You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  “Why don’t you come in and have some coffee?” Caroline said. “I want to ask you something.”

  Dobry wiped his feet and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Caroline put his cup down with the bowl of sugar and a spoon. “I was thinking I might get the house painted next summer. Would you be willing to do that? Or know someone I could hire?”

  “I’ll do it. That’s no problem. Save you some money.”

  “Oh no, I’ll pay you.”

  “No.” Dobry shook his head. “You hold on to your money. You never know when you might need it. Rainy day.”

  When Dobry stood to go, Caroline asked, “Do many children go to the houses in your block for Halloween?”

  “I think there’s more than there used to be. People feel bad for them. It’s the only time of year they get a treat.”

  “Does Eva make paczki?”

  “We didn’t get too many children in the apartment. She gave them some coffee cake.”

  Dobry walked down the back stairs. It had grown nearly dark while he was inside. There were kids shouting a few yards over, on the other side of a chain-link fence. Boys, Caroline could tell, from their posture: jittery, absentminded, backs to the dark. As Dobry mounted his bike, Caroline caught sight of a box and the black body writhing in the boys’ hands. She ran across the yard to the fence. The struggling creature cried out while the boys shut the box.

  “Get out of there!” she yelled. “I see you! Go away! Leave it!”

  “What’s the matter?” Dobry jogged up.

  “Chase those boys away,” she said, pointing. Then hollered, “My son-in-law’s coming down there and that cat had better be untouched! You hear me! I’ll find you boys!”

  The boys ran and Dobry loped over and retrieved the box, which had been taped shut. The firecrackers had fallen out, and lay around the box like a child’s drawing of sunrays. Dobry opened the lid and the cat leapt for the bushes. Caroline told Dobry to wait there and went in the house, where she retrieved a can of tuna fish.

  They lured the animal out and took him home, where he sprawled beneath the kitchen table, his bright eyes disappearing into the blackness of his vaselike face.

  “I didn’t think you much cared for cats,” Dobry said.

  “Well, I don’t want to see anything murdered.” Caroline wiped the counters with a sponge and ran it under steaming water.

  As Dobry opened the back door to go, the cat scuttled into the darkness of the adjacent dining room. “You want me to chase him out?”

  “Why not finish up this coffee with me?” Caroline said. “It’ll go to waste otherwise. And I’ve got some cake.”

  Back at the table, she asked, “Do you know why I came to America?”

  Dobry shook his head.

  Caroline smiled. “Of course I never told anyone. I never even told Frederick. Can you believe that? Thirty years of marriage.” She looked down at her cup, then into the dining room. The cat couldn’t be seen in the darkness, but she knew he was there.

  When she looked back up, Dobry’s face waited like a blank piece of paper—neutral, open, empty.

  Silk had disappeared. Her mother asked if she’d seen the cat.

  “No, I haven’t.” Caroline looked under her bed, where the cat sometimes slept. Her mother waited a moment, then left.

  Caroline could hear her walking through the house, whispering the cat’s name in her slurred speech—“Sik, Sik.”

  When her mother was still whispering half an hour later, Caroline went to help. Silk hid when Atlas was home because he’d bitten her once, but when he was at the shop with her father, the cat normally sat with Caroline’s mother. Sometimes, though, in hot weather she would sleep on the brick floor of the porch off the kitchen or under the parlor sofa. Her mother caught Caroline checking the latter on her hands and knees. “I’ve looked,” she said.

  “Perhaps she’s in town,” Caroline said, “getting mice.” Silk liked to go to the docks and catch mice, which she’d leave in her food dish. She never ate them. She was too full from the chicken and fish Caroline’s mother gave her.

  Caroline suggested other possibilities too. None of them moved her mother to even respond. They sat until dark, skipping the dinner the maid had left in the icebox. Every few minutes her mother would get up and look out the back door. Normally Silk sat on the stoop when she was ready to come back inside.

  Caroline’s father arrived home later than usual, assembled his dinner and settled in without a word at the dining room table. Caroline could see him through the glass doors, his sharp frame wavy and dissected through the seeded panels and their wooden mullions, his arm almost whole in the shadows cast by the flickering oil lamps.

