No Place Like Home

by April Hill

  My mother owns a lot of rental property, and she's rolling in dough, but she kept telling me that paying rent would force me to grow up, take responsibility for my future, and get a real job—as opposed to my unreal job of writing books. I suspected that she probably wouldn’t throw me out on the street just because I was a smidge behind on the rent, but I’d never tested the theory for longer than two weeks. I'd already seen enough flop-houses in my descent into poverty, and as bad as this place was, at least I was I wasn't living among a lot of toothless drunks who talked to themselves and urinated in the hallways. So, I did my best to keep ahead of the rent by going without other necessities— like copies of the New Yorker and canned ravioli unless I had a two-for-one coupon. In return for Mom’s charity, I listened politely when she called me up and rattled on about how I was flushing my life down the toilet trying to be a writer when everyone knew that the only writers who made the big bucks were crooked politicians or coke-snorting movie stars. That was Lecture Number One. Lecture Number Two went something like this: Why couldn't her only child have just gotten a real job at Sears and Roebuck, for heaven’s sake, or a nice job in a bank, where she could have found herself a nice man to support her like other girls not half as nice-looking managed to do without some college degree that was a total waste of her time and my money in the first place?

  And there you have the real price I paid every month for living in a repulsive house on a godforsaken hill with a terrific view of traffic on the Hollywood Freeway and the fumes that went with it. And for finding half-cats in my doorway.

  So far, I'd lived in four of Mom’s crappy houses, or camped out in them, to be more precise. Whenever she found a "real" tenant, ergo, one with money, I was usually asked to pack up my Oreos and cheese-puffs and move on to the next dump. I’d moved into this one just over six weeks earlier, and I may have held the record for the longest uninterrupted residency. According to Mom, the fifth tenant in the space of a year had bailed out after only three weeks. It wasn't hard to see why people didn't stick around, though. The house was tiny, relentlessly tacky, and the only windows were these long, narrow strips of louvered glass located close to the ceiling. The place also had a long-standing mold problem, and if you didn't keep the skinny little windows open twenty-four hours a day, the smell of mold and mildew was enough to gag a horse. I was blowing a fair chunk of my unemployment check each month on sandalwood and cinnamon incense sticks.

  The funny thing about this house was that I had lived here as a child, until my dad walked out on us, and Mom began collecting replacement husbands. I'm sure the place was just as ugly then, but I guess I didn't notice. The ink was still drying on my high school diploma when I took off for the Big Apple, determined to hole up in a garret and write the world's greatest novel. Meanwhile, Mom took up real estate and got rich, and I decided that maybe it wouldn’t tarnish my artistic principles to enroll at NYU and get an education, instead of living on three-day old bagels.

  Only a week before the dead cat turned up, Mom had told me more about what had happened to the house after she and I moved out. If I'd been paying attention to that night’s history lesson, I would have bailed out, myself, before what finally happened did happen.

  "So, why did the last tenants left?" I had asked. "Aside from the smell, the freeway fumes, the mice, and the nest of heavily armed drug dealers just down the street?" I wasn't especially interested in such a discussion, but I also wasn’t eager to be left alone with only late night TV for company. The house sometimes made creepy noises at night. Probably because it had been built with criminally sub-standard materials, and because it sat on top of an active earthquake fault— but the noises could be a little unnerving.

  "Well, if you must know," Mom confided, inspecting her new manicure. "The last tenants said the house was haunted."

  "Haunted!" I whooped. "That’s the lamest excuse yet for breaking a lease! Houses built five years before the Beatles don’t get haunted, not in Southern California, anyway. You were had, Mom."

  Mom sighed. "Well, they insisted that they were going to leave, with or without my consent. Going back to Oklahoma or whatever. My lawyer told me it wasn’t worth trying to sue them, out of state and all. And it had happened before, of course. Several times. It's absolutely shocking how many people just get up and leave, without giving any kind of notice. Especially at this house, for some reason. People don’t pay their rent, disappear in the middle of the night, and never even leave a forwarding address. Single men are the worst. It’s a shame, though. The Oklahoma people were quite nice. They had a very sweet little girl. She looked rather like you did at the same age. Her name was Freebie."

