"Yeah," he said again. "I called the cops, actually, and they basically told me that if I wasn't a blood relative to mind my own business. They said it happens all the time, after guys enlist, after they sign the last papers and the plans for boot camp are solid, they get cold feet. They take off. The cops wanted nothing to do with it. But I said, what about the house? What happens to the house if he doesn't come back? It's just sitting there empty. And they said they'd deal with it eventually, when the neighbors complained."
I stood looking at him for a moment. There was a sad light, I thought, shining from this boy. Had Garrett been his best friend? His only friend?
In the distance, I could hear a cat crying, and the boy looked behind him then, and said, "I broke a window, to get the cat out"—he held up the shovel—"but she freaked out when she saw me, and took off. I put out some food, but I can't get her to come back. Do you think you could help?"
I put my car keys down on the hood of my car, and said, "I'll help."
The woods behind Garrett's house were thick—pines and birches—and the ground was carpeted with old needles and leaves. We walked a few paces into it, then stopped. I let him call for the cat (kitty-kitty—he couldn't remember the cat's name) because, we thought, the cat knew him at least a little. He told me his own name was Mike, and that he'd known Garrett only since the beginning of the fall when they'd met in their automotive class. They were friends, and Mike was helping Garrett with the Mustang, so he'd been to the house, and they'd hung out up at the college, but they weren't close.
Still, Mike was worried. It was weird, to have a guy like Garrett just disappear. "He wasn't scared of the Marines," Mike said. "He was looking forward to it. He wouldn't have bolted."
As we walked together into the woods we could hear the cat, always a few feet ahead of us, her paws snapping twigs, rustling over the needles and leaves.
"Here, kitty-kitty," Mike called, in a voice so soft it seemed impossible that anything would refuse to come to it. He carried with him an opened can of cat food. On the can there was a photograph of a white princess cat sitting on a cushion, wearing a tiara. "Kitty-kitty?"
We stopped and listened, and the cat ran on ahead.
We walked farther into the woods, and Mike called again, and the cat scurried farther on. Finally, Garrett's friend said, "Maybe you should call."
I did.
I tried to sing it.
"Here, kitty-kitty," I called.
Nothing. But I could see her behind the spindly trunk of a white birch—a large gray shape with long for, pausing. I crouched down.
"Here, kitty-kitty"
Still, she didn't come, but she also didn't retreat. She was looking at me.
"Please, kitty. Come here, kitty."
Garrett's friend gave me the can of food, which I held out to her, and I could see her nose lift into the air, smelling it.
"Come here, baby," I said. "Come on. Come on."
She took a step in my direction.
She was coming to me.
She sped up then, hurrying toward me, purring under my hand when I reached out to stroke her.
"Wow," Garrett's friend said. "How did you do that?"
In the car, Garrett's cat howled for a few seconds, and then curled into sleep in the passenger seat. Mike had said that he couldn't keep her at his apartment. Could I keep her?
Of course.
I tore a piece of paper from my notebook and left a note in Garrett's door:
Garrett, Please, if you get this note, call me or call Mike right away. We are very worried. I have your cat. Sherry Seymour
On the back, I wrote my phone number, in case he'd lost it.
"WHAT the hell is that?" Chad asked when he stepped in the house. He'd gotten a ride home from Fred because the job they'd been doing was right up the road, and he was home early. I had only been home an hour. The cat was sitting on the love seat, looking up at Chad.
"It's Garrett's cat," I said.
"What?"
"Chad, Garrett's gone."
Chad looked from the cat to me, and then walked past me, into the kitchen.
He went straight to the refrigerator, the orange juice, unscrewed the top, drank long and hard straight from the jug.
"Did you hear me?" I asked.
"Yeah, I heard you. Garrett's gone," Chad said. "Off to the war, I guess, huh?"
"No," I said. "I mean, I don't know. He hasn't been back to his house since—the other night."
"And how exactly do we know this?" Chad asked. He didn't turn to look at me. He was staring straight ahead, with the orange juice jug still in his hand.
