FELIS DIRUS
The Doc was a heart attack waiting to happen. A heavy user of McDonalds and Krispy Kremes, he was a sloppy, overflowing-his-pants kind of fat. The kind of fat that left greasy sweat on everything he touched. He was a cardiac surgeon. He was mean, too, punishing Sharon and six-year-old Candy for coming to live with him after his son died in Afghanistan. He never tired of reminding her that because she and Aaron never married she was not in fact his daughter-in-law. This while the Doc himself regularly “forgot” to tell her that he'd gone through the milk or bread or butter, leaving her to rustle up whatever she could for her own or her daughter’s breakfast. Lately he’d stopped flushing the toilet. Last night Sharon had gone into one of the upstairs bathrooms and found a massive turd in the bowl, sticking out of the water as if lying in wait for the Titanic.
“Life isn’t fair,” he would tell her with a sneer and his practiced heh-heh-heh of a chuckle. Meaning that “Life was just dandy” if you happened to be the Doc, living in a tri-level home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula with a 180-degree view of the Los Angeles basin and the most selective of memories. He used the same line on Candy who was, legally and in every other way, his only grandchild whenever he caught her touching his things. Even his collection of Cheshire Cats, plastic and ceramic and enamel, which were designed to be exactly the type of pretty-bright-shiny that was like crack to six year-olds.
Sharon’s own mother’s contribution to the welfare of her only grandchild was a box of garage-sale toys at Christmastime and the ongoing warning, uttered in the rasp of a voice that was all she had left after her daily three packs of cigarettes, that now Sharon would find out what a thankless job raising a kid was.
Sharon herself made no more than the average nursing home aide. Less than some, she reflected as she drained her first cup of coffee. She added the cup to the dishwasher, where the Doc’s breakfast dishes already resided. Vista Hermosa in filthy rich Rancho Palos Verdes paid eighteen cents an hour less than the job she’d had in Torrance. And while she supposedly paid no rent, the Doc took it out of her by turning her into his personal maid. He’d left for surgery earlier than usual, so she sacrificed time usually spent hunched over a second cup to make his bed. The sheets were still tacky with his signature sweat. Resigned, she peeled them off the mattress. A pair of underpants came with them. Not the Doc’s. His weren't printed with little orange kitties.
Sharon could never afterwards remember how she got to the laundry room. But in the laundry room she was, pushing her daughter’s panties to the bottom of the hamper, heaping dirty sheets and towels, jeans and socks on top. And all the time asking herself what she was doing. Shouldn’t she be slipping them into a Ziploc bag? Saving them for the police? Storming the OR at Torrance Memorial and waving them in the Doc’s face, demanding to know…
To know…what? Her mind was full of blank spaces where coherent thoughts should be. Even her horror and her rage seemed to be experienced from a distance, as if she were trying to recall the climax of some made-for-cable thriller. But Sharon, who had left home at sixteen and worked her ass off ever since, never making more than pennies above minimum wage, was used to being beaten over the head with life’s nastier surprises. Now she gritted her teeth and attempted to banish the image of those orange kitties, smeared with something white and gluey and stinking of the Doc’s toadbelly white flesh.
She needed to get Candy somewhere safe, but where? She had just paid for her daughter’s new school clothes and indulged herself with a pair of orthopedic shoes to keep the shin splints at bay. She had a total of a hundred and seventy-four dollars in the bank, not remotely enough to pay first month, last month and security deposit. A city shelter? She didn't think a place like The Hill, as it was spoken of among country mice like herself, even had such a thing. Mom’s dingy one-bedroom? Maybe she and Candy could bed down in her splintery wooden garage, the one that sagged against the neighbor's fence and perpetuated the ongoing war of words between her mother and the meth heads next door.
How horrible a mother was she, talking herself out of moving when God alone knew just how far the Doc had gone? Pretty damned horrible—and very, very late for work. Automatically she hustled Candy into her Incredible Hulk jacket—it was ugly and designed for a boy but was also warm, waterproof and had been on clearance—and hustled her up the hill to school. Vista Hermosa, the nursing home where Sharon worked, was only minutes away, particularly if you ignored the speed limit.
She slowed her ancient Toyota only as she neared Vista Hermosa’s driveway and only because Omar, one-half the staff of Tikriti and Son Funeral Home, was exiting in a discreet gray van. She stopped the Toyota so that each driver’s side window faced the other and tried to put some of her usual concern into her voice as she asked who was inside.
“A Mister Benjamin Schutt,” Omar told her.
“Crap, really?” Ben had been a nice old guy whose cancer, against all odds, had gone into remission and stayed there. He'd been feeling better, gaining weight and, when he last talked to Sharon, had planned to move back home with his daughter.
