The Banks of Certain Rivers (26 page)

I just want all of this to go away. I
honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.

Terrible sleep, but I still feel like
I can’t wake up.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It’s still raining as I
groggily force myself
from my bed to see Chris off to school
Friday morning. Brown puddles have spread over my drive and into my
yard, rippling with falling rain as I watch my son’s car
disappear. It’s strange to not be going with him.

Outside, the rain falls in sheets, and puddles form along the sides
of my house. I decide I should take a run, choosing to wear tights
instead of shorts with a rain jacket and a thin nordic ski cap over
my head. The thermometer outside my back door reads forty-four
degrees.

Rhythm comes slowly today. I head toward town, giving the high school
campus a wide berth, and trot down Purple Street in Old Town. The
eponymous house is quiet, the scaffolding is gone, and the work
trailer has been pulled away. Only the scuffed up grass in the yard
gives a clue that anything had gone on there.

The sky lightens and the rain eases to a light mist, and I can no
longer see my breath. My now-soaked hat feels like too much, so I
pull it from my head and stuff it down the front of my shirt. As I do
so, a friendly dog, fur wet and tongue lolling out of his mouth,
bounds next to me for a moment before getting bored and returning
home.

The town is quiet, and I may as well be invisible.

Forty minutes out and a bit south of Port Manitou, I decide it’s
time to loop back home. This time I do skirt the high school athletic
fields, and Kevin Hammil’s biology class, it looks like, is out
doing some sort of fieldwork by a tree. The kids stand in the drizzle
bunched together like penguins, hoods pulled up over their heads and
notebooks clutched in cold, sleeve-shrouded hands. Kevin sees me and,
hesitating just a moment before letting himself do it, lifts his hand
in a silent greeting. Some of his kids call out to me.

“Hey, Mr. K!”

“Come back to school soon, Mr. K!”

“Python died, Coach! Giving him a proper burial!”

There will be no discussion of snakeskin boots; that’s not
enough reason to stop. I don’t wave back, either. I run, back
out of town and into the farmland, and it feels like nothing before
I’m home again. Hands on my hips, breathing deeply, I slow to a
walk and come up my drive.

Back inside the house, I fill an old chipped mug with coffee, and
wager with myself over who will call first with a report on the
certain-to-be-devastating article in today’s Bungle. Could be
Peggy, could be Alan. I bet it will be Alan. He doesn’t really
have anything better to do.

The answering machine is flashing, but I don’t bother to look
at the number on the display.

I put on the same oversized jacket I wore last night, grab my mug,
and stand out on the back deck. The field is wet, the ground is
saturated, and the line of trees at the back end of the field is
softened by a light mist. The trees and grass are still green,
mostly, green with splashes of yellow and amber, the dusty colors of
early autumn and so, so pretty through the fog. Whatever happens, I
have this. I can always come to look at this.

There’s a motion at the edge of the field that makes me freeze:
a tortoiseshell tomcat slinks out from the line of brush and sets
across the field in a stiff-legged trot. The cat looks just like one
Wendy used to have, so much that I actually call out the long-dead
pet’s name.

“Otto?” I call, my voice lifting at the second syllable,
the way Wendy used to say it. “Otto?” The cat pauses and
lifts its nose before scurrying away, off through the rain and out of
my view.

The Olssons always had barn cats around, and Wendy, through her
childhood, usually had one—against the wishes of her
father—that she’d adopted to domesticate and spoil. When
we moved back to her farm she resumed the habit, and Otto was the cat
she chose when we finished our house and moved over from the
basement.

I’d never been much of a cat person; we’d always had dogs
when I was a kid. But Otto chose us, I suppose. Barely larger than a
kitten, he started hanging around while we were building the house,
and it wasn’t long before Wendy started letting him in to feed
him. Begrudgingly I became pretty fond of the cat, and over time it
seemed to be my lap he found the most comfortable when he needed a
place to hang out, or my shoulder the best place for him to curl up
against at night.

“See?” Wendy would say. “He likes you. And he
wouldn’t seek you out if you didn’t like him back. They
can sense that, you know. So there’s no use in you trying to
deny it.”

