Free Traps by MacKenzie Bezos

behind that, or the intimate privacy of what they are doing, making little sucking sounds, or her own dumb idleness there standing between her and the mama dog nesting her pups—something makes her retreat to the kitchen.
    She stands by the window and scoops coffee into a paper filter with her back turned to the tableful of Kleenex and the girl’s private things. The walls are papered with twin cherries on pale yellow, darker in places where pictures used to hang, the nail holes still there above them. On the counter next to the coffeemaker is a big black and clear blender and a basket of fruit, and behind it, in the shadow of the cupboard, a set of puzzle books and the dark neck of a bottle. The coffeemaker comes to life, bubbling and sighing steam and a trickle of brown into the pot below, and Lynn reaches into the dark corner and takes a sudoku book and lays it on the counter, fat, with pages curled at the corners from use, and she opens it to halfway through where a pencil marks her place and begins to figure.
    When the coffeemaker makes a last series of spitting noises and quiets with a gasp, Lynn fills the blue-and-white mug to the brim. She takes a spoon and stirs, although she has added nothing. The yellow backpack lies empty on the table, and what must be most of what the girl calls important still sits arrayed on Lynn’s table by Vivian’s own invitation, in a cloud of tissues she had done nothing to try to hide. The zipper on her little pouch is open, plainly exposing the cigarettes inside. Her wallet is the kind with a window on the front, and her pure face stares up at Lynn from the driver’s license, smiling in an open way no one ever does at the DMV. Vivian Louise Able. Born June 27, 1995. Seventeen: as young as she had looked to Lynn, but no longer seemed. Lynn clampsthe coffee cup in her metal loops and sips at it, returning to her puzzle book, writing numbers in the squares with her shaking hand, and forcing any glances past Vivian’s possessions out the window at her dogs, a few sniffing the air for traces of the girl and the babies, others tracing tight circles to lie down again and finish their sleeps, and some still barking their gunshot barks at the memory of her arrival.
    It is no more than five minutes before she can hear Vivian in the next room shifting. She rinses her mug in the sink and walks as softly as she can to the threshold where the girl holds the two babies, sleeping.
    Lynn lowers her voice. “You can lay them down in there.”
    “I can just use their carriers.”
    “There’s a clean bed.”
    “That’s nice of you really—”
    “It’s no trouble.”
    “It’s just—they’ve never slept anywhere but in those car seats.”
    Lynn doesn’t comment on this. She steps outside onto the porch and down the stairs toward the girl’s car, squirrel-brown she sees now in the early morning light, with a bumper sticker on the rear chrome that says “Young Life.” The two padded buckets still sit there on the hard ground and she reaches for them, with her ring-covered hand and the metal loops opening, and heads back for the house. One or two dogs stand to look at her, but she is not anything to fuss over this early, they know, and she brings the seats inside and passes between Vivian and the mama dog into the darker dark of the bedroom she cleaned last evening, the sun pushing through between the drawn curtains just enough to shed a little light on the strata of posters left behind by the girls she has lost.
    Vivian cups her hands beneath the babies’ little thighs and stands and brings them in and slides them in under each handle, their arms windmilling first and their toes straining against the pajama feet before they ease and settle into their curved sleep in the seats. From the pocket of her sweatshirt she takes two sets of plastic measuring spoons and sets them on their bellies for them to find when they wake. Then she follows Lynn to her kitchen.
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    Vivian