Carrie Grinstead
In creeping shadows, Mare saw the cat, but the cat was dead. She remembered that much while still too tangled in sleep to remember anything else. Gritty eyes, poor balance, and the midnight hall stretched long.
Gia had just screamed bloody murder. Gia was Mare’s daughter, and she was six.
Mare knelt by Gia’s bed and stroked her hair. “Sssshhh, sweetheart. You’re okay. You just had a bad dream.”
Mare’s husband Paul drifted in, hair springing up like he’d stuck his finger in a socket, penis bulging awkwardly into one side of his shorts. “Everything okay? You all right, Porkchop?”
Gia shivered hot. Snot bubbled from her nose. She said something, but she was a mumbler in the best of times. Mare patted her back. “Baby. I need you to swallow and then speak slowly.”
“Dying!” she hiccuped. “Don’t. I don’t.”
“You what?” Paul asked, and Mare gave a sad and startled laugh. “Oh, my love. No. You’re not dying at all. You’re very young and healthy.”
Molly, Mare’s twelve-year-old, from another man and another life, wedged herself into the doorway next to Paul, arms crossed over her stomach and glasses riding low on her nose. All wrong for Molly’s boxy face, and Mare had known that when they picked out the frames. But Molly had insisted, pitched a fit, these ones and no others. She wanted them, presumably, because her mother said no. Because she could see ahead to a frazzled night when cat eyes glinting in weak light would be the perfect little dig.
“Spicy was eighteen, Gia,” Molly said. “That’s like a hundred for a cat. I’m older than you. I’ll die before you. You don’t see me screaming.”
“Molly, go to bed. You’ve got school.”
Paul bent and kissed Mare’s forehead. “Speaking of bed. I’m meeting a client at seven.” He shuffled out, but Molly plunked down cross-legged on the rug.
Mare worked a tangle from Gia’s hair. “Is that what’s going on?” she murmured. “Are you upset because Spicy died?” Squirming, Gia kneed Mare in the stomach, but Mare hugged her close. “Molly is right, sweetie. Spicy was an old, old cat, and he was sick.”
“Oh my God. You said I was right. That’s a first.”
Mare cranked Gia’s window open to the backyard and the garden. “Tomorrow will be beautiful,” she said. “Maybe after dinner we can go out back and plant our seeds. Before you know it you’ll be eating fresh carrots that you grew yourself.” She failed to stifle a yawn. Her eyelids stuck to each other and clicked when she blinked. “Gia, my baby girl. You have so much time. You could live to be a hundred, easily. Think of that! Ninety-four more Christmases. Ninety-four more summers.”
Molly crawled forward and rested her chin on Gia’s mattress. “How long could I live?” she demanded.
“Forever,” Mare said.
***
The next morning, she was on her fifth cup of coffee before she saw her third patient. Paul was an account executive for a regional bank. Paul was reasonable and measured and thought it couldn’t be good for her to drink so much caffeine. And okay, she would answer, fine, but of the two of them, who was the health professional?
Patients complained of headaches or stomach cramps or heartburn, and she said they might want to consider cutting back on coffee. She bleached her own stained teeth with Crest White Strips. She was a nurse practitioner. She worked in a clinic on the grounds of a sprawling medical center, in a town in Wisconsin that had the same humid summers and whining mosquitos, same dry leaves burning in barrels, same banked snow under searing sky as the town in Illinois where she grew up. And the other town in Illinois where she went to college. She might think the problem was age, might worry about early menopause or very early dementia, when her references slipped and she turned down Blodgett Street thinking it was Hart Street back home. When for an instant the West Tower of the hospital was the single tower of her junior high school, and she had overslept, and she was late. But hadn’t it always been this way? Weren’t there days when she was younger than Gia, when she’d stood barefoot on a corner with the dizzying sense that she could be anywhere at all?
She had twenty-two patients scheduled in eight hours. She would hit the Keurig as often as necessary, even if it seared her throat and charged up her heart, even if she knocked harder than she meant to on the exam room door.
