Bound (6 page)

Outside, the sirens had ceased, the helicopters had flown away. The silence had the quality of waiting, the trembling feel at the end of any sounded alarm. The air kind of vibrated. Catherine let loose her husband’s hand just before he could let loose hers.

“I’m going to take a pill,” he said. “I have too many things to do tomorrow.” He rolled from the bed. “You want one?”

“Yes,” she said. “Plus something else for the headache.”

“Good idea.”

After they took their capsules, sharing the water glass, kissing with cool damp lips, married couple committing to a mutual dulled slumber, Oliver decided to retire to his own room. Catherine curled away from him, her back to his departing back and the shutting door.

By habit, she reached to grasp the metal rosebud on the far side of the headboard. This had always been her side; she’d seen the bed’s brass origins only because her worrying hand, over many years, had unearthed the shine by clasping in her palm the chilly ribbed rosebud. One hand on it, the other tracing the tiny six-pronged scar on her shoulder. Now she waited for the wave of narcotic and painkiller to wash over her. She did not want to lie awake revisiting any more of the past, where, beside her, Misty had lain. She wished Oliver had not left her here with that vacated space.

She could go to him, she thought, she could crawl into his bed the way she had her parents’ bed as a child, seeking assurance of protection. She could also summon the dogs from their cave beneath her, merely whisper, “Boys,” and pat the comforter, where they would land like logs and rest their chins upon her legs.

But instead she lay alone, in this bed where she and Misty had read pornography together, here where they’d suffered hangovers, where they’d laughed long into the night. Eventually they slept, but more often they were inexhaustibly conversant, buzzing and pleased, two teenage girls burning bright as neon in the dark.

CHAPTER 6

T
HE MAN IN
JOANNE’S ATTIC
came downstairs on the first day of the new year. Maybe it was his resolution. Two thousand and five: inaugurated the night before in Montpelier with gunshots and banging pans, just the way it was in Houston. Cattie had spent the evening wandering up the hill from Joanne’s house, watching at the top in a bundled crowd as a meager display of fireworks was set off. The bright bursts of color in the sky reflected on the snowy hills. Everyone clapped and hooted every time, waving fizzling sparklers in their hands; small towns reminded Cattie of her public school events back in Houston, the insulated adoration and devotion of a very biased group. Both Joanne and Ito had gone home to New Hampshire for New Year’s, having declined to visit there at Christmas. They weren’t much alike, Ito and Joanne, one too happy, one too glum, but about their blended family they completely agreed: awful, and tolerable only with a sidekick along. Now it was just Cattie and the soldier in the attic. His name was Randall, but even Joanne, lax landlady, didn’t know if it was his first or last. He paid rent in highly tangible cash; otherwise he comported himself like a ghost, drifting down when everyone else was asleep or away, leaving traces of himself that were nearly imperceptible, occasionally emitting a noise from his upstairs quarters, a strange bump or step, something that might be mistaken for the house itself, a rodent running over its roof, a blown tree limb banging at its siding.

Down, however, he came on New Year’s Day morning, dressed in a uniform (the new camouflage, pixilated patches of tan and yellow, boots the color of gourmet mustard), carrying a razor and can of shaving cream. In the bathroom off the kitchen he filled the sink and scraped away at his face, having passed through the room without saying a word to Cattie. As if she were the ghost.

“I can make coffee,” she said eventually.
So what?
she answered herself.

“Fine,” he said. She delivered the cup to the lid of the toilet, where he stared at it briefly as if they’d had a misunderstanding. Maybe they had.

“I’m Cattie,” she said, leaving the small room.
So what?
He had finished shaving and was peering into the mirror at different tipping angles, noting his own features curiously. Cattie knew the feeling. Avoid a mirror long enough, and you became a kind of curiosity to yourself, some internal idea going smash against the reality, and never in a good way. He was not much older than she, a fact that was made clearer when his cheeks were smooth, when his physique was obviously young—unfinished and still disproportionate—inside a uniform that did not quite fit. He could have been one of the students over at St. Sincere, if he were a photographed headshot rather than a person in motion. His evasive facial expressions and his jittery movements said he’d never been treated as a pampered or beloved child.

She and Ito had researched and discussed PTSD ad nauseum; this tenant appeared to be a textbook specimen.

“Randall,” he said; she repeated her name in response. He didn’t seem an enthusiastic drinker of coffee but a resigned one, as if Cattie had ordered him to do it. If Ito were here, he would have begun a peppering assault on this man, querying him relentlessly, merrily: the uniform, the strange hours, the horrors of war—how did Randall feel concerning the Iraqis, and President Bush, and weaponry, and what did he think of conscientious objection? Did he hate those cowards? Ito never, ever ran out of questions. Cattie had some curiosity about Randall, but depended on conjecture rather than inquiry. She was an awkward inquisitor; the practice did not come naturally to her, reluctant as she was to reveal much about herself. About Randall she had decided the day before that it was foolish to be afraid of him. If he’d wanted to do something to her, last night would have been his chance. Her bedroom, that former little boy’s room, had a simple eye-and-hook lock; he could have broken through it with one swift kick, so she’d not bothered to latch it. She didn’t feel fatalistic, exactly, but was operating as if waiting for instructions that made sense to her. This period in her life was a lull, longer than the usual lulls she guided herself through (cavity-filling at the dentist; class periods that bored her; road trips during which she knew she’d be carsick). She’d gotten plenty of advice that didn’t make sense to her, delivered to her daily on her cell phone’s voice mail, but none, so far, that felt absolutely correct. The fact that somebody was paying her phone bill impressed her; if the service ceased, she supposed she might have a motive to step back into the world. That, or when she had spent all of her money.

