Cradled in my lap, still swaddled in breakfast linen, I carried my heart, and my heart was stiff and cold. My heart was a dead time bomb drooling decayed corruption. In response to her inquiry, I could but meow flatly. Behind the murk of the tinted windows, the outskirts of Lisbon or La Jolla or Lexington fell behind us and vanished. As we motored along, I felt the putrefying juices of my soul mate migrating downward to soil my skort. Smoothed flat, the napkin in my lap would chart jagged islands and filigreed coastlines. Flecked and blotched with the stains of decomposition, the linen would trace a rambling journey in which everything you love falls apart.
This, it was the opposite of a treasure map.
My father? He hardly took notice. In that plush setting, my father was busy behind his newspaper, the salmon-toned pages of the Financial Times. Of his person, all I could see were his legs from the knees down, those creased and cuffed trouser legs. I could see only those and his knuckles holding the paper spread in front of him. There, his gold wedding band. While my mom wrestled with her sedated empathy, and I sank deeper into despair, my dad snapped his newsprint pages. He turned them with rustling flourishes. If you’ll notice, Gentle Tweeter, a businessman with a newspaper is worse than any Jane Austen heroine flouncing through life in a taffeta ball gown.
“Maddy?” asked my mom. Her words shrill with false good cheer, she said, “How would Tigerstripe like a new brother?”
Meaning: She was pregnant? Meaning: She was insane?
From within his paper fortress, my father said, “Sweetheart, we’re adopting.” From behind the scrim of wars and stock prices and sports scores, “The kid’s from someplace awful.”
Meaning: I wasn’t paying them enough attention. Meaning: They wanted to feel more appreciated.
“The paperwork took months,” my mom said. “It’s not as easy as adopting a…” And she nodded toward the sodden napkin wadded in my lap.
In response, I offered an almost inaudible tear-choked meow.
My father shook his papers angrily. My mother rattled her bottle of Xanax as she tipped back another pill. My hands forgot to be careful, and my fingernails itched at my kitty’s soft tum-tum. And at that juncture, Gentle Tweeter, in the spacious seats and enclosed interior of the limo, poor Tigerstripe’s distended abdomen burst.
DECEMBER 21, 10:55 A.M. PST
At Last, a Violent Comeuppance
Gentle Tweeter,
The earthly remains of my beloved Tigerstripe were to be interred in a toilet of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in an elegant, low-key ceremony patterned after that of my goldfish, Mr. Wiggles. While our personal staff of Somali maids flung open windows and put flame to scented candles, I carried the death-fragrant, napkin-wrapped remains into the suite’s master bathroom. The mourners included my parents, who stood near the whirlpool soaking tub. My dad impatiently tapped his foot, the toe of his handmade shoe tick-tocking loudly against the tile floor. The funeral cortege consisted of a trailing black cloud of houseflies. We were, the mourners, literally veiled in buzzing black houseflies.
“Flush it down,” my father commanded.
My mom breathed through a perfumed handkerchief and said, “Amen, already.”
I stood over the yawning commode, my spirit shattered, unable to relinquish something I’d loved so deeply. So bereft was I that I prayed Jesus would phone, forgetting that I’d only made him up. Jesus didn’t really exist, and Dr. Angelou wasn’t going to touch this stinky bundle of bones and rotting fur and bring it back to life.
I beseeched, “Shouldn’t we say a prayer?”
“What for?” said my dad. “Maddy, sweetness, prayers are for superstitious idiots and Baptists.”
“For Tigerstripe’s eternal soul!” I pleaded.
“A prayer?” asked my mom.
I pleaded for them to call on Sir Bono or Sir Sting for divine intervention.
“There is no such thing as a soul,” said my dad. Exasperated, he huffed out a short breath scented with Binaca and Klonopin. “Baby girl, we’ve discussed this. Nothing has a soul, and when you die you rot away to create healthy organic compost for subsoil life-forms to reproduce in.”
“Wait,” my mom said. Closing her eyes she began to recite from memory: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste….”
A growing cadre of Somali maids had begun to gather in the space immediately outside the bathroom door.
“Exercise caution in your business affairs,” continued my mom, her Botox-infused brow semifurrowed in concentration. “For the world is full of trickery….”
“There is no God. There is no soul. Nothing survives beyond death,” lectured my father. Shouting now, he asked, “Didn’t those nuns teach you anything at that expensive Catholic school?”
My mother droned on, “Speak your truth quietly and clearly….”
“Flush it, Maddy,” said my dad, Ctrl+Alt+Snapping his fingers between each short imperative sentence. “Flush it. Flush it. Flush it! We have reservations for dinner at eight at Patina!” He shot back his shirt cuff and checked his watch. He waved away the annoying vermin. Meaning: the flies, not the Somali maids who hovered, watching these curious funeral rites.
When my voice came it sounded faint. “Forgive me, my kitty.” I gave the squishy bundle a big hug against my flabby tummy. “I’m sorry I killed you.” My sobs began in earnest. “I’m sorry I murdered you with maternal neglect.” I’d proved to be a worse parent than my own parents. With this terrible admission I was rocking forward and back, racked with hoarse sobs, squeezing the not-fresh final graveyard juices from my beloved charge. Yet still I couldn’t consign my Tigerstripe to a final watery resting place.
At my father’s whispered urging, my mother stepped to my side and cooed, “Maddy, baby girl…” She murmured, “You didn’t kill the cat. Nobody killed him.” She gave me a little pat on the back, leaving her hand to linger on my shoulder, and said, “Mr. Tiger had a genetic condition called feline polycystic kidney disease. It means his kidneys developed cysts, honey. It’s no one’s fault. He filled with cysts until he died.”
I looked up at her, my eyeglasses fogged and streaming with tears, my nose livid and flowing. “But a cat doctor…”
My mother shook her head no. Her mournful eyes, the expressive eyes of every death-row public defender and deathbed nurse she’s ever played. “Baby girl, there is no cure. The kitty was born sick.”
I asked, “But how can you know?” Instantly, I felt ashamed of my infantile, bleating tone, my pathetic words gargled through mucus and misery.
“It was printed on the index card,” my mother explained. “Maddy, do you remember the index card taped to his cage at the animal rescue place?” Arrayed on the bathroom’s marble vanity were an orange-colored prescription bottle of Xanax, a bud vase containing a trembling spray of purple orchids, an assortment of Hermès soaps heaped in a basket. “According to that index card, Mr. Tiger couldn’t live longer than six more weeks.” She reached to pluck the Xanax bottle, twisting off the cap. “Why don’t you and I take a nice pill?” She said, “Your new brother is coming this afternoon. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Drop the cat,” my dad ordered. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped them together, shouting, “Ditch the cat, and let’s move forward, people!”