Bound

by Antonya Nelson

  Cattie nodded. The bar that had been Catherine and Misty’s illicit hangout. Also? That same bar had once been a filling station, and Misty’s uncle—what was his name? Bud?—had been a grease monkey there, much further back in history.

  “Luther,” Cattie said. She’d heard about her mother’s uncle Luther.

  “Right, Luther, he worked at that station that turned into Lucky’s, and then Misty and I went to Lucky’s, the place where the BTK might have visited, staking out his victim across the street. Her and her brother, the one who got shot in the head. Twice. And survived.” On and on it went, her conversation style like the kids’ song about the flea on the wing on the fly on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the middle of the sea. The neighborhood near the university, the university where the dorms were, the dorms where Catherine had lived, and before she lived in the dorms, she and Misty had made prank calls to the place. And also the playground on that street, where Catherine’s parents had taken her, when she was very young, to participate in a peace march, and Catherine had stepped on a bee and her mother was furious that they were forced to miss the march.

  Not so far from the airplane crash memorial, the Arf-and-Barf poisoning.

  For Catherine, Wichita was a big bag of loose yarn, ensnared connections that knotted together the past and the present without clear cause and effect or pattern. Cattie couldn’t make sense of it yet, but she was good at listening, patient at untangling. “Anyway, that bar and the playground are on the same street where Miriam’s track coach lived. He was also the government teacher, but that’s kind of beside the point, I guess. Miriam used to babysit for his two little kids. Isn’t that kind of weird, her taking care of the kids, then sleeping with their dad? Poor Miriam, high school was more horrible for her than for me and Misty, I think.”

  “Yeah,” Cattie agreed. She could certainly imagine that was true. Ever since their ride from the El Dorado sheriff’s office in January, Miriam had decided she would make Cattie her project. “What was your jail like?” Miriam had asked, en route to Wichita that hard bright first day.

  “Like a dog pen,” Cattie told her. “It even had dogs.” All night there’d been somebody just around the corner of the cell, the sound of turning pages to keep Cattie company. She tried to explain that a guard wasn’t necessary. But like Miriam, the cops seemed to prefer dramatic possibility. “They thought I was going to kill myself,” Cattie told her. “They took my shoelaces. They took Bitch’s leash.” Then Cattie had realized what Miriam wanted her to say next. “What was your jail like?” she complied.

  Miriam’s jail, of course, had been much much worse. Possession, intent to sell, a couple of parents who couldn’t be reached, cellmates who wished to injure her.

  This kind of exchange repeated itself on Sundays, when Cattie worked at the spa cleaning. Miriam followed her around pretending to be a big sister but actually just hoping to hear Cattie complain about Oliver. Miriam loved to hate her father, or maybe it was that she hated to love him, or both. At any rate, Miriam had recently adopted two of Bitch’s puppies, so Cattie felt some obligation to be friendly. She allowed the sister act, although the woman was at least twice her age, and was apparently oblivious to the kinds of remarks that seemed insensitive. As in: “He might as well have been a sperm donor, for all the time he spent with me.” Why, Cattie wondered, would you say this to a girl who had no father whatsoever? Whose mother had recently died? Nevertheless, she listened. She said, “Really?” when it seemed it was her turn to speak. Or “Exactly,” because that was another word that occupied space and helped conversation roll along without uncomfortable silent gaps.

  After their chat about jail, Cattie had opened the glove compartment of Oliver’s car. Miriam was filling the tank, and Cattie, curious, had simply removed the Saab key from the ignition, unlocked the box lock, and quickly caught the clutter of pill bottles that spilled from the interior. Miriam was gleeful to discover everything that was wrong with her father’s health. “Heart, prostate, cholesterol, anxiety, depression, erectile dysfunction!” she hooted. “He’s just another old man!”

  Not having known him very long at that point—all of the twenty minutes it had taken to have him spring her from the El Dorado sheriff’s office—Cattie wasn’t prepared to judge yet. But yes, he did appear to be a man heading toward elderly. His hair was white, his face was wrinkled, his teeth were yellow. However, he owned a nice car with heated leather seats and was willing to drive the stinking vehicle of Ito’s so that the girls could take his. His mouth made a sour expression when he saw the dogs, but still he climbed behind the wheel.

