In Your Life You Will Meet Many Familiars

            “…your life, somewhere far behind you…”
            —Danusha Laméris, “Fictional Characters”

 

The cat—she assumed it was a cat because she never really saw it, not then—darted across the road before she could react. She had turned her head when Hayley said, “Mom,” in a kind of frozen, horrified way, and then they both heard the thump and then a thump again, and in her side-view mirror, she saw the black body arching and compressing, spasming like a spring, and Hayley was saying through compressed lips, “Keep driving.” She bent over in the passenger seat and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Just drive. Please, Mom. I know you, but don’t even think about stopping.”

Ever since the separation and divorce, they were always late, Elena and her daughter. But who made them that way on a daily basis? Hayley, of course. Hayley was the usual reason, with her fourteen-year-old petulance and smart mouth, her fourteen-year-old fears framed by the bathroom mirror. This morning, though, Elena had been the one to blame when, even though she knew better, she took Tom’s call five minutes before they needed to leave. Even then, she hadn’t needed to stand on the landing above the stairs, did she? It was a cell phone, for god’s sake. You can walk and talk and drive at the same time, can’t you?

Can’t you?

“What?” she said. “We’re on our way out the door.”

“You wouldn’t need to leave so early,” he said. “Not if you lived in town. Or at home. You could live here, you know. There’s no law against it. Not in God’s sight or man’s. Separate bedrooms if you want. Until I prove myself. Why not?”

“Tom,” she said. “You know why.” To her mind, it was answer enough, the only answer she had been able to give him for why she’d moved into Fresno when their life had been twenty miles away in Sanger, when Hayley still insisted on going to the school where all of her friends were. All of which meant she had a forty-five-minute drive to her job in the dental office five minutes from the apartment where she and Hayley now lived.

“We have to go,” Elena said. “I can’t talk about this now.” She looked at the cell phone as though it were a foreign object. “Or ever.”

“Why did we move here?” Hayley said when Elena had broken the connection. She had broken the connection, but she couldn’t seem to move from the landing, much less move down the stairs. She was staring at her phone, even though the screen was dark and blank. Why? Why did they move? Why was she staring? Even when they needed to go. They needed to go, and they needed to go now.

“You know why,” she said to her daughter.

“Because,” she replied to herself.

“I don’t know,” in answer to the existential question.

And all of them were true.

 

#

 

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Hayley said. “You know that don’t you?” They were in the school parking lot, and her door was open, but she hadn’t moved and her backpack was still imprisoned in her lap, her flute case on the floor at her feet. “I mean you’re still fucked up in so many ways, but it wasn’t your fault.”

The swearing. When had that happened?

“I never saw the damn thing,” Elena said. “I was looking at you, and then… wham. Jesus, why can’t people keep their pets indoors?”

“I meant the divorce, Mom.” Hayley sighed and gave her mother her best fourteen-year-old stink-eye. She was good at it and in the last six months had been given too many opportunities for practice and refinement. The tilt of her chin. The irises buried in their respective corners. “You and Dad. You’re okay. Mostly. Dad is gross. Clearly.”

“Okay,” Elena adjusted the rearview mirror. “Thanks for that. I guess.”

“Otherwise,” Hayley said, “you could maybe drive a little slower. You’re always in such a rush.”

“You,” Elena said, “are a lousy, lousy kid.”

“Yeah?” Hayley stepped out onto the curb, adjusted her backpack, and shifted her flute case from one hand to the other. “I love you, too.”

 

#

 

The reasons were as complicated as they were simple.

And while she sat at her desk unfocused and confuzzled, staring at the computer screen with the appointment calendar she couldn’t and didn’t want to see, with its list of patients she couldn’t and didn’t want to call, she attempted to list those reasons for herself.

First, Tom was a dick, and if he was also hairy that was just coincidence on his part. And if she had stayed with him for five minutes more after the fifteen years she’d already lost, that would have been willful obstinance, not to mention ignorance on her part.

