One Amazing Thing

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  When the boy is five and a half, Mary Lou and Jimmy abandon them for Memphis, which is clear across the country. They’re going to live with Mary Lou’s mother, although she constantly bitches at Mary Lou, because Mary Lou can’t make it on her own anymore, and she’s just too tired trying. She cries as she tells the boy’s mother this, wiping at her eyes, smearing mascara over apologetic cheekbones. The boy’s mother doesn’t say anything, but he sees something flicker in her eyes. He thinks it’s anger with Mary Lou for quitting on them. But later he wonders if it’s fear, and that makes him afraid, too. Then Mary Lou and Jimmy are gone, and his memories get a lot worse.

  IN THIS AFTERNOON MEMORY, THE BOY IS ABOUT EIGHT, WITH long, untidy hair and clothes that aren’t quite clean. He’s playing by himself in the empty field behind the apartment building that doubles as a junkyard. The junkyard is off-limits—his mother thinks it’s dangerous—but she’s at work and isn’t going to know. Marvin, who lives with them now, is aware of the boy’s disobedience, but Marvin isn’t going to tell his mother. Because then she would insist that the boy stay inside after school, and Marvin wouldn’t like that. In the afternoon, when the boy’s mother is at work, Marvin’s friends come over to the apartment. The boy isn’t sure what they do there, though from the sweetish smoke-smell that lingers after they have left, he can guess at some of it. In any case, he is playing alone in a field overgrown with brambles because there aren’t any kids his age who live around here. If there were, they probably wouldn’t be friends with him, like the children at school who sometimes make fun of his name or shove him around during recess when the teacher on duty isn’t watching but mostly just ignore him.

  The boy pretends he’s Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island except for the cannibals who are after him. From behind an abandoned freezer, he trains his binoculars on them, watching them laugh with their pointy cannibal teeth. But they won’t get him; he knows his way around the entire island, the caves and mountain passes where people must travel single file. He has his M1 semiautomatic and one hundred clips of ammo, and he knows how to move quiet as death. He raises his rifle and takes a step forward, then jumps back with a yelp because something furry has just brushed against his shins. It is a kitten.

  The kitten is small and scrawny and meows loudly, opening its mouth wide and displaying tiny cannibal-sharp teeth and a very pink tongue. It skitters away when the boy reaches for it, but then lets itself be picked up. Its claws are sharp, too, but the boy doesn’t mind. He thinks it looks like a miniature tiger, and he holds it and strokes its back while the kitten squirms in an attempt to get away. The boy remembers something he read in a book. He sets it down, breaks off a bramble branch, and bobs it up and down. The kitten swipes at it, entranced. They play like this for a while, but then the kitten starts mewing again—with hunger, the boy is sure. So he tucks it inside his shirt—he is afraid he’ll lose it if he leaves it out here—and goes to the apartment. Inside, Marvin’s friends, who scare him, observe him through a haze of smoke. One of them beckons him, asking if he wants a beer. The boy’s face goes hot. Marvin’s friends laugh. He almost backs out. Then he feels the kitten trying to climb up the inside of his shirt. Its tail tickles his chest. He tightens his shoulders and strides past their stares to the fridge—it is his fridge, he reminds himself. His apartment. He pours milk into a bowl. His hand shakes and milk spills on the sticky counter, but only a little. He carries the bowl out to the field.

  The kitten laps up the milk and licks the boy’s fingers. Its tongue is sandpaper-rough against his knuckles, and the boy shivers with pleasure. They play some more with the branch, the boy pulling it backward and the kitten pouncing on it so fiercely that right then and there he names it Shere Khan, after the character in The Jungle Book. They play this game for hours, even after the sun sets and the boy shivers in his too-small jacket. Finally he hears the sound he’s been waiting for, the roar of trucks. Marvin’s friends are leaving, and when the boy peers around the edge of the apartment building, he sees to his delight that Marvin is going with them.