"I went to his house," I said.
"I bet you did," Chad said.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing," Chad said, and put the jug down on the kitchen table, and walked past me. "Nothing, Mom. But I think it's time you stop worrying so much about Garrett." He glanced over at the cat and went upstairs.
JON SAID nothing when he stepped in the door and saw the cat on the love seat. He put down his briefcase. He leaned over and looked at her and then sat back on his heels, held out a hand, which she sniffed, and then licked.
"Hello, beautiful," he murmured. "Hello, kitty cat."
When he realized I was watching him from the kitchen, he looked up at me. He was smiling. He said, "Whose lovely creature is this?"
"Garrett's," I said.
"And what's Garrett's cat's name, and how did she get here?"
"I don't know her name," I said, and proceeded to tell him how we'd come to have Garrett's cat on our love seat.
Jon picked up the cat as I told him the story, and nuzzled into her gray fur, and the sweetness of it—the gentle warmth of Jon—came back to me. The way he used to bend over to scoop up a tiny Chad, loft him into the air, press his face into Chad's soft neck and hair and simply breathe. I had loved Jon all those years, I realized, pardy because there was so clearly such a wealth of love in Jon. Seeing him with Garrett's cat, perfectly content in his arms, I remembered that. I went to him and put my hand on his arm, and then my face on his shoulder.
"Sherry," Jon said, putting the cat back down gently on the love seat, "do you forgive me?"
He took me in his arms.
He said, "I love you, Sherry." He said, "I'm a deeply flawed man, Sherry, but I love you more than anything in the world. And I swore to God that if ever you would just let me hold you like this, I would never ask for anything else in this life again."
WE MADE love that night without saying anything to one another. The lights out. Our clothes tossed onto the bedroom floor. It lasted for hours. Long, slow, tender hours made of flesh, made of tears. I put my fingers in his hair, in his mouth. He put his mouth on my breasts. He kissed my arms, my neck. When I finally came, it was a sobbing crescendo of pleasure. When he came, I could feel the whole shudder of him like a wing inside me.
In the morning, we kissed good-bye on the porch. A lingering of lips and teeth and tongues. Garrett's cat watched us from the love seat, blinking in slow motion. Chad was still asleep upstairs. He hadn't come out of his room, as far as I knew, all night. Outside, in the backyard, Kujo was asleep, curled up at the edge of the scrubbrush.
"That dog," Jon said, shaking his head. "You better call the Henslins, or he's going to starve to death out there."
"I will. I love you," I said to Jon's back as he stepped out the door.
He turned around.
He came back.
We kissed again. Harder, longer. And then he left.
ON THE way into Fred's Landscaping, Chad didn't speak. He looked out the passenger-side window. I spoke, although I had the sense that Chad wasn't listening. I said, "About Garrett, Chad—he's probably just taken off, maybe left for boot camp early, or maybe he changed his mind about boot camp. Maybe he ran off to avoid it, or went to visit his aunt, but I can't help being worried, Chad. I don't blame you for any of this. This is all my fault, of course, but I need to know, Chad—you didn't threaten Garrett, d
id you? I know he told you about—" I couldn't continue. I swallowed. "But, of course, you know that none of it was his fault. I understand if you were angry at him, Chad, but Garrett didn't leave, did he, because—?"
Chad snapped around and looked at me. "No, Mom, I didn't threaten Garrett."
I looked away. I said, quietly, "I know you didn't, Chad. I'm sorry I asked."
We drove for a few minutes in silence, then I cleared my throat and asked how he was feeling, how he'd slept.
He said, "Fine."
WHEN I pulled back into the driveway, Kujo was still there.
I walked halfway down the backyard and called to him, but he was pawing busily around in the dirt and didn't even look in my direction. His ears did not even perk up. I went inside and dialed the number of the Henslins. Mrs. Henslin answered. Her voice sounded fragile, faraway, as if she were answering the phone from much farther down the road than she was, or as if she'd aged greatly since I'd last spoken to her—and I realized that I hadn't actually seen her, except as she and her husband passed in their blue pickup (a glimpse, mostly, of my own reflection in their windshield, and a wave) since last October.