Second, she owned the house in Sanger—what had once been her parents’ old house of forty years, not to mention her birthplace as well as her inheritance, hers, dammit—and by all rights, he should have been the one to move. But he had likewise never lived anywhere but Sanger and the holy roller church of his childhood and the errors of his youth and his newly-delayed adulthood. Why should he be allowed to escape? Besides, ever since That Day, stepping inside her childhood home created a visceral reaction on her part. Like swallowing a piece of undercooked chicken before her gag reflex could kick in.

Third, well, there really wasn’t a third, except for the fact that she blamed herself, at least in part. And that was where the complications began.

 

#

 

On her lunch hour, she didn’t go home to the apartment. Instead, she drove in the other direction, retracing the route toward Sanger. In her memory, the “accident” had occurred at a bend in the road lined by a white horse-ranch fence and an orchard of lemon and eucalyptus trees. Behind the grove, heavy with its glossy and impossible fruit, a house was set back from the road, in deep shadow, and in that split-second of impact and clarity, she had thought, That’s where it lived.

She stopped on the shoulder nearby, but there was no body with tread marks and no sign that a cat had been killed there. No blood, no fur. It couldn’t have survived. She was sure of that, no matter how many lives cats were supposed to possess. She walked the shoulder. A quarter-mile to the east and back to the car and then a quarter-mile west. Nothing. On top of a telephone pole, a murder of crows cawed their collective displeasure. Murder, murderer.

What am I doing?

“What are you doing?” The voice seemed an echo within her own ears.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” On the other side of the fence stood a gnomish little man, dominated by a bird’s nest of a beard and a belly that seemed to move independently. If he was wearing a feed store ball cap rather than something pointy and red and if he was wearing an oil-stained tee shirt that read I ♥ Pissing Outside, those were his only breaks with stereotype. His mouth was surrounded by bristles that looked like toothpicks.

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure.”

“No.” She weighed her options, none of which seemed good. “I might have hit something earlier this morning.”

“You might have hit something.”

It was like listening to a CD on repeat.

“That’s what I said. I might have hit something.”

“You did, or you didn’t, which is it?”

“I’m not sure. I might have. That’s what I said. Might. Maybe. Not sure.”

“What do you think you might-maybe have hit?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was stalling, and she knew that he knew it. “A cat. A raccoon, a small dog. Maybe a cat. Probably a cat. That’s what I think.”

“Uh, huh.”

The gnome lifted a black garbage sack by his feet and climbed with it over the white fence. For such a pudding of a man, he was a surprisingly nimble climber.

“Like this?” He held out the bag with both hands, its mouth open. A cat was nearly invisible inside, but all the same, the shock of recognition was no less. “This yours?”

“It’s not mine,” she said, “but that’s probably what I hit.”

“You break it, you buy it,” he said, offering the bag to her. “Isn’t that what they say?”

“I guess,” she said, backing away.

He shook the bag, and she took it. Reluctantly.

“I had to finish him off, you know,” the gnome said. “You only hit the back half.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I had to bash his head in with a shovel,” he said. He swung his arms overhead as though reenacting a crime. “It was the merciful thing to do.”

She shuddered; he sneered.

“He was suffering, you know. But you didn’t stop.”

“My daughter and I,” she began. “We were late.”

“People like you—you don’t stop, do you? For nothing. Not even my granddaughter’s cat. People like you.”

“People like me,” she said. Behind her eyes and nose, she felt the flood waters coming. “I stop. That’s the problem. I’m so sorry. I stop all the time. You have no idea.”

“No?”

“Why do you think I’m here?”

 

#

 

He had no idea what she was talking about, just as she had had no idea six months earlier what she would find that day. She had gotten home from work two hours earlier than usual because the office had been the victim of a power outage. A windstorm swept through, rain had pounded every surface, and the streets were flooded while Christmas decorations—inflatable Santas and red-nosed Rudolfs—crashed and scattered and flew everywhere. Was there ever anything sadder than an inflatable Santa without air? A Rudolf without a blinking nose? Then a transformer blew, the neighborhood went dark, and her cheapskate boss, who had refused to order the backup power block she had recommended, went ballistic. He could perform root canals in his sleep, but he was the definition of penny-wise. He bought the cheapest gloves for his hygienists but flew private when he traveled, and now the computers and monitors, the dental suites, all dead, when they didn’t have to be. An unnecessary expense. Five thousand dollars or thereabouts. Unnecessary until—after an hour of waiting and drinking lukewarm coffee—they all went home, there being no point to sitting in the dark with desktops and phones, lights and drills that couldn’t be turned on, much less used. As for appointments, cancellations, or insurance forms, who knew what had been lost in the moments just before the blackout?

