Soul Catcher (5 page)

‘My heels are on fire,’ he said. He stooped to kiss my cheek. ‘How’s my girl?’

I hugged him with all my might.

‘Mom can’t wait to see you.’ He picked up my suitcase.

‘How’s Betty?’

He smiled. ‘She’s fine.’

We were walking in the direction of the street exit, where
we could get a taxi to take us to Grand Central Station, when I heard the
clop clop
of footsteps running up behind us. In my excitement, I had completely forgotten about Gwen.

‘Hey!’ she called.

We turned around. There she was, dragging her suitcase, her eyes mean-narrow and her lips mad-tight.

‘Fuckwad! What am I supposed to do?’

Dad looked at me with the blank expression that meant he was prepared to be surprised.

‘That’s Gwen,’ I said, ‘my roommate.’

She dropped her suitcase and sighed. ‘You must be the old man,’ she said.

Dad looked at me and I could see a glimmer of a smile.

We walked into the house and Betty flashed across the living room just like her old self. But when she tried to jump off the back of the couch, instead of clinging to the heavy fabric, she slid backwards.

“That’s pathetic,’ Gwen said.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked Dad.

‘Mom’s cooking dinner. Why don’t you go say hello.’

I was no fool. He was ignoring me, which meant something was wrong. I picked Betty up and she patted my face with paws that felt like cotton balls. Gwen squeezed one of Betty’s pads.

‘This cat has been declawed!’ she said. “That’s cruelty to animals, you know.’ I pressed the pad of Betty’s little white paw. No claws sprang out.
Nothing
sprang out. Gwen was right: they had removed her only defense against the world. Cruel world! I hugged poor Betty tight, and she tried to squirm away. I admit, she didn’t seem too upset about the whole thing, but still, it was the principle. No one had asked me first; my parents had no right to maim my pet. I knew something was going to be wrong at home, I just knew it.

I marched into the kitchen, still holding Betty (by force). Dad had parked himself at the kitchen table. He was dipping his finger into a glass of scotch, tinkling the ice. Mom was at
the stove, wearing a red canvas apron over her business suit, cooking. I was surprised. Mom and Dad had devoted themselves to their law practice: they were partners in their own firm in Manhattan. I grew up on spaghetti and hamburgers and baked chicken. Mom only cooked for special occasions, and this was just a regular Friday night.

She thrust a wooden spoon into an enormous pot of something, stirred, then turned around to cast one of her brilliant smiles upon me. The smile she claimed made Dad fall in love with her.

I wouldn’t buy it.

‘What did you do to Betty?’

‘Hi, sweetheart. Welcome home! I’m making paella,’ Mom said. Mrs Innocent.

‘Betty, my cat, she has no
claws,
if you know what I mean.’

Dad tinkled his ice.

‘Remember Betty?’ I squeezed her pad so her fluffy, clawless paw fanned out.

‘Betty’s fine,’ Mom said. ‘It didn’t hurt her. She was destroying the new chairs.’

Oh, the chairs. ‘Since when is furniture more important than life?’

‘It isn’t, dear, we simply made a choice.’

Choices. Like sending me away to school. Random choices, as far as I could see.

‘Ehem.’ It was Gwen, standing behind me, clearing her throat.

‘This is my roommate, Gwen,’ I said. ‘Dad said she could come.’

Mom flashed Dad a look, then said, ‘Welcome! Make yourself at home.’

She did. Leave it to Gwen. She marched right over to the fridge, opened it, and said, ‘No Tab?’

‘Mix some juice with seltzer, dear,’ Mom said. ‘It’s better for you.’

Gwen shrugged and closed the fridge. She sat with Dad at the table. I released Betty — who skidded out of the room
— and joined them. We all watched Mom stir and pour and organize. Her easy movements were like a thread, weaving us together, warming us, tugging back friendship. I wished I hadn’t crashed in so meanly, despite Betty. I should have thought of Mom’s feelings. Obviously this special dinner was for me.

As I watched her, I realized that Mom looked different somehow. Then it struck me that she had lost a lot of weight. She was never exactly fat, just a little chunky. But now she was thin. She looked tired. Her hair, twisted into the usual chignon, was laced with grey. Cooking, greying, declawing my cat. I had only been gone six weeks. Was Mom suddenly getting old?

She served a fabulous dinner of big bowls of paella over brown rice, French bread with sweet butter, and salad with olives and tomatoes and cukes and carrots and sprouts, my favorite. We even had dessert: chocolate eclairs from the bakery. The food was incredible! Conversation, though, was just the usual babble. Mom and Dad grilled me about school (with Gwen answering for me half the time), and traded remarks about their business as they happened to spring to mind.

