by L. R. Wright
There were dark cats and light ones, sleek cats and fat ones, large cats and small ones. Alberg, who had acquired two cats of his own, had begun thinking of himself as someone who respected and appreciated cats. At this moment, though, it was difficult not to at least flinch as the swarm of feline bodies swept around him; what he really wanted to do was get the hell out of there.
“How many have you got?” he said to Hetty Willis, who had squatted to stroke several of her cats, her voice thrumming wordlessly. “Miss Willis? How many cats have you got?” She stood up and hustled across the hall to the doorway opposite. Oh my God, thought Alberg, but this time when she opened the door nothing emerged. She motioned to him. The cats swirled around her feet but when she went through the doorway they didn’t follow. Some sat, some wandered back to the room from which they’d come, some disappeared into the shadowy reaches of the hallway, some climbed the stairs. Alberg followed Hetty Willis into what seemed to be a parlor.
“Sixtytwo,” she blurted, perching on a straight-backed chair.
The room was dark and cool. Heavy curtains hung at the windows; they were dark green, and might have been velvet, Alberg thought. There was a large fireplace at one end of the room, with two loveseats in front of it, facing one another over a long, low table. Opposite the fireplace was a wall of bookcases. A rolltop desk stood nearby, and a couple of easy chairs, each with a standing lamp behind it. There were two large rugs on the floor.
“Sixty-two cats,” said Alberg, stunned. He looked around. “You don’t let them in here?”
She shook her head. Her gray hair hung to her shoulders. She looked at him steadily, with brown eyes that were hooded and wary.
Alberg tried to imagine sharing a house with sixty-two cats. He wondered how much it cost to feed them. “Do they all have names?”
Hetty Willis moved to the desk. She put into the drawer what looked like an unfinished letter, and began stroking the back of the chair with nervous, restless fingers. She wore a shapeless tweed skirt and a long-sleeved gray blouse that buttoned up the front. On her feet were socks and sneakers. She touched her throat. “Insidemyhead.”
“Pardon?” said Alberg.
“Insidemyhead.”
“Inside your head,” said Alberg, slowly and carefully.
She nodded. “Catnames. Catfaces.”
“The—your cats’ names are inside your head?”
She nodded again. She stared at him fixedly. “Onaroll ofpaper. Insidemyhead.”
Alberg gave a helpless shrug. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“Can’t seethemall,” she said, and he saw how hard she was working. “Playerpiano,” she said finally. “Like a playerpiano.”
Words yearned to fall from her lips with the profuseness and rapidity of raindrops; she fought to subdue them, in order to control their disposition.
“Catnames. Catfaces.”
But there was a momentum created by every word she spoke that wanted instantly to pull forth more and more; those she allowed to escape slid bumpily from her lips, colliding in midair.
“On thepaper.” She swallowed repeatedly, editing in her mouth. “Rollspast. Can’t seethemall.”
Alberg didn’t know whether her disability was physical or mental. He was fascinated.
“Justsome.” She was holding tight to the back of the chair. “Then it rollspast.”
Alberg listened for a code; and found it, finally, in rhythm.
“Somemore.” She made a circle in the air, again and again. “See morenames. Morefaces.”
Alberg grinned. “Gotcha,” he said. “Like a player piano.”
She sat down, and pointed at one of the easy chairs.
“Thank you,” said Alberg. He pulled his notebook and pen from his jacket pocket. “Do you know about that place off the highway, with the animals in cages?”
“Didn’thave,” said Hetty Willis, fingers once more against her throat. “Didn’thaveit. Twodollars.”
Alberg was confused for a moment. Then, “Ah,” he said. “You mean, the admission?”
She nodded.
He frowned at her, thoughtful. “Anybody who’s got sixty-two cats must care a great deal about animals.”
“Cats,” she said. “Aboutcats.”
He looked at her sharply, wondering if she’d smiled, just for a second. “So it’s only cats that you love?”
