by Barbara Hall
In my head, the challenge was how to keep my parents from blaming Cat.
I didn’t think they would. I thought they would be rational and would picture her, as I had no trouble doing, as a little girl running through the woods, away from her own father. She was trying to survive. She hadn’t told because of that survival instinct. And now she was telling, even though it was taking every bit of fortitude she had. Even though it meant her father would go to jail and her whole life would be disrupted. I didn’t say destroyed, even to myself, because I knew she was thinking it and sometimes I let myself think it but then I remembered that my parents, let alone any kind of merciful God, would never let an innocent girl be punished.
This I told her while we sat in the parking lot, waiting for her father’s green Ford LTD to arrive. I always walked away before the car drove up, at her request. She didn’t want him to see me. She didn’t want him to suspect anything. She wanted to keep me out of it until she couldn’t anymore.
It made my blood run cold to see her getting into that car. I’d watch from a distance, near the track field, so far away that I couldn’t see her features and I couldn’t see him at all. But I knew there was evil in that car, and the girl I loved was getting in and riding shotgun.
Are you okay? You look pale. We can stop now. I can tell you later.
It’s very late.
Well, have some water and I’ll keep going.
• 7 •
We sat in the living room of the horrible pseudo-Colonial house in Union Grade, Virginia. My mother, who had dressed up as if she were going to a PTA meeting, and my father, who had come home early from his dental practice because, as it had been sold to him by Mother, “John is bringing a girl home for dinner.”
We had no intention of eating dinner, but that was what my mother had in mind, so she had made a meat loaf, which was in the oven, and some canapés, which were spread in a fancy way in front of us, as if we were the bridge club. Dad mixed himself a drink and Mother declined one, which was unusual for her. She was showing off for Cat. After all, she knew Cat’s mom. She told her so. Such a nice lady. Made such an effort to be kind when we moved here. Our Charlie is your sister’s age. He’s at Chapel Hill. Architecture. Football. He has a girlfriend. We haven’t met her. We think she’s Asian but he won’t say.
I barely heard any of this. Neither did Cat. She was pulling on the sleeves of her black sweater and staring at the carpet and forcing a smile.
My mother was firmly lodged in the bubble. She was fully functional and willing to believe that her life could be normal and she could be in the position of simply entertaining my girlfriend, the daughter of a local prominent citizen. These kinds of things made her happy.
My father was a little more connected to the mood. He saw the way I was sitting forward in my seat and chewing my nails and looking only at Cat.
He said, “How do you kids know each other?”
“We have English together,” I said. “But that’s not why we’re here.”
“Darling, we know why you’re here,” Mother said. “You want us to meet your friend, and we’re happy to do that. We’re happy to meet you, Catherine.”
She looked up and smiled and didn’t say call me Cat, because she didn’t care.
“No, I mean, there’s something else.”
“Yes, we know. You’re dating. We picked up on that a long time ago.” Mother laughed. She liked to be the intuitive, sophisticated one. Ahead of the game. It was a way to prove her sanity, which, I saw to my frustration, was something she could trot out when she felt like it, as if it were the good china.
“Well, dating,” my father said also with a mild laugh. “As much as anyone can date without a car.”
I didn’t have a car, either, Lynne. You’ll find this ironic.
I had been begging them for Charlie’s old car, which still lived at home because he had nowhere to park it at college, but they were refusing, saying it still officially belonged to Charlie, and if I wanted my own car I could work and buy one the way he had. I was a few months away from getting my license, so it was a future issue.
“I know, they don’t call it dating. They call it going together,” Mother said, showing off more of her urbane wit. Trying to fit in. “One wants to ask, going where? Where are you going? As Daddy says, you don’t even have a car. But I know just what you mean. We called it going steady. I suppose that sounds archaic to you.”
“Mother,” I said, “it’s a little more serious than that.”
The room and all its nervous activity came to a halt. I saw the canapés—crab and mushrooms and olives on thin bread—sweating in the stale air of the living room, and I thought of my mother planning and cutting off the crusts and picturing an evening right out of Tennessee Williams or a Jerome Kern song. My mother was a romantic, which was probably the thing that made her so crazy, always seeing things in a dramatic light, always letting them grow larger than life, like a sponge in water.
When I said that, Cat looked at me and her face stalled, because now she knew it was all going to happen. I wasn’t going to back out. The truth was going to come out and her whole life was about to change. Her eyes landed hard on me and I just nodded at her to let her know I was in charge when, in reality, I had no idea what I was going to say, just that I was going to say it.
My parents went to an entirely different place altogether. I should have seen it coming. But I was too stupid. Stupid in love, stupid in purpose and planning, stupid in all the ways I was going to save the girl I loved.
My mother put her palm to her chest and said, “Oh, my God.”
My father stood and swirled the Scotch around the ice in his glass.