  Miriam and Cattie had each taken a Valium before restoring the pills to the box.

  At Oliver and Catherine’s house it was Miriam’s old bedroom that Cattie now occupied. Guest quarters, Catherine’s overflow closet. “He wouldn’t let me decorate it,” Miriam told her. “Catherine would have, but Oliver doesn’t like real colors, only things that are variations on tan. Oatmeal. Ecru. Almond.”

  “He seems to be okay with black,” Cattie had said.

  “Yeah, the other not-a-real-color color.” Get over it, said Misty in Cattie’s head. What are you, ten years old? Grow the fuck up.

  Last Sunday Miriam had offered to supply Cattie with hashish. “There’s terrible stuff out there,” she explained. “I wouldn’t want you to end up in a coma from smoking formaldehyde, so let me know, promise?” Cattie agreed; again, it was easier to go along than to try to convince the woman she didn’t particularly want drugs.

  With whom, exactly, would she smoke hashish?

  Soon enough, Cattie might matriculate here at this school where Miriam and Catherine and Misty had. The East High mascot was the Flying Aces, colors blue and white. The English teacher was the same woman who’d taught Catherine. “Misty and I were very rarely in the same classes,” Catherine said now, blushing. Cattie knew why; her mother had followed the remedial track. Left behind in an early grade, her mother had been perceived as a girl who would thrive in the vo-tech halls, out in those outbuildings filled with budding auto mechanics, welders, carpenters, motel managers. In her future was a uniform and a name tag, some functional outfit that could be easily laundered to wash the unsavory yet essential fluids that would stain it. “She was really good at fixing cars,” Catherine said, apparently trying to prop up Misty’s high school image. “She could talk to guys really easily.” Sometimes, however, Misty had been mistaken for one of them.

  “I used to get that, too,” said Cattie, knowing Catherine was interested in knowing. “Before boobs.”

  “People are insensitive.”

  “My mom would say the same thing,” Cattie replied. Dipshits, her mother said in Cattie’s head. Assholes.

  At the heavy door of a room marked “Health,” Catherine said, “This was where the pregnant girls took classes, them and the moms with their little kids! It was so hilarious having babies and toddlers at school. And Misty kept flunking PE, so she ended up in Pregnant PE one semester. All they did was walk around the football field for an hour. Her and a bunch of fat black girls.” Catherine slapped both hands over her mouth, looking around the empty hall in case there were fat black girls anywhere nearby to take offense. “They were all black,” she confided quietly.

  “White girls get abortions,” Cattie said.

  “Really?” Catherine said, furrowing her brow. This wasn’t an act, Cattie had discovered. The woman actually did not know some fairly basic stuff. “I guess that’s what I did,” she conceded. “Twice, in fact. But not in high school, just after. That guy I told you about who was a professor? Who worked with my mom at the U?”

  Cattie nodded; probably she’d heard about him. Probably he was going to come up again, anyway, some other stray and dangling part of the snarl, another bump on the log.

  “Well, him. Him and me at Planned Parenthood.” Catherine sighed. “Downtown round the block from Kansa Karma. Anyway, those babies would be in their twenties. Good God. I might have
ended up a faculty spouse.”

  “You’d probably be divorced,” Cattie said. “By now.”

  Catherine laughed, and then went serious, and Cattie knew what was coming next, what motherhood made her think of.

  “It’s slightly difficult to imagine your mother as a mother,” Catherine had told her when they met. “No offense.” Cattie’s response then was like her response now: a shrug that meant none taken. Catherine was only reiterating the same surprise Misty herself had been marveling over for as long as Cattie could recall. Never in anybody’s wildest dreams had Misty Mueller seemed like a future mother. Who’da thunk it? she would say with the lopsided grin she called her village idiot face.

