Bound

by Antonya Nelson

  “Sunday?” he said.

  “Today is Sunday. Tomorrow is Monday. And it’s already clear,” she pointed out. The resulting blue light contributed to the sensation of ice; the fire had completely burned out. The dogs stood by the back door, prepared to go outside, waving their stubby tails. Oliver held a flashlight and watched them tumble down the back steps like seals, seek purchase on the slick ground, quickly pee and then come skittering up once more. The moon shone relentlessly on everything, a cold gleaming landscape that looked as if it were all made of glass and could be shattered.

  He asked Miriam to come with him because young Catherine was in possession of a car, and that car had to be driven away from the El Dorado dispatcher’s yard. It relieved him to think that he could volunteer to take the clunker, allow Miriam and the stranger the luxury of his Saab. He had no interest in sitting in a confined space with an orphaned runaway teenage girl.

  Not that driving with Miriam was very different.

  Teenage Catherine would be acne-ridden, angry, and would smell awful. She might throw open the car door and roll out. Her ugly despair would seem contagious, and Oliver felt susceptible.

  The Sweetheart had strapped herself into her snowshoes at dawn, ready to trek the distance between Oliver’s home and Wheatlands. If the streets were going to melt, the restaurant would open. Brunch. And it would be packed, people sick with cabin fever, prepared to step back into the sunshine and spread their versions of their shared adversity. Already there’d been the slow spread of restored power; Oliver’s microwave and coffeemaker clocks were blinking unset time at them in the kitchen, heat rising from the grates once again, various beeps resounding from all over the house as the technology came to life. From the curb, the Sweetheart had tossed his newspaper to Oliver, and then she disappeared down the block, steady and swift, a healthy young animal in motion.

  Sure enough, by noon everything was a cheerfully dripping mess. Crews went from street to street piling fallen branches into a wood-chipping machine. Oliver took a Valium to calm himself, and then aimed the car for Miriam and Leslie’s place. The roads were flowing with melt, patches of ice harmlessly slushing, people outside wandering and examining the strangely larger sky, all those pesky tree tops missing now.

  “You’re welcome,” Miriam said, settling herself like a praying mantis in the leather seat. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with last night’s mascara.

  The preemptive You’re welcome; not an auspicious start. He willed himself not to bring up the man who’d been the last person to sit where she now sat, her naked friend, whose disposal, by the way, might have represented a favor Oliver had performed for her, his own unmentioned You’re welcome, the exchange of transporting stinking strangers that would make them even. Instead he sighed.

  “Got any ibuprofen in here?” she asked.

  “No,” he lied, unwilling to unlock the glove compartment for it.

  She leaned her head back and used her palms to massage her bleary eyes. A few minutes later, she said, “No way you’re adopting a child.”

  “Jury’s out,” he said. “Catherine’s thinking of it as a moral quandary.”

  “But you don’t think of it as a moral quandary?”

  “Well, she wasn’t bequeathed to me.”

  Miriam snorted, head wagging wearily as if she’d expected no better response from him. She could have said, “You never acted as if I was bequeathed to you, either.” And she would have been sort of correct. Her mother was always trying to teach the lesson of kindness, not correctness, but Miriam would never be the proper audience for that. She was evidence, Oliver thought, of his and Leslie’s supreme incompatibility. A child of such a union could never be whole or done.

  The prairie outside town was more dramatically odd, more blindingly bright, after the storm, the devastation of ice and wind uninterrupted by houses and other human structures, the sun shining down without the shadows cast by those stronger, bulkier breaks in the landscape. It shone without warmth, merely brilliance, white now instead of last night’s blue.

  “Well, maybe Catherine will finally turn out to be a good mother,” Miriam said. “Maybe she’ll have a knack for it, this time. Maybe it’ll be just what the doctor ordered.”

  “This time?” he said, then realized what she meant. He felt the familiar depleting tedious guilt. “Catherine was too young, back then. She was too young to know what to do with a teenager. Not just you, but any teenager.”

  “How hard could it be? I adored her.”

  He glanced over to see if she was joking. “You were always threatening to kill yourself.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes. You were.”

