If the Fates Allow

by Zoe Kane

  “Not really,” said Lucy, a little dubiously. She felt a twinge of guilt at speaking ill of Bug, who was snuggly and soft and fun to chase around. He was nice, and she loved him more than anybody in the world except her family and Princess. And Uncle Marcus had given Bug to them which made him extra-special, especially since Uncle Marcus himself was now gone.

  But the brutal truth was that Bug really wasn’t all that bright. Aunt Annie had suffered many an afternoon trying to extricate his head from some tiny enclosed space, like the narrow opening underneath the dishwasher, or the space between the sofa and the wall, which always seemed far too small to accommodate a cat head. And Bug was sometimes too dumb to know he was being rescued; he’d yowl and mew and whine until someone came to find him and said, “Oh my goodness, Bug, how did you get stuck in there?” and then try to carefully squeeze him out. But he would scratch and claw sometimes, as if to say, “Hey! Leave me alone! I’ve got this under control, I don’t need your help.” By the time Aunt Annie pried him loose, her hand would be covered in scratches and she always said to him, in an irritated voice as though he spoke Person and they were having a conversation, "You know, one of these days I'm just going to leave you there."

  “Bug is pretty dumb,” agreed Isaac, who was thinking the same thing as Lucy. “He might get washed away by tomorrow. We can’t wait.” Isaac had thought about making some flyers – had even gotten out his paper and the good markers – but decided there was no point if they’d just get smeared in the rain. He wasn’t sure he could draw a very accurate portrait of Bug anyway, though he did know how to write “LOST CAT.”

  “Okay,” conceded Abe. “But we need a grownup.”

  They all looked at each other in silent agreement.

  Something would have to be done with Aunt Annie.

  It was time.

  Lucy made her way down the hall to the bedroom that used to be her parents’, where Aunt Annie was lying on top of the covers with all her clothes still on, her back to the door, curled up in a little ball.

  Lucy did not do what Sophia and Isaac had done. She did not stand in the doorway and fruitlessly call her aunt’s name. In fact, she didn’t say anything. She just climbed up on the bed and crawled, a little awkwardly, over her aunt’s body – kicking her in the abdomen once or twice with clumsy little feet – until she was on the other side of Aunt Annie and could look at her face.

  Aunt Annie’s mouth formed the word “Lucy,” though no sound came out. But she was looking at Lucy. She could see her. She had remembered that she was not all by herself.

  Lucy had brought Princess as backup, and once she saw the glazed-over fog inside Aunt Annie’s eyes begin to slowly clear a little bit, she nuzzled Princess up against Aunt Annie’s neck, and picked up her aunt’s limp arms to wrap them around the cat’s soft white fur. Then she put her own arms around her aunt’s neck too. They didn’t say anything for a long time. Lucy could see that she was crying a little bit. So Lucy and Princess hugged her tight and let her get on with it.

  Sometimes you needed to cry and then snuggle with something soft and then get a hug. It worked on Lucy, when she was sad. Maybe it would work on Aunt Annie.

  Because Lucy had figured out something that Isaac and Sophia hadn’t grasped yet. Aunt Annie said things sometimes that sounded mean or angry or scary, but she never meant them that way. Aunt Annie was just very, very, very sad. She was sad about Mommy and Daddy, just like everybody else, but she had also been sad before that. Aunt Annie had always been sad.

  But right now, Lucy had to help her not be the kind of sad that lays in a bed for three days anymore. She had to help her be the kind of sad that can still get up and do things.

  After a long pause, Lucy tapped her aunt on the shoulder. “Aunt Annie,” she whispered. “Dolphin says that Bug is lost. We have to go find him.”

  “It’s pouring rain,” said Aunt Annie dully, the first real words she’d spoken in days, which heartened Lucy considerably. This felt like progress. “We can go look for him in the morning.”

  “No, now,” Lucy insisted. “He has been lost for a long time. He will be wet and cold and scared. Something bad might happen.”

  “He’ll be fine,” said Aunt Annie, and Lucy began to worry she still was not really getting it. She tried again, a little more forcefully this time.