Already Ito had suggested they drive to New York City to pull cash from an ATM there, just to throw off the authorities, those mysterious figures who would be waiting for just such an alert.

“You want to help me with something?” Randall asked suddenly. He still stared at the mirror, but Cattie assumed he must be speaking to her.

“Maybe.” She had completed the crossword puzzle, something she had once made fun of her mother for caring about. These commemorative days, the seasonal lazy hush between Christmas and New Year’s, could not help but summon up their earlier versions, Cattie and her mother in restaurants or their own home, lounging on the couch, exchanging gifts, toasting with a glass of ginger ale, suffering the few bites of black-eyed peas on New Year’s Eve to assure the next year’s good luck. A new year had begun—Cattie felt herself now poised atop a blank scrolling calendar, a lengthy furl made of shining blank aluminum, a blinding slide into the void. Time would launch her, and down she would fly.

Ito and Joanne weren’t due back until nightfall.

“All right,” she told Randall. They left the house on foot, Randall several yards ahead of Cattie. If she hastened to catch up, he raced forward once more, so she gave up and followed. In general, Cattie did not care what people made of her, so tagging along after a crazy hell-bent soldier on New Year’s Day in Montpelier, Vermont, didn’t bother her. Not the way it would appear to others, anyhow.

The East was different from the West, where Cattie had grown up, and one difference was that the woods seemed always nearby here. Clearly the town had been carved into them. There were no reassuring flat plains to consider, and the sky was frequently cloudy, so that navigating by the sun was also impossible. She’d not known which direction was north since arriving last August. She’d not known she’d cared which direction was north until then, either. She hadn’t realized she actually possessed orientation until it was rendered opaque, and then she missed it, imagined her mind like a compass spinning aimlessly. But now Randall was leading her away from downtown and toward a forest. This wasn’t necessarily frightening; the forest was everywhere, and for all she knew, there were houses inside that cluster of trees, a whole neighborhood or other little village, some civilized place from which they were going to pick up something he said he’d found yesterday. He couldn’t bring it back alone, was the deal. “And damned if I can find a box,” he complained about Joanne’s. Nor a basket or wagon or wheelbarrow.

“How did you get here?” Cattie asked. He made the hitchhiker’s fist, led by an extended thumb.

Under the train overpass they went, Randall storming ahead, Cattie trailing, past the last dilapidated wooden buildings, those places where derelicts and crack addicts would have lived, if they were in Houston, but where birds nested here, and then the two of them were in the sudden hush of the woods. A new quiet settled, more quiet than the quiet of the town in the holiday morning; the snow was clean, untouched. Now he waited for her to reach him. It seemed warmer among the trees, also darker. “I’m pretty sure it was right along here,” he was saying under his breath, moving more tentatively now, and definitely speaking to himself. For a long time they made footprints in fresh snow; beneath it, pieces of the forest floor were slick with ice, and Cattie could hear Randall breathing, muttering random piloting information about his own route the day before. She had not been aware that he left the house for walks in the woods; was there a hatch on the roof from which he sprang like a jack-in-the-box? She might have shared with him her own passion for walking, especially walking at night, but sensed that he wouldn’t necessarily welcome an interruption from her, nor mention of the ways they resembled one another. Resembling others might also remind him in a bad way of the military, the haircuts and outfits and those famous group marches. Like her, walking for him seemed to be a way of thinking, and today it was about retracing his steps.

She’d not brought a proper coat to the East Coast, and that fact was abundantly clear today. She’d not known how to imagine the East, nor had her mother. They’d showed up shell-shocked, giving each other meaningful glances during orientation, sitting together at lunch making unkind remarks about Cattie’s new peers and instructors, who went by Tutor instead of Teacher. Students were addressed by their last names. “If you don’t like it, you can come home,” her mother offered before driving away. “Right, Mueller?”

“Yeah,” Cattie agreed. Her mother had often surprised Cattie with her ability to simplify a problem. At the mall, for instance, when the jeans wouldn’t fit and Cattie was near tears, her mother had shrugged, sitting patiently on the dressing room bench. “There’s a million pairs of jeans in this mall,” she’d said. “Do you really think we can’t find some for you? No big deal.” That was her motto, in general: no big deal. When Cattie hadn’t been invited to parties, her mother had said, “Most teenage girls are assholes. Why would you want to spend time with them?” And then they would go to a movie on a school day, or to an expensive restaurant on the roof of a skyscraper, or off to Austin to swim in the springs. “We have money,” she explained. “If there wasn’t money, it’d be different, believe me. A lot of this shit that is not a big deal would become an enormous deal. A royal pain in our ass.” Her mother only worried when Cattie was without her. It seemed, then, that their separation was the only big deal, especially a separation in which Cattie could not be found.

