Bound (3 page)

“How come you aren’t going home?” Joanne asked, on the third evening of their odd cohabitation.

“I don’t have any relatives. I’m afraid somebody will put me in a foster home.”

“I was fostered,” Joanne said, suddenly pissed off again.

“No offense,” Cattie said. On the rare occasions she opened her mouth, in went her foot. “But I’m from Texas, you know.”

“Ah,” said Joanne, suddenly understanding everything, insult forgotten. The East Coast thought very little of Texas, Cattie had discovered. When she hadn’t displayed much of a drawl, her new classmates seemed disappointed. What good was she, if not to provide novelty, to spice up and enrich their experience?

Like most children (surely like most children, she reasoned; perhaps like no other children, she feared), Cattie had often fantasized that her mother died. Maybe it was this elaborate and frequent imaginary scenario that now accounted for her relatively affectless reaction to the reality. She’d played out too many times her own lostness—walking bereft in the night of the big city, positing an existence of need and wits—for the fact to totally distress her; she and her mother were the only two members of their family; some part of Cattie’s fictional narrated life had maybe already taken in and adjusted to orphanhood. She had, perhaps, foreseen it too clearly, and could not now claim surprise. And her new roommate Joanne seemed okay with that. She was passing time, not paying attention particularly to what or who walked through her door. Along with Cattie, there was a man in the attic who’d been in the army, off to war. Cattie heard him at night when he came down the foldout stairs in the hallway ceiling, crawling quietly from his hideout to eat some snack food, shower, clack away on the Internet for a while, then creep back up.

“PTSD,” Joanne hissed knowingly. Cattie had no idea what she meant.

The room Joanne had assigned to Cattie was a child’s bedroom. She slept on a single bed under a pile of dusty quilts. The bedroom had belonged to a boy, who was maybe eight or ten, and whose boyhood had been captured and preserved at least twenty years in the past. A stereo turntable and a collection of story records, Disney sound-track albums from movies Cattie had grown up watching on video.
The Jungle Book
,
Dumbo
,
The Aristocats
. Tunes she turned on when she went to bed, strangely soothing as they scratched and popped along at low volume. Also empty boxes of Legos, the pieces themselves fashioned into a chaotically colored simple house. A set of Hardy Boy books. Stuffed animals that smelled of mold and whose plushness had been worn flat by time, perhaps by affection. Whose room had this been? Not Ito’s.

Joanne daily donned her waitress uniform and grumbled out the door, slamming it behind her. Cattie would then always look up, toward the ceiling, tuned abruptly to the other human presence in the house, the man in the attic. She was not sure what she’d do when her cash ran out, the five hundred she’d wisely withdrawn and hoarded since arriving at St. Christopher’s, now to be parceled out sparingly until she decided what next. When asked, Ito had told the head of school he’d accompanied Cattie on foot to the double-wide bar at the edge of the village, top of the list of places in the village students had been warned to avoid, where she’d probably hitched a ride with a logger in one of their ubiquitous thundering trucks. That would send her south, back to Houston. Who would think to look north and west, over in blameless Montpelier, upstairs at a shabby house near the bottom of a hill right alongside the train tracks? Why would anyone run away there?

Cattie wondered herself, after a couple of weeks. Could foster care be much different? Dwelling with strangers, one a grumpy woman, the other a vaguely scary, shadowy man? Wasn’t that sort of the hallmark of foster care?

Ito’s visits were what kept her at Joanne’s, provided a routine and purpose to her days. The house itself was not very welcoming. Its rooms were dim, its windows filthy in the way of the neglected aquarium, and the assortment of furniture not just ugly but uncomfortable or broken or bad smelling, stuff that had been discarded, second-, third-, fourthhand stuff, warehoused here rather than being hauled to the dump. Joanne had inherited the home and its contents from one of the parents that the two stepsiblings did not share, a father gone in the usual gone-father way, off with a new wife, having left his first set of children the way he had his belongings, trading up. Joanne was trapped here by finances, not ambitious enough to pull herself out of a hand-to-mouth existence, her gesture toward a savings account the recent development of tenants, her nod to possible change the ancient For Sale by Owner sign teetering in her yard. “It’s totally don’t ask, don’t tell,” Ito gleefully explained to Cattie. “She can’t be harboring a fugitive if she doesn’t know you’re a fugitive.”

