by R. Lee Smith
“I see.” His expression and tone remained guarded. “And so, a closed ceremony, each year to each human.” He eyed the locket. “With tribute paid.”
“Were you ever a child?”
“I?” He wasn’t used to being surprised so often. She could feel a stirring of unease in him, ready to become anger. But he thought about it, and even if those thoughts were closed to her, she sensed a kind of careful sincerity in the way he answered. “So I must assume, having seen those of my kind birthed and suckled. I recall no age of youth. Perhaps…a sibling…” He closed his eyes, simultaneously closing a fist around her locket, and remained silent for some time before shaking his head. “The very stones of that world are surely ash and gone by now. There are no more memories and no children. How strange.” He raised his head and gazed broodingly out the open aerie at the empty sky. “So should reason say my day of birthing wouldst be remembered and a human’s hardly marked even at its dropping. But there again doth Time divide us. We, disdaining all that comes of its passage, and they, dissecting it until naught but names remain. When wert thou born?”
“November 4th.”
“Aye.” He shook his head, still watching the sky. “For certain. Speak on.”
“You know who I’ve come for.”
“Aye, enough I know.” He shrugged and opened his fist to look at the locket. “She gave it to thee?”
“Yes.”
“Was it her only marking of thy birth? The only tribute ever paid thee?”
“No.”
“Yet this is more precious. Why?”
“I know you don’t really care. I know you’re only doing this to hurt me.”
“Then well thou knowest me, and know thou also that there are hurts far worse I could inflict, if I chose. Tell me.”
“She gave it to me—” In spite of it all, her damned voice cracked. Kazuul’s attention was on her in an instant, burning deep. “—so that I would always remember…” She couldn’t do it. Not the truth, not to him. Mara did not drop her eyes or in any way show the lie, but finished simply, “…remember her.”
He stared at her, into her, for a very long time without altering his grim expression in the slightest. At last, he snorted out a single, short, soundless breath that might have been a laugh if only it were repeated. He released the locket and turned away, swinging his legs out over the edge of the bed. He sat there, glaring out the aerie, and finally snorted again, louder this time. “Keep it,” he said blackly, and then threw back his head and laughed, terminating with a snap of his jaws loud enough to make her jump. “Keep it and go.”
“You’re the one who had to know,” she said, her cheeks burning.
“True,” he muttered, and laughed again, an angrier, even more bitter sound. “Keep it all the same. Do we not all hold our store of useless treasure? Do not ask me, Mara,” he said curtly. “Thou hast set in me a dangerous mood. If thou wert to ask, I should be compelled to answer honestly, and it is bound to end badly.”
“What is so goddamned funny?” she demanded, and he heaved an angry, laughing sigh. “You make me…You make me bare my soul to you and then you have the…the goddamned gall to snicker behind your fucking hand at it? Fuck you!” She threw herself off the bed, shaking and hot with anger, and stormed for the stair.
“Thee, Mara. Thou art the horns of my humor. Not thy worthless toy and not the absent calf who gave it, but only thee.”
She snatched up her robe and kept going.
He was there on the dais when she reached the top of the stair, his green eyes blazing out over the jagged features of his snarling face. “I laugh,” he said, coming towards her on all fours like a beast, “for that thou believest thee loves thy Connie.”
She backed up, caught herself doing it, and made herself stop. “What would you know about love?” she demanded. “Nothing!”
“I know it is not she thou lovest,” he said quietly, now face to face. His breath was hot on her mouth. His eyes were cold. “Thou lovest only that she loveth thee, and it is a pale, desolate love.”
She gaped at him, too shocked and furious even to think, much less answer.
“I think thou wouldst love her if thee could,” he went on coldly. “Thou lovest so the idea of love—”
She’d slapped him before she even knew she was going to do it.
“—that thou wouldst give much to have it, even in pretense. Yet this Connie is as close as thee ever came to that Eden, and she only for that she never knew love better than in thee. And that is surely the greatest jest of all, and a miserable worm of a mortal, for it would have to be the most wretched creature—”
She heard a rusty scream wrench out of her and threw herself at him.