She had driven back to Sanger through a pelting rain and roads that were threatening to disappear. Tom should have been at school, instructing sixteen-year-olds on the finer points of volleyball and Frisbee golf, nutrition and substance abuse, but his restored Karmann Ghia sat in the middle of the carport, and she was forced to park behind it in the driveway and then make a mad dash to the side door and shelter underneath the carport roof.

She remembered opening the door and yelling, “What are you doing home?” But there was something off in the still, humid air of the house. Something off. Something wrong.

She yelled again, while she shook herself off in the kitchen. Like a wet dog. “You could have parked like a human being. I’m completely soaked.”

Silence. Or not quite silence.

She walked through the living room with its collection of used glasses and coffee mugs and the previous night’s dinner dishes because no one seemed ever to pick up after themselves, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and either yelled like a banshee or just did it herself. And then she heard the noises coming from Tom’s “study” which was just an excuse of a room at the far end of the house, overcrowded with all the junk for which they had no other place except the places that were already full.

“Tom,” she said and pushed open the door. “What are you—?”

He was naked in his desk chair, and his laptop was open. A pale young woman in an unzipped choir robe filled the screen; she was singing in great breathy soprano puffs while he pulled at himself with a violence that was shocking. The young woman seemed too familiar somehow.

How great thou art,

“Praise Jesus,” Tom groaned. “Thank god, thank god,” and pulled and pulled.

How great…

The woman looked to the ceiling—anywhere but the camera—while she threatened to come out of her blue polyester robe. A striptease, a snake shedding its skin in the choir. That’s what it looked like.

“Fucking hell,” Elena said.

“Elena,” Tom said.

“Tom,” Elena said.

“This is not what it looks like.”

He stood up from his chair. In all his red and erect and yanked-upon glory.

“No,” she said, “you’re right. I’m sure it’s something else.”

“Elena, is that you?” the woman on the computer screen was calling. “Elena, I can’t wait to explain.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so.” Which was when Tom slammed the laptop shut but not before the penny dropped and the revelation occurred: the nineteen-year-old daughter of Tom’s pastor. Joan, Brother Les’s daughter.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at your Goody-Two-Shoes Bible College?” she said to the vanished image.

Then to her two-faced, piece-of-shit husband. “No. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Elena,” Tom said.

“Fucking hell, Tom,” Elena said again. It seemed as good a comeback as any, the only thing she could think to say. “Fucking hell.”

 

#

 

Which was just the beginning of how she became the bad guy in whatever you might choose to call the situation. At least in the way Tom presented it. The situation of That Day. That Day and beyond. If she could have found it in her heart to understand. To see it from his side. When, according to Tom, he was doing it for her, doing it for the wife he loved and had loved for fifteen years, with all his heart and soul, mind and body. Joan was just a vehicle, a conduit for his healing, his choice of therapy for the pornography and sex addiction he’d struggled with his whole, hormonally-driven, immature life. The addiction he’d hidden from her until now when he had finally decided to address it. Oh, the pleading she was forced to hear. The prayers he had prayed, he and Joan’s father. In Joan’s father’s study no less with its framed white Jesus on the wall. She had had no idea. They’d been together since their sophomore year of high school. Pregnant at graduation and married before another school year could begin. But she had had no idea. Like hell, she realized now. She had known without the pain of admission.

“I wondered,” she admitted. “There were times, I wondered. Whenever I let myself think about it. Which I tried not to.”

“I’m not proud of myself,” he said, “but you need to give me some credit for doing something about it.”

