Goldilocks

10

I heard the burglar-alarm siren the moment I turned the corner into my street. I immediately looked at the dashboard clock. The time was twenty-five minutes past five. I could not imagine why the siren was going, or why Reginald Soames was standing on the sidewalk in front of my house, together with a handful of other neighbors. The sound of the siren was piercing. I pulled into my driveway, got out of the car, and immediately said, “What is it? Has someone broken in?”

“Police have already been here,” Reggie shouted, “Couldn’t turn the damn thing off.”

“Were the key holders here?”

“The what?”

“The key holders. There’s two of them. If the alarm goes off—”

“Couldn’t turn it off!” Reggie shouted.

“The key holders?”

“The police.”

“Did someone try to break in?”

“Your daughter hit the panic button.”

“What? My daughter—”

“The cat got run over.”

“Sebastian?”

“Run over by a car. Your daughter hit the panic button, figured that’d bring the police.”

“Where’s my wife?”

“Don’t know where she is. Mrs. Tannenbaum drove your daughter and the cat to the vet’s. Police were mad as hell. Been trying to get you at the office, Junior, you shouldn’t be out sailing on a workday.”

“What vet did they take him to, do you know?”

“Haven’t the faintest. You’d better turn that siren off, Mr. Ziprodt up the block’s got a bad heart.”

The front door was unlocked. I went directly through the house and to the back door, where one of the alarm stations was set into the wall just outside. I took my key ring from my pocket, and searched for the key to the system, wishing it were color-coded like the key at the jail. The siren was still screaming. I found the right key at last, put it in the keyway, and turned it to the right. The siren stopped abruptly. The silence was almost deafening. I went back into the house and to the utility closet, where the burglar alarm control box was mounted on the wall alongside a circuit breaker. I opened the front panel of the box and reset the system, but not the alarm; this had to be done whenever the panic button was hit. I slammed the panel shut, and went immediately to the phone in the study. In the yellow pages, I found under VETERINARIANS-D.V.M. at least a dozen listings. I scanned them quickly, found one that sounded familiar, dialed the number, and asked for Dr. Roessler.

“Dr. Roessler is in surgery, sir.”

“Who’s this I’m speaking to, please?”

“Miss Hilmer.”

“Miss Hilmer, this is Matthew Hope, I’m calling about a gray tabby named Sebastian. Would you—”

“Yes, sir, the cat’s here.”

“How is he?”

“He’s being operated on now, sir.”

“Can you tell me what... how bad is it?”

“His thorax is torn, Mr. Hope. The lungs and heart are exposed. Dr. Roessler is closing the wound now.”

“Thank you, could I... is my daughter there?”

“Just a moment, sir.”

When Joanna got on the line, I said, “Honey, I’m on my way, you just wait there for me.”

“Dad,” she said, “I think he’s going to die.”

“Well, we don’t know that, honey.”

“I tried calling, where were you?”

“With a client.”

“Cynthia said you were on a boat.”

“Yes, I went there first to talk to someone, and then I went to the Police Department to talk to Michael Purchase.”

“I heard on the radio that Michael did it, is that true?”

“I don’t know. Honey, is Mrs. Tannenbaum still there with you?”

“Yes. Did you want to talk to her?”

“No, that’s all right. But please ask her to stay till I get there, would you? Where’s Mommy?”

“I think she went to the beauty parlor, I’m not sure.”

“All right, honey, I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

“Do you know how to get here?”

“It’s near Cross River, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll remember it when I see it. G’bye, darling.”

“Bye, Dad,” she said, and hung up.

All the way to the vet’s, I kept thinking of Sebastian.

On the day before we’d taken him into the family, Susan had gone down to the basement of our house in Chicago, and found herself face to face with a rat the size of an alligator. Brazen bastard got up on his hind legs and snarled and squealed, sent her screaming up out of the cellar to phone an exterminator who came that afternoon to seed the basement floor with poison pellets. Trouble was, we had a five-year-old daughter and I didn’t like the idea of all that poison lying around, however infrequently she might be visiting the basement. Susan began crying when I suggested the possible danger to Joanna, immediately thinking I was scolding her for having called the exterminator. I told her she’d done exactly the right thing, but that a cat might be a safer deterrent than scattered poison patties.

