Always, however, they stopped at her cottage first, for he delighted in visiting her cats. Running with her down the hill he’d already be shouting “Caa!” into the wind he made. She gave him treats to use to win them over, and he squeaked with pleasure while the boy cat purred and licked them from his fingers. Then he ran upstairs clutching more treats in his moist fist and pushed them back as far as he could into the dark space underneath Laurelie’s bed, where the girl cat ran to hide whenever she heard him coming.
Task accomplished, they crossed the dirt lane and headed down the river trail. No wider than the height of the boy, it measured less than a quarter mile in length, but still they could lose an hour along the way. Today the boy was taking his time collecting treasures, stuffing his pockets full of stones while Laurelie carried the rest in a sack she made from the bottom of her T-shirt. But as soon as he heard the river’s chuckle he began to trot, and when the trail gave way to a root-threaded bank, he danced impatiently while she removed their shoes.
They stepped together into the water. “Cold,” she murmured, but he didn’t answer, too intent on his study of his feet. The water was so clear they could see every grain of the fine black mud their entrance had puffed up from the river floor. Again and again he wiggled his toes, and then after a while he raised his head and they headed further in, but still the water reached no higher than his knees by the time they reached their destination.
Thinking Rock jutted out of the river ten feet from shore, perfectly flat and glittering darkly, the air above it sparkling as particle-filled rays of sunlight filtered down through the canopy. She lifted the boy up first and then clambered after him, and they sat with their backs in the direction they’d come, looking out over another twenty feet of water stretching away on the other side. The rock must have marked a hidden chasm, for it seemed another river entirely here, this one deep and fast and wide. Every time they came its color varied, as did its flow. During the winter it had ranged through every shade of black, sometimes glossy and others dull, its edges frozen and piled with snow, while the middle still pulsed its thick life’s blood. But as spring took hold it had lightened and thinned; the last time they’d come it had looked like chocolate milk.
“Gee,” the boy pronounced, and then with a hint of ceremony, began removing stones from his pockets. Laurelie unrolled her shirt and handed over the items within, one yellow forsythia branch, one dead orange and black caterpillar, one smooth stick bare of bark, one drooping cluster of bluebells, and one still-crisp white narcissus. All of these he carefully arranged according to some private order, shifting and reorganizing the whole lot often to accommodate each new piece. While he worked she leaned back with her legs dangling down over the side of the rock, barely brushing the water, and considered its color herself. The boy was right; there was green inside the brown today, she decided, a deep lustrous olive.
“Buh.” He’d been turning a smooth gray rock in his hands, and now dropped it into the deep side of the river.
“Yes, it did bubble,” she affirmed, “when it sank. Which one of your treasures won’t sink, do you think?”
After considering the question awhile, he threw in the forsythia branch, and together they watched it float away, seeming at times to struggle and others to tease as it swirled into eddies and snagged on roots but always worked its way free.
Once the boy had given all his treasures to the river, she fished a granola bar from her pocket and they shared it. The sound of their crunching merged with the river’s low burble and the forest’s stillness, which seemed to have a sound all its own. In her head she was sketching it, soft and full of light with the trees reflecting back the color of the sky in the style of Monet, when a squirrel rattled a warning high in a tree. Abruptly the scene twisted, turning hellish, hedonistic, as the squirrel continued rattling and the boy clutched her shoulders, crying, “Caa!” over and over until she too turned to see.
At first there was only the forest. The riverbank, trees, river, and the trail from which they’d come. Then a shape she’d taken for shade detached itself from a large growth of ferns off to her left. Slowly, it approached.
The boy was right. It was a cat. Although this one was three times larger than her own boy cat, at least. It had a tan coat with black striping that hung loose down its legs and then fluted out into a ruff of a lighter hue around its neck. Its ears were large and black and tufted, and its tail was just a stump. Silently it padded to the water’s edge, and then stopped and bent its head. Its tongue emerged and began lapping at the water, slowly, dreamlike, the pink flesh shedding fat droplets from both edges that sparkled as they fell, full of sunlight.
“Paa?”
“Hush,” she said to the boy and squeezed him, for the large cat had frozen when he spoke, and was now staring directly at them.
She herself had no urge to pet it. Even the idea made her lose her breath. The cat was stunning, but in her mind’s eye each element of its beauty equally signaled threat. Its eyes and ears and nose and mouth appeared to her like giant receptors, constantly seeking prey. Its rear legs were thickly muscled, and disproportionately longer than its front ones, built for catching prey. Its four large paws looked soft and puffy but they bore strong curved claws sheathed beneath, precisely spaced to hold and puncture prey. Now that it had finished drinking, she thought it would surely leave, but instead it sat back on its haunches and cleaned first its face and then its ruff. And then, when it finished its ablutions, it just sat there, staring off at the trees as if it had forgotten all about them. But one of its ears was still aimed in their direction, and it twitched with every movement she or the boy made. The longer this dissemblance went on the greater her anxiety about it became, until finally she forced her gaze away. Beyond it the trail beckoned, promising safety, but the cat sat too close, barely a foot to its left. Looking behind her, she gauged the distance to the opposite shore. Nothing had changed. It was still too far and cold and deep to swim with a two-and-a-half-year-old boy.