  But if it was hard imagining Misty as a mother, it was at least as difficult for Cattie to imagine her mother with this woman as a friend. Catherine was pretty, for one thing, and moved in the way that pretty women moved, as if being observed, her simplest actions—rinsing dishes, starting the car, pulling fruit from bins at the grocery, touching her own face—laden with self-consciousness. See my pretty hair, her tossed head said. Look at my pretty nails, her posed fingers demanded as they touched any- and everything. She applied lipstick whenever she left the house, blotting, kissing, wiping away excess with her thumb, then applied it again fifteen minutes later when she turned off the car engine. She consulted a mirror with regularity—the one by the telephone, the one in the bathroom, the one by the front door, the one attached to the windshield. Why did she care what she looked like while talking on the phone, before retrieving the newspaper on the front porch, when visiting her mother at the nursing home? But because it mattered to her, it seemed to matter in general. Catherine often asked the opinion of both her husband and Cattie. “This one or this one?” she would say, standing with a different shoe on either foot, or with two separate panty-hose possibilities, a leg in mesh, a leg in something footless, the limp other halves hanging like tails.

  The husband always had an opinion.

  “Which is more comfortable?” Cattie would ask.

  “Neither is actually comfortable,” Catherine would say.

  “Comfortable is sweatpants,” said the husband. “Comfortable is giant T-shirts and plastic shoes. Comfortable is giving up.”

  “My mom wore sweatpants,” Cattie said, just to get an apology out of him. He also enjoyed mirrors. Gaylord, her mother would have named Oliver. “Never trust a man who weighs less than you,” she’d advise.

  Her mother was a force around her, a series of impressions and thoughts that protected Cattie. She resorted to them daily. Would it go away, this voice that had become her constant helpful companion? Was it the fact of her mother’s old stomping grounds, this city and school and former best friend, that had made Misty come so vividly to Cattie, to displace the anonymous narrator of her old life?

  And did that voice explain why she and Catherine seemed so often to be thinking alike? For instance: the serial killer had recently revealed that an old cold-case murder was actually another of his victims. She hadn’t been bound, this woman found beneath a bridge a decade ago, but she’d been his nonetheless. When Cattie and Catherine saw the victim’s middle-aged son on television, weeping to have his mother’s murder made at least one step closer to solved, they turned to each other and said, “He looks just like Dick Little!”

  “The freckles,” they went on, in tandem. And the earring, they added.

  “Pretty soon you two won’t have to talk at all,” said Catherine’s husband over the top of his magazine. “It’ll be telepathic. Catherine and Catherine Junior.” Cattie had texted Ito then: This guy hates my guts. Ito’s sedan sat at the curb, a blight; the El Dorado police had kindly not impounded it, although its papers were not quite up-to-date. And Oliver had made a point of returning Ito’s car keys to Cattie. Coming from Catherine, it would have been a gesture of trust; from Oliver, it seemed nothing more obvious than an invitation for her to get behind the wheel and drive away.

  Not yet, she often thought.

  Catherine hadn’t known exactly what else to do with the girl, and so had begun their drives around the city, those places where Misty and she had spent their time, the junior high, Catherine’s old home, the well-manicured park where their elementary school had once stood, and across from it, the grandmother’s house.

  “That’s where the family was killed,” Catherine had said. It was another bitter day; the wind had swept everything and everybody away, sky and sidewalk exactly the same cement color, some irritable gray geese plodding around. The shades at the dead people’s house were drawn, their trees were bare. Misty’s grandmother’s home, three doors down, was nearly identical. “Innocuous enough, huh?” Catherine said.

  “Which?” asked Cattie.

  “Gosh, both, I suppose.”

  Stigmatized, Misty said in Cattie’s head. “Yeah, pretty ordinary looking.” In real estate, there was a dilemma selling houses in which something awful had happened. Some buyers—maybe most—were uneasy at the thought of living in a place tainted by tragedy. “Horror house,” Misty would have said. Realtors were obligated by law to tell prospective buyers, but only if those buyers knew to ask. Most didn’t, a fact that Misty had found surprising. “I would,” she’d confided in Cattie. “I for damn sure know what can go on in a house.”

  “There was always somebody home at your mom’s house,” Catherine told her. “There would have been somebody there, that day the family was killed.”

  My relatives? scoffed Misty. They wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Cattie studied the two places. The only survivor of the massacre was the family’s guard dog, but then he’d been put down the next day by the police. Miriam had told Cattie that. Miriam was an expert on the BTK situation. Ironic, said her mother flatly, in her mind.

