Kitten

Chapter 20

James’s mother was shorter than she looked in photos.

My lips grazed the top of her ear when we hugged.

She smelled like Holme, like the shampoo James used to wash my hair.

She called me love. “So good to meet you, love,” she said, while James lingered behind me, holding his right hand with his left.

Earlier that morning, James delivered the news about Silver to his parents in a single, clipped sentence over the phone. Not even an hour later, his mother knocked on the door. They had the same long nose. She pursed her lips when she wasn’t speaking, just like he did.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Lunch,” she said. “The Mitchells. You know.”

James glanced at the tote bag at the foot of the couch. I could just make out Silver’s little hand-painted bowl, slivers of rainbow fish drawn by a younger James. “It’s all there,” he said. “If you—”

She opened her arms. James moved into them without a breath of hesitation.

Stepping on her toes, his mother rose so her head slotted over his shoulder.

For a moment I feared we would accidentally meet eyes, but she kept hers closed, the effect more intimate than if we’d looked at each other.

I slipped to the bedroom and shut the door.

In James’s bed I curled into a ball with the duvet over my head, feeling naked and inconveniently alive.

Desperate to give them privacy, desperate also to hear their conversation, I pressed my head deep into the pillow.

Muffled speech made it through anyway: James’s voice saying sorry, over and over.

I let his sorrys blanket me, a cold, nervy feeling piling on.

At last, the sound of James’s mother’s voice cut through his apologies. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I do. It’s my fault.”

“Oh, lamb,” she said. “You are very good.”

James fell silent then. I removed the pillow from underneath my head and positioned it over my face, as if that would stop the tears from coming. I knew that in the living room, James was crying, too, and I didn’t want him to hear or worry about me.

Later, there was a knock on the bedroom door. James’s mother’s voice traveled through. “It’s me.”

“Oh.” I sat up. “You can come in.” Through my blurry vision I could make out the twist of her scarf, a line of sunlight running down her nose.

You are very good. I understood this was what James wanted and needed to hear most in this moment, likely his whole life.

He was good, not useless; he was not responsible for Silver’s death, though he so wanted to be.

There were mothers who knew their children like this.

She switched on the light. I had the unexpected desire to crawl into her arms. If she opened them then, I would’ve, just as James had.

“I don’t want you to think it’s your fault, either,” she said. Silver’s tote hung from her bent elbow. “These things happen.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll take care of yourself, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “You’re a good girl. I can tell.” She opened her arms, and I understood what she was offering me, but by then I could no longer bear to take it.

The door shut. She said something to James that I could not discern. The sound of his quiet laughter broke through, slightly wet and almost real. I squeezed my eyes tight, pinched the skin of my wrist, counted and counted.

Had anyone ever been so wrong? I couldn’t believe I once saw James as unflappable, infallible, singularly adult. All along, he was just somebody’s lamb.

—

I worried I was running late to meet Lou, but when I got to the bar, she wasn’t there yet. The street was crowded with people. Sunday evening on the Lower East Side, perfume of matured garbage and peach vape. The hostess sighed. “I can only hold your reservation for five more minutes.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I’m just calling her now.”

Lou picked up. “Katie. I lost my necklace. I’m sorry. I’ll be ten minutes, max.”

“They’re going to give the reservation away,” I said. “Like, right now.”

“Tell them to hold it.”

“They’ve already held it for twenty-five.”

“Oh my God, put them on the phone with me.”

I looked at the hostess, who glared back. “Where are you?” I asked. “Have you even left?”

“No, but I’m about to, I’m literally opening the door.”

“You haven’t chosen your outfit yet.”

“You know what?” Lou’s voice drifted in and out. “Just come over. I’m four blocks away. I have wine at home.”

“Are you sure? Won’t you get charged?”

“It’s fine, I don’t care,” she said. “You have my location.”

I never thought to check Lou’s location. She would’ve been upset to hear that, because she gave it to me when she first started going on online dates as a safeguard against ending up in the Hudson.

At the corner store next to her building, I bought a bag of pizza-flavored chips and a bottle of red wine. I rang her buzzer three times before her voice crackled through the intercom. The elevator looked ancient, so I climbed the four flights of stairs.

