The Kitty Committee

by Kathryn Berla

  “So this is how the two of you want to live?” she said at the exact moment Jane walked by our car with some friends. “Take a good look because there she is—the witch who’ll control your destinies. You want to live in fear of her for the next year and a half—that one day she’ll wake up in a bad mood and decide to turn us in? We could be expelled. Arrested. No college, no future. That’s what you want? Well, not me.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Maggie said. “I can see what she’s thinking . . . reason with her. Even if she’s mad at me, we have a bond. Had a bond.”

  “You always say that, but how well did that work out last time?” Carly said, her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. “We’re all invested in this, and we all have something to lose. Grace and I will let you do all the talking, but we want to be there.”

  “I don’t care if I’m there,” I said. It had taken fear to give me a backbone in the face of Carly, but I’d finally developed some semblance of one.

  “Well, I do want to be there,” she said.

  “If Carly’s going to be there, I want you there too, Grace. If that’s okay with you.”

  How could I deny Maggie? I knew she needed me as a buffer—for emotional support. Carly alone was undoubtedly too scary a prospect.

  We decided to do it that night. It was a Thursday night. Maggie would call ahead and let Jane know we wanted to talk. We wouldn’t admit anything, but it would be a way for us to judge Jane’s emotional temperature. To convince her that nothing could be gained from picking a fight with us, that we should just part amicably and leave each other be. I can honestly say I felt a huge sense of relief. It would finally be over, and we could go on with our lives. I deeply regretted what I’d done to Kerry, but nothing like that would ever happen again. Carly was a flawed person, I could see that now. Maggie was flawed too. But the biggest revelation was how flawed I was. In that moment, I had an epiphany. I could be flawed but still loved by God, as my name implied. And even though I was on tenuous terms with God and religion in general, He would forgive me if I turned my back on negativity and evil—become a strong and good person like Luke. Like Jane. The meek shall inherit the Earth, I thought.

  We piled out of the car and waited for Carly to collect her backpack from the trunk and lock up. I took a look around. The daffodils were already in full bloom. This was the time of year when I’d arrived in Indian Springs, and I remembered the optimism that had filled me those first moments on the day I had started school one year earlier. The nodding heads of those bright yellow blooms that lined the pathway leading to the entrance of the building—as though they were escorting me into a future where anything and everything was possible. I’d fallen short. But now was my chance to begin anew, this time with the confidence I had lacked back then. It was a new day, and like the saying goes, the first day of the rest of my life.

  “Meet up at Maggie’s tonight at six,” Carly said. “I’ll pick you up, Grace.”

  Once we were all at Maggie’s, she made the call. Leann answered and said Jane would be home in thirty minutes. She was at rehearsal. Maggie left word that she needed to talk and could Jane please call back.

  “Let’s just go wait for her,” Carly said. “We don’t want to talk over the phone, and we can’t do it at her house with her family around. Let’s catch her before she gets home.”

  It seemed like a reasonable plan. We could get near Jane’s house in fifteen minutes and wait for her on the windy, narrow country road which led to her house. It was private. There were places to turn off and park. Places where we could sit in the car and hash everything out in private. Everything that required privacy for teens by necessity happened in cars, and we couldn’t exactly persuade Jane to come to Maggie’s house.

  We got there quickly and pulled off onto the dirt shoulder. It was already quite dark at that hour in the winter, and a light drizzle was falling. Carly killed the headlights, and we admired the view of city lights from high up on that hill.

  “I never realized how creepy it is up here,” Maggie said. “So lonely.”

  “But it’s beautiful in the day,” I said. “And Leann gets to keep a horse.”

  “Hah! You and Leann,” Carly said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She stretched back in her seat, but I resented the implication. Me and Leann what? Were lovers? Were little girls enthralled by a horse? I decided to drop it, but a bitter feeling overcame me, and I wondered if Carly wanted to deny me any pleasure that didn’t have to do with her.

  We waited in the dark on the side of that hill, the drizzle turning into pitter-patters of actual raindrops on our windshield. Thirty minutes went by. Forty-five. After an hour, Maggie and I complained of being cold, but Carly was low on gas so she didn’t want to run the heater. I was also beginning to feel nervous and a tad skeptical of our plan.

  “Here, warm up,” Carly said, passing back the flask. I was happy to have it. It had the effect of both warming me and reassuring me. My optimism returned. Maggie must have felt the same way because she helped herself, as did Carly. By the time we saw car lights heading in our direction from the bottom of the hill, we had polished off the entire contents the flask.

  “This has gotta be her,” Carly said. “Let’s get out and flag her down.”

  I was relieved it would soon be over.

  “Be careful,” Maggie pulled on the back of my jacket when I stepped into the street. “It’s hard to see on this road.”

  “I’m here for you, Maggie,” I said in a sudden feeling of goodwill. I put my arm around her shoulder. “We both are. Everything’s gonna be alright.” And I believed it with all my heart right at that moment.

  “I know,” Maggie said, as though surprised anyone would think otherwise. The crawling headlights inched their way up the hill, appearing and disappearing behind every turn in the road. “It’s Jane,” she finally announced once the car was close enough to identify. We were, all three of us, sopping wet by then.

