Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  Maggie sat down across from me with her own pancakes. I was afraid she might start asking me questions I hadn’t thought of answers to, so I asked her to tell me more about herself, and then listened to her talk. She was a good storyteller. It was even better than hearing her play the pennywhistle.

  But she did, eventually, ask me for my own stories. “Tell me about your family,” she said, when she’d finished telling me about her four sisters (she was the youngest) and twenty-seven cousins.

  “I’m an only child,” I said.

  “Where did you grow up?”

  I always paid attention to stories, wherever I went. Since coming to Minneapolis I’d paid careful attention to the stories I heard about my new home, and I drew on those stories now, to give myself a history. “Brainerd,” I said.

  “Really? I used to vacation up there. It’s beautiful. I guess you hear that a lot.”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t mind.” I cleared my throat. “My parents—well, you’ve heard that old joke about the Scandinavian man who loved his wife so much he almost told her? That was written about my father.”

  “Oh yeah, I think I’ve met him. Or one of his thirty-six identical twin brothers.” She shook her hair out of her face. “My family’s Irish. They’re, like, the complete polar opposites.”

  “So is that why you went to Ireland?”

  “No, actually, I went because the program let me satisfy one of the requirements I needed to graduate, and it wasn’t too expensive.” She laughed. “I never thought I’d go to Ireland—I mean, come on, the Irish-American who wants to go get in touch with her roots, that’s so not me. Except then I had my picture taken next to the statue of my famous ancestor, just like every other American dork. It’s so embarrassing.”

  “Ha. Which one’s your ancestor?”

  “The Crank on the Bank. Patrick Kavanagh.”

  “Oh yeah, I should have guessed that.” Her name was Margaret Cavanaugh.

  *

  Maggie, you were everything I’d dreamed a mortal woman would be. If we are stone, unchanging, you are fire. All mortals are, but you, especially. I knew I’d done right to follow you.

  But to keep you, I would need to back up my story.

  When you went back to your college in Chicago, I went to find a family.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said. The white-haired woman stood wide-eyed and still for a moment, twisting a heavy gold ring she wore on her right hand. Before she could slam the door in my face, I gave her a kiss on the cheek, sealing the enchantment. Memory is a malleable thing—half the enchantments of my kind are as much suggestion as anything else. “It’s nice to see you.”

  She had blue eyes. Her white hair was tightly curled. She made an old mother for a man my age, but she and her husband fit my requirements—childless, without a lot of people in their lives who would need their memories altered as well.

  “I don’t have—” She met my eyes, and I saw a look of deep longing pass through them like a shadow. She blinked. “That is, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “I know. I was in the area and thought I’d stop by. I don’t get up here often enough anymore. How are you and Dad?”

  “Bob?” She retreated from the door. “Robert’s here.”

  Robert? Well, fine. I could be Robert. “Hi Dad,” I said, and shook his hand. Men his age didn’t kiss their sons, but I felt my magic settling as soon as our hands touched. “How’s the business?”

  “Eh. As bad as always. You want a beer?” I nodded. “Doreen, since you’re up . . .”

  We all sat down together in the living room. It was a musty old-person living room, full of knickknacks. Doreen apparently did needlepoint. A reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night hung over the fireplace, and they had a framed map of Norway on the wall. I sat down in a chair near the fireplace and sneezed from the dust. They didn’t get many visitors. Perfect. Well, unless Maggie met them and ran screaming in the other direction.

  But they were very nice. Bob was the perfect laconic rural Minnesotan and Doreen was sweet and fairly quiet. She twisted the ring on her right hand when she was nervous. Towards the end of the evening I mentioned that since they’d lost all my old childhood photos the time the shed flooded, I thought I’d give them a start on a new collection, and handed over a picture I’d had taken the day before, framed and ready for hanging. Doreen took it and thanked me. Her hands gripped it tightly. Bob gently took it from her, took down a needlepoint and put up the picture in its place.

