Stray City
Page 32
Look at her tormenting herself all over again. Andrea would forever tie herself in knots, and probably had been for the past ten years. How completely herself she still was. He said, “I don’t think it would have worked between us.”
“No, it definitely wouldn’t have. I mean for Lucia.”
“Oh. It would have been a mess.”
“I suppose we spared her that.”
“I have plenty to answer for myself, Andy.”
“No.” Andrea reached out a hand and touched his arm, a quick, urgent press. “I didn’t want you to. I wanted her to be all mine. And I got what I wanted, for better or worse. Better, I hope, for her sake.”
“Look at that girl. You did really well.”
“I did, didn’t I.” She sat back and let out a long shuddering breath. “Sometimes I can’t believe I did. Especially when it was just me.”
“Hard, huh.”
“Oh my god. So fucking hard.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When you look at her, do you think, That’s my kid?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what to think. It’s a lot, Andy. It’s a lot to take in.”
“I know.”
“What I think is . . . I think we have the same color eyes.”
“She has long hands too, like you.”
“And I think, I’m not into kids, but this one, I can tell she’s good.”
Lucia and Beatriz shut the door quietly behind them. Beatriz tucked Lucia’s mittens into her hat and set them on the chair by the door. Her mom wiped her eyes quickly, but she was also smiling.
“Hey, kid,” Andrea said. “Hey, love.”
Beatriz took a seat at the table, sat back in her chair, and crossed her ankle over her knee. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen stars like that,” she said. “And it’s so quiet.”
“You see why I never want to live in a city again.”
“It’s cold enough to kill me,” Beatriz said. “But it is beautiful.”
Ryan lifted the bottle. “Want to finish this?”
“No, I’m good,” she said reluctantly.
“Go ahead,” Andrea said. “I’m driving.”
Beatriz slid her glass forward. “Just, like, a centimeter then.”
Lucia didn’t want to sit at the table and talk. All adults did was sit and talk. It made her legs twitchy. “Can I put on a record?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ryan said. “Do you—” He caught himself. “You probably know how to do that.”
“Yes,” Lucia said decisively. Beatriz shot her a triumphant smile.
The records stood in a small vintage cabinet, maybe fifty of them. Lucia knelt and flipped through. Most were old and weathered, thrift-store records. Classic country, old soul, the Kinks, a Norwegian punk compilation, several eighties bands she’d never heard of. Then she landed on a Cold Shoulder record—not the ten-inch EP she had at home, but a full-sized twelve-inch called simply The Cold Shoulder, from 1997. Eleven songs.
Lucia figured out the stereo, which had silver levers and knobs instead of buttons, and gently set the needle down on the record. She loved the sound of those first few rotations, the hush and faint crackle. Then the song started. The guitars were coarser than they were on the EP, the singer’s voice rawer, but the drums were still taut and precise.
“Is this what I think it is?” her mother asked.
“Your band?” Beatriz pointed a baby carrot at Ryan.
“So long ago.” Ryan looked a little embarrassed. “I honestly haven’t heard this in years. It’s just in the stash. I don’t know if I can listen to it again.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I heard this,” Andrea said. “It’s one of those records that just became part of that era.”
“I’ve never heard it. It sounds pretty good,” Beatriz said.
“I can ask her to change it,” Andrea said, looking to Beatriz and Ryan.
“No, don’t,” said Beatriz. “It’s her choice. We have to let her play it.”
Lucia leaned back on her heels to address them. “I wouldn’t have changed it anyway,” she said.
“Okay, then next time I get to hear your band,” Ryan said.
“The Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs?” Lucia said.
“Yes. Fair’s fair.”
“Oh, if you want to be extra fair, it would be Taco Night,” Beatriz said. “That’s her first band.”
“Taco Night sucked,” Lucia said, which got the laugh she was hoping for out of Beatriz. “You have to hear Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs.”
“Got it,” Ryan said.
“They are really really good,” Beatriz said.
“We’ve recorded two songs with GarageBand. But Mom won’t let us have a MySpace.”
“Good. I think the Internet is creepy, and I’m an adult man.”
Andrea said, “You can send him a tape through the mail.”
“Why don’t I just send it by owl?” Lucia said.
“Close enough.”
The adults started talking about obsolete technology, a boring subject they always found entertaining. Lucia moved closer to the speakers and got down on her hands and knees.
The cat was still under the couch, back legs sprawled, eyes dilated to nearly black. Tufts of dust and fur floated around her.
“Hey, cat,” she said. What name had her mom called it? She couldn’t remember.