The patient’s eyes popped wide.
“Hi there. Okay if I call you Tom?”
Caucasian male, appeared stated age. Strong handshake, good color. Hunched through the shoulders but in no obvious distress. Bushy hair and matching beard, flannel shirt under a sport coat, gold wire-rimmed glasses like some kind of eccentric professor. But she knew from his face sheet that he worked at the wood veneer company that had made the cabinets for Mare’s kitchen, back when she was pregnant with Gia, back when they were building the big house in the country that they had always wanted, that everyone wanted in this town and all the others.
“It looks like you had some food poisoning? How are you feeling now?” asked Mare’s voice, the bright voice that she put on every morning and sometimes didn’t get used to until at least noon.
“I don’t know how I could’ve gotten food poisoning. I didn’t eat anything I don’t always eat.”
“Have you had a fever at all? Any vomiting or diarrhea?”
The last one, he answered. A bright flush rose up his cheeks, like his beard had kindled a fire. Poor thing.
“Any blood?” she asked.
“Blood?”
“Have you noticed any blood at all, with the loose stools?”
“Yes,” he whispered. Yes, a little blood. In the toilet or only after wiping, she asked, and he flushed and looked like he would fall over and die of embarrassment on her floor. She told him to drink herbal tea and eat a bland diet. Bananas, rice, applesauce, dry toast.
“Bananas?” he asked, one side of his mouth hitched up just a little, like there was a joke and it wasn’t all that funny but at least they were both in on it. “How am I supposed to live off of that?”
Just for a few days, she promised, and he should start to feel much better. Come back in if not.
A toddler howled when she jabbed him. An anemic teenager for reasons unknown smiled more this month than last. A whistling guy delivered boxes of tongue depressors and specimen cups. A constipated eighty-year-old and then a constipated ten-year-old, and Mare wondered how Gia’s bowels were doing. It all connected, the brain and the gut.
By midday patients were hard to distinguish one from another, were not so different from screens opening, closing, alerting at seizure-inducing speed. Lunch was a Powerbar in the hall, and if she paused long enough to pee she thought of Tom the cabinetmaker. She remembered things that had not happened, handing him his own coffee and telling him about the one cabinet door that they’d kept open all the time, shelf empty because Spicy loved it. Dear cat, so good and sweet through two men and two pregnancies, so patient when the girls put him in doll clothes and carried him around. Sometimes cats, too, needed breaks. Sometimes he curled up on his shelf and watched Mare through half-open eyes.
Eleven days now since he stopped eating entirely, couldn’t even stand, and she wrapped him in a towel and took him one last time to the vet. No time at all, and all the time there would ever be.
And then she was in the car, armpits itching. A lonely dove cooed. Purple clouds hung low over the clinic. The sliding door opened, and a man who must have been someone else’s last patient stepped out with his glasses perched high above his perfectly bald head. His lips parted slightly, as if he had something important to say.
At the end of this day, at the end of every day, Mare rested her elbows on the steering wheel and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
***
She let Molly have a sip of her coffee with dinner. She tipped a couple drops into Gia’s milk. “It’s all of two milliliters,” she said, before Paul had a chance to protest.
They ate lasagna at the kitchen island, off cheap Corelle plates that Mare kept meaning to upgrade. Gia picked weakly at her food. She fussed and wriggled until Mare gave her a box of crayons and a piece of printer paper. Dear Spicy, Gia wrote at the top, and Mare’s heart swelled. She was desperately proud of her little one, who had learned her ABCs at four and was now composing simple sentences.
“Can I have the iPad?” Molly asked.
“Of course not,” Mare answered.
Molly sighed and rolled her eyes. “Paul. Can I have the iPad.”
“No, Molly! I told you no.”
“Well how come Gia gets to do something and I just have to sit here and listen to you guys chew?”
“Molly, if you would like to write a letter while we eat, you’re welcome to.”