  “By the way,” I said, as I was getting ready to leave, “I have a new girlfriend, Maggie. She’s really great. I was thinking I might bring her up to meet you the next time she’s home on vacation—she goes to school in Chicago.”

  “That would be lovely, dear,” Doreen said. “I hope you can make it up here again soon. We miss you.” She stood on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek and ruffle my hair. “Drive carefully.”

  *

  I fretted for days the first time you met them, but it was fine. My parents remembered me, they were pleased to meet you, and you were charmed by them. I worried before our first Thanksgiving, and even more before our first Christmas, but it all went fine. The spell kept its hold. The picture of me always hung on the wall; my mother even dusted it.

  You finished your studies and got a job in Minneapolis. We found an apartment and moved in together. It was perfect. Just what I’d dreamed of when I followed you.

  Of course, there were limits. I couldn’t marry you. Because there would be all these other relatives—too many at once. I shuddered at the thought of enspelling them all. Even if we’d eloped, I couldn’t take wedding vows as Robert. Or even as Finch. I couldn’t do that to you, to swear an oath to you without using my real name. And there was too much to explain. I still believed you’d think I was crazy, but even if you didn’t—well, I had lied to you. I really did love you, and it really was me who loved you, but there were so many things I had lied about. It was too late.

  And then my mother got sick.

  *

  “Doreen is in the hospital,” Bob said. The phone had rung as Maggie was getting out of the shower, and now she was watching my face, her hair clinging damp to her own. “We’re in St. Paul. I thought I should call you.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “She’s been having dizzy spells. I nagged her to go to the doctor and yesterday she finally went. They did some scans, and then sent us here for more tests.”

  “What do they think it is?”

  A pause. “They saw something on the CT scan,” Bob said slowly. “They don’t seem to want to call it anything yet. I figure it must be bad if they don’t want to tell us what it is. Can you come over?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  I hung up the phone, then called my boss—I was working then at a bookstore. “My mom’s just gone to the hospital,” I said. “She’s here in the cities. I’m going to go see her.”

  “Do you want me to come?” Maggie asked.

  I hesitated. Seeing Maggie with my parents always made me tense. “I’ll call you once I know what’s going on,” I said. “This might be nothing. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She gave me a kiss. “Send her my love. I have some yarn I bought for her last week—I’ll send it with you.”

  I peeked in at the bag of yarn as I rode the city bus to downtown St. Paul. It was a deep red-brown and soft like a tangle of silk. Doreen had taken up knitting in the last year, but she mostly seemed to use cheap acrylic yarn, fearing to “waste” the nicer yarns Maggie tried to talk her into buying. I stroked it for a moment, thinking of Maggie, and bracing myself for the hospital.

  There are mortals who think they hate hospitals because they fear their own mortality. I am not mortal, so I can say with certainty that I hate hospitals because they are horrible places. Whenever Maggie was ill, I tried to ensure she got restful sleep and wholesome, tempting food. Hospitals offer disrupted sleep, and vile food. Why anyone expects to get better in a hospital is somet
hing I still find a mystery.

  Doreen looked wasted and shrunken in her hospital bed. Her hands were bare without her rings, which they’d made her take off for the MRI. “I want to go home,” she said when I came in. “Are they going to let me go home soon?”

  “I think they wanted to run more tests,” I said, leaning over to give her a kiss.

  “They’ve run all the tests they have. When are they going to let me go home?”

  “Why don’t I go get you something decent to eat?” I said.

  Bob shook his head. “The doctor was going to come by in a few minutes,” he said. “Wait till then.”

  Of course, he didn’t come for over an hour, and then stood outside our door talking to a nurse for another ten minutes before he actually came in to talk to us. “Doreen,” he said, looking at my mother’s chart. “I have some bad news about your dizzy spells. You have a brain tumor. Now, it might be benign . . .” He talked on, about different kinds of brain tumors, treatment options, prognoses. I don’t think any of us heard much beyond “brain tumor.”