  It’s simple enough, after that, to carry into the apartment the discarded kitchen drawer that he has already picked out, to hide it behind the couch where he sleeps nowadays, beside the cardboard boxes that hold his clothes and books. He lines the drawer with an old shirt and places the kitten in it, admonishing it to stay put while he does his homework. The kitten promptly climbs out, scampers to his chair, and clambers up his jeans leg onto his lap. That’s how he does his homework, with the kitten curled into a ball of warmth against his stomach and him not daring to move because he doesn’t want to disturb its sleep.

  He has never loved anyone in the world as much as he loves this kitten. He will never love anyone this way again, with nothing held back.

  When he hears the key rattle in the door, he squeezes his eyes shut and prays it’s his mother, and, miracle of miracles, it is. He stuffs the kitten into his shirt and fetches her a soda pop, and when she puts out a tired hand to rumple his hair, he tells her about it in a rush, because he knows he has only a little time before Marvin returns.

  “Can I keep it, please, please? I’ll take care of it. It won’t cost you anything.”

  Holding the kitten carefully in both hands, he offers it to her. She puts out a finger to scratch behind its ear. It closes its eyes and purrs, and butts her finger with its head when she stops. She laughs and his heart leaps. But then her face fades and she shakes her head. “We don’t have enough room,” she says. “And Marvin doesn’t like pets.”

  All his pent up resentment comes out in a rush. “Why do we have to do what he says? This isn’t his place. Why does he even have to live with us?”

  She’s angry, he can tell that by the way her nostrils flare and little blotches of red appear on her cheeks. But then her shoulders sag. “He pays part of the rent,” she says. “He watches you in the afternoon in case there’s a problem or something.” He’s about to protest hotly, but she goes on. “This way I don’t have to get a babysitter. Plus—” She shakes her head. “Oh, you won’t understand.”

  He wants to tell her she’s the one who doesn’t understand that things were so much better when there were only the two of them, snuggled in their whale quilt. Her raspy, lovely morning voice reading to him on Saturdays is only a memory now. Instead, at night, wriggling around on the lumpy couch, he hears noises from the other room that make it hard for him to look her in the eye the next morning.

  The door swings open, banging against a chair, and the possibility of telling her anything ends. Marvin throws a fit when he sees the kitten, going on and on about how he’s allergic to cats, and is the boy trying to kill him. Scared by the noise, the kitten pees on the boy’s hand. He doesn’t care, but some of the pee drips onto his mom’s uniform and now she’s shouting, too. He’s forced to take the kitten out on the porch, where he puts it into the drawer, tells it to stay, and covers the drawer as best he can with a cardboard box. The box is too small and he’s afraid the kitten (already scrabbling madly inside) will escape. He hunches beside the box, trying not to cry, shivering, hating Marvin, wishing he would die. Alongside Marvin, he hates his mother—this is a first—and wants her to die, too. Then he can go and live with a different family, one that will let him keep his kitten. He hates them even more when she yells at him to get inside before he catches a cold and when Marvin stomps out and yanks him into the apartment, telling him to mind his ma. His hatred swells through the broken dreams of a night he will never forget.

  In the morning, he runs out to discover the kitten gone. In school he is unable to pay attention—even to math. He rushes from the school bus to the junkyard, searches frantically through piles of garbage, and finally discovers the kitten shivering under a bush. Even when he hugs it hard against his thumping chest, hatred simmers inside him.

  HE WILL REMEMBER THIS HATRED THE DAY HIS MOTHER DIES. Guilt will press down like a ball of iron on his chest no matter how much he rationalizes it, telling himself that he
wasn’t responsible, because look at Marvin, wasn’t he still walking around hale and hearty in spite of all the boy’s wishing?

  He will be sent to live with foster parents. They’ll turn out to be an older, childless couple, a bit strict but clean and organized. They will not get him a pet—and that’s good, because surely then the iron ball would crack his chest. They will make sure he gets to school on time and does his homework and has nutritious meals. They will take him to art museums and classical music concerts and will not upbraid his indifference to such things. They will recognize his talent and enter him in math contests—regional, then state, then national—and winning these contests will begin to change the way he feels about himself.