  “It’s a whole new generation of owners,” Catherine said, of both of the desolate-looking homes. “You wanna knock on the door? Get a tour?”

  “Of which?” But before Catherine could say, Cattie declined wanting to visit either house.

  Catherine had stared across the street at the geese strutting around, their abrasive honking audible over the car heater. “At that school that used to be there, your mom and I hated each other. Absolutely hated. Oh my God.” It was another two-sided thing, Cattie thought. Like everything else in Wichita, its streets and buildings and people, even their friendship provoked in Catherine a knotted multiplicity.

  A sudden bleeping alarm sounded at East High, and the doors of the hall’s rooms banged open, releasing wave after wave of human noise and motion. Cattie and Catherine flattened themselves against the wall across from the hallowed senior lockers, watching as students surged by, nobody seeming to notice the two of them. In general, these students looked precisely like the ones from Houston. Cattie felt the familiar invisibility that she’d lost when she moved to St. Sincere. This school would not trouble her, nor she it.

  And also? She could simply walk away. Having done it once, she knew she could do it again. At night, as had always been her habit, she sometimes left the Desplaines’ house and walked the neighborhood. Once, upon returning home, she’d found Oliver in his Saab, retrieving pills, she supposed. When he looked up and saw her, she froze. His expression had three stages: first surprise, next hostility, and, finally, smooth professionalism. “I, too, am an insomniac,” he said. No mention of the potential harm that might befall a girl out alone in the night, no threat of punishment. He probably wouldn’t mind if something did happen to Cattie. She certainly didn’t have to worry that he’d concern Catherine with it.

  “He could never have stood a son,” Miriam had said of her father. “He can hardly stand me. But a younger, more handsome version of himself? Forget it. He has a mirror, if he needs to see himself.”

  In the crowded school hallway, Catherine sighed. “You could always just get a GED.”

  Why didn’t anybody tell me at the beginning? Misty’s voice responded. If you could pass a test in a couple of hours, why in the name of
God spend three years in this hellhole?

  “How is it that a little test could be the same as all that time in high school?”

  “I was thinking the exact same thing,” Catherine called out. “It’s totally retarded, isn’t it?”

  When the halls finally cleared, the two of them found a different swirling tempest in the parking lot, where the wind tore Catherine’s umbrella inside out and blew her dress up above her thighs. They ran to her car and sat in it watching the waves of sleety water break across its windshield, the wipers frozen to the glass in mid-motion. “Do you mind if we just sit?” Catherine asked. “I’ve never liked driving in this stuff.”

  “I don’t mind.” They both glanced upward as the hail began, pellets pinging off the roof and hood.

  “Wow,” Catherine said. “You never know what’s gonna fall out of the sky here. Your mom and me, we used to get lunch out of the vending machines, like a Snickers and a Coke—my mom would have had a cow if she knew what I ate—and then come sit in Misty’s car for an hour. Right in this same parking lot.” Catherine waved at the water-drenched sea of vehicles around them. “Or sometimes we’d go downtown to our silly apartment.” Catherine had already driven Cattie by the building. Which, coincidentally, was in the exact same building that one of Catherine’s dentists’ offices had been in, ages earlier. “You could still sort of smell that dentist-office odor, like drilled teeth, you know? He was called Dr. Tusk!” And one of Oliver’s first businesses turned out to be on the ground floor of that precise same building, its ribbon-cutting probably going on at just about the time Catherine and Misty were renting the apartment on an upper floor, storing vodka and orange juice in its sad little refrigerator. A brown-brick high-rise by the river, a great location for a restaurant because it had a view. And that had reminded Catherine of canoeing in the river, she and Misty and two twins, Ron and Don, she told Cattie. The Twinkies. They had taken those boys to prom that year (“They had bald spots, they were so not the right age for prom! They wore leisure suits!”) but then ditched them early and went to a cop bar, after hours. Naturally, strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, one of those same cops ended up giving Oliver a ticket about ten years later. Catherine recognized him. Hole, sea, bump, log …