We were all having a great time, until I asked Dad if he would drive me and Gwen to the movies and then pick us up. He said he couldn’t. He said, ‘I’m going out.’
Out.
No explanation. Mom flashed him the meanest look I’d ever seen. That was it, that ended dinner. Dad left, and Mom went upstairs, leaving me and Gwen and clawless Betty with a big mess to clean up. It happened so fast, I didn’t even have a chance to ask Dad where he was going. No one did, not even Mom. Unless she already knew.

After a while, I went upstairs to see if Mom wanted some ice cream, and her door was closed. They never closed their door unless they were sleeping. I stood there for a minute, debating whether or not to knock. It was too quiet; something was wrong, besides Betty. Was that Mom crying? Why would she want to cry?

I didn’t knock. I just crept downstairs to Gwen. She was sitting at the kitchen table eating directly out of the container of Heavenly Hash with a serving spoon.

What was happening to our family?

‘Does she want any?’

I shook my head and sat down across from her.

‘Good.’ She licked the spoon.

I had always felt joined to Mom and Dad by an invisible cord. Ours had been a happy home, full of humor and sharing and learning and
quality time
before everyone else’s parents both worked and they had to invent the phrase.
We
invented it. Mom and Dad were always dashing around in suits, with their fat briefcases, throwing me kisses on the run. I never felt neglected. Until Grove, until now.

Where had Dad gone?

‘Hey, Kate,’ Gwen said. ‘I’m sorry you feel so bad. But like I told you, they sent you away for a reason.’

‘What is it?’

She shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

‘I swear, they never acted like this before.’

‘Yeah, tell me about it.’ She leaned forward and grinned. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

‘I don’t feel like it.’

‘You will.’

I didn’t know what was on her mind, and I didn’t much care. I felt so down all of a sudden, like a blind girl in the wrong house without her cane. So I let Gwen lead me outside. It was chilly and dark. There were no lights on our street, just big, sulky houses with blinking yellow windows. It was quiet and peaceful. We walked around the bend, out of sight of our house.

‘Shh, just look at this,’ Gwen whispered. She dug into her back pocket and withdrew the fat white joint she had showed me the first time we met. ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Okay? Now?’

I didn’t know. I felt so down, I wanted to join that dark-cave club — any club — and not feel alone. I didn’t
know what grass would do to me, which is why I’d never smoked it before. The crazy thing was that now I didn’t care.

So we smoked. We sat behind a bush in a neighbor’s yard, and puffed away at our bitter weed. In no time, we were stupid. Then, when the high lifted us, everything seemed hilarious and we thought we were just about the funniest people alive. Then we had to eat, and it had to be something sugary, so we went home and stuffed ourselves on ice cream, raisins and cinnamon toast — whatever we could find. After, we went to the living room and lay head-to-foot on the couch and
passed out,
as they say in the trade.

Next thing I knew, it was morning. I sort of enjoyed the weird, hungover, cotton-brained feeling when I woke up at around ten o’clock. I remembered Dad sneaking in very late — or early — and felt wise and bitter and scared and revenged. Getting stoned was getting back. Mom and Dad were pulling off into their secret worlds, so I pulled off into mine.

Gwen made coffee while I made eggs, sausages and toast. I put the radio on loud, hoping the music would wake them. I was raring for a fight. Every few minutes, I raised the volume a little more. After a while, Dad came down. He was wearing his old blue bathrobe that Mom and I had given him one Father’s Day, and a pair of worn leather mocassins. He yawned, stretched and crumpled onto a chair.

‘Didn’t get much sleep,’ he said.

I poked the sausages and they sizzled.

‘Coffee, Mr Steiner?’ Gwen lifted the pot as if he needed a visual aid to stimulate his imagination.

‘Yes, please.’

I gave her a mug and she poured. She was setting it down in front of him when Mom came in. She looked pretty in her ruby-red robe, with her long hair messy down her back like tangled vines. Her eyes looked watery and small, as if they stung.

‘Morning, Mom!’ I said.

‘Morning.’ She patted my waist on her way to the coffee pot.

‘Have a seat,’ Gwen said. ‘I’m here to serve you.’

Dad chuckled, and Mom shot him a sharp look that stunned us all into silence. She pulled a chair out from the table very slowly, and it scraped like fingernails on a chalkboard. Dad cringed but Mom didn’t even blink. She sat on the chair and rode it back under the table with two thuds.

