Be Mine (32 page)

The small, content family at the dinner table.

The son, almost grown.

The parents, long married and comfortable in their shared life.

The home, tastefully decorated. The food on the table. The easy conversation. The ordinary life being quietly lived. I was imagining that person, at the window, and myself from that perspective. If I imagined it vividly enough, it seemed to me, it could really be the life I was living. Who was to say, I thought, that the life glimpsed from a distance was any more of an illusion than the life being lived? Shouldn't I, of all people, understand that by now?

Then, as I looked out that window, imagining, I thought I actually
saw
someone out there, looking in—a quick glimpse of a face emerging from the dark glass, then disappearing.

I must have gasped, or flinched. Both Jon and Chad looked up at me quickly. "What's wrong?" Chad said, and looked behind him, at the window.

He didn't wait for me to answer.

He said, "Let's pull the curtains, okay?"

He got up and pulled them himself.

After dinner, Chad went up to his room to check his e-mail. I stood up and began to gather the plates from the dining room table. Jon caught my wrist as I reached for his plate, looked up at me, and said, "Let me clean up, Sherry. Please." But I pulled my wrist out of his hand, twisting it to get away, and said, "No."

"When, Sherry?" he asked. "When can I talk to you again? When can I hold you?"

I said, "I don't know."

J
ON WAS
gone already in the morning when I got up. I sat at the edge of the bed for a long time. I could hear, again, what must have been squirrels on the roof. Perhaps some new family had found the abandoned nest already? Easier than starting their own, making a new one, had they simply moved into the one left behind?

No, I thought.

Animals had a better sense of this than people. They would have been able to smell it—that something violent, and permanent, had happened there. They would not have chosen to live in that nest. If there were new squirrels up there on the roof, they were starting over, building a nest of their own.

I needed, I realized, to get Chad up, to drive him to work. The night before, I'd washed his T-shirt, taken it from the dryer, still a little damp, and put it on his bed while he was writing an e-mail. I asked, "Who are you writing to?"

"Ophelia," he said without looking away from the screen.

He was still in his room when I went to bed, and although his door was closed, I could hear the soft rattle of his fingers on the keyboard.

8:00
A.M
, I checked the clock, got out of bed, slipped on my robe, went to Chad's room, but he was not, as I'd thought, still asleep in his bed.

I looked in the bathroom, went down to the kitchen, heard something outside, looked out the kitchen window.

He was out there, in the backyard, crouched at the edge of the scrubbrush, making hand motions to Kujo to come to him—but Kujo would not come.

G
ARRETT.

After I dropped Chad off at Fred's Landscaping (today Fred was wearing overalls, no shirt under them, and I could see that, once, he'd been a muscular man, but now the flesh hung off his arms and chest like old, damp rags), I remembered that it was this week that Garrett was to go to boot camp, to North Carolina.

I have to tell him,
I thought, before he goes, how sorry I am, how I never thought, for one second, that my mistake with Bram Smith would have anything to do with
him.

I wanted him to know that I didn't blame him for telling Chad about my affair with Bram. It wasn't his fault. I wanted him to know that I knew it. I wanted Garrett to know that I would remain his friend, and if there was ever anything at all I could do for him, I would do it.

But when I called his number from home, there was no answer.

I tried again.

And then a third time.

And then I got in the car, and drove to the house I remembered picking him up at, dropping him off at, so long ago, when he was a little boy.

I
T WAS
exactly as it had been then.

Ramshackle, but pleasant. A small blue modular home with a chain-link fence around it.

Back then, they'd had a dog, I recalled. Some kind of mutt that would bark ferociously when we'd pull in the driveway, and then begin to wag its tail so wildly when we stepped out that it could barely keep its balance.

Had the dog been named
Creek
? Could that be right? Or had I ever even known the name of Garrett's boyhood dog?

Now, there was no dog in the yard, but the grass was green. The garden was without flowers, but udy. The curtains were drawn, and the garage door was open. In it, I could see what must have been the red Mustang, covered carefully with a tarp. I opened the door to the chain-link fence, and walked up the steps, and rang the doorbell. I heard nothing inside, so I knocked, thinking that the doorbell might be broken, and then I heard something behind me
("Hello?")
and turned around.

