by Celia Laskey
I pull over a few houses early. A woman in a maroon down jacket walks by with a cocker spaniel on a leash. A teenage girl in the house directly in front of me sulkily does dishes behind a large window. I step out of the car, closing the door as quietly as I can. Then I remember that no one would think a man getting out of his car was suspicious unless he was acting suspicious, and I stride purposefully down the street. When I spot the blue house on the corner, I dart into the yard, staggering across the shin-high snow, before I make it to the side of the house. The window next to me is dark, but pots hanging from a rack reflect the silvery glow of a television coming from the other room.
I sidestep around the house, my boot holes in the snow glaringly obvious—winter has to be the worst season for stalking—before reaching the living room window. My wife and the lesbian are sitting on opposite sides of the couch, my wife with her arms crossed around a pillow and the lesbian with a hand to her forehead, her lips pressed together. My wife says something, and the lesbian just keeps looking straight ahead at the TV. My wife gets up and stands right in front of her, angrily gesticulating. When she’s finished talking, she places her hands on her hips. The lesbian looks up at her and says something that makes my wife start to cry. She turns to walk up the stairs, and the lesbian doesn’t follow her.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING I whistle as I check the internal temperature of refrigerated chicken breasts and hot soups in warming pots. I don’t even deduct points for the improper use of a cutting board at the deli on Market Street. By late afternoon, I’m surprised she hasn’t called, so I call her while driving to my next inspection.
“What is it, Henry?” she says. “I’ve got ten minutes before I have to meet with a lame horse.”
“I was just calling to see how you’re doing.”
“How I’m doing?” She’s chewing something crunchy, probably her beloved kettle corn. “Why do you say that like I got a cancer diagnosis yesterday?”
“Did something happen yesterday?” Fishing for something that you know but you’re not supposed to know is harder than it seems.
“What are you talking about? We had lunch yesterday. I’m the same now as when you saw me. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, I just had a feeling something might be up. You know, the old marital intuition.”
“Henry, no offense, but you never had intuition even when we were together.”
The car behind me beeps. I look up to see a green light, and press the gas. “We never fought, did we?”
“Not really,” she says. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It just seems strange, looking back. Why didn’t we?”
“I don’t know,” she says, sighing. “I think fighting requires a certain amount of . . . passion.”
In the distance, the rotating blades of wind turbines make it look like they’re blowing thin clouds across the sky until they disappear. I feel like one of those clouds, being blown away from my wife until I fade into nothing. She says it’s time for her meeting and hangs up. I pull into the parking lot of Prairie Café, my next inspection, and dial Peter. The rich, charcoal smell of hamburgers wafts in through the car vents.
He picks up on ring five and a half, just as I’m expecting the call to go to voice mail. “Hey, Dad,” he says, leery.
“You picked up.”
“Your messages were getting pretty pathetic. I didn’t think I could listen to another one.”
“So you forgive me, then?” The lunch crowd arrives as if on a timer. Men in khakis and oxford shoes get out of their sedans, and farmers in snow overalls and beanies get out of their trucks.
“I guess,” he says.
“Oh, good,” I say. “Because I have a question about your mother.”
He laughs, then I laugh.
“Oh, man, you actually do, don’t you?” A long breath of air comes through the phone. “Just ask it.”
“Do you remember your mother and me fighting?”
“No,” he says. “You mostly avoided each other.”
“Do you think if we had fought more we would have stayed together?”
“I think Mom realized she’s a . . .” His voice goes down an octave. “A lesbian, and it has nothing to do with you. Do you want her back? Is that what this is all about?”
“No, I don’t want her back,” I say, realizing it’s true. Is it possible that I feel jealousy not about the lesbian, but about Laurel herself? That I don’t want her back, but I want to be her, the one who has an exciting new life spread out in front of her? You’re with someone for twenty-five years, not happy, exactly, but not miserable, either—there’s a kind of comfort in bleak predictability, because it requires nothing of you—then everything changes. She’s this new person who may have always been there, but you never saw her. You’re a tidal pool left by the wave of her sea change. You want to figure out how she did it. You wouldn’t know how to become someone else even if you wanted to.
Laurel is probably driving home for lunch—her new home. Maybe once in a while, when she’s caught up in her thoughts, she autopilots to our house before remembering and turning around. She’s probably listening to the Top 40 station and debating between making apricot-glazed chicken or chicken cacciatore for dinner. She’ll pull into the driveway, admiring how the sun reflects off the ice-covered snow. It reminds her of the ocean. It’s been such a long time since she’s seen the water. They should plan a vacation, maybe Southern California, where they can walk along the rocky coast, their feet stepping over the shallow pools of trapped water that wait for the tide to come in and draw them back into the endless, shifting depths.
Harley
The smell of sausage and syrup and damp down jackets infuses the air as I walk into the Pancake House to hang more signs. The cashier says I can tape one to the front door. One outside, one inside? I ask. Sure, he says. As I press diagonal pieces of Scotch tape onto the corners of the sign inside the door, I catch bits of conversation from people checking out at the register. Did you hear another storm’s coming? The Farmers’ Almanac says there’ll be at least two more before spring. The truck broke down. The roof caved in. The snow blower’s busted. My wife here wants to get a new one. Who can afford that? I can’t wait until summer. Summer’s too hot, winter’s too cold. You can’t win. It’s a cat-and-dog life.
