Child of My Heart (19 page)
I touched her arm. The blood was sticky on her skin.
“Hey, little swan,” I said.
She raised her head to look at me. The blood was smeared on her cheek and her chin, she may even have had some of it in her mouth, and I wondered for a moment if she might have bitten her own tongue with her crying.
“It’s Curly,” she said, in her hoarse voice, her body shaking with her tears.
“A car hit him.”
I nodded.
“Poor little guy,” I said. I could smell the blood, something like the metallic smell of the rain, rising from the darkness in her arms.
She lowered her face into his fur again. And then looked up.
“I think he’s still breathing,” she said.
“I felt his heart. Before.”
I reached out and stroked him, feeling the blood stiffening on his fur. Debbie watched as I did, growing still, or at least stopping her keening for a moment, though her shoulders still shook.
“I think he’ll be okay,” she said, looking at me to confirm this.
I continued to pet him, not sure just what I was running my hand through. I said, “It was nice of you to hold him.”
Another car pulled into the driveway, a police car, and I heard Mr.
Swanson and my father move toward it. I saw an officer get out, but I didn’t look long enough to see if he was the new Mr. Moran. I heard Mr. Swanson say, “Didn’t even stop … had to be speeding ... thought we should tell the police.”
I moved my hand off the cat and placed it on Debbie’s knee.
“Little swan,” I said, leaning toward her but trying to keep my eyes off the terrible skull, “Curly might like it if you let Mr. Clarke hold him awhile, too. Don’t you think?”
I looked over my shoulder toward the house. Mr. Clarke was standing by the bay window, in the multi paned light cast from the living room onto the porch, looking small and wet and bereft himself here on the prow of his magical inheritance.
“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “do you think you could hold Curly for a while?”
I felt Debbie flex beside me, every little-girl muscle in her body ready to protest, but as I slid my arms into her lap, under the limp and heavy body of the cat, I felt her fall back, too. She let go, and I lifted the heavy thing, handing it to Mr. Clarke, who cradled it in his arms like his own lost child, turning away.
Now Debbie began to cry in earnest, but it was that helpless, pliable broken hearted crying of a less determined child. I touched her elbow and she got up slowly, her bloodied arms outstretched, her wrists limp, and I led her as she cried up the steps and to the front door, which I tried not to mark with blood, into the light of the hallway and up the ornate Victorian stair. From the living room I heard her brother say, “Eeewww!” and we were only halfway up the stairs when her mother called softly, from behind us, “Try not to touch anything.”
I took her into the hall bathroom, a small pink-and-black linoleum bathroom with a thick, shaggy bath rug and the cloying scent of rose-shaped decorative soaps mixed with Mrs. Swanson’s decaying wildflowers. First I unbuttoned her shirt as she cried, the material so soaked with blood that I could barely work the slick buttons through the sodden holes, and then I unbuttoned her shorts and pulled them down to her ankles and asked her to step out of them, pulling off her bloodied socks and sneakers as she did. The blood had pooled in her lap, the shorts were no doubt ruined, but I put them in the pink sink anyway and ran cold water over them.
“Always use cold water on bloodstains,” I told her, washing my own hands in the cold stream. I smiled at her, pushed back her thin hair, which also had blood in it.
“Future reference,” I said.
I took her hand and helped her into the tub. She began to bend her knees, but I said, Not yet, and instead ran the water, getting it warm enough. I found a washcloth and soaked it and first ran it across her face, over her mouth and her cheeks and her still falling tears, rinsing it again and again, and then I ran it over her arms and her shoulders and between her fingers, until most of the blood, the sad, wet smell of it, had gone down the drain. I told her to sit down. Then I filled up the tub and swished the warm water around her body, which was tanned and beautifully healthy and showed the perfect outline of her bathing suit. I let her hold on to my wet arm, her mouth against my skin, and cry some more.
“Poor little swan,” I said.
Her mother peeked in twice while I bathed her, the second time to deposit a pile of thick pink towels, and then went away.
