Doomed (23 page)

Whether international security was alarmingly lax, or my parents had placed big-money bribes to the right officers, my sad burden was never discovered. Occasionally, I’d mew quietly, defeated, but I kept my secret always wrapped in that original breakfast napkin. Don’t imagine that I was deranged, Gentle Tweeter; I knew my kitty was dead. No one in contact with his deflating fur coat could ignore its constant drip-drip-dripping of cold fluids. Under my sweater, lumped against my belly like a pregnancy, like a miscarriage, I felt the jumble of his collapsing bones.

In the hours since he’d passed, his furry tum-tum had
begun to balloon. And, yes, I might’ve been temporarily insane with grief, but I knew that my kitten was filling with gas, the excretal product of renegade intestinal bacteria. And, yes, I might’ve been secretly terrified that I’d fed him something that had caused his demise, but I knew the word
excretal
, and I knew that my beloved was about to burst and that such an explosion would reduce my heart’s treasure to a bug-infested carcass. The linen felt sticky against my fingers. To my caressing hands Tigerstripe wasn’t dead, but I was careful not to pet him too vigorously.

At present, we shared a stretch limo, my parents sitting side by side with their backs to the driver, withdrawing themselves as far as possible from my not-happy circumstances. My parents’ flattened emotional aspect, their somber voices implied that they sensed the truth. Nevertheless in that car between the airport and our home in Jakarta or Johannesburg or Jackson Hole, my mother asked, “How’s the little patient?” Her eyes bloodshot. Her voice forcing a Ctrl+Alt+Lilt. “Feeling any better?”

In the limo’s plush interior, the perennial flies and rank smell proved difficult to ignore, and one of her yoga-sculpted arms flailed out, seeking the controls for the air-conditioning. Her manicured fingers increased the air flow to a full arctic blast, and she plucked a prescription bottle of Xanax from her bag and upended a few pills into her mouth. She handed the bottle to my father behind his newspaper.

Cradled in my lap, still swaddled in breakfast linen, I carried my heart, and my heart was stiff and cold. My heart was a dead time bomb drooling decayed corruption. In response to her inquiry, I could but meow flatly. Behind
the murk of the tinted windows, the outskirts of Lisbon or La Jolla or Lexington fell behind us and vanished. As we motored along, I felt the putrefying juices of my soul mate migrating downward to soil my skort. Smoothed flat, the napkin in my lap would chart jagged islands and filigreed coastlines. Flecked and blotched with the stains of decomposition, the linen would trace a rambling journey in which everything you love falls apart.

This, it was the opposite of a treasure map.

My father? He hardly took notice. In that plush setting, my father was busy behind his newspaper, the salmon-toned pages of the
Financial Times
. Of his person, all I could see were his legs from the knees down, those creased and cuffed trouser legs. I could see only those and his knuckles holding the paper spread in front of him. There, his gold wedding band. While my mom wrestled with her sedated empathy, and I sank deeper into despair, my dad snapped his newsprint pages. He turned them with rustling flourishes. If you’ll notice, Gentle Tweeter, a businessman with a newspaper is worse than any Jane Austen heroine flouncing through life in a taffeta ball gown.

“Maddy?” asked my mom. Her words shrill with false good cheer, she said, “How would Tigerstripe like a new brother?”

Meaning: She was pregnant? Meaning: She was insane?

From within his paper fortress, my father said, “Sweetheart, we’re adopting.” From behind the scrim of wars and stock prices and sports scores, “The kid’s from someplace awful.”

Meaning: I wasn’t paying them enough attention. Meaning: They wanted to feel more appreciated.

“The paperwork took months,” my mom said. “It’s not as easy as adopting a …” And she nodded toward the sodden napkin wadded in my lap.

In response, I offered an almost inaudible tear-choked
meow
.

My father shook his papers angrily. My mother rattled her bottle of Xanax as she tipped back another pill. My hands forgot to be careful, and my fingernails itched at my kitty’s soft tum-tum. And at that juncture, Gentle Tweeter, in the spacious seats and enclosed interior of the limo, poor Tigerstripe’s distended abdomen burst.

Gentle Tweeter,

The earthly remains of my beloved Tigerstripe were to be interred in a toilet of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in an elegant, low-key ceremony patterned after that of my goldfish, Mr. Wiggles. While our personal staff of Somali maids flung open windows and put flame to scented candles, I carried the death-fragrant, napkin-wrapped remains into the suite’s master bathroom. The mourners included my parents, who stood near the whirlpool soaking tub. My dad impatiently tapped his foot, the toe of his handmade shoe tick-tocking loudly against the tile floor. The funeral cortege consisted of a trailing black cloud of houseflies. We were, the mourners, literally veiled in buzzing black houseflies.