  “Can I go home?” Doreen asked when he was done. “Do I have to stay in the hospital?”

  “You’ll have surgery here, and we’ll do a biopsy. You can get the rest of your treatment in Brainerd, if you want, and you can probably be home most of the time.”

  Doreen burst into tears. “It’s time to plant my bulbs,” she said.

  *

  I called Maggie at work from a phone in the waiting room. “Oh, Finch,” she whispered when she heard. “I’m so sorry. I can come over . . .”

  “She’s napping,” I said. “You can come over later. And you know—it might not be that bad. The doctor said the benign ones aren’t nearly as scary as you might think.”

  Maggie laughed, a little shakily. “I don’t buy the idea of a non-scary brain tumor.”

  “Yeah, me either.”

  We chatted a little more and then hung up. A woman was waiting to use the phone, so I moved to another chair. “Jenny?” I heard her say after she dialed, and then her voice faded. She’d covered her face with her free hand, and her shoulders were shaking. She was crying too hard to speak.

  I closed my eyes, trying to think about my own problems instead of eavesdropping on other people’s. It occurred to me that I could find out if Doreen were already doomed. The banshee would know. No, I decided. Best to be as ignorant as the mortals, lest they suspect something was strange.

  The woman on the phone was still crying too hard to speak. I wanted to touch her hand, to offer her some sort of comfort, but instead I went to the elevator and headed downstairs.

  As I went outside into the rain, I thought I heard my brother’s voice, laughing at me. “You’re right,” I said to him, half already in my dream. “I don’t want to know. I’d rather believe she’s going to make it.”

  *

  It was the bad kind of brain tumor.

  They weren’t sure how bad until after the surgery. Doreen was still unconscious, her head swathed in bandages; the doctor told us that he’d cut out as much of the tumor as he could. He talked about radiation and chemotherapy. He gave percentages, rattling numbers off so quickly none of us understood any of them. He forced a smile, said something that tried to be encouraging but wasn’t, then left.

  Bob turned to me and said, “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  When Doreen woke up, for a few minutes she didn’t know either of us. I wasn’t surprised she didn’t recognize me; traumas could shake the grip of any spell like this. But Bob was horrified. Doreen’s lapse scared him more than any prognosis from the doctor. Something slid into place after a bit and Doreen was herself again. But as I left that day, Bob turned to me and said, “That’s what it’s going to be like, isn’t it. She’s going to forget me. And you. Both of us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said again.

  “One of our friends got Alzheimer’s. Didn’t know any of us after a while. I thought I’d rather die, than live like that.”

  “Mom was only confused for a minute,” I said.

  Bob shook his head and didn’t answer.

  *

  Doreen was discharged a few days later, and Maggie drove all of us up to Brainerd. We’d expected to be able to head up in the morning, but the doctor didn’t come to discharge her until afternoon, and we didn’t get on the road until after three. Doreen sat up front with Maggie; I sat in the back seat next to Bob. It was a quiet trip. Doreen dozed most of the way. Bob stared out the window. As we grew near Brainerd, Doreen stirred, and Bob looked at her from his seat behind Maggie. I saw naked terror in his eyes, as if he’d glimpsed her death out there rather than grain elevators and cornfields.

  “She’ll be okay, Dad,” I whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Bob gave me a long, bleak look, and went back to staring out the window.

  Their house was dark when we pulled up. Bob unlocked it and turned the lights on, and Maggie gently roused Doreen. Maggie had to work tomorrow, and we’d decided she would drive back tonight. I’d take the bus home from Brainerd in a day or two. Maggie settled Doreen into her chair, then heated up some soup for dinner while I found sheets for the guest bed. We ate dinner in front of the TV, and then Maggie kissed Doreen and headed back to Minneapolis.

  When I came back into the living room, Doreen stared at me. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Robert, your son,” I said, and tapped my picture on the wall, trying to nudge the spell.

  She stared at me, her face a complete blank. “We never had children,” she said.

  “Doreen,” Bob said, and sat down next to her.