“I don’t think I do,” she said. “Credit for Zoom-sexting with a girl five years older than your daughter? A girl who once upon a time was our babysitter?”

“It’s a process,” Tom said. “You know? I’m weaning myself. Tapering off.”

“That’s what you call it.”

“She’s helping me become sick of myself. Sick and ashamed.”

“Oh, please. That’s not hard.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened,” Elena said, “except that I can’t unsee what I just saw.”

She moved into a hotel room that afternoon, and she took Hayley with her, without divulging the details. A vague outline, yes. The rest Hayley filled in over time, by overhearing her parents’ louder and louder conversations. As with any game of telephone, Elena shuddered to think of all that her daughter had gotten wrong. Not that congratulations were in order for anything she might have gotten right.

He claimed it was a private form of aversion therapy, suggested and approved by Joan’s father, Brother Les, that loopy Fundamentalist with an associate’s Bible degree, who would seek to give his own spin on the matter. A sister helping a brother regain his spiritual equilibrium. He wasn’t happy about their methods, and no matter what Tom might have said, he hadn’t given his blessing to such treatment, except to what their goal might be. That’s what Brother Les told her, as though he expected her to believe him. Which, on the other hand, was not quite Tom’s defense either. For his part, Tom called it compensatory for the love withheld these past ten years; they might be growing old at the same time, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were growing old together where the body and pleasure were concerned.

“So, you’re saying it’s my fault,” she said, “for being tired all the time? For working at a lousy dentist’s office while you’re playing with the high school kids? I just hope you’re not ‘playing’-playing with them. In what world is your behavior my fault?”

“I would never,” he said, and he looked genuinely abashed at the thought that she might think him criminal in some way, but who knew? “I know you think she’s going to Stupid School, but she’s a psychology major. She’s just trying to help me become my best self.”

“I bet.”

“Seriously,” Tom said. “Why are you so sarcastic? It makes you sound bitter and old.”

“I just heard you use the word ‘compensatory.’ Now who’s being sarcastic?”

 

#

 

Cars passed behind her. In front of her, a dirty tee shirt proclaiming a fondness for bear-in-the-woods urination. And in both hands, she held a garbage bag with a dead cat.

“So, what am I supposed to do with this?” She shook the bag with its surprisingly heavy weight.

Mr. I-♥-Pissing-Outside shrugged. “Up to you.” His mouth twisted, and his toothpick whiskers shifted. “Nothing to do with me. Not now.”

“Great,” she said. “That’s helpful.”

That shrug again.

“My condolences to your granddaughter.”

He waved one hand before clambering back over the fence. “She’ll be touched by your concern.”

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He waved again, the back of his tee shirt without a motto, only a tie-dye of oil stains.

Which was why, when she picked up Hayley from band practice at school, she had a dead cat in a garbage bag in the trunk of her Civic. Not that Hayley knew. But for her, it might as well have been Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart while she made phone calls and entered billing information. Although the car was in the parking lot fifty yards away, she heard intimations of meowing through her headset while she spoke to Harriet Duffy about rescheduling her cleaning; she heard scratching while Roger Burkett called to complain about an insurance denial. And then, as she drove to Sanger to pick up Hayley, she heard a purr. You came back.

“We’re making a stop at the house,” she said as Hayley slung her backpack and the flute case into the back seat. Four of Hayley’s band friends stood in a row at the curb, wearing their bandmembers’ letter jackets, trying to look like a girl gang or a barbershop quartet. Elena couldn’t decide. Tabitha Reynolds, another flute, stuck her tongue out for reasons that again escaped her.

“Why?”

“I’m leaving your father something.”

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever.”

“How was band?”

Hayley didn’t so much respond as she let air escape, put her feet on the dashboard and her forehead on her knees. “I hate school.”

“Hey, anytime you want to change, I’ll be happy to make that happen.”

“My friends are here.”

“But you hate school. Your friends are school.”

“Whatever.”

“I hear the band program’s better in Clovis.”

“Whatever.”

The carport was empty, and she pulled in as though she still lived there, but allowing enough room for a second car because—well, you know—habits of civility die hard.

