The Stardust Lounge (13 page)

But I knew I could trust him to see to Buster's best interests, trust he would give him the right medications, limit Buster's playtime with the ball, and know exactly what to do if and when he seized.

Pulling in our driveway from New Hampshire with Buster, I'm greeted by Stephen and a boy who introduces himself as Trevor. They help me unload the car, pet and play with Buster. Then Stephen takes me aside.

“Mom,” he says. “Now, Mom, listen. I've got to talk to you about something important.”

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. I'm beginning to know this preamble well.

“Promise you won't interrupt.”

“Okay.”

“Say you promise.”

“I promise.”

“Okay. Mom, Trevor's homeless.”

“What?”

“You promised.”

“Sorry.”

“You're forgiven. Mom, listen. He's homeless. He can't go home. He's been kicked out. He's been away this whole
past year at DYS. I knew him a little last summer, but then he got shipped off.”

“May I ask for what?”

“You can ask. Things.”

“What things?”

“Things, Mom. Stuff like I've done. What does it matter? He paid his dues. He just got home from a year in juvie, but no one wants him. They say he'll just make trouble again. He's been sleeping in a friend's car. I told him
maybe
he could stay here—just for a night or two. Mom, I'll cook the dinner. I'll make it fair, Mom.”

“Just for a night or two,” I answer. “We've got a lot going on, huh? School's just started. I'll be at Tufts three days a week now, and you've got school, and your community service, and the animals …”

“I know.” Stephen is clear, earnest. “I've been thinking about all that. But look, Mom. We just rescued a dog who's epileptic. Here's a kid, Mom, a
kid
who's homeless …”

Trevor in trees / Photo by Stephen Digges

In late October Mugsie the cat gives birth to a second litter of kittens. A week later she is killed by a car on Blue Hills Road. Trevor finds her as he walks home from God knows where. He places her on the front step. The dogs solemnly circle and sniff her.

It's about three in the morning of a weeknight, but we're all up, our lights burning on through the November night, each of the boys carrying out some business of his own, music or reading. I've been what might roughly be called asleep, released for a while upstairs like a flag at the top of the house.

Stephen kneels and weeps. He lifts Mugs's head to see and to show her slack gaze, the small stretched body pooling a bit. Steve gently turns her over.

Trevor curses and goes to his room. Later we will hear from him bitterly. We're still getting to know each other, though he's lived with us now for a year.

Things hadn't gone well regarding his return home to his family from DYS. After a month or so it was clear that if he didn't stay on with us, he'd be returned to the Department of Youth Services shelter in Springfield. Though he was living at our house, attending high school with Stephen, I had no authority to speak with his teachers about his work, his status.

“I'm sorry,” the guidance counselor would say, flatly satisfied, “but you have no rights in this matter.”

In the end I applied to the state boards to become his foster mother.

At sixteen, Trevor is quiet, thoughtful by nature, an observer of life. It's hard for me to imagine him acting out the trouble everyone, including the school, holds against him. He loves the animals, especially the cats, and he has given African names to several.

One must look closely into his dark eyes to get a fix on his mood. He is polite, solitary, powerful in his silences.

I've begun to think of him as our Queequeg. Who can explain it? His presence has completed the circle around us. Trevor and Stephen call each other brothers, defend the other in all things. By way of their pact, they are willing to take on new responsibilities.

They work together for hours making music, beats, sampling, and Trevor is brilliant in his rap freestyling. Words come out of his mouth in a deep baritone that resonates a sadness and a will, an intimation of the islands his absent father immigrated from. Listening to Trevor freestyle, I've come to believe in the phenomenon of the gift of speaking in tongues.

Now from his room comes a loud thud. Maybe he's hit the wall with his fist.

Charles lays his hand on Stephen's head and looks hard at me. We read the other's thoughts.

“I guess we could try an eyedropper with milk,” I say. “But can kittens drink cow's milk?”

“We could mix it with water and a little sugar,” Charles answers.

“And warm it up,” I say. “We'll get a book tomorrow. We'll ask the vet…”

“Can I stay home from school?” Stephen holds the dead cat in his arms. I look at poor Mugs and the blond head of the boy kneeling over her, that head with such an inventive haircut—shaved bald on the sides with a sort of mane ridging the top. Trevor hits the wall again. The buzz of the halogen light behind us burns on conspicuously, expensively, as it does every night near 5:00 A.M.

I'm aware of a sort of dream-portent, a forerunning into the crazy imminent dawn-to-day a day through which large adolescent boys sleep on, their backpacks full of unopened schoolbooks by the door. Six tiny kittens cry to be fed while our dogs romp, slide through the kitchen, our other cats leap through the kitchen window, then out again, knocking Buster the bulldog's many epilepsy medication bottles into a sinkful of dirty dishes.

“You've missed a lot of school already,” I sigh. He and I know I'm stating the obvious.

“So? For God's sake, Mom.” Stephen's tears come freely. Everything about his demeanor insists that
this
above all incidents, accidents, illnesses, or just plain fatigue is the exception to beat all exceptions. This is
it
and I as his mother am missing the point.

“Look,” Charles offers, “I'll run by school and pick up their work.”

“Uh-huh.” Something sharpens in me. “Who in the world let Mugs out? How did she get out? She was supposed to stay in the basement. We were supposed to keep that door shut.”