“You lost your cat?”
I turn around and see a young girl in purple mittens that are too big for her. They slide off her hands and fall to the floor. She picks them up and pulls them back on, holding her hands in the air like she’s making the signal for a touchdown.
She’s standing next to a man who must be her father, who looks at my face and tries to figure out what I am: man, woman, or freak. He pulls on her mittened hand. “Come on, honey. We have to go.”
“Does your cat like cheese?” the girl asks, leaning away from her father’s tug. “Our cat likes cheese.”
Her father jerks her hand so hard that the girl trips over her snow boots and falls onto her knees. Her eyes fill with surprised tears.
“You’re fine, you’re fine,” her father says, sighing loudly and picking her up under her armpits.
She wipes at her eyes with the back of a mitten as he carries her out the door. From over his shoulder she says, “I hope you find your cat.”
* * *
• • •
LORNA HAS BEEN missing for three days. My mother has been dead for exactly one month. Things pile on. That’s the rule of the universe. My mother and I were not close. The cat and I are—or were, depending on if she ever comes back. I had taken a leave of absence from the task force to go back to Minneapolis, where I grew up, and take care of my mother. I was an only child and she was a single parent; I didn’t have much choice. Her liver was failing. It wasn’t a surprise. She had been an alcoholic her whole adult life. A few d
ays before she died, she said I should understand because she was born that way. Just like I was born the way I am. It was never a choice, she said. That may be true. But who I am never hurt anyone. Who I am hasn’t killed me. At least, not yet.
When I told my mother I was joining Acceptance Across America, she wasn’t thrilled. “It sounds like a scam,” she said. “They were stalking you on the internet, for Christ’s sake. And it’s not like you have any experience.”
“They weren’t stalking me, Mom. I write essays about my life and they’re published online. Remember that one I sent you about airport security?”
“Puh! No one wants to hear about that.”
Apparently, Acceptance Across America did. Joining AAA as their social media copywriter was the first time I actually felt legitimized. But with every plus there’s usually a minus tagging along somewhere. Since returning to Big Burr from Minneapolis, I have been called “sir,” “ma’am,” “you,” and “ummm.” I have driven sixty-seven miles without moving the steering wheel. I have seen a foamy glob of spit floating on top of my corn chowder. I have stared down into the silver orb of an empty grain silo and heard my sigh echo back at me. I have been stared down by countless people in restrooms.
I lurch down the icy sidewalk, putting up signs in Dollar General, Barb’s Boutique, Giovanni’s, and the entrance of the strip mall. Lorna is a twelve-year-old orange tabby with a diamond of white fur on her chest. She is skittish, but may come for food. She was last seen near Walnut and 12th St. Call Harley with any information: 218-555-0199. A few people are sympathetic, but most look at me like I got what was coming. “You let her out in weather like this?” one woman says. “How old did you say she was?” says another, clucking her tongue.
Should I have seen this coming? She was getting old. And I did worry about all the moving around: Chicago (where I lived before joining the task force) to Big Burr, Big Burr to Minneapolis, Minneapolis back to Big Burr. Maybe Lorna was depressed—she had actually liked my mother, who always dropped part of whatever she was eating on the floor for her, claiming that human food didn’t give Lorna diarrhea. But my mother wasn’t the one who scooped the litter box. As I corralled Lorna into her carrier for the eighteen-hour drive back to Kansas, she gave me a look that seemed to say: Not fucking again.
So maybe she did run away. Before I let her out three nights ago, we had gone through our usual routine. Around eleven p.m., when I started getting ready for bed, she’d meow by the back door. If I didn’t let her out, she’d knock everything off my bedside table in protest: reading glasses, Casio watch, ChapStick, pens, pocket change, and the framed photo of my father standing on the runway in his olive-green jumpsuit, giving the camera a cocky smile. When I finally capitulated and opened the door, she’d dart outside, where she’d roam around until six a.m., or whatever time I felt like dragging myself out of bed and letting her back in. She was almost always waiting on the front stoop, covered in burrs or with muddy snow caked between her paws, evidence of some kind of nocturnal adventure. Once inside, she’d meow frantically until I gave her a can of shredded beef feast with extra gravy. Every day, the same, until three mornings ago, when I opened the door and she wasn’t there, tail twitching impatiently, waiting for me.
What I dread most is ringing doorbells, talking face-to-face with locals who search my body for clues the way I’m searching for Lorna. At every house, I renegotiate whether to act more masculine or feminine so the person behind the door will be more inclined to help me. Should I lower my voice pitch or raise it? Should I introduce myself using my name or not? Should I stand up straight or hunch my back? After stopping at thirty houses within a two-mile radius, I’m exhausted from all the shape-shifting, but I still need to visit my next-door neighbors, who are not exactly neighborly.
