* * *
Belinda Carlisle had been Ted’s cat since she was a kitten. She was an old cat when they’d listed her on various websites for adoption. Old and gassy. Only medical researchers might bother. When euthanasia had loomed as their best option, Ted called Rachel into the kitchen and showed her the cat’s fifty-pound bag of kibble. It was still over half full. He said, “Just give me this long to find her a new family.”
To Rachel this had seemed like a good compromise. Every day meant two scoops out of the kibble. The bag became an hourglass counting down their final days with Belinda. After two weeks, Rachel was no longer so sure. The food bag was still half full. In fact, it seemed a little heavier than it had been when she’d first made her bargain. She suspected Ted was smuggling kibble from another source. Perhaps he kept a secret bag stashed in his car or somewhere in the garage and he was using scoops of that to replenish the kitchen bag. To test her theory, she began to dole out double helpings for the cat’s meals. Rachel told herself she was giving the cat a treat, indulging it instead of hurrying it toward its grave.
The increased rations had barely fit in the cat’s bowl, but Belinda ate it all. She was getting fat, but she wasn’t getting any closer to being gone. Like the parable of the loaves and fishes or that lamp in the Temple of David, the big bag of kibble was always half full.
* * *
Tuesday’s call from Orlando doesn’t go any better. Each night, she and Ted make small accountings to each other. He’s raked the first fall of leaves. She’s implemented the initial on-site catalysts for satellite microwave transmission. He’s found a grocer that carries the cheese she likes so much. Rachel reports that she’s re-sequenced the protocol script for the pre-systems recharge matrix. She says Orlando is a terrible place to find oneself without children.
When she stops speaking, there’s a stretch of silence, as if Ted’s paying attention to something else. She listens for the sound of him keyboarding, doing e-mails while she talks. Finally Ted speaks. He says, “What’s going on there?”
He means the sounds. The guests in the next room are screwing, again. Actually, they’ve never stopped, and their constant moaning and shrill cries have disappeared to Rachel’s ears. The sounds have droned on so long, they must be a pornographic film. No one was ever that much in love. It makes her furious to imagine Ted has been listening to strangers humping instead of the progress she’s made.
While a sapphire hovers on television, Ted’s voice says, “Take the phone, April. Tell Mommy goodnight.”
To hear more, Rachel tries to subtract the sound of the freeway outside. She tunes out the hum of the minibar and the endearments grunted from beyond the wall. She hasn’t taken a drink since some Christmas eggnog three years ago, but now Rachel goes to the minibar and surveys the racks of little glass bottles, each priced higher than the diamond pendant on television. A dwindling countdown shows that there are fewer than five thousand of these pendants left. For the price of pearl earrings, Rachel mixes herself a gin and tonic and chugs it down.
Over the phone Rachel hears Ted’s voice. Muffled in the background, he whines, begging, “Tell Mommy about the turtles you liked at the zoo.” Nothing follows. Rachel feels a respect for her daughter that she’s never felt for her husband. For dinner, she tears open a minibar bag of plain M&M’s that costs more than a shopping-channel engagement set. For every bag of potato chips or candy bar she eats, another will appear to replace it as if by magic.
* * *
Rachel had confronted Ted about the bag of cat food, but he’d denied any cheating. Rachel didn’t cop to overfeeding, but she did point out that five weeks had gone by and Belinda Carlisle looked like a watermelon wearing a fur coat. Anymore, Rachel wasn’t much of a skinny Minnie, either. “Are you saying,” she’d asked, pointing to the food bag, “that this is a miracle?”
It didn’t help that the realtor who’d listed the house told them the living room smelled bad. The realtor said their asking price was two hundred grand too high for the current market. Rachel’s hormones didn’t help, either.
Ted and Rachel had argued. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, they bickered almost every day. During that time, the level in the food bag rose until kibble was spilling out on the kitchen floor. The cat was so bloated she could hardly drag herself around the living room carpet. That was when their overpriced house caught fire.
* * *
On Wednesday evening, as usual, Rachel calls from Orlando. She half-hopes April won’t speak. That might prove that the girl’s inherited some of Rachel’s own gumption. As a test, Rachel asks, “Don’t you love Mommy?” Under her breath she prays the girl won’t take such obvious bait.
The world is a horrible place. The last thing Rachel wants to create is a kid who bruises like a ripe banana.
As if April needs further testing, Rachel says, “Let Mommy sing you a bedtime song,” and she begins to croon a lullaby she knows will melt her daughter’s resolve. Backing her up are the moans and groans from next door, those sounds without language that weak people make against their will. Rachel intends to sing all of the verses, but she loses her nerve when she hears Ted’s laugh. It sounds too clear. She guesses April has set down the receiver and walked away. That means Rachel has been singing to an empty kitchen. She ends by warning, “If you don’t say goodnight, you’ll make Mommy cry.” If no one is listening, it doesn’t matter what she says. She pretends to cry. She escalates her pretend sobs to wailing. It’s easier than she imagined, and when she finds she can’t stop, Rachel hangs up.
* * *
Rachel hadn’t invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis; she’d gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn’t crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders.
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people. As far as the cat was concerned, Ted was both.
On the last night in their first house, as Rachel had later explained it to the police, they’d gone to a Christmas party in the neighborhood. The two of them were coming home. They’d been drinking eggnog, and as they trudged through the snow, she’d explained to Ted that he didn’t need to be such a softie. She spoke carefully, waiting for her words to stick. The footprints she left were splayed wide apart to balance her new weight.
Rachel was still working as a Level I corporate interface consultant, but simply entering her second trimester felt like a full-time job. She worried that with a new baby the situation wouldn’t get much better. You might be able to divide a man’s love in half, but not in three ways.
The way Rachel told it to the police, she had walked into the darkened house first. She hadn’t even taken off her coat. She’d said, “It’s freezing in here.” The Christmas tree filled the living room’s front window, blocking any light from the street. In fact, everyone’s first assumption was that the Christmas tree was the culprit. The usual suspects were always scented candles, faulty twinkle lights, an overloaded outlet. Ted pegged the roving robotic vacuum cleaner. His fingers were crossed that it had overheated. Some circuit had shorted out, and it had raced around filled with flammable cat hair and set fire to everything.
* * *
Thursday night in Orlando, it’s the age-old paradox: the more Rachel tries to hurry the installation process, the longer things take. She phones herself and leaves messages. “Memo to self: Finalize nomenclature for graphics inventory.”