The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  Clara died first. She was eaten by a coyote. She was a nice cat. I don’t expect you to care about the cats. Clara was a long-haired Maine coon mix who loved to be petted. She went outside to use the bathroom, or frolic, or whatever cats do, around sunset, and never came back.

  The problem was an influx of hungry coyotes into the development where my sister lived. As the town crawled up the mountain, coyotes, bears, and lynxes were displaced from their habitats and wandered down the mountain, where they discovered the delicious new food, cat. In September, when my sister’s family barbecued on their back deck, they saw coyotes trot through the pines at their yard’s edge.

  Clara was eaten in October. Afterward, my nieces cried, blahblah-blah. My sister, too; Clara had been her first cat. And through the years, whenever my sister felt sad about anything—fight, failed test, car accident, etc.—Clara sensed it, came to her, and sat in her lap.

  My sister instituted a lockdown. The cats got one outing, at dusk, to use the bathroom in the yard. They were let out for five minutes, watched, and lured back in with cooked shrimp.

  The other cats were Chocolate, a diabetic brown male with postnasal drip who made stinky farts and loved all people, but especially loved to sit on the chest of my brother-in-law (who once spent five thousand dollars on an operation to save Chocolate’s pancreas and life); Patches, a brindle who loved playing in the bathroom sink; Simmy, a bony Siamese loner who fought other cats and never purred; and Crow, a black cat. Crow was fit, above average size, and a mouser. She left dead mice in my sister’s bed, which displeased my sister, because Crow first bit out the eyes. Crow did not curl up in anyone’s lap. But she slept on my elder niece’s bed most nights.

  Wildfires burned throughout the Monashee Mountains that fall; though it was now December, there’d been no snow. Rather than disappearing, bears, lynxes, and coyotes foraged in the developments, thinking it still time to fatten up. Patches was eaten next. One evening, she sneaked past the yard’s edge when no one was looking, probably to investigate a mouse smell, and never came back.

  My sister made a new rule: no cats outside.

  But two weeks later Simmy, the Siamese who fought other cats, sped past my brother-in-law one night as he opened the door to the deck. When he lunged for her, she slipped into the forest. My sister’s family walked the woods until midnight, calling her name.

  When I arrived in Revelstoke for the holiday, everyone was still shellshocked about the cat deaths. My elder niece, Adira, a pale, blackhaired tomboy, would occasionally mutter, “We shouldn’t have let her out”—about Clara or Patches, I guess—and my sister would say that if she hadn’t been able to go out at all she wouldn’t have been happy; and my niece would say, “But she’d be alive”; and so forth.

  My sister’s house was large—its kitchen opened to a dining area and a “circle room” with a fifty-foot solar-panelled glass dome—but contained few rooms. So I was given my elder niece’s second-floor bedroom, my brothers shared my younger niece’s room, and our mother and our uncle took the sleeper couch in the library, on whose carpet Crow often peed.

  Because we were aware of the traumatic cat deaths, we all behaved well, even me, and when our uncle knelt down and spread his arms wide and said to my nieces, “Come give Uncle D a kiss!” and I had to watch my nieces tense up, walk stiffly toward him, and let him grab their faces and kiss their lips, I didn’t say anything. I just smiled widely and continued to behave, that afternoon, by not eating any gumdrops while my family spent several hours baking and constructing the gingerbread mansion, and we all felt, I think, good after the mansion was completed. It was late afternoon on December 23rd, and I probably never would have instituted the Kamikaze Training if it hadn’t been for what happened after the gingerbread mansion was finished, which was that we all went for a walk in the woods.

  The fires hadn’t reached Revelstoke. The ground in the forest was a soft red-and-bronze carpet of pine needles, and the fields around the forest were gold brush. Revelstoke is set beside a river formed by glaciers circled by six-thousand-foot-high craggy mountains, and the sky above was velveteen blue. We were all breathing hard, laughing, running along the forest path when my younger niece giggled, pointed to an opening in the pines, and said, “What’s that thing?” and ran off the path, and my mother said, “Lily, be careful, don’t touch it,” but she was touching it, and it turned out to be Simmy. The cat’s mouth was open, her gums shrunk, her teeth exposed, her tan torso gutted. My brother-in-law wrapped the cat remainder in dead leaves and carried it home, and then he and my uncle worked for an hour to dig a hole in the frozen back yard.

