I bring Severin home. He doesn’t say anything on the drive, and once we’re back, he goes to his room and shuts the door. I sit down in the rocker, which has found a new place by the shoved-aside coffee table. I quit my job. I can’t believe it. I quit my job.
“Do you think God’s a baseball fan?” Bex asks. Since school let out and since we bought the new TV and Xbox, Bex has given up on tsunami victims, given up on her friends Max and An Ling, who she used to play with after school sometimes. Bex just wants to lie on the floor in front of the TV, be swallowed up and devoured by the huge screen and whatever is on—Wheel of Fortune, Animal Planet, the Travel Channel, the Daytona 500 racing game. Now a field of green fills our living room, as do men in white uniforms, cool and pure as vanilla ice cream.
“I don’t know, Bex, why?”
“They always pray before a game,” she says.
“Do you want to go swimming or something? I’ll take you to Pine Lake.”
“No.” Her chin rests in her open palms. Her legs are crossed at the ankle. She has a Band-Aid on one shin, but I have no idea how she could have gotten scratched, since she hasn’t moved from the TV in days. Freud is curled up in a spot of sun by the front window.
“I don’t really want to either,” I say. “How about CNN?”
“Nah. There are so many more choices now that you got Premium Cable.”
We watch baseball. We watch a men’s diving championship, which is more interesting, due to the embarrassing bathing suits. Bex does a lot of snickering and pointing. We share a bag of Cheetos and then we watch some woman trying out Paris restaurants. Bex puts in a video game and her cartoon car makes cartoon loops around a cartoon track.
Mom comes home just after six. “God, what a shitty day,” she says. “Bex, I told you no TV today.” She heads straight for the kitchen, and I get up and follow. I’m actually stiff and creaky from sitting in that chair so long.
Mom drops her purse onto the kitchen chair, and her mail onto the table. “Indigo, please. Don’t let her sit and be a zombie like that.”
“You don’t mind if I’m a zombie,” I say.
“Zombie,” Chico says. “Zombie. Zombie. Zombie.”
“Would you feed Chico, please? I don’t worry about you being a zombie because you never were exposed to endless entertainment on a life-size television when you were her age. You didn’t go from compassionate Samaritan to hypnotized TV child. The other day, she was watching bass fishing.” Mom rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers. “Of course, you were never as prone to extremes as Bex either. I’m worried she’ll join a cult someday, or get involved with some guy she’ll never leave even if he’s jobless and wears a Budweiser cap….”
“Maybe we should sign her up for some summer camp thing. Horseback riding or crafts, or—”
“They’re just so expen—No! Jeez. I didn’t mean to say that. Forget I said that. We’re not having this conversation. Ack!” She pounds her head twice with her fist.
“Mom, this is stupid! What good is this money if I can’t share it with you? You, who needs it? This is ridiculous.”
“So, it’s ridiculous. I don’t like the idea of crazy spending. It worries me. If there was a thoughtful plan, it’d be another matter. Some sense of applying the brakes. But it feels like all, buy this, buy that, buy whatever.” She does what we do when we don’t know what to do. She opens the refrigerator and stares inside. She lets the door slap shut again. “Indigo—you know, I just haven’t processed how to handle all this money stuff yet.”
“I know,” I say. I lift the door to Chico’s cage. Chico eats these bird pellets, but he also needs regular, healthy human food too. I give him some broccoli from the fridge, a bit of wheat bread, a little pinch of leftover chicken. “Chico good boy,” he says. Sure.
“And I can’t process it right at this moment. This has been one shitty day.” She drops into a kitchen chair. She shoves aside the stack of mail. She rubs her temples with her fingertips. “There’s a full moon, or something, because Dr. Kaninski’s schedule was just packed. So we’re seeing twice the amount of people, and no one’s got their insurance cards, and then there’s an emergency call from this father who says his son’s locked himself in his room and he’s got a gun, and Dr. Kaninski’s at lunch and then it turns out the son doesn’t have a gun, after I interrupt the doctor’s pad thai, and then this woman calls for the second time in a month to get more meds when she has a three-month supply, and then the day is finally over and I go to my car and I’ve got a flat.”
