No One Will Miss Her(14)

“Them cats can hunt for themselves,” he said. “That’s why we don’t chase ’em away, ’cause they keep the yard clear of vermin.”

“But I want them to like me,” I said, and I must have looked truly pathetic, because I saw him suck in his cheeks to keep from laughing—and the next time he went to the market, he came back with a bag of cheap kibble and a warning: no cats in the trailer. If I wanted a pet, he said, he’d get me a dog.

I didn’t want a dog. Not that I didn’t like them, understand. I always liked animals, liked them better than people for the most part. But dogs, they were just so much. The slobber, the noise, the desperate desire to please. The loyalty of a dog is overrated; you get it for nothing. You could kick a dog every day and it would still come back, begging, wanting to be loved. Cats, though—they’re different. You have to work for it. Even the new kittens at the junkyard, the ones who hadn’t learned yet to be wary of people, wouldn’t take food from my hand right away. It took days before they didn’t run from me, more than a week for me to earn their trust. Even when they would take scraps from my fingers, only one of them ever let his guard down enough to crawl into my lap and purr. He was the smallest of the bunch, with a white face and gray markings that covered his head and ears like a cap, and a funny pair of front legs that bent inward like a pair of human elbows—what some people call a “twisty cat.” The first time he crawled out of the heaps, I laughed out loud at the sight of him, hopping forward and sitting up on his hind legs like a kangaroo, appraising the situation. He didn’t seem to know that he was broken, or if he did, he didn’t care. I loved him fiercely and immediately. I named him Rags.

My father didn’t understand, nor share my warm feelings for broken things. The first time he saw Rags come creeping out of the heaps, his face darkened.

“Oh, hell, girl. He can’t hunt with those cockeyed forelegs,” he said. “He won’t survive the winter. The kind thing to do would be to put him down, before he starves.”

“He won’t starve if I feed him,” I said, balling my hands into fists and glaring. I was ready to fight, but Pop just gave me that dark look again, frustrated and sad, and walked away. That summer more than most, he didn’t have time to battle it out with a stubborn kid over the sad, brutal facts of life. He’d worked it out with Teddy Reardon to buy the house at the lake—it was on the verge of collapse then, a hundred years old and barely used for the last twenty-five—and would leave me to watch over the junkyard most afternoons while he worked to fix it up. I took the job seriously for about three days, which is how long it took me to realize that everyone in town knew what Pop was up to, and nobody was going to come around looking for scrap metal or car parts when he wasn’t here.

I didn’t mind. I was used to spending long hours alone, playing elaborate make-believe games based on things I’d read in books. I’d cast myself as a pirate, or a princess, and imagine that the heaps were high walls surrounding a strange and mysterious land that I was trying to either escape or plunder, depending on the day. I was good at pretending, and I preferred doing it alone; other kids would always mess up these games, breaking character or breaking the rules, and shattering the fantasy along with it. By myself, I could occupy a single story for hours or even days, picking up where I left off as soon as Pop’s car had disappeared down the road.

The weather that morning was ominous. The day had dawned gray and grim, the sky already heavy with low-hanging clouds. Pop had glanced at them, grumbling; he was still patching the roof of the lake house, and unhappy at the prospect of the work being interrupted by what seemed like an inevitable storm. To me, though, the massing clouds were just part of that day’s story: a witch had taken up residence in the woods, I decided, and had cast a curse that was slowly spreading like a dark sickness over the sky. I would have to make my way to her lair, and battle her black magic with my own. I filled a glass jar with the makings of a counterspell: clover blossoms, a length of ribbon, one of my baby teeth from a box where I kept odds and ends. (The tooth fairy had stopped showing up at our trailer as my father’s drinking grew worse, though I wouldn’t make the connection for years yet; in the meantime the unclaimed teeth made themselves useful at times like this.) When Rags crept out of the heaps, I gathered him in my arms and added him to the game: all the other cats in the yard were the witch’s servants, I decided, but this one had changed his allegiance after she cursed him with twisty legs.

I didn’t hear them arrive; I don’t know how long they’d been there, watching me. I was moving slowly and carefully through the heaps, making my way back toward the magical spot where the three rusted trucks sat nose to nose: if ever there were a spot to perform magic, that would be it. Absorbed in the game, lugging Rags along while he contentedly napped against my shoulder, it took me by surprise to realize that I wasn’t alone. A group of three kids, two boys and a girl, stood staring from beside the long stack of cars, blocking the yellowed grass path into the forest. I knew all three, of course, from school and from town. Two of them, a girl and a boy with dirty blond hair, were Brianne and Billy Carter, twelve and thirteen years old, the children of our nearest neighbors on the other side of the woods that abutted the back of the yard. Once upon a time we’d played together, back when my mother was still alive to facilitate such things, but that friendliness had disappeared when she did; now they only ever showed up to throw rocks at the cars, and my father had spoken to them more than once about not crossing onto our property. Clearly, they hadn’t listened.