by Otto Penzler
“I might have seen something that day he took me on the boat?” Lauren asked, trying to tug the conversation back to where it had begun.
“You might have, I suppose. I wasn’t in any shape to take notice of much right then. I’d had all these stitches, down there, you know, and they were so uncomfortable, and then you were going through this phase of being jealous of your new brother and so kept waking me up at night with your bad dreams and forgetting your toilet training and bursting into tears at the least thing. Which was perfectly normal with a new baby in the house,” she hastened to say, “even if maybe a little extreme. In the end I had to agree with my mother and your father that the best way to let you get over your naughtiness was to ignore it as much as possible. And you did settle down, after a while. In fact, you became a new child, so quiet and obedient. You were always so good with your brother, too.”
Her mother dithered on for a while, recounting in intimate detail the extensive difficulties the stitches had caused, even going so far as to speculate aloud (Does she even remember that she’s got her daughter on the other end of the phone? Lauren wondered) that the lingering discomfort, and at a time when her husband needed her most, what with the embezzlement and Arty’s treachery and all, had contributed to the divorce.
Lauren interrupted desperately, before her mother could go into any greater detail. “Well, think about it, Mother, see if you can remember anything traumatic involving a cat.”
“I’ll try, dear. You could call your father and ask him. I have a number for him somewhere.”
Lauren cut her off, knowing that she was about to take the phone over to the desk and begin a search. She had no intention of asking her father about it; she hadn’t talked to him in so long she’d forgotten the sound of his voice, and she wasn’t about to resume their relationship with a revelation of her psychic distress. Maybe her mother’s approach was best and would work as well now as it had then. Ignore it. and it’ll go away.
Her mother’s approach, to ignore distress. Look at their conversations centering around the cat: She’d been fond of Arty, that was obvious, but expressed neither resentment nor even puzzlement at his abandonment. Then must have come a hellish time—a newborn and a jealous three-year-old, a demanding husband and the first threats of bankruptcy, the revelation that a trusted friend (or more than a friend?) had stolen them blind. Creditors, an abrupt change in lifestyle, a husband fleeing infamy and leaving her behind to raise two children on a secretary’s pay. Lauren’s father, meanwhile, had salvaged enough out of the whole mess to afford a nice house on a tropical island, complete with a twenty-four-year-old “housekeeper.”
Ignore it, and it’ll go away. Only it didn’t. The nightmares continued. Not every night now, but at least every other, she would see the spinning cat with the human face, hear a startlingly loud and completely imaginary thud, and come heart-poundingly awake in the dark. It was beginning to make her angry. And just a little bit worried. Insanity didn’t run in her family, so far as she knew—although come to think of it, her father’s final loss of stability had come when he wasn’t much older than she was now.
Another Friday and Monday in Min Henry’s soothing office, a Sunday and a Wednesday correcting papers and grunting replies while her mother rambled on in her ear, practice three afternoons and the beginning of the season on Saturday, plus her regular schedule of classes. A person could grow accustomed to anything, Lauren said to herself; even being haunted by a cat. Still, regular as clockwork it came: hard bench under her bottom, cold wind on her face, wet fur and the “O” of shock, a thud and the roaring sound of blood beating through her ears in the still house. Then the following Monday, Min Henry tapped the wedge in a little further, with a couple of questions.
“Tell me again about the sound you hear in your dream,” she said in this, their sixth session. “Was it the car behind you hitting the cat?”
“In my imagination, maybe—I didn’t actually hear anything. I couldn’t have, since I know I didn’t hit it, and the car windows were up and the tape player going.”
“Then what is the sound?”
“That is weird, isn’t it? In the dream, it’s the sound that panics me more than anything.”
“You described it as a clunk?”
“Sort of a hollow thud. A little like… Jeez. Is it like…? No, not really. I was thinking it reminded me of the sound of a basketball bouncing, but that’s not it. Other than a sort of hollowness. Brief, final—God, Min, I don’t know. Why does it matter, anyway?”
“Okay, Lauren, take a couple of deep breaths. The tissues are on the table next to you.”
I’m crying, Lauren realized with a shock. Why am I crying? What the fuck is going on, a stupid frightened cat causing some damned psychosis or something. “Why is this so awful?” she pleaded. “I mean, I could understand if I’d watched a person get run down, that would be enough to haunt you, but cats get killed all the time. And it wasn’t even me that hit him!”
One of the things she had always liked about Min Henry was that the doctor actually answered her patients’ questions instead of turning the questions back around. Now she said, “Lauren, you are assuming this scene with the cat has triggered off some traumatic episode or emotion that you’ve hidden from yourself. That may be so, or it may simply represent some state of mind you’re having trouble acknowledging. In either case, the key may lie with that anomalous sound. You say it doesn’t belong with your memory of the actual cat incident; if that’s the case, then it must have snuck in from elsewhere.”
“But where? I told you that my mother had no idea of a trauma with a cat.”
“Could it have been something other than a cat?”