Molly snorted. “Right. Yeah. Who am I going to write a letter to? The president?” She jerked the crayon from Gia’s hand and dragged it across the paper while Gia shrieked. “Dear Mr. President! My mom makes so much spit and sounds horrible when she chews!”
“Molly, go to your room!”
Molly knocked her stool over and bolted for the stairs.
“The iPad stays down here! No screens after dinner!”
“I know.”
Molly slammed her bedroom door, rattling the ceiling. Already once they’d had to replace that frame, when one too many slams splintered the wood and warped the hinges.
It was already obvious, and it seemed inevitable, that Gia would be the pretty one, eyes almost the color of new-mown grass on sunny days, delicately upturned nose. Molly had her father’s blotchy freckles and thin, dirty-blond hair. Things would be easier if Mare could adjust her. Smooth away the heavy brow that made her look angry even in the rare moments when she wasn’t. Go back in time, ideally, and give her a dad who wouldn’t bolt just after the snow melted, in the first spring of Molly’s life.
“Another day in paradise,” Paul mumbled. He got up, rinsed his plate, dropped it in the sink. Out in the den, the gas fireplace shooshed on. The couch creaked. He’d be reading one of his Civil War books, which he never seemed to tire of. In the house he’d rented before they did it all in swift but proper order—marriage, pregnancy, buy a thirty-acre plot, hire an architect and a contractor and an interior designer—he’d had Stephen Ambrose stacked floor to ceiling. And she’d thought, okay. I can live with this.
***
She gave Gia an envelope, even got out the glue and glitter for decorating.
Spicy was deep in the garden. Bacteria and fungi. Worms and moles. Bit by bit, day by day, Spicy spread into soil and roots and buds. Life went on, the dead changed, and wasn’t that a better comfort, Mare had once asked over coffee with a friend, than a lie? This friend was an atheist who brought her kids to church every Sunday. It was just easier, she’d shrugged. Put them in church to install some morals. Give them the god thing, so they’d maybe freak out a little less over the death thing.
There had still been patches of snow on the day they buried the cat. Distant thunks as clumps softened on branches and fell. Paul dug until he was red and sweaty. He brushed tears from his eyes. The girls sobbed, and he hugged them each in turn as Mare took the shovel and refilled the hole.
Mare alone did not cry. “Jesus, Mom, what is wrong with you?” Molly howled, and it was all Mare could do to refrain from telling her kid to fuck right off.
When Spicy grew frail in his final months, she bought a soft cushion for his shelf. She gave him a low dose of Tramadol and rubbed Vaseline on his sores. She ended up on thin ice at work because she kept going home to check on him. And, two Fridays ago when almost nothing of him remained, she went alone to the vet. In her arms, somehow, he purred, just enough to rattle his ribs.
Gia peeled stamps. Mare helped her count them, and yes, sometimes it was easier. Yes, she told Gia. Eleven was just the number of stamps you needed to send a letter to the other side.
***
Molly’s dad wrote to her at Christmas and on her birthday. The last return address was in Texas, and he would be gone from there already, Mare pointed out, when Molly threatened to run away to him. Also he left you, she did not say. So if you think he will take you now—good luck with that.
She’d adopted Spicy after he broke up with her for the third time, college boyfriend whom she loved terribly but did not particularly like. Full of himself and full of shit, moodily strumming a guitar in the courtyard, writing poetry, letting his hair hang shaggy to his shoulders. It made her crazy, trying to understand and explain. It was chemical, physical, primal. It was ego. He could, if he wanted, make her believe she had the softest hair, sharpest wit. Her feet were sculptures, her ears held universes, she had personally invented sex. It was stupid. It was intoxicating.
He was allergic to cats. She had never thought about cats, never wanted one, but it seemed a solution to her problem. Pick out a tortoiseshell kitten from the Humane Society, and when next the boyfriend drifted back he would find the way blocked by his own immune system.