“I always heard that ignorance of the law was no excuse.”

“
Bliss
, dude,” Ito corrected. “Ignorance is bliss.”

“Your stepsister is not blissful,” Cattie told him. He came as often as he could, parked in the alley alongside the house, and then wandered with Cattie around Montpelier’s downtown for a few hours. Ito’s car was a forbidden thing, unknown to the school administrators or his parents, left when he drove back to St. Christopher’s behind the village bakery whose owner didn’t mind.

Ito loved the subterfuge he’d engineered for Cattie, his small part when he joined her. She wasn’t sure what she’d do without his energy for the project. Go back to Houston? Finish the year at boarding school? Her mother had made no excuses about their lack of family; Cattie’s father was literally unknown to her, one of three—bad, worse, worst—possibilities, men from her promiscuous and renounced past. “Wasted,” Misty said of her own youth, dispensing with it. She had been raised by her grandmother in Kansas, and the old woman had died many years before Misty had left her old hometown of Wichita, never to return. Theirs was a corrupt bloodline, Cattie was given to know; the closest kin Misty had was a cousin who, during the final encounter, had attempted to kill her, leaving her with a broken nose and a concussion. “The only reason he didn’t succeed is because the phone rang, broke his concentration. I’m a person who actually was saved by the bell. You call that family? You want anything at all to do with that bullshit? ’Cause I sure don’t.”

When she found out she was pregnant, Misty had quit drinking. Until Cattie left town, she had been sober. Maybe that one night, that one phone call, was her only lapse. Cattie was not unhappy to have erased the drunk message, yet the fact remained: her mother had been alive, and sober, when they lived in the same place.

“Don’t you love it here?” Ito shrieked.

“I don’t love it here,” she replied, and he laughed as if she were joking, bluntness her brand of deadpan wit.

Montpelier absorbed them, clerks greeted them when they came through doors, Ito always eliciting a smile, a free cookie, a bit of banter in the music shop, the outdoor store, the antique emporium—snotty barista, self-righteous hippie, dumb kayaker, deaf old lady. He found all novel human traits hysterically amusing, as if he were living in a cartoon, where unexplained action and nonsequitous dialogue were the norm, where violence and tragedy need not lead to tears. He trod lightly, he skimmed like a water walker, he smiled and chattered like a monkey and then moved on. He had a very short attention span, so although he asked a lot of questions, they never tired Cattie. From him she had not had to hide her nonplussed response to her mother’s death. She supposed this could actually be what those school officials had assured one another was shock. Eventually shock would wear off. But her mother had never trusted melodrama, and Cattie had grown up keeping her cool. Not so Ito. You might think somebody as flagrant and noisy as he would irritate people, but the opposite seemed true. He radiated too much cheer, too wide a smile, too contagious a curiosity. People reflexively smiled back.

And after his visits, off he went back to what they called St. Sincere. Everyone was so serious there, so
concerned
, from the head of school to the groundskeeper. Cattie had never been to school as a customer before. Before, it was always as an annoyance, an obstacle to a clean floor, impediment to a quiet hallway, interruption to a perfectly lucid lesson plan.

On Friday, during her last shift at the restaurant, Joanne asked Cattie to come help her vacuum and scrub and refill. The manager took Fridays off; Joanne accepted Cattie’s help as partial rent payment. They also stole food, which was easier to do with an accomplice. The last bag of trash they left in the Dumpster was perfectly edible goods; later, they returned to retrieve it, spirit it home in Joanne’s back seat. Frozen burgers, chocolate wedge the size of a brick, a thousand catsup packages.