The simple question reverberated softly through Lauren’s mind, stirring up an odd and unidentifiable series of feelings, excitement and confusion and a peculiar stillness, as if she were a rabbit hiding from a circling hawk. She blinked, and found that the therapist was watching her closely.
“We’re running short on time today,” Min Henry told Lauren, “but I can see that sparked something off.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it, for next time.”
“How about trying hypnosis?” Lauren blurted out. “This not knowing—it’s making me crazy.”
“Lauren, I’d rather see if your memory can loose this on its own. We can try hypnosis, but let’s give the mind a while longer to work it out.”
“How much longer?”
“Give it a month, two at the most. Your doctor gave you the prescription for sleeping pills, didn’t he?”
He had, although they left Lauren feeling as groggy as sleeplessness did. Two months?
But in the end it didn’t take anywhere near that long.
The week passed. Wednesday a conversation with her mother, Friday a session with Min, two more practices, four broken nights, and all the while Lauren’s mind fretted over the question.
Could it have been something other than a cat?
Oh, yes. But what?
Saturday dawned, four endless weeks after the cat had fallen from the sky and into Lauren’s mind. There was a game this morning, and Lauren dragged herself reluctantly from bed, made herself a pot of forbidden coffee, and drove to school. The girls were excited, the new uniforms looked good, the other team was strong enough to challenge but with definite exploitable weaknesses, and the bleachers were full of enthusiastic supporters. Lauren’s own problems, for once, retreated.
It happened in the last quarter, the blow that hammered the wedge all the way home and split her memory clean up the middle.
The score was 47–45, the home team hanging on to its slim lead through the quarter, when the visitors called a time-out and sent in three new players, girls who separately were a threat, but together bonded into something formidable. A tipped-in rebound tied the score, a gorgeous shot from what seemed like center court put Lauren’s girls three points behind. They made up two, the others matched it, then got two more, and w
ith ninety seconds left on the clock, the struggle was in earnest. As the visitors brought the ball down, Marisol’s hand darted out to slap it away; Juana was there as if by magic, and the two girls flew down the court with a stampede on their heels. The crowd stood and roared as Juana leaped up to drop the ball through the hoop. Then the other team had possession, sprinting down toward the basket with the determination of aristocrats threatened by the lower classes. They slammed into the home players, tried for a shot, missed, and as Marisol struggled to position herself for a rebound, the opposition’s six-two forward rose past her, spiked the ball in, and came down again with her elbow centered squarely over the top of Marisol’s skull.
The crack must have been more imagined than actual, since the noise level in the auditorium was so high only a gunshot would have risen above it, but the impact was nearly as great. Marisol’s knees turned to water and she staggered back into the girls behind her, collapsing slowly until she was sprawled flat on her back, her short hair spiky with sweat, eyes wide, mouth in an astonished “O.” Three hundred throats went abruptly still as the girl lay briefly stunned, then Lauren, in a narrow gap between two players, saw the comprehension come back into Marisol’s eyes, saw the girl’s focus snap onto the clock to see if she had time, saw the determination to regain those points, to get back into play, to win.
The tall forward was nursing her elbow with stifled curses and the other coach was racing across the court to see if either girl was badly hurt, but Lauren stood rooted in place. Thud; bewilderment; spiky hair; a determined struggle to rise. The faint lapping of waves against wood reached Lauren’s ears. Marisol sat up, the opposing forward stopped hugging herself to reach down and pull Marisol to her feet, the crowd applauded its relief, and players from both sides gathered around the two girls.
Nobody was expecting one of the coaches to collapse. No one even noticed Lauren at first, standing rigid on the sidelines, both hands clapped over her mouth, her face as bleached as the team’s new shorts. She stared at Marisol, who was rubbing her head and shrugging off the concern of her teammates, and then Lauren’s knees gave way and she dropped to the court, completely limp. It was Lauren for whom the paramedics came.
In the hospital emergency room, with the curtains drawn and a call in to Min Henry, Lauren saw it again and again, a twenty-six-year-old movie playing itself out in her mind’s eye.
The bench beneath her had been the unpadded seat of an old wooden skiff, her tiny shoes dangling free of the boards; the gray expanse of concrete was really the cold surface of a wooded river in winter. The young man in the water had been, she could only assume, Arty. She had adored him—that she remembered—not just his fragrant cigars, and he had gone into the river with a huge and bewildering splash, to surface, spluttering, head bolt upright and eyes popping at the shock of cold, a look of astonishment on his face. He had shaken his head like a dog, making his dark hair go spiky; his naked hand, surprisingly delicate without the glove, had reached up, in supplication or to ward off the next blow of the upraised oar. His eyes had been frantic, locked into a determined search for support, for haven from the icy water. He had been about to lunge for the boat when the oar hit him a second time, with a weird, hollow thunk.
She had been little more than a baby, too immature to make any sense of what her eyes had witnessed, too young to remember this confusing event in a confusing world. Until the cat had dropped in front of her and shaken loose her father’s deed.
Lauren looked up at the rattle of the curtain being pulled back. Min Henry’s kind face was pinched with concern.
