Bound

by Antonya Nelson

  She could almost see them, the two of them standing on the desktop, bucket of red paint, two small brushes, stretching up and creating a party on the ceiling. It was something Catherine and Misty would have done themselves, once upon a time.

  The house’s air conditioner went on and off at intervals. Every time it ceased there were two heaving final breaths, like an exhausted monster sighing in the cellar. The girl would have thought that, too, Catherine thought. She and Misty would have an inside joke about it.

  She listened to the messages on the answering machine. Queries about missed meetings, a reminder from dental associates, vote-getting messages from the Democratic Party, other solicitations, hang-ups, the public library concerning an overdue audio book, and three from a company called PetSafe. Catherine backed up the machine and noted the number. They were calling about a chipped dog; she used the same service for her own.

  “This notification is nine days old,” the woman at headquarters chastised Catherine. “Just after New Year’s, in fact.” What sort of responsible owner waited more than a week to respond? Why bother with a microchip if you didn’t have the time to follow through?

  “It’s complicated,” Catherine said. This was Oliver’s way of defusing a person who was about to offer unsolicited advice.

  “Nevertheless, an attempt was made to contact you,” the woman said. “We stand by our commitment to returning every pet to its proper home, but the owner has to meet us halfway.”

  “I’m not the owner,” Catherine said. “It wasn’t me you were trying to contact. The owner died.”

  A silence fell upon the line. When the owner died, so much became frayed in an otherwise flawless system. The car had not only gone off the road but was then unfound for a while; the bereaved daughter was still at large; the executrix heir had a married name and forwarding address; and now the dog—incarcerated two states away! In Arizona at a shelter, the woman at PetSafe reported. She recited a phone number and hung up without saying good-bye.

  “We hold them for five days, if they’re chipped,” the next woman told Catherine. “Three days if not.”

  “And after five days?”

  “Adopted out or put down,” she said. The general odds, it seemed. Max, the dog was named. Inscribed on the ceramic water bowl in the kitchen. In the family portrait by the phone dock in the hallway, a black-and-brown-mottled creature that looked like a coyote or hyena, wilder and leaner than Catherine’s chunky bred animals, smiling nonetheless between the two people on the fake bridge, in front of a false blue sky, some plastic shrubbery. Misty and Cattie, two versions of the same girl.

  How had their dog gotten from Colorado to Arizona, anyway?

  “I hope it was adopted,” Catherine said.

  “It’s always good to hope that,” agreed the woman on the phone.

  Later that afternoon the doorbell rang just as Catherine had fallen asleep on the couch. She had made a mistake in coming to Houston over the weekend; it was the kind of error she was prone to, not thinking far enough ahead. Not until Monday could she visit the law office to sign paperwork. On the other hand, she was telling herself as she began to drift away, perhaps these extra days had allowed her to choose to sign those papers. Staying in Misty’s house was what would convince her to …

  The woman at the door came bearing a Christmas gift bag and introduced herself as the next-door neighbor. “When Misty left town, she asked me to collect her mail and her newspapers.”

  “Come in.”

  “This is the mail. I saved everything, you never know.”

  “Yes, that’s smart.” You never did know, Catherine thought, remembering the lawyer’s letter that had almost gotten away from her, the one that started everything.

  “Did you want the newspapers?” The woman feigned panic that she might have done the wrong thing, recycling the daily local paper. “I didn’t think to save those.”

  “No, no.” This was yet another type that her husband loathed: the person who has to be assured of her proper behavior. Thank you, is all she ever wanted to hear.

  “And then I saw about the accident. Terrible!” The woman made a face as if she’d encountered an odor, trying to settle the bag of mail on the coffee table, where it kept falling over, finally giving up and letting it spill. “So I just kept picking up the mail, what else was I going to do? Bless her heart. And what in the world has become of poor Cattie?” The woman settled into the center of the sofa, looking around the room in a way that let Catherine know she’d not been welcomed inside the house before, or at least not lately.