“Oh, man,” I say. “You should have called me.”
“For you to do what? Change my tire? Offer me moral support while I panic?”
“I can change a tire!” I say. “Okay, maybe I can’t change a tire.”
“Dr. Kaninski changed it for me.” She chuckles. “A psychiatrist changing a tire. His golf ball tie was flipped over one shoulder. I feel stupid not knowing how to change it myself. I doubt I could have jacked the thing up, though…”
“I think that means you have penis envy,” I say.
“Male arm muscle envy, and no other body parts, thank you.” Mom takes off her shoes. There’s the clunk of her heels under the table. “Hot, tired, and sick of humanity. This calls for fast food,” she says.
“Agreed,” I say. “It’s been a shitty day for everyone.”
“What happened?”
“Trust me.”
“Do me a favor? Take a poll and figure out what everyone wants to eat. I’ll meet you at the car.”
“I’ll drive” I say.
“Forget it,” she says. “I value my life.”
Taco Time, we decide. I’m counting on insta-fat and salt served in cardboard food boxes to lift my mood, which has gone gray and senseless as ash. I’m not the sort to get depressed. Usually, the times I can count on it hitting are when we’ve had two weeks of straight, gloomy rain, and when I hear those ads for some depression medicine or clinical study on the radio. Are you feeling helpless or hopeless? Does your life seem meaningless and empty? Are you full of the awareness that we just put up with a bunch of endless crap, punctuated by brief moments of brightness, and then we die? Depression ads are so depressing. If you don’t have it before one of those things, you have it after. Those usually are the only real times a fuzz of gloom descends on me. But now I feel this tug and pull at my inner joy, a gradual darkening, the way they used to get the room ready for a movie in elementary school. The screen is yanked down. The heavy curtains dragged shut, first one, then the other. Finally, Justin, get the lights. I’ve just graduated from the inane prison that’s high school and I’m the relatively new owner of two and a half million dollars and I’m feeling depressed? Melanie (and most of my peers and a few teachers and Severin and sometimes Mom) may have been right after all—I am crazy.
We get into Mom’s car, which now has three regular wheels and one tiny, undersize spare that looks both forlorn and wrongly hopeful. Then Mom forgets her keys and has to go back in again. It’s practically a law in our house that you can’t leave the house without forgetting something. You say good-bye to a member of my family, and it’s just a rehearsal, because a second later they’ll come dashing back in. Finally, we’re buckled up, and the minute Mom starts up the car, my phone rings.
“In, listen. I’ve just had a brilliant idea.”
Uh-oh. The last brilliant idea Trevor had was when he thought he’d surprise his mom and give her the afternoon off from day-care work. He carted off six little kids and put them into her minivan while they were playing outside. When Mrs. Williams came out to the backyard and found it empty, she screamed with the full-power open-throttle fear and outrage of a bear whose cubs have been snatched. It was so loud, the guy on parole across the street took off running even though he didn’t do anything wrong, and old Mrs. Jaynes, the neighbor lady next door, who’d been on a ladder picking apples from her tree, flew from it in airborne surprise, breaking a hip and flinging apples in all directions. An apple was even later found in one of Trevor’s mom’s flowerpots, and another, weirdly, in a baseball mitt one of the toddlers had brought over. Poor Mrs. Jaynes has used a walker ever since; she shouldn’t have been on a ladder at her age, but still. The police stopped Trevor and the minivan as they were pulling out of Burger King; they were all wearing golden crowns and singing a sloppy rendition of “Wheels on the Bus.”
“I’ve had a lousy day, Trevor,” I warn. Mom backs out of the driveway, looking both ways. Ever since I got my own car, everyone else’s driving has been driving me crazy. I never realized how slow she goes. We’re moving at maybe five miles an hour. I wouldn’t even have known we’d left, except the trees and houses are stepping backward oh so slightly out my window. At this rate, we’ll be at the mailboxes by Tuesday.
What happened? Mom doesn’t say, but mouths instead.