  "Freebie?"

  She thought for a moment. "Perhaps it was Phoebe. Anyway, she had the loveliest, soft yellow hair, just like you did when you were little and before you started doing all those awful things to your head. They had a little dog, too. Sort of a rat-looking dog, and I don’t usually allow dogs, you know, but there were so few people looking at the house that I finally agreed—with a substantial deposit, of course. The little rat-dog died, though. They told me that some wild animal ate him, or most of him. The woman was quite hysterical, and the husband said the house felt haunted or something. I believe he said ‘creepy.’ Yes, that was it, ‘creepy.’ He told me the little girl was having nightmares, and that she saw things at night." Mom sighed. "I think maybe it’s too secluded up here for some people."

  "Gee," I said dryly. "You think?"

  "I know, dear," she sympathized, patting my hand. "But you’re different. You've always liked being alone. Maybe that's why you never married any of those perfectly nice men you've met. All writers like to be alone, don’t they? You’d probably even enjoy having a ghost. You could write one of your little stories about him. Anyway, after the Oklahoma people left, I was up here one day when this nice young woman named Wendy knocked at the door and asked to see the house. She'd seen the sign in the yard, but when I checked her credit, it was absolutely terrible. That's when I simply gave up trying to find a decent tenant, and rented it to you."

  Lucky me, I thought. Nice young Wendy’s rotten credit history had earned me a place to live. I love the way life works, sometimes. My own credit history would have made Wendy look like the Queen of England.

  Finally, Mom stood up and looked about her for her purse and her hat.

  "I need to get along, now, sweetheart. Why don't you come down this weekend and have dinner with Leo and me, if you’re not doing anything—like going out on a date or something? Leo cooks, you know. Japanese."

  I sighed. "Okay, Mom. That sounds great. We’ll make it a foursome. I’ll bring the ghost, if he's not doing anything."

  Mom leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. A minute later, the house was quiet again, and I settled down on the couch to watch television. I offered the ghost a choice, and when he expressed no preference, I clicked to a rerun of "Law and Order".

  I fell asleep before the program ended, and woke to a slight scratching noise coming from the opposite wall. The ghost of the little rat-dog, maybe, or the troop of mice that were nesting somewhere under the dishwasher and gnawing their way through the wiring. The dishwasher hadn't worked since I moved in, and I was always finding little chunks of pink insulation in front of it. Not that it mattered. Doing dishes wasn't my thing, even if I'd owned any dishes. Eating off paper towels or simply standing over the sink was more my style. Very Bohemian. I yawned, then staggered off to bed, already half-asleep. The wind had blown up while I was napping, and the moon was casting odd, undulating shapes through the narrow window and onto my bedroom wall. Probably the overgrown but withered oleander bushes on the patio, I guessed, making a mental note to water them the next day. Just before I dropped off again, the mice began to scratch more insistently, in the next room. I made a second mental note to call Mona tomorrow and complain—again.

  Okay, that's the back-story. Now, let us return to the day I found the dead cat.

  The calendar that da
y read October 25, but it was hot as blazes outside, which is not exactly a news flash in Southern California. So after Mona drove off with my rent check (doomed, alas, to bounce,) I went back inside, cranked up the air conditioning, and fell asleep on the couch with a good book. I knew it was good because I wrote it, and according to my former publisher, close to nine hundred real, live people had bought it. When I woke up from my nap, about an hour later, I suddenly remembered that I'd forgotten to check the mail. Not that I ever get much mail. I'm one of those people Mom dislikes, who never leave forwarding addresses. Once in a while, though, even I get some interesting junk mail. When I opened the door and stepped (barefoot) onto the porch, I stepped into something sticky. I didn’t even have to look down to know it was the other half of the dead cat.

  This half was wearing a striped party hat, and both its eyes had been gouged out.

