Bound (16 page)

Cattie stretched out along the front bench while Randall took the back, with the animals. In the absolutely silent dark and cold of their night half-on, half-off the road, Randall said, “I don’t like it when I feel responsible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I worry when I’m in charge.”

Cattie blinked, knowing from a long history with a reticent person that you had only to wait silently. You would learn. And so, eventually, Randall told her about his friend at boot camp.

“I woke up, and he was dead,” he said into the black interior of the car. “I never been so scared in all my life.”

Cattie listened, feeling suspended in time. Randall and his friend had been celebrating a twenty-first birthday; the friend had drunk every drink anyone had bought him, one after another. They’d somehow wound up back in their quarters, one waking in the morning, one not.

Some other person might have asked him to compare the experience of war casualties with the experience of a single death, but Cattie wasn’t that person. And Randall was grateful not to have to lie and pretend. “I don’t feel like I react the way other people do,” he confessed to her. “I never have.”

“Me either,” she said.

“That’ll cost you,” he said. She let these last words run through her head, over and over, without responding. They must have slept, Cattie later realized, because it surprised her to see the world outside the window when she woke, Randall already up and out there with it, his back to her as he peed. Steam rose in a delicate plume.

She wished it was possible to stand behind him and lay her head between his shoulder blades. She wanted to touch him without forcing him to respond.

And then he was gone, walking down the road like an advertisement for the army, his fatigues still shipshape, his stride purposeful, the ground sparkling with reflected light on ice. His back said to her he was embarrassed to have revealed his secret grief, his confusion about his friend. The sunlight warmed the car’s interior, and Cattie studied the U.S. Atlas. Seymour, he had said. He guessed they were between ten and twenty miles from it. He believed it’d be no more than eight hours before he would be back, with tire or tires, depending. He’d taken two hundred of her remaining four-hundred-some dollars for the purpose. He instructed her to lock the doors and to be glad that Bitch would bark her head off if anyone approached.

“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly.

“It’s not your fault the tire blew.”

By nightfall, she was wondering if his apology had to do with abandoning her. Now she regretted having passed up the two offers of help that had come her way during the long day. The two boys on their ATVs; the farmer in his pickup. From the radio she’d learned it was Friday. From the atlas she’d discovered she was still a long way from Houston. When she studied the car, standing in the ear-aching wind, she saw that it wasn’t one but two tires that were no longer functional, the car’s front end slanted decidedly downward as if disappointed or exhausted, resting on its chin. The day had alternated between sunny and cloudy, and her mood had shifted as dramatically as the clouds above. Optimism, despair. A funny story for Ito, later, or the beginning of a terrible nightmare, as yet to unfold. She’d walked a few hundred yards in both directions on the road, testing her cell phone reception. The boys on the ATVs had smirked in a very familiar, debilitating way, and that had sent her back to the locked car. “Sic ’em,” she practiced on Bitch, whom she discovered she could goad into growling.

The car was redolent of dog.

In the dark she grew angry. What sort of fools made a road that only two or three or four or five people drove on in a twenty-four-hour period? How goddamn useful was a road like that? Was it even officially a road if nobody fucking drove on it? Where was asshole Randall? Had he gotten lost? Or had he just decided to hell with her, and taken off with her money?

No, she realized, all of a sudden, interrupting her own inner rant. He wouldn’t leave the dogs. He might have left Cattie in this mess, Cattie and the embarrassed confession he’d made to her, but he wouldn’t have intentionally abandoned Bitch and the puppies. It felt comforting, to Cattie, to know something so surely. With the passenger-side door open, she oversaw yet another series of peeing with the slight animals, slighter still in the enormous plain and its relentless weather, one at a time in the hard ruts of the frozen roadway shoulder, their hindquarters shivering, their slitty little eyes squeezing out tiny beads of tears.

The same farmer drove up in the same truck the next morning and blew his horn. This time he had a woman in the front seat beside him. “I called the highway patrol,” he told Cattie when she stepped out of the car. “They’re backed up with the jackknifed big rigs on the interstate, so I brought my wife.”

He was lifting tires from the bed of his truck. The woman sat inside the truck, not looking at Cattie. It seemed it might have been better for the farmer to have come alone. “She’s shy,” he explained, dropping the first tire onto the ground beside Ito’s car. It spun for a long while before settling flat. “You go on and get in the cab. I’ll be done in a jiff.”

“I can help,” Cattie said.