  After dinner her father headed toward his study. He’d just passed the parlor, where Caroline still sat with her mother, when he stopped and she felt, rather than heard, him and Atlas come back toward them. “My dear,” he said, his face close to a lamp to be sure her mother could read his lips. “I almost forgot. I think there’s something wrong with your cat.”

  Caroline’s mother almost didn’t move. It was very close, but she did. Her eyes widened, just a moment, then back to normal. Her father went to his study. Her mother went out to the back porch and there Silk was, wet, limp, a potato sack next to her with a coarse rope fallen loose from her neck.

  “Oh no,” Caroline moaned.

  Her mother whirled as if she’d heard her, but it must have been a motion caught from the corner of her eye. “Sh!” She picked up the dead cat and took her inside as if she were merely damp from the rain.

  The next day and the next and the next was like any other in their house. Caroline’s father and Atlas left for the shop at eight o’clock sharp. It opened at nine and he liked to be sure the money was in the register, the counters freshly dusted, the front window washed. At home Caroline’s mother did needlework while she read in her room.

  Sunday arrived, the maid’s day off. In the morning they went to church, then her father went to his club. That Sunday, after he left, Caroline could hear her mother in the kitchen, pots being set down, a fire starting. Usually they ate leftovers on Sunday, so Caroline wondered what she was doing, but decided to stay in her room, pretending she couldn’t hear.

  When her father came home, her mother had already laid the table for dinner. Neither parent had said a word about her marriage all week. Though she hadn’t liked any of the men her mother had chosen, and moreover disliked the very process of their choosing, it occurred to Caroline the alternative to marriage would be staying here, with her parents.

  Finished with dinner, her father pushed his chair out from the table.

  Her mother tilted her head, drawing out her deaf-softened words. “Before you go…” Her father stopped. The same slight widening of the eyes. Caroline saw in retrospect that he’d already known, just that fast. “I wondered,” her mother continued, “did you enjoy dinner?”

  Her father looked at his plate, hardly anything of the meat left. Red meat. Unusual for her mother. Caroline looked at her own plate. Half-eaten. Her mother’s gone completely. Then she knew too. Atlas never went with her father to the club. He wasn’t allowed in.

  Caroline ran out the back door, heaving, convulsing, choking on the red chunks of half-digested dog. In the distance, she could hear the slap-slap-slap of the water as the wind moved hard across the river.

  WHEN WE’RE INNOCENT

  Obi didn’t want to go, but he believed there are some things you can’t ask someone else to do for you. One of them is cleaning out the apartment your daughter killed herself in.

  So he drove, the mood of a flight too cheerful, the planning too optimistic. The rules too absurd. He feared what he might do if a flight attendant instructed him to put his seatback in an upright position. Even the word “trip” angered Obi. He was going somewhere, but he wasn’t taking a trip.

  He climbed in his car on a Saturday morning and drove for four days at the speed limit, not below or above by even a singl
e mile per hour. The navigation system’s mellifluous, vaguely foreign voice, like a Swede who’d grown up with an American parent, kept him company only rarely. At five p.m. on Tuesday, Obi entered the outskirts of Phoenix, the sun a circle of heat on his right cheek until he took Highway 10 and it fell behind, chasing him down the walled expressway. Camelback Mountain, whose name he didn’t know or care about, filled the windshield like a giant’s boot in his path.

  Obi and his wife Karen had been in Phoenix one other time, three years ago, when they drove from Toledo to Columbus, helped Jolly load the U-Haul, then made the slow journey west and south so she could start a new job. Jolly and Karen rode in Jolly’s car. Obi drove the truck, a nerve-racking clatter-box with poor sight lines and a soft clutch that brought back the worst days of his life.

  As they crossed the country, Obi’s girls got off the freeway for fruit stands and flea markets, then caught up and sped past him, smirking kindly at his white-knuckled, right-lane progress. With every mile Obi prayed, and when he finally pulled into the Phoenix U-Haul, he resolved never to make such a grueling trip again. Staring now at the circle of sun in his rearview mirror, Obi realized that during this journey his habitual terror of driving had been entirely absent. His punishment had already been meted out, after all. No need to continue expecting it.

