by Deb Caletti
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. Trevor’s voice has a snap. And Trevor’s voice never has a snap—Trevor has the perpetual cheer of a Hawaiian shirt. My throat closes. There are so many words there that want to come out, that nothing can come out. I watch as Mom eeks through the neighborhood. We finally make the left turn heading toward town; we inch in the direction of the small bridge that hooks over Nine Mile Falls Creek, where the salmon run. “You’re thinking I’m after your money. It’s what you’re always thinking lately.” I look at fir trees, every fir tree, and wish for more space between Trevor’s words and what might come after them.
“I’m not your ticket someplace,” I say.
It comes out before I realize it. Mom shoots an alarmed look my way. There is silence. I just sit there, holding the phone. I don’t even hear him breathe. I’ve shocked him, and I’ve shocked myself. The words are horrible, I realize. I want to snatch them back, but there’s too much truth in them to do that.
“Wow,” Trevor says finally. “Wow. I guess after two—more than two—years of being together, I thought we could handle anything. Even this, In. But you haven’t even given us a chance to handle it. You put yourself in one place and you put me over here.”
“I am in a different place,” I say.
“Funny, I thought we were heading somewhere together. I thought this—the money. I thought it was something that happened to us. But apparently I was wrong.”
I don’t say anything. His words are too close, and so I shove them far.
“And maybe you ought to know something else,” he says. “Just now? I didn’t call you to talk about your money. Maybe you might remember that I had this idea long before that. I don’t need your money.”
And suddenly I feel something I’ve never felt with Trevor before. A corner I could turn, down a street away from him. I can see that corner so clearly that I feel a choice in front of me. To walk ahead and make the turn or to run back the way I came. The space ahead seems so large, so frighteningly unknown; the space behind is known. It’s where a sense of home is, even if home doesn’t fit anymore. And so I rush back. I run back to safety like a little kid who thought for a moment he was lost.
“Trevor, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sitting in the car with Mom. I love you, all right? Just, let’s do this later.”
Silence again. “Fine.”
We hang up our cell phones I bought us. The thing about running back to safety—its relief abandons you fast. The things-are-still-okay comfort is fleeting, like touching base in a tag game before you know you have to run off again. Change is the most relentless nag. For about thirty seconds, I’m so glad I didn’t do something crazy and end things with Trevor right there. And then, the scritch of annoyance starts. He thought the money was something that happened to us? Wasn’t he making an awful lot of assumptions here, without checking with me first? And, really? My money wasn’t going to be brought up? When it has come up in practically every conversation we’ve had in the last six weeks?
“Are you all right?” Mom sneaks a look at me.
“Yeah,” I sigh, but shake my head. My body isn’t so sure. Along with my resumed annoyance is something else. Supreme inner disappointment, the big daddy of guilt, aka shame. I said I love you and didn’t mean love. I meant Please don’t leave me. I meant Please don’t inflict change on me. I meant Let’s just ignore this. I’m not ready for this right now. I’m embarrassed at my own self for using Love and Cling interchangeably.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mom asks. She has finally crept over the other side of the bridge. One of us, anyway, is capable of forward motion, even at the pace of a marble on a barely tilted surface.
I shake my head, which is starting to hurt. I realize this about the inner voice—it whispers, then it shouts, and then it backhands you one with a headache for not listening. You can fool the mind, but you can’t fool the body. The body is more honest. “Can we just get there?” I ask.
“I’ll take the freeway, instead of going through town,” she says.
I roll down my window, lean one elbow out. I sniff the green, hopeful air of summer. Mom sits at the freeway entrance, her turn signal making an endless click, clock, click clock. Finally, she hits the accelerator and we are off, and then there is a horrible, screeching cry in the backseat, and a sudden moment of confusion and fur and the long searing scrape of a claw down my forearm.
“Oh my God, oh my God. Freud!” Mom screams.
“Shit, what’s he doing in here?”