I shampooed her hair, rinsing it with the pink plastic cup on the sink, and then helped her out, wrapping her body in one towel, her hair in another. We walked together down the hall to her bedroom.
Her small valise lay open on the bright pink bedspread, just a few pieces of clothing folded into it, her damp bathing suit still on the floor. Seeing it all, she began to cry again, and I realized that this, of course, was what she had been doing when the benign day shifted on her and someone called up from downstairs that Curly had run out the door. I hugged her and tried to see the room with her eyes—the colorful drawings and the bright-eyed stuffed pets, the new seashells scattered across the dresser in a little pool of sand, the old ones painted yellow and blue and bright green on the shelves. I thought it must seem to her a very long time ago that she was here, simply getting ready to go home, busy and naive and sun-tired, vaguely contented. A Sunday afternoon in summer a very long time ago.
I found a nightgown in her dresser and slipped it over her head. And then sat her on the bed and combed out her hair.
“Moe and Larry are going to be so sad,” Debbie said softly, and I said, “Gosh, I know. We’ll have to be extra nice to them.”
Debbie said, “If only he hadn’t run out the door like that.”
“That wasn’t really like him, was it?” I said.
“Sleepy old Curly.”
She was pulling at her fingers, one after the other.
“I should have locked him in up here,” she said.
I laughed.
“He wouldn’t have liked that.”
“I should have, though.” She turned to look at me, tears coming back into her eyes.
“He was right on my bed when we got back from the beach. I should have locked him in.”
“You didn’t know,” I said.
“No one could have known.”
I lowered the valise to the floor and pulled back the bedspread.
Wearily, she climbed under the covers. I put her stuffed animals around her, every one I could find, although she usually slept with just a bear and a worn-out calico cat. She didn’t seem to mind. Looking out from among them, she moved her eyes all over the room. I leaned down to kiss her.
“You couldn’t have known,” I said again.
“You couldn’t have known what you know now.”
The Swanson kids didn’t say prayers at night. They didn’t, as far as I could tell, have any kind of religion at all. So I said nothing about Curly among the angels, or Curly as a kitten again, rolled up against his mother’s fur. I simply said that Curly was probably very grateful to her for the way she had held him all night. Curly always liked being held. It seemed a rather insubstantial consolation, and as I offered it I had a funny recollection of Petey’s rabbit trap in the yard—of the thin twig he’d used to prop up the cardboard box, of something slight and fragile holding back a weighty darkness. But Debbie nodded, and then threw her arms around my neck.
“Can you babysit for us next weekend?” she whispered into my hair.
“Can you come over and babysit?”
“Sure,” I said, and kissed her again.
As I went toward the door, she said, “Do you think my mother will come up?” and I said I was sure she would.
In the living room, Mr. and Mrs. Swanson seemed to be arguing, but when I got all the way down the stairs I realized they were actually agreeing with each other, albeit angrily.
“This is why I never wanted them,” Mrs. Swanson was saying. And he was saying, “I never thought she’d get so attached.”
They both turned to look at me when I stood in the doorway, and Mrs. Swanson said, in that same angry tone, “Jesus, look at your nice coat. You leave it with us and we’ll get it cleaned for you.” I looked down and saw that my raincoat was smeared with Curly’s blood.
As Mrs. Swanson advanced toward me, determined to get my coat, Mr. Swanson said, “George and your dad went on home. I said I’d give you a ride. You were a godsend, really.”
“Oh God, yes,” Mrs. Swanson said. She had my raincoat by the collar and I let her slip it off. She looked at it with some disgust.
“Poor Debbie was just beside herself. I’ve never seen her like that. She even frightened Donny, and God knows he was crazy about that damn cat, too. Honestly, it was just too much.”