“Flush it down,” my father commanded.

My mom breathed through a perfumed handkerchief and said, “Amen, already.”

I stood over the yawning commode, my spirit shattered, unable to relinquish something I’d loved so deeply. So bereft was I that I prayed Jesus would phone, forgetting that I’d only made him up. Jesus didn’t really exist, and Dr. Angelou wasn’t going to touch this stinky bundle of bones and rotting fur and bring it back to life.

I beseeched, “Shouldn’t we say a prayer?”

“What for?” said my dad. “Maddy, sweetness, prayers are for superstitious idiots and Baptists.”

“For Tigerstripe’s eternal soul!” I pleaded.

“A prayer?” asked my mom.

I pleaded for them to call on Sir Bono or Sir Sting for divine intervention.

“There is no such thing as a
soul
,” said my dad. Exasperated, he huffed out a short breath scented with Binaca and Klonopin. “Baby girl, we’ve discussed this. Nothing has a soul, and when you die you rot away to create healthy organic compost for subsoil life-forms to reproduce in.”

“Wait,” my mom said. Closing her eyes she began to recite from memory: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste.…”

A growing cadre of Somali maids had begun to gather in the space immediately outside the bathroom door.

“Exercise caution in your business affairs,” continued my mom, her Botox-infused brow semifurrowed in concentration. “For the world is full of trickery.…”

“There is no God. There is no soul. Nothing survives beyond death,” lectured my father. Shouting now, he asked, “Didn’t those nuns teach you
anything
at that expensive Catholic school?”

My mother droned on, “Speak your truth quietly and clearly.…”

“Flush it, Maddy,” said my dad, Ctrl+Alt+Snapping his fingers between each short imperative sentence. “Flush it. Flush it.
Flush it!
We have reservations for dinner at eight at Patina!” He shot back his shirt cuff and checked his watch. He waved away the annoying vermin. Meaning: the flies, not the Somali maids who hovered, watching these curious funeral rites.

When my voice came it sounded faint. “Forgive me, my kitty.” I gave the squishy bundle a big hug against my flabby tummy. “I’m sorry I killed you.” My sobs began in earnest. “I’m sorry I murdered you with maternal neglect.” I’d proved to be a worse parent than my own parents. With this terrible admission I was rocking forward and back, racked with hoarse sobs, squeezing the not-fresh final graveyard juices from my beloved charge. Yet still I couldn’t consign my Tigerstripe to a final watery resting place.

At my father’s whispered urging, my mother stepped to my side and cooed, “Maddy, baby girl …” She murmured, “You didn’t kill the cat. Nobody killed him.” She gave me a little pat on the back, leaving her hand to linger on my shoulder, and said, “Mr. Tiger had a genetic condition called feline polycystic kidney disease. It means his kidneys developed cysts, honey. It’s no one’s fault. He filled with cysts until he died.”

I looked up at her, my eyeglasses fogged and streaming with tears, my nose livid and flowing. “But a cat doctor …”

My mother shook her head no. Her mournful eyes, the expressive eyes of every death-row public defender and deathbed nurse she’s ever played. “Baby girl, there is no cure. The kitty was born sick.”

I asked, “But how can you know?” Instantly, I felt ashamed of my infantile, bleating tone, my pathetic words gargled through mucus and misery.

“It was printed on the index card,” my mother explained. “Maddy, do you remember the index card taped to his cage at the animal rescue place?” Arrayed on the bathroom’s marble vanity were an orange-colored prescription bottle of Xanax, a bud vase containing a trembling spray of purple
orchids, an assortment of Hermès soaps heaped in a basket. “According to that index card, Mr. Tiger couldn’t live longer than six more weeks.” She reached to pluck the Xanax bottle, twisting off the cap. “Why don’t you and I take a nice pill?” She said, “Your new brother is coming this afternoon. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Drop the cat,” my dad ordered. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped them together, shouting, “Ditch the cat, and let’s move forward, people!”

Turning to face both of them, dropping my voice to a dragging growl, I said, “You knew?” My tears instantly boiled away. The corpse in my tender hands was teeming with maggots. My voice like a distant Swiss avalanche bearing down upon them with a billion-billion tons of ice and rock, I said, “All along, you knew you’d gotten me a dying kitty?”

