“The kitten will need feeding again. If it lives.”
“I’ll wake you.”
I’m caught in a backwater of drowsiness too strong for me to resist. It’s all I can do to keep from lying down right there in the middle of the floor and letting my eyes close. Cole has work in the morning, I remind myself. I should . . .
He presses a finger over my lips. “Shhh. Don’t argue.” He scoops me up into his arms. My head rests comfortably against his chest, his heartbeat a steady, soothing rhythm in my ear. He carries me into the bedroom and deposits me on the bed. The mattress is bare, but it doesn’t matter. A fog of exhaustion and love and desire holds me silent as he picks up a blanket from the floor and tucks me in. His lips touch my forehead, gentle and warm. My hands reach up to clasp his neck, pulling his face down toward mine.
Our lips touch, cling, and part, a butterfly kiss, no more.
“Later,” he murmurs. “You can count on it. I’ll wake you in two hours.”
My eyes close into oblivion before he makes it to the bedroom door.
Chapter Fifteen
The vet calls back in the morning, and I take Wish over and get him settled while Cole goes home to shower and change. He’s the on-call crisis worker today, and Katya is his first order of business. She’s also my business, although my emotions in her regard are so tangled, I don’t even try to sort them.
Cole comes back for me so we can go see her together. He has shifted into his official crisis worker mode, and I feel stiff and awkward and shy. But then he glances at me and asks, “You’re sure Wish is okay at the vet’s?”
He reaches for my hand, his warm fingers twining around my cold ones. My heart swells too big to fit in my chest. “Better there than at home. They’ve got an incubator for constant heat. Maybe they can even find a queen to foster him.”
“A what?” His startled tone triggers a laugh from me. “As in ‘pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?’”
“Nope. Mama cats are called queens. Don’t worry, I didn’t know, either, before my first rescue litter.”
“Figures. Always knew cats thought they were royalty, anyway.”
He pulls the car into the parking lot but doesn’t turn it off, leaving the engine running. “You sure you’re okay with this?”
“I’m not sure at all, but I’m coming with you anyway.”
There are so many ways this interaction could get ugly, and part of the reason is my emotional entanglement with Kat.
“Discord,” I tell him. “Even in music.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but now that it’s out there I might as well carry on. So far he seems to like me despite my weirdness.
“If I get upset, or she gets upset, it’s like discord in music. It resolves back into harmony and everything is okay.”
“Sometimes,” he says. “In the good songs.”
“Help me, here.” I feel all the ways my smile is ragged at the edges.
“No false pretenses between us,” he says. “My job is to get to the truth, and then decide what to do with that once we find it. Maybe it would be better . . .”
“If I’m not there?”
It’s an enticing thought. I could wait out here, or in the cafeteria over bad coffee, and let Cole do his job. I wouldn’t ever need to see Katya again. No need to confront her with the lies she’s told me, or to face the betrayal she’s sure to feel that I’ve shared all of her secrets with Cole.
“I’m not a coward.” I cringe internally at the sound of my own voice. Small, childlike, not calm and confident as I’d intended.
“No,” Cole agrees. “Coward is not on your playlist. I believe you’d face down an angry elephant if it meant salvation for some small creature. I’m not entirely sure that your instincts for self-preservation are quite so strong.”
“I need to do this. It is necessary.”
“All right, then. Don’t hate me.” He smiles, but the skin around his eyes looks tight and the corners of his lips are tucked in.
At the door to the hospital he grabs my hand and squeezes it, then lets me go. I feel the shift to objective detachment, but we’re still a team as we walk through the door of Kat’s room together, and this time I don’t pretend otherwise.
She looks from one of us to the other. “Should I have an attorney?” Her tone is biting sarcasm, but Cole responds directly to the words.
“You can call one if you like. This is an official evaluation, Katya. I don’t want there to be any false pretenses. Anything you say this morning can be used as cause to send you to a psychiatric facility for treatment against your will. Do you understand this?”