Aside from Ito and Joanne, Cattie had no other encounters. When Dick Little the Houston insurance agent phoned, she didn’t answer. “Whoa,” he said, the first time he heard her message. It always drew a grown-up’s comment. His lispy southern voice was soothing to Cattie, no disputing that; she had to admit that she missed the languid drawl of her hometown. The school also called, the brisk head of school and the soppy band teacher, both itching to scold her phone etiquette. By now her disappearance was registering with all the strangers who thought they knew her, that force field of adults, no doubt phoning one another, too, a crisscross of calls, a peculiar net overhead, yet still unable to locate or trap her. She listened to their voices on her machine, erasing before they finished speaking. Only her mother’s message did she save, over and over, every day. She waited always for that pause, in between the righteous rage at Cattie’s lateness, at Cattie’s endangering herself out there in the perilous night world, in the streets among cars and men, bad drivers and bad desires, with the endless possibility of collision and injury and death, and then the switch, the hesitation, and next the awareness that Misty was an aged miscreant herself, nearly a chuckle, the little comic self-check. Who was she to judge? the hitch said to Cattie, who was this pot to name the kettle black? And this was the small vacillating space that roused a flutter in Cattie’s esophagus, just behind her ribs and in her throat, trapped moth, powdery wings.

CHAPTER 3

T
HE WICHITA SERIAL
KILLER
was back. Every morning, every night, the self-named BTK appeared once more in the news; for twenty-five years he’d lain dormant. Incarcerated, the city speculated: insane asylum or correctional facility; how else to explain the hiatus? Once, it could have been plausible that he’d moved on, to another town, to another smorgasbord of potential victims. In leaving, he might have changed his methods, no longer binding, torturing, killing, but some other set of signature initials. Strangling, dangling, mangling, the SDM of, say, Sioux Falls or Grand Rapids.

Nobody believed he’d have reformed. Neither did anyone really want to think he’d one day conveniently, coincidentally, have died. And of course bad guys did not simply disappear.

There would always be bad guys; evil was one of the rules.

At the nursing home the occupants—those who were free to come and go, those who were not—gathered around the television news at dusk the way their ancestors had around campfires, convening to bask in the glow, compare notes, agree and disagree, recall and invent, horrified and thrilled to have their despicable killer indisputably returned. For a little while it overrode the other monotonous sounds of the place: the moaning and complaint that came drifting out of one room or another, all the time, day and night; the Haitians’ lilting voices in the break room; the security person’s ludicrous buzzing walkie-talkie; the burbling oxygen tanks, beeping monitors, clattering carts; the creaking old building itself, former private psych hospital from the 1970s, as it stood up to the relentless prairie wind—all faded under the shrill sense of a more pressing alarm.

In the circle of the lighted screen tonight were: the former university professor and her visitor; the former city magistrate who now cradled a scruffy stuffed animal on whom she bestowed constant maternal affection; the former housewife and mother who was now known only as The Woman Who Wept; the former school-bus driver and Girl Scout leader who read the same line of her children’s book over and over again, “Jesus
loves
the little children”; the former college student, a too-young brain-injured girl, no more than thirty years old, who was an advertisement for motorcycle helmets; the three look-alike old men, former minister, postman, Cessna engineer, lined up now in Barcaloungers like benched players on the team of the curmudgeonly, murmuring their bitterness and complaint; and the keepers, in their colorful pajama-like scrubs—the obese white lady who was in charge, the tattooed Chicano intern, and the kind Haitian woman who was fixing the hair of the unkind Haitian woman. All over town, people sat, together or alone, to study their local celebrity, that naughty prodigal son.

This was the hour Catherine Desplaines chose to visit her mother. From watching crime drama, she had learned to spread mentholated ointment beneath her nose when entering a fetid space. She had a gag reflex like a cat’s.

“Grace Harding,” she said to the lumpy security person at the front desk. Probably a woman, given the Christmas ornament earrings, two plastic Rudolphs with blinking noses. They flashed intermittently, the only less-than-dull aspect of the woman, who wasn’t even reading a magazine. Just looking blankly at the parking lot she faced, the tin-pan-colored December Kansas sky. Was she medicated? Contemplative? Merely depressed, as any person might be, by her job? No. She was watching the news, which was reflected in the glass of the door, the talking head on the giant screen behind her, the excited newscaster who’d not yet been born when the BTK was first around.

Guests were supposed to check in; residents were not supposed to leave without paperwork. Yet there were no other signatures besides Catherine’s on today’s roster. The woman had not met her eyes when she punched in the code on the door’s outside keypad. The numbers, inside and out, made a song, a simple tune that could have been easily decoded, had anyone been paying attention, had anyone wanted to break in or out. It was always on Catherine’s mind to mention this flimsy arrangement to somebody, merely suggest they change the code now and then. But to whom would she take her thought? Certainly not the security guard.