What I had in mind was a big cat.

I suppose the range of animals varies at any given shelter on any given day. On that particular day in March, seven years ago, there were two cats, eleven kittens, five mongrel dogs, and the most beautiful thoroughbred boxer I’d ever seen. Sebastian was one of the cats, an enormous gray tabby with darker gray stripes, white markings on his face, markings that looked like white socks on all four paws. The one on his right hind paw seemed to have slipped to his ankle. He was prowling the topmost shelf of a cage that contained two separate litters of kittens and a scrawny Siamese that was not only cross-eyed but looked mangy as well. Sebastian paced the shelf like a tiger. He looked fierce and proud and I was certain he was the best rat-catcher who’d ever stalked a basement. “Hey, there,” I said, and he looked at me with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen on man or beast, and gave a short “meow,” and I fell in love with that big old pussycat right then and there. Susan had wandered down to the other end of the room, where she was looking at the boxer. I called her over.

“Well, he’s certainly big enough,” she said.

“Look at those green eyes, Sue.”

“Mm,” she said.

“Let’s find out why he’s here. Maybe he ate his former owners.”

We went outside to where a young man was filling out papers behind a desk. I asked him about the big gray tabby. Was there anything wrong with him?

“No, the mother was allergic to him,” he said.

“The cat’s mother?”

“No, the mother in the family. He’s the gentlest cat. Not a thing wrong with him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sabbatical.”

“What?”

“Yeah, she’s a schoolteacher. The mother.”

“That’s no name,” I said.

“Well, that’s his name.”

Susan and I went back inside again. The cat was still up there on the top shelf, licking himself clean now. We stood outside the cage, watching him.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Susan said. “I was hoping we’d find a white cat.”

“Is he huge, or am I dreaming?”

“He’s enormous.”

“Hey, Sebastian,” I said, and the cat meowed again.

Ten minutes later, we were taking him home in a cardboard carrier. We’d given a donation of twenty-five dollars to the shelter, and already had misgivings about this unknown cat without papers or pedigree. Sebastian broke out of the carrier before we’d driven five miles from the shelter. First his ears popped up out of the opening, then his green eyes wide and curious, and at last his face, white mask over the nose and mouth. He climbed out onto the back seat and looked around.

“The cat’s out,” Susan said.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

But Sebastian only leaped up onto the little ledge inside the rear window, and sprawled there to watch the scenery going by. Never made a sound, didn’t scramble all over the place like most lunatic cats do in a moving automobile. Just sat there with those big green eyes taking in everything. Automobiles never frightened him. One morning — this was after we’d been living in Calusa for almost a year — I got into the Ghia and had driven halfway to the office when I heard a sound behind me. I turned to look, and there was Sebastian sitting on the back seat. I grinned and said, “Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing there, huh?” He blinked. Joanna played with him as if he were a puppy. Hide-and-seek, games with string or yarn, races across the lawn. One time she came into the bedroom, beaming, to describe a game she and Sebastian had been playing. “We had the most fun,” she said. “I was chasing him around the sofa, and he was laughing and laughing.” She really did believe he was laughing. I guess I believed it too. For some reason, perhaps because we’d got him close to St. Patrick’s Day, we all thought of Sebastian as Irish. I’d sometimes talk to him in a thick Irish brogue, and he’d roll over on his back to reveal the whitest, softest, furriest belly, and I’d tickle him — and yes, he was laughing, I’m sure he was laughing. I loved that cat with all my heart.

The veterinary hospital was set on a street with three used-car lots and a store selling model airplanes. I parked the Ghia alongside a Chevy station wagon I recognized as Mrs. Tannenbaum’s, and then began walking across the parking lot toward the front door. From the kennel behind the red brick building, I heard a chorus of barks and yelps. My immediate reaction was to wonder what all that canine clamor might be doing to Sebastian’s nerves. And then I realized he was no doubt still unconscious, and my step slowed as I came closer to the door. I did not want to open that door. I was afraid that once I stepped inside, someone would tell me Sebastian was dead.