  “Well, that’s the way I must have felt,” she said stubbornly. Oliver didn’t think that she felt much different now.

  “That’s not easy to be a parent to, especially a stepmother.” Nor for a father, not then, not now.

  “No, you’re wrong, that wasn’t it. She was too smitten with you to pay attention to me. To anybody. Anybody but you.”

  “She was young,” he repeated, although Miriam was right: he and Catherine had been preoccupied with each other. The intensity of the sweetheart. “Anyway, this girl, this current teenager, doesn’t have a mother of her own at all. You had Leslie.”

  “Leslie,” she said dismissively. “You got to divorce her. I didn’t have that option.”

  “If you feel that way, you shouldn’t be living with her, or working for her. I mean, feel free to hate her, but don’t just take advantage. Don’t take her love for granted,” he said.

  Miriam suddenly laughed. “Oh, please. As if you …” She shook her head. “Do not even begin to try to teach me how to not take love for granted.” Oliver was on the verge of mentioning her friend the naked tattooed Adonis when Miriam went on, energized by self-righteousness, “You are such a fucking hypocrite! You with your mistress! As if you have any room to talk about ‘taking love for granted’!”

  Although he’d set the cruise control, Oliver now matched the acceleration in his heart with that of the gas pedal. Valium provided mild blunting, but still he noted his suddenly fluttering heartbeat in his larynx, the need to gasp as if to release pressure. “Excuse me?”

  “ ‘Excuse me,’ ” she mocked. “I should say ‘mistresses,’ plural. You are so fucking unbelievable. Do you really think it’s such a secret? I’ve been watching you for a long time, Oliver. I know what you do. You find somebody, you marry her, and then after a while you get hooked up with somebody young enough to be your daughter. You are a walking, talking, big-ass complete cliché. You did it with Leslie. I mean, at first she was the younger woman, while you were married before to what’s-her-face—HeeHaw? Fifi?—and then she was the one you left for a different younger woman, who was Catherine, and now you’re doing it again. Do not try to deny it.”

  “YaYa,” he said, when she seemed done. “First wife, YaYa.” He wanted desperately to know how she knew about the Sweetheart, or if she knew, specifically, about the Sweetheart, particular, as opposed to a sweetheart, general. He wanted to know from which direction the assault was coming, which defense would have to be attended to.

  “YaYa,” she went on, “and the other discarded daughter. The first in the tradition. Or maybe not, maybe there were others? And also?” she said, not waiting for him to either refute or confirm predecessors to YaYa and Mary, “I knew about Catherine way before Leslie did, way before. When I was thirteen, I saw you and her one day. Skipping school at College Hill Park, I saw you in our car with her. You were making out like some kind of fucking teenagers. And the really psycho thing about it was, I thought it was like you and I were doing something together against Leslie, that was my reaction, like she deserved it, me getting stoned and skipping school, and you with a girlfriend. I wanted to come be with you guys, you and me and the girlfriend against Leslie, against my mother. She was so innocent and upbeat and optimistic and … What’s the word?”

  “Guileless?” Oliv
er offered.

  “Like that, times a hundred. So I never told her. I’ve never told her, to this day. And why should I? It’s not like it’d help her. It isn’t even about her, it’s about you. This is your problem. I don’t give a shit about telling Catherine. If she’s too dumb to figure out who she’s married to, well, that’s just too bad. Why should I help? Where was she when I needed help? Being all obsessed with you, that’s where. Let her get what she deserves.”

  The car shuddered beneath them. They were traveling at ninety-seven miles an hour on a road still patchy with black ice. Oliver lifted his foot, forced himself to breathe more slowly.

  Miriam blew her nose on her sleeve. “Well, whatever,” she said, more mildly. “I was thinking that you probably can’t really help it. That it’s some sort of addiction. And I know you hate that kind of jargonish diagnostic bullshit, and that you would rather die than go to some twelve-step meeting of sex addicts—you hate being categorized into any kind of group, I know that about you, Oliver, believe me—and sit there telling your story, but really, I guess it might be helpful to think of it as an illness rather than as a—” She left off again.

