Murder at the Foul Line (20 page)

“I might have seen something that day he took me on the boat?” Lauren asked, trying to tug the conversation back to where
it had begun.

“You might have, I suppose. I wasn’t in any shape to take notice of much right then. I’d had all these stitches, down there,
you know, and they were so uncomfortable, and then you were going through this phase of being jealous of your new brother
and so kept waking me up at night with your bad dreams and forgetting your toilet training and bursting into tears at the
least thing. Which was perfectly normal with a new baby in the house,” she hastened to say, “even if maybe a little extreme.
In the end I had to agree with my mother and your father that the best way to let you get over your naughtiness was to ignore
it as much as possible. And you did settle down, after a while. In fact, you became a new child, so quiet and obedient. You
were always so good with your brother, too.”

Her mother dithered on for a while, recounting in intimate detail the extensive difficulties the stitches had caused, even
going so far as to speculate aloud (
Does she even remember that she’s got her daughter on the other end of the phone?
Lauren wondered) that the lingering discomfort, and at a time when her husband needed her most, what with the embezzlement
and Arty’s treachery and all, had contributed to the divorce.

Lauren interrupted desperately, before her mother could go into any greater detail. “Well, think about it, Mother, see if
you can remember anything traumatic involving a cat.”

“I’ll try, dear. You could call your father and ask him. I have a number for him somewhere.”

Lauren cut her off, knowing that she was about to take the phone over to the desk and begin a search. She had no intention
of asking her father about it; she hadn’t talked to him in so long she’d forgotten the sound of his voice, and she wasn’t
about to resume their relationship with a revelation of her psychic distress. Maybe her mother’s approach
was best and would work as well now as it had then. Ignore it. and it’ll go away.

Her mother’s approach, to ignore distress. Look at their conversations centering around the cat: She’d been fond of Arty,
that was obvious, but expressed neither resentment nor even puzzlement at his abandonment. Then must have come a hellish time—a
newborn and a jealous three-year-old, a demanding husband and the first threats of bankruptcy, the revelation that a trusted
friend (or more than a friend?) had stolen them blind. Creditors, an abrupt change in lifestyle, a husband fleeing infamy
and leaving her behind to raise two children on a secretary’s pay. Lauren’s father, meanwhile, had salvaged enough out of
the whole mess to afford a nice house on a tropical island, complete with a twenty-four-year-old “housekeeper.”

Ignore it, and it’ll go away. Only it didn’t. The nightmares continued. Not every night now, but at least every other, she
would see the spinning cat with the human face, hear a startlingly loud and completely imaginary thud, and come heart-poundingly
awake in the dark. It was beginning to make her angry. And just a little bit worried. Insanity didn’t run in her family, so
far as she knew—although come to think of it, her father’s final loss of stability had come when he wasn’t much older than
she was now.

Another Friday and Monday in Min Henry’s soothing office, a Sunday and a Wednesday correcting papers and grunting replies
while her mother rambled on in her ear, practice three afternoons and the beginning of the season on Saturday, plus her regular
schedule of classes. A person could grow accustomed to anything, Lauren said to herself; even being haunted by a cat. Still,
regular as clockwork it came: hard bench
under her bottom, cold wind on her face, wet fur and the “O” of shock, a thud and the roaring sound of blood beating through
her ears in the still house. Then the following Monday, Min Henry tapped the wedge in a little further, with a couple of questions.

“Tell me again about the sound you hear in your dream,” she said in this, their sixth session. “Was it the car behind you
hitting the cat?”

“In my imagination, maybe—I didn’t actually hear anything. I couldn’t have, since I know I didn’t hit it, and the car windows
were up and the tape player going.”

“Then what is the sound?”

“That is weird, isn’t it? In the dream, it’s the sound that panics me more than anything.”

“You described it as a clunk?”

“Sort of a hollow thud. A little like… Jeez. Is it like…? No, not really. I was thinking it reminded me of the sound of a
basketball bouncing, but that’s not it. Other than a sort of hollowness. Brief, final—God, Min, I don’t know. Why does it
matter, anyway?”

“Okay, Lauren, take a couple of deep breaths. The tissues are on the table next to you.”

I’m crying
, Lauren realized with a shock.
Why am I crying? What the
fuck
is going on, a stupid frightened cat causing some damned psychosis or something
. “Why is this so awful?” she pleaded. “I mean, I could understand if I’d watched a person get run down, that would be enough
to haunt you, but cats get killed all the time. And it wasn’t even me that hit him!”

One of the things she had always liked about Min Henry was that the doctor actually answered her patients’ questions instead
of turning the questions back around. Now she said,
“Lauren, you are assuming this scene with the cat has triggered off some traumatic episode or emotion that you’ve hidden from
yourself. That may be so, or it may simply represent some state of mind you’re having trouble acknowledging. In either case,
the key may lie with that anomalous sound. You say it doesn’t belong with your memory of the actual cat incident; if that’s
the case, then it must have snuck in from elsewhere.”

“But where? I told you that my mother had no idea of a trauma with a cat.”

“Could it have been something other than a cat?”

The simple question reverberated softly through Lauren’s mind, stirring up an odd and unidentifiable series of feelings, excitement
and confusion and a peculiar stillness, as if she were a rabbit hiding from a circling hawk. She blinked, and found that the
therapist was watching her closely.

“We’re running short on time today,” Min Henry told Lauren, “but I can see that sparked something off.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it, for next time.”

“How about trying hypnosis?” Lauren blurted out. “This not knowing—it’s making me crazy.”

“Lauren, I’d rather see if your memory can loose this on its own. We can try hypnosis, but let’s give the mind a while longer
to work it out.”

“How much longer?”

“Give it a month, two at the most. Your doctor gave you the prescription for sleeping pills, didn’t he?”