  Still, the mountain unnerved him. No matter where he turned, it stood in his sight line as if it had something to say, but preferred to wait at a discreet distance until the time was right. Obi had lived his whole life in northern Ohio, where the sky remained above, as it should, and it took only twenty minutes driving any direction to see the earth’s round profile shrink to a line of green, brown, or gold depending on the season. Here, the sky reached down and pulled the land up around the city like a knife raises a scar. That’s what mountains were, Obi thought, a cicatrix on the planet. He glanced in each side mirror and saw more of them, thinking for the first time in many days about his own preferences. He preferred fewer reminders of the history of collisions and fractures.

  “We need a psychologist sympathetic to rapists.”

  “I’m not a rapist.”

  “But that’s what the prosecutor’s going to be saying, and we need a psychologist who’s able to present a more…” The lawyer Brian’s father had hired paused, searching for the right word. Brian wished he wouldn’t; he wanted to hear the man’s disgust. “…a more nuanced portrayal of the situation. What we need is a person who can credibly explain to the jury the difference between…” The lawyer stopped again.

  “Fetish and pathology?” Brian offered, clamping the phone between his jaw and his shoulder to lean down and pull out the cuffs of his jeans. They had become squashed inside the corner pocket of a fitted sheet during the dry cycle. Smoothed, the denim looked like rice paper, crisscrossed with fold lines.

  “Yes,” the lawyer agreed. “The danger in cases like this is that the jury will equate one type of behavior that is”—here he hesitated long enough for Brian to get out the word “aberrant”—“unfamiliar,” the lawyer corrected. “We want them to make a clear distinction between two very different types of unfamiliar behavior.”

  Brian stood by his apartment’s patio door. Outside, a metal balcony clung to the lumpy stucco wall. He’d secured a director’s chair to the balcony’s railing with tie wraps, though the desert wind seemed less inclined to take things away than the gusts in his native Chicago. The frigid blasts off Lake Michigan reminded truck drivers and ad execs that everything has its foe. The desert seemed less foe than abyss; it wouldn’t come and get you, but you might fall into it.

  “We’ll talk more after I get a psych eval lined up.” The lawyer cleared his throat and the scratch of a fine-point pen on paper traversed the phone line. Brian stepped to the right for a better view of Jocelyn’s car in the parking lot. It hadn’t moved. The front left tire remained at an odd angle, nearly ninety degrees to the wheel well.

  The lawyer said, “We want to be careful because we don’t want the evaluation done until we know what it’s going to show.”

  From his father, also an attorney, Brian recognized this cornerstone of legal theory—only ask questions you already know the answer to. Increasingly, it struck him as a good policy for life in general.

  “So I’ll call you,” the lawyer said. “And don’t do anything between now and then, all right? I mean, don’t go out drinking or ask anyone on a date. Just daily necessities. Nothing special, all right?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Brian hung up and went out on the balcony. Over the two years since he’d moved in, the director’s chair had faded from navy to a dusty shade the color of old blueberries. He sat down.

  Next door, Jocelyn’s balcony looked the same as yesterday, and the day before and the one before that. The plants, a group of cacti in staggered-height pots, didn’t divulge her absence. Even in containers and with temperatures over a hundred, cacti could go weeks without water. What worried Brian was her red bathing suit. It was Jocelyn’s favorite, and it wasn’t like her to leave it outside for days at a time, and yet it had been there ever since Brian returned from his last flight. Snagged on the spines of the tallest plant, its bright gold stars had tarnished to brass under the July sun.

  Brian listened for movement or voices from her place. Hearing nothing, he leaned over the railing. Through the sheer drape he could make out her armless purple couch and yellow chair. The sun blinded him from the rest.

  Brian had been off work for two weeks, having taken a leave of absence from his job as a commercial pilot. Before that he was doing overnights to New York and Detroit, and he couldn’t say when he’d last seen Jocelyn, though he did know it was before his arrest.