She heard that tune at night sometimes, just running through her head, reminder of the grim place her mother had ended up.

“I like your earrings.”

“Hmm,” the guard replied, still studying the reflection just over Catherine’s shoulder.

Catherine moved timidly around the woman. She tried never to make trouble here. She wanted no bad feeling to surround her mother, nothing for this security person, nor the caretakers or volunteers or administrators, to hold against her. The home wasn’t classy enough to require kindness from its employees or residents. Only the most modest of efforts had been made to hide its institutional aspects—standing lamps in some rooms to take the place of the overhead fluorescents; a volunteer harpist who arrived on Tuesdays to roll her battered instrument out of its closet, ready to play for whomever requested it; and the three fat cats who lived in the television lounge, leaping lazily from lap to lap, heavy staticky creatures who’d been rescued from their Alzheimer’s-afflicted owners. Did they mind that they had several different names? That they, like the others who lived here, could not step outdoors at will? That every now and then they would be injured by an errant cane or wheelchair or walker?

“How was Green Acres?” her husband would ask, when Catherine came home. He never joined her. He preferred to treat the place like a joke. He was only a few years younger than his mother-in-law.

“She could live with us,” Catherine had said to him once, hesitantly, a test.

“No,” said he, “she absolutely could not.” And Catherine was terribly relieved.

Professor Emeritus Grace Harding sat in the lounge among the others, although in general she preferred the newspaper to the television as a place to receive information. Beside her, unfortunately, sat her only other regular visitor, Yasmin Keene.

“Hi Mama,” Catherine said, resting her hands on her mother’s shoulders. “Hi, Dr. Keene.”

“Catherine,” said Yasmin primly, unhappy as always; her tone of voice always suggested that Catherine had earned yet another demerit. She sat wedged in a wing chair, her brow creased, her heavy lips down-turned, looking for all the world like the chastising high priestess of a disappointing African tribe. This impression was aided by the ebony walking stick she habitually grasped in her right hand, with its fierce carved knob and spiraling length, like a giant corkscrew she might decide to plunge through the heart of somebody, and gladly. She used the stick to walk, to point, to tap against the floor like a scepter as if to call order to a meeting. If one of the cats threatened to approach her chair, Yasmin used her stick to wave it away. Her short Afro was white now, like a cap of popcorn on her black, black head, and her customary outfit was faded, a once-vibrant kente weave, a loose covering that, on anyone else, would be named a muumuu, the tentlike thing with random pleats. Under her incensed gaze, and in spite of the debilitating heat of the room, Catherine decided not to remove her coat and hat; Drs. Yasmin Keene and Grace Harding had always taken a dim view of the attention Catherine paid to dressing herself.

Dress up was for little girls, not grown-ups. Would Catherine never grow up?

“It’s looking like snow,” she said brightly to the group at large. The curmudgeons had initially turned her way, anticipating the moment when Catherine would strip off her coat and display herself, then looked back at the television when she didn’t. Her mother was the only resident without a designated easy chair and blanket out here in the lounge. Struck by stroke, she could no longer speak, but she made her statement regardless: she had a purely temporary relationship to this room and its occupants, to television and the low culture it encouraged. Her damage was a specific cruelty, Catherine thought, her lack of speech. Or it was poetic justice, some scolding moral lesson from myth or fable, her mother the pontificating professor, never without an opinion she could articulate in lengthy, grammatically correct extemporaneous paragraphs, persuasively, downright aggressively, the person who treasured speech above all else, now utterly mute.

Yasmin said, “She didn’t get her
Times
today.” Her tone of voice said that this was Catherine’s fault. She treated the home like a prison sentence her old colleague had been mistakenly made to serve. Her visits, as a result, were like those of a lawyer to her wrongly accused client. Moreover, Yasmin’s own children, unlike Catherine the frivolous clotheshorse, had all become exemplary citizens in the world of ideas and culture. Surely they would never have moved their mother into a place like Green Acres.

If Catherine were braver, she might say aloud what she often thought: Why didn’t Yasmin offer to share
her
house with her mother?

