“I kept them in the house.”
Pultwock shrugs. Lavinia steps toward him and jabs at the air with her knife. “I ought to gut you like a fish. Nobody would care, you know. Nobody would give a damn.”
“You’re right about that,” Pultwock says. “But I want to know first — where’s number fifty-six?”
“What?” Lavinia steps forward, having convinced herself she’s going to do it. She’s going to jam this knife into his belly because she doesn’t believe him. He’s a liar. He is the cause of her tremendous loss.
“You had fifty-four, but that Jason, he gone off today, and you got the kittens. I seen fifty-five leave. Should have been fifty-six, and I want to know, where you stash her?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” The numbers mean nothing to Lavinia. She’s never actually counted the cats.
Pultwock takes a piece of paper out of his robe pocket, the back of a long grocery receipt, and lets its wrinkled length drop to his knee. “Gray one with white spots, black nose. Black one. Long white hair with gray face. Black and white (big). Black and white (small). Orange with black swirls. Gray with black stripes. White with orange circles…”
He reads for several seconds, describing by color and unique markings each one of Lavinia’s fifty-four cats, kittens not included. “So what happened to the all-white one? The one you call Emily?”
She’s in the rafters of course. Lavinia stands on the concrete floor, kicking aside newspaper, calling up, “Here, kitty kitty kitty. Here, Emmy Emmy Emmy. They’re all gone. It’s just us.” She instructed Pultwock to stay upstairs so he won’t scare her. “We’re all alone here. Here, Emmy Emmy Emmy. Come to mama. Kitty kitty kitty.”
The cat’s eyes, glowing blue, appear out of the darkness. She meows and rubs against the fragile knob and tube wiring. Her face is dusty.
“Do you see her?” Pultwock hollers.
“Sh!” Lavinia hisses. “She won’t come down if she knows you’re here.”
Pultwock walks gingerly down the stairs. He’s staring at the floor, covered with the flattened boxes Lavinia brought home that morning. “You’re not moving,” he says, surprised.
“I told you,” Lavinia says.
Pultwock holds out a can. “Here. They like this, don’t they?” It’s a can of real tuna. The scent cuts through the stench of ammonia.
Lavinia takes the can and holds it high above her head, waving toward the empty spot where Emily’s face used to be. “Emily, look what I have. Look.”
PRISONERS DO
Before going into Shayla’s house, Mike fired up the laptop to check on his wife. Via the home-monitoring website he could see her on the couch wearing sweats and his old Bulls T-shirt. She wore little else these days, needing comfort more than style.
A can of Pepsi and a plate sat on the stool beside her. For years that stool, pink with blue butterflies, had boosted their girls to the sink for tooth-brushing and hand-washing, but it looked ludicrous next to the Italian leather sofa.
Mike zoomed in on Fawn’s face. She looked relaxed. No pursed lips, no wrinkles, except for the usual ones. He shifted the camera down and left to get a better look at the stool. There, on one of the old melamine plates with the kids’ handprints, her yogurt with its foil top and a pile of cheese and crackers appeared untouched, and he wondered if she’d lost track of them, if he should call to remind her. That morning he’d told her he had a lunch meeting and it might seem odd if he called now, when he should already be in the meeting, but what did she know of odd anymore?
Mike had begun to dial before he caught sight of Shayla in the window. She held up a Mountain Dew, his drink of choice, as if toasting him. He signaled with a raised finger that he needed a second, slid the laptop under the seat, checked the volume on his cell, then put it back in his pocket, where he’d be sure to hear if Fawn called.
Shayla and Mike had sex, then over a quick sandwich talked about work. She was a breast surgeon; Mike a radiologist. He’d diagnosed Shayla’s mother with lung cancer a few years ago and after that, when they saw each other in the hospital break room or cafeteria, he always asked about Norma. By the time they slept together, Shayla understood his situation, didn’t expect anything more than what he could give.
At least she’d thought so, but that afternoon while discussing a medical conference in San Francisco, she started to say, “It’s a combination clinical and imaging seminar. We could go…,” then stopped. Laughing lightly, Shayla fluttered her fingers to indicate momentary confusion, harmless forgetting. “Right, sorry, never mind.”
Later, as Mike got ready to leave, he took her in his arms and kissed her hard, as hard as he usually did when first arriving. “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”
She smirked. “I’m so glad.”
“I’ll see you back at the hospital. I have a mammogram we should go over.”
Shayla stood at the dining room window watching Mike start the car, then fiddle with something in the passenger seat. A laptop came into view, propped on the steering wheel, and she stepped back into the shadows, but as a radiologist Mike had been trained to identify things in patterns of dark and light that other people thought meant nothing. Glancing up from the computer, he hesitated, then gave an exaggerated wave. Embarrassed, Shayla waved back.
A mile away Mike pulled into a McDonald’s and signed on to the monitoring site again, having decided against doing it in Shayla’s driveway with her at the window, watching him. While he waited for the image of his living room to appear, Mike let himself play back what it felt like to slide that red sweater over her head, her breasts rebounding against his chest, her thick hair, streaked like tiger maple, tickling his face.
Fawn, slumped on the couch, popped into view. She looked exactly as she had before. So did the crackers and cheese. He dialed and watched her feel around for the phone. “It’s on the floor,” he said. “The floor.”
Letting it ring and ring seemed like a kind of torture, but the new phone announced the caller audibly, so Fawn knew it was him and that he’d let it ring as long as necessary.
“It’s on the floor, by your foot,” he said again.
As if she could hear him, Fawn leaned over and saw the phone.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.
“Good. I’m fine.”
“It’s one o’clock.”
“I know.”
“The girls will be home in two hours.”
“I know, Michael. I can tell time.”
“Did you eat lunch?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat anyway.”
“Goodbye, Michael. Goodbye.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later.”
The afternoon bolted past in a continuous stream of CTs, MRIs, a lumbar puncture, two complaint calls from the ER, and countless plain films. At three thirty his watch beeped and he called his oldest daughter’s cell.
“How’s Mom?”
“She’s fine. We’re just having a snack.”
“What’s the homework situation? Does Middie have math?” His middle daughter, Miranda, was struggling with pre-algebra and his oldest would try to help if she had time, if she didn’t get distracted by Facebook, or Instagram, or some other thing Mike felt the danger of but didn’t know how to control. Fawn used to handle things like that.
“Put Mom on.”
He heard mumbling, then Rebecca. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
Mike became aware of a shadow in the hallway. He stepped to the back of the room and lowered his voice. “Give her the phone.”