I’m expecting Trevor to ask the same thing. He’s always been a good boyfriend that way, and is alert to comfort and misery clues. Offering his sweatshirt, remembering that girls actually need to use the bathroom, stuff like that. But this time, I’m not sure he even hears me.
“I was just driving home from work, and it hit me,” Trevor says.
“A Hostess truck?” I say. I still hear that jerk’s horn.
“What? No, this idea. I’ve been thinking about how to expand my product line, you know. I mean, I’ve got a good line of Catholic products, I think. But what about other religions? Am I limiting my sales base? So, I’m just running through the list in my head, okay? Methodists. Well, the fact of the matter is, Methodists aren’t funny. Protestants, Methodists, Lutherans—none of them are funny. They’re pot roast, green beans, potatoes. What’s funny there? Then I realize. Mormons. You’ve got the whole bigamy thing. Bigamy’s hilarious.”
“That’s kind of going low, Trevor. Kind of cliché. They don’t even really practice bigamy.” Irritation rushes in. I know where this is heading. Another way to spend my money. I hate the way he sees me lately. Like I’m a human ATM machine.
Mom scrunches her eyebrows. Bigamy? she mouths.
“What’s the matter with you, In? Jesus, you’re sounding uptight.”
“I told you, I had a bad day.”
“Well, then I guess you’re not going to like my ‘I Heart My Wives’ T-shirts.”
He’s still being a Teflon listener. Everything I’m saying is sliding right off of him.
“Why don’t we talk about this another time,” I say. “Right now? I’m tired of the whole topic.”
There’s silence on the other end, the kind of silence that’s very noisy. Unsaids say so much more than saids. I feel the sharp corners and dangerous ledges in the quiet.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. Trevor’s voice has a snap. And Trevor’s voice never has a snap—Trevor has the perpetual cheer of a Hawaiian shirt. My throat closes. There are so many words there that want to come out, that nothing can come out. I watch as Mom eeks through the neighborhood. We finally make the left turn heading toward town; we inch in the direction of the small bridge that hooks over Nine Mile Falls Creek, where the salmon run. “You’re thinking I’m after your money. It’s what you’re always thinking lately.” I look at fir trees, every fir tree, and wish for more space between Trevor’s words and what might come after them.
“I’m not your ticket someplace,” I say.
It comes out before I realize it. Mom shoots an alarmed look my way. There is silence. I just sit there, holding the phone. I don’t even hear him breathe. I’ve shocked him, and I’ve shocked myself. The words are horrible, I realize. I want to snatch them back, but there’s too much truth in them to do that.
“Wow,” Trevor says finally. “Wow. I guess after two—more than two—years of being together, I thought we could handle anything. Even this, In. But you haven’t even given us a chance to handle it. You put yourself in one place and you put me over here.”
“I am in a different place,” I say.
“Funny, I thought we were heading somewhere together. I thought this—the money. I thought it was something that happened to us. But apparently I was wrong.”
I don’t say anything. His words are too close, and so I shove them far.
“And maybe you ought to know something else,” he says. “Just now? I didn’t call you to talk about your money. Maybe you might remember that I had this idea long before that. I don’t need your money.”
And suddenly I feel something I’ve never felt with Trevor before. A corner I could turn, down a street away from him. I can see that corner so clearly that I feel a choice in front of me. To walk ahead and make the turn or to run back the way I came. The space ahead seems so large, so frighteningly unknown; the space behind is known. It’s where a sense of home is, even if home doesn’t fit anymore. And so I rush back. I run back to safety like a little kid who thought for a moment he was lost.
“Trevor, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sitting in the car with Mom. I love you, all right? Just, let’s do this later.”
Silence again. “Fine.”
We hang up our cell phones I bought us. The thing about running back to safety—its relief abandons you fast. The things-are-still-okay comfort is fleeting, like touching base in a tag game before you know you have to run off again. Change is the most relentless nag. For about thirty seconds, I’m so glad I didn’t do something crazy and end things with Trevor right there. And then, the scritch of annoyance starts. He thought the money was something that happened to us? Wasn’t he making an awful lot of assumptions here, without checking with me first? And, really? My money wasn’t going to be brought up? When it has come up in practically every conversation we’ve had in the last six weeks?
