You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  Lavinia tells them to wait a second, closes the door, and turns up the TV, hoping to drown out the inevitable whining and scratching from the bedrooms and basement. A soap opera is on. Lavinia turns the dial two clicks. The woman outside hollers “Mrs. Simms?” so Lavinia settles on a game show, with its bells and frequent clapping. Then she unchains the door and invites the two Humane workers in.

  The lady has a face that ought to be pleasant—soft cheeks, bright blue eyes, yellow eyebrows—but strikes Lavinia as arrogant and unknowing. The man shakes Lavinia’s hand and introduces himself as Tom Mitchell. “This is Dawn Kester,” he says. Tom is very tall and thin, his narrow, too-small face split by a thick, straight mustache which obscures his upper lip. Dawn looks around appraisingly. Tom raises his eyebrows and nods at nothing in particular.

  “Well, you can see I have a few cats.” Lavinia waves her hand around the room. Lucifer jumps onto the recliner and stretches his paws against Tom’s leg.

  Eight is okay, Lavinia thinks.

  “Hey, buddy.” Tom reaches out to pet him, but Lucifer swats his hand away and a thin line of blood appears on Tom’s finger. He glances at it with lifted brows, pursing his lips.

  “Sorry,” Lavinia grabs the cat. “He’s like that.” She puts Lucifer in the kitchen, and turns to find Dawn on her heels. Behind Dawn the small living room looks suddenly foreign. A bookshelf blocking half the front window and piled haphazardly with yellowed, dog-eared paperbacks. A threadbare autumn-gold loveseat with avocado stripes obscured by cat hair. A brown, sculpted shag carpet spotted with stains—cat puke, the occasional potty accident and, of course, the blueberry mollusk. A blue La-Z-Boy with a seat cushion pilled to gray by zealous paws. Above the La-Z-Boy the back of a culled calendar page is taped at its torn frill. In black marker, printed neatly in block letters, the page reads, What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

  “Mrs. Simms, do you think you could turn the TV down?” Tom says.

  With one long step, Dawn reduces the contestant’s joy to a pathetic, distant screech. Lavinia wants to slap her hand. She can hear Plato crying, his squeaky meow like an unoiled bike chain.

  “I’m sorry,” she says loudly, tapping her right ear, “you’ll have to forgive me. A bit hard of hearing. So what can I do for you?”

  Dawn scratches her nose with her thumbnail and clears her throat. “Mrs. Simms, we need to take a look around. To inspect the premises. We’ve had reports you have a number of cats living in unsanitary conditions.”

  Was cat hair considered unsanitary? How about a few spots on the rug? She tried to get the blueberry stain out, but the rug is old, none of that stain protector they advertise these days.

  “Well, as you can see, I’m a widow, don’t have much money. My cats are healthy, though, and well fed. I take very good care of them.”

  “The report suggested you had more than a few cats. More than these,” Tom says. “And to be honest, ma’am, the house doesn’t smell very good.”

  “May I?” Dawn says, motioning toward the kitchen.

  Lavinia steps aside. Tom and Jerry, a pair of littermates Lavinia picked up at a garage sale, stand on the counter peering through a smear of white bird poop on the dusty glass.

  “Exactly how many cats did you say you have?” Dawn, looking at the plates and the scattered crunchers on the floor, shrivels her small, round nose.

  Lavinia recognizes repulsion. It is the expression most often seen on a person before he hangs himself.

  She checks out the window. Of course old man Pultwock is standing in the narrow strip of gravel between their houses. Lavinia sees the interest in his eager face, the bright, alert way he watches the van parked out front. He drags on his cigarette, then flicks the filter toward Lavinia and pulls out his pack to take another.

  “Mrs. Simms? How many cats do you have?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Tom calls in from the other room, “Dawn, come take a look.”

  He’s standing in the doorway to the back bedroom. Lavinia hollers, “Who do you think you are? This is my home!”

  Dawn continues toward the room as if deaf while Tom cocks his head to the side and sighs. “I better call my wife. She’ll freak if I’m late for dinner.”