“We need to figure out about feeding the kittens,” says Charles. “Who knows how she got out? No one did it intentionally. Steve, go get a box and some blankets.”

Charles has been home now for a week or so. For the past year and a half he has been living and working for a human rights organization in St. Petersburg, Russia. Now he is on leave until January. I'm thrilled to have him home and at the same time I find myself oddly self-conscious around my reasonable, conscientious, worldly, grown-up son. Life is so crazy around here. I wonder if he can adjust.

At twenty-four Charles is tall and handsome, unshaven and swarthy these days as he gets over the huge time change from St. Petersburg to Amherst. He has always been disciplined, enthusiastic, capable. I'm afraid he actually believes that with his influence now the sixteen-year-old Trevor and seventeen-year-old Stephen will turn a corner.

The most trouble—that I'm aware of—Charles has ever been in took place some years ago while he was studying in London. He and some friends climbed over the wall into the Regent's Park Petting Zoo. More than a little intoxicated, Charles fell asleep among the young goats and sheep. He was awakened by a guard who took him to jail for the night. The next morning he was released with a warning, the incident merely
noted.

Charles is at heart philosophical, a peacemaker. He wrestles with his nature.

“Never mind,” I say. “Steve, go to bed. Maybe you can go to school at noon.”

“What about Trev?”

“He can go at noon, too.”

“What will you tell school?” Stephen wipes his nose on his sleeve.

“I'll tell them the truth for once,” I say.

“Don't,” says Stephen.

“You're right,” I say. We don't explain why to each other. There's no need. The boys have been absent or late to school so often, I've surely run out of believable excuses. But to tell the truth about Mugsie and be laughed at seems disrespectful of the dead cat. In our collective sense of the present scheme of things it appears, in this case, more moral to lie.

Recently I've written,
Please excuse Stephen and Trevor for being tardy. Our dogs got loose and the boys helped me to round them up…

Another note read,
Please excuse Stephen and Trevor for being absent. Our electricity went out during the night and so our alarms didn't go off.

And still another quite recent one said,
Please excuse Stephen and Trevor for being tardy. Our cat Mugs gave birth to six kittens last night and we stayed with her until the early hours of the morning to make sure she was ok…

Most of the excuses I write for the boys approach truth; some are absolutely correct. Others, out of necessity, do juggle time, context. We know we've gone off the maps, off the maps and beyond the margins into that region where once the ancient cartographers wrote,
Out here there be dragons.

The boys and I are still for a few minutes. Trevor's room has gone silent. Stephen hands the dead Mugs over to me, all the while petting her head. I hold her close. She is still warm, limp against my chest.

Our huge yard is knee-deep in leaves from our sycamores, maples, beeches. Lord knows when we'll get them raked. The gardens have dried up for the year. That sea of leaves rustles at the far dark corners where Mugsie's older offspring hunt mice or voles. We will wake to those prizes in the morning, our cats carrying their kills into the kitchen or right up the stairs and onto our pillows. November is a fruitful month for the hunters. Maybe that is what drew Mugs out. Tomorrow I'll collect the kills and set them on Mugs's grave.

Life is so big at our house,
I'd like to write the attendance office.
Sometimes it is very big. Do you understand.

We line the bottom of a dresser drawer with Stephen's old baby blankets, blankets that have somehow made the move with us from California to Missouri to Iowa to England to Maryland to Brookline and then Amherst. Several are hand-crocheted, gifts of fellow air force wives so many years ago.

The six tiny kittens curl up in one corner, a black-and-white swirl, their markings an amazing variation, as if one kitten had borrowed from the last some incidental trait, the incidental becoming all in the next, and so on.

Bette Davis, the only female, is black except for a tiny white spot on her right cheek, giving her the appearance of a chorus girl. Mugsie II has the identical markings of his mother. He is black except for white feet, and a white mask across his face.

The biggest at birth, whom Stephen names Einstein, is essentially white with black spots. He has a large black
patch over one eye like a pirate. Then there is Ignaz, a gray-black tiger, and Badger, white with Ignaz's tiger stripes drawn beautifully, like a badger's mask, across his face.

The kitten Vasco DaGama is identical to the cat who impregnated Mugsie. We have seen the father in the woods behind our house, and later I see his picture at the vet's on an adopt-a-pet poster.

The vet has given the stray father a name, Rainier, as if he understands that this cat is surely the prince of Amherst, no doubt the father of much of the feral and domestic cat population in the area. He has an unforgettable face—his head is hooded in black, like an old flying ace. The rest of his face is white except for a black oval on his nose, and arched black brows.

So named by Charles, Vasco is always climbing up over his brothers and sister, out of the drawer onto the floor. There he lifts his little quivering blind head and, mewing furiously, struggles forward. When we get up through the night to feed the kittens, we often find Vasco a good distance from the drawer. We have gated the dining room against the dogs, but we worry that Vasco might stray near the mesh and wood partition and be swooped up by Rufus the basset hound.

After all, Rufus
is
a hound, by nature a hunter and a killer of small animals. From time to time he has picked up the scent of a rabbit and taken off baying, howling through the woods.

Rufus has caught and killed rabbits, moles, mice. I've seen him stalk and catch a chipmunk, shake it, and then—as if in disdain for such an easy catch—toss its broken body into the air.