by Celia Laskey
I consider this. A few months? A year? Years? I picture myself as an old person, in a wool cardigan sitting in a ratty armchair next to a window, peering out in search of a streak of orange fur. “Indefinitely?”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
After some more half-hearted consoling, JJ tells me she has to get ready for a date. I take my burrito to the living room and wrap myself in a down comforter. There’s a Law & Order on about a missing girl, and I can’t help thinking of Lorna. I wish she had friends I could interview, phone records I could look up, a diary I could read for clues. Instead I’m left to picture her shivering, trapped under a shed by a wall of snow. Or crossing endless white-blanketed fields, her line of paw prints intersecting with trails of fox, raccoon, and deer. Or jumping fences into backyards, looking for the familiar blue door but never seeing it. Or even worse, knowing exactly where I am but choosing not to come back to me.
As I lie in bed trying to sleep through the cold that wriggles its way through my blanket, I remember a time when the heat went out when I was a little kid. My mother made us hot chocolate, the good kind with milk and Hershey’s syrup. I was too young to realize that hers was probably full of whiskey. Then we both got into a bath so hot that it felt cold on my feet. She flipped through a Sears catalog, dog-earing pages of things I said I wanted, like light-up sneakers and a swing set with a slide. Things I knew even then I would never get, but it was fun to pretend.
After she finished her hot chocolate, she stopped paying attention to me. So I slipped my head under the water, waiting to see how long it would take her to notice. I opened my eyes. My mother’s dark brown pubic hair waved serenely in the water like seaweed, and the long rust-colored scar on her stomach from her C-section seemed to wink at me. The Sears catalog was splayed open in front of her face. On the cover, a family in pajamas was nestled around a Christmas tree with countless presents underneath. It became harder to hold my breath. Under the water, I grasped my mother’s calf, squeezing it hard, until her face appeared from behind the catalog and she scooped me up out of the water. She blinked at me slowly, then burst into tears. She thought I had been drowning. She sobbed while rocking me back and forth, clutching me to her chest. She stopped drinking for a full month after that, or so she claimed.
* * *
• • •
DURING THE MORNING meeting at work, I surreptitiously google “how to find a lost cat,” my phone hidden under the table like I’m in high school. Lostpet.net tells me to “be calm and try to think like your cat.” If I thought like Lorna, I would think: food food food food food. So what does that mean? Someone is feeding her? Or she’s dead. Or trapped. Or dead. Every now and then I look up and nod at one of the PowerPoint slides outlining our anti-bullying session for the junior high. Gender nonconforming students feel less safe in school and “play sick” because they’re afraid to go. 4 out of 5 kids report they don’t know an adult they could turn to for help. The site says if I’ve recently moved, I should extend my search to my old neighborhood. It doesn’t mention what to do if my old neighborhood is over a thousand miles away.
Back at my desk, I try to write a Facebook post about our new #TrustYourNeighbor campaign, a partnership with HGTV where a townsperson and a task force member pair up and redecorate a room in each other’s house. Karen arranged it through her media connections and is really excited about the exposure it’ll bring to the task force, but all I can do is laugh, picturing myself partnering with Martha Wagner and her covering my living room with woven baskets, sugar-cookie-scented candles, and reclaimed wood wall art from Hobby Lobby that says something like LOVE LIVES HERE. Instead of finishing my post, I return to my cat search. Catsinthebag.org tells me Lorna may still be inside the house, and I should check behind the books in my bookcase, in the heating ducts, and even inside my box spring and mattress—like I wouldn’t know if I had been sleeping on top of my cat.
Jamal sits down at his desk next to mine. “I’m a little nervous to go to this school,” he says. “Junior high kids scare the shit out of me.”
“I know. I’d rather run into a pack of rabid wolves than a group of teenagers.” I sigh and turn back to my computer, trying a different cat-finding site.
“Still no sign of her?” says Jamal.
I shake my head.
