Casebook (32 page)

“Like having a wife didn’t get in the way!”

“She believed him when he said things like that, though, because she’s always wondering: Is she good enough? Could she
improve
? She wants to improve us, too.”

“But she’s a really good person. She’s my favorite. Of the moms.” Hector kicked sand. “Eli wasn’t very worried about improving. If he had any conscience, he would have committed suicide by now.”

I shrugged. “I heard her say once that if two people like them were lucky enough to find each other, there was a God. They said they were going to join a church. And they were going to become birdwatchers.”

“Him with his two wives. That’d go over well with the congregation. Maybe it’s only good people who worry about being bad.”

“And her crimes, like forgetting his birthday. They go flimsy against
his
.” I’d been mortified when the Mims forgot his hometown. I’d felt guilty about my not wanting Eli to move in. Not anymore. If he was evil, did that make us good? We seemed better to me now. It was a relief, in a way.

We heard the highway, where headlights staggered on, smearing the fog.

“I’m jealous of you,” Hector said.

“Me? Why?” I was truly dumbfounded. Why would anyone be jealous of me?

“At least you got rid of him. I wish I could get rid of Surferdude.” Hector picked up a whole apple from the sand, wiped it on his shirt, and bit into it.

“I’m not sure we’re rid of Eli forever.” Sometimes, when I was falling asleep, I imagined that he’d come to our door with a stack of wrapped presents and a long, long story that would make all of it forgivable, like in a book.

When Philip picked us up, he invited me along to see Jules playing Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
, but I thought I’d better get home. Then, once I was there, I snapped at the Boops to clean their room.

The house had loosened its angles. The kitchen floor felt sticky and slanted. I swept every night after dinner, but that didn’t keep it clean. Mail piled up in random stacks on all the surfaces. The Boops’ beds stayed unmade until I yanked the scrambled sheets up before I said good night. Boop Two still didn’t like to read. “Boring,” she said about
To Kill a Mockingbird
. “Scary” was her excuse for stopping
Harry Potter
.

I checked the Mims’s medicine cabinet. Every couple days I counted the vitamin Cs in the Xanax bottle. There were still thirty.

After the play, Hector’s dad dropped him off. They worried about us now the way we used to worry about them.

The last day before vacation, we stayed after school to collect the jackets and scarves from the cardboard boxes we’d set out around campus for the FLAGBTU cold-weather drive. Through the glass of a door, I glimpsed Maude in a school desk, facing a wall, her shoulders heaving. I’d been at Cottonwoods since kindergarten, so I’d seen most people cry. But not her. Whenever Maude had any emotion in my presence, it felt off. As if it were an act. What she really meant was
Like me
. And what I had in me was
I don’t. Can’t
. But this was different. She didn’t know I was watching.

I stepped into the classroom and she looked up.

“We’re probably going to put our cat to sleep,” she said.

“Wait, didn’t you have two cats?” They had one they kept in the house, I thought, and an outside one that tormented it.

“Tomcat and Mittens. I’m talking about Tomcat.”

Hector burst in, then. “Oh, hi, Maude. How did you like the math test?”

“Not bad,” she said.

Hector and I looked at each other. “I thought it was effing impossible,” I said.

“Did you study the supplementary problems?”

Instead of answering—I mean, it was pretty obvious we hadn’t studied the supplementary problems—I told Hector about Maude’s cat. She said he’d attacked the neighbor’s maltidoodle.

“Has he ever bitten a person?” Hector asked, with that weird intensity he got.

“He did!” she said. “Oh my God, this three-year-old was toddling along, with my brother’s friend, and he jumped up and bit his knee.”

Maude’s mom wanted to give the cat away, but no one would take him. Hector was following this story so intently I wondered, all of a sudden, could
he
like Maude? She was mine, kind of! Even though I hadn’t decided I really wanted her.

“If you bring him to the pound,” I said, “they’ll kill him. Cat adoptions are way rarer than dogs.” I knew from my sister that they put down eight or nine cats a week.