There was a desk immediately facing the entrance door. A nurse in a starched white uniform sat behind it; she looked up as I came into the room. Joanna and Mrs. Tannenbaum were sitting on a bench against the wall on the left. A framed painting of a cocker spaniel was on the wall above their heads. I went immediately to my daughter, and sat beside her, and put my arm around her.

“How is he?” I asked.

“They’re still working on him.”

We were whispering.

I leaned over and said, “Mrs. Tannenbaum, I can’t thank you enough.”

“I’m glad I could help,” she said. Her first name was Gertrude. I’d never called her that. She was seventy-two years old, but she looked sixty, and knew more about boats than any man I’d ever met. Her husband had died ten years back, leaving her a twin-dieseled Matthews Mystic she did not know how to operate. She enrolled promptly in the Auxiliary Coast Guard’s boating safety course, and a year later took that boat from Calusa past Charlotte Harbor, into the Caloosahatchee River and then into Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie Canal, across the state to Stuart and Lake Worth, where she’d jumped off across the Gulf Stream for Bimini. She had lavender hair and blue eyes and she was tiny and wiry, but when she wrestled that forty-six-footer into a dock you’d think she was on the bridge of an aircraft carrier.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“I got home from school about three-thirty,” Joanna said, “and I looked for Sebastian, but he wasn’t anywhere around. I was going to the mailbox to see if there was anything for me, and I just happened to look across the street — do you know where that big gold tree is on Dr. Latty’s lawn? Right there, near the curb. Sebastian was... he was just lying there in the gutter. I thought at first... I don’t know what I thought. That he was... playing a game with me, I guess. And then I saw the blood... oh God, Dad. I didn’t know what to do. I went over to him, I said, ‘Sebastian? What... what’s the matter, baby?’ And his eyes... he looked up the way he sometimes does when he’s napping, you know, and he still has that drowsy look on his face... only... oh Dad, he looked so... so twisted and broken, I didn’t... I just didn’t know what to do to help him. So I came back in the house and called your office but they told me you were out on a boat — what were you doing on a boat, Dad?”

“Talking to Michael’s girlfriend,” I said, which was true enough. But by three-thirty, I had left the boat and was in bed with Aggie. I thought again of Jamie’s alibi for last night. Would his wife and children have been slain if he’d gone directly home at eleven, rather than to the beach cottage he shared with the surgeon’s wife? And similarly, would I have been able to help Sebastian if I’d been at my office when Joanna called?

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t know where Mom was, and I couldn’t get in touch with you, so I just went in the bedroom and hit the panic button. I figured that’d bring everybody running. Mr. Soames from next door came over, and then Mrs. Tannenbaum—”

“I heard the siren, I thought at first it was some crazies come to rob your house in broad daylight. It could happen, believe me.”

“She drove the wagon to where Sebastian was against the curb—”

“We picked him up very careful. We made a stretcher from a board I had in the garage. We lifted him only a little, enough to get him on the board.”

“Then we came right here. I knew where it was from when he had his shots last time.”

“What did Dr. Roessler say?”

“Daddy, he doesn’t think Sebastian’s going to live.”

“He said that?”

“Yes, Dad.”

There seemed nothing more to say. I told Mrs. Tannenbaum I was sure she wanted to get home, and I thanked her again, and she asked me to please call her as soon as we got back. We sat alone on the bench then, my daughter and I. I held her hand. Across the room, the nurse was busily inserting what I supposed to be bills into envelopes. To her right was a closed door. To the left of that was an aquarium with tropical fish in it. Air bubbles tirelessly climbed the inside of the tank.

The last time I’d been inside a hospital was two years ago, when Susan’s mother died. She was fifty-six years old, and had never smoked a cigarette in her lifetime; but both her lungs were riddled with cancer. They’d performed the biopsy, and then closed her up, and told us there was nothing they could do for her. It was Susan’s uncle who made the decision not to tell her she was dying. I’d disliked him before then, but that was when I began hating him. She was, you see, a marvelous woman who could have accepted the news, who would in fact have welcomed the opportunity to die with at least some measure of dignity. Instead... ah, Jesus.