Freud is wondering the same thing. The car as a stationary sleeping palace is one thing, but as a speeding, scenery flying, wind-sucking metallic force of nature—Freud is having none of it. Freud is in full get-me-outta-here panic, and Mom is trying to merge and a corvette with its radio blaring screams past, the driver flipping her off, and her turn signal is still on, and now she’s flicked on her windshield wipers by mistake and sent a fountain of wiper fluid shooting across the windshield and Freud has leapt to the backseat and now the front again and is clinging halfway up Mom’s shoulder. I try to pull him off so she can drive and we won’t be killed as Mom yells, “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Move him! Ow, damnit! I can’t see!”
“Pull over, pull over!” I say, and finally Mom eases over to the side of the freeway. She turns off the engine. A semi rattles and whooshes past, and the car shakes with apparent fear. Freud still clings to her shoulder, his eyes wild.
“How did we not see him?” she says.
“I don’t know. I didn’t even look. He was probably on the floor.”
“When we started going fast…”
I remove Freud’s claws from Mom, and he lunges to my lap, sinks his little needles into my bare shorts-clad legs. I let out a scream, clench shut my eyes, and feel his squirming mass rise from my grasp. Shit, he bounds from me, and all I see when I open my eyes is his furry narrow ass and his hideous, villainous tail escape through my open window.
“Freud!” Mom yells. “Oh, God!”
I have a vision of a flattened Freud; Freud as a thin roadkill animal crepe. Trodden by Sears radials, guts insta-compressed into a new layer of asphalt, his soul hightailing it from the premises (heading for you know where), leaving glassy eyes behind. I don’t want to see that happen to Freud, even if Mom and I look like we’ve just made a joint jaunt through a paper shredder. Freud’s one of those relatives that you aren’t especially fond of but who is still part of the family, damn it.
But Freud’s plan does not involve a leap into speeding traffic. He’s running as fast as his hairy hide can take him, into the woods adjoining the freeway. I barely notice the SUV pulling over ahead of us, its monstrous emergency lights blinking on-off. A woman with short brown hair pops her head from the driver’s side window. Her mouth is a gash of open anger.
“You sicko!” she screams. “I saw what you did!”
Nothing is making sense. Mom is flinging open her door, her eyes glued to Freud’s little gray body heading for the evergreens, but this woman is shouting from her massive, environment-smashing car.
“You animal killer! I’m going to call the police! Sicko!” she screams again. And then her huge tires are in motion and the tanklike back of her SUV rolls back into traffic to suck more life from our planet.
“She thinks we threw him out the window. She thinks we brought him here to ditch him,” I say.
But Mom isn’t paying attention to any of this. She’s hiking one leg over the highway barrier, her arms flailing around for something to hold on to. Oh, God, this is Mom putting up Christmas lights and changing smoke detector batteries all over again.
“Wait for me,” I say. I unclasp my seat belt and go out after her. She’s stumbling toward the forest and shouting Freud’s name. His evil little behind disappears into some ferns and then appears again out the other side. He looks over one shoulder at us.
“It’s okay, Freud,” Mom croons. “Stay there. I’ll come get you. It’s okay.” Mom is using her talk-the-sui
cide-from-the-ledge voice, which she perfected at work. Well, maybe not perfected, because Freud takes off again. We scramble after him, branches breaking under our feet, and holly and blackberries scraping our legs, already in shambles. Freud eyes a tree trunk. He isn’t quite crouched to leap, but his shoulders are in that considering-it pose.
“No,” Mom pleads. She’s gone from rational and calm to desperate. “Freud, no.”
But cats love a yes when you need a no. He slings his body back then forward, slingshot-style, and up the tree he goes.
We watch him clutch and climb and settle onto a branch just out of reach. He makes himself comfy.
“Oh, Freud,” Mom says.
“This isn’t funny, Freud, goddamnit,” I say.
Mom hides her face in her hands. I look around for something, anything that might help us. The freeway hums behind us. There’s nothing here but huckleberry bushes and…I don’t know, green bushes, I’m not some kind of horticulture expert. We’re in a forest, that’s the point.
“This is ridiculous,” I say.
“I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know.”
“We ought to leave you here, Freud. You can be eaten by coyotes and mountain lions. You could be a tasty little morsel,” I sneer.