In that voice, she said, "I'll send Ty down when he gets home for lunch, to fetch him. I can't do it, not with this arthritis. And Ernie hardly leaves the house since he broke his hip."
"He broke his hip?" I asked.
"Last October."
"Oh, Mrs. Henslin, I'm so sorry. I had no idea."
I felt more alarmed by how little I knew about the suffering of the elderly couple who lived less than half a mile down the road than I did about Ernie's broken hip. What had I been doing all those months that I hadn't thought to check in on them, had never once stopped by, or called, or wondered more than in passing why it was I never saw them outside any longer?
"Why would you know?" Mrs. Henslin asked. Always, she was practical. "But, anyway, he can't come down there. I'll send Ty"—her grandson—"and he'll bring a leash and get the dog back here. And I'm sorry about the trouble."
I told her that it was no trouble, that I'd only called because I was worried, because—
"Of course it's trouble," she said. "We'll take care of it."
She said good-bye and hung up, and I held on to the receiver for a few moments, feeling somehow dismissed too summarily—reprimanded, or rejected. I wanted to call her back, to explain myself again. Why I'd called. Why I hadn't known about Mr. Henslin's hip, how busy I'd been, teaching, and Chad having gone off to college. How I'd thought of them often. How I'd—
But then Kujo began to wail—a famished, cavernous noise. A cry of such frustration and despair that I put down the phone and hurried to the door to look out at him.
Had something else happened?
No.
The Henslins' spaniel was just where he'd been for days, his head thrown back, directing that long wail to the sky.
I went to the refrigerator and got the last of the pork chops I'd made for Jon and Chad on Saturday, and put it on a paper plate, and I headed for the backyard with them.
BUT, AS soon as I reached the edge of the scrubbrush with the paper plate, the pork chop—
As soon as I saw what he'd done—
That the dog had dug a hole at least three feet deep.
And the way, even when I approached him with the meat held out in front of me on a plate, murmuring his name, calling his name, finally shouting his name (Kujo!) he would not turn toward me, he would not stop howling—
And the scent of it, rising—
And a swarm of sweat bees hovering over the hole that Kujo had dug—
And the flies—
The music of those flies—
I knew.
I understood.
Just tell him you'll call the cops if he comes around, or that your husband will shoot him, or something, if he comes to the house again.
I put the plate with the pork chop on the ground at Kujo's feet, and turned back to the house, running.
AT TWO o'clock in the afternoon, after hours of standing at the back porch door, looking out to the end of our yard, listening to Kujo there, howling, then pacing, then rising up again to howl, I saw Mr. Henslin—his shadow first, hobbling in the dust—coming down the dirt road with a leash.
I opened the back door, and stepped out.
I watched as he approached his dog.
The dog crouched, wagging its tail across the ground—whining, pacing. Mr. Henslin caught him by the collar, and Kujo struggled to get away.
Mr. Henslin clipped the leash to the collar, and Kujo began to cry, and bark, and pull backward on the leash.
But Mr. Henslin was surprisingly strong. He managed to pull Kujo behind him, the dog finally giving up the struggle to pull Mr. Henslin back, but still unwilling to leave, letting his legs scuttle across the ground, refusing to stand, to walk, but having no choice but to let the stronger of the two of them drag him away, out to the road. When Mr. Henslin noticed me standing on the steps of the back porch, he called out to me. "You've got something dead out there," he shouted, then turned his back, pulling his dog behind him, home.
I SAT on the love seat with Garrett's cat. I stroked her shadowy coat. There was so much sunlight pouring in through the window on us that I could see nothing beyond this cat, in my lap, and my limbs. It was if we were floating there in a sectioned bit of glare, a bit of roped-off brilliance. The dust around us revolved slowly, galaxies of it. We were space travelers. Time travelers. We had arrived here, in this new world, with nothing. We'd brought nothing with us. We hadn't expected, I supposed, to stay so long, and then hundreds of years had passed, and we were still here, floating, homeless, alone on the love seat—
But when the phone rang, the cat leaped from my lap, straight out the back door, which I'd left open.