I remembered going to the hospital one afternoon, I went alone, I don’t remember where Susan was. I think she simply had to get away from the vigil for just a little bit, it was taking so much out of her. I went there, and my mother-in-law was propped against the pillows, her head turned to one side, where sunlight was coming through the slatted Venetian blinds. She had Susan’s features and coloring exactly, the same dark eyes and chestnut hair, the full pouting mouth showing age wrinkles around its edges now, the good jaw and neck, the skin sagging somewhat — she’d been a beauty in her day, and she looked beautiful still though ravaged with disease, and rapidly dying. She was weeping when I came into the room. I sat beside the bed. I said, “Mom, what’s the matter? What is it?”

She took my hand between both hers. Tears were streaming down her face. She said, “Matthew, please tell them I’m trying.”

“Tell who, Mom?”

“The doctors.”

“What do you mean?”

“They think I’m not trying. I really am, I really do want to get better. I just haven’t got the strength, Matthew.”

“I’ll talk to them,” I said.

I found one of her doctors in the corridor later that day. I asked him what he’d told her. He said it had been the family’s decision—

“I’m the goddamn family, too,” I said. “What did you tell her?”

“I was merely trying to reassure her, Mr. Hope.”

“About what?”

“I told her she would get well. That if she tried hard enough—”

“That’s a lie.”

“It was the family’s decision—”

“No matter how hard she tries, she’s going to die.”

“Mr. Hope, really, I feel you should discuss this with your wife’s uncle. I was trying to help her maintain her spirit, that’s all,” the doctor said, and turned on his heel and walked off down the corridor. My mother-in-law died the following week. She never knew she was dying. I suspected it came as a total surprise to her when she drew her last breath. I kept thinking of her that way; as dying in surprise. I loved her a lot, that woman. I think she was one of the reasons I married Susan.

I sat now beside my daughter, and wondered if I could ever tell Aggie how I’d felt about my mother-in-law. Wondered if I could ever tell her about Sebastian getting hit by an automobile, and about this family vigil at this hospital, where another loved one was fighting for life. Would it mean anything to Aggie? Would the death of Sebastian, whom she had never seen and did not know, mean anything more to her than the death of my mother-in-law? I realized all at once that I was already thinking of Sebastian as dead. I squeezed my daughter’s hand. I remembered coming home from Chicago, after we’d buried Susan’s mother. Joanna was waiting at the door with her sitter. We had not told her on the telephone that her grandmother was dead. She asked immediately, “How’s Grandma?”

“Honey...” I said, and did not have to say another word.

Joanna covered her face with her hands, and ran to her room in tears.

There was a computerized memory-bank we’d shared together for the past thirteen years, Susan and I. Into it we had programmed a mutual set of experiences that could be recalled at the touch of a button or the flip of a switch. Susan’s mother was a part of what we had known together, and loved together. I wondered now what would happen when at last I mustered the courage — yes, courage — to tell Susan I wanted a divorce. Would I be able to get past the first word, “Honey,” before she, too, burst into tears? It was funny how the word lingered, how we continued using it as a term of endearment, even though it had long ago lost any real meaning, at least for me. But it had been fed into the computer — HONEY, EXPRESSION OF AFFECTION, SUSAN/MATTHEW — and there was no changing the data now, except through direct confrontation. Susan, I want a divorce. Click, whir, the tapes would spin, the new information would be recorded and replayed, SCRATCH SUSAN/WIFE, SUBSTITUTE AGGIE/WIFE. But when that happened, would I have to change the memory-bank as well? Would I have to pretend I’d never been in that hospital room with my mother-in-law weeping helplessly against her pillows, my hand clutched between her own? Would I have to forget her?