“Are you all right?” Mom sneaks a look at me.
“Yeah,” I sigh, but shake my head. My body isn’t so sure. Along with my resumed annoyance is something else. Supreme inner disappointment, the big daddy of guilt, aka shame. I said I love you and didn’t mean love. I meant Please don’t leave me. I meant Please don’t inflict change on me. I meant Let’s just ignore this. I’m not ready for this right now. I’m embarrassed at my own self for using Love and Cling interchangeably.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mom asks. She has finally crept over the other side of the bridge. One of us, anyway, is capable of forward motion, even at the pace of a marble on a barely tilted surface.
I shake my head, which is starting to hurt. I realize this about the inner voice—it whispers, then it shouts, and then it backhands you one with a headache for not listening. You can fool the mind, but you can’t fool the body. The body is more honest. “Can we just get there?” I ask.
“I’ll take the freeway, instead of going through town,” she says.
I roll down my window, lean one elbow out. I sniff the green, hopeful air of summer. Mom sits at the freeway entrance, her turn signal making an endless click, clock, click clock. Finally, she hits the accelerator and we are off, and then there is a horrible, screeching cry in the backseat, and a sudden moment of confusion and fur and the long searing scrape of a claw down my forearm.
“Oh my God, oh my God. Freud!” Mom screams.
“Shit, what’s he doing in here?”
Freud is wondering the same thing. The car as a stationary sleeping palace is one thing, but as a speeding, scenery flying, wind-sucking metallic force of nature—Freud is having none of it. Freud is in full get-me-outta-here panic, and Mom is trying to merge and a corvette with its radio blaring screams past, the driver flipping her off, and her turn signal is still on, and now she’s flicked on her windshield wipers by mistake and sent a fountain of wiper fluid shooting across the windshield and Freud has leapt to the backseat and now the front again and is clinging halfway up Mom’s shoulder. I try to pull him off so she can drive and we won’t be killed as Mom yells, “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Move him! Ow, damnit! I can’t see!”
“Pull over, pull over!” I say, and finally Mom eases over to the side of the freeway. She turns off the engine. A semi rattles and whooshes past, and the car shakes with apparent fear. Freud still clings to her shoulder, his eyes wild.
“How did we not see him?” she says.
“I don’t know. I didn’t even look. He was probably on the floor.”
“When we started going fast…”
I remove Freud’s claws from Mom, and he lunges to my lap, sinks his little needles into my bare shorts-clad legs. I let out a scream, clench shut my eyes, and feel his squirming mass rise from my grasp. Shit, he bounds from me, and all I see when I open my eyes is his furry narrow ass and his hideous, villainous tail escape through my open window.
“Freud!” Mom yells. “Oh, God!”
I have a vision of a flattened Freud; Freud as a thin roadkill animal crepe. Trodden by Sears radials, guts insta-compressed into a new layer of asphalt, his soul hightailing it from the premises (heading for you know where), leaving glassy eyes behind. I don’t want to see that happen to Freud, even if Mom and I look like we’ve just made a joint jaunt through a paper shredder. Freud’s one of those relatives that you aren’t especially fond of but who is still part of the family, damn it.
But Freud’s plan does not involve a leap into speeding traffic. He’s running as fast as his hairy hide can take him, into the woods adjoining the freeway. I barely notice the SUV pulling over ahead of us, its monstrous emergency lights blinking on-off. A woman with short brown hair pops her head from the driver’s side window. Her mouth is a gash of open anger.
“You sicko!” she screams. “I saw what you did!”
Nothing is making sense. Mom is flinging open her door, her eyes glued to Freud’s little gray body heading for the evergreens, but this woman is shouting from her massive, environment-smashing car.
“You animal killer! I’m going to call the police! Sicko!” she screams again. And then her huge tires are in motion and the tanklike back of her SUV rolls back into traffic to suck more life from our planet.
“She thinks we threw him out the window. She thinks we brought him here to ditch him,” I say.