He looked her over, then toward his truck. “She doesn’t bite. That’s just her natural expression.”

This turned out to be true. The wife scowled. She moved her jaw as if shifting something from one side of her mouth to the other, an object her molars worked at. She reminded Cattie of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, barrelish and monosyllabic. Her hairline seemed very low.

“My boyfriend walked to Seymour,” Cattie told the woman.

“Yeah,” said the woman, as if somebody had already fed her this ridiculous line.

“He’s in the army,” Cattie went on, “just back from Iraq.” Once more the molars went round, grinding, the woman staring out at her husband, whose arm was seesawing away at a jack, lifting Ito’s car.

It was a relief when he finished, bringing with him the frozen outer air, and the sound of recognizable words. “You drive this, Mama,” he said. To Cattie, he said, “I’ll make sure your alignment isn’t catty-wampus.”

“There’s dogs in the back,” Cattie told him, wishing she could ride with him instead. “Sometimes the puppies crawl under the pedals.” Catty-wampus indeed, she thought. Wampus might be her middle name.

They rode not far on the empty blacktop, turning in at the mailbox that said “Kinderknechts” on it. A trailer sat all alone in the middle of a large flat piece of fenced land. What did the fence hold in? Or out? There were tires on the trailer’s roof, which may have been where the ones on the car came from, and a large American flag whipping bravely in the cold wind over the front door. In the time it took to drive to the Kinderknechts’ home, Cattie realized she would have to claim to know how to operate a motor vehicle. She was going to have to drive away from Missouri in Ito’s car. The last time she’d tried to drive had been in a cemetery in Houston, her mother’s logic being that everybody there was already dead. That had been last summer, on a Saturday so hot and demoralizing that the two of them had designed six different activities in air conditioning. Driving lessons came in between an action movie downtown and dinner at the café around the block from their house.

Cattie tried to imagine driving Ito’s car into the Houston driveway. That didn’t seem impossible. But her imagination refused to accommodate the patchwork of states she was fairly sure existed between Missouri and Texas, never mind the very intimidating knotted network of freeways that made Houston, on the map, look like something strangled by a bundle of multicolored wires.

“Let’s put those pups in the lav,” said Mr. Kinderknecht, watching as Cattie led Bitch from the car. “We’ve raised us a couple litters in a bathtub, haven’t we, Mama?”

The Tasmanian Devil snorted.

The farmer studied Cattie’s face. Now that he’d solved the most obvious, first, problems, what came next? “Let’s all get out of the cold. And then I’ll park your car out by the road. That way your soldier boy’ll see it when he comes back.” Like his wife, the farmer didn’t seem to believe Cattie’s story about this alleged driver who’d left her in the ditch. Maybe she wouldn’t have believed it, either.

Without Randall there, Cattie thought it best to put Bitch on a leash.

Their home was warm, cluttered, close. The ceiling seemed too low, the furniture too large, the heat too high. Cattie sank into a leather couch and accepted a hot microwaved plate of leftovers from Mama the Tasmanian Devil. It was a huge serving, enough for two or three people, yet Cattie found herself eating everything. She could hardly keep her eyes open when she finished; what if they’d drugged her, laced the gravy with whatever …“Just lay down,” said the Devil, taking the empty plate. Her voice was deep, like a man’s, and slow. She provided a brightly colored afghan, “Go on, lay down. I’m giving your dogs some scraps.”

Randall would have objected, Cattie thought blearily; beef, he’d said, was not good for dogs.

She woke only because someone had sat down on the other end of the couch, sending up a poof beneath her. She’d slept all day with her feet on the floor, her top half folded over on the sofa. Just as if she were still in Ito’s car, and Randall was driving.

But it was Mama Devil on the end of the couch, in the driver’s seat. The evening news was playing. Her hosts were arranged on either side of her, Mrs. on the couch, Mr. in the oversize leather chair that had been jammed into this too-small space.

Just before a commercial break, there was a story about the serial killer next door in the state of Kansas. The killer had been sending messages for nearly a year now; his most recent some kind of word game, the one before a package in a Wichita park. “My mother lived next door to his first victims,” Cattie said, sitting up, rubbing at a crease in her face from the couch. Her hosts turned—like salt and pepper shakers, Cattie thought, opposites that fit together. The package contained the driver’s license of one of his victims, something stolen from the crime scene. It also held a doll. On the screen appeared a naked dark-haired Barbie, hands and feet secured with panty hose, a plastic bag tied over its head.

