White Cat (8 page)

Mom looks pretty good.

The first time I realized I had a talent for crime was after Mom took me out—just me—for a cherry slushy. It was a scorching summer day and the leather seat in her car was hot from the sun, burning the backs of my legs just slightly unpleasantly. My mouth had turned bright red when we pulled into a gas station and then around back, like Mom was going to put air in the tires.

“See that house?” she asked me. She was pointing to a ranch-style place with white aluminum siding and black shutters.

“I want you to go through that window in the back by the stairs. Just shimmy on in and grab the manila envelope off the desk.”

I must have stared at Mom like I didn’t understand her.

“It’s a game, Cassel. Do it as fast as you can and I’ll time you. Here, give me your drink.”

I guess I knew it wasn’t a game, but I ran anyway and I boosted myself up on the water spigot and poured through the window with the boneless grace of little kids. The manila envelope was right where Mom’d said it would be. Nearby, piles of paper rested under coffee cups stuffed with pens and
rulers and spoons. There was a little glass cat on the desk with what looked like glittering gold inside it. The air-conditioning made the sweat dry on my arms and back as I held the sculpture up to the light. I tucked the cat into my pocket.

When I brought the envelope back to her, she was sucking on my slushy.

“Here,” I said.

She smiled. Her mouth was bright red too. “Good work, sweetie.” And I realized that the reason she had taken me instead of my brothers was just that I was the smallest, but it didn’t bother me, because I also realized that I could be useful. That I didn’t need to be a worker to be useful. That I could be good at things, better than they were, even.

That knowledge sang through my veins like adrenaline.

Maybe I was seven. I’m not sure. It was before Lila.

I never told anyone about the cat.

I stack the photographs, with a few more of Grandad and Lila’s dad in Atlantic City in front of a bar. They’re standing with an older man that I don’t know, arms draped over each others’ shoulders.

I sweep layers of dust from under the couches and chairs until it billows up and chokes me.

When I flop down to rest, I find a notebook shoved under one of the cushions, filled with Mom’s writing. No more racy photos, just boring stuff. “Oil tank removal—buried” is scrawled on one side of the page, while the other side reads, “get carrots, chicken (whole), bleach, matches, motor oil.” Two pages later there are some addresses, with one circled.
Then a script for calling a car dealership and talking them out of a rental car for a week. There are a few more scripts for different scams, with notes on the side. I read them over, smiling despite myself.

In a couple of hours I’m going to run my own scam, so I better study up.

In our family—maybe in every family—there’s this idea that the kids take after someone from another generation. Like Philip is supposed to take after our granddad, my mom’s father. Philip’s the one who dropped out of high school to join up with the Zacharovs and got his keloid necklace a few years later. He’s big on loyalty and stability, even if he pays his rent by busting kneecaps. I picture him in forty years retired to Carney, chasing a new generation of worker kids off his lawn.

The family legend says that Barron is just like Mom, even though he works luck and she works emotion. Mom can make anyone her friend, can strike up a conversation anywhere because she genuinely believes that the con is a game. And all she cares about is winning every single time.

That leaves me to be like my luck worker dad, except that I’m not. He was the person that held things together. When he was alive, Mom acted normal most of the time. It was only when he was gone that she started chasing around millionaires with her gloves off. The second time a guy woke up at the end of a cruise a hundred grand lighter and head over heels in love, his lawyer called the cops.

She can’t help it. She loves the con.

I tell myself I’m not like her, but I have to admit I love it
too.

I flip through the notebook, looking for I don’t know what—maybe something familiar, maybe just some secret that will make me laugh. As I turn more pages, I find an envelope taped to a divider. Written beside it are the words “Give this to Remember!” I rip it open and find a memory charm, silver, with the word “remember” stamped on it and an uncracked blue stone set off center. It looks old, the silver tarnished black in the grooves and the whole piece heavy in my hand.