“Spare me,” she says. “I know the law.” Her eyes look bruised. Her color is a little better, but she’s far too pale. The IV still drips into her arm; she’s still hooked up to monitors.
“Could you sign this for me, then?” He hands over paper and a pen. She looks at it, but doesn’t sign.
“We already went through this last night. Marci and I.”
“Humor me.”
“I’d rather not.”
“All right.” Cole crosses to the door and vanishes, leaving the two of us alone together. I stare after him in dismay, feeling abandoned in enemy territory.
“I thought we were friends,” Katya says.
“We are.”
“Then help me. He’s trying to lock me up.”
“Maybe that’s what needs to happen.”
Katya gasps. “How could you? You promised.”
“All promises were neutralized when you broke yours.” Detaching the opals from my ears, I hold them out to her. “I don’t want to keep these.”
She turns both hands over, palms down, and shakes her head. “Those are a gift.”
“That is one of the classic signs of impending suicide, the giving of gifts,” Cole says, walking back into the room with a nurse behind him.
The opals, once so beautiful, make me think of blood now. I drop them onto the sheet between Kat’s hands. “I refuse the gift.”
“Rae,” she says.
“Don’t.” She’s going to say please again. I don’t want to hear it.
“Since you’re not willing to sign that you’ve received your rights, I’ve brought in a witness,” Cole says, not getting sucked into our little drama.
Katya glares at the three of us, then shrugs. “Fine. I’ll sign it.”
The nurse gives Cole a questioning look. He nods, and she slips out of the room. Cole pulls up a chair for me, and one for himself on the other side of the bed.
“All right, let’s talk about what happened. I don’t want to put you in a psych ward, Katya, but I will if I need to.”
She rolls her eyes. “Save your breath. As I explained last night to Maria—”
“Marci.”
“Whoever. I was cutting. I didn’t mean to go so deep—”
“Don’t do this,” Cole interrupts. “You’re an intelligent woman. I’ve been around this particular block more than once. Let’s have the truth.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Let me see your arms.”
“They’re perfectly visible.”
“You know what I mean.” He touches the back of her bandaged wrist lightly. “Turn them both over. Let’s see.”
Still, she doesn’t move.
“Anybody who cuts habitually enough to keep a special blade hidden for the purpose knows better than to cut lengthwise along a vein. And they are always scarred. I asked the nurse just now, and she doesn’t remember seeing any marks on your arms in addition to the suicide scars.”
“Do we have to use that word?” Katya asks.
“Suicide, you mean?”
“It’s such a judgmental word.”
“Fair enough. We can just talk about you trying to kill yourself instead.”
“God, you’re a terrible person. That’s not better. And maybe I do my cutting somewhere besides my arms. Maybe I’m
smarter than that.”
I can’t figure out why she keeps lying. Obviously he’s not buying the story, and it’s easy enough to prove. “There aren’t any scars on your legs,” I say. “Or your belly or your breasts. You don’t have a razor blade hidden away; you used a piece of broken glass.”
Her mouth opens and then snaps shut.
“Probably you weren’t thinking,” Cole says, gently, “or you might have realized Rae would find it in the trash.”
“So I’m an opportunist.”
“That glass broke two days ago. You picked up a piece the night my parents were here and kept it. You practically pushed me out the door to the party. You gave me a gift.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. Rae, you have to believe me even if he doesn’t. It was on impulse. The kitten died, and I—”
“But the kitten’s not dead,” Cole says, very gently now.
“What?” Katya’s eyes flicker from him to me and back again. She has the desperate look of a trapped animal. “Rae said, last night . . .”
My throat feels clogged with dust. “I thought it was. I couldn’t find it. You know where it was, Kat? In the bathroom. Under the vanity. It had your blood all over it. You knew where it was the whole time and you didn’t tell me. Last night, you said you cut yourself because it died.”