When I first moved in, my passing comments of “Nice day, isn’t it?” or “Would you like some help carrying that?” were met with frowns or grunts. They have a prefabricated colonial that looks like it belongs in a miniature Christmas village. It has two stories, with two white columns on either side of the red front door, beige plastic siding, and decorative red shutters. To the right of their frozen driveway, a snowman with a black top hat, red scarf, and carrot nose lies on its back in the snow-covered yard. Its twig arms make a Y shape next to its head, two arcs of snow smoothed out on either side of its body, frozen in the act of making a snow angel. On their minivan is a bumper sticker in the shape of a paw print that says OUR CATS ARE REPUBLICANS.
I press the doorbell and my heart speeds up, a combination of nerves and hope. You would think at this point in my life I would have learned to be more skeptical, but I still approach every new interaction with my fingers crossed. I still think, Maybe this time it’ll be different. Almost every time I’m proven wrong, but the rare instances when I’m not keep the flame burning. A wicker wreath with a wooden placard that says WAGNER in calligraphic script hangs from the middle of the door. I ring the bell again and the wife’s face appears. She steps out onto the porch and looks at me suspiciously.
“Hi, Martha,” I say, deciding to appeal to her feminine side by raising the pitch of my voice. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m your next-door neighbor, and—”
“I remember you,” she says, crossing her arms. “We thought you had left for good.”
“No, I just had some family stuff to deal with.”
I wait for her to say something like “I hope everything is okay,” or even just “Oh,” but after a few seconds of her staring past me, expressionless, I hand her a flyer. “I’m looking for my cat. She’s been missing for three days.”
Her face softens and she lets out a sympathetic sigh. She presses her hand to her heart as she looks at the picture of Lorna. “Such a cute cat,” she says. “I have four, myself.” Her head tips down as she reads the flyer. There’s a half inch of gray hair in her part, before the blond starts. Her eyes flick right and left. A thick border of eyeliner follows her bottom lash-line, but not the top. I wonder if I’ve caught her in the middle of putting on her makeup or if this menacing intensity is her preferred style.
A gust of wind pushes against me and a chill undulates through my body. Martha sniffles and takes a folded tissue out of the pocket of her khaki pants. Her nose is short and turned up at the end, a blip in the wide expanse of her square-jawed face. She wears a pink cable-knit sweater over a white turtleneck. There’s a small stain on the turtleneck, a faded rust circle directly below her right ear, like a drop of blood fell off the tip of her lobe a few washings ago.
“You poor dear,” she says. “I haven’t seen Lorna, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye out. My kids play in the backyard a lot, so I bet they’ll see her.” She looks me in the eye, without probing my face or my body. Hope releases a latch in my chest.
* * *
• • •
AT HOME, I put a frozen burrito in the microwave and pick up the phone to call my mother. Then I remember. I used to dread talking to her, but there’s something about going to one’s mother in times of crisis. I think of what she would say to me, depending on how many drinks she’d had. If she was at the lower end, it would be something like “She’s just a cat. At least it’s not your husband who went missing.” At the higher end: “Oh, how awful!” with empathy, not sarcasm. “Put a can of tuna on the back steps. I’m sure she’ll be back in a few days.” The more drinks she had, the nicer she became. Sometimes I’d let her get into the double-digits just so she would run her fingers through my hair and tell me how much she loved me, how special I was, how having a “normal” child would have been so boring.
In lieu of my mother I call JJ, my best friend back in Chicago.
“The cat is smarter than you,” she says when I tell her Lorna is missing. “She knew to get the fuck out of Kansas.”
I crouch down and turn the knob on the radiator, even though I know the heat isn’t working. Every day my landlord says he’s co
ming, then he doesn’t come. “Maybe, but someone has to help these people.”
“You think they see it that way? That you’re helping them?”
“Some of them.” Maybe not my neighbor, but there are at least modest numbers at all of our events now, and my favorite waitress at the Pancake House even sent me a condolence card after my mom died.
“So what are you going to do about the cat?” JJ asks. “I’ve read about cats that trekked all the way across the country to get back to their old home. Maybe she’s going to Minneapolis to visit the ghost of your mother.”
The burrito spins in the white chemical light of the microwave. “I think I might miss her,” I say.
“Of course you miss her.”
“Of course? How can you say of course?”
“Because she was your mother and you loved her, despite everything.”
The microwave beeps. I take the burrito out and cut a piece off, pushing it around the plate. “Honestly, I feel more torn up about Lorna being gone.”
“Well, that’s a classic case of displacement. You’re mourning for Lorna because you won’t let yourself mourn for your mother.”
“When did you become a therapist?”
“Did you forget I was a psych major before I dropped out?” The toilet flushes on the other end of the phone.
“Are you diagnosing me from the shitter?”
“No, honey, that was the garbage disposal,” she says. “So if the cat doesn’t come back, does that mean you’ll consider leaving Kansas?”
“If the cat doesn’t come back? That’s a terrible thing to say.” I grab a PBR out of the refrigerator and pop the tab before taking two big gulps. “She’s only been gone for three days.”
“How long does one wait for a lost cat to come back?”