Charms to throw off curse work, charms like the ones Audrey has hanging around her neck, are as old as curses themselves. Workers make them by cursing stone—the only material that absorbs a whole curse, including the blowback. Then that stone is primed and will swallow up a curse of the same type. So if a luck worker curses a piece of jade and wears it against her skin, and then someone tries to curse her with bad luck, the jade breaks and she’s not affected. You have to get another charm each time you’re worked, and you have to have one for each type of magic, but you’re safe. Only rock is effective, not silver or gold,
leather or wood. Certain people prefer one type to another; there are charms made out of everything from gravel to granite. If what I’m holding is a charm, the blue stone is what powers it.

I wonder if Mom grifted some ancestral heirloom or if it actually belongs to her. It’s kind of funny to think of forgetting a memory charm. I tuck it into my pocket.

While cleaning the living room, I find a button-making machine, two plastic bags of bubble wrap, a sword with rust staining the blade, three broken dolls I don’t remember anyone owning, an overturned chair that creeped me out as a kid because I swore it looked identical to one I’d seen on television the night before Barron and Philip dragged it home, a hockey stick, and a collection of medals for various different military accomplishments. It’s almost noon by the time I finish, and my hands and the cuffs of my pants are black with filth. I throw away stacks of newspapers and catalogs, bills that probably went unpaid for years, plastic bags of hangers and wires, and the hockey stick.

The sword I lean against the wall.

The outside of the house is already piled with garbage bags from the morning’s work. There’s enough stuff that we’re going to have to take a trip to the dump before long. I look over at the neighbors’ tidy houses with their manicured lawns and brightly painted doors, and then back at my own. The shutters hang off kilter on either side of a row of front-facing windows, and one of the panes is broken. The paint is so worn that the cedar shingles look gray. The house is rotting from the inside.

I’m in the process of dragging the chair out to the side of the road when Grandad comes downstairs and dangles the keys in front of me.

“Be back in time for dinner,” he says.

I take the keys, gripping them hard enough for the teeth to dig into my palm. Leaving the chair where it is, I head out the driveway as if I really have an appointment to be late for.

CHAPTER SIX

THE ADDRESS I GOT OFF the Internet for Dr. Churchill’s office is on the corner of Vandeventer Avenue in the center of Princeton. I park next to a fondue restaurant and check myself in the rearview mirror, finger-combing my hair flat in the hopes of making myself look more like a good kid, reliable. Even though I washed my hands three times in the bathroom of a convenience store when I stopped for coffee, I can still feel the oily grit of dirt on my skin. I try not to rub my fingers against my jeans as I walk into the reception area and up to the desk.

The woman answering the phone has dyed red curls and glasses hanging around her neck on a beaded chain. I won
der if she made the chain herself; irrationally I associate crafting with friendliness. She looks like she might be in her fifties from the lines on her face and all the silver at her roots. “Hi,” I say. “I have an appointment at two.”

She looks at me without smiling and taps the keyboard in front of her. I know there’s not going to be anything on her screen about me, but that’s okay. It’s part of my plan.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Cassel Sharpe.” I try to stick to the truth as much as possible, in case there’s a need for elaboration or photo identification. As she clicks around to figure out who made a mistake, I take stock of the office. There’s a young woman behind the desk, wearing light purple scrubs, and I think she might be a nurse, since there’s only one doctor’s name—Dr. Eric Churchill, MD—on the door. The few files on top of the cabinets in the back are in dark green folders, and a note about the holiday hours is taped to the front of the desk. On stationery. I reach for it.

“I don’t see anything here, Mr. Sharpe,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, my hand freezing. I can’t rip the tape without her noticing the movement. “Oh.” I try to seem worried and hope that she’ll take pity on me and do some more fruitless searching or, better yet, go ask someone.

She doesn’t seem to notice my fake distress and seems, in fact, more irritated than sympathetic. “Who made the appointment?”

“My mom. Do you think it might be under her name?” The nurse in the scrubs takes out a file and sets it on the counter, close to where I’m standing.

“There’s no Sharpe here,” the receptionist says, her gaze steady. “Maybe your mother made a mistake?”