Lou swung open the door. “I thought you died,” she said. Her dark curly hair was still wet from her shower, dripping onto her white T-shirt. A bright yellow pimple patch sat on the center of her forehead. I felt enormously happy to see her. “What took you so long?”

“I took the stairs.”

“You’re so weird.”

She led me to the velvet couch. I took in the surrounding décor, eclectic and unfamiliar.

On the coffee table, a plastic bottle filled with flowers leaked onto a stack of glossy fashion magazines.

Candles in the shape of headless and busty women flickered dangerously close to the sheer yellow curtains.

Few of the items seemed to belong to Lou, or maybe they were just new.

“Is anyone else home?”

“Nope, Becca and Nicolo just left.”

“I brought you something.”

“Delightful.” Lou unbagged the chips. “Pizza, my favorite. Thanks.”

“Did you find your necklace?”

“What necklace?”

“The one you lost. You know, that made you late.”

“Fuck, sorry.” She unscrewed the wine and poured out two glasses. “I was lying, obviously. No, I was in a fight with Becca. She’s thinking of moving out. This is good, by the way.” She nodded at her glass. “Nice pick.”

“It was twelve dollars.”

“Double digits. What did I do to deserve such royal treatment?”

“I wanted to apologize to you,” I said. “We don’t have to make a big deal out of this, but. I feel like I haven’t been a good roommate to you. Or a friend.”

“Hm.” Lou made a show of swirling her glass. “How so?”

“The utilities. I should’ve—”

“No, I was being a bitch. I don’t give a fuck about the money, to be honest. I wasn’t upset about that.”

“Okay, well. Thanks for covering me anyway. I was really wrapped up in stuff.”

“As if I didn’t know,” said Lou. “I was just annoyed that you disappeared into James. I never saw you anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “I told you, I can be obsessive.”

“And clearly so can he. But I thought if you were going to completely merge your life into your boyfriend’s, you might as well get the benefit of borrowing his money.”

“I think I just didn’t realize you’d care so much.”

“Are you serious?” Lou’s voice gained an edge, like how it sounded when she fought with her sister over the phone. “You thought I didn’t care about you? We’ve lived together for four years.”

I pinched my wrist. She batted my hand away. I forced myself to meet her eyes.

“You think nobody in your life cares about you, because it allows you to act like a little monster.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“I get it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Just get a grip, you know.” Lou refilled her glass. “Where are you living now, anyway? With James?”

“Kind of.”

“What do you mean, kind of?”

I didn’t exactly know. James and I hadn’t discussed our living together.

The sex last evening was good, better than it had ever been.

But that night James slept facing away from me, and in the morning, I still couldn’t bring myself to touch BL?HAJ or open the new dresser.

After James’s mother left, the apartment cleared of all reminders of Silver, we became awkward, nearly polite, around each other.

An uncomfortable feeling scraped at me whenever I looked at or thought of James.

I wasn’t sure if the feeling was love, or regret, or both.

I had caused him pain. I’d done it mindlessly, passively, which was even worse.

I yearned to be part of his life but rejected it at the same time.

He wanted me to be his equal, and I wanted to be his pet. Was that still what I wanted?

Lou listened to me explain. Her expression was difficult to read. “Personally,” she finally said, “I think you should take the free housing. But I shoplift from small businesses, so maybe I’m morally bankrupt. You said you loved each other, right?”

“I can’t tell if I love him,” I said. “If I really loved him, I wouldn’t have, I don’t know, killed his cat.”

“Plenty of people do crazy things to the people they love,” said Lou. “Just talk to my parents. Anyway, I swear when you first met, you were like, this is my person.”

“But I was barely a person back then. My mother and I had basically just broken up. That’s probably why I started dating him.”

“You act like you’re the first person on Earth who hooked up with a stranger because they were depressed. Relationships change. The beginning of a relationship is the least interesting thing about it.”

“Maybe. But living with him still feels wrong. Like, if I move in with him now, I’ll never move out again.”

“Right. You know what I think? I think you actually don’t feel bad about what this would do to him, but about what it would do to you.”

“Okay.” I shifted, uncomfortable. “And by that you mean…”

“I mean there’s some part of you that realizes it would be the easy thing to do. Maybe you wanted easy before, but you don’t anymore. You want something of your own.”

