He tossed the butt into the ashtray and headed for the bacitracin.
Roughly seven years later preparatory to Annabel and Gerard’s tenth anniversary party he stepped out of a steaming shower and admired the pale white circle that stood out plainly against his glowing flesh.
Laura was already waiting, dressed and ready to go.
She always was a bit ahead of him.
RETURNS
“I’m here.”
“You’re what?”
“I said I’m here.”
“Aw, don’t start with me. Don’t get started.”
Jill’s lying on the stained expensive sofa with the TV on in front of her tuned to some game show, a bottle of Jim Beam on the floor and a glass in her hand. She doesn’t see me but Zoey does. Zoey’s curled up on the opposite side of the couch waiting for her morning feeding and the sun’s been up four hours now, it’s ten o’clock and she’s used to her Friskies at eight.
I always had a feeling cats saw things that people didn’t. Now I know.
She’s looking at me with a kind of imploring interest. Eyes wide, black nose twitching. I know she expects something of me. I’m trying to give it to her.
“You’re supposed to feed her for godsakes. The litter box needs changing.”
“What? Who?”
“The cat. Zoey. Food. Water. The litter box. Remember?”
She fills the glass again. Jill’s been doing this all night and all morning, with occasional short naps. It was bad while I was alive but since the cab cut me down four days ago on 72nd and Broadway it’s gotten immeasurably worse. Maybe in her way she misses me. I only just returned last night from God-knows-where knowing there was something I had to do or try to do and maybe this is it. Snap her out of it.
“Jesus! Lemme the hell alone. You’re in my goddamn head. Get outa my goddamn head!”
She shouts this loud enough for the neighbors to hear. The neighbors are at work. She isn’t. So nobody pounds the walls. Zoey just looks at her, then back at me. I’m standing at the entrance to the kitchen. I know that’s where I am but I can’t see myself at all. I gesture with my hands but no hands appear in front of me. I look in the hall mirror and there’s nobody there. It seems that only my seven-year-old cat can see me.
When I arrived she was in the bedroom asleep on the bed. She jumped off and trotted over with her black-and-white tail raised, the white tip curled at the end. You can always tell a cat’s happy by the tail language. She was purring. She tried to nuzzle me with the side of her jaw where the scent-glands are, trying to mark me as her own, to confirm me in the way cats do, the way she’s done thousands of times before but something wasn’t right. She looked up at me puzzled. I leaned down to scratch her ears but of course I couldn’t and that seemed to puzzle her more. She tried marking me with her haunches. No go.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. My chest felt full of lead.
“Come on, Jill. Get up! You need to feed her. Shower. Make a pot of coffee. Whatever it takes.”
“This is fuckin’ crazy,” she says.
She gets up though. Looks at the clock on the mantle. Stalks off on wobbly legs toward the bathroom. And then I can hear the water running for the shower. I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to watch her. I don’t want to see her naked anymore and haven’t for a long while. She was an actress once. Summer stock and the occasional commercial. Nothing major. But god, she was beautiful. Then we married and soon social drinking turned to solo drinking and then drinking all day long and her body slid fast into too much weight here, too little there. Pockets of self-abuse. I don’t know why I stayed. I’d lost my first wife to cancer. Maybe I just couldn’t bear to lose another.
Maybe I’m just loyal.
I don’t know.
I hear the water turn off and a while later she walks back into the living room in her white terry robe, her hair wrapped in a pink towel. She glances at the clock. Reaches down to the table for a cigarette. Lights it and pulls on it furiously. She’s still wobbly but less so. She’s scowling. Zoey’s watching her carefully. When she gets like this, half-drunk and half-straight, she’s dangerous. I know.
“You still here?
“Yes.”
She laughs. It’s not a nice laugh.
“Sure you are.”
“I am.”
“Bullshit. You fuckin’ drove me crazy while you were alive. Fuckin’ driving me crazy now you’re dead.”
“I’m here to help you, Jill. You and Zoey.”
She looks around the room like finally she believes that maybe, maybe I really am here and not some voice in her head. Like she’s trying to locate me, pin down the source of me. All she has to do, really, is to look at Zoey, who’s staring straight at me.
But she’s squinting in a way I’ve seen before. A way I don’t like.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about Zoey, ” she says.
I’m about to ask her what she means by that when the doorbell rings. She stubs out the cigarette, walks over to the door and opens it. There’s a man in the hall I’ve never seen before. A small man, shy and sensitive looking, mid-thirties and balding, in a dark blue windbreaker. His posture says he’s uncomfortable.
“Mrs. Hunt?”
“Uh-huh. Come on in,” she says. “She’s right over there.”
The man stoops and picks up something off the floor and I see what it is.
A cat-carrier. Plastic with a grated metal front. Just like ours. The man steps inside.
“Jill, what are you doing? What the hell are you doing, Jill?”
Her hands flutter to her ears as though she’s trying to bat away a fly or a mosquito and she blinks rapidly but the man doesn’t see that at all. The man is focused on my cat who remains focused on me, when she should be watching the man, when she should be seeing the cat carrier, she knows damn well what they mean for godsakes, she’s going somewhere, somewhere she won’t like.