  Doreen burst into tears, burying her face against his neck. “Bob, why not? Why not?”

  Bob stroked her hair; it was damp with sweat. “What did the doctor say about fevers?” he asked me, his voice shaky.

  “He said any fever was an emergency. If she runs a fever we’re supposed to take her to the ER.” I came over and touched her forehead. “Do you have a thermometer?” I asked, though her head was scorching hot.

  “I don’t know. Doreen’s always the one who looks after that sort of thing.”

  Doreen looked up at me. “Oh, Robert,” she said. “Thank goodness. I thought you’d gone. Back to Minneapolis, I mean.”

  “I’ll see if I can find one,” I said, and went into the bathroom. I found a digital thermometer in the medicine cabinet, its instructions still folded around it. Doreen’s temperature was 102.

  “I’ll get the car,” Bob said.

  St. Joseph’s medical center was only about a mile from their house; it didn’t take long to get there. I helped Doreen into the ER while Bob parked the car. She was admitted almost immediately; they suspected infection. This hospital room was eerily like her last, right down to the color of the privacy curtain. Bob slumped in the chair next to her bed. I fidgeted with the thermometer, which I’d put into my pocket on our way out the door.

  “Are we still in St. Paul?” Doreen asked.

  Bob raised his head and gave Doreen a look of bleak horror. “Don’t you remember coming home?”

  “We’re in Brainerd,” I said. “We brought you home this afternoon, but then you started running a fever.”

  Doreen looked at me helplessly. “I don’t remember coming home.”

  “You slept most of the way.”

  Her hands plucked at the thin hospital blanket. “Can’t I just take some aspirin for the fever and go home?”

  “They think you have an infection.”

  “But I don’t want to stay here.”

  “I don’t think they’ll keep you here long,” I said. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep.”

  Doreen nodded. “Take your father home. He looks like he’s having a rougher day than I am.”

  *

  When I got up in the morning, Bob was gone.

  I found his note on the kitchen table. It was very short—just that he was sorry. The car was gone, but
he’d taken no money. With the note, he left his wedding ring and the two rings Doreen usually wore—her wedding ring, and the heavy ring she normally wore on her right hand. I slipped them into my pocket.

  I’d hoped to avoid telling Doreen, at least right away, but when I came in, she looked past me and said, “Where’s Bob?”

  “He couldn’t come in today,” I said.

  Doreen scoffed at that. “The man’s retired. What, he had some sort of pressing engagement?” She looked closely at my face. “What happened, Robert? Is it the house? Did the house burn down?”

  “Oh, no!” I said with false heartiness, wondering why I couldn’t lie about this when I lied about myself so well. “The house is fine, don’t worry.”

  “He left me, didn’t he?”

  I curled my hand around the rings in my pocket. “Yes,” I said, finally. “He left your rings.”

  Doreen didn’t cry. She just nodded once, and said, “I’d like them back. Even if he ran out on me. I’ve worn a wedding ring for thirty-six years. It doesn’t feel right not having it on my hand.” She slipped the rings back on. “Now, this one,” she said, pointing at the one she wore on her right hand. “This one was my great-grandmother’s. My mother told me the ring was looted from Gaul by the Vikings and that’s how it came into the family. But a jeweler told me once there was no way it could really be that old. I was supposed to hand it on to my daughter, but I never had a daughter. I don’t get along well with my nieces. I guess it will go to you, and you can give it to Maggie when you get married.”

  “I’m in no hurry,” I assured her.

  “Psht. If you two would hurry up and get married, I could give her the ring now. I’m not going to live forever, you know.”

  *

  The staff at the hospital were sympathetic when they found out about Bob, but not as surprised as I’d expected. They responded to the news with an efficient command of regulations: Doreen needed new paperwork. She’d drawn up papers years ago giving Bob the power to make health care decisions for her. That all needed to be changed, and the nurses thought I should be designated. “Of course,” the doctor said. “You’re her son. The next of kin.”