I couldn't move, watching her leave.
I tried to follow her with my eyes, but she was gone.
THE PHONE rang so long, the answering machine never picking it up, that I finally found myself rising, despite myself, from the love seat, and going to it. "Sherry? Is that you?"
"Yes," I said. "Jon."
"Sherry. I was worried. I let the phone ring about a hundred times, sweetheart. Were you outside?"
I said, "Yes."
"Sherry. Do you still love me? Is everything, now—is everything okay?"
"Everything is fine," I said.
There was a pause.
He said, "It doesn't sound okay, Sherry. What's happening? Has something happened there?"
"Yes," I said.
"What."
But it didn't sound like a question. It sounded as if he knew.
"Jon," I said. "Did Bram come here again?"
Another pause. Phone lines stretching through cornfields, forests, apple orchards. Soberly, Jon said, "How did you know?"
I said, "I know."
Jon cleared his throat. He said, "You were in Silver Springs with Chad. Do you want me to tell you what happened?"
"No," I said. I felt the blood move from my fingers, my hands, up my arms, into my chest, and then pooling coldly around my heart. I was sweating—my back, my chest, my brow—and had to wipe it from my eyes.
Jon sighed. He said, wearily, "Sherry, I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm not."
My hands were shaking. I dropped the phone. I could hear Jon's voice inside it, still—tiny and a million miles away, calling my name. When I was finally able to pick it back up again, all I could say was that I was sorry. I was sorry, but I'd dropped the phone.
"Jesus, Sherry," Jon said, "I thought you'd passed out. I was getting ready to call 9-1-1. Look, you go lie down, sweetheart. You lie down, and forget all about this, and we can talk about it when I get home."
I heard, then, what sounded like fingers snapping just under my chin, or some delicate bone breaking in my throat. I managed to choke out, "Jon. My god. What now?"
"Nothing now, Sherry," Jon said. "That's the beauty of it, sweetheart. Now it's over."
***
/> OVER dinner, he was no different than he ever was at dinner. I'd brought a rodsserie chicken home. Potato salad from the deli counter. I'd walked through the grocery store with a red plastic basket on my arm—a ghost woman, gathering food for the dead. I paid for the food. I carried the brown bag out to the car. I'd driven, without thinking about driving, to Fred's Landscaping, where Chad was waiting for me, sitting under a tree with Fred, both of them with their shirts off—Chad, chiseled and tan beside Fred, whose flesh was the pure white of papier-mâché except for a jagged red scar straight down his chest.
I asked Chad, when he got in the car beside me, what Fred's scar was from.
"Open-heart," Chad said.
He was talkative on the way home.
He'd seen a coyote in the backyard of a house where he was planting saplings. "Right there, in this pretty little suburban area—kind of scouting out their pool, the biggest coyote I've ever seen. It could easily have eaten their poodle, or their kid. It just froze when it saw me looking at it. We stood there staring back and forth for a long time, and then, just like it had made itself invisible somehow, it was gone."
His tone—natural, healthy, familiar, like the smell of grass and leaves and sun on him—brought me back to myself, gradually, until I was an ordinary woman driving a white car, having picked up her son at his summer job, on her way home to her remodeled farmhouse in the country, where everything was the way it had always been, and would continue to be (that's the beauty of it, now it's over...) forever.
At dinner—the rôtisserie chicken, the deli potato salad, some bread from a plastic package full of reassurances about our health (no saturated fat, heart healthy, high in fiber, calcium)—Jon and Chad talked about golf, about hunting, about hedgerows and saplings. Now and then, Jon looked across the table at me, and his eyes would linger for a moment. When I looked back, he looked down at his plate, or back at Chad—sheepishly, I thought, like a child who'd recently been reprimanded, who was not sure if he was still in disfavor, who was hoping desperately that he was not.
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