It was Garrett's friend, the one from the cafeteria, the one with the red nylon jacket, except that today he was wearing a T-shirt (
HARD ROCK CAFE, LAS VEGAS
). Again, his resemblance to Chad surprised me. The hair. The structure of his face. The shape of his eyes. He was standing in the driveway with a shovel in his hand.

"Oh," I said, taking a step toward him, recovering my composure. "Hello. Does Garrett still live here?"

"He
did
" the friend said. "Do you know where he is?"

"No," I said. "I came here to look for him."

"So did I," the boy said.

"He's not here?" I asked.

"He hasn't been here for a week," the boy said. "I guess. That's the last time he got his mail, anyway. That's the last I heard from him."

I came down the steps, met this boy at the gate. "A week?" I asked.

"Yeah. I guess," he said. "I saw him about ten days ago, up at the school. And then he called me on Monday morning, and we were supposed to put the transmission back in the Mustang on Wednesday, and I came up here, and he wasn't here. And he hasn't been here since. I've come up every day, and there's no sign of him at all."

Monday.

The night he came to dinner.

The night he and Chad went to Stiver's, and Garrett told Chad about Bram.

"Oh, no," I said. "Has
anyone
heard from him?"

"Who would hear from him?" the boy said. "He doesn't have a girlfriend. His parents are dead. He's got one aunt, but he never talks to her at all. Who would hear from Garrett?"

"Have you—done anything?"

"Yeah," the boy said.

He looked younger than Garrett, I thought, younger than Chad. His arms were thin. His teeth were crooked. His eyes were a gray so light they looked colorless. He looked, I thought, like a
shadow
of Chad.

"Yeah," he said again. "I called the cops, actually, and they basically told me that if I wasn't a blood relative to mind my own business. They said it happens all the time, after guys enlist, after they sign the last papers and the plans for boot camp are solid, they get cold feet. They take off. The cops wanted nothing to do with it. But I said, what about the house? What happens to the house if he doesn't come back? It's just sitting there empty. And they said they'd deal with it eventually, when the neighbors complained."

I stood looking at him for a moment. There was a sad light, I thought, shining from this boy. Had Garrett been his best friend? His
only
friend?

In the distance, I could hear a cat crying, and the boy looked behind him then, and said, "I broke a window, to get the cat out"—he held up the shovel—"but she freaked out when she saw me, and took off. I put out some food, but I can't get her to come back. Do you think you could help?"

I put my car keys down on the hood of my car, and said, "I'll help."

The woods behind Garrett's house were thick—pines and birches—and the ground was carpeted with old needles and leaves. We walked a few paces into it, then stopped. I let him call for the cat (
kitty-kitty
—he couldn't remember the cat's name) because, we thought, the cat knew him at least a little. He told me his own name was Mike, and that he'd known Garrett only since the beginning of the fall when they'd met in their automotive class. They were friends, and Mike was helping Garrett with the Mustang, so he'd been to the house, and they'd hung out up at the college, but they weren't close.

Still, Mike was worried. It was weird, to have a guy like Garrett just disappear. "He wasn't scared of the Marines," Mike said. "He was looking forward to it. He wouldn't have bolted."

As we walked together into the woods we could hear the cat, always a few feet ahead of us, her paws snapping twigs, rustling over the needles and leaves.

"Here, kitty-kitty," Mike called, in a voice so soft it seemed impossible that anything would refuse to come to it. He carried with him an opened can of cat food. On the can there was a photograph of a white princess cat sitting on a cushion, wearing a tiara. "
Kitty-kitty?
"

We stopped and listened, and the cat ran on ahead.

We walked farther into the woods, and Mike called again, and the cat scurried farther on. Finally, Garrett's friend said, "Maybe you should call."

I did.

I tried to sing it.

"
Here, kitty-kitty,
" I called.

Nothing. But I could see her behind the spindly trunk of a white birch—a large gray shape with long for, pausing. I crouched down.