She was right, but I kept up my act of grumbling acceptance. Otto
went out during the days, we’d call him in at dusk, and while
he was usually prompt about coming in, those occasional evenings he
was late in coming home I always seemed to be the one to stay out to
wait for him. I’d call his name into the insect-buzzing
darkness, and finally he’d gallop out of the night, home from
his adventures, and bound up the deck. I’d pick him up and say
his name while I scratched his neck before bringing him inside to
deposit him on Wendy’s stomach while she read in our bedroom.

One year, during winter break, Otto went missing. Chris was in the
first grade, just a little guy then, and we’d gone down to
spend Christmas at my parents’ house. I’d arranged for
one of my students to housesit for us and feed the cat, and on
Christmas Eve when she showed up Otto made a break for it. The poor
girl called us in tears to let us know; she’d tried and tried
to get him back in, she explained, but he wouldn’t come back. I
told her it was fine, he’d probably spend the night under the
deck and be waiting for her when she came the next day. But he wasn’t
waiting. Not that day, or the day after that, or the next day when we
returned home. Chris and I wandered the orchard, calling his name,
while Wendy called the animal shelter and all the veterinary clinics
in the area.

Chris found Otto’s collar in the brush line at the far end of
our field, and his chin trembled when he handed it to me.

It had been a mild early winter and the ground was bare, our first
significant snowfall was forecast for New Year’s Day. I went
out by myself on the last day of the year to search, once in the
morning, and again in the afternoon, and went over to talk to the
workers building a house on the property next door before they
knocked off for the holiday.

“You guys see a cat around here? He’s big”—I
formed a shape with my hands—“and kind of multi-colored.”
They shook their heads. Back home, Christopher’s eyes filled
with tears, Wendy put up a good front, and I felt sick to my stomach.
Outside, the temperature was falling, and the weather service issued
a winter storm warning starting noon the next day. Ten to eighteen
inches of lake-effect snow were forecast. It wasn’t much of a
New Year’s Eve. Chris couldn’t sleep, and he crawled into
bed with Wendy and me.

“Will Otto come back home?” he asked us.

“I don’t know if he’ll come home.” I told
him. “He might not.” I didn’t want to lie to him,
and tears began to roll down his cheeks. “He’s been away
for five days now. That’s a long time.”

“Do you think he’s dead?” Chris asked.

Wendy was trying with all her might to keep from breaking down at the
sight of our heartbroken son. “It’s hard to tell with a
cat,” she said, her voice quavering. “Sometimes something
frightens them and they hide. He could come back after a long time.
Or maybe some nice person found him and is taking care of him.”

“I want him to come home,” Chris said. “I’d
give back my Christmas presents if Otto would just come home.”

This, of course, put Wendy over the edge, and I followed not long
after that.

“I’ll go out tomorrow morning,” I promised him,
wiping my eyes with my thumb. “Before it starts to snow.”

I set out the next day after breakfast, walking the orchard once—and
one more time again—getting down on my knees and peeking under
the bushes where we’d found his collar.

“Otto!” I called. “Otto!”

I walked along the highway in the ditch, to the south and to the
north, looking through the frost-covered weeds for any sign of him.
If I found him here, I wondered, killed by a car, would I tell
Christopher, or Wendy, even? Maybe it would be better for them to
think he’d found a new home. That would be an acceptable sort
of deception, I thought.

“Otto!”

I reached the fence line at the northern end of the orchard, and
turned to walk among the trees for a bit, up along that bank of the
Little Jib River. Could he somehow be down in the stream bed?
Nothing. I didn’t think he’d ever even ventured that far
before. I returned to the highway, resigned to the loss of the cat,
and started home.

When I was just about back to my drive, I heard a shout behind me.

“Hey!” a man called, jogging toward me on the pavement.
He was clad in heavy canvas work pants and a paint splattered jacket;
this is how I first met Alan Massie. “Hey, were you the guy
looking for the cat?”

“Yes?”

“I think he’s in my house. The one we’re building
up the road.”

