Dr. Roessler apologized now. He said Sebastian was a fine cat, he remembered him from other times he’d been here. He said he had done his very best. His face was beaded with perspiration. There were flecks of blood on his gown. He said again that he was sorry, and then excused himself and left the small reception room. His nurse took me aside and asked what I would want to do with the body. She said there was a man who came by to pick up animals for burial, he carried them to Palmetto, he did a very good job. She said that some families preferred to have the animal cremated, but this was very costly. Most families took the body with them, she said, and buried the animal themselves. Most of them used a Styrofoam ice chest. I told her we wanted to take Sebastian with us. She went through the door and was gone just a little while. When she came back, she was carrying a heavy-duty black plastic bag weighted with Sebastian’s body. She told me the bag was waterproof. I carried the bag out to the car and put it on the folded-down back seat. I could remember Sebastian sitting on that seat, alive, the morning I’d driven him halfway to work. “Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing there, huh?” Sebastian blinking.
We were silent for a long while, Joanna and I.
When at last we talked, it was not about Sebastian. Not at first.
My daughter told me she’d weighed herself that morning, and was three pounds overweight. She was getting fat again. She didn’t know why, she’d been watching her diet very carefully. I told her she wasn’t getting fat at all. She was a tall girl, she was still growing...
“Really, darling, you’re not getting fat. I’d tell you if you were.”
“I’m not that tall,” Joanna said. “Crystal is much taller than I am, and she weighs six pounds less than I do.”
“Crystal is skinny.”
“Dad, she has a beautiful figure.”
“She’s skinny.”
“She has breasts, and I don’t.”
“You’ll have breasts soon enough, don’t worry about it.”
“And this rash around my nose, Dad, we went to the dermatologist and he doesn’t know what it is, he just keeps telling me to wash my damn face three times a day. Well, I do wash my face, I wash it four, five times a day, and I’ve still got all this junk around my nose, I look terrible, Dad. If it doesn’t go away soon, can Mom take me to another doctor?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Because it isn’t acne, he admits it isn’t acne.”
“We’ll get rid of it, darling, don’t worry.”
“Dad...”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“He was like a person, you know? Sebastian. He was just like a person.”
We buried him in the back yard.
There was a spot under the poinciana tree, where Sebastian used to lie flat to watch the pelicans swooping in low over the water, his ears twitching, his tail snapping back and forth like a whip. We buried him there. It was twenty-five past six, and beginning to get dark. Susan was not home yet. I found myself getting angry at her for not being here when Joanna found the cat broken and hurt in the gutter, for not being here now when we were burying him.
I asked Joanna if there was anything she wanted to say.
She knelt by the open grave and placed a small orange seashell onto the Styrofoam chest we’d bought on the way home. “I love you, Sebastian,” she said, and that was all. I shoveled back sand and then topsoil, and replaced the rectangle of grass I’d earlier carefully removed. Joanna put her arm around my waist. Silently, we went back into the house together. I poured myself a stiff hooker of scotch over ice, and asked Joanna if she wanted a beer. She nodded. I opened a can and handed it to her. She took a sip and said, “I hate the taste of beer,” but she kept drinking it, anyway.
Susan stormed into the house ten minutes later.
She’d come out of her hairdresser’s to find the right front tire of her Mercedes flat. She’d called our local gas station for help, but it had taken them an hour to get there, and another twenty minutes to put on the spare. Then, on the way home, the causeway bridge got stuck open for another—
“Is that beer you’re drinking, Joanna?”
“Yes, Mom,” Joanna said.
“Did you give her beer to drink?” Susan said, whirling on me.
“Yes, I gave her beer to drink. Susan... the cat’s dead. Sebastian’s dead.”
“What?”
“He got hit by a car, honey.”
“Oh,” Susan said, and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, “oh,” and began weeping, surprising me.
11
The party was being held on the twelfth floor of an oceanfront condominium on Stone Crab. The moment we stepped off the elevator, we were greeted by the sound of music and laughter coming from beyond the open door to the apartment on the left. Inside the apartment, some fifty or more people milled about against an extraordinary backdrop of sky and sea; the entire western wall of the apartment was open to the Gulf of Mexico. Lights on the beach below illuminated an irregular white curving line where the surf broke. The sky above was black, sprinkled with stars, hung with a full moon shimmering in halo. On the wall opposite the windows, running the entire length of the room and broken only by a pair of open arches at either end, was a wall alive with a magnificent collection of paintings.
The guest of honor was a painter himself, an Italian whose show had opened earlier in the evening at a downtown gallery. His host and hostess had been collecting his work for years, and had invited us to the gallery opening as well as to this private party following it. But the invitation to the opening had read 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., and Susan hadn’t come home till a quarter to; there was no way we could possibly have got there on time. I suggested that we skip the party, too, but Susan wisely offered the advice that it would do no good to mope around waiting for Sebastian to come padding around every corner of the house.
As we made our way toward the bar set up just past the distant arch, I heard a woman mention Emily Purchase’s name, heard her telling another woman that her daughter was in the same first-grade class at school. At the bar, two men were talking about the confession Michael Purchase had made. It seemed that while Joanna and I were out burying Sebastian, the State’s Attorney was making a brief television appearance on the six o’clock news, reiterating much of what had already been printed in the afternoon paper. He told the assembled reporters that Michael Allen Purchase, the twenty-year-old son of the man whose wife and daughters had been slain, was being held for first-degree murder on an arrest warrant issued by a circuit judge. Detective Ehrenberg, the police officer conducting the investigation, had obtained a confession from the youth — one of the men at the bar now demanded to know from the other why the State’s Attorney referred to a twenty-year-old man as a youth! — and when the grand jury was called to render a decision on the facts of the case, hopefully by Friday at the latest, the State’s Attorney was certain they would indict for first-degree murder. When asked by one of the reporters whether the murder weapon had yet been found, he replied at once, “The boy threw the knife in the Gulf, from what I understand.”
“Did he say why he killed them?” another reporter asked.