A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (19 page)

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Gabe's mom came home around six. She dressed like an office worker, in a beige skirt and sweater. She had short, light brown hair, large blue eyes, and a heart-shaped face. She was extremely thin. She didn't look like a real mother. She looked like the sort of woman who would play a mother on TV. She introduced herself as Claire, rather than Ms. McAlister or Miss Anything-Else, which I thought was unusual among straights. I recognized her as one of the adults with Gabe in the bookshelf photo.

“Would you like to stay for dinner?” she asked me as she headed into the kitchenette in the corner of the living room.

I got excited, but I tried not to let it show. I'd eaten at other people's houses plenty of times back in Eugene, but I hadn't actually been invited to dinner at another kid's house since we'd been in Seattle.

“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Mm,” she said. “Polite.”

Claire turned on the oven and took a frozen pizza out of the freezer.

I watched her from the corner of my eye as Gabe and I played, and I wondered if this was how they ate all the time. My dad had inconsistent attitudes about instant food: he claimed not to believe in it, but he didn't take time to cook very often. He bought instant food as “emergency food,” but then he'd end up cooking it six nights a week. Breakfast was always Raisin Bran, lunch was always Top Ramen, dinner was usually a homemade entrée with a side of macaroni and cheese. When he bothered to make an effort, it was usually for dinner. But he didn't make an effort very often. In spite of that, frozen pizza, pop tarts—instant food I might enjoy—all that stuff was absolutely forbidden. I could eat Top Ramen until it was coming out of my ears, but Chef Boyardee or Eggo waffles were right out.

When the pizza was done, Claire called us to sit down at the stools around the counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room. She got three plates from a cabinet, cut the pizza into what looked to me like six equal slices, put two slices on each plate, and handed a plate each to me and Gabe.

Gabe burst into tears. It happened so fast I nearly jumped off my stool.

“What?” I yelped, looking around to see what had happened.

“His slices are bigger than mine!” Gabe sobbed to his mom.

“I … what?” I said, looking from my plate to his. They looked the same size to me.

“Gabe,” his mother said firmly. “Jason is our guest.”

“Uh, you can have mine,” I said, pushing my plate toward him.

He looked at his mom expectantly. She looked at me.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Really.”

“Okay,” she said. Gabe quickly switched our plates, and I waited a beat to see if anything else surprising was going to happen. Gabe picked up one of the slices and took a bite. I started eating, watching him warily as I did. I was momentarily distracted by how good the instant pizza wasn't.

“Would you like some milk?” Claire asked.

“Yes, please,” Gabe said.

“Yes,” I said carefully. “Please.”

Other kids crying always left me rattled. My dad had kind of a reflexive hitting thing he did when I pitched a fit like that, where his hand would just leap out on its own and smack me on whatever part of my body was closest to him. It wasn't like I never cried—according to Calliope I was the biggest fucking crybaby she'd ever met—but actual temper tantrums like the one Gabe had just staged were simply not done in my house. Or at least they weren't often survived. When other kids had them in front of me, I always had a reflex to shush them before the smacking started. Then, afterward, I felt like I wanted to be farther away from them, in sort of the same way I'd want to put some physical distance between me and someone who was about to be struck by lightning.

I called my dad around seven, and Gabe and I played until eight. When his mom said I had to go home he pitched another hissy, but I was ready for it this time and tried not to let it freak me out.

We hung out on the playground the next day, talking about movies. Then I went over to his house for a sleepover that weekend. He didn't seem to think much of it one way or the other; I felt like I'd just won the Publisher's Clearinghouse.

 

27

My cats always landed on their feet. I was fascinated by it. I didn't understand how an object moving through the air—a cat—with nothing to push off of, could alter its own trajectory to land on its feet every time. Sometimes I would roll a cat off my lap, or pick one up and drop it from a height of a few feet, to see if I could spot how it controlled its fall. Every time, the cat would land upright. It looked like magic to me, but I knew it wasn't. There was an explanation for it. I just didn't understand what the explanation was.