This seemed too good be true, and I tried not to get excited.

“Is he big?” I asked. “Brown and white and orange?”

Alan nodded, and my excitement grew. “I found him upstairs last
night,” Alan said. “He didn’t want to come down,
there’s been a dog hanging around. I think the dog chased him
in.”

I followed Alan to the house under construction up the highway,
trying to keep my hope in check. It really couldn’t be. There
was no
way
it could be.

“I was talking with the contractor this morning, I told him
about the cat, and he said some guy had been looking….”

Inside, the house smelled like raw lumber, just open framing with no
drywall hung yet, and Alan pointed up into the rafters.

“He hasn’t moved from up there all day.” Sure
enough, it was Otto, and he let out a pitiful meow when he saw me.

“Otto!” I called, sincerely overjoyed. He was perched on
some framing over a window, and he yowled and yowled as I approached
him.

“Oh, wow, my wife and son…thank you!” I shook
Alan’s hand, and we introduced ourselves to each other. “I’d
better…I don’t think I can carry him back without him
flipping out. Let me go get his carrier.”

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t go anywhere,” Alan
said.

I ran home through spitting flurries, and Wendy met me in the garage.
She must have seen my smile as I flew up the driveway.

“You didn’t...is it Otto? You
found
him? Where was
he?”

“I’ll tell you when I get back.”

I ran back with the little cage, and Alan erected a ladder so I could
climb up to reach the cat. He felt skinny under his fur, but he
purred and purred, and I gave him a good scratch before putting him
into the carrier. Alan walked back to the orchard with me. Chris and
Wendy met us in the yard, and Chris practically turned cartwheels
with excitement.

“Otto’s back! Otto’s back!” Chris shouted as
he danced around us.

“Let’s get him inside, Chris,” Wendy said. “He’s
probably very hungry.” She gave Alan a hug. “Thank you so
much. Are you the new neighbor-to-be?”

It turned out we had mutual friends, and we made plans to get
together sometime. When Wendy learned Alan and Kristin had two
daughters, the first thing she asked was if they liked to babysit. We
always had a hard time finding good babysitters back then.

That night at bedtime Chris climbed into his bunk, and Otto hopped up
via the dresser, curled against our son and began to purr with a
throaty rumble. My wife and I stood in the doorway and watched them
for what felt like an hour; Wendy even got her camera to take some
pictures. I put the camera on Christopher’s dresser and set the
timer and jumped up into the bunk with my son and wife. We smiled
broadly—Chris holding the cat up under his chin—and the
flash popped.

I wish I knew where I’d put any of those photos. It’s
been a while since I’ve seen them.

We left Chris and the cat to sleep. In our own room, Wendy propped
herself up on some pillows in bed to read while I peered out the
window to try to gauge how hard the snow was falling.

“That cat,” Wendy said, dropping some papers flat on the
down comforter. “I really didn’t think we’d see him
again.”

“I had a feeling,” I said.

“What are you talking about? You were ready to give up
yesterday.”

“I just had a feeling I’d track him down.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot I’m married to Neil
Kazenzakis, Indian tracker.”

“Stop it,” I said. I undressed and got into bed, and
Wendy picked up her papers and started looking over them again.

“What are those?” I asked.

“It’s from Northern Michigan. The CPA Program. I can do
it in two years—”

“Do you want to do it?”

“Maybe,” she said, and she rolled to face me. “But
I’d need your help. I’d need your help with the house.
I’d need your help with Chris. I can’t run this place and
go back to school at the same time.”

“Are you saying somehow I don’t help out enough?”

Wendy just looked at me.

“Okay,” I said, rolling away from her to turn off my
lamp. “Whatever. Whatever you need.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

I stared at the ceiling, starkly illuminated by the light on Wendy’s
side of the bed. “Just tell me what to do. You tell me, and
I’ll do it.”

“Dammit, Neil, you should know what to do anyway. Why should I
have to ask you to do this stuff?” She clicked out the light
and the room went dark. We were silent for a while, feeling the
weight of the darkness, then Wendy spoke again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel
overwhelmed sometimes. I know you work hard.”