  “Betrayal?” Oliver offered.

  “Moral flaw,” Miriam countered. “I mean, an illness can be cured. Whereas a moral flaw … So, anyway, just don’t go around telling me that I take love for granted, okay? That is just so not going to be something you’re allowed to do.” She had pulled her long skinny legs up and was hugging them under her chin, the flexible self-contained gesture of a teenager. “You and me,” she said blandly, staring out the window. “Not very different, huh?”

  Oliver watched the road. The weekend seemed to have added a decade to him; Catherine’s trip had set off some very strange days. When he glanced in the rearview mirror, his face seemed worried, panic of a specific type etched there, the panic of an old person losing control.

  He’d never have guessed that he would be relieved to finally meet up with Cattie Mueller.

  SPRING

  CHAPTER 13

  WHY DID YOU run away?” Catherine asked the girl.

  Cattie hadn’t immediately answered. This pensiveness drove Oliver mad, but Catherine appreciated it. And even Oliver had to concede that Cattie was perhaps the only person he knew under the age of forty who didn’t use “like” in every sentence she spoke. It was one of the first things he trained out of his elite squad of drones. That, and “you guys,” which the upper-class patron did not like to be called.

  “I don’t think I did run away,” she finally responded. Her silence had forced Catherine to consider the question herself, so that when she answered, Catherine understood. The boarding school hadn’t been home. Wherever Cattie had been that wasn’t her home, that wasn’t with her mother, could not be a place from which she was running away. The sadness of the girl’s situation was sadder still because Cattie didn’t seem to find it sad. “She’s so stoic!” Catherine cried to Oliver.

  “It’ll serve her well,” he said dryly. He didn’t respond to unpretty girls; he’d had a hard time with young Miriam, when she lived with them, so hell-bent was she on being ugly in both body and spirit. Since Cattie had moved in with them, he was taking himself away from the house earlier in the morning and returning later in the evening. In part this was because Catherine no longer had time to check in on his businesses for him. She also felt a purposefulness that had nothing to do with him, a new challenge for her charms, this girl she wished to befriend.

  “It’s nice to actually be needed,” she tried to explain to Oliver.

  “I need you,” he replied.

  When she faced him, she was shaking her head, aware that what she would say next would not be taken by him the way she meant it, seriously. “No, you don’t.”

  He’d shrugged, lightly, but Catherine felt her words take up residence inside her.

  “I actually really like that your dog’s name is Bitch,” she confided one morning to Cattie. “It’s fun to yell it out the door.” It was also fun to watch her husband flinch. Coarseness offended him, and somehow Catherine was enjoying that fact. It reminded her of the pleasure of tormenting her mother, once-upon-a-time, with the spectacle of Misty. Oliver had, however, helped distribute Bitch’s puppies to his employees. The last two went to Miriam. The Desplaines’ corgis, like the Desplaines themselves, were trying to adapt to this new addition to their formerly simple, coupled life, this strange dog named Bitch.

  Catherine watched once as Cattie had encountered the fat corgi brothers splayed on their backs, white bellies soft and unprotected, confidently snoozing. Cattie had knelt and slapped those exposed bellies, alarming both dogs.

  “Why’d you do that?” Catherine asked, oddly injured by the gesture, sensing that she herself was similarly undefended against an abrupt and hurtful assault.

  “I don’t know,” the girl had said. “It just seemed like they were asking for it.” A moment later she said, “Bitch would never leave herself open like that.”

  “True,” Catherine said, considering. Like Cattie, Bitch seemed happiest to be left alone; like Cattie, she did not require pampering or privileges. She slept where she was told to sleep, ate what she was given to eat, displayed minimal enthusiasm or preference, yet also did not complain. She did not require a fenced yard; she had escaped the one in the back only to come around and sit on the front stoop. She didn’t wish to run away, but she also did not wish to be penned. This subtle distinction appealed to Catherine. Cattie herself was like that, leaving the house on foot, without bothering to notify anyone, to wander around the neighborhood. She took Bitch, who did not require a leash. So far, she and the dog had chosen to return to the house. Both appeared to be taking note, waiting to see, making no sudden moves.