But Mom isn’t paying attention to any of this. She’s hiking one leg over the highway barrier, her arms flailing around for something to hold on to. Oh, God, this is Mom putting up Christmas lights and changing smoke detector batteries all over again.
“Wait for me,” I say. I unclasp my seat belt and go out after her. She’s stumbling toward the forest and shouting Freud’s name. His evil little behind disappears into some ferns and then appears again out the other side. He looks over one shoulder at us.
“It’s okay, Freud,” Mom croons. “Stay there. I’ll come get you. It’s okay.” Mom is using her talk-the-suicide-from-the-ledge voice, which she perfected at work. Well, maybe not perfected, because Freud takes off again. We scramble after him, branches breaking under our feet, and holly and blackberries scraping our legs, already in shambles. Freud eyes a tree trunk. He isn’t quite crouched to leap, but his shoulders are in that considering-it pose.
“No,” Mom pleads. She’s gone from rational and calm to desperate. “Freud, no.”
But cats love a yes when you need a no. He slings his body back then forward, slingshot-style, and up the tree he goes.
We watch him clutch and climb and settle onto a branch just out of reach. He makes himself comfy.
“Oh, Freud,” Mom says.
“This isn’t funny, Freud, goddamnit,” I say.
Mom hides her face in her hands. I look around for something, anything that might help us. The freeway hums behind us. There’s nothing here but huckleberry bushes and…I don’t know, green bushes, I’m not some kind of horticulture expert. We’re in a forest, that’s the point.
“This is ridiculous,” I say.
“I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know.”
“We ought to leave you here, Freud. You can be eaten by coyotes and mountain lions. You could be a tasty little morsel,” I sneer.
Mom clasps her hands and looks skyward. Man, we are in trouble if Mom’s praying. Mom says she doesn’t generally like to bother God unless there’s a crisis, same as she does with Dad.
“Mom!” I say. I’m trying to snap her back to the here and now. At the moment, we need a higher power that will actually return our phone calls.
Mom looks back at Freud. “Please,” she says. “Come on, Freud. Here, kitty. Come here.”
But Freud’s twisted little sadistic self is just beginning to enjoy this. If cats love a yes when you need a no, they love a no when you need a yes even more.
“Fine. Let’s leave him,” I say.
“Indigo, no. We can’t do that.”
“Why not? This is a power trip. Look at him.”
“He looks scared,” she says.
“Scared, my ass. He looks smug.”
Mom looks at Freud, considers this. “Well, still. We need something to climb up. Maybe we can call someone. Someone with a big ladder.”
Right as she says that, we hear the crack-snap of footsteps in a forest. A big square-shouldered figure approaches. A big square-shouldered figure in a uniform. My God, a cop.
“Is everything all right here?” he says. “What seems to be the trouble?” He must have watched plenty of cop shows, because he has the lines down.
“Officer! Oh my gosh,” Mom gushes. She’s suddenly turned all Catholic girl in the presence of authority. Mom never says “gosh.” “My cat…”
“You need to understand that we take animal cruelty cases very seriously,” he says.
I don’t doubt him. He looks like he takes everything very seriously. He has a square jaw, too, and his eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. His hips are bulked up by radios and other cop stuff that hangs off of him. If he actually had to run, it’d be as awkward as having a toddler strapped around your waist. “No, there’s been a misunderstanding,” Mom says.
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Officer Friendly says. “We got a call about someone throwing a cat onto the freeway.”
“I wasn’t throwing a cat…. This is my pet. We’d never hurt him.”
“Ha,” I say.
Mom shoots me a look. “He was in the backseat.”
“The caller witnessed a cat being thrown,” the officer says.
“We didn’t throw him! He jumped up…My daughter had her window open…He panicked when we got on the freeway, and now…I don’t know how to get him down…” Mom’s voice cracks. Mom’s voice cracks and Mom cracks. She lets out a small sob. She puts her palms to her eyes.
“Ma’am?” the officer says.
“I would never hurt my cat. Never. Any living being…” She’s crying now. “He’s part of my family. His shots are all up to date….”
