out her hands, asking him to cut those ropes as well, but he shook his head. They had made a step in the right direction, but he was not a fool. They had a long drive back to Altadena.

“Where are you?” Jonathan wailed as he threw open the front door. He let it bang the wall. He slipped on the marble floor as he ran toward the curving central staircase.

“Jess!”

Chakra whined from her kennel. If the dog was locked up, then Jess could not be home. But where was she? He spun in all directions. “Jessica!”

“Mr. Jonathan, what is it?” Lupe, the housekeeper, hurried out of the kitchen. “Everything okay?”

He realized what he looked like. He was barefoot. His hair was a mess and his nose still red from crying. He took a deep breath and closed the front door gently before turning back to Lupe. “Sure,” he said. “Everything is hunky dunky. Is Jessica here?”

“She teaches an ashtanga class at noon. Then back-to-back hatha. She won't be home until almost five.”

Lupe was wearing one of his show T-shirts. It read, “
Tie the Knot
Will Pull Your Heartstrings.” It made him feel better to see the bright red lettering. He had come up with that slogan. It was a good one. He had thought of it all by himself.

“Oh. Right. You're so good at keeping her schedule straight.” Lupe shrugged as she went back to the kitchen. “It's on the refrigerator.”

Chakra scratched and whined. If he let her out, she would
never go back into her kennel, but if he left her in there she would keep whining. She didn't do it for Jessica, but the moment he walked in the door she started. He missed Buddy, aloof and quiet. He took out his cell phone and called Winnie. She was supposed to call him at eleven. It was way past that now. He had many things to discuss with her. Her phone rang and rang. It was definitely turned on. Where was she? Then he heard someone answer.

“Hello.”

“Uh… Winnie?” It didn't sound like her.

Giggling. He heard a kid's voice muffled in the background, “Say yes. Say yes!” And more giggling.

“Who is this?” Jonathan asked. “Is Winnie there?”

“I'm sorry.” A fake deep voice. “The party to which you are calling is not in service.”

“I'm trying to reach Winnie Parker. This is her phone.” Jonathan was almost shouting. “Did you steal it? I will report you.”

“She left it on my lawn.” The kid sounded both young and belligerent.

“Your lawn?”

“I found it. In the grass. Chill-lax, man. I just found it.”

“Hang up!” Jonathan heard the other kid. “He can trace it. Hang up!”

The phone went dead.

Jonathan tried to call back, but it went straight to voice mail. Whoever it was had either turned off the phone or was making long distance calls to Australia. They sounded like kids, but you never knew. Maybe it was a ring of cell phone thieves. They had ways of stealing your identity, your passwords and bank accounts. Winnie could be in serious trouble. He called his lawyer. When Harry got on the phone, Jonathan explained what
had happened. Winnie was supposed to be in her car after a tennis lesson.

“I'm worried the kid stole it, you know, part of a ring of cell phone criminals,” Jonathan said. “What should I do?”

“Do you pay her cell phone bills?” Harry asked.

“No.”

“So no offense,” Harry went on, “but your ex-wife is kind of flakey, right? She probably dropped it out of her bag at the tennis court and these kids picked it up. It's her problem.”

“It's not like her.” Winnie was many things, but flakey wasn't right. She was hard-baked, you could even say crusty—he thought that was the word—but not flakey.

“Call her at home. Leave her a message. You've done a good deed.”

They talked a moment more about his contract for the movie, but Jonathan felt anxious. It had been a hard day. Nothing had been as good as he expected. He looked around his mansion. Lupe was singing in the kitchen, something low in Spanish. She had the radio on, but the announcer was talking and she was singing something else. He was still standing in the front hall. It seemed he spent a lot of time there. Jessica was always coming and going. He often held the front door for her and then stood there after he had shut it behind her. He started for the den, library, whatever Jessica called it. It was supposed to be his room, a man's room, in leather and forest green with hunting pictures on the walls. He liked it as well as anywhere else in the house.

“Excuse me, Mr. Parker.” It was Lupe's daughter, Libby, in tiny shorts and a tiny tank top, carrying the vacuum cleaner. She was pretty and twenty-something, but she had two babies at home already. Of course, Winnie had Lacy when she was twenty-one. Libby went into his den to vacuum. He followed her.

“Didn't you do this yesterday?”

She laughed and shook her head as she plugged in the cord. The vacuum cleaner growled over the carpets, clattered on the hardwood. It took a staff to keep the house as clean as Jessica liked it.

He went back to the entryway. Lupe was still singing. He listened to Libby vacuuming. She was so young, and her husband had left her. Just as he had left Winnie.

That was it. He was going back to Winnie's house and check to make sure those hoodwinks who had stolen her phone hadn't figured out where she lived. They could be lying in wait for her. He would surprise them.

He ran his hands through his hair, fluffing the curls. He checked his reflection in the mirror over the mail table. First he would go upstairs and change his shorts. He wanted to be wearing jeans if he was going to confront a criminal. And maybe a different shirt.

He grinned as he went upstairs to the bedroom. No one could say Jonathan Parker, actor, host of the country's most popular game show, was not a courageous man.

Oren's good feeling was long gone. It was taking forever to get home. Winnie would not stop crying. He thought they had come through something together, something bad and now it was better. He reminded her she was safe, he told her this would all be over soon, but she sniveled and snorted and every so often her breath would catch in her throat and she would sob and hiccup at the same time. He checked his watch. He was behind schedule. Traffic was bad on the surface streets, so he slipped back onto the freeway. Winnie slouched low in her seat. No one in the other cars was paying any attention to her. He had not told her all the important stuff, had not yet convinced her that she was a bad mother and should treat her daughter better. If she never stopped crying, he would never be able to talk to her. It had been a terrible day. Nothing had gone as planned. First Winnie and then Cookie. His poor friend. There were other places, legal places, to get a female, and he would start researching it, but Kidney had the best reputation. That bridge was burnt to a crisp. Because of Winnie. Because of the day.

