White Cat

Page 5

“Came up as soon as I heard.” Grandad’s voice is unmistakable. He lives in a little town called Carney, in the Pine Barrens, and he’s picked up the trace of an accent there—or he’s let some vestige of an old accent creep back in. Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them. Practically no one in town isn’t a worker, and very few of the workers there are younger than sixty; it’s where they go to die.
“We’re taking good care of him.” For a moment I’m thrown, trying to figure out if I’m hearing right. Barron’s downstairs. I can’t figure why he didn’t tell me he was coming. Mom used to say that he and Philip hid things because I was the youngest, but I knew it was because they were workers and I wasn’t. Even Grandad wasn’t coming upstairs to add me to their little conference.
I might be a member of the family, but I am always going to be an outsider.
Murdering someone didn’t help, although, from a certain perspective, you’d think it might have. At least it proved I was capable of being a criminal.
“Kid needs someone to keep an eye on him,” Grandad says. “Something to keep his hands busy.”
“He needs a rest,” Barron says. “Besides, we don’t even know what happened. What if someone was after him? What if Zacharov found out what happened to Lila? He’s still looking for his daughter.”
The thought makes my blood turn to ice.
Someone snorts. I figure it is Philip, but then Grandad says, “And he’s supposed to be safe with you two clowns?”
“Yeah,” Philip says. “We’ve kept him safe this long.”
I draw near to the stairs, squatting down on the balcony over the living room. They must be in the kitchen, since I can hear them very clearly. I’m ready to go down there and tell them just how clearly I can hear them. I’m going to force them to involve me.
“Maybe you don’t have time to worry about your brother, considering how much you should be worrying about that wife of yours. Think I can’t tell? And you shouldn’t be working her.”
That stops me, foot on the first carpeted step. Working her?
“Leave Maura out of this,” Philip says. “You never liked her.”
“Fine,” Grandad says. “None of my concern how you run your house. You’ll see soon enough. I just think you’ve got your hands full.”
“He doesn’t want to go with you,” Philip says. I’m surprised—either Philip really hates Grandad telling him what to do or Barron convinced him to let me stay after all.
“What if Cassel was up on that roof ’cause he wanted to jump? Think of what he’s been through,” Grandad says.
“He’s not like that,” says Barron. “He’s kept his nose clean at that school. Kid needs a rest, is all.”
The door of the master bedroom opens and Maura steps out into the hall. Her flannel nightgown rides up on one hip. I can see the corner of her underwear.
She blinks but doesn’t seem surprised to see me on the balcony. “I thought I heard voices. Is someone here?”
I shrug, my heart beating hard. It takes me a moment to realize I haven’t been caught doing much of anything. “I heard voices too.”
She looks too thin. Her collarbones seem like knives threatening to slice through her skin. “The music’s so loud tonight. I’m afraid I won’t be able to hear the baby.”
“Don’t worry,” I say softly. “He must be sleeping like—well, like a baby.” I smile, even though I know the joke’s lame. She makes me nervous. She looks like a stranger in the dark.
She sits down beside me on the carpet, straightening her nightgown and dangling her legs between the balusters of the stairs. I can count the knobs of her spine. “I’m going to leave him, you know. Philip.”
I wonder what he’s done to her. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know she’s been worked, but if it’s a love curse, maybe it’s wearing off. They do, although it can take six or even eight months. I wonder if I can ask her if she’s visited my mom in prison. Mom has to wear gloves, but she could easily have picked out a few threads to let skin brush skin while saying good-bye. “I didn’t know,” I say.
“Soon. It’s a secret. You’ll keep my secret, right?”
I nod quickly.
“How come you aren’t down there? With the others?”
I shrug. “Kid brothers always get left out, right?” They’re still talking downstairs. I can’t quite hear the words, but I’m afraid to stop talking, for fear she might hear what they’re saying about her.
“You’re not a good liar. Philip’s good, but not you.”
“Hey,” I say, honestly offended. “I am an excellent liar. I am the finest liar in the history of liars.”
“Liar,” she says, a slow smile spreading across her face. “Why did your parents call you Cassel?”
I’m defeated and amused. “Mom loved extravagant names. Dad insisted that his first son be named after him—Philip—but after that, she got to name Barron and me whatever fanciful thing she wanted. If she’d had her way, Philip would have been Jasper.”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on. Are you sure they aren’t from her family? Traditional names?”
“Who knows? It’s all a mystery. Dad was blonde and I bet he found the name Sharpe in a crackerjack box of fake IDs. As for Mom’s side of the family, Gramps says that his father—her grandfather—was a maharaja of India. He sold tonics from Calcutta to the Midwest. Makes some sense that we could be Indian. His last name, Singer, could be derived from Singh. But that’s just one of his stories.”
“Your grandfather told me that someone in your family was descended from a runaway slave,” she says. I wonder what she thought when she married Philip. People are always coming up to me on trains and talking to me in different languages, like it’s obvious I’ll understand them. It bothers me that I never will.
“Yeah,” I say. “I like the maharaja story better. And don’t even get me started on the one where we’re Iroquois. Or Italian. And not just Italian, but descended from Julius Caesar.”
That makes her laugh loudly enough that I wonder if they hear her downstairs, but the rhythm of their voices doesn’t change. “Was he a worker?” she asks, low again. “Philip doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Great-Grandad Singer?” I ask. “I don’t know.” With the blackened finger stubs on his left hand, I’m pretty sure she knows that my grandfather’s a death worker. Every kind of curse gives off some kind of blowback, but death curses kill a part of you. If you’re lucky, it rots some of your fingers. If not, maybe it rots your lungs or heart. Every curse works the worker, my grandfather says.
“Did you always know you couldn’t do it? Could your mother tell?”
