White Cat (5 page)

“Philip pissing you off?” Barron says.

“Let’s put it this way: If I stay here long enough, I
am
going to kill myself.”

“The important thing is that you’re okay,” Barron says, which is satisfying, if patronizing.

“Can I come stay with you?” I ask. Barron’s at Princeton, studying pre-law, which is pretty funny because he is a compulsive liar. He’s the kind of liar who totally forgets what he told you the last time, but he believes every single lie with such conviction that sometimes he can convince you of it. I don’t think he’ll last half a minute in court before he’ll make up something outrageous about his client.

“I’d have to ask my roommate,” he says. “She’s dating this ambassador, and he’s always sending a car to take her to New York. She might not want more stress.”

Yeah, like that. “Well, if she’s not there a lot, maybe she
won’t mind. Otherwise, maybe I can do some couch surfing.” I lay it on thick. “There’s always the bus stop.”

“Why can’t you stay with Philip?”

“He’s farming me out to Grandad to clean the old house. He hasn’t said so, but I don’t think he wants me here.”

“Don’t be paranoid,” Barron says. “Philip wants you there. Of course he does.”

Philip would have wanted Barron.

When I was about seven, I used to follow a thirteen-year-old Philip around the house, pretending we were superheroes. He was the main hero and I was his sidekick, the Robin to his Batman. I kept pretending to be in trouble so he could come and save me. When I was in the old sandbox, it was a giant hourglass that would smother me. I was in the leaky baby pool being chased by sharks. I would call and call for him, but it was always Barron who finally came.

He was already Philip’s real sidekick at ten, good for taking care of things that Philip was too busy for. Like me. I spent most of my childhood jealous of Barron. I wanted to be him, and I resented that he got to be him first.

That was before I realized I was never going to be him.

“Maybe I could just come for a few days,” I say.

“Sure, sure,” he says, but it’s not a commitment. It’s stalling. “So, tell me what this crazy dream you had was. What made you go up on the roof?”

I snort. “A cat stole my tongue and I wanted to get it back.”

He laughs. “Your brain is a dark place. Next time, just let the tongue go, kid.”

I hate being called a kid, but I don’t want to argue.

We say good-bye and I plug my phone into its charger and plug that into the wall. I email my completed assignments.

I’ve started opening random folders on Philip’s computer when Maura comes to the door. There are lots of pictures of naked girls lying on their backs, pulling off long velvet gloves. Girls touching bare breasts with shockingly bare hands. I close the obviously misfiled etching of a guy in crazy-looking pantaloons wearing a giant diamond pendant. As scandalous stuff goes, it’s all pretty tame.

“Here.” She holds out a cup of what smells like mint tea. Her eyes don’t quite focus on mine, and two pills rest in her palm. “Philip said to give you these.”

“What are they?”

“They’ll help you rest.”

I take the pills and swig the tea.

“What’s going on with you two?” she asks. “He’s so odd when you’re here.”

“Nothing,” I say, because I like Maura. I don’t want to tell her that Philip probably doesn’t want me alone in the house with her or his son because of Lila. Philip saw my face, saw the blood, got rid of the body. If I was him, I wouldn’t want me here either.

*   *   *

I wake in the middle of the night with a raging need to piss. My head feels fuzzy, and at first I barely notice the voices downstairs as I stagger down the carpeted hall. I pee, then reach to flush. I stop with my hand on the lever.

“What are you doing here?” Philip is asking.

“Came up as soon as I heard.” Grandad’s voice is unmis
takable. 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 blond 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 end
less 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 breathe 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.