“The sound was an oar,” Lauren told her without preamble, reaching out for the therapist’s hand. “I was too young to make any sense of it, but it was an oar, hitting the head of a man in the water. A man named Arty, my father’s manager, whom I loved, and used to follow around like a shadow. I think my mother was having an affair with him. My father set him up, made it look like Arty was the one who stole the company into bankruptcy. When Arty was never found, everyone assumed he had fled to Mexico.”
It explained an awful lot, Lauren thought, about what I became. When I was two and a half years old, a young man with spiky hair passed in front of me, and was gone.
MRS. CASH
Mike Lupica
They were inside the blue and white Academy tour bus, on their way down Fifth Avenue from the Pierre, on their way to the Garden, and Billy Cash was talking about Monica again.
Somehow it always came back to Monica these days, even when he was talking about all the other girls in his life, the ones Billy said he wanted to fuck, not have it be the other way around. Didn’t matter where they were, either, or who was listening. They could be talking about whether or not the Magic—Billy’s team—could hold off the Nets and Sixers for home court in the playoffs. Or whether Billy could score enough points the last two weeks of the season to hold off that little tattooed shit from Memphis, Taliek Moore, to win another scoring title, which would make it only ten in a row.
Billy didn’t even seem to pay much mind to his injured foot, that fascia deal he had going, whether or not he could mess himself up good by playing on it between now and when the playoffs started.
He was fixed on his wife. Mrs. Cash, he called her most times. At least when he wasn’t calling her “that bitch.” The former Monica LaGuerre. Most times Billy talked about her like she was some defender he couldn’t shake, not even with the famous step-back move he liked to use right before he shot his patented fade jumper. Or that move he’d make starting to his right, then planting his right foot—the one hurting him so bad now—so that the guy guarding him would go flying past just before Billy’d make another fifteen-footer, the ball usually hitting the net like hair hitting a pillow.
“You see that guy in the lobby last night, we got back from the club?” he said to Gary Hall.
Gary said, “Course I saw. You pay me for that, right, dog? To see shit?”
Billy Cash leaned back in the first seat on the left, behind the driver, the one that was always his seat, on the way to a shootaround or a game or to the airport in the night. Gary was where he always was, across the aisle.
“He coulda had a camera on him,” Billy said.
“Yeah,” Gary said, “he coulda. So could the room service waiter. Or the woman from housekeeping they keep on call twenty-four hours a day when you’re in town, in case you decide your pillow feels as hard as your dick or some such. Or the bellman brings your brushed suedes back looking all new after you smudged them someplace and they’ve been botherin’ you ever since.”
Only Gary could talk to him that way. Not even the Magic coach, Tommy Clayton, could. There’d never been a coach Billy Cash had in his life, all the way back to Wake Forest, who had any real juice with him. Or any coach Billy trusted. But he trusted Gary Hall, his bodyguard, the man in charge of what Billy liked to call his all-around situation, the ex—undercover cop from New York City he’d hired to permanently have his back, in season and out, work his surveillance, watching out for Billy Cash the way he had when he was chasing bad guys, going over every single hotel room Billy stayed in like it was in one of those crime scene shows on television.
Only the job was more than that now, Gary knew. All of a sudden, these last months, the full-time job was listening to this nonstop shit about Monica and how he was sure she was having him followed so it would be no problem when she divorced him to get half.
That and taking care of the girls.
Billy Cash said, “That your way of tellin’ me you checked him out? The guy in the lobby?”
“I talked to security. They said he was just a driver, wanting to be right there when his man, some Saudi asshole, came off the elevator, probably coming down from doing the same bad things in his suite you were about to go up and do in yours.”
“Speaking of,” Billy said. “We good for later?”
“With the MTV girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
Billy Cash leaned back, smiled. “M
TV,” he said. “Maybe we’ll make our own damn video.” Then he closed his eyes and with them still closed said to Gary, “You see that driver guy in the lobby again, the one with the towel-head, you act like you’re with hotel security, check him out your own damn self.”
“After I get Miss MTV squared away,” Gary said. “As part of my ever-expanding duties.”
Billy wasn’t even listening, Gary saw that he’d put his headphones on, was probably listening to some of that thump-thump-thump rap he said got him going.
So this was another time when Gary stopped short of telling him that he didn’t sign on to be a pimp, that he didn’t know when he signed on with Billy Cash that his job would turn into getting the girls into the hotel and then out, after Billy had finished his business.
That and watch out for all the private eye shit Billy was sure Monica was putting on him, looking to have him by the balls when she filed, something Billy was sure was going to happen soon.
Billy took the headphones off and said, “You ought to get yourself a girl of your own, you wouldn’t act so fucking pissed off all the time.”
“So I can be as happy as you and Monica?” Gary said.
“I’m talkin’ about one who’ll love you for yourself, not for the cold cash,” Billy said. Always looking for another play on words when it came to Monica.
The Academy ran into some traffic, turned right on Forty-fifth, on its way over to Broadway.
“My life’s complicated enough,” Gary said, “watching out on your life.”