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Catherine said. “Thank you,” she added, for good measure. She took a chair on the other side of the table. The woman looked at her expectantly, chin and brows lifted, entitled to know how it was Catherine was in possession of a key. And Catherine would have been willing to tell some other kind of neighbor, divulge the strange circumstance that had brought her here. But not this neighbor.

  “Beverage?” she finally asked. “Tea? Coffee?” Vodka, she might have offered, had it been somebody else.

  “If there’s a pot made …” She followed Catherine into the kitchen. It was neither of their homes, and each had a different claim to it. Come Monday, it would be Catherine’s property, hers to oversee. The neighbor, meanwhile, informed Catherine that her grandson had lived with her ten years earlier and been little Cattie’s best friend. She and Misty had shared a gardener, Ernesto, who was keeping up Misty’s yard still.

  “Does Misty owe him money?”

  “Oh, I’ve been covering it.”

  “So she owes you money.” The woman was exhausting. But retrieving a checkbook from her purse and writing out the amount due permitted Catherine a way to turn their encounter into something recognizable, services rendered, exchange made, coffee drunk, visit over. “Thank you,” she said a half dozen more times, the last words as the woman disappeared behind the closing front door.

  And in the bag of mail, the life Catherine had assumed must exist, the one she’d been seeking, finally arrived.

  Misty Mueller had a pen pal in prison, a man whose correspondence came religiously, his seven-digit identification penciled on each envelope’s upper left corner, the Huntsville imprint dated every week for the months of October and November. The final letter, dated December 8, was addressed instead to “Whom Remains.”

  This was the letter Catherine felt entitled to open.

  I am sorry I did not know Miss Mueller had passed so I hope you will forgive this man if you saw what I wrote before. Please destroy those previous letters, I plead of you. Miss Mueller was a friend to me and time after time she would say to me I should wait til I know the facts before making hastie judgements. I did it again about her I cannot believe I did. It is true that I have learned nothing from experience (she would say that to me too!) Her passing away makes me more alone then you can know. In the paper it says a daughter is her survivor. If this is you, her daughter, whom remains from her, I want to say that your mother wrote to me so often to relive my solitude I looked for her mail to me and felt like I had a kindred spirit in the world. Someday if not today you will understand that a kindred spirit is like a light that is shining in a room of a house you can remember where you were happy with somebody a long time in the past. Its corny (believe me I can hear your mom saying that to me) but she was that light in a far away place and I cant believe its gone. I will keep this simple and say goodbye. And please if you are forgiving you will not judge me from those other letters.

  It was signed “Ohell.” The envelopes he regretted sending lay stacked on the table. Catherine was tempted to open them—the use of the pencil instead of pen already had given the man some kind of childish appeal, to her, his smudged earnestness, the fact that he printed on lined paper, all of it so reminiscent of grade school and sincere labor and the beginnings of putting feelings into words, and words onto paper. As an incarcerated adult, he was capable of anything Catherine could imagine; he might be the unknowing
father of that daughter he had not known about. He hadn’t mentioned the possibility, hadn’t speculated upon it—and yet Misty could have kept such a secret, Catherine knew.

  The fireplace was a working one, so Catherine placed the prisoner’s letters, all except the one addressed to the daughter, in the grate. And then she sat once more on the couch and looked at the pile. She didn’t have to decide now. She had time to see how she felt about it tomorrow. Or the next day. The one after that.

  There had been an ice storm in Kansas, a snow that turned to rain, and then back to snow, and then, whimsically, finally, to sleet. Inadvertent perfect strata of disaster. The ground was treacherous, layered and slick, its surface deceptively benign seeming, snowy, with a thick scrim of ice beneath. Oliver slid as he headed for the newspaper at the curb, a swift flush of panic that he’d nearly fallen, then marveled at the tire tracks of the deliverer, who’d roved back and forth from side to side all down the block. Overhead, the trees were laden. They creaked ominously. Eventually, when the sun finally emerged, everything began to snap. All over town the branches crashed down—on cars, on houses, on power lines. Giant boughs. Devastating breaks. The streets were filled with broken limbs, electricity went out, windshields were shattered. What remained was a forest of strange topless trees, their severed appendages imploring the sky. Everyone stayed at home, built fires, used flashlights, listened to the radio.

