True Places(44)

Iris nodded. “Sit on the bed and don’t move.”

“We can set a trap.”

“What about Vishnu?”

His snake would only accept live prey, but Reid had never given him anything more challenging than a wriggling pinkie. “He does need to eat, but we get baby mice for him.”

She shook her head hard, squeezing her eyes tight. “There’s a mouse here.”

Iris’s circumstances in this house, with his family, confounded her to the brink of madness. Her logic was inescapable, and Reid felt for her.

He climbed on the bed and crossed his legs, curious about how she’d go about luring the mouse and catching it. He settled himself. It could be a while.

Iris crouched low and moved noiselessly to the far wall under the window. Half the room was in total darkness, including the area near the door where he had seen the mouse. Iris was completely still and, although half in shadow, nearly invisible. Her head was cocked, and the tips of her fingers grazed the wood floor. She slid forward so slowly he was not sure she had moved at all; only the pattern of shadow on her back gave her away. She was not simply predatory. She was not of this world, at least the world he knew. The air in the room seemed to have become denser from her concentration and the disguise of it. Reid held his breath.

A shadow flickered and snapped. Iris sprang to her feet and took a step toward the bed. Dangling between her thumb and index finger was the mouse, immobilized by the pinch at the scruff of its neck.

Reid jumped off the bed. “Whoa! That was awesome!”

For the first time since he’d met her, Iris grinned so wide her eyes crinkled at the corners.

She followed Reid into his room. He lifted the lid off the cage—an extra-large terrarium with a mesh top—and Iris dropped the mouse in. It froze on the shaving-covered floor, either because it was stunned from being handled or because it had detected the snake. The snake was sprawled along one side of the cage, half-uncoiled. It lifted its head, testing the air with its tongue again and again. The mouse shook itself and circled its head, sniffing and searching, one circle, two, three. It took a few tentative steps. The snake stiffened. It had spotted the mouse. Reid was reminded of Iris only moments before; the intense concentration and something else as well, the cold confidence of a machine, a laser-guided missile.

The mouse turned and scrabbled at the glass wall, rising up on its hind legs. Uncoiling completely, the snake approached, sliding silently, its head tracking the mouse’s uncertain movements until the snake’s nose was inches from the mouse, now backed into a corner.

The snake struck and tucked the mouse into a coil, one loop, two. The mouse was locked in a noose from which it couldn’t possibly escape. It happened so fast, like a magic trick that succeeds even when you are paying close attention. When Reid fed pinkies to Vishnu, the snake didn’t give them the big squeeze. He just swallowed them.

Iris watched without emotion. Reid figured she’d seen a lot of animals die, and had killed some of them herself. After a few moments, she went to sit in the chair by the window. “Why do you have this snake?”

“A couple years ago I was mowing the lawn.”

Iris shook her head in a way he’d learned meant she didn’t understand.

“The short grass around the house? When the weather gets warmer, it has to be cut once a week.”

“Why?”

“Why? Oh, you mean why do we bother?”

She nodded.

“So people can walk across it, play on it, I guess.”

“I’ve never seen anyone do that.”

“Maybe more when we were little.”

She nodded, unconvinced.

“Anyway, I was mowing the grass, with a machine. Normally we pay someone to do it, but they hadn’t come for some reason. Mom was having people over and wanted it cut, so she asked me.”

“The people were going to play on the lawn?”

“No. They were going to be near the lawn, so she wanted it to look nice.”

Iris didn’t even nod. She was right. It was stupid.

Reid sighed. “So the lawn mower, the machine, hits this snake. Just the tip of its tail got chopped off. He was only a foot long then.” He expected Iris to nod but she didn’t. “What?”

“The snake would have healed if it was just the end of the tail.”

“Well, I didn’t know that. I wanted to help it.”

She smiled, just a little.

Reid felt foolish. He gestured toward the cage. Vishnu was working on swallowing the mouse; it was halfway down, more actually, because getting past the mouse’s shoulders was the hard part. “He’s been here since. My dad was against it, didn’t want him in the house. He said a snake wasn’t worth getting upset about.”

“Suzanne disagreed?”

“Well, I don’t think she wanted it either, but she could see it mattered to me.”

Reid paused, feeling he’d gotten to the important point of the story, the message he wanted to relate to Iris. His mother had backed him up. The snake was a reminder of that. His father always seemed to win. He was a winner! Brynn, too. Keeping the snake, with its strange odors, its sinister blackness, its appetite for live meals, was proof that sometimes the messy, the ugly, the imperfect could win. His father had offered to get him a snake from a pet store, one that didn’t smell and would accept dead prey, or frozen ones they could keep on hand, like those tamales from Whole Foods he loved. But Reid wouldn’t budge. He didn’t see why he should.