“Ma’am? It’s okay, all right?” The officer removes a radio from his hip. Clicks it on, holds it up to his mouth. He spits a few words into it, hooks it back to his hip again.
“He gets this special medicine for his eye….”
“Mom, it’s okay,” I say. She has branches in her hair.
“The fire department will be here in a minute to get him down,” the police officer says.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just been one of those days…. One thing after another. You know?”
He lifts his glasses off his head. Maybe his eyes aren’t so bad underneath. Maybe they’re slightly kind. “You look really familiar to me,” he says. “You didn’t happen to go to Lake Washington High, did you? In Kirkland? Mr. Cassady, history?”
“Yes…,” Mom says. “I did.”
“Brian Murphy?” he says.
She squints her eyes, like he’s a tiny, fuzzy place on a map that she can’t see without her glasses. “Brian? Oh my God, I’d have never recognized you.”
“Naomi Connors? You look great!”
She doesn’t correct her last name. I can hear the heaving sound of a truck pulling up, and see the spin of red lights through the trees. The fire truck is here.
“The fire truck’s here,” I say.
But they ignore me. Mom is flashing this smile as bright as an amusement park at night, and Officer Brian Murphy is grinning like a goofy kid who just won a ribbon for his volcano at the science fair.
“So, how’ve you been?” he asks. “God, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.” She laughs.
“Oh it is, it is,” he says.
Two firemen are picking their way through the forest, hauling a mega ladder between them. Freud must see it too, because he stands lazily, and begins inching his way back along the branch.
“Mom! Freud…,” I say. But Mom has forgotten the reason we are standing out in the middle of a forest. Mom has forgotten we are out in a forest at all. She may as well be at a cocktail party, swirling her ice cubes in a glass and contemplating the basket of tortilla chips.
“You live here in town, then?” Officer Brian Murphy asks. He folds his arms and leans his weight on one foot, turning his shape from intimidating square to friendly triangle.
“I do. After my divorce…”
Blah, blah, blah. I leave the exciting plot right there and wait under the tree, scooping up Freud when he touches down. The firemen barely make it halfway, when I head toward them with Freud in my death grip.
“He’s a hideous beast who came down the minute he saw you. I’m sorry,” I say.
“Cats,” the fireman says to his partner, and shakes his head.
I roll up the car window, place Freud in the backseat. I sit up front, waiting for Mom and Officer Brian. When she finally gets into the car, she’s all cheerful. “Okay, Freudy Boy,” she says. “We had quite a little adventure, didn’t we?”
“Did he give you happy drugs from some bust?”
“He asked for my number. Isn’t that funny?” she says. “Now, I don’t want you to ever, ever do that naughty thing again,” Mom addresses Freud. “Indigo, hold his collar from here so he stays in the back.”
“You sure are cheery,” I say. “For just getting mauled by the cat and almost arrested.”
She laughs. “Brian would never have arrested me.” She flips down her visor, smiles at herself and makes sure there’s nothing in her teeth. Satisfied, she pulls out into traffic. Her windshield wipers are on. Flick-flick. Flick-flick.
“Mom, your wipers, for God’s sake,” I say.
“Oh!” she says.
She swipes at the wiper handle. But she doesn’t turn them all the way off. They’re set at that annoying channel where they seem off, but give a single, sudden burst of on after fifteen seconds. Mom doesn’t seem to notice. The wipers are silent, then fifteen seconds later, on again.
I consider letting out a single, bloodcurdling scream. Then I consider pulling a Freud and leaping out of the window myself. It all suddenly seems too much. Firing myself from my job; Leroy’s and Trina’s and Severin’s humiliation; a near breakup with Trevor; Mom in all her Mom-ness. I feel the sudden Had Enough that is quiet but powerful in its certainty. I want out of here. Away from all of them. I want into a different “real world.” Everyone wants a Big Decision? Fine, my Big Decision is going to be to make my world bigger. I will take my two and a half million dollars and head to the only place I have an invitation—with Melanie to Malibu. Indigo Skye, phase two.