Page 43 of Gone Tonight
She caught Catherine’s attention, too. I watched as Catherine turned her head and studied the mother.
“Well, hello there!” The woman gave Catherine a toothy grin. “Do you like to swing, princess?”
Catherine didn’t smile back.
“Look at you, so small and so serious!” The mom began talking in a voice meant to be funny. Catherine wasn’t having any of it.
The woman hadn’t paid attention to me before, but now I could see her taking me in. I had an old cloth tote bag with a cinnamon raisin bagel wrapped in a paper towel for me and Catherine to share, a spare diaper, and a water bottle to refill at the playground’s fountain. It wasn’t just my age that separated me from the group of moms with their stackable Tupperware containers of blueberries and rice puffs and their organic apple juice boxes.
I tried to crack a joke. I guess I was pretty lonely, and as I’ve mentioned, Catherine wasn’t the best conversationalist.
“Maybe she can be Wednesday for Halloween. You know, that little girl fromThe Addams Familywho never smiles?”
The mom looked shocked. She even stopped swinging her son for a minute, and his smile slipped away, too. Like we were contagious.
The mother’s cheer returned quickly, but it seemed a bit forced now.
“Is she your little sister?”
I’d gotten that question before. Most people assumed Catherine and I were siblings, or I was her babysitter. “No, she’s my daughter.”
“Oh! I’m sorry! You’re just… it’s that you’re so…”
Her little boy’s grunts turned into the start of a wail. He wanted to be pushed again. His mom’s attention snapped back. “Ooh, I’m so sorry, my little man! Mommy’s here! Want to swing up to the sky and grab a cloud?”
The woman didn’t talk to us anymore, but I noticed her glancing at Catherine a few more times. Catherine wasn’t doing anything unusual. She was just swaying back and forth and looking around. But to this mom, it seemed as if Catherine was a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out.
After a few minutes, I took Catherine out of the swing, and we walked to the bus stop to make our way back to the three-hundred-square-foot room I’d sublet from another single mom who had a two-bedroom apartment. The trip took thirty minutes each way, but the playgrounds around this part of the city were much nicer than the one by me. The only time we’d ever gone to that one, I’d found a used condom next to the slide and broken glass from bottles of booze in the grass.
I tried not to think too much about that other mom’s reaction to Catherine, but I guess it stayed lodged somewhere in the back of my mind. When we got back home, I washed Catherine in the kitchen sink because we didn’t have a tub. Even when she splashed her hands in the soap bubbles, her expression didn’t change. She didn’t coo or laugh. She seemed as detached as a scientist.
I tried using the high-pitched voice of the mom at the park: “Ooh, bubbles! Splashy-splash!”
Catherine looked at me like I was a fool, and I guess she wasn’t wrong.
I went back to talking like a normal person, and in time Catherine found more words to communicate with me. When she was three, she had a pretty advanced vocabulary, so I guess starting to talk late didn’t hurt her one bit.
I wasn’t alarmed that Catherine didn’t exhibit a wide range of emotions. Truthfully, I’d be even more exhausted if I had to take careof a toddler whose moods ticked like a metronome between angry and joyful and sulky. I liked my quiet daughter exactly as she was.
There was just this one thing.
Shortly after she turned five, we were waiting for the bus to go buy groceries—at times I felt like I spent half my life waiting for or riding buses—and something on the sidewalk behind the glass bus shelter caught her eye. I couldn’t exactly see what Catherine was doing, but it looked like she was poking at the ground with a stick. I was distracted and tired. I was working as a telemarketer from home thirty hours a week because it was one of the few jobs I could do that didn’t require child care, and I also took whatever babysitting gigs I could get from other parents on my block. Most of them couldn’t afford much, and sometimes they couldn’t pay me at all, but they always managed to give me a little something, even if it was just a hot meal or hand-me-down clothing and supplies.
By the time I finished rustling in my wallet for my bus pass and walked around behind the shelter to check on Catherine, she was squatting down, staring at something intently.
It was a dead squirrel.
I instinctively recoiled. The squirrel must’ve been hit by a car and flung through the air before landing in this spot. Its stomach was partially torn open, probably from crows feasting on it. You could see a bit of its pink insides.
Most little kids would’ve been grossed out or burst into tears—the squirrel still had a fuzzy tail and brown fur and was recognizable as a formerly cute animal—but not Catherine.
She used the stick to gently tap on its limp little paw.
“What are you doing?”
She gazed up at me, then resumed exploring the animal carcass with her stick.
“Stop it!” I almost screamed the command.