The cat remained impassive. Lucia reached a hand under the couch and the cat raised the corners of her lips in a silent eh and scooted farther away.
Lucia lay down on her back. The rug was soft and plush underneath her. At home the few throw rugs lay directly on the scratched-up wood floor, but this one had a cushiony padding underneath it. She imagined a forest floor of thick moss would feel like this. The first song ended and a new one started; she could feel the kick drum, a soft steady thud, along her back.
“Come here,” she said gently. She reached toward the cat and let her hand lie limp on the floor. After a moment, the tips of whiskers brushed her palm. She lifted her hand slightly and the cat pressed her head into it. Lucia stroked her cheeks and ears and the cat stretched out her neck, eyes closed, rolling her face around.
“Good cat. Come on.” Lucia withdrew her hand and patted her chest.
The cat emerged from under the couch. Her bony hips sagged, and her orange fur looked damp and sort of clumpy, even though it was dry to the touch. Her pupils contracted, her eyes the light green of new leaves.
Lucia patted her chest again. Edith climbed up and stiffly settled in.
Her body weighed almost nothing. Lucia ran her hand over the cat’s small insistent skull, along the corrugated line of her neck and back, down to the points of her hips, where her tail rose in a satisfied question mark and subsided again. Her fur was thin and soft. Her paws opened and closed and she began to purr. The purr rattled her whole body, a living thing itself, a vibration like life.
There was laughter in the kitchen. Lucia closed her eyes and soaked in the warmth of this old animal, this elder who had lived longer than she had, who knew her parents before she herself came into the world, who was near the end of her own long life. Her father’s cat. Or was it her mother’s cat? Or, Lucia decided, she was no one’s cat at all. She was her own. Her own self, her own life. Her own secrets and favorites and sorrows and preferences. Her own millions of memories that none of them would ever know.
“I wish I had known you,” Lucia murmured. “I could have had a cat.”
The cat settled in deeper and flexed her toes. The thin, sharp claws pierced through Lucia’s sweatshirt and T-shirt and into the skin of her breastbone—a delicate, bearable pain.
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU TO MY CREATIVE, CURIOUS, AND INFINITELY SUPPORTIVE parents, Deane and Jill Johnson, who inundated me with love and books, and my brothers, Nate and Daniel.
Thank you to PJ Mark, my brilliant fierce agent.
Thank you to Jessica Williams, my visionary editor, whose talent, insight, and intelligence
proved transformative.
Thank you to all of the superb Custom House crew, especially Geoff Shandler, Liate Stehlik, Laura Cherkas, Aja Pollock, Kelly Welch Rudolph, Katherine Turro, Eliza Rosenberry, and Mary Ann Petyak. Thank you to Michael Taeckens for your expert navigation. Thank you to R. Kikuo Johnson, Mumtaz Mustafa, and William Ruoto for your art and design.
Thank you to readers and advisers Brian Perez, Sean Martinez, Carrie Brownstein, Amanda Paulk, Donal Mosher, Torrence Stratton, Frances de Ponte Peebles, and Andrea Ferreira Schumacher. Extra effusive thanks to Nicole J. Georges, Peyton Marshall, Amy Thielen, and Kara Thompson for essential early reads.
Thank you to all my Portland and ex-Portland friends and families and rock camp comrades. This book is a homesick love letter to you.
Thank you to all the queer writers and fighters and artists.
Thank you to all my students over the years, for all you have taught me.
Thank you to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for getting me going, and to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship for lighting the spark that became this book. Thank you to all my teachers, especially Tove Dahl, Bruce Burkman, Helen Bonner, David Walker, Ellen Douglas, Frank Conroy, Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, John L’Heureux, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tobias Wolff, and my fellow Fellows and workshop-mates.
Thank you to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts for transformative writing residencies. Thank you to the Willamette Week for access to the archives. Thank you to Oberlin College and the College of William & Mary for crucial support.
Thank you to Emmett and Sylvan for long clarifying walks and lying at my feet while I write, and to Seven for being Edith.
Thank you forever to Kara, for giving me new ways of knowing.
About the Author
CHELSEY JOHNSON received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. Born and raised in northern Minnesota, she currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, and is an assistant professor at the College of William & Mary. This is her first novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
STRAY CITY. Copyright © 2018 by Chelsey Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover illustration © R. Kikuo Johnson
Digital Edition MARCH 2018 ISBN: 9780-06-266670-3
Version 01282018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266668-0
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* CAT ALLOWED if guarantee of no piss smell