“You know what my aunt did when her dog went missing a few years ago? She called a pet psychic and found the dog within, like, two days.”
I type “pet psychic Big Burr” into Google, doubting there will be any results, but a woman named Laurel Plummer comes up. She calls herself an animal communicator, which sounds slightly better than pet psychic. On her “About” page, there’s a picture of her kissing the bridge of a horse’s nose. She has light red hair and wears a white polo shirt and mom jeans. “She doesn’t look like a psychic,” I say.
“What did you want, bangles and a head scarf?”
I shrug and read her testimonials. Laurel really knows her stuff! My parrot Ruby stopped talking, and Laurel helped me figure out that it was because Ruby was jealous of my new boyfriend. Now I have my boyfriend give Ruby a treat every time he comes over, and she’s back to talking a mile a minute! Another says, My terrier Jack had a bad habit of eating only when I’d hand-feed him. Laurel showed me that Jack thought he was the pack leader, and once I changed my behaviors to assert that I was the leader, Jack only ate out of my hand metaphorically! I click on the rates page. The cheapest option is seventy-five dollars for thirty minutes on the phone. “For that price, she better know the exact latitude and longitude of Lorna’s location,” I say.
* * *
• • •
FIVE DAYS LATER—Laurel’s first available appointment—we talk.
“So how does this work over the phone?” I ask.
“I understand how it might be confusing, Harley,” she says in an overly empathetic voice. “Animal communication is done through mental telepathy, so neither of us need to be physically present. I may see images or feel emotions that I then translate into words.”
“So you think you can find Lorna?”
“Let’s start with the basics. Can you tell me about Lorna, Harley?”
I tell her that Lorna lives for food, that her favorite is beef feast with extra gravy, that she likes listening to Nick Drake, and sleeps with one paw on my arm. That when she sees a bird outside the window she makes a plaintive mewling sound, that she hides under the bed when the doorbell rings, that her favorite toy is a ball of tinfoil on the end of a string and she won’t play with any store-bought toys. That she doesn’t like to be petted on her back, only her head, and that she gave me that look when I moved her back to Big Burr, the look that said, I don’t want to do this again.
“Okay, I’ll be quiet for a few minutes while I connect with Lorna,” she says.
I watch the snow fall out the window, piling up on a branch before it gets so tall that it topples over.
“I’m getting an image,” she says after a while. “Newspaper. Wet newspaper.”
I wait for her to go on, but she doesn’t say anything else. “Is that it?”
“I understand it’s a little frustrating, Harley, but the images I get are usually singular.”
“Well, can you at least tell if she’s inside or outside?”
“All I see is the newspaper, very close up, from her perspective, like she’s sitting on top of it.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”
“In shelters, the cages are normally lined with newspaper. Have you called all the shelters in your town?”
“Of course I have.”
“Wait—now Lorna is talking to me. She’s telling me she didn’t run away. She wants you to know that.”
“So if she didn’t run away, then what happened?”
“That’s all she’s saying.”
“Great. So
she didn’t run away, she saw some newspaper at some point, and I still have no idea where she is.”
“I know losing a pet is so hard, Harley. Sometimes the information I give needs a chance to marinate, so to speak, and then in a day or two, you’ll say, ‘Newspaper!’ And it will all click.”
* * *
• • •
I SPEND THE WEEKEND standing for abnormally long amounts of time in front of the newspaper rack at the grocery store. When I see a piece of stray newspaper blowing around an abandoned lot next to Barb’s Boutique, I climb over the chain-link fence and dig through the snow with my bare hands, looking for Lorna’s frozen body. The hawks that have taken over the old billboard screech at me indignantly. I’m convinced one is giving me side-eye, like I’ve lost my mind. Could a hawk have gotten Lorna? One time she came home with an odd circular puncture wound at the base of her tail. Could it have been a talon? Could they be digesting her right now?