“Don’tbesilly,” she said sharply, then clapped a hand over her mouth.
“What’s silly?” said Alberg, feigning hurt. “How am I silly?”
She shook her head. “Lovelovelove. Nolove. Nolove.”
“What, you mean you don’t love your cats?”
She regarded him with infinite weariness.
Alberg looked down at his notebook. “The guy calls the place a mini-zoo. Somebody stole a couple of his animals. A couple of skunks, I think it was.” He glanced at Hetty Willis, who was impassive. “Maybe let them loose, I don’t know.”
Hetty looked back at him and said nothing.
“And there was damage done, too.”
Hetty sat quietly and said nothing.
“And whoever did this left a note behind for the man who owns the place.” Alberg put his notebook back in his pocket. “We’re having it checked for prints,” he said casually, but Hetty was apparently indifferent. “The guy took it as a threat.” He clicked his ballpoint pen closed and put that in his pocket, too. “I figure it was more of a warning,” he said, standing up.
Hetty stood up, too, and led him back into the hall, where cats were waiting to rub against her ankles and meow for her attention.
She watched from the window as he climbed down the steps and disappeared, and she waited until she saw headlights come on, and a car drive away. Then she returned to the sitting room and sat down at her desk. She got the letter from the drawer, put on her reading glasses, uncapped her pen, and resumed writing to her lawyer.
“Out on the Redrooffs Road,” she wrote, “some new people have moved into the McNeil place. They’ve got several cats, a big black dog, and a horse. Their children run about with virtually no clothes on and I cannot believe that they treat their animals any better.” She peered through her half glasses, rereading what she’d written. “Not that I think animals should be clothed,” she added, and put down her pen for a moment, to stretch her fingers.
That policeman is full of curiosity, she thought. It bubbles out of his skin.
“Nothing has been done about that so-called zoo, yet,” she complained to the lawyer. Her penmanship was as exquisite as ever; but it was an art more and more difficult to practice. “There’s no place for such a thing in this community. I know you say the man isn’t breaking any laws. But there are laws,” Hetty wrote, “and there are laws.” Again she put down her pen, and flexed her hand.
It doesn’t bother him to feel inquisitive, she thought. He can ask, or not ask, and get an answer, or not get one, and it doesn’t bother him.
“Now to the other side of the ledger,” she wrote, “where I fear the pickings are scarce, as usual. There have been eleven adoptions from the SPCA. Mr. Thomas took three kittens; Mrs. McMillan, Mr. George, Mr. Samuelson and the little Gazetas girl each took a cat. Three young dogs were taken by Mrs. Adamson (of Halfmoon Bay), Miss Jacobs and Mr. Pupetz. And Miss Wachowich, bless her heart, took a grown dog with asthma, a wall eye and a limp.
“And that’s all I have to report.” Her hand was aching badly now, but she persevered, because she knew that if she put down her pen again she wouldn’t finish the letter today.
At the door the policeman had scrutinized her face, and she had felt his curiosity, detached, powerful, not necessarily benign. He’d been going to say something—and then he’d changed his mind.
“When you come to see me next,” Hetty wrote, laboriously, painfully, “I have a personal matter to discuss.”
He’d smiled at her instead. And she’d been surprised at the sweetness of his smile, and wondered if it was genuine.<
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“I want to change my will,” Hetty told her lawyer. “Because my nephew Bobby has come back.”
Chapter 5
THEY’D LIVED OUT of town when Steven was growing up. On three acres out by Porpoise Bay. He was an only child, so he spent a lot of time by himself.
Velma, walking home from work—slowly, because of the heat—smiled to think about those days. They constituted the part of her life she had labeled “Happy”; a parcel of days, a piece of time that she had put away on a shelf, tied up with red ribbon, wearing a big red bow. And Steven’s reappearance in Sechelt seemed to have returned those days to her.
She wondered how long he would be able to stay. She was full of plans for the two of them.