  He knows his mother would have done none of this. Why then, lying in a bedroom all his own, the wallpaper of flying dragons that he picked himself lit ghostly blue by the night-light—a room he couldn’t have imagined when he lived in the old apartment—should he give in to tears?

  FOR A WHILE AFTER THAT TRAUMATIC NIGHT, THINGS GO WELL. The boy cleans out the abandoned freezer in the junkyard and lines it with his old clothes. He keeps inside it a bowl of water and a dish of cat food bought with money he has stolen from his mother’s purse and Marvin’s wallet, a couple of cautious dollars at a time. After school each day, he takes Shere to the other end of the junkyard and plays with him, keeping a wary eye out for his mother and Marvin, because he doesn’t want them to know what he’s doing. When it’s time for him to go in, he reluctantly puts Shere in the freezer, bids him good night, and wedges a stick under the lid—enough to allow the kitten to breathe without letting it escape. This way, the raccoons and wild dogs that roam the junkyard at night can’t get to it. The kitten learns to recognize the boy. It launches itself at his chest as soon as he opens the freezer lid, purring so loudly that its whole body vibrates. The boy steals more money—what else can he do when his mother will not give him an allowance?—to buy Shere a catnip ball and can’t stop grinning as he watches the kitten go crazy over it. Then one day he returns from school to find the stick with which he had wedged the lid open lying on the ground. The freezer lid is shut, and when he opens it, he discovers that the kitten has suffocated.

  He does not tell his mother. From this time on, he speaks to her as little as possible. She tries at first to engage him in conversation; then she gets angry. She doesn’t have time for this nonsense, this sulking without a reason when she’s knocking herself out to provide for him. He finds a pie server in a bottom drawer, digs a hole in the junkyard, and buries the stiff kitten-body though he can hardly bear to touch it. He can’t eat anything the rest of the day or the next, but no one notices because he fixes his own meals. At night he lies in bed, going over the moment when he had last wedged the stick in the freezer door. How could it have fallen out? Had he been in a hurry? Had he been careless? Had someone followed him and pulled the stick out on purpose? Who would do something like that? There are no answers, and perhaps that’s why the questions keep replaying in his head. Sometimes when people are talking to him, the questions come back, very loud, and he is unable to hear anything else. He gets in trouble at school for this; a couple of his teachers wonder if he’s mentally handicapped. But they’re overworked; since he doesn’t cause trouble like the others, they let him be. At home he gets clouted on the head when he blanks out while Marvin is talking to him. Once his mother sees this and it leads to a huge fight between her and Marvin. Earlier, such a development would have pleased the boy. Now he hardly notices.

  The only time he can forget the feel of the kitten’s fur under his palm, or the way it butted its head against his shins, is when he’s doing math. So he does more and more of it, asking his teacher for extra worksheets that he brings home, fractions and decimals, and word problems about Aunt Anna who’s driving from Boston to Philadelphia at a certain speed, or a bathtub where the stopper doesn’t quite fit, and how long would it take to fill. The words transform themselves into numbers that line up like acrobats, numbers that can be trusted to perform the way they’re supposed to. He begins to understand their nature. They are ancient and immortal, not frail and easily broken. As long as he offers them his full attention, they will never abandon him. They sing their answers to him, and the inside of his head fills with light as he writes them down.

  THERE HAD BEEN A NAKEDNESS ABOUT MR. PRITCHETT’S STORY, the feeling of a wound not yet healed. Perhaps that was why no one said anything, Uma thought. Or were they hoarding energy and oxygen for their own tales?

  The noise of water had grown louder, more uneven, a chug-chug followed by a silence, then a gurgling, swallowing noise. Uma tried to visualize what might be happening. Cameron told them to roll up their pants legs or hitch up their skirts and remove their shoes and socks before getting off their chairs.

  “Once you’ve taken off your socks, you need to put your shoes back on so you don’t cut your feet on broken glass. Keep your socks in your pocket, along with these.” He handed out pieces of blue cloth, the last bits of Malathi’s sari. “We have to move to the employees area and sit on the tables there. The ceiling at this end of the room is sagging more than before.” They stared up at the hole that yawned above. In the near blackness, Uma couldn’t tell how much worse it really was. “Use the cloth to wipe your feet before wearing your socks again,” Cameron said. “Stay as dry as you can so you don’t get chilled.”