“Get the shovel, will you?”

Hayley shrugged, said, “I guess,” while Elena opened the trunk.

Her childhood home was at the back end of a cul-de-sac. She had grown up there believing it to be everything she would have or could have ever wanted. The backyard was large and lush in the midst of such an arid and harsh landscape, the product of fifty or more years of growth, some judicious pruning, but mostly a force-feeding of water fortified by benign neglect. The source of her own myths. Of adventure, exploration, and heroism. Was that true for Hayley as well? She didn’t know. Maybe it was just a reminder for Hayley that her parents were divorced and at cross purposes with each other. That her life wasn’t what she had always assumed or imagined. Certainly not the ideal.

She lifted the garbage sack from the trunk and carried it to the back flowerbed where she began to dig a square hole under the red leaves of the Rhaphiolepis and the glare of Hayley’s scrutiny.

“You went back, didn’t you?”

Her easiest response was to deflect and keep digging. “It was weighing on my mind.”

“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” her daughter said.

“No.” She stood back from the hole, judging the size relative to the trash bag. “No, I couldn’t.”

Two things, then, happened at once: St. Joan-of-the-Zoom-call opened the back door and said, “What are you doing?” just as Elena turned the trash bag over and let the carcass slide into the hole. A black cat with white paws. One that didn’t land with a thump but got to its feet, stood unsteadily, and then tottered away, crawling into the underbrush of the bay laurel as though it had been on a three-day bender. This was in the back corner of the property where an abandoned fountain lay in pieces.

“What the fuck?” Hayley said. She stood with her hands on her hips and shook her head, signs easy enough to interpret. “I mean, what the fuck?”

They stared into the darkness by the fence line, the low branches, the fountain.

“Language, language,” Joan said. She wore a man’s terry-cloth bathrobe and was brushing out her wet hair, signaling a late afternoon shower. “That’s disappointing.”

“The cat was fucking dead,” Hayley said, “and then it fucking wasn’t. That’s what we call a fucking surprise.”

“But I don’t know what’s more surprising,” Elena said, “a walking dead cat or a not-in-real-life therapist, who uses her not-in-real-life client’s shower.”

“Tom is letting me stay here for a few days,” Joan said. “He’s been very kind. But then, maybe you wouldn’t know that side of him.” She frowned against any possible judgment. “It’s not a big deal.”

“To you, maybe,” Elena said. “I wonder what Daddy would say.”

Joan pressed her pouty lips into a severe line. “We’re not speaking at the moment.”

“That makes sense.”

Joan shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Welcome to the club,” Hayley said, “whatever your name is.”

 

#

 

Three days later, Elena finds herself once again driving the route to Sanger on her lunch hour. In that time, early summer has arrived like a promised oppression: the heat radiates through the windshield even though she has the air conditioner set to high. Where the road bends and the white fences begin, she stops on the shoulder and opens her door. A black horse eyes her warily but then shakes its head and returns to eating grass. Apparently, she’s not worth further attention.

“Me neither,” she says. “You have my vote.” But the horse refuses to be deterred.

The driveway is straight and flanked by rows of peeling eucalyptus. The ranch house beyond is nondescript and in need of paint. The red door is flaking, revealing a layer of blue underneath, and when she knocks, red chips fall to the cement step below. If there’s an enormous MAGA flag somewhere in the backyard, she won’t be surprised.

A girl in a once-white, much too-tight tee shirt opens the door with a baby, maybe nine months old, on her hip. Elena recognizes the outline of a nursing bra as well as the tell-tale stains.

“What?” she says, hiking the baby higher.

“I’m looking for your father,” Elena says. “Maybe your grandfather. We met, a few days ago?” she adds.

The girl looks puzzled.

“Beard. He was wearing a shirt that said something about peeing outside.”

“Oh.” She turns and yells to the back of the house. “Danny! Goddamn it. Someone’s at the door for you.”

The baby grabs her mother’s ear. “Stop that,” she says, and the baby grabs her mother’s breast instead, and the young woman bats the pudgy hand away. “He’s family, but we’re not close, you know what I mean? He’s a great-uncle or something; he lives here, but he’s more work than this one.”