I take a deep breath and concentrate on minimizing tells. Liars will touch their faces, obscuring themselves. They’ll stiffen up. They’ll do any of dozens of nonverbal things—breathe quickly, talk fast, blush—that could give them away. “Her last name’s Singer. Could you check?”

As she turns her face toward the screen, I slide the file off the counter and under my coat.

“No. No Singer,” she says, with profound annoyance. “Would you like to call your mother, maybe?”

“Yeah, I better,” I say contritely. As I turn, I pull the stationery sign off the front of the desk. I have no idea if she sees me. I force myself not to look back, just to keep walking with one arm crossed over my coat to keep the file in place, and the other sliding the sheet of paper into the file, everything perfectly natural.

I hear a door close and a woman—maybe the patient that goes with the file—say, “I don’t understand. If I’m cursed, then what good is this amulet? I mean, look at it, it’s covered in emeralds; are you telling me it’s no better than a dime-store—”

I don’t pause to hear the rest. I just walk toward the doors.

“Mr. Sharpe,” a male voice says.

The doors are right in front of me. Just a few more steps will take me through them, but I stop. After all, my plan won’t work if they remember me, and they’ll remember a patient they have to chase down. “Uh, yeah?”

Dr. Churchill is a tan, thin man with thick glasses and close-cropped curling hair as white as eggshells. He pushes his
glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose absently. “I don’t know what happened to your appointment, but I’ve got some time right now. Come on back.”

“What?” I say, turning toward the receptionist, hand still holding my coat closed. “I thought you said—”

She frowns. “Do you want to see the doctor or not?”

I can’t think of anything to do but follow.

A nurse leads me to a room with an examining table covered in crinkly paper. She gives me a clipboard with a form that asks for an address and insurance information. Then she leaves me alone to stare at a chart showing the different stages of sleep and their waveforms. I rip the lining of my coat enough to drop the file inside it. Then I sit on the end of the table and write down facts about myself that are mostly true.

There are several brochures on the counter: “The Four Types of Insomnia,” “Symptoms of HBG Assault,” “Dangers of Sleep Apnea,” and “All About Narcolepsy.”

I pick up the one on HBG assault. That’s the legal term for what my mother did to that rich guy. Assault. There are bullet points with a list of symptoms, and the caution that the diagnostic differential (whatever that means) on each is pretty broad:

• Vertigo

• Auditory Hallucinations

• Visual Hallucinations

• Headaches

• Fatigue

• Increased Anxiety

I think of Maura’s music and wonder just how weird the hallucinations can get.

My phone buzzes and I take it out of my pocket automatically, still staring at the pamphlet. I’m not surprised by any of the information—like, I know I get headaches a lot because my mother gave an emotional working the way other parents give a time-out—but it’s still strange to see it printed in black and white.

I flip open my phone and let the pamphlet fall to the floor.
Get over here
, the message reads.
We’ve got a big problem.
It’s the only text message I’ve ever gotten where everything is spelled right. It’s from Sam.

I push the buttons to call him back immediately, but the call goes to voice mail and I realize he must be in class. I check the time on my phone. A half hour more until lunch. I text quickly—
wht did u do?
—which might not be the most sensitive message, but I’m imagining disaster.

I’m imagining him caught with my book, ratting me out. I’m imagining being doomed to sifting through my parents’ detritus until Grandad finds some other odd job for me.

The reply comes fast.
Payout.

I breathe. Someone must have won a bet and, of course, he doesn’t have the cash to cover it.
B ovr soon
, I text back as the door opens and the doctor walks in.

Dr. Churchill takes the clipboard and looks at it instead of at me. “Dolores says there was some kind of mix-up?”

I assume that Dolores is the unfriendly reception desk lady. “Mom told me that I had an appointment with you today.” The
lie comes out easily; I even sound a little resentful. There’s a tipping point with lies, a point where you’ve said something so many times that it feels truer than the truth.

He looks at me then, and I feel like he sees more than I want him to. I think about the file sitting in my coat, so close that he could reach down and grab it before I could stop him. I hope he doesn’t have a stethoscope, because my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest. “So why’d she make you an appointment with a sleep specialist? What kind of problems are you having?” he asks.