She knocks on the back door. “It’s me,” she says to it. Sailor adds a couple of paw scratches. He’s here too, is what he’s saying.
“Hold on. Joe will unlock it for you.” Neale’s voice from the other side is faint. Cate can barely hear her.
Joe opens the door but doesn’t say anything. Sailor stands to put his front paws on Joe’s shoulders. The two of them stand like this for a while, Joe rubbing his forehead against Sailor’s.
“Did you get creepy questions from your friends?” Cate asks him, lifting Sailor from under one of his front legs and setting him back to ground level.
“We’re on Christmas break so I’ve only seen Kiera and Theo and they’d never ask a creepy question.”
A piece of memory is sliding into place.
he makes a terrible sound. his hands go to his head, which has started leaking blood. she twists the opposite way, then smacks him much harder with the extinguisher, this time with a backhand. there’s the slightest cracking sound, like that of an eggshell. then just mush.
“oh no, no.” he says this mildly, almost politely, as though there has been some mistake. more blood rushes out, a lot of it onto cate’s hands. he sways a little, then collapses sideways, onto the floor. she looks at daffy duck on his neck. the tattoo makes everything a little worse, she’s not sure why. lying still on the floor, he looks big, but now soft. his chin is recessed into fat, babyish cheeks. the rain jacket, although filthy, has hung onto its price tag. now he’s still. she’s not sure if he’s alive, dying, or dead. a new smell has come to the fore, warm, and bad. what the inside of humans smells like. for good measure, she bashes his head a couple more times. she started out just wanting him off neale. now she also wants to make sure he’s dead.
She refocuses on Joe, who is grabbing around on top of the refrigerator, for doughnuts that aren’t there.
“I’ll get some this afternoon.”
Neale is sitting on the kitchen floor with a rag and a can of a product called BludOut, rubbing in a hopeless way at a faded but stubborn stain on the linoleum. Banged up and dressed for bloodstain removal, she looks like an extra in a war movie. Her cheek is still swollen and bruised. Cate realizes that of course all of this is superficial and will dissipate. Her surgery is scheduled for next week.
Joe says, “I can walk over to the Seven-Eleven. Not a problem.” He seems relieved at the idea of getting out of the house. Weirdly, he looks older, even though it’s only been a few days since Cate last saw him.
“No way you’re going by yourself. Cate killed one of them, but the other is still unaccounted for.”
And so Cate drives Joe the two blocks to the 7-Eleven. Their easy, oblivious days are behind them. Now they must protect themselves.
When they’re back, Joe takes his doughnuts upstairs and Cate opens two cans of diet ginger ale, then drops to the floor next to Neale, thinking how could you be closer to someone than saving them? This horrible event has brought them to a new place, past the ordinary configurations of friendship, which now look like preliminaries. Of course, she can’t bring herself to say this.
Neale says, “The other thing I feel bad about is that, although I am totally grateful, what you did was really too much for any friend. The whole mess itself was too big, then your response had to be so huge, so way off the edges of anything. It’s hard to put everything back to regular.” Then, after a bit more worthless rubbing at the stain, “Do you think they had our house staked out? Like for a burglary? It’s kind of hard to imagine.”
“Maybe they weren’t looking for lucrative, maybe they were just roaming around, looking for something easy. They seem like people who might’ve had a lot of free roaming time. Maybe they tried this and that gate and they were all locked but yours wasn’t. The bigger problem was the keys dangling in the door. Maybe the door wasn’t even open—”
“No, it was open. I was just back. I knew I was running late, that you were going to be here any minute, and so I was a little frazzled, I was yanking stuff out of bags. I remember thinking if I could just get the frozen and cold stuff put away I could leave the rest until I got back. I keep replaying those first minutes. I see the two of them coming through the back door, but this isn’t even remembering. It’s only imagining, because I never actually did see them come in. My back was to the door. I was putting a couple of Leans into the freezer. I didn’t even know they were there until the woman coughed. The cough was the scariest moment in my life.
“And now I’m frightened she’ll be back with one of their friends. I don’t even know how to picture them. I think maybe they’re junkies? The police weren’t able to ID the guy. He just slipped away, like a spiky line melting into a nice, smooth anonymous one.”
“Do you think you should see someone professional?” Cate says. “Or do you think we should?” Cate would like to fold her arms around Neale, but the two of them have such a withering view of hugging there’s no way they could just start that sort of thing up now.
“The hospital brought in a counselor, but she used words like penetration, also ejaculate. As a noun. Journey as a synonym for life.”
Sailor is busy now, sniffing the floor with a little too much enthusiasm. It goes beyond sniffing into a snuffling that implies prey. A squirrel in a bush. Or with the new influx of urban wildlife, a rabbit. Or in this case, traces of blood from a large man.
“Hey, buddy.” Neale rubs her thumb over the sharp angle of bone above his eye. “Everything is over. All is said and done.”
He casually licks the bruised side of her face. He’s a visiting nurse.
“Maybe Joe and I should get a dog. I think we could use a canine presence in the house.”
“We could look on Petfinder,” Cate says, but she can tell Neale has drifted away somewhere. “I wanted to be the one who brought you home, but Mrs. Pappageorge beat me to it.”