Mom clasps her hands and looks skyward. Man, we are in trouble if Mom’s praying. Mom says she doesn’t generally like to bother God unless there’s a crisis, same as she does with Dad.
“Mom!” I say. I’m trying to snap her back to the here and now. At the moment, we need a higher power that will actually return our phone calls.
Mom looks back at Freud. “Please,” she says. “Come on, Freud. Here, kitty. Come here.”
But Freud’s twisted little sadistic self is just beginning to enjoy this. If cats love a yes when you need a no, they love a no when you need a yes even more.
“Fine. Let’s leave him,” I say.
“Indigo, no. We can’t do that.”
“Why not? This is a power trip. Look at him.”
“He looks scared,” she says.
“Scared, my ass. He looks smug.”
Mom looks at Freud, considers this. “Well, still. We need something to climb up. Maybe we can call someone. Someone with a big ladder.”
Right as she says that, we hear the crack-snap of footsteps in a forest. A big square-shouldered figure approaches. A big square-shouldered figure in a uniform. My God, a cop.
“Is everything all right here?” he says. “What seems to be the trouble?” He must have watched plenty of cop shows, because he has the lines down.
“Officer! Oh my gosh,” Mom gushes. She’s suddenly turned all Catholic girl in the presence of authority. Mom never says “gosh.” “My cat…”
“You need to understand that we take animal cruelty cases very seriously,” he says.
I don’t doubt him. He looks like he takes everything very seriously. He has a square jaw, too, and his eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. His hips are bulked up by radios and other cop stuff that hangs off of him. If he actually had to run, it’d be as awkward as having a toddler strapped around your waist. “No, there’s been a misunderstanding,” Mom says.
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Officer Friendly says. “We got a call about someone throwing a cat onto the freeway.”
“I wasn’t throwing a cat…. This is my pet. We’d never hurt him.”
“Ha,” I say.
Mom shoots me a look. “He was in the backseat.”
“The caller witnessed a cat being thrown,” the officer says.
“We didn’t throw him! He jumped up…My daughter had her window open…He panicked when we got on the freeway, and now…I don’t know how to get him down…” Mom’s voice cracks. Mom’s voice cracks and Mom cracks. She lets out a small sob. She puts her palms to her eyes.
“Ma’am?” the officer says.
“I would never hurt my cat. Never. Any living being…” She’s crying now. “He’s part of my family. His shots are all up to date….”
“Ma’am? It’s okay, all right?” The officer removes a radio from his hip. Clicks it on, holds it up to his mouth. He spits a few words into it, hooks it back to his hip again.
“He gets this special medicine for his eye….”
“Mom, it’s okay,” I say. She has branches in her hair.
“The fire department will be here in a minute to get him down,” the police officer says.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just been one of those days…. One thing after another. You know?”
He lifts his glasses off his head. Maybe his eyes aren’t so bad underneath. Maybe they’re slightly kind. “You look really familiar to me,” he says. “You didn’t happen to go to Lake Washington High, did you? In Kirkland? Mr. Cassady, history?”
“Yes…,” Mom says. “I did.”
“Brian Murphy?” he says.
She squints her eyes, like he’s a tiny, fuzzy place on a map that she can’t see without her glasses. “Brian? Oh my God, I’d have never recognized you.”
“Naomi Connors? You look great!”
She doesn’t correct her last name. I can hear the heaving sound of a truck pulling up, and see the spin of red lights through the trees. The fire truck is here.
“The fire truck’s here,” I say.
But they ignore me. Mom is flashing this smile as bright as an amusement park at night, and Officer Brian Murphy is grinning like a goofy kid who just won a ribbon for his volcano at the science fair.
“So, how’ve you been?” he asks. “God, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.” She laughs.
“Oh it is, it is,” he says.
Two firemen are picking their way through the forest, hauling a mega ladder between them. Freud must see it too, because he stands lazily, and begins inching his way back along the branch.