  With a stretch of only five or ten yards by the time her car rounded the turn where we waited on the shoulder, Carly lunged into the road, waving her arms wildly to flag Jane down. Maggie and I followed, and I remember being caught in the beam of her headlights, wondering, for one instant, if I’d just stepped into the path of my demise.

  Everything tragic supposedly happens in slow motion—I read that some years later. Whether or not it’s true, in this case it was, at least for me. Jane veered sharply to the left, surprised by our sudden and unexpected appearance. The road slick from rain. The dark night. The steep drop. Jane’s car disappearing over the side of the hill. The sickening sound of crumpling steel. The unreality of what had just happened. My mind stalling while events raced ahead of me. Running to the edge of the road, looking down on the car. Upside down. Headlights pointing toward the lights of the city far below. Tires spinning in the air. Maggie’s scream in my ears. Skuttling down the hillside on all fours, like a crab—muddy, cut by rocks. The driver’s side window, smeared dark with what I knew was blood and not mud. And then someone grabbing me by the arm and pulling me back.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here.” Carly, yelling directly in my ear. Yanking me. Dragging me away. And me allowing it.

  The drive back down the hill. Maggie’s wailing and what I believe was my shock. Only Carly in control. Carly who assured us we’d be implicated if we stayed. We’d been drinking. Everyone knew Jane was mad at us. We had to save ourselves. Carly stopping at a gas station once we got into town. Calling the police from a pay phone to say she heard what might be an accident on Durham Road. Not identifying herself and hanging up quickly before they could ask.

  “There’s nothing we could have done,” she correctly stated. “The police will be there soon.” And indeed, we passed a police cruiser, lights flashing, speeding in the direction of the accident.

  But Jane hadn’t hesitated when I fell into the icy wat
ers of Lake Tahoe. She hadn’t given a second’s thought to her own safety or whether anything could be done. Jane thought only of me and without her I would not be alive. The meek shall inherit the Earth, I thought again. They already have. Not its glory and splendor. Just its problems and worries. The weight of it on their shoulders. I was beyond redemption. I would never be a strong and good person. I would never be like Jane.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was reported that Jane had most likely swerved to avoid hitting a deer and plunged down the hill to her untimely death. Parents had talks with their children about deer in connection with the dangers of driving. They were plentiful in Indian Springs. Better to take one’s chances hitting a deer head-on than to swerve off the road, it was thought. But this was only a guess, and nobody knew for sure. All that anyone really knew was that Jane was dead.

  We all attended her memorial service—Maggie and Carly and I. Most of the school was there. We went separately with our families. Afterward, I waited to say something to Jane’s family, but I only succeeded in catching Leann’s eye. When she turned her back to me, I told my parents that I felt overwhelmed and needed to go home. It was the truth.

  Carly’s after-school activities occupied most of her free time. I was grateful for that because I had no desire to spend time with her anymore. We saw each other occasionally, mostly at Maggie’s, where Carly would remind us we bore no legal responsibility, and nobody had any proof of our involvement.

  “Leann knew I wanted to talk to her that night,” Maggie said.

  “And she knows you and Jane were having problems,” I reminded her.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” Carly repeated. “If anything, Jane was the instigator because she started the whole thing.”

  I got up and left. After that, Carly was careful what she said around me during the rare times we were together.

  That summer, my mother suggested I get a job, and I jumped at the chance. I was only fifteen, but I was allowed to work less than full-time with a school-approved work permit. I got a job as a checkout clerk in the drugstore where Alice and I had once swooned over a made-up, grown-up version of Grace. It seemed another lifetime. I spent most of my spare time at home, and when my parents went to visit Luke in Sacramento, I always went along.

  Mom and Dad fretted at the reclusive change in my nature since Jane’s death. They encouraged me to return to church and throw myself into helping others. One Sunday, when I was sitting in the pew, only half paying attention to the sermon, I focused on the stained-glass image of Christ. A beam of sunlight hit the red robe at an angle which would normally have been breathtaking. Awe-inspiring. I thought about the driver’s side window of Jane’s car and the dark smear of blood that I knew was not mud. I got up and walked out of the church for the last time. My parents prayed for me every night, but I only wished I could tell them they were praying for the wrong person. I didn’t deserve anyone’s prayers.

  I have very little memory of my senior year of high school. Generally, I recall that Dad improved dramatically. He’d taken a part-time job working in a local hardware store. He and Mom were already making plans to return to the field after my graduation. Mom and Dad didn’t worry about me as much anymore. I’d become an expert at hiding what was inside. Only to Maggie did I let down my guard. Only with Maggie did I have any release. Maggie was my confessor, and I hers, although we could never absolve each other of our sins.

  I’d fallen out of love with Carly, if that’s what it ever really was. But Carly and I were, and would continue to be, inextricably linked like a divorced couple never able to be completely rid of each other because of their child. Our child—Carly’s and mine—was our terrible secret.