  We all felt, I think, eager to bring calm back to Christmas, so after dinner my brother-in-law went to bathe, as did my mother; my sister took refuge in doing dishes; my brothers and my younger niece played Super Mario Kart together on one living-room couch; and, on the other, my elder niece, Adira, read a book, one of her easy-readers, “Ramona Quimby, Age 8.” My uncle entered the room, still dirty from digging the cat-hole, and said kindly, “Adira, would you like a foot rub?” and the girl tensed and a small “Nnnneh” sound came out of her mouth, and my uncle sat down next to her and began rubbing her feet.

  I felt the Bartonella bacteria in my head move. They had been fed when I ate my dinner of chicken and broccoli. I’d been careful not to eat a speck of sugar, but even the carbohydrates in broccoli could feed them. I felt them grow strong and say to me, “There’s a gingerbread house on the counter. Its frosting is sugar and cream, it’s soft and warm, you can eat some!”

  Meanwhile, Adira sat stiffly, staring at her book but not reading; my uncle had pulled her legs onto his lap and was kneading her calves. I sat in a leather chair nearby, not reading, either, because I heard the Bartonella bacteria yelling, “Sugar! Sugar!” I don’t know how many minutes passed before my sister asked our uncle, from the kitchen, whether Adira had said that she wanted a foot rub. Our uncle answered, in a soothing, asset-management-specialist’s voice, Yes, she had; my sister responded in a clipped voice that she thought she’d heard my niece say, “Nnnneh.” Our uncle continued to rub my niece’s feet, and then my sister said angrily to my niece that she needed help in the kitchen, and Adira put her book down and walked into the kitchen without looking right or left and said quietly, “What do you want me to do?”

  My sister said, “Dry these dishes.”

  Our uncle went downstairs to shower, and I helped do dishes, too, because sugar was in the kitchen—and not just the gingerbread house. In the cupboards, I knew, there were Mint Milano cookies. Full dark pulsed outside the sliding glass doors to the deck, and a coyote yip-yip-yip-yipped in the woods. When my sister looked over her shoulder through the dark glass, I just dipped my finger into the gingerbread mansion’s white trim. From the living room, my brothers saw me do it, and one told me loudly not to eat the mansion with my fingers, because that was gross and others would get my germs, but Bartonella said, “Ignore him. Do again.” And so I finger-dipped again, and the other twin yelled that I was disgusting and was destroying the mansion, and that hurt my feelings and made me angry, so that before my sister went to bed I cornered her in the empty kitchen and told her that I did not think my nieces felt comfortable when our uncle kissed their lips, and that we should stop it. My sister, in a stretched voice, reminded me that grand-uncles kissing grand-nieces was normal, and that she’d spoken to a professional family counsellor about correct procedures in these cases, and the real me said, “Okay,” but Bartonella me, who was larger than me and lived outside me, said, “Not okay.”

  My sister added that she was the mother.

  The real me said, “I know.”

  But Bartonella me said, “You are the mother. Big deal. I am the godmother!”

  The counsellor had warned her, my sister said, that telling her daughters our concerns would damage their psychological development, and that the issue must never be addressed.

  My sister said, “Promise you won’t say anything about Uncle
D to the girls,” and the real me said, “Okay,” and she said, “Also, don’t bring up the fact that Kunda’s trying to conceive when Kunda comes over—it’s secret,” and I said, “I won’t,” but Bartonella said, “Eat sugar.”

  The only notable thing about Kunda, besides that she was a hot, nice, Hindi immigrant who had put herself through college by waitressing, is that she worshipped her husband, a pimply blond government secretary in her department. She met him when she was thirty-seven, and after they started dating she told me, “I love him.” I said, “Really? He’s so ugly, pink-faced, and blond,” and she said, “He’s a good one, a keeper.” She always worked the same schedule as he, so that no other female official could “get him.” For the past five years, apparently, she’d been failing to have his baby, owing to “mystery infertility,” and was racked by shame.

  At 3 A.M. I woke and ate half the gingerbread mansion. I’m not proud of that, but I do blame it for the rest of the story.

  At 7 A.M., I awakened dizzy, wanting more sugar, already tasting it in my mouth. When I entered the barely lit circle room and found Adira alone, playing Super Mario Kart on a couch, it was Bartonella who said, “Kamikaze Training.”