“Did you have a cat?” Elena asks, but before the young woman can respond, the gnome appears from a dark hallway, wearing a hoodie noosed around his beard. In this heat, no less.

“What did you kill this time?” he says.

The front of the hoodie spells out FUCKDADDY in a Gothic script, apparently in the belief that form is more important than content.

“What?” the girl says.

“Nothing,” Elena says, “and apparently nothing a few days ago either.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” the gnome says. “You squish ’em, they die. That’s what happens.”

“What happens is I nearly buried a live cat.”

“That can happen you give ’em enough of the good stuff.”

“Goddamn it, Danny.” The girl pushes the old man toward the back of the house and a room with a door that slams shut.

“How many times are you going to do this?” the girl yells at the door.

“I’m sorry?” Elena says.

“No.” The girl shakes her head, and the baby shakes hers in imitation. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I can’t watch his crazy ass twenty-four hours a day. Not with this sack of sugar at my tit day and night. He’s just an old demented lunatic who has a box of trash bags and a bottle of chloroform in the garage and a sick sense of humor when it comes to animals that don’t respect boundaries. If you hit a cat, you hit a cat. They’re three-a-week on this street. You’re just lucky a pig didn’t get loose. It’s his idea of a joke, but he’s the only one who thinks he’s funny.”

“Yeah,” Elena says, “he’s a laugh riot, alright.”

“I swear,” the girl says. “The state of California pays me a couple thousand dollars a month to keep him out of a home, but is it worth the aggravation? You tell me.”

“Can’t help you,” Elena says. “I’m just as confused as the next guy.”

“I’m telling you,” the girl sighs, “it’s no way to live.”

 

#

 

On another night two years and two seasons later, Elena and Hayley drive to the house of longtime Sanger friends for their annual Christmas party. Their friends—husband and wife musicians—live by the river in a house that blends in with the undulations of river and hills. Their friends’ lives are so different from their own as to be from another world. They have played with the dogs before the early winter sun has a chance to set, eaten Thai food by candlelight, and sung Christmas carols at the piano. During the songfest, Elena has downed a glass or two of an eggnog so whiskey-fueled and flammable that Hayley—four weeks after getting her license—has taken the car keys. As they leave, clouds have blanketed the sky, and fog is beginning to form; the moon is missing, and with the exception of Christmas lights that spell out “Emanuel” in a globular haze above the front door, the darkness seems absolute. The headlights extend a tunnel that goes only so far.

“Be careful,” Elena wants to say to her daughter, “take it easy,” but she offers this advice without the ability to utter the words, much less the weight of their warning.

They drive over the narrow bridge and stop before turning onto the highway. To the left, the river—far below the level of summer’s crest—is a dark ribbon in the mist while to the right they skirt the granite of the hills. Hayley is accelerating, testing the limits of the headlights’ latest alignment, when it happens.

An enormous black-and-white thing, one that looks like a caterpillar on steroids, scuttles across the road in front of them but without any discernible urgency or fear. Hayley stomps the brakes, and the Civic slews and fishtails before coming to a stop perpendicular to both lanes. The engine idles, but they are neither coming nor going. There is no traffic, thank God, on this darkly muffled road. Skunk. That’s what finally enters Elena’s mind.

“Shit,” Hayley says.

Thank you, Elena thinks. Thank you for missing it. You saved us a week of misery. But what comes out of her mouth is a single word: “Language.”

“Fucking hell,” Hayley says. “Not you, too.”

Their headlights face the steam above the river below, their taillights the granite. In her side mirror, Elena can see their red glow reflected on the hillsides and within that glow are two pinpricks of light. The skunk has still not scared, in no hurry, it seems, to be gone.

“Okay,” Elena says to her daughter who is visibly still gathering herself. She taps her on the knee which is connected to the leg which is connected to the foot which is atop the brake pedal so recently and so sharply depressed. “We’re fine. You did good. No harm, no foul. Let’s go home.”