“Lord have mercy,” murmured Mr. Kinderknecht. His wife said, “Hmm,” in a skeptical tone, as if she’d seen worse treatment of toys.

Just then, the house of the first victims appeared on the screen. A simple structure, not unlike the houses Cattie had drawn in the first grade: two rectangles resting against each other, one upright, one lying down. The slats of siding, the sloped roof, windows with curtains tied back, a chimney, a single tree centered in front. Her mother’s home hadn’t actually been next door but three doors down. Still, same floor plan. Same basic first-grade assurance of lines and planes and angles and slope. Smoke wafting from that chimney. At first, every man in the neighborhood had been a suspect, her mother once told Cattie. A community suddenly suspicious of itself, turned inward with doubt and watchfulness. “Especially the deadbeats at my grandma’s. I come from a long line of bad seeds, baby. Be thankful you never knew them.” For a while, whenever anyone returned home to the grandmother’s house, they’d first pick up the baseball bat just inside the door, then the telephone receiver to be assured of a buzzing connection. The killer had cut the lines at the house down the block.

Cattie and the Kinderknechts stared at the small white house on the screen. Despite the fact that the house next door was not her mother’s, Cattie found herself tilting her head as if to look beyond the photo on the screen, to see that place nearby, the unremarkable structure where her mother had grown up.

CHAPTER 12

C
ATHERINE HAD CHOSEN
to sleep in the girl’s bedroom instead of the woman’s. Misty’s bedroom oppressed her, its tidiness, its hotel-room esthetic, the needle-stitched motto overhanging the bed about God granting serenity, and the bed itself—overloaded with small tasseled pillows, ornamental flammable spread, navy blue silk throw carefully draped at its foot. The effort it took to make and maintain this every morning, this stuff that then had to be tossed onto the floor, come night. Catherine felt the same enervating regret she had when she faced Misty’s photograph online: that something neutralizing and ultimately disappointing had happened to the girl she’d known. It wasn’t as if Misty’s life had seemed ideal, back in high school; it had been, in fact, a frightening specter, grubby and violent. A life Catherine had been allowed to visit, and then leave, like a privileged tourist dunked briefly into the third world but in possession of a round-trip ticket out. Misty did not have that luxury. She’d been a native to the place, suffered its hardships, carried its scars. For instance, as a toddler she’d fallen from an open car window and cracked her skull. The great-uncle who was in charge had neglected to either strap her in or take her with him inside the liquor store. Onto the pavement she’d tumbled; the uncle later complained of the inconvenience of having to haul her to the ER. You wouldn’t wish such a thing upon a child; would Catherine really have preferred discovering that Misty was still living like that?

No. Yet it seemed that that life, and the girl who lived it, had been
real
. Misty had had a personality unlike anyone else’s, peculiar and earned, her own. This bedroom, these recent professional photographs, had the feel of borrowed identity—that wasn’t an actual bridge they were standing on, it traversed only the floor of a photographer’s studio. The sky behind was made of paper. Throughout the house, there seemed to be a great deal of useless adornment—seashells gathered around the sink spigot and toilet bowl lid. Random hardback books—sold by the yard! Catherine knew, having seen ads in decorating journals—placed on shelves, the various pairs of bookends—statues, geodes, snow globes—on either side the true focal point. Business garments hung in dry-cleaning bags, matching low-heeled pumps the colors of sherbet lined up below.

She had shoved aside those plastic bags and shiny shoes, plowing through Misty’s closet for any sign of a current secret life, some hidden message from the past one. But Misty either didn’t possess such a thing as a secret life, or knew better than to hide its evidence at home. She lived, after all, with that most persistent and gifted detecting snoop, a teenage girl.

And that teenage girl’s room was a welcome mess, in Catherine’s opinion. Here she found the detritus of a recognizable person—messy, but genuine. A person who’d made her bedroom into her proclamation of self, that riot of likes and dislikes and righteous opinions and laughable lapses, the walls festooned with bumper stickers and pins and posters and graffiti, the shelves and drawers and closet overspilling with many seasons’ worth of beloved trinkets and gear, disguises and embellishments. On the ceiling, an unfinished mural starring red skeletons apparently at a party for the dead: smoking cigarettes, clutching bottles, throwing back their skulls and dropping open their jaws in laughter, a couple in the corner with their various leg and arms bones entwined in what might become skeleton sex. Misty’s daughter, she and her friends, had painted those characters. Stood on chairs and desk, brushes in hand, faces tilted up using paint the color of blood. Misty had allowed it, and that cheered Catherine.