  “We have to go find him before something bad happens,” she urged her aunt. “Before the bad things find him.”

  “What bad things?”

  “The bad things that took Mommy and Daddy,” she explained, and Aunt Annie froze.

  Then she sat up.

  For the first time in three days, Annabel Walter came back to the world.

  “Lucy,” she said, looking down with her Super Worried Grownup face. “Lucy, honey, nothing like that is – Jesus. Okay. Honey, it’s going to be okay. Do you hear me?” She wrapped her arms around Lucy then and hugged her, tighter than she’d ever hugged Lucy in her life. Surprised, but pleased, Lucy wrapped her little arms around Aunt Annie and hugged her back.

  “Please come help us,” said Lucy. “Please come make it better.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” whispered Aunt Annie, her voice slowly beginning to return to something that sounded more like normal. “I promise. I’m here, baby. I’m right here. I’m sorry I went away, but I’m right here. And we’re going to be okay.”

  Lucy nodded.

  Then the miracle happened.

  Aunt Annie set down the piece of paper she had been holding for three days. She got out of bed. She pulled her tangled, messy, unwashed hair into a neat braid. She changed into clean clothes. Then she took Lucy by the hand and she marched into the twins’ bedroom, startling the life out of everyone inside it.

  “Raincoats and flashlights, everyone,” she said firmly. “Abe, does your mother know you’re here?” He and Alexa both nodded. “Good,” she said. “Then you can come along and help. We’re on a mission.”

  “Are we going to go rescue Bug?” asked Sophia, and Annie nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re going to go rescue Bug.”

  * * *

  God, the rain.

  The second they stepped off the shelter of the porch, Annie could barely see. The hood of Grace's raincoat, which she had grabbed from the coat closet, did nothing but funnel a never-ending river of water down over the bill and in front of her face, as if she were looking out from behind a waterfall. So she gave up on the hood and let the rain soak through her hair and the collar of her shirt. The children were bundled up in coats, galoshes and hats, even the Arbors; Helen had forced them to put on all their rain gear to walk down the street, so they had arrived prepared.

  Sophia had tucked several blankets inside her coat, explaining to Annie that Bug would need to be warmed up when they found him, and what if he was far away and it was a long walk back? Annie was impressed at this level of planning. The others were too, so much so that no one commented on the comical appearance of her giant potbelly created by the folded blankets.

  Once outside, standing on the darkening sidewalk in the sheets of rain, Annie realized that she had no clear plan. Looked at logically from the outside, the chances of them finding the cat were slim. There were thousands of places within three day's walk for a cat in which Bug could have gotten his head stuck, and the odds that the tiny idiot was still alive weren't actually all that great. And the thought of having to explain another loss to these children made her feel ill.

  Out of nowhere, Annie suddenly, nonsensically, remembered something Michael had once told her about turkeys. Most of the turkeys in the country that were raised for meat were some breed that was genetically modified to be pretty much too stupid to live, he said; they couldn't even mate on their own, they all had to be inseminated. He'd read an article once where a farmer watched several of his turkeys drown just from looking up at the rain. No idea what was happening to them. No idea what to do when water started falling from the sky, so it just filled up their lungs and the
y drowned. Too stupid to live.

  But sometimes it wasn't your fault, it wasn't stupidity, another voice in her head corrected her. What if the turkey just didn't know what rain was? It wasn't his fault that all his instincts had been bred out of him. And weather was unpredictable. It could kill turkeys, or spook and confuse cats, or cause cars to crash, and these things couldn't always be helped, sometimes they were just accidents, just things that happened, things that nobody could ever have stopped no matter how hard they tried.

  But you owed it to the cluster of tiny children looking at you expectantly, needing reassurance and direction, to keep trying to stop them anyway.

  She had seen it in Lucy's eyes, back there in the bedroom, had seen it in a flash, lit up in her mind as though illuminated by the lightning outside. The children were terrified. There were wounds deep below the surface that she couldn’t see. Marcus had helped keep the Bad Things at bay while he was in the house – not just for the children, but for her too. And now he was gone, maybe forever. Another person snatched away with no warning. God, why hadn’t she thought about that? Why hadn’t she thought about what it would do to the children to send him away, for her own selfish reasons? She had told herself she was doing it for them, but that was a lie and everyone knew it. She had sent Marcus away because he made everything too painful for her.