Maybe my throat is dry, but my eyes aren’t. I can’t stem the rush of tears. Kat’s hand twists the edge of the sheet into a little knot and clamps tight around it. She turns her face away from me. “You don’t understand. You’ll never understand.” Her voice sounds flat, hopeless.
“I understand that you lied to me. Took advantage of my friendship. Maybe you even planned some sort of murder-suicide thing with the kitten.”
“No!”
“How can I believe anything you say?”
Unlike Marci, Cole doesn’t try to stop us from ripping open each other’s wounds. He sits. Quiet. Watchful. Waiting for something.
“You want the truth?” Katya flares. “Because I don’t think you can handle it.”
“Try me.”
“Fine. Yes. I want to die. I can’t think of one single thing worth living for. I tried. I meant it when I promised you I would be safe if I stayed at your house. I swear it. You’re a good person, Rae. Naïve. Full of all sorts of magical ideas about how life should be, but good. So I figured I owed it to you to at least wait until I got away from your house to finish the job I botched. Because I’m truly sorry I dragged you into this.
“But that tiny runt kitten . . . he’s going to die. Despite anything you do, or try to do, and all your dedication, he’s not going to make it. He wouldn’t eat. He was crying and I tried to feed him, but he wouldn’t eat.”
“You should have called Rae. If there was a problem with the kitten, you know she would have come straight home.” From the way Cole glances at me, I see he’s trying to protect me, but there is no shelter from what Kat is saying.
She laughs, a horrible, twisted sound. “Don’t you see? That’s the point. She would have come home. And she would have tried and tried to save the kitten, but it would have died anyway. And then I thought maybe it would be better, kinder, to just end things now instead of stretching them out. Let Rae get on with her life. End the charade of my own.”
Her eyes are dry, but her breathing sounds like she’s been running, ragged, tortured. “Is that twisted thinking? Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. How can I tell? I didn’t have a plan when I picked up the piece of glass. I just felt better, safer, not so trapped, knowing I had the means if the pain got too much . . .”
She pauses, one clenched fist resting over her heart. “Oh God, it hurts.”
I make a move toward her, but Cole gestures me back.
“Why did you stop?” he asks.
Kat gasps, a sound half sob, half moan. “That thrice-damned kitten. I couldn’t—couldn’t cut him with a blade. So I thought maybe I’d drown him in the sink, but I couldn’t do that, either, and then he crawled under the vanity. I was desperate by then; I’d come this far, I wasn’t going to stop because of a kitten. So I did the first cut, and after I was already bleeding out, before I could do the second, I heard myself promising Rae everything would be fine. And the crying kittens just became deafening, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t make the second cut. So I tried to bandage it. And I tried to get him out from under the vanity, Rae, truly, only I was too dizzy and weak, and I couldn’t . . .”
“Why?” Cole asks.
Katya stares at him but doesn’t answer. Her face goes quiet and remote. She holds her breath.
His voice is as inexorable as a slow-moving glacier. “Why do you want to die? Not this time with the kitten. Not the bike. Tell me about the first time.”
The room falls into silence, broken only by the rapid beeping that records Kat’s heart rate, and the whir-click of the IV pump. It seems to me that all three of us are in suspended animation.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kat says, in a strangled voice. “Go ahead. Lock me up. Just leave me alone.”
“I think there’s something you’re holding back. Something bigger than kittens or an unhappy marriage. What is it, Katya? Tell me.”
All of the darkness I’ve sensed in Kat is in the room with us now, growing and swelling and expanding. It’s going to suck us all under. The air is thick with grief and rage.
Cole is pushing too hard. “She can’t have babies now,” I blurt out, trying to ward him off. “Since the accident. There was damage—”
“Shut up!” Kat shouts at me. “Just shut up. Don’t—” Her voice breaks. The corners of her mouth turn square. She sucks in a great gout of air and begins to weep—ugly, racking sobs that make her splint her rib cage with both hands.
“It—hurts—too—much,” she gasps, and I feel the first brush of panic.
