Soul Catcher (4 page)

He wouldn’t budge.

‘Come on!’

Tamara the cook’s gold Mustang skidded to a stop. She looked at us from the driver’s seat, but didn’t move or say anything. I could barely see her through the hazy windshield: a boxy dark-haired woman of thirty-five or so, with thick black eyebrows and a tiny nose. Then I noticed that there was someone with her. The door on the passenger side opened and Silvera lumbered out. His face was bright red as if he wanted to shout, or cry.

Patrick propped himself up on his elbows, and said, ‘Oh
shit:

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You’re sick.’

I thought Silvera was going to help us.

Patrick lurched onto his hands as if struggling with five hundred pounds. Silvera came toward us in even steps. His
stomach wasn’t bouncing; that meant he was sucking in his breath; and that meant he was really mad.

‘He fell,’ I said. ‘He’s sick.’

But Silvera wasn’t in the mood to listen. We were
standing in
not
crossing
the road. We were technically off campus, breaking a rule.

‘Get up!’ he shouted.

Patrick got to his knees and was just beginning to stand, when Silvera’s fist flew up and opened to a flat palm. His dark eyes settled on me. I was terrified and didn’t know why. What had we done wrong, besides being in the road, that earned this much anger? The loud smack of his hand against my face startled me. Pain stung in my cheek. I clenched my teeth and did not cry; I knew now that I must never cry in front of this man again. Like the first night of school, when he pegged me as vulnerable. I stared at him and he stared back, shaking as if he were going to explode. Then, suddenly, he turned around and walked back to the car.

Patrick stumbled after him, screaming, ‘Bastard! You goddamn fucking prick!’

The gold car drove slowly away. I stood there, stunned, and watched Patrick drop to his knees in the middle of the road. He flattened his palms on the asphalt and leaned forward. I realized he was crying when I saw tears falling straight down from his face to the ground, making a puddle.

All I could say was, ‘What if another car comes?’

All he could say was, ‘I’m so sorry, Kate. I’m so sorry.’

I still didn’t know what we had done wrong, or why the man had slapped me, or what was wrong with Patrick. He didn’t come down to dinner that night and he wasn’t in study hall. All night long, with each minute he wasn’t there, I became more confused. I was desperate to see him, to understand what was wrong with him. After study hall, Gwen took my books back to our room and I ran up to Lower Boys. Walter, a dorm parent, told me that Patrick was in Lower Girls ‘visiting’ with Silvera.
Visiting.
It was a
transparently diplomatic choice of words. No one visited the fat man. You went to him to be challenged or accused or forgiven.

Silvera had a suite in Lower Girls, where the Little Kids lived. I hated going to him after he’d hit me, but I had no choice. Patrick was there. I couldn’t wait any longer to see him. I took a deep breath and knocked. It was a minute before the door creaked open. Patrick was sitting in a bean bag chair on the floor. He peered at me as if I were a stranger; he said nothing, didn’t even smile, just looked blankly at me, through me, beyond me. Then I heard Silvera’s voice ask who it was, and Patrick muttered, ‘Kate.’

‘Come in!’ Silvera said.

I pushed open the door and looked around inside. This was the first time I had seen the man’s living room. He was slouched against a blue bean bag, directly opposite the door — like a frog king on a mushroom throne. Posters of seashores and sunsets decorated the walls. A plume of peacock feathers rose from a huge brass vase in the corner. He waved me in with the burning end of a filterless cigarette squeezed between two yellowed fingers.

I had never felt such coldness from Patrick as when I entered that room. He was in trouble, and I wanted to help him. But he was rejecting me; I felt it in the starkness of his silence. I hesitated, and almost turned around. Silvera told me to sit. I chose a red bean bag across from Patrick. Silence, cold and stark, froze me.

Finally Silvera spoke. ‘Patrick has something to say to you.’

Patrick said nothing. He made a knot of his fingers and stared at it.

Silvera lit another cigarette. As he exhaled, he said, ‘Patrick wants to apologize to you for this afternoon.’

When I heard that, anger ballooned in me and I nearly burst. How could he say that? He was the one who hit me! Not Patrick,
him.
Then a vivid memory of Patrick kneeling
on the road, begging for my forgiveness, flashed like neon. Why?