Later it was Miles, the perpetually bright-eyed and bushy-tailed receptionist, who filled Sharon in on the details.
“And you know what? River spent the whole night with him. It’s as if she knew.” River, currently spread across the anthropology textbook in his lap and purring like an outboard motor, was Vista Hermosa’s resident cat. She had shown up less than two weeks before, thin and bedraggled from a rare southern California rainstorm. She wore a collar and red metallic i.d. tag that gave her name and address. It was Miles who located the house in a gated community, only to learn that its owner was herself dead of heart failure at the less-than-ripe age of 34. Presumed heart failure, a neighbor told him. No one had been there but the cat.
The residents adored River. What wasn’t to adore? She was a cream-colored puffball with the faintest of tiger stripes on her cheeks, legs and tail, as if some god or other had tried to shroud her wild side with gauze. She almost never stopped purring.
It was barely noon when Sharon began boxing up Ben’s things but it felt later. Not only were the fall days shortening but she felt beaten by the morning's discovery. It wasn't until she picked up a framed photo of his grandchild, the perfect Gerber Baby he had so looked forward to seeing, that she remembered that the Doc was supposed to pick Candy up from school. She violated protocol by using the Ben’s phone to call the Doc and tell him he didn't have to bother, she’d take care of Candy. How Vista Hermosa’s director, whose name was Ely, would react to her slipping out and returning with a small child in tow was a problem she’d deal with later.
The wall clock read 2:22 as she opened the door to the back patio, hoping to slip past the residents without being asked for something or worse, run into Ely. It was then that she realized that as usual, she’d left her purse in reception and needed the car keys it contained. Her driver’s license might be helpful, too. She changed course.
“Miles, I’ll be back in ten minutes, I swear. Maybe twenty. I have to—” She stopped, aghast. Tears of a deep, oxblood red stood in Miles' eyes. They created thick tracks down his cheeks, ran from ears and nose and soaked his sweatshirt. He didn’t stir. Sharon made herself grope for a pulse, first at his throat, then at his wrist. Nothing. His skin was cold, already going the color of pork fat. He’d died curled over his schoolbook, his chest almost touching it. Gobbets of blood stained the pages. Gently, she began sliding it out from underneath Miles’ body.
And gasped. River poked her head out from under a dead arm, apparently unbothered. She was still purring, a musical little trill that said all was well with her world. A dollop of gore the size and shape of a Hershey's Kiss sat atop her fluffy head.
The sight was enough to trigger a surprisingly violent flood of tears, tears so violent Ely jumped to the conclusion that she and Miles were closer than he’d imagined. Sharon took full advantage, resisting the urge to wipe them away as she called the mother of one of
Candy’s classmates to ask if she minded picking her up and watching her for a few hours. Candy had long been vocal in her dislike of said classmate on the grounds that he was a booger-eater, but his mother’s was the only name Sharon could think of at the moment.
Sharon made herself available to Miles’ shocked and heartbroken parents, fetching them coffee and making sure that she stayed close until the home’s on-call physician had him removed to the hospital for autopsy. The doctor, normally a complacent son-of-a-bitch accustomed to the long illnesses and anticipated deaths of the residents, was clearly rattled by what appeared to be an aneurism in a previously healthy college sophomore. It probably didn't help that he hadn’t seen Ben’s demise coming, either.
But then, who could have guessed Death would steal in on little cat feet? Particularly such precious ones?
River had retreated to the grotesquely elaborate cat-tree one wealthy resident had insisted on installing in the lobby. Sharon lifted her gently. She was surprisingly heavy for such a little thing but didn’t protest as Sharon shut her into cardboard cat carrier. She hoped the Doc liked pets.
In the end it didn't matter. Dinner that night was heavy on the steak and potatoes and mac and cheese, with apple pie and ice cream for afterwards. Candy had Coke, the Doc his favorite imported ale. He was asleep and snoring away in the disgusting, phlegm-gargling way of the morbidly obese when she opened the carrier and tipped River through the crack in the door to his bedroom. She waited, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dark so she could be sure the cat had settled down.
But cats are notoriously fickle little beasts. Something Sharon hadn’t considered until the next morning, when she went in to wake Candy and found River cradled like a beloved plush toy in her daughter's lifeless arms.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to express her deep gratitude to cover designer and computer whiz Pamela Meserve, and to editor Katherine Tomlinson, without whom this collection wouldn't exist.
About the Author
An alumna of The Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, Berkeley Hunt works as a script reader and screenwriting coach. She is a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, Dorothy Parker and Saki—the writer, not the alcoholic beverage. She lives in North Hollywood, proud home of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and of the Circus Liquor Clown.
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