  Oliver looked forward to this odd day without obligations other than stoking a fire, opening and closing the back door for the dogs, relocating the refrigerated food from inside the dark refrigerator to outside in the bright hard light. On Saturday morning the Sweetheart trekked from her grandparents’ house to his, four miles, in snowshoes. Her cheeks were red as cherries when she finally arrived.

  “Unbelievable!” she declared. “It’s like a war zone out there!”

  As if she knew what a war zone was like. As if Oliver did, he scolded himself, he who’d been conveniently exempt, falling into a peaceful pause that made him too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. It would not do to transform into a churlish grump, the complaining curmudgeon, one of the malcontents in their row of loungers at Green Acres. He kissed the Sweetheart’s sweet cheeks, that flesh he felt like biting, it was so plump and ripe. Would he grow tired of her? Was she going to be his next, his last, love?

  “She won’t come home unexpected?”

  He shook his head. The weather alone would have prevented his wife’s return just yet. But Catherine was also settling an estate in Houston. She now owned a house, it seemed, one worth nearly a half million dollars. With it came a child who was at large, a delinquent who’d taken the opportunity of her mother’s death to flee her boarding school. “I might like a kid who’d do that,” Oliver had conceded. “I can sympathize with that.” The privilege and private clubbiness of the East Coast. He recalled his own prickling resentment of that place, that it was mocking him, that it would never take him seriously.

  Catherine had said, “So you should know why I have to try to find her.”

  “That part I’m not as confident about. That part I have some questions about.”

  He’d worked hard not to sigh over the girl, young Catherine. Could his wife not recall Miriam’s complicated years? Or her own, for that matter? Teenage girls required the full attention of everyone in the house; they entered rooms as if strutting onto a stage, the eye-catching star with the biggest conflict in the production that was called All About Me.

  The adults must have encouraged it, dressing them up, adoring their theatrics. First it was harmless, their favorite color pink, their preferred outfit the princess tutu and tiara, their venerated pet the kitten. They progressed through the rainbow, colors shifting from pink to purple to blue to green to, finally, black. From smiling affection and good humor and hugs and candy and fluffy kittens they moved to a sullen anger and ferocious affect that could sap the energy of an entire household. The piercings! The pet rats! The histrionics! Oliver shuddered. Teenage girls were graceless, moody, insecure, bad actors, annihilatingly melodramatic in the way of the suicide bomber: ready to claim collateral damage. What happened, he wondered, that allowed them to finally arrive at the lovely perfection of young womanhood? Something. A gentling. A dreamy distractedness, an unconscious maneuvering of their bodies, some stretch that came in their early twenties, the finishing touches. First love, perhaps, the initial inkling of a vast and untapped sex life. His daughter Miriam was an exception, her young womanhood somehow either truncated or pending; she’d gotten stuck in squalor and self-destruction. He hated to realize it, hated to know he could not cure it.

  But the Sweetheart possessed that elusive young woman’s charm. At times she became aware of his watching her, and she would stiffen, or oversexualize her movements. Yet at other times she inhabited the world like a very beautiful animal, without audience, a jaguar, a racehorse, muscles flexing beneath the flesh in every common gesture or exertion, head tossed in restless eagerness for what came next, a quality of excited readiness, availability, game.

  Over and over he’d fallen for a young woman.

  “I love you,” he told the Sweetheart. Too often, perhaps.

  “Me, too,” she would say in reply.

  The dogs were attracted to the snowshoes she’d removed, and had settled themselves on the floor mat where she’d left them, one on either side, identically flayed out with their back legs in what Catherine called the chicken drumsticks position, faces resting on their front paws, eyelined eyes staring intently at the people. If they could speak, they’d make insinuating, passive-aggressive remarks about his behavior; as people, Oliver wouldn’t like them. They were busybodies, too clever, officious perky types who, anthropomorphized, would be beaming, freckled, bulky yet buff secretaries, gossiping and judging, fussy gay men or prissy spinsters.

