“Okay. Stop here.”
The box was open but she still needed to slide out the runnered panel. Stephen had used three-in-one oil on the wheels and runners just this morning so it slid out easily.
“Guess what?” she said. “You get a treat tonight. Three treats actually. First, no gag. You saw last night — there’s nobody around anyway. Plus the walls are soundproofed.”
She untied it and lifted the rubber ball out of her mouth. She never liked this part. The ball was slimy. She didn’t even like the feel of it when she had to take it out of her own mouth. Much less somebody else’s.
“Second, you get this. Hold out your hand.”
She handed her a thin faded cotton nightgown. It used to be her mother’s. Her mother was dead three years now or would be in December and she’d ransacked the house for anything that might be of use to them before they sold the property. No sense wasting. Most of what she took turned out to be less useful than she’d thought. The nightgown, for instance, had sat in mothballs along with a bunch of other stuff in a box in the attic ever since. It was much too big for her. And much too big for Sara. But it would do. After a washing it still smelled faintly of mothballs but that hardly mattered.
“You can put it on.”
She said nothing, not even a thank you, only found the neck of it and then the bottom and pulled it on over her head. Kath guessed she’d have to tell Stephen about her lack of gratitude.
“But the real treat, because of the mark and all, is you get to sleep on a mattress tonight. An air-mattress. Otherwise you’d never get any sleep, you know? Stephen pumped it up for you. See? Here, lean down and feel.”
She took her arm and guided her hand.
“Nice and soft, right? You need to use the toilet or anything?”
She shook her head no.
“Okay, move over here and lie down and I’ll scoot you in. Careful not to scrape the bandages or it’ll hurt like a bitch. Plus I’ll have to do you up all over again.”
She watched her ease herself down, favoring her right hip, then move her legs in along the mattress and lie slowly back, once again favoring her right side.
They also said that killing makes you horny.
She supposed she had the proof of that one.
” ’Night,” she said and pushed the panel into the box and swung the headpiece shut and threw the lock. As she stood again she smelled her own perspiration wafting up at her.
If they were going to fuck she was definitely going to need a shower.
Sara felt it immediately down at the end of the box.
The cat lay curled at her feet.
She wondered when it had crept in and how it had avoided getting hurt by the sliding panel and thought that well, cats were very agile. She’d known that since she was a girl.
She’d learned the hard way.
Her cat Tiggy was then just a kitten. She was only five or six herself and loved him to distraction. She probably drove him crazy half the time, always wanting to pick him up and hold him, chasing him around the house trying to pet him. But he was patient with her in his catlike way and tolerated her hugs and kisses until his own enjoyment began to wear thin, at which point he’d signal that enough was enough with a little meow and more often than not she’d let him drop then and let him go his way.
Sometimes though she wouldn’t, not right away and the reason was his breath. His breath was one of her guilty pleasures. His fur smelled wonderful. But in some ways his breath smelled even better. It smelled to her like the seashore. It always did, whether it was fish or chicken or meat-flavored food he’d been eating and this she found amazing. It was warm and rich and its salty tang reminded her of summers by the shore. So sometimes she’d wouldn’t let him go at the first meow. Instead she’d hold onto him, nose up close to his mouth for a whiff of his breath on the second meow. She wouldn’t let him squirm away.
And just this one time he bit her.
They were out on the back lawn sitting in the grass and she was holding him, holding him too long and probably too tightly and instead of meowing the second time as he usually did he nipped her nose instead. Not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to hurt and make her angry, actually suddenly furious at him and when she thought about it later as an adult she realized she must have seen the bite as a kind of rejection. A rejection of her love just like her father’s rejection because she was a girl and not the boy he wanted. Like her mother’s merely qualified acceptance. Like other kids’ rejection because she was fat and not yet pretty.
The cat sensed her fury instantly and began to snarl and spit, a small bundle of teeth and claws and though she’d never seen him angry before and it scared her, she held him away from her and let him writhe and struggle and she squeezed until the cat let go with an ungodly wail of abject fear and she realized what she was doing, terrorizing a small animal, taking out her anger at somebody on an innocent kitten. And heartsick, attacked by sudden tears, she dropped him to the grass.
He ran. But she couldn’t let it go at that.
She had to get him back. Hold him, pet him, stroke him. Reassure him that it would never, never happen again and let him know how sorry she was and that she loved him.
So she ran too.
There was a woods behind her house and a brook, narrow and fast-running after a rain like the one they’d had the night before and the cat ran away from her back through the grass and scrub, the cat small but incredibly fast and nimble for its size and she couldn’t catch him, he kept avoiding her, she was running as fast as she could and scaring him even more she knew by chasing him but her guilt was huge and overwhelming and she couldn’t stop. Not until she had him home again, until she was sure he wouldn’t run away for good from the monstrous awful thing she’d done and suddenly, there was the brook.
The cat ran along the stones by its bank but he was in full panic by now and he slipped and fell right in front of her eyes too far away to reach. She screamed and saw him try to scale the rock he’d fallen from but his claws could get no purchase and he began to drift downstream, his meow a piteous thing now tearing at her heart, an infant calling for its mother, the cat’s eyes terrified, astonished, as he started moving fast away from her in the deep pull of the stream.
She plunged through the brush trying to get ahead of him. Trying to go faster than the stream, refusing to take her eyes off him for a second, unmindful of the branches scratching at her face or the brambles tearing at her legs but only watching as though her gaze alone would stop him from drowning. She saw him go under and come up again and claw at a rock and whirl in the current, scrabbling with his paws, trying to stay afloat and all the while his wailing in her ears and the sounds of the rushing stream and finally after an eternity it widened, slowed and she stumbled into the water and had him in her hands, Tiggy so cold and wet and fragile, she could feel his heart racing against her own chest as he clung to her for dear life and gone suddenly silent, looking every which way out through the woods as though he’d never seen them before. As though the whole world were new and frightening and she couldn’t even say words to comfort him she was crying so hard, she could only stroke and pet him. And then the miracle, the absolute miracle happened.
At the steps to their porch he started to purr.
As this cat here in the box with her was purring.
She didn’t know if it was this cat or remembering Tiggy’s forgiveness that started her crying but they were the first tears she’d shed that were not in fear or pain for a very long time. She couldn’t move much inside the box but she bent her knees until they pressed against the top and shifted sideways until her shoulder hit the right side and reached out in the dark and wiggled her fingers.