“Mom! Freud…,” I say. But Mom has forgotten the reason we are standing out in the middle of a forest. Mom has forgotten we are out in a forest at all. She may as well be at a cocktail party, swirling her ice cubes in a glass and contemplating the basket of tortilla chips.
“You live here in town, then?” Officer Brian Murphy asks. He folds his arms and leans his weight on one foot, turning his shape from intimidating square to friendly triangle.
“I do. After my divorce…”
Blah, blah, blah. I leave the exciting plot right there and wait under the tree, scooping up Freud when he touches down. The firemen barely make it halfway, when I head toward them with Freud in my death grip.
“He’s a hideous beast who came down the minute he saw you. I’m sorry,” I say.
“Cats,” the fireman says to his partner, and shakes his head.
I roll up the car window, place Freud in the backseat. I sit up front, waiting for Mom and Officer Brian. When she finally gets into the car, she’s all cheerful. “Okay, Freudy Boy,” she says. “We had quite a little adventure, didn’t we?”
“Did he give you happy drugs from some bust?”
“He asked for my number. Isn’t that funny?” she says. “Now, I don’t want you to ever, ever do that naughty thing again,” Mom addresses Freud. “Indigo, hold his collar from here so he stays in the back.”
“You sure are cheery,” I say. “For just getting mauled by the cat and almost arrested.”
She laughs. “Brian would never have arrested me.” She flips down her visor, smiles at herself and makes sure there’s nothing in her teeth. Satisfied, she pulls out into traffic. Her windshield wipers are on. Flick-flick. Flick-flick.
“Mom, your wipers, for God’s sake,” I say.
“Oh!” she says.
She swipes at the wiper handle. But she doesn’t turn them all the way off. They’re set at that annoying channel where they seem off, but give a single, sudden burst of on after fifteen seconds. Mom doesn’t seem to notice. The wipers are silent, then fifteen seconds later, on again.
I consider letting out a single, bloodcurdling scre
am. Then I consider pulling a Freud and leaping out of the window myself. It all suddenly seems too much. Firing myself from my job; Leroy’s and Trina’s and Severin’s humiliation; a near breakup with Trevor; Mom in all her Mom-ness. I feel the sudden Had Enough that is quiet but powerful in its certainty. I want out of here. Away from all of them. I want into a different “real world.” Everyone wants a Big Decision? Fine, my Big Decision is going to be to make my world bigger. I will take my two and a half million dollars and head to the only place I have an invitation—with Melanie to Malibu. Indigo Skye, phase two.
14
What I did next was shitty. Only I didn’t feel like it was shitty at the time. I felt it was my right, and “my right” is the guilt-avoiding umbrella under which most shitty things are done. It was my right to call Melanie as soon as we got home, the very second after the Taco Time papers had been balled up and thrown away, the splotches of hot sauce wiped from the table. It was my right to not tell anyone where I was going, until I left the next morning. It was my right to tell only Bex, who was still hypnotized in front of the television.
“I’m going to California for a while with Melanie,” I say. “Tell everyone.”
“Okay.” Bex watches an enormous wooden spoon stir an even bigger pot of a rice concoction the yellowish tones of risotto.
“Tell Trevor I’m gone,” I say.
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Bex says.
Every conflict, I’ve decided, is about power. Every one. Wars are about power, sure, and immigration, and crime, and poverty, but so is who gets the parking space and if you go to the movies or out to dinner and if he thinks you look fat in those jeans and if she’ll let you change shifts and whose turn it is to let the dog out and if he loves her more than you and if she snubbed you at that party. Power—who has it and who doesn’t, and who has what the other person doesn’t have. Who’s up and who’s down. Sandbox stuff. He took my tractor. We both want that shovel.
Power.
And what’s the shortcut to power? The winner, the king, the insta-got-it? Money, naturally. Take it from me, someone who didn’t have it and then did, you feel different when you’ve got it. You’ve got rights. You’ve got a voice. You’ve got power-over. And maybe, just maybe, you feel a little smug about that. Maybe you feel a little entitled. You, after all, sit in the part of the plane where they use china and linen, or better yet, a different plane entirely from those poor slobs whose knees are scrunched to their chins all the way to their destination.
