This Cake is for the Party (23 page)

She never goes, Robin hissed. She wasn't hissing at me, she wasn't even looking at me, her eyes wouldn't rest on anything. She looked back and forth along the ground in the backyard as though there were a patch of lichen-covered rock that she'd missed.

The way Robin's eyes were moving. Like she was reading very fine print, back and forth across an invisible page. Her eyes were hectic and charged with static.

Babe, I told her. Let's go finish work. I'm going to make us something special for your birthday dinner. Just try to relax. Maggie was just here last night. She caught that squirrel.

She looked up at me, but I don't think she saw me. Her pupils skittered across my face.

We were leaving for Toronto in less than a month. I needed Robin to work as hard as I was working, so we would meet our production deadlines. But she was messy when she was distracted. She hadn't sealed the moulds tightly the day before, and the pale turquoise Buddha wax had leaked all over the pouring table. We had to scrap all ten of them. When I saw the spill, I thought, Ten moulds spilled equals two hundred and fifty dollars lost. It's something my father would have said. I felt like I was turning into my father. I felt like an asshole.

We tried to work for another hour. I dismantled all of the ruined turquoise Buddhas and dropped the wax in a pot to re-melt it, knowing I'd have to go into it later to pick out all the wicks with a fork. I counted up our Buddha stock. Then I left her in the studio and told her, Come in the house in twenty minutes. I'm grilling you halibut. Happy Haliburthday!

She said, How many are there?

Just two pieces, I told her. She didn't answer me.

I made it quickly on the grill, with lemon and garlic and a drizzle of oil. I covered the patio table with a blue cloth and cut a few stalks of foxglove, put them in a mug on the table. I struck a long wooden match and lit a thick white pillar candle. The body of a leggy mosquito-eater that had flown into the fire at the beginning of the summer was preserved in the well of cooled paraffin.

I thought, Why isn't she here yet? Why isn't she coming inside?

When I went out to the studio to see, she was in the back counting the Buddhas.

After dinner, I told Robin to take a hot bath and relax and get ready for a birthday massage. I was going out to look for Maggie. It was dark. If she was hunting, that would be the time to find her. I headed out for the woods behind the house, shaking her canister of tuna treats.
Thrumpity-thrumpity
thrump.
The sound made no sense when she didn't come running for it. It just fell onto the tree roots and made the night feel empty.

Once I was deep in the woods, I switched my headlamp off and stood for a minute until my eyes adjusted to the dark. I could see where the path was by looking at the treetops—there's a line, a clearing—and I could stay on the path easily if I kept looking up. The stars poked out at me. It was clear and quiet. I walked along the path, trying not to make any noise, and I got this feeling that everything was okay. I can't describe it any other way: just that everything that had happened up to now was good and was supposed to have happened.

I made kissing noises with my mouth, calling for Maggie, and I heard a rustle in the salal beside me. I stopped breathing. Cougar. Now, I knew it wasn't a cougar, but my body reacted. My muscles hardened, my heart pumped like someone turned the dial to ten. I felt full of rushing blood. My mind does this to me in the woods. A twig crunches and I freeze, ready for attack, even if it's nothing but a mouse or a shrew. Maybe a beetle. It happens to everyone.

Cougars have infrared vision. If a cougar wanted to hunt me, I'd feel claws at my throat before I'd hear a slip of paws in the bushes. I tensed up anyway. The body of a big cat was right there, beside me, this dark shape. I knew it was a boulder. I shook the can of tuna treats.
Thrumpity
thrump.

Then I saw her. She was on my path, standing about five feet away. My joy surprised me. She was Robin's cat— I just pinched the ticks out of her fur, mopped up her accidents, disposed of her dead things. But there she was in front of me, and I was so stupidly happy. I lurched for her and she ran, of course, back into the salal. I caught a flash of her white fur as she ran away, a white flag waving surrender. She was running back in the direction of home.

I could smell it before I saw it. The smoke was sour and pungent. I ran after Maggie and the dark smell of scorched plastic got stronger and stronger. It stung to breathe it. Even though it was a cool night, my face started burning. I heard blood rushing in my ears, the sound of a jet engine. I ran out of the woods with cymbals crashing in my chest. And in that moment, before I really saw it, I had such an awful thought. I thought, Doesn't the studio look beautiful, all lit up with warm light?

Maggie knew what was happening. I know what you're thinking, but I'm telling you, she was there. She got to her first. Up on her hind legs pressing her paws at the studio door. What kind of cat would do that? When I opened the door, she ran inside. She got too close. Her whiskers were entirely singed off. She walks into things now. They say she'll do that until her whiskers grow back. That's how cats find their way around, did you know that? I thought it was all in the tail.

Robin's head was black and tufted. Her clothes were burning. I got her outside. I covered her with my jacket and tried to hold her, patting her down like I was drying her after a bath. She screamed at me as I did this. Her face looked strange and bare and I realized it was because her eyebrows had burned off. Her eyelashes. Her face was a smoking burn and I thought, If I can just get her body to stop smoking, she'll be okay. I didn't see any other burns. I thought, It's just her hair. There were black, wiry strands of it left on her face from where it singed up as she leaned over the flames. More ash than hair. Her cheekbones were bleeding and there were places where her skin had blackened. I need a telephone, I thought. I need to call the ambulance. The fire department.

The telephone in the studio, it's right there. I can still reach it. I turn around to see if I can reach it. The flames don't even seem that big. The fire is still confined to the back, in the wicking station. And I see them all, lined up in rows: one thousand multicoloured Buddhas, smiling at me in enlightenment, their heads burning off.