  As the year drew to an end, we learned that Tim LeClerc, who would graduate first in our class, had been accepted to Harvard. Carly, who would graduate second, would be attending Yale. I would be at the University of San Francisco. And Maggie was exhibiting the first symptoms of an eating disorder.

  That year, when the daffodils were still in bloom but just on the cusp of wilting, we received our first letters. Carly, Maggie, and me. Handwritten in block letters. Postmarked from San Francisco.

  “Will anyone cry when you die?”

  SAN FRANCISCO

  How quickly it seemed to happen that one year turned into two, and two turned into three, and then somehow fifteen. Fifteen years had passed since I followed Nathan back to San Francisco and rededicated myself to my studies, this time choosing a focus more in line with my past—an undergraduate degree in nursing and a master’s in Public Health. Fifteen years of school and work. Fifteen letters, which had evolved into emails. Fifteen phone calls to Carly, whose reassurances I had become addicted to, divorced as they were from any troubling emotions. Even after I knew who she was. Even after I knew what she was. Fifteen years of obsessing over what kind of person would devote their lives to ruining ours, not that we didn’t deserve it. Leann had the most realistic motive and justification, yet I couldn’t imagine her penning that annual missive. Mr. Sutherland had been hurt. His wife. His daughter. Kerry and Timothy only superficially, relative to their lives as a whole. But one never knows who lurks hatefully on the borders of their consciousness. Sometimes I’d wake at night, panicked not only by what I’d done but by the realization someone out there was determined to make me pay for it. If time heals all wounds, the email was the means to reliably rip the scab from the wound in a predictable way. Never forget. And I never did.

  Nathan and I rededicated ourselves to each other, and as long as we remained focused on school and work, things were close to wonderful between us. If I’d been with Nathan all along, I would never have felt that awkward tug of his life in a different direction. I probably would have gone there with him. But when I returned to San Francisco, we had to start all over again.

  Fifteen years of school and work, the last ten bonded in marriage.

  Over the years, Nathan occasionally broached the forbidden topic of Carly, knowing all the while that it would inevitably lead to an argument between us. He couldn’t help himself, perhaps hoping he’d eventually uncover the real me somewhere between hurt feelings and angry accusations. But we only picked around the edges of my relationship with Carly. If Nathan knew the full truth, he would be compelled to reject me. Wouldn’t he?

  “She sounds like a psychopath,” he said one day after a grueling shift during his residency at Stanford. We’d taken an apartment halfway between Palo Alto and San Francisco, where I worked and continued to study. We sat at our small kitchen table, sharing a rare dinner together—cold pizza, salad, and beer.

  A psychopath. This was before novices like us were using the more modern term of sociopath or the more appropriately medical term of sociopathic personality disorder. But I rejected that. It was impossible. I would have known. But a worm burrowed into my brain. If Carly was a psychopath, then maybe I was one too. After all, how was I any different from her? Wasn’t I just her spiritual little sister without her courage?

  “Well then, at least she must have had bad parenting,” he said, knowing only that Carly was unkind, knowing nothing of the true depths of the darkness of her soul. So what was bad parenting? I knew very little about Carly’s parents, but the little I did know, I didn’t like. Her father raised the tiny hairs on the back of my neck when I was around him, and yet he had been one hundred percent supportive of Carly in all her endeavors. Her mother seemed absent. Vacant.

  Nathan’s parents were interested in every detail of his life, constantly breathing down his neck, making him crazy, causing him to doubt every decision he made, including marrying me.

  My parents had left me to my own devices, Maggie’s mom as well—and yet I never doubted their love for their children. But I was not my parents’ priority. Their priority was their faith and their work. Each other. Would that reality make me a monster in Nathan’s eyes? Unsuitable? Or did we reserve the label of bad parenting
only for the children we didn’t like?

  As our careers took off, and our homes grew larger and larger, we grew further and further apart, sometimes spending an entire day without ever coming together in the same sprawling house.

  Nathan began to suspect depression in me and suggested I’d inherited my father’s tendency toward depression.

  “My father’s depression was situational,” I corrected him in the middle of yet another argument.

  “Depression can seem situational but be more deeply rooted. A person can be predisposed to depression. My grandfather survived the Holocaust but never lost his sunny disposition.”

  And just like that, the state of my happiness had been coopted as Nathan’s weapon in our ongoing war.

  Our arguments started out as theoretical, even existential. But after a while, they became practical. Nathan wanted kids. I didn’t. At first, this wasn’t a problem. We were young and never at home. We had work, studies. Money and time were tight, and Nathan didn’t want to rely on his parents to tide us over financially. But there came a time when that was no longer a valid excuse. Nathan wanted kids, so I went on birth control and kept that fact from him.

  “One or the other of us has an issue,” Nathan said after nine months. “You definitely should be pregnant by now.” We were both medical professionals. Who did I think I was fooling? “We need to see a fertility specialist,” he added.

  “It seems if it’s meant to be, it’ll happen.”

  Nathan looked at me curiously. “I can’t believe you just said that. You’re an OB/GYN nurse practitioner, for God’s sake. Is this how you advise your patients?”