  They call the police, who must subdue Lavinia before the cats can be removed. It turns out the kittens are dead. Somebody broke their necks while Lavinia was talking to Tom and Dawn.

  When they run out of cages, Dawn stays behind to write up reports while Tom drives the first load back to the Humane Society and returns with more cages and another woman, who helps him round up the remaining cats and load them in the car.

  After everyone is gone, Lavinia sits at her Bakelite table, tilting to the left where the foot of one leg came off years ago. Her head aches from crying and her hip hurts where she fell, slipping on a pool of Friskies vomit by the basement door when she tried to bar Tom’s way down. The plastic plates lie around her, scattered into the middle of the room, several upended.

  This can’t be right, she thinks. She must have some recourse.

  She considers calling Christopher, but can’t bear the thought of his perfunctory pity.

  A knife lying on the counter catches Lavinia’s eye and she imagines herself knocking on Pultwock’s door and, when he opens it—all bathrobe and day-old cigarettes—stabbing him. She imagines the look of surprise cross his greasy features.

  Lavinia gets the knife. She stabs at the air first with an overhand grip, then underhand. This would be better, she thinks, for getting him before he can see what is coming, a blow beneath the ribs, right where his flimsy robe ties around his disgusting potbelly, like a sack of skinned rabbits shuddering beneath the terry cloth.

  Lavinia goes to the back door. On this side of the lock the other half of the envelope outside reads, Rarely is suicide committed through reflection. If a friend addressed him indifferently that day, he is the guilty one.

  Lavinia opens the door quietly and looks across to Pultwock’s porch, at his dark windows, giving nothing away. She goes out, holding the screen door until it latches, then crosses the gravel path, stepping on a pile of cigarette butts in the dark, fallen heroes under her slippered feet. Around back she tries to spot him through the kitchen window. The house sits on a high foundation, though, and even on her tiptoes, ingrown nails piercing painfully, Lavinia can’t see in. She moves to the living room, where the windows are set lower, cups her hands beside her eyes, the knife held precariously between her thumb and the edge of her palm.

  In the contrast between dark and light, Lavinia can now see the picture clearly. Her mother is hugging the dog Lavinia sent to the pound with one arm and clutching the throat of her bathrobe closed with the other, as if someone has caught her unprepared. But she smiles. The surprise is not wholly unwelcome.

  Lavinia adjusts her hands and sees Pultwock at the kitchen table, just as she was a moment ago. He has a plate of eggs and a piece of toast, but instead of eating, he’s smoking a cigarette.

  He looks behind him, sees Lavinia staring and waves. He doesn’t even seem surprised. Did he see her come outside? Perhaps tracked her progress around the house? She wonders if he sees the knife.

  The back door opens and Lavinia hears his voice. “Fifty-five with the new ones!” he shouts.

  “What?” Lavinia grips her knife in the underhand position.

  “Fifty-five fucking cats I counted,” Pultwock says.

  Lavinia tromps to the back door and stands in the dark. “You were the one who called, weren’t you?”

  Standing on the lowest step, Pultwock cinches his robe. “I didn’t call nobody. Fifty-four fucking cats is pretty hard to hide.”

  “I kept them in the house.”

  Pultwock shrugs. Lavinia steps toward him and jabs at the air with her knife. “I ought to gut you like a fish. Nobody would care, you know. Nobody would give a damn.”

  “You’re right about that,” Pultwock says. “But I
want to know first—where’s number fifty-six?”

  “What?” Lavinia steps forward, having convinced herself she’s going to do it. She’s going to jam this knife into his belly because she doesn’t believe him. He’s a liar. He is the cause of her tremendous loss.

  “You had fifty-four, but that Jason, he gone off today, and you got the kittens. I seen fifty-five leave. Should have been fifty-six, and I want to know, where you stash her?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” The numbers mean nothing to Lavinia. She’s never actually counted the cats.