I call in sick to work and spend days watching Law & Order marathons. On day three, I get a call from an unknown number. At first I’d get excited every time my phone showed a number I didn’t recognize, thinking someone must have seen the flyers and knew something about Lorna. I answered calls promising a free vacation to the Caribbean, lower interest on my credit card, and a “do-not-miss investment opportunity.” This time, I don’t pick up. After a minute, my phone chimes, letting me know I have a voice mail. It’s a guy named Ed who sounds like he has a head cold. In Big Burr for the day. Saw my flyer. Works at a shelter in Dry Creek. (Newspaper!) Thinks he might know what happened to Lorna. Can I meet him at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Wilson in an hour?
Ed might not know anything about Lorna. He might say, Why don’t you get in the car and I’ll take you to her? When we’re far enough out of town, he’ll lock the doors and undo his belt, saying something like Let’s find out what you really are. After, he’ll push me onto the frozen ground and kick me until the snow is red, the attraction and the revulsion feeding off of each other. I hold my trembling pointer finger over the number, going back and forth, until I decide my need to know trumps my fear.
A generic recording about the person I’m trying to reach being unavailable kicks in after the fourth ring. I throw on my coat and get in the car. Dry Creek is almost an hour away. How would Lorna have ended up there? He thinks he might know what happened to Lorna. Meaning she is not currently in his possession. What happened. Past tense. Not where she is. And he wants to see me in person. People deliver good news on the phone and bad news in person. The possibilities race through my mind: (1) someone else adopted her; (2) she’s injured or sick; (3) he saw her but then she ran away again; or (4) she’s dead.
I pull into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot without remembering the drive there. When I walk in, a man sits in the corner with my flyer on the table in front of him. He has thick ears that stick out from the side of his head and a large, rounded nose. He reminds me of a Smurf, which makes me feel better. Then he looks up and our eyes meet, and it is not the look of someone who has something good to say.
I sit down at the table and decide to just be myself. The man seems kind, and I’m too upset to devote my energy to something other than Lorna. “Please. Just tell me what you know. No preamble.”
He pulls back the tab on the white plastic lid of his coffee cup and presses the pill-shaped knob into the drinking spout, then pulls it out and presses it in again. “I’m so sorry,” he says, my heart constricting. “I think we euthanized your cat a couple of days ago.”
“You think?”
“Well, she looked just like the photo on your flyer. She had the diamond on her chest and everything.”
“A lot of tabbies look alike,” I say. “How did she act?”
“Well, her favorite thing seemed to be food, but I think that’s true for a lot of cats,” he says. “She didn’t seem to like being petted on her back. Her skin would ripple and she’d give you this testy look. But otherwise she was really sweet.”
Outside, a Dunkin’ Donuts employee stabs at the ice-coated sidewalk with a flat shovel. The metal crunches against the ice and clangs against the cement in a steady rhythm. Crunch crunch clang. Crunch crunch clang. I nod. “That’s Lorna.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says again.
“How did she get all the way to Dry Creek?” I ask, more to myself than to him.
“Some lady brought her in,” he says. “Said her kids found the cat under their shed in the backyard.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“She said she wished she could keep the cat, but they already had four at home.”
The hair on my neck stands up. “What did she look like?”
“Oh, medium build. Blond hair. I’m not very good with faces.”
* * *
• • •
I STARE DOWN the wicker wreath that says WAGNER and repeatedly press their bell. I can hear it ding-donging inside the house.
When Martha opens the door and sees the expression on my face, she gives me a long, satisfied look. “You’re that poor dear with the lost cat, aren’t you?” She brushes her bangs out of her face. “Did you ever find her?”
“I’d really appreciate it if you stopped playing dumb and just tell me why you did it,” I say.
She crosses her arms over her purple cardigan. “I’m sure I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You knew I was looking for her. Why would you take her to a shelter over an hour away? So I wouldn’t find her? So she would be euthanized? For what?”
“I think you’re very upset and very confused,” she says, starting to shut the door.