Sitting on that wooden bench, watching the bubbles rise in the fish tank, expecting to hear momentarily that Sebastian was dead, I wondered what my mother-in-law would say if she were still alive and I came to her with news that I was divorcing Susan. I thought perhaps she would listen with the same dignity she might have given news that she was dying. And afterward, she might take my hand between her own two hands as she’d done that day at the hospital, and look directly into my eyes in that level, honest way she had — Jesus, how I’d loved that woman! Susan used to have the same direct way of looking at me. It had vanished somewhere, perhaps to wherever it was that Susan herself had gone.

Her mother would want to know why. She would hold my hands and say, But, Matthew... why? And I would say, Mom, we haven’t got along now for the past five years, we thought the move to Florida might help, we thought there was something about Illinois... my job there, the people we knew there... that was causing us to drift apart. But we’ve been living here for three years now and nothing’s changed, except that it’s getting worse all the time, a day doesn’t go by that we aren’t fighting...

Mom, I’m not happy.

I don’t love her.

We’re neither of us the same people we married almost fourteen years ago; it seems ridiculous now that we ever thought we’d stay the same. We should have hoped instead that the person each of us eventually became would be someone we could still love. I can’t love her anymore. Jesus, I’ve tried. So what can I do, Mom? What else can I do but leave her? And my mother-in-law, if she were still alive, might say, Matthew, do what you have to do. Maybe she’d say that. And then maybe she’d ask me if there was another woman, yes, I was certain she’d ask that. And when I told her there was, she might want to know about her, might ask... no, I didn’t think so.

As I sat beside my daughter waiting for word about Sebastian, I realized the relationship would end right then and there; I would be divorcing Susan’s mother together with Susan. I was suddenly grateful that I’d never have to face her, never have to tell her I was moving out of her life. But the relief I felt was out of all proportion to the reality of the situation — my mother-in-law was dead, there wasn’t the faintest possibility I’d ever have to tell her I was divorcing her daughter. And I realized then that it was Susan I didn’t want to tell, Susan I was reluctant to confront, perhaps even ashamed to confront. Did I simply go to her now and say, “Honey...” I would choke on the first word, knowing for sure that I was about to short-circuit the computer forever, wipe the tape entirely clean, program it with new people and new experiences that only with time might become memories to recall.

The thought was frightening.

I did not want to push the MOTHER-IN-LAW button one day and conjure Aggie’s mother who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and whom I’d not yet met. No. I wanted to recall Susan’s mother, who’d held my hand in hers and told me she was trying. When I pressed the DAUGHTER button, I did not want the daughter of Gerald Hemmings to appear, his daughter, I did not want to see baby pictures of Julia Hemmings, I did not want their memory-bank to become mine. When I pushed DAUGHTER, I wanted Joanna to fill the screen of my mind in full color, twenty times larger than life, Joanna smiling, Joanna shoveling soggy cornflakes into her mouth, Joanna falling and splitting her lip when she was three, Joanna, my daughter.

And when I pressed the button that had PET printed on it in bright green for Sebastian’s eyes, I did not want Julia’s goldfish to appear, which I’d seen in Julia’s room, the room of a little girl I had not yet met, the room of a little girl who was not my daughter but who would become my daughter, my stepdaughter, my whatever-the-hell the moment I changed the computer, the moment I fed into it all this new data — no! When I pushed the PET button, I wanted to see Sebastian’s big masked face and those emerald Irish eyes of his, I wanted to recall all the marvelous things about him, the way he stalked lizards as though they were dinosaurs, the way his ears twitched when he was listening to the Modern Jazz—

“Mr. Hope?”

I looked toward the open door. Dr. Roessler still had his hand on the doorknob. There was no need for him to say anything further. I knew the moment I saw his face that Sebastian the cat was dead.

He really hadn’t had a chance.

Dr. Roessler had been forced to operate at once. In order for Sebastian to begin breathing normally again, there had to be a vacuum between his lungs and his ribs; the torn thorax had to be sutured immediately. But there were other problems as well. A rib bone had been driven into one of his lungs and had punctured it. His pelvis was crushed. There was a huge rupture in his diaphragm, between the chest and abdomen. Dr. Roessler told us he would have preferred treating him first with massive doses of cortisone and I.V. fluid, hoping to stabilize his condition, waiting a full twenty-four hours before surgery. But there had been no choice; Sebastian was taken into the operating room the moment he was brought in.