“—that ever tried to love thee,” Kazuul concluded, watching her harmless hands scratch and beat at his stony hide. “If pity ever had power to move such as me, I would pity her, this Connie, because thou art all the better friend she has known, and thou—” He caught her railing fists and then cupped her shaking cheek with cruel tenderness. “—thou art terrible.”
“I hate you,” she whispered.
“Thou dost not. And I am terrible,” he added, with a rueful smile. “And truly, what more proof of thy nature do I need?”
She felt his lips on hers, felt them part for him, then yanked herself back and out of his arms. She couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t shout at him, so she slapped him again right across his smirking face and ran for the door, fighting her way up the risers in a haze of rage.
“Thou wilt find her,” he called, his voice booming right behind her. “And thou wilt save her when thou dost, I think. But never thee. Thou art beyond all redemption.”
She fell on one of the benches, stumbled up again, and left bloody smears on the door when she forced it open.
“I told thee not to ask,” he said, his voice receding now. “And such a mood of honesty I have about me that I tell thee now, why not leave her lost among us, Mara? Let her languish where she lies, believing only the best of thee until she passeth out of all reason. Wouldst thou truly have her know thee better?”
But the door slammed behind her then and he did not follow, so that, mercifully, was all.
* * *
She ran home, or as much like it as she could, just like any frustrated child will run to the security of her room when pleas and tantrums fail her. In her cell, alone for the moment, Mara took off her locket and wrapped a loop of cheap chain around her fingers so that it could dangle. It spun slowly back and forth, flashing reflected light from the blister lamp in the hall around the dark cell. Mara stared without seeing. She was back in the Panic Room, dialing back her memories to the day, just six days before her twelfth birthday, the day of the orange cat.
Her party had been planned now for three months. It was going to be at Madame Jade’s Tea Parlor, in the city. All the little girls from the right families were invited. Kimara’s party dress, in crimson and gold Chinese silk, hung in plastic in her closet. Today, Mara’s mother had told her she could invite Connie if she wanted to. This concession had been the result of one idle-seeming request on her part about two months back, and a veritable psychic siege ever since. Caroline Warner resisted the idea much more than she ever had any of Mara’s previous mental demands. She didn’t like Connie, who she saw as a filthy, cringing little foreigner, and she hated Connie’s mother, who was all these things as well as noisy and socially awkward. She had tolerated Connie’s presence at her daughter’s previous parties, but the Tea Room was really more of her own idea and she wanted only her own kind of people there. The girls, well, the girls were rather like accessories, no different from a bracelet or a brooch, and Caroline had been looking forward to seeing her well-behaved if strange little daughter among the others, shrill and giggly creatures that they were. Having the Vitelli brat around would simply ruin everything.
Mara did not insist, not out loud. She simply pummeled her mother’s mind under the surface day and night—hourly on the weekends—until h
er mother wore out and started seeing things her way. Kimara asked for so little, after all. She had only the one friend and it was her own party. Things of that sort. So this morning, an exhausted and smudge-eyed Caroline had poured out her breakfast coffee and announced that if Kimara wanted to bring her ‘little friend and her mother’ to the Tea Room on Monday, so be it. Dress was formal. Mara extended the invitation after school, visiting with Connie at Connie’s apartment, and Connie’s mother (who was rather noisy and socially awkward to tell the truth, and who knew it, which was even worse) had accepted, her large heart gripped by dread at the thought of the malicious old hens who would be at that sort of party with her. She would have to have her hair done, she supposed. And mend the buckle on her good shoes.
Her thoughts had only become more frantic as the afternoon wore on, and so Mara had excused them from the apartment. Now the two best friends walked through the Poho County Arboretum, relaxing in the autumn air.
“We could have gone to the movies,” Connie said. “You never want to do anything fun.”