  Everyone did as Cameron instructed. Maybe they were grateful for these small, concrete acts that they could successfully perform. When Uma pulled off her socks with an awkward hand, she almost dropped one. Lunging to grab it, she hit her broken wrist against the chair. Pain shot through her and she cursed out loud. Standing, she saw that the water reached above her ankles, and the inevitability of that rising, more than the pain and the cold, made her want to cry. The group shuffled to their new location and pushed the tables around until they formed a triangle with gaps. Lily helped Jiang, who was holding her arm out stiffly, onto a table, and beckoned to Tariq to join them. Uma climbed onto the second table. Cameron wiped her feet for her and pulled her socks back on. Uma had expected Mrs. Pritchett to join them, but the older woman went to the third table, where her husband was sitting. Uma wondered if his story made her do this. Mrs. Pritchett perched on the edge, leaving the center spot for Mangalam.

  Uma moved closer to Cameron to make room for Malathi, who was climbing onto their table. Three to a tabletop was a snug fit. But it would keep them warmer. Cameron was asking if anyone suffered from diabetes. No one confessed to it because Mangalam was holding a big plastic bag filled with sugar packets. When Cameron nodded, Mangalam passed the bag around. Uma took three packets. Greedily, she tore open the corner of one with her teeth and poured some onto her tongue. She was looking forward to the taste, but it was overly sweet and made her want to throw up. The unfairness of this made her want to cry.

  Everything was making her want to cry. No matter what her own problems were, Mr. Pritchett’s mother should have taken better care of her son. And why did the boy love her so, in spite of everything? Uma thought of her own mother, who had watched out for her with a hawk-eyed vigilance that she had ungraciously tolerated through childhood and rejected as a teenager. Did one always take for granted what came easily and long for what was impossible?

  Cameron disappeared into the storage area, returning with a small stack of disposable tablecloths. He divided them among the three groups, to use as communal blankets. They weren’t very warm, not even with two or three of them layered atop each other. But there was something comforting, Uma thought, something childlike and innocent, about sharing them.

  HALFWAY THROUGH MR. PRITCHETT’S STORY, MRS. PRITCHETT had been broadsided by a memory. Years back, when she first realized they weren’t going to have children, she had asked her husband for a dog. He had dragged his feet, pointing out that it would mess up their beautiful new carpet. He didn’t have time to help her take care of it. And what would they do with it when they traveled? But she ha
d begged and begged because she was lonely. Finally he had given in to her entreaties and taken her to the animal shelter.

  A few minutes into their visit, before Mrs. Pritchett had taken a single dog out of its cage, Mr. Pritchett had complained of shortness of breath. He had rushed out of the building, and when she followed, concerned, she found him inside their Mercedes, bent over the steering wheel. His hands, when she had grabbed them, had been clammy.

  She had guessed the problem to be an allergy, a severe one. To get to the dogs, they’d walked through a room filled with cat cages. Maybe that had set it off. Very convenient! a part of her had thought angrily. Then, ashamed of her selfishness, she had busied herself with rolling down the windows and getting him water. She had put away this disappointment like many others and had busied herself with the garden, the golf lessons he wanted her to take so they could join the local club, and the dinner parties he loved for her to throw. Now she was filled with sorrow and anger: sorrow for the boy he had been and anger because he had not ever trusted her with the truth.

  ENTANGLED IN THEIR THOUGHTS, LOST IN THE HYPNOTIC GURGLE of water, they were startled when Lily said, “I’m glad you had your math, Mr. Pritchett. It made you special when everyone thought you weren’t good enough.” She glanced at Cameron. “Can I tell my story?”

  “Hold on a little longer,” he said. He peered at the faces around him, checking for responses.

  Uma wanted to say something about the treacherous nature of memory, how one painful event can overpower the many good experiences that came before. But a dangerous lethargy arising from cold and hunger prevented her from speaking. It was imperative that someone start telling a story before the feeling overpowered them all.