I slide my hand between the door and the frame. “Please.” I can feel my face contorting, my eyes starting to burn.
She blinks at me and her face hardens. She swings the door shut and I pull my hand out at the last second, before my fingers get crushed. The dead bolt clicks. I stand there, wiping hot tears from my cold face, before I turn around and see that it’s started to snow. The flakes fall steadily to the ground, settling on top of that stupid snowman. I yank out its carrot nose and chuck it into the street. I break its twig arms into little pieces. I stamp on its face, pressing its button eyes and button smile deep into the snow. I keep stamping until all three circles are flat, the snow compact under my boots. Then I lie down on top of its flattened body and close my eyes. Flakes fall onto my face, first melting but then accumulating as my skin gets colder, eventually numbing. I imagine how my face must look, blanketed into featurelessness. I imagine how nice it would be to not have to be any sort of person at all.
Lizzie
We do artificial insemination here,” says Neal, the rancher whose cow-calf operation I’m visiting for the day. Cow-calf operations are just what they sound like: a rancher keeps a herd of mostly heifers whose only job is to crank out calves. My company, King Beef, buys these calves when they’re ready for slaughter. I’m here to make sure everything is up to code and to see if we can create any efficiencies, my boss’s favorite phrase since profits started falling.
“We call artificial insemination AI for short,” Neal goes on. “Not to be confused with artificial intelligence.” He chuckles. Neal has a face like a potato: wide, chinless, unremarkable.
We’re standing at the end of a long pole barn, where Rosie, the heifer about to be inseminated, waits between a red metal head gate. Her irises, so dark they appear to be all pupil, stare straight ahead. They look vacant, hopeless. Or maybe I’m only assigning such human emotions to the cow because the other night my husband, Derek, asked me if I thought it was time we start trying. The question echoed in my ears like it had fallen into a dry well. Trying. You know what I’d like to try? All sixteen flavors at the frozen yogurt place. I don’t want to try to have a baby, then try to lose the baby weight, then try to make VP after I just took two months off, then try to have pleasurable sex wi
th Derek when my vagina is still stretched out like the waist of decade-old gray sweatpants.
The rest of the cows are grazing in the field. Their colors remind me of a spice rack: turmeric, cinnamon, clove, black sesame. A group of exclusively cinnamon-colored cows cluster underneath a small tree, and I wonder if they know they’re all the same color. If they’re the cinnamon clique. It’s a sunny, warm day, and I’d like to ask Neal for a refill of my lemonade, but I haven’t been able to find a break in his steady stream of cowversation. I don’t think he gets many visitors, much less visitors who are interested in all the details of a cow-calf operation.
“A lot of places still use bulls, but I’ve found a better success rate with AI. We get our semen from this distributor called Select Sires. It’s virile stuff,” he says, winking.
The most ironic thing about artificial insemination is that it all starts with a male-on-male sexual encounter. Semen distributors use a steer “teaser” to arouse the bull—they don’t use female teasers because they don’t want to risk actual intercourse and the spread of venereal disease. The bull will mount the steer but before it can get too far, an actual person has to insert the bull’s penis into an artificial vagina to collect the semen that eventually impregnates heifers like Rosie.
Neal pulls on a breeder’s sleeve, a plastic glove that extends to the armpit, and rubs mineral oil over it. “We’re about to get to the unladylike part,” he says. “There’s a bucket of pears up there next to Rosie. You can go feed her one so you don’t have to watch.”
“It’s my job to learn about this operation, and that includes watching you stick your arm up that cow’s ass,” I say. I’m the only woman in a leadership position at King Beef, a fact the men make hard to forget. My dad is the owner, and since I’m an only child, I’ll be taking over when he retires. When I was in college I resisted the idea, but after I graduated with a business degree and saw the non-nepotistic prospects out there, working at the beef plant didn’t seem so bad. It was a business just like any other, and at least I wouldn’t have to start at the very bottom of the ladder.