  On the loft stairs, the large black cat, Crow, curled and watched. Beside my niece, the fat brown cat, Chocolate, licked its rear.

  My niece paused her game and said, “What?” and Bartonella explained that I’d pay her to say a few phrases. The real me remembered my sister’s warning, but Bartonella said, “The therapist’s wrong.”

  Bartonella felt that our difference of opinion stemmed from the previous holiday, at our uncle’s Texas ranch, when my sister hadn’t seen what I had. Christmas night, she’d played backgammon with most of our family in the living room; I’d wandered the house looking for a quiet place to read, and gone into the dark den, where we’d all watched a movie earlier. She hadn’t seen my elder niece asleep on her belly on the couch—or feigning sleep—and our uncle seated behind her, massaging her ass. She hadn’t had to think, Christ, why me? or notice that my niece’s tiny hands were clenched. I’d told my niece I had a present for her upstairs, and she’d vaulted up and run with me to my bedroom, where I gave her an old rubber eraser; I’d got her out of there, but like a thousand-per-cent wuss I said nothing to my uncle. Later I told my sister what had happened, said we should do something, and she said we’d be more vigilant. But she hadn’t seen what I had.

  So, about fifteen feet from the couch, I squatted down in the posture that our uncle always adopted when he spread his arms and said, “Come give Uncle D a kiss,” and I informed my niece that I was going to tell her to give me a kiss, and that she should respond by saying she didn’t feel like giving me one, and that if she followed my instructions I’d pay her a dollar.

  My niece started playing her game again.

  I said, “I’ll pay you a dollar!”

  She smiled a little. She said, “Aunt D, do you know what my allowance is?”

  I said, “Five dollars?”

  She shook her head.

  Her hand waved upward.

  I said, “Is your allowance ten dollars?”

  Guiltily, she nodded.

  On the screen, she leaped over a mushroom.

  She whispered, “I don’t want to say it.”

  I knelt in his posture, I opened my arms the way he did, and I growled in his voice, being careful not to be so loud I’d wake everybody, “Come give me a kiss!”

  Her eyes were wide.

  I said, “Now you say, ‘I don’t feel kissy.’ I’ll pay you ten dollars.”

  On the stairs, Crow got up. Her black pupils went large.

  On the couch, my niece shook her head.

  Bartonella exhorted my niece to say it. If she can’t say it she’s a sucker, Bartonella said. If she can’t say it she’s doomed.

  My niece said she didn’t want to say it.

  I kept exhorting. I offered her the choice of two phrases—“I don’t feel kissy right now” or “No thanks, I must go clean my room”—and was telling her again that I’d pay her ten dollars, when my niece started breathing as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her posture wasn’t good; she’d hunched.

  She whispered, “It’s too scary.”

  My real self said, Stop, you’re being a jerk, you made her cry, jerk; but Bartonella said, Someone’s gotta train her.

  Bartonella said, “Adira, if you say it, I’ll buy you a ruby necklace.”

  She looked at me.

  I added, “And matching earrings.”

  I knew from experience that one could buy a “real” ruby necklace and earrings on eBay for ten dollars.

  My niece looked down. Wiped her cheek. Said, “Okay.”

  Crow licked her right paw. She stared at me.

  I squatted down and said in my uncle’s voice, “Come give me a kiss!”

  She breathed shallowly, and whispered in a high, artificial voice, “I don’t feel—”; Chocolate farted, a smell of cheese/egg filled the room, and at that second my uncle walked in and yelled, “Hellooo! What’s everybody doing?”

  He paused, sniffed.

  Crow’s tail whipped.

  I said, “Nothing”; Adira said, “Nothing.”

  My sister entered behind my uncle and announced that she’d found a mouse by her bed. She held it up by the tail. Its paws dangled. Where its eyes had been were deep holes. She stared at Crow and said, “Crow, I don’t want you to do this again.” Crow’s head lifted. She closed and reopened her eyes, then stood, stretched, and padded up the loft stairs. My sister watched her go. Then she saw my niece’s face. She looked at me. Her brow furrowed. She asked my niece why she was crying. Was it something Aunt D had said? Bartonella said, “Ohnoooyourefucked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and my niece said calmly, “I was remembering Simmy.” Then my sister started crying, and I did, too—for fun and because I wanted sugar so bad—and my niece re-started her video game and my uncle baked us all cinnamon buns for breakfast.