Or maybe this had been done without permission, girls stoned and nihilistic, and there’d been an argument later, and lingering resentment, smoldering ill will.
My house!
the mother would roar;
My room!
the girl would counter. Catherine could remember being sustained by feelings like that toward her mother, the fuel of injustice simmering, ever-ready to erupt.

Catherine laundered the bedsheets she found beneath the skeletons. She slept in this girl’s crowded den. The room was so full of what
was
there, under the red, nimbly dead figures on the ceiling, that its missing objects didn’t immediately strike her. But there were no photographs—not of friends or pets or relatives, not of young Catherine herself. And no mirrors. No opportunity, in here, to examine and loathe the always imperfect adolescent face and body. Catherine ran her eyes over the exclamations on the walls, contradiction everywhere—gleeful cheer next to fatalistic gloom—the piles of books and DVDs and stuffed toys on the floor, this warehouse of excess and life being constantly, desperately revised, layered upon. A life coming clear to Catherine, or at least growing more specific, intriguing. And also heartbreaking for its feverish casting about: Boy bands! Political causes! Three different high school pennants!
I heart mutts. Buck Fush! Gaze long into an abyss, and the abyss will gaze back into you.
Catherine was old enough to be this girl’s mother, yet the sensation the bedroom brought up in her felt distinctly un-adult. Maybe a person never ceased seeking her niche. In here, books meant for reading rather than decorating. Books about damaged children and their heroic helpers. Books about true crime. Books assigned in English classes that some students, some girls, this girl, would keep forever.

Attending the skeleton party overhead, one dog guest. Sitting at the foot of a lone figure in the corner. The person’s skull was tilted, one hand’s many bones stretched toward the dog’s up-tipped skeleton snout.

That red figure was Cattie, Catherine understood. Spectator. And most likely she had painted the ceiling by herself. Not with friends. Maybe with her mother.

She could almost see them, the two of them standing on the desktop, bucket of red paint, two small brushes, stretching up and creating a party on the ceiling. It was something Catherine and Misty would have done themselves, once upon a time.

The house’s air conditioner went on and off at intervals. Every time it ceased there were two heaving final breaths, like an exhausted monster sighing in the cellar. The girl would have thought that, too, Catherine thought. She and Misty would have an inside joke about it.

She listened to the messages on the answering machine. Queries about missed meetings, a reminder from dental associates, vote-getting messages from the Democratic Party, other solicitations, hang-ups, the public library concerning an overdue audio book, and three from a company called PetSafe. Catherine backed up the machine and noted the number. They were calling about a chipped dog; she used the same service for her own.

“This notification is nine days old,” the woman at headquarters chastised Catherine. “Just after New Year’s, in fact.” What sort of responsible owner waited more than a week to respond? Why bother with a microchip if you didn’t have the time to follow through?

“It’s complicated,” Catherine said. This was Oliver’s way of defusing a person who was about to offer unsolicited advice.

“Nevertheless, an attempt was made to contact you,” the woman said. “We stand by our commitment to returning every pet to its proper home, but the owner has to meet us halfway.”

“I’m not the owner,” Catherine said. “It wasn’t me you were trying to contact. The owner died.”

A silence fell upon the line. When the owner died, so much became frayed in an otherwise flawless system. The car had not only gone off the road but was then unfound for a while; the bereaved daughter was still at large; the executrix heir had a married name and forwarding address; and now the dog—incarcerated two states away! In Arizona at a shelter, the woman at PetSafe reported. She recited a phone number and hung up without saying good-bye.

“We hold them for five days, if they’re chipped,” the next woman told Catherine. “Three days if not.”

“And after five days?”

“Adopted out or put down,” she said. The general odds, it seemed. Max, the dog was named. Inscribed on the ceramic water bowl in the kitchen. In the family portrait by the phone dock in the hallway, a black-and-brown-mottled creature that looked like a coyote or hyena, wilder and leaner than Catherine’s chunky bred animals, smiling nonetheless between the two people on the fake bridge, in front of a false blue sky, some plastic shrubbery. Misty and Cattie, two versions of the same girl.

How had their dog gotten from Colorado to Arizona, anyway?

“I hope it was adopted,” Catherine said.

“It’s always good to hope that,” agreed the woman on the phone.