But Catherine wasn’t very brave. “I’ll go look,” she told Yasmin, concerning the
New York Times
.

She located it in the break room, its parts separated, her mother’s room number buried now beneath classifieds and inserts from the local paper. In the past, at the breakfast table, her mother had narrated ceaselessly over the morning’s news. Catherine could still see her father’s colluding smile to her, his nearly imperceptible shrug that forgave and indulged and defused his wife’s tiresome habit, and, as usual, this brought on Catherine’s most frequent recurrent fantasy: her mother and father dying together, both swiftly taken on the same day, neither left to suffer the loss. In her fantasy, her father was not alone when he died but sitting beside her mother. Then he could reach out his hand for her mother’s hand, and the merciful aneurysm that had hit him like a sudden bolt of lightning would carry sufficient buzzing currency to extinguish them both. Tears, as usual, came to Catherine’s eyes.

This was the kind of soft-boiled thinking her mother abhorred. In another wishful fantasy, Catherine granted herself a few helpful siblings with whom she could share this guilty exasperation and wretchedness, an older sister to give her advice, and a couple of older brothers for protection and adoration. Catherine was not made to be an only child. Not made to be half orphaned, either. And who, in the real world, was ever going to witness or reward or punish her for her daily service?

“Earning some stars in your heavenly crown,” her husband would say drolly. Despite the mentholated ointment, Catherine could smell the remains of dinner—breaded meat, boiled root vegetables, some sickening pureed sweet. The residents ate all of their meals depressingly early, and on plastic divided trays nicked and faded from multiple trips through the scalding dishwashing machine. Her mother wasn’t finicky about food, thank God; imagine if Catherine’s husband Oliver lived here.

Not so difficult to imagine; one day he might be in a home. Not this one, of course; he’d design and build his own, a model facility, classy as all of Oliver’s businesses were. He was an entrepreneur, a so-called idea man who had helped start dozens of businesses in Wichita—restaurants, spas, movie theaters, bars, coffee shops; he found locations, financed the start-ups, trained the personnel. He had an uncanny ability to predict what the next logical need could be in this affluent yet conservative market—and the place to locate it. He’d been succeeding at this calling for decades, by now; Catherine had met him when she needed a job nearly twenty years ago, when his first restaurant/bar had already spawned its offshoots. He was much older than she, a fact her mother had gone out of her way to decry, long ago when Catherine had married, mourning her daughter’s refusal to see Oliver as an antifeminist decision, a throwback desire for male dominance. “He’ll be like another parent!” she’d said, as if any fool could see the doomed predicament of that.

Moreover, he’d had a vasectomy. Her mother’s objections had been thoroughly laid out, an argument built on sound logic, one that would have held up in court, had such decisions been reached that way, were there justice.

Catherine had appreciated her father’s submissive silence on the matter; he understood the vagaries of love, its curious tendency to illogic. And like his daughter, he was accustomed to being the listener, the respondent, to Grace’s opinions.

“Your mother needed a son,” Oliver diagnosed. “Not a pretty daughter.”

Trophy wife, her mother might have said, concerning Oliver’s motives. Her colleague Yasmin Keene would have nodded in agreement.

It was as if her husband had battled her mother for possession of Catherine, and won.

As a result, he refused to visit Green Acres. Catherine held it against him, although he might not realize that. To punish him, she imagined him here, debilitated in a wheelchair, locked inside this building with a bored security guard between himself and freedom, paralyzed, say, so that he couldn’t do anything about the annoying cats who would keep leaping into his lap, shedding on his black clothing. The harpist and her cloying music …

Only accidentally, only because there was so little here to stimulate the imagination, to fill the torpid passage of nursing-home time, did Catherine notice the bundle of mail on the counter, there behind the basket of Splenda, the plastic cup of stirrers, the sticky spill of Cremora, mail for the residents, some of them deceased. She picked through it idly, seeking the odd bill or card that might have her mother’s name on it, the usual gruesome coupons from funeral homes and insurance companies. Instead, she found her own name, her maiden name (her mother had sorely wished she’d kept it). The envelope had been forwarded from the old house, where she hadn’t lived since she left for the college dorm in the fall of 1979. It was from a lawyer’s office in Houston, Texas. The postmark on it was weeks in the past.