  They’d met at the complex’s pool, where they both liked to do laps in the tolerable heat of twilight. Jocelyn swam every day, straight from taping the evening news, while Brian made it only when he wasn’t flying. They swam in opposite directions. “This way it doesn’t feel like we’re racing,” she said, squeezing her nose empty of water with her thumb and index finger in a cute, ladylike way. She never acted wary, as he expected her to, because she was on TV and he wasn’t. It didn’t seem to occur to her she might be the target of weirdos and stalkers. When he pointed this out, she laughed. “You aren’t the type, and I’m pretty good at spotting things like that.” It was the uniform—captain’s hat and double-breasted navy jacket with four gold cuff stripes and six gold buttons. People had to see you in it only one time and they’d put their lives in your hands.

  Last year Jocelyn broke her leg and Brian had carried her groceries and laundry and driven her to work while she was still on painkillers and couldn’t drive herself. Still hobbling around in one of those black boots, her cast cut down to below the knee, she made him dinner as a thank you. While she cooked, he walked around her living room. She must have noticed his expression because she laughed, a little embarrassed. “I know. It’s bright. Turkish monarch moves to Soho.”

  “I like it,” Brian said. “It’s a hell of a lot better than tan and turquoise.”

  On the balcony, mindful of being caught peeping, Brian sat back down. Jocelyn hadn’t delivered the news since he’d been off work. If she was on vacation, why hadn’t he seen her at the pool, or passed her coming and going? It was possible she’d taken a trip, but why would she leave her suit out? Maybe she’d heard about his trouble and was avoiding him. Maybe she was scared of him.

  Under the Phoenix sun, Brian’s jeans and long-sleeved shirt felt like a suit of armor sweat-welded to his skin, so he gave up and went inside, to the opposite problem—too-cold air conditioning, the annoying hum of the fan that never turned off. His apartment had come furnished, castoffs from another pilot who moved out to get married. Brown leather sofa with enormous saddlebag arms. A pine Adirondack chair with cushions in the ubiquitous, threatening Navajo pattern of expanding triangles. Scarred pine coffee table. Cut-pile, tan wall-to-wall carpeting and turquoise drapes. Besides toiletries and clothes, the only thing Brian broug
ht with him was the faded director’s chair. That ought to make prison a simpler affair.

  Taking up a pad which bore the flight carrier’s logo at the top and their slogan—Travel made good again—across the bottom, Brian sat down on the couch. After thinking a moment, he wrote, As you might have heard, things haven’t been going well for me. I promise, though, I won’t bother you if you don’t want to be my friend anymore. So I hope to see you around just to say “hi” and be relaxed where you live. Brian.

  And be relaxed where you live? He crossed out that part, reread the note, then copied the edited version onto a fresh sheet of paper, went outside, and walked the ten feet of squeaky metal planks that separated his door from Jocelyn’s. As Brian leaned over, ready to work the note into the generous gap between the door and the frame—a gap he counted as another reason he hadn’t bought a house here: what kind of craftsman could the desert produce who didn’t need to guard against bitter cold, furious hurricanes, or sneaky earthquakes?—the lawyer’s admonishment made him pause. Just the daily necessities.

  Brian straightened up. Maybe Jocelyn had started seeing that guy again, or someone new, and was staying at his place. But wouldn’t she have her car there? He raised his hand to knock, then stopped. Even if she wasn’t avoiding him, she probably knew about the arrest. She was in the news business, after all, though his story had not garnered enough attention to appear on TV, thank God.

  Brian reread the note, went back to his apartment for tape, then left it hanging on Jocelyn’s door. If the note disappeared it meant she was safe and he’d let it go. If the note didn’t move, he would call. Maybe screw up the courage to knock. If that yielded nothing, he’d have to ask around the complex. But Brian didn’t know any other residents. They might not even recognize him. In the desert, where construction of gated communities never stopped, dozens of people transferred from these holding pens to their fake adobe two-cars on the last day of every month.