Velma waved through the window of the drugstore at Peggy Allan, who worked there, and turned the corner to walk up the hill toward her street.
She remembered the summer Steven had made a sword out of two pieces of wood: he must have been about five, she thought. He’d gone howling through the woods slashing at the underbrush with his makeshift weapon, and it was always breaking, or coming apart, so that he’d have to make himself a new one. He used to come home with his legs and arms all scratched, and pieces of the forest in his hair.
Velma walked up the hill, swinging her handbag, squinting a little against the bright sunlight. She and Steven had gone to Percy and Edna’s for dinner last night—it had been so good to feel like a family again!
There’d been a stream running through their acreage, she remembered, with a little field of grass next to the water, and Steven had found wild strawberries there. And salmonberries, in the woods. And blackberries.
She was slightly winded when she got to her corner. Not much, though. She was in pretty good shape, for a woman her age.
He hadn’t had many friends, when he was a child. Harry was always trying to get him to join the Cubs, or a hockey team, but Steven wouldn’t. He’d had some friends, though, thought Velma, plodding along the side of the road. She remembered one little boy he brought home to play—he had an odd talent, she recalled vaguely; birdcalls, or something.
She glanced across a tumbled-down fence into the front yard of an empty house with a FOR SALE sign tacked to one of the posts that held up the porch. She wished she could afford to live on a nicer street.
Less than five minutes later she was trudging up the walk to her front door, feeling tired, now, and looking forward to putting her feet up.
As she climbed the steps she saw through the screen that Steven was on the phone. He was facing the wall, holding the receiver to his ear with his right hand, and his left hand was splayed out and pressed against the wall above his head. Velma opened the door silently and slipped inside, not wanting to startle her son.
“Do you know who this is?” she heard him say, in a voice curiously thin and dry.
Then, “It’s—it’s me.”
Velma put her purse on the floor by the closet and clasped her hands together.
“Steven.” He paused. “Steven Grayson.”
Velma stood quietly; courteous.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve—it’s important. It’s very important.”
She watched as he pulled his hand away from the wall and took a quick step forward, toward the kitchen.
“Please don’t hang up, don’t—”
He replaced the receiver. Velma saw that the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat.
“Steven?”
Slowly, he turned around.
“What’s wrong? Who were you talking to?”
She saw in his eyes that he had no intention of telling her.
Chapter 6
THAT NIGHT, HERMAN wanted to make love. Afterward he fell asleep and started snoring, but Annabelle still wasn’t tired. She lay on her back with her hands under her buttocks and didn’t feel sleepy at all.
After a while she got up and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of milk and sat down at the table, in moonlight that spilled through the window. The glass had a blue-white glow even after she’d emptied it, created by the shadow of the milk still inside it, and the moonlight touching it.
Annabelle lifted her hands and spread them wide and looked at them in the light from the moon; rough, short-fingered hands. There was a thin gold ring on the left one. Annabelle took it off and set it down on top of the table. She spread her hand again: she could see a faint mark encircling her finger, now, a circle of skin paler than the rest of her hand.
The refrigerator began whirring. It was a sound that Annabelle liked. She enjoyed knowing that the refrigerator held so much good food; milk and eggs and butter and vegetables and fruits. She wanted a freezer, too. She’d put lots of chickens in it, bought from Erna Remple’s place up at the top of the road, and maybe they could buy a quarter of beef—lots of pot roasts and stew meat and ground beef and chuck steak, and a few good steaks and roasts for special occasions. She’d get strawberries in June, and raspberries in July, and blueberries in August, and she’d freeze them, too. And she might set one day a week aside for baking; at the end of that day she’d have bread and coffee cakes and muffins and all kinds of things to put away in the freezer. She’d get a copy of the Buy-and-Sell and find out how much they cost, secondhand.
Annabelle got up from the table and wandered quietly through the house, peeking in at the children, keeping an ear open for sounds from the cages out back.