She was a thin, attractive woman, a frosted blonde, with one of those high foreheads and straight hairlines that I always associated with smart, wealthy women. Newly tanned, like her daughter. Given to wearing shades of orange and pink and bright green. The Clarkes had told us that she didn’t stay out here during the week because she was afraid to sleep alone in this house, without her husband. Looking at her now I found it difficult to believe she was afraid of anything. She folded my coat inside out, as if to avoid looking at the stains. I told her I had left Debbie’s clothes soaking in the upstairs sink, and she waved her hand, grimacing.
“We’ll just throw those away,” she said.
“My husband’s already hosed down the steps.”
She shuddered, and then glanced at him.
“This is exactly why I never wanted pets.” And he nodded and held out his hands, to show he wasn’t disagreeing with her. She turned back to me and eyed my T-shirt and my cutoffs.
“Let me just get you a sweater,” she said.
Mr. Swanson and I walked into the hallway. I saw Donny in his pajamas peering down from the top of the stairs and I blew him a quick kiss. He grinned, and then, as his father followed my eye, he backed away and disappeared. Mrs. Swanson brought me a cardigan, a bright yellow cashmere.
“You can return this next weekend,” she said.
“We’ll need you Saturday.”
I nodded. I told her Debbie had asked if she would go up, and she said, Of course. But then she folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the banister. She wore a gold charm bracelet on her tanned wrist. She looked at her husband again.
“Christ, it was all out of proportion, wasn’t it? Her reaction.
Just madness.”
He nodded.
“I’m afraid there’s more to it than meets the eye.”
She pulled her arms tighter across her chest.
“I told you, I’m calling Dr. Temple as soon as we get home.” She said this somewhat defiantly, her chin raised.
“He did wonders for Sue Bailey’s kid, the one who wet the bed. We need to know what we’re dealing with here.”
Her husband held his arms out once more to indicate he was not objecting.
I draped the sweater over my shoulders, shades of Flora’s mother. I threw back my hair. I said, “Curly was her favorite,” and the way they both looked at me, you’d think I’d claimed he was her sibling.
“It broke her heart,” I said.
They both studied me for a moment, as if to decide which side I was on, or what other dimension I came from, and then Mrs. Swanson said, “Well, we don’t need this kind of grief.”
Mr. Swanson said, “And it had been such a nice weekend up until tonight.”
When he dropped me off at home, my mother was still awake, although my father had gone to bed and the Clarkes back to the
Unfortunately, the apartment complex where the Clarkes were renting didn’t allow pets, either.
“Well, Daisy will be pleased to see them,” I said.
“Though I hate to have to tell her about Curly.”
My mother lifted Larry off her lap and placed him beside his brother.
“Just tell her he ran away,” she said.
“Just tell her you’re sure he’ll be back any day now.”
I took a quick shower to wash off any other traces of blood, and then got into bed beside Daisy. My mother had told me that she’d slept soundly the whole time I was gone, but when I got in beside her and put my arm across her hip she whispered, “Poor Curly,” and put her hand over mine. I could tell she’d been crying. Together, we said a prayer for him in the dark, Curly among the angels.
The Moran kids must have had their radar out, because all five of them had their noses pressed to our screen door the next morning, asking to see the cats. I wondered if the news had reached them somehow through the policeman. I let them in after swearing them to utter silence—Daisy was still asleep-and they knelt in our living room for a while as Moe and Larry strutted among them, rubbing jowls to knees and accepting the long strokes down their backs, the eye-closing luxury of a patient and unending scratch behind the ear. True to their word, the Moran kids, even baby June, mouthed and pantomimed their exchanges. (My turn. You petted him enough. Let me.) And in the odd, and oddly graceful, silence, the cats’ luxuriant purring took over the room. It was sort of wonderful, the silence and the cold-cave smell of the fireplace, the towheads and the tanned limbs of the Moran kids as they spread themselves across the living-room carpet. The new light of a summer morning after a night of rain. When Daisy emerged from my bedroom, she was wearing my old seersucker outfit, and her socks and pink shoes were already in place. She stood in the doorway for a minute, the sunlight behind her wiry hair.