  But they made very fine dogs.

  These days were a gift, an insular piece of stalled time. He and the Sweetheart had never spent more than a couple of hours together, never been capable of easy silence because they were accustomed to being rushed or being in public. The stories told after sex were not the same ones told after eating unheated English muffins. The banter in the kitchen of Wheatlands was not the same banter that evolved at the Scrabble board, where Oliver discovered that the Sweetheart was dyslexic and could not see the obvious words that practically made themselves on her slender rack of letters. The encouragement he offered was not the same as that he offered elsewhere.

  Over the course of their strangely timeless interlude she grew more comfortable, or more weary of not being comfortable, or maybe she grew less in awe of his daunting gifts, those of experience and confidence, gender and power. She had, after all, the most powerful gifts of all: a long future and physical beauty; best of all, she also had no sense of how powerful those things were. Oliver had to be careful not to notify her of that.

  In the afternoon they made love in Oliver’s study, on the leather sofa in there. They lay afterward beneath a blanket, watching night fall outside, every now and then a distant crash as another tree dropped its exhausted freighted limbs. They drowsed in this cave of chill and dark, a forgotten peaceful space in the middle of a city-wide shutdown.

  The phone rang much later. The house felt unfamiliar to Oliver, as if it wasn’t his, as if he hadn’t navigated it thousands of times before, dark or not. He realized as he stumbled in alarm from the study to the hall that he’d wakened thinking he was in his upstairs bedroom instead of downstairs on the sofa. He’d imagined Catherine in his arms rather than the Sweetheart. He only fully understood this when he followed the noise of the telephone rather than his spatial sense of where it ought to be. When he heard Catherine’s voice there on it when he’d believed she was back in bed.

  “Oliver, it’s crazy, but I just got this bizarre call from the police in Wichita.”

  Now that he had oriented himself in the hallway, downstairs instead of up, Oliver had to reorient all over again: the police? Surely he w
ouldn’t have been caught by them.

  “Little Catherine,” his wife was saying. “She’s been found. She was driving a car somewhere off I-35, some place I never heard of called Freedonia, out in the sticks. Anyway, she’s been found. She’s fine.”

  The Sweetheart had made her way to him, silently. She stood with her head leaning against his shoulder, listening. Her face was bowed, as if to receive punishment, the cold light of the moon turning everything inside blue. Oliver had the urge to push the Sweetheart away, to shut a door between himself and her, to encounter this strange business on the telephone without distraction. He was having a hard time making sense of everything at once. An angry flare went up inside: this was age, his enemy, now disallowing him the ability to quickly adapt, to sync up one thing with another, to rise from a deep sleep into sudden chaos without suffering the slow machinery of mind and body refusing to fire at command. Napping synapses, sluggish muscles.

  Catherine was still talking. Not all of what she was saying would adhere. He turned the phone slightly so that the Sweetheart could listen in. And it was she, when the call was over, who said back to him what he’d been told and not heard. Repeated to him his own part of the conversation, those things he’d agreed to do, those steps he would apparently be taking.

  The girl was in El Dorado, twenty miles away, spending the night in a cell. “Your wife said they said Catherine was a flight risk,” said the Sweetheart. “She said they said Catherine might have been suicidal, the way she was driving. She said she didn’t tell them that Catherine probably just didn’t know how to drive, she’s only fifteen, and her mother died in a car crash not that long ago. She said she didn’t want to complicate things by piling up a lot of extraneous details. But which one is Catherine?” the Sweetheart asked. “I thought your wife was Catherine.”

  “They’re both Catherine.”

  “Well, no wonder there’s so much confusion. You don’t actually have to do anything until morning. Your wife said the forecast is for sunny and warm, and she said she thought the roads would be clear, so you could drive to El Dorado, to expedite. And she’s going to get here as soon as she can. Tomorrow.”