He said, “Now hold on, everybody. This is just a problem. Problems have solutions. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Right,” I said, still stupid. “That’s what I keep telling Cat. It’s just a problem.”
My mother had turned pale. She got up and went to the bar and poured herself a drink. My father was staring daggers at me. Cat was staring at me that way, too, because she knew and she was not being stupid and she was feeling completely let down by my inability to grasp the situation.
Mother turned once her vodka glass was full and she said, “How far along?”
“What?” I asked.
Cat closed her eyes and looked away from me. She shook her head slowly.
“How far along,” my mother said, enunciating her words in an angry and deliberate manner, as she once used to say “Go to your room.”
“Far along what?” I asked.
Cat’s head was bowed so far forward that her dark hair was covering her face. I felt lost.
“These things can be handled,” my father was saying.
“What things?”
My mother stood up straight and pointed her vodka glass at Cat and said, “She’s pregnant. For God’s sake, just say it.”
“Ella,” my father said quietly.
Cat just stared at the carpet. I saw her shoulders shaking. I didn’t know if she was laughing or crying. I reached out to touch her and she swatted my hand away.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
Cat stood and said, “I should go home now.”
“No, Cat, sit down,” I told her.
She did.
My parents were staring at me. I was embarrassed and proud all at once. Embarrassed—that’s obvious. Proud that my parents thought I was mature and brave and frankly skilled enough to accomplish something like that at fifteen. I was a virgin—yes, men can be virgins, too. And so was your mother. And we had never gotten anywhere close to sex. I still felt lucky that she let me touch her hand. Which, in that moment, she wouldn’t let me do.
“No,” I said. “No, Cat’s not pregnant.”
I had a strange moment where I wanted to ask her if she was in fact pregnant, pregnant with someone else’s baby, feeling that my crazy mother with all her weird intuition had picked up on something I had missed. But I knew she wa
sn’t pregnant and I took a breath and reconnected with reality and reminded myself what we were all doing there.
“No,” I said again. “Cat and I aren’t…we aren’t like that. Nobody’s pregnant.”
My father let out a breath but my mother was standing hard and straight, staring at me. She took a long drink from her vodka glass and said, “Well, if that’s the case, what can be wrong? What can be so serious?”
I thought about what to say. I was choosing my words. But before I could even put a sentence together, I heard Cat talking.
Your mother always had the gift of truth. You saw it in her; you experienced it. She never lied to you. When you were tiny and you asked her if ghosts were real, she simply said, “I don’t know, honey, but I know they can’t hurt you.” When you asked if she was going to die, she’d say, “Well, I can die, but I don’t think I’m going to.” When you asked if dead people went to heaven, she’d say, “Oh, I hope so.” I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know about her. Your mother was infected and besieged and haunted by the truth. She didn’t know how to say anything else.
Once I asked her why she didn’t soft sell the world to you, when you were just a tiny child. I asked, “Why can’t you let her make believe while she’s little?” She said, “I’m afraid she’ll make believe all her life.”
As she had been forced to do. Until she couldn’t anymore.
This is what she said:
“Mrs. Russo, I knew your niece, Jackie. She was my babysitter when I was little. She was only a little older than my sister but my parents called on her to look out for us when they went out at night. She came by in the afternoons to play with us so my mother could get some work done or take a nap. We loved her. I loved her. She was my favorite babysitter.”
I saw my mother’s posture softening.
Cat went on.
She said, “Her father worked in my father’s carpet plant as a machinist. They were poor and it was made clear to us that we couldn’t really socialize with Jackie or her sisters. But I loved her anyway. I didn’t understand any of that. Jackie had the wild boyfriend who came to see her on the motorcycle, but he was never mean to her or to us. She didn’t run away with him.”
My mother was paralyzed by Cat’s voice but she somehow found the energy to say, “What makes you say that? Everyone thinks she ran away with that boy. My sister thinks it to this day.”
“No,” Cat said.
“Well, yes, there is the rumor that she was involved with someone in town. And he paid her to disappear,” my mother said, ready to shift to another reality.
“No,” Cat said.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” my mother demanded. “You can’t possibly know for sure.”
“No,” Cat said. “She was murdered.”
“That’s only a theory,” Mother said.
“No, it’s not a theory, it’s a fact.”
My mother let out a little cry and my father moved to her side.
“I think this is enough,” he said. “I think we’ve heard enough for one night.”
“Let her finish,” I said.
Cat kept talking.
She said, “I know she was murdered because I saw it.”
She went on to say how she saw it. She described it much as she had done with me. My mother completely checked out somewhere in there. My father helped lower her to a chair but he remained alert, standing and listening intently. The only thing I said while all this was going on was that Cat had written me a letter about it and I still owned it and my father wanted to know where it was and I didn’t answer.