“Tomcat has issues, but he doesn’t deserve to die. We’re trying to find him a home. There’s an organization that places animals, but they have a long wait list. My mom asked what would get them to for sure take Tomcat. They said fifteen hundred dollars.”

“We’ll do it for three,” Hector said.

“What?” I said. “How do you think—”

“Ask your mom,” he said to Maude, interrupting me.

^*
Then I come to this thing about you
flushing
the Xanax. I didn’t remember you did that. What were you thinking! The point should have been: she gets the vitamin C, we get the Xanax. Win/Win
.

61 • A Revenge Plot

Maude told us the next day that her mom would pay three hundred dollars, but she needed to be certain nothing bad would happen to Tomcat. They wanted him to have a good life.

“This couple we know,” Hector said, “they
love
animals. Even difficult ones.”

The mammal was huge. It must have weighed half as much as Boop One. Maude’s brother handed us a crate. “Now, I’ll be happy to call the new owners,” their mother said. Maude stood there, barefoot in a skirt, holding Mittens, the fluffy indoors cat. Her legs were very, very long, her feet small. “Can you manage?”

We carried the heavy thing, me in front, Hector in the rear. Maude walked us to the edge of her lawn. “Where’s his new home?”

“Pasadena,” I mumbled.

Then, when she cartwheeled, her skirt dropped open so I saw tight hot-pink shorts.

I hissed as soon as we turned the corner. “How’re we going to transport this oversize vermin to Pasa
de
na?”

“It won’t be as heavy without the crate.”

“We need the crate, dumbo. You can’t tie a cat to a doorknob. What if they’re not home? We’ve got to leave it with food and water. Probably at night, so they don’t see us. You haven’t thought this through. Are you planning for your dad to drive us?”

“He’d make us tell your mom. Do you think she wants revenge?”

Confucius had appeared on the blackboard:
BEFORE YOU EMBARK ON A JOURNEY OF REVENGE, DIG TWO GRAVES
. “She’s not there yet,” I said.

“I’m there,” Hector said.

The car sputtered and then spurted forward like a go-kart. “See, I’m not a bad—”

“Look where you’re going!” My hand hovered in the air, ready to grab the wheel. Not that I knew how to steer. “Don’t talk.” I stayed mad. The vehicle wobbled and veered too close to the parked cars on my side. I ducked in toward the middle. Before we passed under the 405, something changed, and the motion felt different, as if we were sliding on ice. Then the car sputtered to a stop.

“What? Whoa. You’re out of gas, man! I can’t believe you!”

“Kat is such a flake.”

“Don’t blame your mom. She probably would’ve filled it up the minute she took it out.”

We bickered like a long-married couple. I said he had to call his dad. He wanted to try the Mims. “She’d be kinder,” he said. We blamed each other. Finally, Hector dialed Ben Orion, who sounded extremely annoyed. Forty minutes later, he arrived carrying a can of gas with a spout like the Tin Man’s, still angry. We saw the police side of him. He unscrewed the cap and poured it in. He nudged Hector out of the driver’s seat and silently steered us to a Union 76, where he filled the tank and paid.

“You guys realize you’ve broken the law,” he finally said.

We tried to explain about the cat and Pasadena. His mouth stayed in a straight line. “I don’t like this at all.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t expect you would.”

He started driving. We stayed quiet. Finally, I asked where we were going.

“I’m driving this car back to wherever you found it.”

“What about your car?” I said.

“I’ll have to get a taxi. This time I’m going to let you pay me.”

We tried to argue that Hector could drive now, but Ben wouldn’t hear of it. In the Palisades, we had to tell him where to turn to get to Hector’s aunt’s house.

“What about the cat?” Hector said.

“I suggest we take a taxi to my car, then I drive to where you got the cat, you tell the truth and give it back.”

“But it’ll die otherwise!” I explained.

Ben Orion just shook his head.