"
Here, kitty-kitty
"

Still, she didn't come, but she also didn't retreat. She was looking at me.

"Please, kitty. Come here, kitty."

Garrett's friend gave me the can of food, which I held out to her, and I could see her nose lift into the air, smelling it.

"Come here, baby," I said. "Come on. Come on."

She took a step in my direction.

She was coming to me.

She sped up then, hurrying toward me, purring under my hand when I reached out to stroke her.

"Wow," Garrett's friend said. "How did you do that?"

In the car, Garrett's cat howled for a few seconds, and then curled into sleep in the passenger seat. Mike had said that he couldn't keep her at his apartment. Could I keep her?

Of course.

I tore a piece of paper from my notebook and left a note in Garrett's door:

Garrett, Please, if you get this note, call me or call Mike right away. We are very worried. I have your cat. Sherry Seymour

On the back, I wrote my phone number, in case he'd lost it.

"
WHAT
the hell is that?" Chad asked when he stepped in the house. He'd gotten a ride home from Fred because the job they'd been doing was right up the road, and he was home early. I had only been home an hour. The cat was sitting on the love seat, looking up at Chad.

"It's Garrett's cat," I said.

"
What?
"

"Chad, Garrett's gone."

Chad looked from the cat to me, and then walked past me, into the kitchen.

He went straight to the refrigerator, the orange juice, unscrewed the top, drank long and hard straight from the jug.

"Did you hear me?" I asked.

"Yeah, I heard you. Garrett's gone," Chad said. "Off to the war, I guess, huh?"

"No," I said. "I mean, I don't know. He hasn't been back to his house since—the other night."

"And how exactly do we know this?" Chad asked. He didn't turn to look at me. He was staring straight ahead, with the orange juice jug still in his hand.

"I went to his house," I said.

"I bet you did," Chad said.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," Chad said, and put the jug down on the kitchen table, and walked past me. "Nothing, Mom. But I think it's time you stop worrying so much about Garrett." He glanced over at the cat and went upstairs.

J
ON SAID
nothing when he stepped in the door and saw the cat on the love seat. He put down his briefcase. He leaned over and looked at her and then sat back on his heels, held out a hand, which she sniffed, and then licked.

"Hello, beautiful," he murmured. "Hello, kitty cat."

When he realized I was watching him from the kitchen, he looked up at me. He was smiling. He said, "Whose lovely creature is this?"

"Garrett's," I said.

"And what's Garrett's cat's name, and how did she get here?"

"I don't know her name," I said, and proceeded to tell him how we'd come to have Garrett's cat on our love seat.

Jon picked up the cat as I told him the story, and nuzzled into her gray fur, and the sweetness of it—the gentle warmth of Jon—came back to me. The way he used to bend over to scoop up a tiny Chad, loft him into the air, press his face into Chad's soft neck and hair and simply breathe. I had loved Jon all those years, I realized, pardy because there was so clearly such a wealth of love
in
Jon. Seeing him with Garrett's cat, perfectly content in his arms, I remembered that. I went to him and put my hand on his arm, and then my face on his shoulder.

"Sherry," Jon said, putting the cat back down gently on the love seat, "do you forgive me?"

He took me in his arms.

He said, "I love you, Sherry." He said, "I'm a deeply flawed man, Sherry, but I love you more than anything in the world. And I swore to God that if ever you would just let me hold you like this, I would never ask for anything else in this life again."

W
E MADE
love that night without saying anything to one another. The lights out. Our clothes tossed onto the bedroom floor. It lasted for hours. Long, slow, tender hours made of flesh, made of tears. I put my fingers in his hair, in his mouth. He put his mouth on my breasts. He kissed my arms, my neck. When I finally came, it was a sobbing crescendo of pleasure. When he came, I could feel the whole shudder of him like a wing inside me.

In the morning, we kissed good-bye on the porch. A lingering of lips and teeth and tongues. Garrett's cat watched us from the love seat, blinking in slow motion. Chad was still asleep upstairs. He hadn't come out of his room, as far as I knew, all night. Outside, in the backyard, Kujo was asleep, curled up at the edge of the scrubbrush.