Traps by MacKenzie Bezos Page B

crossed and one of a girl alone with a guitar—with the edges of some older ones sticking out from underneath.
    Lynn sets the little box on the nightstand. First she takes fresh sheets from the bottom drawer of the dresser, and she changes the bed, gripping the edges in her different hands in different ways and smoothing it down and covering it again with the black-and-yellow star quilt. Then she gathers the girl’s stray things, setting them in the bottom of the little box—the hair clip and the socks and the lip gloss. She takes a marker from a drawer in the nightstand beneath and across the side she writes, “Charlene.” Behind a louvered closet door is an empty hanging rod and a high shelf above it with a row of other boxes, each labeled with a name: “Karlee,” “Amber,” “Cecelia,” “Jessie.” Lynn places this new one at the end beside them and closes the door.
    The room upstairs where she herself sleeps is hardly a bedroom at all—just a narrow corduroy-covered daybed bullied into a corner by an enormous oak pedestal desk. The surface of the old desk is furred with dust and heaped with file boxes and a black sewing machine so old it looks to be an antique. Lynn takes her coat off and lays it over the back of the desk chair. Her mechanical hand has a cable running up the side to a harness that loops around the back of her shoulders. She shrugs the straps off and pulls the hand free so that there is just the smooth bulb of her wrist, and then she takes off the rest of her clothes and puts on a plain long cotton nightgown from a hook on the back of the door.
    At the end of the upper hallway is a closed door she does not open or even meet with her eyes. She steps into a tiny low-ceilinged bathroomand washes her face with one hand and brushes her teeth without watching herself in the mirror and returns to her room and piles both arm bolsters from the daybed next to the desk and pulls back the buckling corduroy spread. She slips in under it, sitting up against the bolsters without dimming the lights or drawing the curtains, and takes a book of sudoku from a pile on the desk and opens a marked page. Then she slides open the bottom desk drawer and takes out a sealed manila envelope, a clean juice glass, and an empty fifth bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and sets them there on top beside the stack of puzzles.

Day 2

5

Unwanted Callers

    T he empty bottle and the empty glass still sit clean and empty beside the envelope when she wakes. Moonlight through the uncurtained window shows them to be so. Lynn switches on a lamp, throwing shadows. She is out of bed quickly, standing among them and casting one herself, pulling on blue jeans and a thermal shirt and fitting her wrist into the plastic-and-metal hand. She slips her other arm through the harness strap like a sweater. The clamp on this hand is closed unless she puts tension on the cable to open it. She does this by reaching out, stretching her arm against the harness on her body, and when she relaxes again it always closes.
    The house is silent. The dogs have not yet figured her to be awake. But soon she is creaking down the stairs, and when she reaches the kitchen and flicks a light on, one of them outside yelps.
    Then her telephone rings.
    She looks at it. A cream-colored cordless on the kitchen table.
    She looks at the clock. 6:02.
    She picks it up. “Dog rescue.”
    “Hello?” It’s a girl’s voice. “Hello, ma’am, I mean? I’m sorry to call so early, but I saw you were awake.”
    Lynn looks out the window into the dark.
    The girl says, “I’m out on the road in my car and I was waiting for the lights to go on. I was calling about your posting at the diner? About the room and the job?”
    Lynn squints. She tries to focus out beyond the silhouettes of the dogs stirring in the moonlight. They are barking, and their eyes catch in the light from the kitchen or the moon above, and stare back at her, eerie and hollowed. She can’t see anything on the