He had, although they left Lauren feeling as groggy as sleeplessness did. Two months?

But in the end it didn’t take anywhere near that long.

The week passed. Wednesday a conversation with her
mother, Friday a session with Min, two more practices, four broken nights, and all the while Lauren’s mind fretted over the
question.

Could it have been something other than a cat?

Oh, yes. But what?

Saturday dawned, four endless weeks after the cat had fallen from the sky and into Lauren’s mind. There was a game this morning,
and Lauren dragged herself reluctantly from bed, made herself a pot of forbidden coffee, and drove to school. The girls were
excited, the new uniforms looked good, the other team was strong enough to challenge but with definite exploitable weaknesses,
and the bleachers were full of enthusiastic supporters. Lauren’s own problems, for once, retreated.

It happened in the last quarter, the blow that hammered the wedge all the way home and split her memory clean up the middle.

The score was 47–45, the home team hanging on to its slim lead through the quarter, when the visitors called a time-out and
sent in three new players, girls who separately were a threat, but together bonded into something formidable. A tipped-in
rebound tied the score, a gorgeous shot from what seemed like center court put Lauren’s girls three points behind. They made
up two, the others matched it, then got two more, and with ninety seconds left on the clock, the struggle was in earnest.
As the visitors brought the ball down, Marisol’s hand darted out to slap it away; Juana was there as if by magic, and the
two girls flew down the court with a stampede on their heels. The crowd stood and roared as Juana leaped up to drop the ball
through the hoop. Then the other team had possession, sprinting down toward the basket with the determination
of aristocrats threatened by the lower classes. They slammed into the home players, tried for a shot, missed, and as Marisol
struggled to position herself for a rebound, the opposition’s six-two forward rose past her, spiked the ball in, and came
down again with her elbow centered squarely over the top of Marisol’s skull.

The crack must have been more imagined than actual, since the noise level in the auditorium was so high only a gunshot would
have risen above it, but the impact was nearly as great. Marisol’s knees turned to water and she staggered back into the girls
behind her, collapsing slowly until she was sprawled flat on her back, her short hair spiky with sweat, eyes wide, mouth in
an astonished “O.” Three hundred throats went abruptly still as the girl lay briefly stunned, then Lauren, in a narrow gap
between two players, saw the comprehension come back into Marisol’s eyes, saw the girl’s focus snap onto the clock to see
if she had time, saw the determination to regain those points, to get back into play, to
win
.

The tall forward was nursing her elbow with stifled curses and the other coach was racing across the court to see if either
girl was badly hurt, but Lauren stood rooted in place.
Thud;
bewilderment; spiky hair; a determined struggle to rise. The faint lapping of waves against wood reached Lauren’s ears. Marisol
sat up, the opposing forward stopped hugging herself to reach down and pull Marisol to her feet, the crowd applauded its relief,
and players from both sides gathered around the two girls.

Nobody was expecting one of the coaches to collapse. No one even noticed Lauren at first, standing rigid on the sidelines,
both hands clapped over her mouth, her face as bleached as the team’s new shorts. She stared at Marisol, who was rubbing her
head and shrugging off the concern of her teammates, and
then Lauren’s knees gave way and she dropped to the court, completely limp. It was Lauren for whom the paramedics came.

In the hospital emergency room, with the curtains drawn and a call in to Min Henry, Lauren saw it again and again, a twenty-six-year-old
movie playing itself out in her mind’s eye.

The bench beneath her had been the unpadded seat of an old wooden skiff, her tiny shoes dangling free of the boards; the gray
expanse of concrete was really the cold surface of a wooded river in winter. The young man in the water had been, she could
only assume, Arty. She had adored him—that she remembered—not just his fragrant cigars, and he had gone into the river with
a huge and bewildering splash, to surface, spluttering, head bolt upright and eyes popping at the shock of cold, a look of
astonishment on his face. He had shaken his head like a dog, making his dark hair go spiky; his naked hand, surprisingly delicate
without the glove, had reached up, in supplication or to ward off the next blow of the upraised oar. His eyes had been frantic,
locked into a determined search for support, for haven from the icy water. He had been about to lunge for the boat when the
oar hit him a second time, with a weird, hollow thunk.

She had been little more than a baby, too immature to make any sense of what her eyes had witnessed, too young to remember
this confusing event in a confusing world. Until the cat had dropped in front of her and shaken loose her father’s deed.

Lauren looked up at the rattle of the curtain being pulled back. Min Henry’s kind face was pinched with concern.

“The sound was an oar,” Lauren told her without preamble, reaching out for the therapist’s hand. “I was too young to make
any sense of it, but it was an oar, hitting the head of a man in the water. A man named Arty, my father’s manager, whom I
loved, and used to follow around like a shadow. I think my mother was having an affair with him. My father set him up, made
it look like Arty was the one who stole the company into bankruptcy. When Arty was never found, everyone assumed he had fled
to Mexico.”

It explained an awful lot, Lauren thought, about what I became. When I was two and a half years old, a young man with spiky
hair passed in front of me, and was gone.

Mike Lupica

T
hey were inside the blue and white Academy tour bus, on their way down Fifth Avenue from the Pierre, on their way to the Garden,
and Billy Cash was talking about Monica again.

Somehow it always came back to Monica these days, even when he was talking about all the other girls in his life, the ones
Billy said he wanted to fuck, not have it be the other way around. Didn’t matter where they were, either, or who was listening.
They could be talking about whether or not the Magic—Billy’s team—could hold off the Nets and Sixers for home court in the
playoffs. Or whether Billy could score enough points the last two weeks of the season to hold off that little tattooed shit
from Memphis, Taliek Moore, to win another scoring title, which would make it only ten in a row.