  I sat on the front step and cried for a while. I hadn’t known the cat in life, but I knew that he might have belonged to someone who cared about him. The first half-cat had been sad, but okay, in a way, because even coyotes have to eat, but this was something else, entirely. I didn’t touch this half, but went directly inside to call the cops. I knew to do that because I watch a lot of television. A vicious act like this could be a threat, right? Anyway, three and one half hours later, my doorbell finally rang, making me almost wish I’d been hacked to pieces before help arrived, to make a point about the LAPD's abysmal response time.

  The cop, who looked absolutely nothing like the guys on "CSI," squatted on my sidewalk, scratched his head, and poked at the party cat with a ball-point pen.

  "This don’t look good," he intoned. My tax dollars at work. God, was I impressed!

  "No shit, Sherlock!" I screamed these words inside my head, of course, not wishing to offend an officer of the law. "What do you think happened to it?" I asked aloud, waiting in breathless anticipation for his forensic insight.

  "Something ate it," he said, rising stiffly. The man’s knees creaked under an extra seventy or eighty pounds, forcing me to conclude that the LAPD hadn't sent its top guy. From my not insignificant experience, a lot of Los Angeles cops look like Greek gods—or maybe Nazi storm troopers.

  "Oh, really?" I replied, trying not to sneer. "Like a sort of a coyote birthday party, do we think?"

  "Well, it could'a been some neighborhood kids," he suggested half-heartedly.

  "Do neighborhood children usually eat cats?" I asked sweetly.

  He looked a bit embarrassed, and I had the feeling he was accustomed to being treated with derision. Finally, he went to his car and rummaged around in the trunk for a minute, and returned holding a brown evidence bag. He wrote something on the bag, then deposited the half-cat carefully inside. For you CSI newbies out there, this is called "preserving the chain of evidence". When I suggested that he might like a quick peek at the first half cat—the half not wearing festive headwear, he shrugged, but followed me to the spot in the back yard where the remains were interred under the three inches of white gravel that I call my lawn. By now, the sweating officer was not in a good humor at all, and even suggested that I had been somehow remiss in my handling of the "crime scene." He seemed unable to decide whether my cat was vital evidence, or illegally buried garbage.

  After exhuming the corpse, which had gone pretty rank in the stifling heat, the cop scribbled importantly for a few moments on a clipboard, then tore off a copy and gave it to me. He was still sweating profusely and looked dangerously red in the face.

  "If you have any further problems," he said solemnly, "Don’t hesitate to call." I’m not kidding; those were his exact words.

  Officer Whomever put the second moldering package in the trunk of his car and drove away down the hill and out of my life forever. I had the feeling that this crime would not be the LAPD’s top priority, but at least I’d done my civic duty.

  In case you’ve worked up sufficient interest in my dismembered cat to read further, let me introduce myself. My name is Karen Thatcher, and I’m a bachelorette. I think bachelorette sounds nicer than dried-up spinster or dotty old maid, don’t you? The meaning’s the same, though. It means that at thirty-four years old, I haven't been able to bag a husband. My marital status was excruciatingly embarrassing to my mother, who had recently begun introducing me as her "unmarried daughter," as though she had a litter of female offspring, among whom I was the only spinster.

  For as long as I can remember, my mother always referred to wealthy, attractive men as "Big Fish." The only kind worth catching, according to Mom, and by that definition, I had been an extremely poor fisherman. Actually, I’d done my share of fishing, and even tried, without success, to land a couple of fish— big, and not-so-big. Apparently, my tackle box was poorly equipped, or maybe the bait I was using wasn't to the fishes' liking. Anyway, the few fish I managed to hook and wanted to keep had usually gotten away. In retrospect, though, I'd discovered that most of the "good" ones that got away didn't look all that good, anymore. To continue the fishy metaphor, a lot of the women I knew who'd hooked their big fish early in the season had already tossed him back into the gene pool—or been tossed back themselves. Sometimes twice. I’d had my share of failures in life, but at least I’d been spared the specter of MMC (Multiple Marital Collapse.)