“He likes the girl,” Hector said. That was a cheap shot.

I started to object, and we talked for a while sitting in the car outside Hector’s aunt’s house. Ben Orion wanted us to put the psychopath behind us. “The mystery’s solved,” he said. “Case closed. Now it’s just life. Next time I see you, we won’t even talk about
Eli Lee. And,
and
, you’ll have each read a book on a new subject. You’ve gotta develop hobbies.” Hobbies! That word seemed to belong to another era.

But we agreed. When the taxi he’d called arrived, he stepped out. “You sure you don’t want to get a ride and return the cat?”

We shook our heads.

“You’re going to try to deliver that thing, aren’t you?” he said.

I didn’t answer one way or the other. I shrugged. I didn’t want to lie.

“I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like this at all.”

By the time we got off the bus in Pasadena, the sky was deep blue with one visible star and a bright crescent moon. When we found the street again, the house looked like it had before. No Christmas lights. Only a sad wreath on the door, the kind you bought at Ralphs, with a fake paper-velvet ribbon.

We lifted the crate with Tomcat balancing inside and hauled it to the edge of their lawn. We’d planned to put Tomcat on the porch, but now that seemed risky. Maybe they’d hear the thing meowing in its crate. I slipped in a treat from my pocket. When we turned around and started walking, Tomcat made a sound like nothing I’d ever heard from a cat. Then we ran.

I felt relieved that Eli’s house had no lights. He must have promised lights to his own kid if he’d promised
me
lights. I was glad he’d been bad to that kid, too.

“Hey, what happened with the puppy?” Hector asked, on the long ride home.

“She came back with more pictures on her phone. But we’re not getting a dog. She just likes thinking that we’re the kind of family that could. We can’t afford a breeder dog anyway.”

“Want to make a mutant when we get home?”

We dug out the bag of half-ruined animals, cut and sewed in a desultory way, like we had for days and days in middle school, but
we’d lost the heart for it. The next time Zeke came over, they went home in the grocery bag to his house, and we never mentioned them again. For all I know, they’re still there. His mother is an artist and doesn’t go on rampages to throw things away. She keeps household odds and ends, believing they’ll come to some eventual, higher use.

Hector didn’t go away that year for break. His dad was stuck grading finals. And his aunt was losing it. “Christmas is the worst time of year if your boyfriend’s married,” Hector said. “She should break up with him. But he woos her back every January.” Hector sussed out the Bundt cakes in our kitchen. I was sick of them already. “We should give one to Ben,” he said. We rode our bikes, with a red-wrapped cake in the front wire basket. But Ben wasn’t home. He hadn’t called us either. We left the cake in his mailbox.

62 • My Sin

I told Boop Two she could stay up late.
It’s vacation!
But she wanted to go to sleep. And then the house went quiet. I puttered, wishing my mom would get home so we could watch an episode of
The Wire
. It turned eleven, then twelve, and I began to search on her computer.

In the drafts folder I found an unsent e-mail to Sare.

I can’t even kill myself because the kids

That stunned me. No period.
Because the kids
what? Or did she mean because
of
us. I’d once heard Eli wail like an animal. I thought it was him, anyway. I googled
suicide
. There was a hotline number, but that was for if you were about to jump off a bridge, not if you were scared about your mom. One in the morning, and she still wasn’t home. I paced. I called her cell phone. Her mailbox
was full. She hadn’t said where she was going tonight, only that I was babysitting. I thought of calling Marge, but now it was really late. I tried to make myself pray, but I didn’t know how; we’d been raised without religion. Fucking mixed marriage. What was I supposed to do? I started counting. Prime numbers and then number chains. I thought of calling the police, but I’d have to say her name, and I didn’t know if they kept records. I didn’t want it to affect her job. I dialed my dad and got his machine. I kept counting. I worked myself into a weird state. I counted and rocked; maybe this
was
praying. I never told anyone, even Hector.
^*