She wished Herman would get rid of those animals. She didn’t like them in her life. They gave her inexplicable feelings of foreboding.
She went into the glass-walled room and sat down in a lawn chair. The moon was large and bright in the sky and it flooded the place with light; the potted plants shone, wide awake in the moonlight.
Annabelle stretched her legs out in front of her. Her bare feet, bare legs, the white nightgown with pink polka dots that came to her knees—everything looked glossy and silver in the moonlight. She thought she could even feel it on her skin, deep and soft like satin.
She thought about the first time she’d seen this place. Herman had trundled them out here in the pickup and she’d gazed in horror upon an abandoned building, and two old rickety gas pumps, and a wooden sign, the paint faded and peeling, that once had said “CAFÉ.” Somebody had painted “CLOSED” across the sign in big black letters that were almost as faded as the word beneath. She’d gotten out of the truck very reluctantly. This was going to be their new home, this falling-down dilapidated dejected-looking place, and Annabelle hadn’t liked the idea one little bit.
She’d climbed out of the truck, though, and while Herman was lecturing the kids about something or other she’d wandered closer to the building. The panes were encrusted with grime but light still managed to poke through, and the dirt-floored area between the glass wall and the wall of the house was crowded with weeds, some as tall as small trees, a thick, urgent forest of weeds that pressed against the glass walls as if against the walls of a prison.
What on earth would Warren think of this place? As if things weren’t bad enough on that front, she’d thought.
At least it was close to Erna, though. That was in its favor.
One of the skylights in the roof was broken, and one of the dormer windows, too, but the window walls were in surprisingly good condition; several panes were missing, glass glinted dully from the dust, and one pane was cracked, that was all. But there was steady, relentless pressure upon the glass from the greenery behind it, and it was clear that the weeds were eventually going to bring the whole thing crashing down.
Annabelle went over to the window wall, where she cupped her hands around her eyes and leaned close, to squint through the grimy glass.
“What do you think, Ma?” said Rose-Iris tentatively. She’d come up next to Annabelle and was trying to see inside.
Annabelle smelled the thick, rich smell of weeds triumphant, and saw in her imagination the weeds ripped out and replaced with exotic flowering plants, in pots.
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sp; “There’s surely a job to be done in there, all right,” she’d muttered crossly to Rose-Iris, but excitement stirred in her chest. Then she’d turned and said loudly to Herman, who was leaning against the truck, watching her, “There’s a job to be done in there, I can tell you.”
“You can handle it,” Herman had said.
Annabelle, looking around now at her indoor garden, thought that he’d been right. She went back to bed. She climbed in beside Herman and turned so that her back was to his back, and she shut her eyes and prepared to go to sleep.
Vancouver came into her mind. She imagined herself walking along a street there, downtown it would be, maybe she’d be on Hastings Street, in front of Woodward’s, near the restaurant where she used to work. There she is, walking along, thinking about her shopping list; she’s taking her time, looking around her, enjoying herself, minding her own business…and all of a sudden there’s a touch on her arm. She turns and sees that it’s Bobby. “Why Bobby,” she says, cool as a cucumber, “what on earth are you doing here?” (She tried to imagine what he’d be wearing, strolling along the street in Vancouver, but she couldn’t. So she went on.) He tells her why he’s come to town, and then he looks at his watch and says, “Why it’s almost lunchtime. Would you care to join me?” And Annabelle frowns a little and then says, “Well I guess that would be all right, as long as I don’t miss my—my dental appointment,” she tells him, “which is at one o’clock.” (No, thought Annabelle, in bed with her eyes closed. She did a revision.) “As long as I don’t miss my dental appointment,” she says to Bobby. “And what time is your dental appointment?” Bobby asks. “It’s at two o’clock,” says Annabelle. He takes her by the arm. “I’ll make sure you don’t miss it,” he says in her ear, and propels her down the street.