One day in the late spring of my fourth grade year, during a fit of extreme boredom, I decided to try to figure it out.

We had a cat named Tom—because he was mostly black, but had a single white tuft on his chest. It looked like a tuxedo, so he started out as Tuxedo Tom. Then T-Tom. Then just Tom. He was the one I happened to lay hands on, and I started out picking him up and dropping him from shoulder height, to see if I could spot how he controlled his roll. Every time, he landed on his feet, glared at me indignantly, and waited to be picked up and dropped again.

I tried this nine or ten times before I realized it had something to do with how he could spin his body sideways. So I tried dropping him with a slight sideways spin of my own added to the equation, but he could always counter and correct.

Afterward, I could never say for sure why I did the thing I did next. Not being able to outspin him sideways, I wondered if I could spin him end over end. So I took his front paws in my hand, lifted him up, and kind of whipped him into the air.

At the exact instant that I let go of his paws, I knew I'd made a horrible mistake. I'd done it too hard. I'd done it too fast. It was a shitty thing to do to a cat in the first place, but as soon as I let go of his paws I realized he was going to go too high, and that his spin was completely uncontrolled. My first thought was to step in and catch him, but I knew that if I tried he'd tear me to pieces with his claws. That shouldn't have mattered—and if someone had given me a choice, later on, I would have taken the mauling—but it was enough to make me hesitate. So instead I watched, praying he'd just land on his stomach, as he arced eight or nine feet up in the air and came down right on his head.

I thought the grass might be soft enough to save him. It wasn't.

His body flopped onto its side, and he lay there, curled up in a ball for a second, before he started to make a noise—a low, long, throaty yowl. I went over to him and tried to pet him and see if he was okay, and the noise got louder as I got closer. My nerve broke, and I ran inside to get Dad.

I was crying hysterically when I ran into his room, and it took me a few seconds to be able to make any words at all. And then I started lying. First it was a weird freak accident—Tom jumping out of my arms and landing weirdly. Then it became me dropping him, to see how he landed on his feet. Then me tossing him up in the air. Each story came out once. Dad would be sympathetic. Then I'd tell the next one—closer to the truth. Dad would be less sympathetic. Every time I got a lie out—every time Dad seemed to believe it—I remembered what I'd done. I remembered Tom spinning in the air and hitting the ground—and something drove me another step closer to the truth.

“I threw him up in the air,” I gasped. “I threw him, and I spun him so he couldn't land on his feet, and he landed on his head. I did it on purpose. It's my fault. It's all my fault.”

Dad's face went completely blank.

“Why would you do that?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Why would you do that?” he screamed.

“I don't know,” I whispered.

Dad looked at the ceiling and took a deep breath. He'd been hugging me a minute before, but now he kind of gently pushed me away and stared at the ceiling.

“You have to help,” I said.

“What do you want me to do, Jason? You dropped him on his head.”

“He's still alive,” I said.

“He's what?”

“He's still alive,” I said, pointing, through the wall to the spot in the side yard where I knew Tom was lying.

Dad walked past me and went outside. When I followed him out he was standing over the cat. Then he knelt down next to the curled-up animal and touched Tom's soft black fur. Tom howled.

Dad jumped back, took a few quick steps, and grabbed me by the shoulders.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he screamed, shaking me back and forth. I didn't mind. I wanted something worse. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What is wrong in your head that you would do this to a helpless animal?”

“I don't know,” I said.

Dad went over and picked the cat up. Tom howled again and Dad carried him down into the basement.

“Come here!” he shouted over his shoulder.

Once we were in the basement he had me make a little bed for Tom in a box, with a blanket. He yelled the instructions at me. I did whatever he told me. Once I'd put the bed together, Dad shouted, “Stay here!” and left the basement.

I sat there next to Tom for a long time. I wasn't sure how long it was. After a while I worked up the courage to reach out and touch him. He was still warm and soft. His tail twitched. His eyes opened wide to get a look at me, like he wanted to turn to face me but couldn't move his head. He made a low noise in his throat. Not quite a yowl. Not quite a growl or a hiss.