I took a sip from my glass.

“I’m good, right?” Lou stuffed three chips into her mouth all at once. “I should bill you.”

Her smirk softened into a smile. One of her real ones, where her top lip thinned so her front teeth peeked out.

I felt very humble and indebted to her at that moment, like I should maybe kneel on the ground and kiss her socks.

I could picture myself doing it, and the way she’d look from below, chin raised, laughing.

James was right. I always said Lou didn’t like me. But look! She loved me.

“Well, then, what’s up with you? Becca wants to move out?”

“Her dad’s buying. Let me get more drunk first.”

Lou gripped the nearly empty bottle of wine with both hands, shaking it upside down to release the last dregs.

It was the same way I used to handle the glass ketchup bottles in our dining hall, for which she always teased me.

I understood that this small performance was her way of apologizing for whatever she felt she needed to apologize for.

But I didn’t care, all was forgiven, and right then, watching the table splatter with wine, I felt we were on the precipice of a new friendship that we not only wanted but also deserved.

It turned out I was right about Nicolo being a terrible roommate for Lou.

He menaced her constantly, ate her leftovers, and never removed his laundry from the dryer.

He slammed doors on occasion, and if he got too drunk, he inevitably hit on women who were not Becca.

Lou didn’t care to hide her animosity toward Nicolo, which annoyed Becca.

They had a “family” conversation to talk things through, which led Nicolo to blame Lou for being passive and not communicating expectations, which led to Lou accusing Nicolo of being lazy and fascist, which Nicolo said was racist against Italians, which Lou said wasn’t possible, and also, he was the racist one because he said I reminded him of Mulan.

“I can’t believe he would say that you’re passive,” was the only thing I could think to say after she finished.

“I know, right? Anyway, Becca probably won’t dump him, and her dad will buy a gorgeous apartment, and they’ll probably end up moving there. It literally pains me to think of Nicolo living somewhere nicer than me.”

“This place is already really nice.”

“You think? Wait, Katie, if you don’t want to live with James, why don’t you move in with me?”

“I doubt I could afford it.”

“It’ll be more than Anna’s, yeah, but how much were you paying for that again?”

“Five hundred.”

“Wow,” said Lou. “She gave you a good deal. Well, this won’t be like that, but it’s a good location. Sixteen hundred is pretty low, considering.”

“Each?”

“Well, yeah.”

“There’s no way.”

“Please, please,” Lou clasped her hands. “I don’t want to have to hunt for a new roommate. I hate everyone.”

“What about your art friends?”

“Becca’s the only one I can actually stand. Why do you think I kept living with you?”

“I have a job interview next week,” I said. “So let’s see.”

Lou squealed. I told her about the job, and she made jokes about the type of people I would have to deal with at a nonprofit. I laughed because her delivery was funny and I was getting drunk. I knew I probably shouldn’t get too drunk, but my brain wanted to be numbed.

We went through a second bottle of wine easily, and when that was done, she brandished Nicolo’s handle of vodka. “I shouldn’t,” I said. Lou either didn’t hear me or didn’t care, and I went from being woozy to gone in two shots.

In the bathroom, I looked at my face in the mirror.

Chapped red lips, shirt chalky with pizza-flavored dust. I tried to imagine that this mirror was my mirror, that the toilet next to me would be the one I peed in for the next year.

But what about the new dresser, what about BL?HAJ, untouched and unloved, on James’s bedroom floor?

I closed my eyes and wished for some third option to find me.

Dots of green and violet danced beneath my eyelids.

If only I could stay forever in this dark untouchable state, but life insisted on letting the light in, multiplying the colors.

I considered my options and how I got here.

I was grateful for Lou’s offer, and for James’s apartment with the new furniture.

But did I really want either? If I let myself be indulgent, I knew what I wanted.

One last swim with Silver. One more night in my mother’s house, before I got old and she got sad.

I thought about all this for a long time until the colors behind my eyes became starry and I had to throw up.

Then I put my fingers in my throat and projected firmly into the toilet bowl.

I felt much better afterward. Lou’s voice traveled from the living room, calling my name.

I thought to myself: Okay, this is your life, and it is honestly fine.