  Dick Little and Catherine spoke every few days. Soon he would hire movers to store the personal belongings of Misty and Cattie Mueller, and rent their place furnished to an intern at MD Anderson. “I don’t want to sell it,” the girl had said, about her house. “But I don’t need to go there right now.”

  She had not been running away, she’d been running home.

  She had been headed there, but then she’d changed her mind. For one night she’d slept at Catherine’s house in Wichita while Catherine was sleeping in her house in Houston. That night before the day they met in person, Catherine had lain in the dark under the skeleton mural, imagining the girl lying in the dark in her bedroom, in a bed once occupied by Misty, a girl who must certainly be imagining Catherine.

  “And these were our lockers, senior year.”

  Cattie had trailed along after Catherine to visit two other sets of lockers, on the first floor, on the second, now on the third. To herself, she noted that on the one hand, the building reminded her of Lamar High, in Houston, and on the other, that here in Wichita nobody had to pass through a metal detector, under the eye of a security guard, and that the students apparently were permitted to use their lockers, whereas in Houston, there’d been a detector, a guard, and a locker ban. Row after row of chained lockers, student after student hobbling around under a fifty-pound backpack.

  Cattie text-messaged Ito: Back in the public sector, yo.

  Seek the geek, he responded. The freak, the meek.

  The chic?

  Never the chic!

  Catherine was leading the tour the way she led all tours of her hometown: cheerful rendition followed by unfortunate sidebar. Everywhere, it seemed, had dual significance, heads and tails. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she’d told Cattie one day in the car. “I’ve lived here my whole life … well, not yet, I guess.” She laughed as she corrected herself. She had a habit of that, too, anticipating being corrected and doing it before someone else could. But Cattie wouldn’t have. “Anyway, I’ve never lived anywhere but Wichita, so everywhere I go, every street I drive down or any building I go into, or whatever, there’s about fifty different ways to think about it. Well, not fifty, but at least two. Like right there?” She had pointed randomly at a tall monument.
“See that? That’s a memorial for the football team that died in a plane crash, like in 1970 or something, but it’s also where me and Misty got simultaneous food poisoning, we just screamed to a stop at the statue and puked out the car doors.” The landmark passed. “We were working at Dog-n-Shake back then, eating free food every night. We called it Arf-and-Barf,” she added, smiling.

  Now, in the East High hall, she told Cattie about the puff science class of twenty-five years past—“Aeronautics! The teacher reminded us of the Pillsbury Doughboy! He actually wept when our weather balloon wrapped around a No Parking sign instead of becoming airborne!”—and then rolling out her lower lip as she provided the B side of that memory—“I felt terrible when I learned that his only child was hydrocephalic!” But quickly she rallied, reminded of the best friends’ forays into choir, photography, drama, and something called Peer Leadership, at which Misty had failed by fighting with the facilitator on day one and bursting open a beanbag chair.

  “Beanbag chairs!” Catherine laughed. “They were everywhere back then.”

  Hanging around with her, Cattie felt oftentimes as if the roles were reversed, that she was the grown-up and Catherine was the kid. Or that they were both neither, some new form of tweener. With odd titles; at the front desk downstairs, Catherine had rambled on trying to explain their relationship, settling on “I’m her guardian.”

  “I’m her charge,” Cattie had said. The boy aide had looked up appreciatively as if for handcuffs; he seemed to think she was dangerous. Maybe she was dangerous, Cattie considered; there was nothing to prevent her from becoming so.

  Over all, Catherine was loving their stroll around East; apparently she hadn’t visited the place since graduating in 1979. “Your mom and I were on the softball team for about ten minutes,” she said. “So we missed picture day.” The team looked out from a black-and-white photograph in a dank hallway, feathered hairstyles, rows of bare knees bracketing a large trophy. “Miriam was on the track team,” she said, moving a few photos down, and sure enough, there was the stepdaughter, rail-thin and scowling. “She was sleeping with the coach,” Catherine said sadly. “Remember that street where the bar was that I showed you? Lucky’s?”