  Pultwock takes a piece of paper out of his robe pocket, the back of a long grocery receipt, and lets its wrinkled length drop to his knee. “Gray one with white spots, black nose. Black one. Long white hair with gray face. Black and white (big). Black and white (small). Orange with black swirls. Gray with black stripes. White with orange circles…”

  He reads for several seconds, describing by color and unique markings each one of Lavinia’s fifty-four cats, kittens not included. “So what happened to the all-white one? The one you call Emily?”

  She’s in the rafters of course. Lavinia stands on the concrete floor, kicking aside newspaper, calling up, “Here, kitty kitty kitty. Here, Emmy Emmy Emmy. They’re all gone. It’s just us.” She instructed Pultwock to stay upstairs so he won’t scare her. “We’re all alone here. Here, Emmy Emmy Emmy. Come to mama. Kitty kitty kitty.”

  The cat’s eyes, glowing blue, appear out of the darkness. She meows and rubs against the fragile knob and tube wiring. Her face is dusty.

  “Do you see her?” Pultwock hollers.

  “Sh!” Lavinia hisses. “She won’t come down if she knows you’re here.”

  Pultwock walks gingerly down the stairs. He’s staring at the floor, covered with the flattened boxes Lavinia brought home that morning. “You’re not moving,” he says, surprised.

  “I told you,” Lavinia says.

  Pultwock holds out a can. “Here. They like this, don’t they?” It’s a can of real tuna. The scent cuts through the stench of ammonia.

  Lavinia takes the can and holds it high above her head, waving toward the empty spot where Emily’s face used to be. “Emily, look what I have. Look.”

  PRISONERS DO

  Before going into Shayla’s house, Mike fired up the laptop to check on his wife. Via the home-monitoring website he could see her on the couch wearing sweats and his old Bulls T-shirt. She wore little else these days, needing comfort more than style.

  A can of Pepsi and a plate sat on the stool beside her. For years that stool, pink with blue butterflies, had boosted their girls to the sink for tooth-brushing and hand-washing, but it looked ludicrous next to the Italian leather sofa.

  Mike zoomed in on Fawn’s face. She looked relaxed. No pursed lips, no wrinkles, except for the usual ones. He shifted the camera down and left to get a better look at the stool. There, on one of the old melamine plates with the kids’ handprints, her yogurt with its foil top and a pile of cheese and crackers appeared untouched, and he wondered if she’d lost track of them, if he should call to remind her. That morning he’d told her he had a lunch meeting and it might seem odd if he called now, when he should already be in the meeting, but what did she know of odd anymore?

  Mike had begun to dial before he caught sight of Shayla in the window. She held up a Mountain Dew, his drink of choice, as if toasting him. He signaled with a raised finger that he needed a second, slid the laptop under the seat, checked the volume on his cell, then put it back in his pocket, where he’d be sure to hear if Fawn called.

  Shayla and Mike had sex, then over a quick sandwich talked about work. She was a breast surgeon; Mike a radiologist. He’d diagnosed Shayla’s mother with lung cancer a few years ago and after that, when they saw each other in the hospital break room or cafeteria, he always asked about Norma. By the time they slept together, Shayla understood his situation, didn’t expect anything more than what he could give.

  At least she’d thought so, but that afternoon while discussing a medical conference in San Francisco, she started to say, “It’s a combination clinical and imaging seminar. We could go…,” then stopped. Laughing lightly, Shayla fluttered her fingers to indicate momentary confusion, harmless forgetting. “Right, sorry, never mind.”

  Later, as Mike got ready to leave, he took her in his arms and kissed her hard, as hard as he usually did when first arriving. “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

  She smirked. “I’m so glad.”

  “I’ll see you back at the hospital. I have a mammogram we should go over.”

  Shayla stood at the dining room window watching Mike start the car, then fiddle with something in the passenger seat. A laptop came into view, propped on the steering wheel, and she stepped back into the shadows, but as a radiologist Mike had been trained to identify things in patterns of dark and light that other people thought meant nothing. Glancing up from the computer, he hesitated, then gave an exaggerated wave. Embarrassed, Shayla waved back.

  A mile away Mike pulled into a McDonald’s and signed on to the monitoring site again, having decided against doing it in Shayla’s driveway with her at the window, watching him. While he waited for the image of his living room to appear, Mike let himself play back what it felt like to slide that red sweater over her head, her breasts rebounding against his chest, her thick hair, streaked like tiger maple, tickling his face.