Cole doesn’t move from his chair. His face is focused, calm, his eyes looking into Kat with such a single-minded intensity I could probably dance around the room singing clown songs and he wouldn’t even notice.
When the weeping eases, she says, “Tom told you, didn’t he? About the babies. Six miscarriages in three years. Pain and blood and failure. Every single time Tom locked himself in the bathroom to weep, I know he did. He tried to hide it from me, but it hurt him so. And my mother, every time, ‘A woman has babies, Katya. That is what she does in this world. What is wrong with you? Do you take the vitamins? Maybe if you stop this working and bicycle riding, you can hold on to a child. Stay home and cook for your husband. All I ask in this world is grandchildren. Is that so much?’”
She pauses, breathing hard, both hands pressed against her eyes as if to block out memories or hold back tears. I remember the picture of her family, the little girl wearing a scarf, her face oh-so-serious. The older brothers looking older than their years.
“But your sister,” I say. “Your brothers.”
“My sister died when we were kids. And my brothers married American women and moved away. I’m her last hope for a house filled with children. Tom’s family is just as bad. Always polite to me, always reserved. He wouldn’t tell me what they said, but I knew. ‘What kind of woman did you marry, that she can’t produce a child?’ I couldn’t even blame it on him, since clearly he was capable of getting me pregnant. I just couldn’t carry them.
“And then . . . after those six lost pregnancies, we had one that seemed to stick. I didn’t tell anybody for the first three months, not even Tom. I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment. But then my doctor said I was past the highest risk. I had a special doctor, and he said everything looked good. We bought baby clothes. Tom fixed up a room. He built the crib himself, a beautiful thing. Four weeks before my due date we went to see the doctor. He came in smiling, and then he listened for the baby . . .”
She puts both hands over her mouth, and the keening sound she makes is one I’ll never forget as long as I live. It’s a sound torn up from the bottom of her soul. I want to tell her to stop, that it’
s okay—she doesn’t have to talk about it. But I’ve been in counseling long enough to know that she probably does.
Still, I wish I wasn’t here.
I wish I could do something to ease her suffering.
As usual, my wishes count for nothing.
Kat catches her breath. “He sent us for an ultrasound, to be sure, but I knew. I wanted him to take the baby, then and there. I demanded a C-section, an induction, threatened to cut it out myself with a carving knife. The doctor said no to everything, that I had to wait. He gave me something to soften my cervix, and I walked around for a week with a dead baby inside me. It was—I couldn’t . . .
“Tom tried to help. He tried to hold me, comfort me, tell me it would be okay, but I wouldn’t let him. And then there was the labor and the pain, for what? They gave me sedatives, opiates, an epidural. But I still had to push. It took forever for my body to rid itself of the—thing—inside me. And when it came out, the nurse wrapped it in a blanket. They wanted me to hold it, said that it would be good for me. I refused.
“So they gave it to Tom.
“And he stood there, in the middle of the delivery room . . . He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, his comfort clothes. He hadn’t shaved in a week, so grief-stricken, so worried about me, and he looked rough and ragged. And the image of him, his head bent over that bundle in his arms, tears falling, him sobbing . . .
“Oh my God. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
It’s too much. I don’t care anymore what Cole thinks, or that Kat lied to me. All that matters is easing her agony, or sharing it if I can’t. I climb into the bed beside her. “Hold on to me.”
I put my arms around her, careful of her ribs, and start murmuring stupid things about how everything will be all right.
She rolls toward me onto her good hip, her hands knotted into my shirt, twisting it tight. Her whole body shakes with her weeping. Hot tears, hers and mine, mingle together.
After a long time, the sobbing begins to quiet and slow. Her breathing grows easier. The tears ebb.
“Everything got twisted after that,” she says, very softly. “Tom and I couldn’t seem to talk about anything without getting into a fight. He started staying late at work. I accused him of having another woman. And then it occurred to me that he should have another woman. He should have children and be happy.”
I Wish You Happy: A Novel Page 19