Eventually his body seemed to relax a little. He wasn't dead. He just unclenched.

Dad came back in and dropped a plastic container of chicken livers on the floor next to me.

“You'll feed him those until he dies,” Dad said. “If he shits or pisses in the box, you'll clean it up.”

“Okay,” I said.

Dad left me in the basement.

*   *   *

For the next couple of days, I took care of Tom whenever I wasn't sleeping or at school. I tried to feed him chicken livers, and I carried his box around with me. One day we had a freak bout of sunny weather and I took him out on the front porch and sat with him for a while in the sun. Dad called me inside for something, and when I came back out on the porch, Tom was gone.

“He probably went off to die somewhere,” Dad said. “That's what cats do.”

“I guess.” I hadn't seen anything to suggest he could move, let alone crawl off to die somewhere.

About a week later, Calliope and I were playing in the backyard when Tom burst out of the bushes behind the house at a dead run and came to a sudden stop about three feet from us. We stared at him in shock while he looked back and forth between us. Then he let out a loud “Meow!” and fell over onto his side.

“Holy shit!” Calliope said. “Is he…?”

Tom looked up. Looked at us. Let out another “Meow!” and jumped to his feet and took off back into the bushes.

“What the holy hell was that?” Calliope asked.

I shook my head. I had no idea.

A few days further on, and Tom started showing up for afternoon feedings. Then he started hanging around on the porch with the other cats. He never was completely normal again. He went everywhere at a run, and when he ran his body tended to elongate, like his hind legs were just a little bit slower than his front legs. When they got too far behind him, his front legs would stop, wait for his hind legs to catch up, and then he'd start running again. He never let me pet his back, but sometimes he'd let me pet his stomach. Other times he'd let me put my hand on his stomach, then he'd close up on me like a trap, digging his claws into my arm and hand. Once he laid open my big toe to the bone. It took months to heal.

Not that I could blame him. I certainly didn't have any illusions that it made us even.

*   *   *

About six months after the thing with Tom, one of our other cats, a gray tabby named Kit-Kat, got hit by a car on the busy street out in front of our house. I didn't see the accident, but when I went out in the side yard I noticed what I thought was a piece of raw meat lying on the lawn. When I got closer I realized it was an embryonic kitten. The furry little body was part of a dried-up trail of blood and tissue that I followed across the yard until I found three more dead kittens—and then Kit-Kat, in the bushes near the back of the yard. She was clearly alive, curled up and licking blood off her fur, but also clearly very badly injured.

I went inside, and into my dad's room where he was reading.

“Kit-Kat got hit by a car,” I said. “I think she was pregnant. There are dead kittens all over the lawn.”

Dad stared at me for a minute, then he put down his book, got up, and went outside. I was following him out when I saw him coming back toward me. His face was dark purple. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the little pile of sticks I kept next to the porch. I used them as pretend swords and spears for my make-believe medieval adventures. One of the things in the pile was an old aluminum tent pole. It was part of a larger pole that used to be connected by elastic cords that ran inside the poles. When the elastic broke loose, I'd kept a section to use as a kind of bullwhip. It was an aluminum tube, about eighteen inches long, with eight or nine inches of elastic cord, like bungee cord, hanging out of the end.

I'd been obsessed with bullwhips since seeing
Raiders of the Lost Ark
the year before. I especially liked the idea of using a bullwhip to wrap around things, like tree branches and people's legs, like a sort of prehensile weapon. Once, when we were living on Aloha Street, I'd used a rubber snake to try to catch Thunder's legs. The movies made it look easy, but I couldn't get it to work on Thunder, and Dad came into the living room to find me on my hands and knees, following the dog around, swinging my long rubber snake in big looping arcs to see if I could make it coil around his feet. Thunder, for his part, was hopping over the snake and looking annoyed. Calliope was watching from the couch, offering opinions on my technique.