  I had begun to think that maybe I just wasn't cut out for marriage. I had my career, after all. (I didn’t actually believe this, by the way, but I don’t see the point of getting maudlin so early in the story.) Why worry, I told myself. It was a proven fact that many incredibly intelligent and attractive women didn't marry until they reached their late thirties. Of course, I had never personally met any of these women, but I'd read these statistics in the pages of Cosmopolitan, so my source was impeccable. Like many savvy ladies of my era, and like all of those fictional but sadly, very true ladies on "Sex and the City," I'd spent much of my life pursuing a dream career, adventure, and an apartment that I could afford in Manhattan.

  I think it was Thomas Wolfe who said that home is the place when you show up, they have to feed you whether you've been invited or not? Okay, the quote’s not exact, but the meaning’s probably the same, and whoever said it was right. I had vowed never to go back to my mother’s, or to Southern California. Not until Hell froze over, anyway. (Note: I vowed all of the above before I found out how it felt to be hungry enough to consume your own stomach.)

  And Mom had been a sweetheart, considering. Considering, for instance, that I never paid my rent precisely on schedule, and that by her standards, I'm a hopeless slob. She'd paid for my ticket here, and even filled the fridge with low-carb treats—in deference to a recent unexplained expansion of my rear-end. Recently, she’d begun leaving money around the house, tucked here and there in vases and drawers, trying to make me think I've just forgotten I had it. Very sweet and very generous, but maddening, because when I confronted her about the mystery money, she absolutely denied doing it, which made me think I was losing my mind or drinking more than I used to.

  Of course, Mom had never been quite generous enough to house me in one of her "A" properties. And after her last boyfriend debacle, she wasn't all that eager to share her personal quarters with me. For a while, there, Mom had a string of real losers. Every time she got slapped around by some new creep, I’d put in my two cents worth and lecture her on what a bum and a loser the guy was. Eventually she got annoyed enough to point out that since I didn’t have a man of any description, even a bum or a loser, maybe I should just shut up and sit down— a valid point, I guess.

  Then, along came Leo the Sexegenrian Hunk, and Mom's life rosied up considerably. Leo’s a sweetie, and though he doesn’t have his own hair, which I think is always a plus in a man, he does have his own money, so he doesn’t regularly clean out Mom’s checking account or hock her silverware. Anyway, around six weeks ago, when Leo moved in, I moved out of Mom’s spare bedroom and into this house. Mom had her sex life to think of, after all, and my mother’s sex life would do credit to a woman half her a
ge. Actually, it would do credit to me, as well, but that’s another subject, entirely.

  Sex-wise, you see, I'd been experiencing a dry spell, or maybe a pre-middle age slump. Okay, a black hole. Just recently, I’d even begun to think about hitting the singles bars. Singles bars were all the rage among the young, which I used to be, before David. (If you ever run into David, by the way, please tell him that I said he’s a pile of stinking dog-shit. No, on second thought, don’t do that. He might think I’m still upset that he dumped me.)

  Career-wise, I was "between engagements." My last novel hadn’t exactly flown off the shelves. Let us simply say— as my publisher did— that the sales were "less than modest." The sales of my previous literary effort—my "breakthrough" novel— had been described as "respectable, but lackluster." I appeared to be working my way down the ladder of success. I had twenty-nine copies of the current book myself, currently being eaten by silverfish in a cardboard box in the garage. I still have them, actually, and for only $24.95, an autographed copy could be winging its way to you, you lucky dog! Send a check, and watch your mailbox. I’d noticed that mother had her personally autographed but conspicuously unread first edition on a living room bookshelf, which meant there were about 870 other wonderful people out there in the darkness sharing the book's "touching but somewhat shop-worn honesty." (N.Y Times, April 14, 2010.) These days, having fallen out of favor with the book-buying public—I was sustaining myself by writing droll and totally fictitious short articles and submitting them under various false names to the Reader’s Digest. I was obviously to be spared nothing in my fall from grace.