“Paa-Paa-Paa-Paa-Paa—”
She swiveled back fast, half-bracing to jump, and saw a second form emerge from the trees. This one was human, and male. Panic swamped her and then slowly dissipated as she took in the boots he wore and the pack on his back, for he was surely an AT hiker, and a lost one at that. The Appalachian Trail threaded through this forest preserve a few miles from where she sat. As he got closer she observed more of the details of him, how tall he was and how thin, the depth of color of his exposed skin, but because he was looking down at the ground all she saw was a wild mass of dark hair.
Had he even noticed the cat? For that matter, had it noticed him? It still hadn’t moved, beyond the single flick of an ear. But even as she was wondering what to do, the hiker looked up. She only saw his face for a moment before he returned his gaze to the ground, but it was enough to register his lack of surprise as he surveyed the scene, and she took this as an indication that he’d already processed it.
Head down again, he proceeded to the river and there crouched behind the cat, who for its part stretched languorously and then turned and bumped its head against his knee. The boy could barely contain himself as the hiker trailed a slow hand down its back. Laurelie, however, now observing the cat from the side, was shocked by how swollen its belly was, distended so far it nearly touched the ground.
The hiker was gazing at the cat, who was gazing back at him. His eyes were long and wide-set above sharply jutting cheekbones, and his mouth was broad and slightly pointed at its edges above a triangular chin, so that looking back and forth between them, Laurelie thought he and the cat shared a kind of family resemblance.
Then, as she watched, his eyes filled with tears, and one spilled over, tracking luminescent down his russet skin.
Flushing hot, Laurelie looked down at the rock, at her pale knobby feet, at her dirty T-shirt smeared with pollen and pine sap. He wasn’t actually crying, she told herself, and yet the boy in her arms seemed to think so as well, for already his fac
e was bunching up in sympathy. Hearing him whimper, her own fear swelled. Gripping him tightly, she slid down off the rock and began sloshing away through the shallow water, intending to give both cat and hiker a wide berth before heading for shore.
But the boy cried out, “Daa!” He wanted down. They struggled for a few steps, each one’s distress only escalating the other’s until finally she gave in. The moment his feet touched water he calmed, grew placid even as she hurried him along, telling herself the cat wasn’t following even as she imagined on her back the grip and tear of its claws.
Reaching the riverbank, she cut straight through the brush for some yards before heading back toward the trail, so that when they did break onto it they were already a few yards along. She stopped then, they both did, their heads turning in unison to locate the intruders once more.
If they hadn’t looked at just that moment they would have missed the cat, for it was loping back toward the ferns from which it had come. Laurelie’s relief at seeing the threat reduced by half faded as she watched the cat move away. At that distance its beauty overwhelmed its risk, but also conveyed clearly that something was wrong. For one step of every four was out of rhythm with the rest. The cat was limping—badly.
The boy had lost interest in the cat. He’d spied their shoes at the head of the trail and was trotting back for them. “No!” Laurelie said, reaching out to stop him. When her hand closed on air she gasped and hurried after him.
Already he was sitting down, preparing for her to put his shoes on. But his attention was fixed on the hiker, still crouched by the water’s edge, who had turned away now, and was gazing after the cat. Distantly, she thought, he looks like a dropped marionette, with those long thin legs folded and the arms and shoulders arcing over them. The corners of his mouth were pointing down and the space between his brows was deeply furrowed. He looked worried, she realized, and in the next instant, she said, “I think its leg’s hurt,” startling herself as much as him.
He rose then, all jostling towering limbs, swamping her again with the peril of him. She took an involuntary step back. But now he froze, just like the cat, and stood there looking off at the ferns from which they’d come. No ear swiveled, but still she sensed a kind of invisible field around him, trembling, listening. His hands were pushed deep into the front pockets of his pants, claws sheathed. She could hear his breath coming fast and shallow, saw his mouth was open and his nostrils were flared, pushing at their skin so hard the edges had gone white.
“A hunter shot her,” he said, and then after a moment, answering her unspoken question, added, “Not here. Up near Bangor, on Barren Mountain.”
Bangor, Maine. That was three hundred miles north. She wondered how they’d gotten here and decided they must have walked.
“She can’t hunt, so she won’t den. Just keeps running.” A ripple traveled over his shoulders then. “Kittens’ll be coming soon,” he said.
“Caa,” said the boy. She looked down at him. Next to him on the forest floor was a pile of tight green pine cones. He was opening and closing his hands and regarding them with an intent expression. In the same instant she realized they were covered in sap, he put them on his cheeks, first one, and then the other. He smiled at this, until he tried to pull them off again. She sank down then and gently peeled them free, and wiped them off as best she could with her T-shirt.
When she looked up again, the hiker was gone.
