Darkheart

The Past: Cats & Dogs

If he hadn't brought the cat home, his mother might have stuck around. As it was, she was gone by lunchtime, taking Kevin's younger brother with her. Kevin would forever after ponder what it meant that she'd left him behind but taken Rusell. He understood why she'd left his father and his older brother, but the fact that she'd left him? Well, much of life was a mystery, wasn't it? He'd always thought mysteries were fun--loved that show Unsolved Mysteries, anything with crimes and supernatural hauntings and aliens--but when the mystery happened to him? It wasn't so fun.

He'd driven into Detroit with some friends (or, at least, other teenagers he associated with) to photograph graffiti in train yards and abandoned buildings, to skate on the tracks and in the massive drain pipes. Nowhere they'd gone was reputable, and they'd spent the night in their cars, drinking and smoking weed and making out, before driving back the next day. But in the middle of all of it, when it'd begun to rain somewhere around one o'clock in the morning, Kevin had wandered off on his own. He'd found solace in the soft mist against his skin, enjoyed the cool sensation of it slipping into the front of his hoodie, down onto his collarbone. The quiet of the empty parts of the city at night . . . there was nothing like it. He was both too young and too old to know real fear, had passed through the childhood of monsters and strangers but hadn't yet met the adulthood of monsters and strangers; he was in that perfect glimmering liminality of adolescence, where the world was malleable and he could never die. So he'd ambled through the darkness, tagged a few brick walls and train cars himself, and then, while walking through a huge metal pipe beneath a short underpass, been surprised to hear a soft mewling sound echoing through the water drips and occasional traffic above. The kitten had been damp, fur matted with mud and a bit of blood, though it'd been unclear where the blood had come from. Kevin had picked it up, taken it back, and--against the cautioning of his peers--brought it home.

The moment he'd taken it into the house, he'd bathed it and fed it with a tenderness even he didn't know was in him. It'd turned out to be white, though the mud hadn't at first allowed him to make out that color, and it'd lapped up a bowl of milk and gobbled some leftover chicken so fast he'd hardly turned around before it'd finished.

He'd named it Arthur.

But his father hadn't wanted it, and his mother had. Their initial trivial argument over the kitten had turned into something far larger and deeper, each pulling out buried angers and regrets and long-simmering resentments as ammunition, adding hateful words to a tempestuous tangle, and by the time the woman had put an end to it by driving off with Russell, a cold, empty void had opened around the house.

In the end, the kitten had stayed.

Kevin lay on his bed with it, now; Arthur was asleep on the boy's chest, the kitten's purring a slight but constant vibration against his ribs. Rain had begun to fall again, right around the time Kevin's mother had pulled out of the drive, but it was a harder and more thunderous rain than the mist of the night before. He couldn't even hear his father banging away on the cars in the garage next door. The boy wasn't sure how his father felt about his mother leaving. The woman had left more than once, but she'd always come back. This one . . . it felt more final. And she'd taken Russ.

Staring at the ceiling, Kevin couldn't help but wonder what his mother saw in Russ. The boy was all of eleven, and he was already on a trajectory to turn out like Mike, their oldest brother. Why had she taken him? Kevin would've loved nothing more than to get out of Port Killdeer. He was seventeen, about to graduate that stupid high school, and had no prospects. His grades had never been great, so scholarships were pretty much off the table, but he'd hoped his mother at least would've helped him find a way to get financial aid so he could attend some college or university out of town. His father wouldn't do it, that was for sure. Kevin's dad wanted him to work in the shop, just as he'd allowed Mike to drop out of school and do. But Kevin knew that working with his father meant cementing himself to Port Killdeer for the rest of his life, and he was hellbent on getting out.