A muted bell began to toll. It was the suite’s front doorbell. It rang again. The gaggle of Somali maids lingered, watching us from the bathroom doorway. The security cameras were watching.

“You knew my kitten was a goner, and you just let me suffer?”

His face flushed almost purple, his jaw clenched, my father shot a dark look at my mother.

My voice a siren, I wailed, “You should’ve told me that my baby was going to die!” Cradling my pain, I demanded, “Don’t you understand? How could you let me love something that was going to die?”

My mom filled a glass with water and brought it to me. Cupped in her other hand, she offered the pills. “Gumdrop,” she said, “we just wanted to see you happy before you
turned thirteen.” So distraught was she that she actually expected me to drink tap water.
Los Angeles tap water
.

Not looking at me, instead gazing upon my cowering mother, my father squared his shoulders and stretched himself to his full height. “Trust me, young lady,” he said. His voice cold, subdued, and resigned, he said, “No one wants to know when their child is doomed to die.” For the first time, I could smell fifty-year-old Chivas on his breath. My father was loaded.

I snarled, “Maybe we ought to get Tigerstripe some liposuction and tattoos, and dress him to look like a Whorey von Whoreski version of Peggy Guggenheim!”

Even before the reality of their conspiracy had fully registered, my father strode across the bathroom and snatched the fragile remains from my grasp. He pitched them into the yawning toilet bowl and summarily pressed the flush lever. And, no, Gentle Tweeter, I am not oblivious to how many of my recent dramas had occurred in bathrooms, be they the noxious men’s rooms of upstate or the gilded ones of the Beverly Wilshire. And with that, my precious Tigerstripe was gone. Water swirled and splashed, and his tiny corpse was washed away. Lost.

And, whispering in my ear, my mom’s voice said, “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

I stared at both of them in mute outrage.

But
was
Tigerstripe truly gone? As my anger built, as the bile swelled within me, fueled by this shocking cystic revelation, the troubled waters also rose within the commode. My loving, former-supportive, former-caring, former-adoring parents had set me up. They’d gifted me a
pet they knew would soon perish. The swirling toilet water rose as the acrid emotions climbed in my throat. Tigerstripe was gone, but his corpse had stuck somewhere in the craw of the hotel’s luxurious plumbing, and now not-fresh toilet water spiraled upward to crest the lip of the ceramic tomb and gush forth, splashing across the stone-tiled floor.

The doorbell rang once more, and, as my father turned to answer it, I stepped into his path. Standing between my dad and the bathroom doorway, I swung … as I’d once swung the
Beagle
book to decimate a lurid dog dinger … I now swung my open hand, jumping, leaping as needed to land a blow across my father’s close-shaved cheek.

His expression was Ctrl+Alt+Shocked. The toilet disgorged water. Choked with the dead body of my tiny kitty, it vomited, erupting beside us. No longer a mere commode, it became a cauldron boiling over with decayed cat parts and evil magic.

Not unnoticed by me, even in my churlish state, a strange boy had stepped into the bathroom doorway, a surly urchin whose thorny brow suggested Romanesque ruins and gothic goings-on. Wolves. Stooped Gypsy hags. At the sight of this brooding waif … and at the toilet’s fury … and in response to my violent lashing out, my mother shrieked, and as fast as an echo from my original blow, my father slapped me back.

Gentle Tweeter,

Yes, my father slapped me.

And yes, I might be an uppity preteen romantic with aspirations to become a long-suffering Helen Burns, but I do know that getting walloped across my sassy, too-fresh-for-my-own-good mouth was a lot less fun than I’d always imagined it would be.

In the well-appointed bathroom of the Beverly Wilshire, as the chilled waters of that kitten-choked commode overflowed beside us, my father’s blow fell, scarcely hard enough to turn my head, but the sharp sound of it reverberated hugely in the tiled space. My meaty child’s hand hurt more from swatting his rugged face than my cheek hurt from his counterswat. The ready expanses of mirror showed us both: my tiny handprint reddening his face, my own rage darkening my visage. My mom stood nearby accompanied by maids and PAs and assorted hangers-on, her tapered fingers having flown up to mask her eyes from the brutal scene. Bits of orange fur rode the cresting tide, and we were—all of us—swamped. Only the unlikely adopted stranger stood apart from this domestic tragedy. The surly blackguard youth, he was a harbinger of disaster from some distant, strife-torn, blood-besotted fiefdom. This, the glowering countenance of a man-child no doubt
suckled by rapacious wolves, this was Goran. This was the taut moment of our first encounter.