Still, I said, ‘No, not Patrick.’ I strained against tears.

It was then, in my weakness, that Patrick found strength to look at me. He spoke solemnly, as if he knew the kind of emotion I was forcing back, as if he wanted to help me release it.

‘Kate,’ he said, very softly. ‘I
am
sorry.’

Silvera leaned into his bean bag and watched us. He was like a voyeur of the soul, like an axe, a fierce eye intent on splitting love down the middle. I hated him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Patrick repeated in a shaking voice.

‘But you didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘It was
him.’

Patrick shook his head. ‘It was me. It was my fault. He knew, that was all. He shouldn’t have hit you. He wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for me.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Patrick slumped forward and dropped his face into his hands.

‘Tell her,’ Silvera said.

‘I can’t.’

‘Tell her!’

I snapped, ‘What if I don’t want to know?’

Patrick’s eyes were red, though he had stopped crying. I had never seen anyone so scared.

‘Go ahead,’ Silvera said.

‘All right.’ Patrick stared at his clasped hands, and said, ‘I got caught —’

‘No,’ Silvera cut in. He leaned forward and shook his head quickly. ‘No. Not
I got caught,
but
lam...
Go on. Say it.’

‘I am not!’ Patrick shouted in a loud voice that cracked. He was sobbing now.
I am not!’
He sprang up from the bean bag and ran out of the room.

‘Go find him and say goodbye,’ Silvera said. ‘He’s leaving tonight.’

‘I hate you.’

He smiled. ‘No you don’t,’ he said, as he took a deep drag of his cigarette.

I tried to hit him with the meanest, most hateful look I could manage. But he stared back calmly, and my anger just boomeranged right back at me. It struck me suddenly that the man was too controlled not to be afraid. I didn’t stop to think of what. I ran out, crying, and slammed the door as hard as I could.

Patrick was on his way from Boys Dorm to the main entrance of campus when I caught sight of him. His blue knapsack was slung over one shoulder. I ran after him down the hill, calling, ‘Patrick! Wait!’

He kept walking. ‘He expelled me!’ he said.

‘Why?’ I kept running, trying to catch up.

I was surprised when he laughed. And hurt. ‘Why not?’

Finally, I was next to him, trotting along, out of breath. ‘What happened?’ I pleaded. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Please.’

‘Kate, just leave me alone. I have to leave. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know. Home, I guess.’

We were almost at the main entrance. A yellow taxi waited, its motor revving in the dark, empty road. I grabbed Patrick’s arm. He pulled away and started to leave.

‘Will you wait a minute?’ I called.

‘I have to go.’

‘Patrick,
wait.’

When he reached the road, he turned and looked at me, really saw me for the first time that night. His eyes were bright spots in a white face, undulating with emotion.

‘I’ll call,’ he said.

He was really going; I was really losing him. As if the words could reel him back, I said, ‘But I love you.’

He shook his head. “That’s not the point anymore, Kate.’

I watched the taxi become a yellow spot consumed by distance, then vanish. Nothing. Gone. I just stood there, staring, filled with a sensation of waiting. But for what? For Patrick to appear and come running toward me? For reality to reverse? To wake up?

What finally snapped me out of it was the sound of a sudden, piercing scream. It came from somewhere on the other side of campus and echoed way up into the blueblack sky. That scream brought me back to the moment, to me, Kate, standing alone in the dark on a deserted road. It wasn’t like me to give myself to danger, or loneliness, or fear. Not until now. I ran up the hill and didn’t stop until I was inside the dorm.

It was late. Gwen was waiting for me in the closet. She called me in and shut the door.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I know all about it.’

‘How?’ I had told her about the slap, but how did she already know about Patrick leaving?

‘Eddie told me,’ she said. ‘I made him.’

‘Patrick’s gone.’

She leaned over and hugged me, and I started to cry. ‘Did you know about it?’ she asked.

I pulled away and looked at her face. It was cool and serious. She waited for an answer.

‘About what?’

She sighed. ‘I don’t believe it. You really didn’t know? That’s why the man slapped you, because he thought you knew. He must have figured you were letting it happen, maybe even helping him.’

‘What?’

‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘Heroin.’

The scream. Whose was it? That word
heroin
triggered the strangest thought: that somehow the scream had been mine.