Cat finished up her story by saying, “So I really needed to tell someone that. I told Noah, and now I have to tell you.”
My father said, “Who’s Noah?”
I said, “It’s her nickname for me. Never mind.”
I could see him using this against her in his head.
My mother was now finished with her water glass of vodka and her eyes were distant and drooping. My father put his hand on her shoulder.
He said, “You kids have too much time on your hands. Obviously, you need to find a hobby.”
Cat looked at me.
I looked at my parents.
My mother was thinking about nodding off and my father was staring hot embers into me and I didn’t know what to do.
I said, “Dad, I believe her. I think it’s the truth. I mean, the whole reason we moved here was to find out.”
“No,” he said. “We moved here to give your mother some peace. Is this your idea of giving her peace?”
My mother said, “Baby Jackie was my little girl. The girl I never had.”
Cat just stared at her.
There was another lull and my father grew angry and slammed his glass down and said, “Goddamn you kids. What will you think of next? Do you really want to kill us? Is that your whole plan?”
Cat stood up again and said, “I have to leave.”
“No,” I said.
“I told you they wouldn’t believe us.”
My mother stood and said, “I have to go to bed.”
She stumbled off in the direction of the stairs.
My father walked right up to me and said, “I need to talk to you alone. In the kitchen.”
I told Cat not to leave. I had no idea if she would or wouldn’t.
My father and I went to the kitchen and he turned off the oven where the meat loaf was sizzling and probably burning. I sat down at the table and he paced and I waited. He turned on me finally.
He said, “Do you know who her father is?”
“Yeah, sure. He runs the carpet factory and he’s on the town council and he’s a deacon in the church. So what? You think criminals are all disheveled and homeless?”
My father said, “He’s an important man in this town.”
“He sets fires.”
“He what?”
“He’s an arsonist. Ask around. He does it in his free time.”
“I suppose this is something she told you.”
“One of the things. But other people must know it.”
“John, he’s practically the mayor.”
“So?”
My father shook his head and drained the last of his Scotch. He put his empty glass in the sink.
“Let’s say this is true. Let’s say your new girlfriend’s father is an arsonist and a murderer. While also being a prominent citizen. Who do you think is going to believe us here? We’re not from this town. We’re interlopers. Do you really think I’m going to start a crusade against him?”
“Dad, I don’t know, but Mom has spent most of the last few years wanting to know who killed Jackie, and Cat is telling you.”
“It’s a lie,” he said.
“It’s not a lie.”
“She’s trying to impress you.”
“Why would she use that to impress me? She avoided talking to me for months when we first moved here because she was so afraid of telling me. It took a real act of courage to tell me. She’s putting her life on the line here.”
My father rubbed his face with his hands as if trying to wake himself up from a bad dream. Then he stared at me.
“This cannot be true. Do you understand? Even if it’s true, it can’t be true. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“She’s manipulating you. I’ve spent the last half hour looking at her. My God, John, you can do better. Would you really throw your life away for this girl?”
I stared at him. I didn’t understand the question. But I already knew the answer.
“Yes, I would,” I said.
He didn’t like that. He ignored it.
“This is the last we’re going to say of the matter. Now get her out of here. I have to go take care of your mother.”
He left me alone.
I sat in the kitchen for what seemed like a long time. I heard the pops and clicks of the oven cooling down. I heard my father walking around upstairs. I heard their mumbled voices in the bedroom.
I finally found the muscles in my legs and I walked back into the living room. Cat was sitting there, staring at a wall, chewing on her shirtsleeve.
She looked at me and gave me a sad smile and she stood.
“They’ll come around,” I promised without any evidence.
We stood face to face.
She kissed me on the cheek and walked out and didn’t close the door behind her.
So much for my plan.
• 8 •
High school went on the way it always had except that Cat wouldn’t look at me.
Our track team made it to the semifinals and the tennis team made it that far, too, so as late as May, we were all meeting in the parking lot, waiting for our rides. I knew all the reasons Cat couldn’t look at me and I didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I hovered near her while she sat on her books and wrote in a notebook. I wondered if she was writing me another letter. But a couple of times when I got close enough to look over her shoulder, I saw that she was just doing math equations. I felt as if the whole business between us had been a strange dream.
It was the beginning of June, when school was so close to being over we all felt cranky and excited and ready to say anything that I approached her. She didn’t look at me as I talked. She was twirling her racket in her hands and staring at the motion.
Our conversation went like this:
“Hi, Cat. Did you win today?”
“Yeah, I took my match. Straight sets.”
“Congratulations. Did the team win?”
“Tie.”
“Bummer.”
The next day I asked her if she was ready for exams. She said she was worried about geometry. I said I was worried about English.
The next day I asked if she had cut her hair. It looked different. She said she had trimmed the ends, that was all.
And it went that way for a while, these formal conversations, her never looking at me, and me thrashing around for questions.