‘Something’s burning!’ Gwen said, hurrying to the stove. It was the sausages. They had sizzled nearly into oblivion.

‘I like my sausages well done,’ Dad said.

‘Mom?’

‘Just coffee for now, dear.’

Gwen stacked toast on a plate and put it in the middle of the table, and I served up the sausages and eggs.

‘What are your plans for the day?’ Mom asked me.

‘I guess we’ll go downtown.’

‘We’ll have dinner at about seven.’

She usually went to the office on Saturdays and worked. Dinner would be pizza and chocolate cake, a meal I looked forward to.

‘That’s okay, Mom, you don’t have to cook.’

‘I want to. I’m staying home today anyway.’ She looked directly at Dad. ‘I thought I’d go through the attic, get rid of some old junk.’

‘Moll?’ Dad said softly.

‘It’s just too cluttered around here.’ Her voice was arctic-cold.

Gwen and I wandered around town. The sky was overcast and it was starting to get chilly. We ducked into stores for warmth: CVS, Toy Town, the florist, Woolworths. Gwen bought a red plastic ashtray, because no one in my parents’ house smoked, and a box of catnip for Betty. I bought a small frame for a photo I had of Patrick in a striped sweater, smiling and waving at me. I called it the ‘Hello Goodbye’ picture. When I first had it developed, I would look at it and
feel he was greeting me. Now when I looked at it, I felt a sharp pang of loss. I tried to tell myself that things were much harder for him than for me, that my suffering over him was nothing compared to his suffering over himself. If he
was
an addict, I could handle it; our love would heal him if only we had the chance. I kissed his photo and slipped it into the frame while we were standing on line. The price tag — $1.10 — covered half his face. I peeled it off before the cashier rang up the sale.

When we went back outside, it was raining. ‘Bummer!’ Gwen said. ‘So, like, what do you want to do now?’

‘Go home, I guess. I want to call Patrick. Rates go down after five.’

‘Is it safe to go back yet?’

‘Safe?’

‘Yeah, you know,
safe
as in we won’t get electrocuted by bolts of marital lightning.’

I wanted to say
nothing is wrong at home!
But I knew that wasn’t true.

When we got back to the house, all was quiet. Mom was still upstairs in the attic. Dad was still out. Gwen sat on the living room couch and rubbed catnip into her sock. I called Patrick’s mother’s house. As the phone rang and rang, I watched Betty stalk Gwen’s wiggling toes as if they were a litter of baby mice nestled under a blanket. Betty got wackier each time she sniffed the catnip, until eventually she hopped around in a frenzy. Meanwhile the phone rang twenty-seven times. I counted.

‘No answer.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘He’s probably at work.’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, you don’t know where he is, either,’ I said. ‘Does a person have to be home all the time for you to believe they’re telling the truth?’

Gwen believed that ‘once a junkie, always a junkie’. She liked Patrick, but thought I was fooling myself by believing
in him at all. I was tired of her cynicism. The way I saw it, faith was half the battle. The one time I said that to her, she responded that too much faith was just the mountain before the valley, the high before the crash. Though that wasn’t how she put it. What she said was: ‘Fuck that shit.’

Mom came downstairs in a pair of old bluejeans and a plaid shirt. Her hair was in a long braid down her back. I thought she looked great that way, like a girl, and told her so.

‘Well, I’m not exactly young anymore,’ she said, smiling. ‘Come on, girls, give me a hand with dinner.’

We followed her to the kitchen.

‘Just three plates,’ Mom said, as I was about to lay out four. ‘Dad’s staying late at the office.’

‘But it’s Saturday night.’

‘He has a case coming up. He’ll grab a sandwich in town.’

Gwen shot me an
I told you so
look.

That was too much. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘where is he?’

She ignored me. ‘How would you like to go to the movies tonight, all of us?’

All three of us, she meant. No Dad.

So, after dinner, we got into the silver Volvo and went to town. The movie was about funnyman Lenny Bruce, how he got famous telling dirty jokes that were nasty but true, and fell in love, and wrecked it all with drugs. In the end, of course, he died. It was a good movie but I hated it. A moralistic story about living wrong and ruining your life was the last thing I was in the mood for, considering the state of my life. Mom and Dad with a million miles between them. Patrick God-knew-where doing God-knew-what. Poor Patrick. If only I knew where he was, I’d go and save him, I wouldn’t just run away like Lenny’s wife, sitting in a cheap hotel in a puddle of tears.