  Fawn, slumped on the couch, popped into view. She looked exactly as she had before. So did the crackers and cheese. He dialed and watched her feel around for the phone. “It’s on the floor,” he said. “The floor.”

  Letting it ring and ring seemed like a kind of torture, but the new phone announced the caller audibly, so Fawn knew it was him and that he’d let it ring as long as necessary.

  “It’s on the floor, by your foot,” he said again.

  As if she could hear him, Fawn leaned over and saw the phone.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.

  “Good. I’m fine.”

  “It’s one o’clock.”

  “I know.”

  “The girls will be home in two hours.”

  “I know, Michael. I can tell time.”

  “Did you eat lunch?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You should eat anyway.”

  “Goodbye, Michael. Goodbye.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

  The afternoon bolted past in a continuous stream of CTs, MRIs, a lumbar puncture, two complaint calls from the ER, and countless plain films. At three thirty his watch beeped and he called his oldest daughter’s cell.

  “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s fine. We’re just having a snack.”

  “What’s the homework situation? Does Middie have math?” His middle daughter, Miranda, was struggling with pre-algebra and his oldest would try to help if she had time, if she didn’t get distracted by Facebook, or Instagram, or some other thing Mike felt the danger of but didn’t know how to control. Fawn used to handle things like that.

  “Put Mom on.”

  He heard mumbling, then Rebecca. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mike became aware of a shadow in the hallway. He stepped to the back of the room and lowered his voice. “Give her the phone.”

  There was another pause.

  “She won’t take it.”

  “You sure she’s okay?”

  “I guess. I mean, she seems okay.”

  Mike could hear Fawn talking in the background. If he went home now, he’d have to read the rest of this stuff tonight, after she fell asleep, which was fine, he could do the MRIs and CTs. He didn’t have the right monitor for plain films, though. His partners had been covering for him, but that couldn’t go on forever. He’d have to buy a high-resolution screen, never mind the money.

  Mike told Rebecca he would try to leave early. “Call me if she starts acting weird, oka
y?”

  The shadow hadn’t moved off. Mike stuck his head into the hall. Shayla stood there.

  “Sorry. I just stopped by about that mammogram?”

  Mike tore through the rest of the films and snuck out the back at four forty-five. On the way home, he thought of Shayla. Later he’d berate himself for getting distracted. For now, and despite the danger he’d sensed at her house this afternoon, Mike thought of her sweater, her hair, and imagined the two of them in San Francisco eating Mexican or sushi, then a walk back to the hotel and slow, quiet sex the way he liked it, with whispers. Afterward he would be allowed to fall asleep.

  At home, Fawn lay in her spot on the left side of the couch staring at one of those cop shows, the ones that always began with some poor dead girl.

  “Hey, honey, how are you?”

  She turned and opened her mouth but nothing came out. Then a little grunt escaped and she frowned.

  “Did you take your medicine?”

  She just looked at him. In the kitchen he checked her pillboxes: purple for morning, yellow for afternoon, red for evening. Behind them a whiteboard with the day of the week and beside it a computer Mike had programmed to beep and play “It’s time to take your medication.” Still, she’d forgotten her noon meds, which is why she couldn’t speak. Normally, he made sure she took them when he came home for lunch.

  Mike went to the bottom of the stairs, ready to shout at Rebecca. Hadn’t she noticed her mother’s words beginning to slur? How long had she been upstairs?

  Pounding rap music and a black man’s voice filtered down. Gonna ride you like a freaky train / Bitch all up inside my brain / I’m thinkin’ what I lost and gained / feelin’ if it worth the pain.

  Cupping his hands around his mouth, Mike took a deep breath and smelled Shayla. On his hands. Though he’d washed at least four, five times.

  In the kitchen he washed again, this time with stinging hot water and dish soap, a strongly scented citrus type that cut grease “magically.” Then he poured a glass of water and went back in the living room, Fawn’s pills like little pink bullets in his palm.