“Zoey! Go! Get out of here! Run!”
I clap my hands. They make no sound. But she hears the alarm in my voice and sees the expression I must be wearing and at the last instant turns toward the man just as he reaches for her, reaches down to the couch and snatches her up and shoves her head-first inside the carrier. Closes it. Engages the double latches.
He’s fast. He’s efficient.
My cat is trapped inside.
The man smiles. He doesn’t quite pull it off.
“That wasn’t too bad,” he says.
“No. You’re lucky. She bites. She’ll put up a hell of a fight sometimes.”
“You lying bitch,” I tell her.
I’ve moved up directly behind her by now. I’m saying this into her ear. I can feel her heart pumping with adrenalin and I don’t know if it’s me who’s scaring her or what she’s just done or allowed to happen that’s scaring her but she’s all actress now, she won’t acknowledge me at all. I’ve never felt so angry or useless in my life.
“You sure you want to do this, ma‘am?” he says. “We could put her up for adoption for a while. We don’t have to euthenize her. ’Course, she’s not a kitten anymore. But you never know. Some family …”
“I told you,” my wife of six years says. “She bites.”
And now she’s calm and cold as ice.
Zoey has begun meowing. My heart’s begun to break. Dying was easy compared to this.
Our eyes meet. There’s a saying that the soul of a cat is seen through its eyes and I believe it. I reach inside the carrier. My hand passes through the carrier. I can’t see my hand but she can. She moves her head up to nuzzle it. And the puzzled expression isn’t there anymore. It’s as though this time she can actually feel me, feel my hand and my touch. I wish I could feel her too. I petted her just this way when she was only a kitten, a street waif, scared of every horn and siren. And I was all alone. She begins to purr. I find something out. Ghosts can cry.
The man leaves with my cat and I’m here with my wife.
I can??
?t follow. Somehow I know that.
You can’t begin to understand how that makes me feel. I’d give anything in the world to follow.
My wife continues to drink and for the next three hours or so I do nothing but scream at her, tear at her. Oh, she can hear me, all right. I’m putting her through every torment as I can muster, reminding her of every evil she’s ever done to me or anybody, reminding her over and over of what she’s done today and I think, so this is my purpose, this is why I’m back, the reason I’m here is to get this bitch to end herself, end her miserable fucking life and I think of my cat and how Jill never really cared for her, cared for her wine-stained furniture more than my cat and I urge her toward the scissors, I urge her toward the window and the seven-story drop, toward the knives in the kitchen and she’s crying, she’s screaming, too bad the neighbors are all at work, they’d at least have her arrested. And she’s hardly able to walk or even stand and I think, heart attack maybe, maybe stroke and I stalk my wife and urge her to die, die until it’s almost one o’clock and something begins to happen.
She’s calmer.
Like she’s not hearing me as clearly.
I’m losing something.
Some power drifting slowly away like a battery running down.
I begin to panic. I don’t understand. I’m not done yet.
Then I feel it. I feel it reach out to me from blocks and blocks away far across the city. I feel the breathing slow. I feel the heart stopping. I feel the quiet end of her. I feel it more clearly than I felt my own end.
I feel it grab my own heart and squeeze.
I look at my wife, pacing, drinking. And I realize something. And suddenly it’s not so bad anymore. It still hurts, but in a different way.
I haven’t come back to torment Jill. Not to tear her apart or to shame her for what she’s done. She’s tearing herself apart. She doesn’t need me for that. She’d have done this terrible thing anyway, with or without my being here. She’d planned it. It was in motion. My being here didn’t stop her. My being here afterward didn’t change things. Zoey was mine. And given who and what Jill was what she’d done was inevitable.
And I think, to hell with Jill. Jill doesn’t matter a bit. Not one bit. Jill is zero.
It was Zoey I was here for. Zoey all along. That awful moment.
I was here for my cat.
That last touch of comfort inside the cage. The nuzzle and purr. Reminding us both of all those nights she’d comforted me and I her. The fragile brush of souls.
That was what it was about.
That was what we needed.
The last and the best of me’s gone now.
And I begin to fade.
JACK KETCHUM is the author of the novels Off Season. Hide and Seek, Cover, The Girl Next Door, She Wakes, Joyride, Stranglehold, Offspring, Red, Ladies’ Night, The Lost, and arguably, Right to Life. His short fiction is collected in The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex, and Pcaceuble Kingdom. His novels have been translated into Japanese, French, Greek, Russian, and Italian. In 1994, his story “The Box” won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction, and his story “Gone” won the same award in 2000.
Stephen King has said of him that, “no writer who has read him can help being influenced by him, and no general reader who runs across his work can easily forget him.” In his introduction to Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition. Douglas E. Winter writes. “When I read Off Season, I knew that its writer was different, that he was working from that raw and risky perspective known as personal vision… [It was] the genuine article, its horrors insistent, visceral, and disturbing.”
Ketchum lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Praise
Other Leisure books by Jack Ketchum:
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
II
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
III
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
IV
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
V
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
EPILOGUE
Chapter Forty-Seven
Author’s Note: On Writing the Girl Next Door
Teaser chapter
Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door
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