Dr. Roessler apologized now. He said Sebastian was a fine cat, he remembered him from other times he’d been here. He said he had done his very best. His face was beaded with perspiration. There were flecks of blood on his gown. He said again that he was sorry, and then excused himself and left the small reception room. His nurse took me aside and asked what I would want to do with the body. She said there was a man who came by to pick up animals for burial, he carried them to Palmetto, he did a very good job. She said that some families preferred to have the animal cremated, but this was very costly. Most families took the body with them, she said, and buried the animal themselves. Most of them used a Styrofoam ice chest. I told her we wanted to take Sebastian with us. She went through the door and was gone just a little while. When she came back, she was carrying a heavy-duty black plastic bag weighted with Sebastian’s body. She told me the bag was waterproof. I carried the bag out to the car and put it on the folded-down back seat. I could remember Sebastian sitting on that seat, alive, the morning I’d driven him halfway to work. “Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing there, huh?” Sebastian blinking.

We were silent for a long while, Joanna and I.

When at last we talked, it was not about Sebastian. Not at first.

My daughter told me she’d weighed herself that morning, and was three pounds overweight. She was getting fat again. She didn’t know why, she’d been watching her diet very carefully. I told her she wasn’t getting fat at all. She was a tall girl, she was still growing...

“Really, darling, you’re not getting fat. I’d tell you if you were.”

“I’m not that tall,” Joanna said. “Crystal is much taller than I am, and she weighs six pounds less than I do.”

“Crystal is skinny.”

“Dad, she has a beautiful figure.”

“She’s skinny.”

“She has breasts, and I don’t.”

“You’ll have breasts soon enough, don’t worry about it.”

“And this rash around my nose, Dad, we went to the dermatologist and he doesn’t know what it is, he just keeps telling me to wash my damn face three times a day. Well, I do wash my face, I wash it four, five times a day, and I’ve still got all this junk around my nose, I look terrible, Dad. If it doesn’t go away soon, can Mom take me to another doctor?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Because it isn’t acne, he admits it isn’t acne.”

“We’ll get rid of it, darling, don’t worry.”

“Dad...”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“He was like a person, you know? Sebastian. He was just like a person.”

We buried him in the back yard.

There was a spot under the poinciana tree, where Sebastian used to lie flat to watch the pelicans swooping in low over the water, his ears twitching, his tail snapping back and forth like a whip. We buried him there. It was twenty-five past six, and beginning to get dark. Susan was not home yet. I found myself getting angry at her for not being here when Joanna found the cat broken and hurt in the gutter, for not being here now when we were burying him.

I asked Joanna if there was anything she wanted to say.

She knelt by the open grave and placed a small orange seashell onto the Styrofoam chest we’d bought on the way home. “I love you, Sebastian,” she said, and that was all. I shoveled back sand and then topsoil, and replaced the rectangle of grass I’d earlier carefully removed. Joanna put her arm around my waist. Silently, we went back into the house together. I poured myself a stiff hooker of scotch over ice, and asked Joanna if she wanted a beer. She nodded. I opened a can and handed it to her. She took a sip and said, “I hate the taste of beer,” but she kept drinking it, anyway.

Susan stormed into the house ten minutes later.

She’d come out of her hairdresser’s to find the right front tire of her Mercedes flat. She’d called our local gas station for help, but it had taken them an hour to get there, and another twenty minutes to put on the spare. Then, on the way home, the causeway bridge got stuck open for another—

“Is that beer you’re drinking, Joanna?”

“Yes, Mom,” Joanna said.

“Did you give her beer to drink?” Susan said, whirling on me.

“Yes, I gave her beer to drink. Susan... the cat’s dead. Sebastian’s dead.”

“What?”

“He got hit by a car, honey.”

“Oh,” Susan said, and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, “oh,” and began weeping, surprising me.