3
After dropping the boy at home she walked back down the hill alone. It was six o’clock already but the sun was still high; this late in April and so far north it would not set for hours yet. From a distance, dappled in warm light and framed by woods, her cottage looked like a fairy’s house, pulsating with energy and motion, an impression that remained as she got closer, for its perspective hardly changed. Small and square, the cottage had only a few rooms, a kitchen and living room downstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs. But those rooms were spacious and full of light, and outside there was a large front porch and a yard that bathed in sun all day and was bordered by lilacs and sugar maples. Still, the cottage was over a century old, and it showed its age. Long ago it had been the servants’ quarters for the main house, and her landlords hadn’t done much upkeep in the few years since they’d bought it. She’d scoured out the prior tenants’ grime herself when she’d first moved in, but still the ceilings were stained and the paint was peeling and the furnishings were scarred and chipped. The window frames sagged so much that bats slipped past the storm windows at night to snatch moths off the screens. The pipes shuddered beneath the floors and the radiators knocked and whistled and the stairs creaked. But to Laurelie all these peculiarities only deepened the little house’s character and made it feel alive.
Her cats seemed to think so too. When they weren’t crashed out sleeping in its soft places they were prowling its perimeters, sniffing out spiders and tracking mice behind the walls or patrolling the windowsills for bats and the red squirrels that ran their circuits along the house’s foundation. They guarded against her own ghosts as well; whenever the atmosphere grew somber or anxious, first one cat and then the other would spontaneously tear through the room, ears cocked and eyes wild, claws skittering for purchase as they chased invisibles across the old wideboard floors.
They were indoor cats; she never let them out, not since finding them the prior spring abandoned in a Philadelphia park. At the time she’d thought an urban environment contained too many threats to them, and now she thought the same about a rural one. Bobcats, for one! She could hardly believe she’d encountered an actual bobcat only a few hours before, and less than a quarter mile from her cottage. Preparing herself a simple dinner of fruit and bread and cheese, she imagined it stalking the birds in her yard, clawing the bark of her sugar maples, hiding in the grass and then springing, trapping a beating pulse between its teeth and gently squeezing until the blood burst. She stopped then, not letting herself consider what it would do to her own cats. Thankfully they seemed content to remain indoors. Even now with the windows wide and the spring evening pouring in sounds and colors and scents, they were lolling on their backs with their heads together, cleaning their ruffs in the blocks of light stacked across her living room floor.
She, however, was feeling restless, and so took herself outside to eat her meal on the front porch. Sitting on the top step, she looked out at the sun inching down through the pines, illuminating every detail of their outer branches without ever penetrating the secrets they hid inside. Including the bobcat the hiker had been following for three hundred miles. It must have taken weeks. She tried to imagine how it must have felt to be immersed in every wild detail of spring as it pushed itself up through dying winter. What, she wondered, munching her own food, did they eat? He’d said the bobcat couldn’t hunt. She imagined him foraging for wild mushrooms, nuts and berries, perhaps even trapping small animals for it, and then pushed the rest of that thought away and considered instead where they might sleep, and whether they traveled by day or night, and how he could have kept up with a wild animal, even a wounded one.
The journey seemed impossible. But then so did the fact that it had led them to her front door. And didn’t every journey seem impossible at first? Sharp and sticking, the truth remained that without a map, without a finger tracing along a path, there could be no certainty as to where one might end up. She thought of her first days back in Philadelphia. Who would have known that path would lead here? She thought of her freshman dorm room, the complete opposite of the sunny cottage in which she now resided. She remembered being so relieved to have been allotted a single, and how the feeling had dissipated, trickling away in slow leaks as she took in the space, for it had been so small and dim, with only one lamp and no overhead light and a window that looked out at a brick wall. And waiting behind that leaking relief had been the realization that the ugly little room contained the sum total of all that was now hers. It was this she kept thinking about long after her father and stepmother had backed o
ut the door with awkward waves. She’d sat on her new bed eyeing her door and had been unable to come up with a good enough reason to leave until finally her bladder forced the situation. Then she’d walked the long hall to the bathroom and taken the longest pee of her life.
She’d been washing her hands while avoiding the mirror, too afraid of what she might see there, when the door opened.
Much later Laurelie would sketch this scene, the doll-like creature sauntering in, cocking her hip with a hand on it and saying, “I saw you moving in. You’re the only cool person in this entire dorm. You must be from The City too.”
What city? Laurelie had thought at the time. The girl hadn’t seemed real, so tiny and porcelain-skinned, with long chestnut curls spilling down her back and a torso long and flat as a boy’s beneath a lacy blouse tucked into tight jeans, shiny leather boots encasing her legs to the knees. Despite her small stature she commanded attention as she moved across the floor. Laurelie couldn’t remember exactly what else she’d said but could recall with near-perfect crystalline sequencing how she’d sashayed to the mirror and pursed her lips, then lifted her chin and examined both profiles, and finally sprung her curls and, with a sway of her miniature hips, turned to inspect the view from behind.
The memory made Laurelie shudder now, but then all her memories of Philadelphia did, all of them imbued with the same sick dread, possessed of a menace they’d hardly suggested at the time. In fact the girl had invited Laurelie back to her room and she’d felt like a character in a Woody Allen movie sitting on that lacy bed, lacy pillows piled high at her back, listening to the girl talk about “The City.”
The Bobcat Page 2