I
grew up in Westchester, in a big white Tudor house with blue window frames and a bright red door. Just my parents and me and our cat Betty. I figured Betty was one quarter Persian, because of her soft coat, one quarter tabby, because of the orange and brown stripes that circled her stomach like hula hoops, one quarter shorthair American, which some old alleycat member of her family had picked up on the street and which accounted for her long stretches of nondescript cat behavior, and one quarter Siamese, which would explain her mean streak. Betty was ten when I went away to Grove. In her younger days, and mine, she was condemned by my parents as a scourge. She would hang on screens until they ripped, and pee in the sink when there was a guest in the house. Dad said we should have the kitten terminated. Mom would just sit there and shake her head. They’d look at each other and laugh. That was their routine.

On the first homegoing weekend, I spent the bus ride into the city ignoring Gwen (who wanted to talk, as usual) for serious contemplation: I was worried about Patrick and Betty. I don’t know why I was so upset about Betty — nothing had actually happened, except that I’d abandoned her and now would have to face the consequences. For all I
knew, my parents had put her to sleep while I was away. My worries about Patrick were in the same vein. We had talked on the phone a few times since he was expelled from school. He was living with his mother on Long Island and working as a clean-up boy in a local deli. His mother wouldn’t talk to him because he took drugs, he was a
bad boy,
not
her
son. Patrick claimed not to care. But he did, deep down. I could just tell. I had a theory that his mother felt responsible, maybe because of the divorce, or because she had been so poor afterwards and couldn’t provide much. She felt guilty. She didn’t expect her baby to grow up and get hooked on smack. No one does, especially not white, middle-class mothers whose sons are supposed to be doctors or lawyers or famous artists. The implication in her silence was that her thoughts were too terrible to put into words. Patrick felt guilty, too, about being home under the circumstances. It was as if by being home he was inflicting himself on her. I could hear in his voice that he was feeling bad about himself. He told me he had joined a methadone program. He said, ‘It’s great. No problem at all. I’m kicking it.’ He sounded self-assured, but it wasn’t that simple, because he was living in a hostile environment that was supposed to be home, with a silent woman who was supposed to be his mother. Did his mother want to terminate him, just like my parents wanted to terminate crazy old Betty when she was a pest?

It was dark out when the bus pulled into Port Authority in New York. Gwen and I hauled our suitcases into the terminal along with the rest of the kids. The bus ride into the city was provided by the school on the condition that the child was met at the station. Gwen and I were both being met by our dads.

‘Shit!’ Gwen hissed. She dropped her suitcase on the polished linoleum floor. ‘He brought
her.’

‘Where?’

‘Rabbit fur at high noon.’

Straight ahead of us, standing by a candy machine, was a slender woman in a hip-length, checkered, rabbit fur jacket.
She wore tailored slacks and very high heels. Her shaggy hair was hennaed and teased. I couldn’t see her face: it was too busy being kissed by the balding, stumpy man whose hands were planted on the back of the fur jacket. A gold wedding band squeezed the man’s bloated finger.

‘Oh my God,’ Gwen said. ‘He went ahead and did it, he
married
her!’ She turned around, frantic. ‘Oh please Kate,
please
let me come home with you this weekend!’

‘Come on,’ I said.

She picked up her suitcase and glided around the corner, out of sight of her father. When I caught up with her, she was standing against a wall lighting a cigarette, cupping her hands around a tiny match flame. Her face lit up orange.

‘Wait here,’ I said. ‘I’ll go find my dad.’

I looked and looked, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Finally, I stationed myself by the gate where our bus came in, thinking he’d look for me there. Meanwhile, Mr Perle (Gwen’s dad) stood by that candy machine necking with his wife. It was disgusting. It made me nervous just to be near him, knowing he was such a sleazeball, and that he was waiting to take Gwen, and that she was just around the corner.

At last, Dad showed up. He came barrelling out of the throng in a blue suit, hauling the famous old briefcase he’d been using ever since law school. His salt-and-pepper hair was a bushy mess, but I thought he looked handsome. His red tie flapped over his shoulder as if from the wind he’d created by hurrying to reach me. It was an old joke of ours. Whenever he was late meeting me somewhere, he’d throw his tie over his shoulder and come running.