Later that afternoon the doorbell rang just as Catherine had fallen asleep on the couch. She had made a mistake in coming to Houston over the weekend; it was the kind of error she was prone to, not thinking far enough ahead. Not until Monday could she visit the law office to sign paperwork. On the other hand, she was telling herself as she began to drift away, perhaps these extra days had allowed her to choose to sign those papers. Staying in Misty’s house was what would convince her to …

The woman at the door came bearing a Christmas gift bag and introduced herself as the next-door neighbor. “When Misty left town, she asked me to collect her mail and her newspapers.”

“Come in.”

“This is the mail. I saved everything, you never know.”

“Yes, that’s smart.” You never did know, Catherine thought, remembering the lawyer’s letter that had almost gotten away from her, the one that started everything.

“Did you want the newspapers?” The woman feigned panic that she might have done the wrong thing, recycling the daily local paper. “I didn’t think to save those.”

“No, no.” This was yet another type that her husband loathed: the person who has to be assured of her proper behavior.
Thank you
, is all she ever wanted to hear.

“And then I saw about the accident. Terrible!” The woman made a face as if she’d encountered an odor, trying to settle the bag of mail on the coffee table, where it kept falling over, finally giving up and letting it spill. “So I just kept picking up the mail, what else was I going to do? Bless her heart. And what in the world has become of poor Cattie?” The woman settled into the center of the sofa, looking around the room in a way that let Catherine know she’d not been welcomed inside the house before, or at least not lately.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Catherine said. “Thank you,” she added, for good measure. She took a chair on the other side of the table. The woman looked at her expectantly, chin and brows lifted, entitled to know how it was Catherine was in possession of a key. And Catherine would have been willing to tell some other kind of neighbor, divulge the strange circumstance that had brought her here. But not this neighbor.

“Beverage?” she finally asked. “Tea? Coffee?” Vodka, she might have offered, had it been somebody else.

“If there’s a pot made …” She followed Catherine into the kitchen. It was neither of their homes, and each had a different claim to it. Come Monday, it would be Catherine’s property, hers to oversee. The neighbor, meanwhile, informed Catherine that her grandson had lived with her ten years earlier and been little Cattie’s best friend. She and Misty had shared a gardener, Ernesto, who was keeping up Misty’s yard still.

“Does Misty owe him money?”

“Oh, I’ve been covering it.”

“So she owes
you
money.” The woman was exhausting. But retrieving a checkbook from her purse and writing out the amount due permitted Catherine a way to turn their encounter into something recognizable, services rendered, exchange made, coffee drunk, visit over. “Thank you,” she said a half dozen more times, the last words as the woman disappeared behind the closing front door.

And in the bag of mail, the life Catherine had assumed must exist, the one she’d been seeking, finally arrived.

Misty Mueller had a pen pal in prison, a man whose correspondence came religiously, his seven-digit identification penciled on each envelope’s upper left corner, the Huntsville imprint dated every week for the months of October and November. The final letter, dated December 8, was addressed instead to “Whom Remains.”

This was the letter Catherine felt entitled to open.

I am sorry I did not know Miss Mueller had passed so I hope you will forgive this man if you saw what I wrote before. Please destroy those previous letters, I plead of you. Miss Mueller was a friend to me and time after time she would say to me I should wait til I know the facts before making hastie judgements. I did it again about her I cannot believe I did. It is true that I have learned nothing from experience (she would say that to me too!) Her passing away makes me more alone then you can know. In the paper it says a daughter is her survivor. If this is you, her daughter, whom remains from her, I want to say that your mother wrote to me so often to relive my solitude I looked for her mail to me and felt like I had a kindred spirit in the world. Someday if not today you will understand that a kindred spirit is like a light that is shining in a room of a house you can remember where you were happy with somebody a long time in the past. Its corny (believe me I can hear your mom saying that to me) but she was that light in a far away place and I cant believe its gone. I will keep this simple and say goodbye. And please if you are forgiving you will not judge me from those other letters.

It was signed “Ohell.” The envelopes he regretted sending lay stacked on the table. Catherine was tempted to open them—the use of the pencil instead of pen already had given the man some kind of childish appeal, to her, his smudged earnestness, the fact that he printed on lined paper, all of it so reminiscent of grade school and sincere labor and the beginnings of putting feelings into words, and words onto paper. As an incarcerated adult, he was capable of anything Catherine could imagine; he might be the unknowing father of that daughter he had not known about. He hadn’t mentioned the possibility, hadn’t speculated upon it—and yet Misty could have kept such a secret, Catherine knew.