  That afternoon, in preparation for guests, we made forty dozen sugar cookies in the shape of jingle bells, angels, and snowmen. My sister watched me eat three, and said carefully, “Drip your I.V. yet?” and I said, “Yeah,” although I had not, and decorating cookies was so much fun that everyone got along well up until the tragedy.

  It’s hard to describe one family frosting cookies, or maybe not worth the effort, but: picture bowls with colored frosting on a kitchen island. Picture my younger niece, a round-faced, brown-eyed six-year-old in a loose red dress sitting on a stool at the island; across from her was my mother, a plump sixty-something Swede with blond hair and a puffy, sad face, bent over giving directions like “Use pink for the bell, Lily,” and “Why don’t you put three Red Hots on the holly?” I was also frosting, beside my younger niece, only I was creating, using colored jimmies, bespoke snowmen who resembled family members; I’d secretly frosted an extra bump onto one and given it curly black licorice hair to make it represent a pregnant Kunda. Outside the kitchen’s sliding glass doors, the sun shone upon goldenbrown grass; it was fifty degrees; everyone was happy. My sister laid wheat noodles in vats for lasagna; her husband dumped sixteen cans of corn syrup into four mixing bowls to make eight pecan pies; my elder niece sat across from me, cutting cookies into squares and icing them yellow to resemble SpongeBob; our uncle, a handsome, red-haired retired asset-management specialist in his mid-sixties who loved to ride horses, build furniture, and collect antique books, sat on my younger niece’s other side and frosted cookies as best he could, without particular imagination, slabbing pink on a heart and yellow on a bell, and holding it up for everyone and saying, “Hey, guys. I did a bell. See?” From time to time he dropped his butter knife, and when he did he’d say, “Whoops, I dropped my butter knife,” and get down and crawl around underneath my younger niece’s stool; at which my niece, whose bare legs dangled from her dress, giggled nervously. Then our uncle would pop over to the sink, near where my sister was working, and say, “Excuse me, my knife’s dirty. I
’m going to wash it.” He dropped his knife five times, I guess.

  I know, K, that you’ll protest that that’s not realistic: how can a man drop a butter knife five times? I’m sorry to say that it’s easy—the fingers spread, the knife drops. And you bet that part of me observed the proceedings and thought, This is crazy, I’m going to kill something, I’m gonna tear down walls or some shit! But the rational me thought, So he crawls under her stool, maybe sees panties, so what? Respect your sister’s wishes. Everybody wants a peaceful Christmas.

  Also, I was distracted by the fact that my sister was preparing wheat-based lasagna for dinner: my sister and my elder niece had both had Lyme disease, and were warned by doctors never to eat dairy (mucus-forming), soy (goitrogenic), or wheat, which spiked blood sugar, caused inflammation, and depressed the immune system. I knew that I was not supposed to criticize my sister’s food choices, because she’d told me not to, but the third time our uncle dropped his butter knife I felt my frustration surge, and said, “Nina, why can’t we make chicken stir-fry? You’re not supposed to eat wheat!” and my sister replied that guests were arriving, and everyone liked lasagna, and I said, “They might like gluten-free lasagna,” and she said that no one liked gluten-free lasagna, and added that normally she did not eat lasagna, but today was Christmas Eve, she was making it, and I needed to lay off her food choices, and outside a V of fat geese floated through the slate sky, and I thought wistfully how, if I could muscle-test Kunda to identify the supplements that would best replenish her iodine and support her adrenals, I could get her pregnant, and our uncle’s butter knife clattered and he said, “Whoops! I’m clumsy!” and crawled under my younger niece’s chair and the kid’s legs kicked, and I knew I shouldn’t say anything, I knew I shouldn’t cause trouble, but I felt dizzy. I saw Crow, who was crouched on the loft stairs, shimmer and float above and beside herself, as if she were three cats, and I yelled, “But I see that you have wheat bread on your counter!” and my sister said coldly, “That’s for the girls,” and I said, “But they shouldn’t eat wheat either—it’s a Frankenfood!” and I was describing wheat’s thyroid-hampering properties when my sister turned to our mother, who was petting Chocolate, and said, “Mother, I said don’t pet Chocolate, stop!”