She was for a short time free. Spicy batted the toys she crocheted for him. He did backflips in midair. He made her laugh, slept on her pillow, draped himself under her hair, around the back of her neck, when she watched TV with her housemates.
She found a notebook in her mailbox, and in it her ex has written to her each morning and evening for weeks. Beautiful Mare, he wrote. Wild Mare. In those days, everyone else still called her Meredith.
She bought Claritin. She washed her sheets and pillowcases, shampooed every rug, even bathed Spicy. For almost seven years, in three different rentals, Spicy found high places to retreat politely to whenever the boyfriend came back.
***
There was a night when Mare stayed for hours in the office, sunk in the quicksand of a third appeal to Blue Cross, trying to stay coherent on a cup of instant and almost relieved when Gia’s cries echoed through the heating vents. She stumbled upstairs, down the hall. Molly leaned out, squinting and hissing, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
She could get kidnapped, Gia said. The house could burn down or get hit by a tornado. Run over by a car, drowned in a lake. She could choke. She could fall down the stairs or off a roof. She could prick her finger with a needle and get AIDS, and how in the world had she thought of that? She could not sleep, would not sleep, because she might not wake up. Because cancer because food poisoning because snakes because Mare could not promise her that she would never and in no way die.
Mare got thin fragments of sleep in the tiny bed with Gia, in her own bed at odd hours on weekends, sometimes even in the car before and after work. She joked with the medical assistants about walking over to the hospital and asking them to induce a coma.
There was a night when Paul worked late. After dinner Molly wanted to take Mare’s phone up to her bedroom and call a friend. It wasn’t a screen, she whined, if she was just talking into it, and anyway if Mare would just let her get her own phone then she wouldn’t have to—“Take Gia,” Mare said, and before Molly could argue she added, “Take your sister if you want the phone. She can play by herself while you talk.”
Mare took her coffee into the office. Dear Gia, she typed. She fiddled with the font until she found one that looked, somehow, catty.
In endless ways, I live on. I am with you for as long as you remember me, as long as the sun shines and the rain falls. As long as flowers grow. You are smart and you are not too young to understand that everything is linked, and nothing, if you look deep enough, is so different from anything else. Drill down to a cell, and one man is nearly identical to another. A woman is a variation on a coffee bean. A little girl is quite like a cat.
She went to the kitchen for another cup, returned to the office and sat on the couch to think and quickly fell asleep. She awoke a blank, empty second later, and Paul was at the computer. “What is this?” he asked.
“Are the girls asleep?”
“They are now. I had to pry your phone out of Molly’s hands.”
“She said she was calling a friend.”
“You were out cold, Gia was hiding under Molly’s bed, and Molly was playing Candy Crush.”
Mare sat up. She’d left the coffee by the keyboard, which Paul hated. Even from across the room, she sensed that it had gone cold. “Sorry. What time is it?”
“Mare, what is this?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. She’s so upset and we’re all so tired and I just thought maybe she’ll feel a little better if Spicy writes to her.”
“He’s a cat! And he’s been dead for a month.”
Twenty-six days, Mare thought. A month would come soon enough, then two.
“It might just make her less scared. It might help us all sleep better.”
“Then what? Then we tell her there’s a Santa Claus and a god?”
“What? Did you even read it? That’s not what I’m saying at all.”
Maybe she wasn’t going to give Gia the letter anyway, but as she tried to find words to explain why she might, for her own reasons, compose a letter to a child from a dead cat, Gia screamed.
“Let me handle it,” Paul mumbled.
***
Low-hanging clouds held the town dark. A sad, strange morning, and she didn’t quite believe that Tom the cabinetmaker was the same person as before. He looked like a variation, glasses and beard retained but frame stretched out thin and gray. He did not look well at all, and Mare must have stared wrong, stared too long without saying anything.
He offered a sheepish smile. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling much better.”
