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“Baby girl,” Dad says. “There’s nothing you can ever do that will make you unwelcome in my house.”
I nod, a few tears falling into my lap when I do. Sara’s still got her face covered. Mom takes my glass to refill it and Dad goes to get some tissues. Sara looks over at me and wipes her eyes.
“You’ve got the best parents in the fucking world,” she says.
15. ALEX
It’s dark when I get home, even though the sun is still up.
Our windows stay closed, our curtains drawn. It’s easier for Mom to ignore the outside world this way: out of sight, out of mind, the only thing perpetually in her line of vision a bottle of scotch. I put myself in her way accidentally, our paths crossing in the kitchen as I get a glass of water. She looks up at the clock, confused.
“You’re home?”
“School lets out at three, Mom.”
Her eyes thin out as she squints at the clock, the shakily applied eyeliner she puts on only for herself crimping together as she does.
“It’s three-thirty,” I supply.
“Oh.” She busies herself for a few minutes, trying to make it seem like she came into the kitchen for something other than to refill her glass. I wait her out patiently, sipping my water and crunching ice between my teeth.
“How was school?”
I imagine this question is asked all over the world, every day, receiving everything from flippant answers to in-depth reckonings. But it’s hardly ever asked here, in this house. The last time I answered this question I was wearing a Hello Kitty book bag and the heels of my shoes lit up when I walked.
I pulverize some ice with my molars while I think. I could tell her, I suppose. Let her know that Anna was on the minds of everyone today. Something that rightfully belongs to only us resurrected once again as a cautionary fairy tale, a warning to all the Little Red Riding Hoods that there are wolves in the forest.
I could tell her, but I don’t. Because I know why the curtains are drawn and the windows are shut. Nothing is ours; nothing is sacred. The one thing we shared was pulled into pieces, memorialized and mythologized so that everyone could participate in it. When she was missing, Anna’s picture was tacked in so many places around town it’s what I see when I think of her, not her actual face. I see that picture next to a lost cat poster and a lawn-mowing service advertisement.
I learned later they did find that cat.
“School was fine,” I say, and dump the rest of my water in the sink.
16. PEEKAY
We’re cleaning cat ears.
Rhonda doesn’t require us to come in on Sundays, but somebody has to feed the animals. Yesterday Alex and I helped five cats and two dogs find homes, one of them being the newly spayed dump, who was pretty cute once she got cleaned up. We agreed we probably could have placed a couple more cats if their ears were nice and pink inside like in the wet-food commercials. We told Rhonda to take a much-deserved break today and we’d come in, feed everybody, and make our cats a little more like the ones you see on TV.
So I skipped church to clean cat ears. Normally that wouldn’t fly, but since we had a half-mortifying, half-heartwarming family moment Friday, Dad was okay with it.
It’s kind of a gross job. A lot of these guys come in here with ear mites. They get this nasty black buildup that has its own special smell if it’s been sitting in their ear canals a while. It doesn’t matter how much I wash my hands; I can still smell it hours later, like an onion.
And cats don’t exactly love having their ears cleaned, so it takes two people. Alex has this weird hypnotic effect on them. I wrap them up in towels, bundled tight like cat burritos in my arms, and then Alex talks to them, low and soft. I don’t know if she relaxes them or if it’s more like utter defeat because they know they’ve come up against an unstoppable force with a Q-tip, but they go limp after a few minutes. When she’s done, she’ll nod at me and I let them go. They stalk off with their ears down and their tails in the air, trying to regain whatever dignity we took from them.
It’s a close work environment. Alex leans over the cats while I’ve got them tucked under my arm like a football. She smells like cold air and the late-evening showers that are two degrees away from being snow.
“What are you wearing?” I ask.
She grunts something that might be a question, her usual word choice lost in concentration as she digs into a tom’s ear.
“Perfume? Body spray? You smell good,” I clarify as her confusion deepens.
“I suppose it could be my shampoo,” she says as she squirts medicine into the tom’s ear, massaging it down into the canal. Inexplicably, he purrs.
“It was raining earlier, and I jogged here. Wet hair smells,” she adds, as if this statement is nothing odd. “He’s done.”
I unwrap the tom and he jumps down, leaving us empty-handed and looking at each other. “What do you mean you jogged here? It was almost snowing this morning.”
