“Sweet Jesus, who would do this to our Boots?” Consuelo looked up at those who had arrived to her aid. She held the black-and-white body of Boots, the cat that Marilyn McCutcheon had found in the parking lot seven or eight years before. It was a black-and-white cat, named very unoriginally for its white paws. To be fair, the name could have been Mittens just as easily, but Marilyn had loved Nancy Sinatra so much that she named the cat Boots and frequently found time to whisper-sing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.”
“What happened?” Marilyn said, rushing to the lifeless body of her beloved cat.
“I don’t know.” Consuelo was in tears then.
“Where did you find her?” Marilyn held gently took the cat from the head cook’s arms. A bloody Rorschach blot was smeared on her light blue blouse. The form looked a bit like a snow angel; the bloody fur had smeared in such a way that it looked like the cat had left the imprint of wings.
One of the kids started to cry, and soon others joined in.
“She was in the mixer. It must have turned on somehow. She liked to curl up and sleep in tight spaces, you know.” Marilyn didn’t cry, but the look on her face indicated a melt-down was coming. Children and staff who knew her only hoped that she’d take out her anger on someone other than them. “There’s no way Boots turned it on,” she said, looking around at the horrified faces.
She was right, of course, but there was no way anyone was going to say so.
On the other side of the facility, Michael Barton stepped from the shower and got dressed. He’d put his bloody pajamas into a plastic bag he’d stolen from the supply room and wrapped that in a cocoon of paper towels in case someone looked through the trash. He also stole clean pajamas from the laundry room and hid them under his clothes.
He’d prepared.
The cat hadn’t really put up much of a fight. He didn’t get a single scratch. It had taken a quick turn of the animal’s head, a snap, and then he could do anything he wanted to with it. It was a furry bag of dead.
A broken neck was quick and decisive. It got the job done. But ultimately, it was no fun.
How to make it fun?
A knife was the answer. It beckoned from the counter next to the sink. In a second, in a flash that was too fast for him to really grasp, he made it fun. Michael gingerly gutted Boots with a small paring knife, splashing the smelly fluids—mostly blood—over the front of his pajamas. His heart rate remained normal. It was odd, and he’d ruminate over that later in life. Though he was excited by what he was doing, he wasn’t scared.
He set the cat’s corpse with his entrails oozing into the institutional-sized mixing bowl and turned it on the setting called Pulse.
Funny, she doesn’t have a pulse, he thought in appreciation of the irony of what he’d just done.
He knew how much Marilyn McCutcheon loved that cat. It might have been the only thing she ever loved. He’d see her from across the TV lounge, holding the cat in her lap talking to it in a kind of sickening baby talk.
“Who’s the prettiest kitty in the whole wide world?” Marilyn asked, scratching the cat under the dollop of white fur under its chin. “You are, that’s who.”
The cat didn’t know Marilyn was a terror to everyone else. Marilyn had scooped her up from the cold outside and given her a cozy existence. If it hadn’t been for the annoying children at the group home, it might have been perfect.
“How’s my precious little fluff ball?” she’d ask.
How was it that a cat was worthy of love when a little girl or young boy was only the focus of derision and scorn?
Later that day, when the excitement of the horror of what happened to the cat had died down, Michael and Sarah played together in the corner of the TV lounge that had been set aside for reading. It wasn’t really a library, of course. Just as the place wasn’t really a home, though it had branded itself as one.
Marilyn came through on her rounds and looked over at the pair.
Michael looked up. No expression. Nothing at all. Then he returned his gaze back to the book he was reading to Sarah.
The Cat in the Hat.
Chapter Forty-two
Garden Grove
Michael Barton cried when the ultrasound technician turned to him as she moved the jellied wand over his wife’s abdomen, looked at the monitor, and said, “You’re going to have a son.”
Olivia tilted her head up from the table to get a better look herself. The image was a little grainy, but to a mother-to-be it was a portrait done by American impressionist Mary Cassatt.
A tear ran down Michael’s handsome face and stopped on his nose. He almost breathed in his tear before reaching for a medical wipe from a large cardboard box on the tray table. He stayed silent for a second, and tried to smile. He had hoped so much that the baby Olivia was carrying would be a girl. He’d read the statistics, of course, and he knew that those who are abused are likely to become abusers themselves.
“Honey, I feel the same way,” Olivia said, looking at her husband’s silent tear. “I’m so excited and scared at the same time.”
Scared? He thought. Olivia doesn’t know fear.
He did.
Michael was a facile liar by then, and he knew it. He thanked God for the practiced skill. Being able to skirt past the truth without batting a lash was an ability that had served him well. It allowed for survival.
“Having a son has been a dream of mine,” he said, his voice very soft. “I want to give him the boyhood that I never had.”
“I know. Me, too,” she said, lifting her head, this time toward her husband, so that he would kiss her. He bent down, and pressed his lips against hers.
As the technician started to mop the gooey globe that was on Olivia’s swelling abdomen, she grinned and shook her head slightly. There was so much joy in seeing people’s dreams come true. The tech pumped the foot pedal and dropped the used wipes into the stainless drum garbage can.
“You’re going to make a beautiful family,” she said exiting the examining room.
Olivia got dressed, euphoric with the news. She wanted nothing more than to get on the phone and call her mother.
“A boy!” It would be the first boy in her family in years. She gave Michael another kiss and dialed her mom with the news.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” he said, leaving Olivia to her call.
The bathroom was one of those family-oriented configurations, with a changing table and a toilet. Best of all, it had a lock on the door. He clicked the lock, turned on the water, and splashed it all over his face. He looked into the mirror.
What am I? A man or a monster?
Michael wasn’t sure. All he knew was that all the things that happened to him, that made him who he was—whatever it was—were seeded long ago.
It started with the idea that if he stopped drinking a glass of water before bedtime, he wouldn’t wet the bed. Soon it was if he’d stopped drinking anything after lunchtime that surely would stem the nighttime occurrence that brought him such overpowering shame. Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of the night and put his hand to his crotch hoping against hope that the wetness that he’d felt had only been the result of seminal discharge and not the flood of urine that taunted him over and over. It was like a pelvic waterboarding, hitting him over and over, telling him that he was useless, a loser, a freak. Every now and then he woke up in time to strip the bed silently and bundle the sheets into a pillow-case so he could hide them from the staff. Those were the best mornings.