“This is fun.”
“No one’s even here!”
“That’s why it’s fun.” Mara led the way up the bark-covered path to the hiking trails. She knew them all by heart.
“But there’s nothing to do!”
“Read the information plaques. See if you can spot the peachleaf willow.”
“You are a laugh riot. Have you been told?” Connie reached up and stripped the leaves from an overhanging branch, scowling at nature’s well-manicured glory. “Can’t we sit down at least?”
“Sure. There’s a bench over by the river.”
“Thank God for really tiny favors.” Connie tromped on ahead. She broke off a branch and used it to beat on other trees as she passed them, sending late-summer berries and dead leaves flying. She was wearing an Arbor Day t-shirt. Love your Mother Earth, it said. “You know, if I didn’t like you so much, I’d never come along on these dumb excursions.”
“Your mom thinks they’re educational.”
“My mom—” Connie rolled her eyes and delivered a particularly savage blow to an unsuspecting huckleberry bush. “—thinks garlic is a food group. Besides, what does she know about educational? I don’t even think she graduated high school.”
“She had other things on her mind.” ‘Like being pregnant with your brother Johnny,’ Mara thought, but did not say. Connie hadn’t done that particular bit of math yet, and anyway, if she ever said such a thing, Connie would want to know how she knew and they were still four months away from that night of purple-haired fairies and frank talk of magic. “Besides, neither did Abraham Lincoln. Or Thomas Edison, I think.”
“Yeah, whatever. All I know is—oh my God!”
Mara gave Connie’s mind a tap and saw the dying cat through those eyes before she had to use her own. “Don’t touch it,” she said immediately, and still had to grab Connie’s arm to keep her friend from picking it up. Should have hammered the suggestion in…but she didn’t want to do that to Connie.
“Is it sick?” Connie asked, her eyes huge as she watched the cat gasp and strain.
“Could be. It’s not okay, that’s for sure.”
It was a big cat, orange and white, and it had surely come out the worst in a fight with another animal over the easy leavings of some family picnic. A dog maybe, or a raccoon. Raccoons were a lot more vicious than most people realized. It had managed to crawl here, close to the trail, before its wounds overwhelmed it and so here it lay. As it writhed, the terrible extent of its injuries were revealed—bloody mats, a torn ear, a few shallow bites, and finally, its wide-opened belly. Its teats protruded on either side of the ghastly wound; it was pregnant, but not due. Mara could sense its life and the little lives it carried, but of course, it had no thoughts. Despite the things most people liked to believe about their pets and animals in general, they really didn’t have much in the way of minds.
“Should we get someone?” Connie asked.
“For what?”
“To fix it, of course!”
Mara could not help the incredulous, dubious expression that crawled over her face at that. She looked from Connie’s heartsick face to the dirt-flecked coils of the cat’s intestines and back again. “There’s no fixing that, Connie.”
The cat rolled onto its side, purring in the extremity of its panic and pain. It did not see the two girls who stood over it or hear their booming, giant-like voices. If one of them had touched it, even to try and help, it would have bit. Animals do that, even the pet ones. They couldn’t reason the way people claimed they could. They didn’t love you back.
“I think it’s dying,” Connie whispered.
“It is.”
“Well, what can we do?”
There were tears in Connie’s eyes. Her twelve year-old heart was breaking, just as if she knew this cat, had loved it all her life.
“We can’t do anything,” Mara said. “It has to die.”
The cat yowled, a terrible rattling sound. It took two or three rapid breaths, then one slow one, and then died. Mara felt its mind fade out. The kittens began to at once to panic in their uncomprehending, unborn way. Then they died too, one by one, as Mara held Connie through the storm of Connie’s grief. Fleas jumped off the dead cat. Ants crawled on.