  And now, the damn cat. The damn moron bonehead cat who could probably come up with seventeen new and ingenious ways to die of sheer cat stupidity. Lucy had come to her in pleading desperation. Lucy had hoped that maybe, just maybe, after losing first her parents and then her uncle, that maybe this time, maybe, maybe, maybe, Aunt Annie could make it right.

  Well. Maybe she could, and maybe she couldn’t. But goddammit, this time she was going to try.

  “Okay, Lucy, you're with me,” said Annie decisively. “Abe, hold your sister’s hand. Sophia and Isaac, you two stick together. Everybody be extra careful crossing the street and nobody go further than I can see you, okay?” They nodded, serious and adult. Thus the search began.

  They spread out on opposite sides of the street, calling Bug's name and looking under streaming wet bushes, shining the flashlights under porches, knocking on doors. The sky got darker and darker. The lightning became more terrifying and the thunder louder. “Bug! Bug! Where are you, Bug?” called Sophia, her voice high-pitched and quavering. But no answering feline yowl came back to her.

  Nearly an hour later, after they had sent the Arbors home for dinner, everyone was beginning to crack. Annie stood up from her crouched position, shining a light under the porch stairs of a large house five or six blocks from their own, and turned to look at the children. Sophia’s face was white and calm, determined, a girl on a mission. But Isaac was struggling. Isaac was afraid this was a loss he could not protect his sisters from, and Annie could see him blaming himself for his failure to keep the bad things away. She could see his lip beginning to tremble.

  And then Sophia reached out and took his hand, as though she just knew, and instantly everything was okay again, and at that moment Annie loved them so fiercely that she thought her heart would burst.

  She watched them for a long moment until she felt Lucy tug at her hand.

  “Let's go check in with the twins,” she said, wondering hopelessly how much longer they would wander around the neighborhood before they gave up. What should she say? How could she possibly explain it to these tiny, beautiful creatures without making them look at her, again, as if she was somehow responsible for taking away everything they loved? For the love of God, how many times was she going to have to say it?

  She wasn't cut out for this. She didn’t have that thing that women like Grace and Aunt Vera had, that gentle reassurance. The ability to explain to children what death meant, to calm them out of tears when they skinned their knee, to say, “Let's go home and make cocoa and say prayers for Bug and come back to look for him in the morning when it's dry.” Annie couldn't do that, she was blunt and awkward and she used words they didn’t understand and she frightened them. They wanted Uncle Marcus and their parents and Bug, and Annie was no substitute for any of them.

  She couldn't fix this. Uncle Marcus gave them a cat, and then left with no goodbyes, and now the cat was gone too, the cat wasn't coming back either, she couldn't make this right. All she could do was the only thing she ever did - try her hardest to tell them the truth.

  All she could do was get out of bed, put on a raincoat, pick up a flashlight, and do the best that she could.

  “Sophia! Isaac! Come over here!”

  They dropped what they were doing and scurried across the street hand-in-hand. “Did you find him? Did you find him?” hollered Isaac as he ran.

  “What? No, honey, I didn't find him. Listen. Sit down.”

  The house behind them had a set of low concrete steps rising up from the sidewalk. Annie, soaked through so thoroughly that she had stopped noticing it, sat down with Lucy on her lap, and motioned the twins to sit down next to her.

  “You guys, I think . . .”

  She stopped. Their big shining eyes were expectant and hopeful. They thought she had an idea. They were depending on her to fix this. The thought of how their faces would change when she said what she was about to say squeezed her heart like a cold hand, and she suddenly, inexplicably, burst into tears.

  The children stared. They had never seen Aunt Annie cry – like really, truly cry. Secretly, each of them had thought that maybe she didn't know how. This was new territory. It was disorienting.