“Why me?” he breathed.

The thought of going home to his hot house depressed him. Cookie would be waiting for him, bumping and scratching, wanting, wanting, wanting. He dreaded telling him he had failed. And with Winnie there, he could not get on the computer, he couldn't make lunch, he couldn't do anything. Not until this was done, his
plan completed, Lacy beside him holding his hand.

“Not much longer.” He looked at his watch again. “Not much longer.” Like a mantra.

Winnie wanted to stop crying. She was relieved to be back in the car with Oren—the known psychopath better than the unknown—but it didn't really matter. Oren's hot house and his iguana. Sex and a suitcase with Kidney. She had become a commodity, a black and blue effigy of herself to be passed back and forth. It made no difference. She was done. She was gone. She swallowed her snot and gagged. Kidney had crushed her. Her spine rattled. Her brain felt loose. Together he and Oren had done serious damage and she would never be the same. She stared out the window at passing Los Angeles and didn't care anymore. No one would help her. No one ever had. Except Oren. Oren had fought for her, if only for the pleasure of killing her himself. Still, that was something she supposed.

“Thank you,” she said. “Oren.”

“That was in—tense.”

His voice broke like a teenager's and she realized he had been scared.

“You were great,” she said. “Tough.”

“Thanks.”

His little smile, the straightening of his shoulders, helped her. As long as he was happy, she would stay alive.

“What happened to your dad?” she asked.

“What happened to yours?”

“My father was a one night stand—my mother never really knew him.”

“You're so dark. Your mother and Jonathan Parker and Lacy, they're all blond. You must be Jewish.”

Winnie shook her head. “Is that what this is about? Some kind of hate crime?” How ironic that after all this he had kidnapped
her because he thought she was Jewish. She would be killed for an identity she had always wished she had: the large family, the loud and loving parents, the clichés of a childhood with heritage and faith and ritual. She'd grown up with nothing. Later there were Daisy's psychics and aromatherapy, the sweat lodge retreats, raw food diets and crystal meditations.

“I have no idea.” She didn't know why she was trying to explain it to him. “My father was basically a sperm donor. He disappeared when he found out my sixteen-year-old movie star mother was pregnant. I only met him once. When I was seven.”

It was a furtive, shadowy meeting, in her school hallway. She had been called out of class. He had come to see her wearing a suit and tie. None of her mother's friends or boyfriends wore suits. In her memory, he was in black and white, holding a hat in his hands, like a character from an old movie. He had that Clark Gable hair, black and shiny, a face as smooth as celluloid, and eyes as dark as hers. She remembered the way his forehead creased as he searched her face. Then he nodded.

“Thank you,” he said to the headmistress.

“Daddy?” Winnie asked.

“Looks that way,” was all he said. He reached out as if to touch her, but pulled his hand back and left.

What could she tell Oren? What was she? Just a mother. That was all. A normal, everyday mom who made mistakes and sometimes got it right and loved her daughter fiercely. Just like everybody else. She woke up in the morning, went to the bathroom, ate food and wore clothes and worked and did exactly what other people do. She did it day after day. She did it. At this moment, the life she had led last week, even yesterday, seemed an incredible accomplishment. It was enough, more than enough. And that's what she would tell him. He had asked her who she was. I want to live, she would reply. I want to live. There was
nothing else to claim. That was enough of a summation of her existence: that she wanted to survive.

Quietly she said to him, “We can't control who our parents are or what we are when we're born.” She paused, and shifted in her seat to face him. “We only have power over who we become.”

“No. You're not listening!”

He was angry suddenly.

“What?” she asked. “What did I say?”

“I'm doing it. I am taking care of her.”

“Who?”

“Listen to me!”

Oren felt the frustration filling his lungs again, making him pant. And sweat. She was so stupid she was making him crazy.

“Winnie.” He forced himself to calm down. “I need you to listen.” He wanted her to understand. “I'm not doing this to you. I wanted to help someone else. I thought if I got you and talked to you—I thought you were different.”

“Different than what?”

“Stop doing that!”

“What?”

He wanted to hit her, smack her with his right hand, knock her senseless, make her quiet, push her out of the car onto the road. But he took the ten deep breaths he had read about on the Calm Yourself website. He could calm himself. He looked over at her. He felt sorry for her. That was all.

“Watch out!” Winnie shouted.

He looked back at the road just in time to swerve around a stopped car and bump onto the shoulder. It had been very close. He crept back into his lane as the traffic moved up.

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

“You were distracting me.”

“You can just let me out right here.”

“Very funny.”

He heard her stomach growl. He looked at his watch. Hours had passed since she had arrived. He was hungry too. Maybe his head would stop hurting if he ate something.

She had stopped trying to jump out of the car. She had stopped trying to fight him since he saved her from Kidney. She was just crying because she was hungry and tired like him. She realized he was her friend. Maybe he could do a drive thru burger place or run in and get sandwiches somewhere. He glanced at her, but then he sighed. He could not take any chances. That was the one thing his father had taught him. Just when you think a girl is down, he had said, just when you think the fight has gone out of her—that's when she'll attack you. His father's words of wisdom. Oren wondered what other gems his father would have provided if he'd had the chance. If Jilly Bean had not been such a whore and Marcus had not gone to jail forever.

It was Jimmy who had turned him in. Jimmy had been fucking Oren's mother for years. He didn't believe it when Marcus announced to the carnies that Jill had run off with a guy from the last town.

“Who?” Jimmy wanted to know. “What'd he look like?”