She nodded. His vitals were normal, no obvious reason for the pallor and the sweat, and what she needed to do was send him to the emergency department for blood work, fluids, a chest x-ray. Her mouth was dry, her hands cold, and what had she missed, and was it already too late? Gia’s little voice, now a worm in her ear, said infarct obstruction rupture he is dying right in front of you Jesus Mom what is wrong with you.
“Ma’am?” Tom said, and he put icy fingers on her wrist.
***
She drank wine on her back steps. A crow landed atop the wire netting where her raspberries would grow. Sunset washed its wings.
She was not the first provider in her clinic to break down, though most had the good sense to do it at home, at night, and not in front of a patient. She would be put on leave, there would be terms attached to her return, and she didn’t know yet what it would all mean but she would, at least, have time now to work in the garden. Rake away crabgrass and turn over the soil under Gia’s window, and the girls could have their own little bed. On the weekend, she would take them to the greenhouse to pick out flowers for Spicy’s grave.
By now, the burrowing things were nesting in his fur. Beatles thriving on his guts, colonies multiplying. Every molecule that was Spicy was on its way to being something else, and which was worse, really? To leave the world, or to forever cycle through it?
The sky lost all color, then turned a richer blue. Molly came out in a T-shirt and tight shorts that said JUICY across the butt. “Can I have a sip?” she asked. Mare handed her the glass, and she gripped it with both hands, raised it to her lips, coughed and spat.
“You’ll like it when you’re older.”
Are you sure you should have wine tonight, Paul had asked, and yes, she answered, she was sure. She drank it like water, like medicine, and wished she could get drunk quickly, that it might unhinge her just enough to see her cat one last time.
Molly hugged her legs in and rested her chin on her knees. “So are you sick?”
She heard no edge, no sarcasm in Molly’s voice. The notes of concern, she was probably imagining, probably pathetically desperate for the day when she could have a drink with her daughter and bond over other people’s bullshit, when the cutting judgments were not aimed at her alone.
“I’m not sick,” she said. “I was exhausted and dehydrated and I just—I kind of fainted, is what happened. I was fine in a few minutes and I probably just needed to sit down and have some water, but obviously they made me go to the ED and get an EKG and sit around all day. I mean I would’ve done the same thing if the roles were reversed, but it’s frustrating and it’s annoying and I totally understand why people hate going to the doctor.”
Crickets sang, and Molly watched the clouds. In no time, she’d be eighteen. She would probably end up in Chicago or New York, live in a high-rise or even score a townhouse. Stair after stair for her cats to explore. She would be a lawyer or a CEO, and a day might come when she pushed herself too hard, remembered this. Called home.
Mare wanted to touch her shoulder. She hadn’t touched her at all in years. Molly was only nine when she started recoiling if Mare so much as brushed past her chair.
“Homework done?” she asked.
“I didn’t have any.”
“How’s your English class? You could read ahead.”
“I found your letter on the computer.”
“What letter? What were you doing on my computer?”
“I printed it out and put it under Gia’s pillow.”
“Molly! Why would you do that? That wasn’t yours.”
“I know. You wouldn’t do it for me.”
“Molly—”
“It’s fine. I don’t need your help. I know dead is dead, and I’m not scared.”
“Oh, Molly. Of course you shouldn’t be scared.”
“Ashley’s mom is picking me up soon. I’m going to sleep over at their house. I’ll come back on Saturday if Gia stops screaming.”
Mare set her glass down, and it tipped gently over into the dirt. “I’m afraid not, young lady! It’s a school night.”
Molly stood. “Yeah, well. Paul already said I could.”
She jerked the screen door open and returned to the kitchen. A car swept up the lane, and its headlight beams for an instant flooded the garden, tickled lilacs, even glittered off the glass and the wine sinking away slow.
#
Carrie Grinstead lives in Los Angeles and works as a hospital librarian. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, New Millennium Writings, The Masters Review Anthology, and elsewhere. Her first collection won the Howling Bird Press Fiction Prize and was published in 2022.