I shake my head. “No. When we were little, she was afraid we would work someone by accident. She figured it would come on eventually, so she didn’t encourage us.” I think about Mom’s quick appraisal of a mark and the host of shady skills she did encourage us to learn. It makes me almost miss her. “I used to pretend that I was, though. A worker. One time I thought I turned an ant into a stick until Barron told me he’d switched them to mess with me.”
“Transformation, huh?” Maura’s smile is distant.
“What’s the point of pretending to be anything less than the most talented practitioner of the very rarest curses?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I used to think I could make people fall down. Every time my sister skinned her knee, I was sure it was me. I cried when I realized it wasn’t.”
Maura glances toward her son’s room. “Philip doesn’t want us to test the baby, but I’m afraid. What if our child hurts someone by accident? What if he’s one of those kids born with crippling blowback? At least if he tested positive, we’d know.”
“Just keep him gloved,” I say, knowing Philip will never agree to the test. “Until he’s old enough to try a small working.” In health class our teacher used to say that if someone came toward you on the street with bare hands, consider those hands to be as potentially deadly as unsheathed blades.
“All kids develop differently—no one can know when he’d be ready,” Maura says. “The little baby gloves are so cute, though.”
Downstairs, Grandad’s warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words “In my day we were feared. Now we’re just afraid.”
I yawn and turn to Maura. They can spend all night debating what they want to do with me, but that isn’t going to stop me from scamming myself back into school. “Do you really hear music? What does it sound like?”
Her smile turns radiant, although her gaze stays on the carpet. “Like angels shrieking my name.”
The hair stands up all along my arms.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN MY PARENTS’ HOUSE, nothing was ever thrown away. Clothes piled up, formed drifts that grew into mountains Philip, Barron, and I would climb and leap from. The heaps of garments filled the hallway and chased my parents out of their own bedroom, so that they eventually slept in the room that was once Dad’s office. Empty bags and boxes filled in the gaps in the clutter, boxes that once held rings and sneakers and clothes. A trumpet that my mother wanted to make into a lamp rested atop a stack of tattered magazines filled with articles Dad planned to read, near the heads and feet and arms of dolls Mom promised she would stitch together for a kid from Carney, all beside an endless heap of replacement buttons, some still in their individual glassine bags. A coffeemaker rested on a tower of plates, propped up on one end to keep coffee from flooding the counters.
It’s strange to see it all, just the way it was when my parents lived here. I pick up a nickel off the countertop and flip it along my knuckles, just like Dad taught me.
“This place is a pigsty,” Grandad says, walking out of the dining room, clipping a suspender onto his pants.
After spending months living in the orderly dorms of Wallingford, where they give you a Saturday detention if your room doesn’t pass semi-regular inspections, I feel the old conflicting sense of familiarity and disgust. I breath in the moldy, stale smell, with something sour in it that might be old sweat. Philip drops my bag onto the cracked linoleum floor.
“What’s the chance of me borrowing the car?” I ask Grandad.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “If we get enough done. You make a doctor’s appointment?”
“Yeah,” I lie, “that’s why I need the car.” What I need is to have enough time alone that I can put my plan to get back into Wallingford into effect. That does involve a doctor, but not one who’s expecting me.
Philip takes off his sunglasses. “Your appointment is when?”
“Tomorrow,” I say impulsively, shifting my gaze to Philip and elaborating. “At two. With Dr. Churchill, sleep specialist. In Princeton. That okay with you?” The best lies have as much truth in them as possible, so I tell them exactly where I’m planning on going. Just not why.
“Maura sent over some stuff,” Philip says. “Lemme bring it in before I forget.” Neither of them suggests coming with me to the completely fabricated appointment, which fills me with profound and undeserved relief.
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They’d find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.
Sometimes the house just seemed filthy, but sometimes it seemed magical. Mom could reach into some nook or bag or closet and pull out anything she needed. She pulled out a diamond necklace to wear to a New Year’s party along with citrine rings with gems as big as thumbnails. She pulled out the entire run of Narnia books when I was feverish and tired of all the books scattered beside my bed. And she pulled out a set of hand-carved black and white chess pieces when I finished reading Lewis.
“There’s cats out there,” my grandfather says, looking out the window as he washes a coffee cup in the sink. “In the barn.”
Philip sets down a bag of groceries carefully. His expression is strange.
“Feral,” says Grandad, using a fork to pry an ancient piece of toast out of the old toaster, and tossing it into the trash bag he hooked over the basement doorknob.
I walk over to where he’s standing and peer out the window. I can see them, tiny liquid shapes. A tabby jumps atop a rusted can of paint, while a white cat sits in a patch of long weeds, just the end of its tail twitching. “You think they’ve been living here long?”
My grandfather shakes his head.
“I bet they were pets. They look like pets.”
Grandad grunts.
“Maybe I should bring them some food,” I say.
“Put it in a trap,” says Philip. “Better catch them before they breed out of control.”
After Philip leaves, I put out food anyway—a can of tuna they won’t come near while I’m standing there, but fight over when I stand at the bottom of the driveway. I count five cats—the white one, two tabbies that I have a hard time telling apart, a fluffy black cat with a spot of white under its chin, and a runty butterscotch one.
Me and Grandad spend the rest of the morning grimly cleaning the kitchen, switching out our regular gloves for rubber. We throw out a pile of rusty forks, a sieve, and some pans. We pull up some linoleum and discover a nest of roaches that scatter so quickly that, despite stomping after them, most get away. I call Sam after lunch, but Johan answers his cell. Sam, apparently, is busy testing to see if the seniors control “the airspace above senior grass.” This experiment takes the form of holding one foot slightly above the restricted ground until someone tries to punch him in the head. I say I’ll call back.