One just like this, Cattie thought. Nobody knew where she was now. Her current flimsy connection to humanity, in the form of Ito and Joanne, had been effectively nullified when she stepped out the door behind Randall. Who would know to look in these woods, should the time come? At what point, she asked herself in her present cold, lulled mood, would she begin to worry about her own sanity? She was following a clearly unstable person into an obviously alien landscape. Woods were where dead bodies were found; the untouched snow suggested nobody came here very often. In general, she was neither so curious nor so dumb as to be reckless, so it wasn’t for the adventure or out of idiocy that she was making this trek. And she wasn’t suicidal, she told herself, although it also seemed to her that she couldn’t see much point in carrying on. Not that she would end her own life, just that she would probably not offer much resistance if someone else saw fit. The instinct for survival, maybe, would have left her. That funhouse slide she imagined as the new year’s commencement was a long chute into nowhere.

“Hear that?” Randall said, stopping abruptly, hands flapped backward as if Cattie were making a ruckus. Lost in her philosophizing, she bumped into him. She did hear; her mother’s recollected words suddenly evaporated, Cattie refreshed to her profoundly silent surroundings. Faint frantic mewling; she looked up into the trees, certain the noise was made by birds. “Careful where you step,” Randall ordered, forcing her gaze downward. He was gently testing the dusted surface of snow with his yellow boots before setting one after the other. And then there was a clearing, a sheltered needle-covered hollow beneath a pine tree, and in it a writhing black living form that became, upon closer inspection, upon proper focusing, a litter of puppies. “The bitch ran when she heard us,” Randall said, squatting now. “See, they still got milk on their snouts. That’s what happened yesterday. We just gotta sit till she comes back. She probably drug one of them with her, too.” He counted the complaining puppies aloud. “I get seven.” Cattie knelt on the other side of the squirming mess and made her own count.

“Me, too.”

“Dumbass Mama definitely took one with. She’ll be back. Don’t touch ’em. Not yet.” So they squatted on the frozen ground under a tree nearby and waited. It was excruciating, listening to the puppies cry and whimper. Had she known where they were going, and why, Cattie would have brought supplies. She’d cared for small orphaned creatures many times before; it was a girl trademark.

Although had any of those orphans actually survived, now that she thought about it? And why, she wondered, had Randall felt the need to shave before coming to do this? It was something Ito would have asked as soon as they left the street and entered the woods.

“Some bastard body dumped her babies here,” he confided to Cattie, leaning close so as to keep still. “My dad did it all the time, and the good bitches would find the spot. The good bitches would bust out of the basement and run, and not stop running, till they found their babies. It’s not much a man that can’t do better than that.” Cattie offered no comment, storing away Randall’s words for Ito, who would be ecstatic to hear them. Randall hailed from the South, she knew now, although a deeper and more rural one than her South. She would not have minded if he continued telling her about his home, offering the accidental sagaciousness of phrases like “some bastard body” or “the good bitches” or “not much a man” for her to ponder. Thinking was warming her up.

When the mama dog finally returned, her babies’ whimpering had grown weak and without hope, and the eighth puppy was not with her, apparently having been stowed safely away elsewhere. Randall sighed. “Sheet,” he said flatly. “She only got half her instincts working. If we weren’t here, a coyote mighta eaten her others while she hid the one.” He was slowly crawling toward the dog, moving to match her movements. “Course she wouldn’t of left these if she hadn’t heard us coming. And course she won’t survive unless a human helps. Did we do you dogs a favor?” he asked the mama softly. “Did we really, when we made you our little whores?” As he neared her, he put his hand in one of his many uniform pockets, bringing out a hunk of white cheese. This he held patiently before himself, squatting like a child, forcing her now to breach the distance. The dog’s hesitation was painful, accompanied as it was by the renewed cries of her puppies, not to mention her slack belly, vivid rib cage, and dangling teats. She looked like a farm dog, black-and-white mutt, ears laid flat in fear, starving out here, helpless and rattled. Randall simply waited on his skinny haunches, turning the graying cheese cube in his dirty fingers. He was a nailbiter, Cattie noted; his camouflage might have been useful in the desert, but he was utterly obvious here in forested verdant Vermont, place of Christmas trees and snowmen. When the dog finally stepped forward to nip the cheese away, he revealed a belt, whipped from another pocket like a magician’s trick, and lassoed efficiently around her neck. She struggled, but she was not a large animal, and she was weakened, accustomed to people and the devices they used to control her, the commands they gave to which she unthinkingly responded. His desire to capture her was far larger than her desire to resist.