Neale revives a little to say, “We were at a red and when it changed, she jumped like a jackrabbit in front of the oncoming traffic to turn left. Laying on her horn the whole way. It was a heart-stopper. When I mentioned that it was a little scary, she told me this was how she learned to do it in driving school. That must’ve been a driving school in Athens. I imagine it has more aggressive traffic, more done with honking.” Cate looks around. The kitchen is not its usual mess. It’s not even just clean, it’s sanitized. Maureen called in a crime scene/dead person cleaning service, which did a great job with the exception of the intractable bloodstain, which is now the only sign of a large event having taken place here.
“Let me text Maureen. Tell her you’ve already tried this stuff.”
Right away a reply buzzes in.
bludout worthless. do you have any magnesium chalk around there?
Instead of replying sure, cases of it, Cate texts back: thanks!, clicks her phone off, and slips it in her back pocket, then turns to Neale.
“Let me help you up.” Using her hands like blades, she awkwardly hoists Neale by her armpits. This proves to be a difficult negotiation. “Getting down on the floor might have been a bad move for you so soon.”
“Fuck,” Neale says when she’s up, rearranging herself over her feet, shaking one foot out of sleep. She’s missing a tooth, far enough toward the front to be noticeable. Cate hadn’t registered this before. “Little Billy Bob thing you’ve got going here.” Cate taps a finger against Neale’s cheek.
“Cold.” Referring to Cate’s fingertips. Meanwhile, Cate is adding up the damage Neale has sustained.
“Oh man. So much happened before I arrived. If only I hadn’t been running late—”
“Oh, please don’t get into if only thinking. There’s no end to that. You’d have to go back to if Ricky was using her diaphragm that night, she wouldn’t have had you and you wouldn’t have been there to help me. Things might’ve gone worse if you’d been on time. They might’ve been facing a different direction. The way it went down, you had the jump on them. The element of surprise.”
“I was just so furious I didn’t think to be afraid. I was Liam Neeson in those movies where he’s always rescuing his daughter from international sex-trafficking operations.”
“There was more than one of those? How could his daughter keep winding up in that same situation? She’d have to be pretty unlucky.”
“I think his wife gets taken in the next one. I think it’s a business that’s hard to get out of. Oh, I have to tell you. Ricky’s embarrassed by the whole thing. She would’ve preferred a gun, maybe a dagger. Something dramatic and avenging, but also neat and clean. Maybe a fencing sword. She referred to my weapon as a Crock-Pot, to make the whole business sound a little goofy. Maybe rural.”
“You can always count on Ricky. She always comes through.”
Cate sees belatedly that she’s going to have to open Neale’s can of pop for her. “Sit down. In this chair. Not back down on the floor. Do you have any straws? I think you’re going to need one to drink this.” She rummages through a few drawers and comes up with one still in its McDonald’s wrapper.
“I have to keep the studio open. I can get somebody to sub for my three classes, but to make up for that extra salary, I’ll have to be over there most of the time, manning the desk, and that’s going to be it for a few weeks, maybe longer. They say the wrist is going to take its time. I hate that he did this to me. Put me out of business.”
A queasiness floats up. Cate identifies it. “I don’t like that knowing him is something we share.”
“But we don’t really share any of what happened. First it was my experience, then I was out cold while it was being your experience. I knew him when he was alive. You knew him while he was dying.”
“Okay” is what Cate says, although this is not the response she was hoping for. The assault is the worst thing they have ever shared, but also the most significant. As circumstances arranged themselves, she rescued Neale, but if their positions had been switched, she knows Neale would’ve done the same for her. For Cate, saving Neale has eliminated whatever thin space was between them. Neale has had a different response. She has the look of someone at the end of her own private dock, looking seaward toward a fogged horizon. When she pulls back into herself, she is looking around what used to just be her kitchen. Cate tries to help. “You don’t have to stay here. You could move to a blander neighborhood. Or even just a frumpy one. West of Ashland. No one will think you’re a wimp if you get out of Dodge.”
“You know what I hate most? I hate that from here on this will be the centerpiece of our friendship. That we used to have a regular friendship and now we have this thing with weights all over, dangling from it.”
This is so not how Cate sees things. In the first place, she has never thought of their friendship as regular. She thinks of it as way big enough to accommodate what happened. Nothing in this conversation, though, is reinforcing these assumptions.
Neale is fixed on the matter of the house. “I don’t think I have what it would take to rehab someplace else, and I won’t get enough for this place to buy anything but another fixer-upper. I’d have to look at all those listings that say, ‘tons of potential.’ I wish that house all the best, but right now I don’t have whatever it would take to help it realize its destiny.”
Cate gets stuck in a long pause, then pulls her random, sorrowful thoughts into some sort of action. “What do you say we go get the magnesium whatever for the floor and pick up some Vietnamese sandwiches on the way back. You and Joe and I can eat spicy sandwiches here and start reclaiming your kitchen, the way trees take back abandoned parking lots.”
Neale disappears for a few minutes, then comes back with two bathroom rugs, drops them over the offending patch of floor. “All right. Rock and roll.” When they get to the door, she shouts up the stairs to Joe, “Don’t open the door for anyone!”