Mara couldn’t quite understand why Connie was taking it so hard. She’d been to hospitals before, and for that matter, to parks and movie theaters and even church, when her mother’s family were visiting. Anywhere there were lots of people, she’d felt people who knew someone who had died or were even dying themselves. This wasn’t the first time she’d shared it, and she seriously doubted it would be the last. It was just something people did. They got sick, they got shot, they got in crash-ups on the freeway or burned up in buildings; people fell off things, like bridges or roofs or ladders; they got things thrown at them, like bottles or bowling balls, and they got things thrown into them, like knives or even a soda straw if the weather was really bad and the wind blew hard enough; or sometimes even got things dropped on them, like big branches or pianos being lifted into apartments. You could go outside and get hit by lightning, or sometimes lightning could come in the house and get you for talking on phone or using the shower. You could get murdered, or kidnapped and murdered, or even kidnapped and raped and murdered. Sometimes sick or sad people suicided themselves by sticking their heads in ovens or cutting up their wrists, and sometimes people who didn’t mean it got dead when they drank too much or used too many drugs. Death happened to everyone, every day, everywhere you looked. It didn’t have to mean anything. When someone died, you just buried them and moved on with your life.
Connie was crying.
“Let’s bury it,” Mara suggested, after groping some time for some comforting thing to say.
Connie picked flowers while Mara found some soft soil under a maple tree and dug out a grave. She lined it with leaves and pine needles, and laid the cat inside, curled on itself so that none of the blood or messy bits showed. She waited for Connie to pet it a few times and then covered it over with dried autumn leaves so that when they filled in the hole, the dirt couldn’t touch it directly. Connie was afraid to see that, afraid to see dirt in its fur and its ears and mostly its eyes if its eyes came open. After the dirt came the flowers and then Mara found a nice big rock with a flat top to use for a marker and that was the grave.
The two girls knelt side by side for a long time, staring at it. Connie’s thoughts were tangled—a collage of cat and blood and grandfather and was it always like that? They said ‘pass away’ and was that like ‘passing out’, because Bobby Tom said you could pass out easy on hot days or if you didn’t eat a breakfast. Could she die if she didn’t eat her breakfast? Could she passout and then, if no one fed her, passaway like Papa Frankie? She remembered him in his coffin and how Mama made her kiss him, his check like wax, lying there. They said he passawayed in his sleep, that it was peaceful, but maybe they just hadn’t been close enough at the e
nd to hear him yowl.
She started to cry again, very softly, and Mara knelt there and wondered what else to do. Hesitantly, she put her arm around Connie’s shoulder, and the other girl immediately swung around and clutched her close, crying hard but in near-silence. Mara patted her, stroked her hair, did all the things that grown-ups do to crying little kids, but none of it made much of a difference to Connie.
So she said, “Look around.”
“W-what?”
“Look around.” Mara tipped back her head, studying the branches above her, that dark leafy lattice eating up the sky, the birds and bugs and everything between her and the heavy West Coast clouds. After a while, Connie did the same, and Mara said, “The world just keeps going.”
“I guess.” Connie let go of her and sat by herself for a while. Finally, she sighed. “You must think I’m dumb.”
“No I don’t.”
“It was just a cat.”
Mara shrugged. “So? I’m just a little kid. I bet you’d feel pretty bad if I died, though. It’s okay to feel bad when things die.”
“Little kids don’t die,” Connie said, but uneasily. Mama said they didn’t, she said, ‘Don’t be silly, angel, you’re going to live a long long time and nothing’s ever going to get you,’ she said that, but—
“Sure they do,” Mara said. “Sometimes. Bad things happen to kids just they happen to grown-ups. Or to cats. But the world goes on. So do we.”
“Like…to heaven?”
“Maybe. Maybe just as other things, I don’t know. I mean, take the cat.” Mara gave the stone over the fresh grave a comforting pat. “It’s gone now, but the bugs and stuff will come along and eat it up, and whatever doesn’t get eaten will turn into good fertilizer for the bushes and trees right here, and they’ll get bigger and be homes for all the animals and birds that eat the bugs and worms and stuff. Everything goes on, see? You, me, everyone.”