  Lucy began to cry first in response, a gentle whimper and then, when Annie kept crying, a full-throated wail that brought tears to her sister’s eyes as well, and then eventually to Isaac’s. Soon they were huddled together, clutching Annie, who sobbed and sobbed as though her heart would break, sobbed at the horrid brutal unfairness of a world that insisted on taking everything from these children, these sweet tiny people who hadn't done anything to deserve what had happened to them, and it was her fault, at least a little, because some of this she could have prevented, not all of it but some, if she had been thinking about anything besides herself.

  There was no telling how long they sat there, as the rain crashed down in sheets. They had ceased to notice the thunder and lightning, and were barely conscious of being wet and cold. The hot tears mixed on their cheeks with cold raindrops as they clung to each other, shaking with sobs of desolation.

  The stupid, stupid cat. Annie had been so careful, she had made rules and stuck by them so nothing could go wrong – and the whole house of cards had come tumbling down because of the damn cat. If it wasn't so awful it would be funny. But it wasn't funny, because nothing and no one was safe. You could keep the night light on, you could organize the books by height and enforce bedtimes and serve broccoli, you could line up stuffed animals in rows to keep watch over you, you could do all those things and still someday, something would get past those walls. Like a thief in the night. Like a dumb-ass cat forever getting his head stuck under the refrigerator. Like a car accident. Like a cocky New Yorker with shaggy black hair who saw all the hidden things nobody was supposed to see, and then said them out loud. Something would break in and get through your defenses and then you'd get hurt again. And again, and again.

  No one was safe in this world, not ever. That was the only lesson Annie felt competent to provide to these children, at this moment.

  You are never safe. There is always a breach in the walls. You can never hide for long.

  * * *

  It was Lucy who looked up first.

  Thinking about Bug, wet and lonely under a bush, shivering with cold and waiting for them to come rescue him, Lucy could not stop crying. Bug didn't like the mud, or getting his paws wet. He would be really unhappy, wherever he was. Lucy couldn't bear to think of him unhappy, burrowing into a bush for warmth, rustling around in the leaves trying to find a dry spot. Poor, nice Bug.

  Suddenly she heard a rustling and looked up, hoping with great excitement that maybe he ha
d found them. She looked down and saw a cat, but it was the wrong cat, black instead of stripey, and he bounded through the bushes for the shelter of his porch. That cat was not lost. He was by his own house and he knew where he lived.

  Lucy sighed and looked off in the distance, in the direction the cat had come from. Maybe he was Bug's cat friend, maybe Bug was coming over to play at the black cat's house and would see them sitting there. She watched for awhile but didn't see anything.

  Then, way off down the block, through the walls of rain, she saw something moving.

  Someone was coming towards them.

  She poked Isaac wordlessly and pointed. Isaac saw and stared, and he in turn poked Sophia. They watched a rain-drenched figure holding something in its arms, head bent protectively over it, as it came nearer and nearer. The shape was only a baggy raincoat, and wet jeans until it stopped a few feet away and looked up at them.

  “You idiots lose something?” said Anya, rain streaming through her hair and down her face, and they all stared, startled, at the wet, gray, unhappy bundle of fur in his arms beneath his raincoat.

  “You found him, you found him!” crowed Isaac. “He's okay!”

  Anya bent down and they crowded around to see. “He was in our backyard,” she told them. “I spotted him while we were eating dinner.” And she very carefully handed the cat to Sophia, who seized him with grateful, loving arms and snuggled him tight inside the warm blankets she had squished under her jacket.

  Isaac reached in and petted the cat’s head sympathetically. “He’s all wet,” he said. “We better get him home.”

  Lucy tugged at Aunt Annie’s hand. “Aunt Annie,” she said, puzzled, “why are you crying? Bug is okay.”

  Aunt Annie shook herself slightly, as if she hadn’t quite been listening, and dashed the tears from her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just – for a moment, I thought Anya was someone else. But yes, it’s very good news. Anya saved the day.”

  “Anya saved the day! Anya saved the day!” The children took this up as a kind of chant, dancing wildly around the tall, dark-haired girl who was looking at them with a poignant combination of embarrassment, pride, annoyance, gratitude, and a valiant effort to look cool.