Today, I am honest. And it’s good. I write about the day my girlfriend begged me to go cliff jumping. She knew a place where the locals did it. By sunset, we’d jump off a waterfall, together, and it would reinvigorate us, she said. I was hesitant, which is a nice way of saying I was afraid. On the way, we drank American beer in the back of a pick-up truck, me feeling queasy the whole time. In the end, my girlfriend jumped off the waterfall by herself while I stood at the bottom, holding our empty bottles, worrying about what I’d say to her parents if she drowned. It’s not my proudest moment, but it feels like progress to write it down. Maybe the most progress I’ve made in the last year.
I am thinking about my next essay when Jenny comes into the office, tears forming at the corners of her eyes.
“Mark, I can’t find Boomer,” she says. “I think he must have gotten out.”
“Okay,” I say, rising slowly from my chair like I don’t think there’s any cause in the world for concern about a missing cat. “Let’s go have a look.”
Together, we visit each of Boomer’s favorite spots in the house, even though I’m certain Jenny has done this at least twice by herself already. He’s not in his cat bed. He’s not in the bedroom closet. He’s not pressed up against the sliding glass door where the sunlight gathers this time of the day. Behind the couch, there is a visible cluster of fur, but no Boomer.
“We never vacuum back here,” I say.
“When do we ever look behind the couch except when we’re looking for a cat?” Jenny asks.
Travis follows us from room to room, meowing. He’d do this no matter what we were searching for, but in the absence of one cat, the presence of the other seems somehow significant. Like he knows something about it.
“I think you’re right,” I say to Jenny. “I think he got out.”
In the yard, we call Boomer’s name and rustle the low bushes that fringe our property. Jenny is crying a little again.
“Don’t think like that,” I say. “Hey, Jenny, he’s around somewhere, okay?”
Jenny shakes her head. “He doesn’t even have his claws anymore to protect himself.”
There are many things that might happen to a cat in this neighborhood. Animal control could have picked him up. He could have wandered out to the highway and been hit by a car. The Rolson boy could be torturing him in the basement of his father’s house while daddy cooks up a batch of drugs in the bathtub. Fuck, we really should have called someone a long time ago.
“He probably just got himself stuck under the Johnsons’ porch,” I say.
I point to the long driveway directly across the street from ours. It belongs to another set of neighbors we nod politely to in passing and make small talk with only if absolutely unavoidable. We walk in the direction I’ve just pointed.
“I don’t think I’ll ever feel like it’s safe for the cats to be outside again,” Jenny says.
“It’s a good thing we don’t have little kids running around to worry about,” I say, and then immediately wish I could take it back. I look into my wife’s eyes. I can see her anxiety turn to anger, her anger to pity, her pity to resignation, and her resignation to regret, all right in front of me in the middle of Derring Street while I call for our stupid cat.
“Shit,” I say. “That’s not what I mean.”
“No, Mark. That is what you mean. That is exactly what you god-damn mean.”
She is one hundred percent correct and I’m at a loss for how to respond.
“I’m going to check the house one more time,” Jenny says, coolly, turning her back to me and walking across the street. I watch her skinny shoulders, the sun-kissed pink of her neck peeking out from behind her ponytail. I should go after her, hug her from behind and apologize not just for being insensitive, but for not being able to give her what she wants, for not being as strong as she is.
Instead I walk up to the Johnson family’s house and knock on the door. No one is home so I duck down and look under their front porch, calling Boomer’s name and whistling even though neither of the cats respond when I do this at home.
There is nothing beneath the porch except a coiled garden hose. I stand and cross the Johnsons’ yard. At their property line, I whistle for the cat again. The family next door to the Johnsons are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They keep their three children from school, educating them at home instead. I don’t know if these two facts are related. When I knock on the door, it’s one of the kids who answers. I feel like a child myself, explaining to an adolescent girl that I’ve lost my cat.
“He’s gray except he’s got white markings on his face and his tummy,” I say. “Have you seen him at all?”
The girl shakes her head and offers a small, “I’m sorry.” I wonder what she thinks of the things that happen outside her window as she’s trying to study each day. The comings and goings of secular life, the Rolson boy, just about her age, tearing around on his bike.
Back on our own side of the street, Darcy Wenger says she hasn’t seen Boomer either.
“You don’t think maybe...”
“I’m sure he just wandered away,” I say, cutting her off.
After that, I don’t even consider whether to go to the next house down or not. I just do. I am not really myself in this moment. Or, rather, I am some approximation of myself. I am the diligent husband helping his wife find her beloved cat. I am knocking on my neighbors’ doors, none of whom I seek to avoid, because I am a grown man and why should I be afraid of the people with whom I share a street? This is the man who walks to Chet Rolson’s door and rings the bell and waits.
This is the man who, when there is no answer, knocks hard. Who calls, “Anyone home?” in a friendly yet assertive voice. Who kicks three times at the base of the door to be certain he’s heard.
When still there is no answer, it is someone else entirely who twists the knob and pushes the door open.
Inside the Rolson Meth Lab, the front door opens to a shallow entryway and then the living room where Rolson’s got reddish shag carpet and three couches that don’t match. There’s a TV, a flimsy coffee table and a bookshelf filled with a variety of items that aren’t books. Plastic bags, matchbox cars, a socket wrench, an empty pastry box.
There are people in the room, too. A man and a woman I’ve never seen before lie head to toe on one of the couches, their arms wrapped around one another’s legs, their eyes closed. Chet sits in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, his head down, chin to his chest.
Whatever they’re on, it isn’t meth. Or, if it is meth, then they’re clearly on the come-down. Or the come-up. I actually don’t know much about meth.
I stand in the doorway, just staring like an idiot until Chet notices me.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I want to know what happened to the tiger,” I say.
“What tiger?”
“The tiger you were keeping in a cage in your backyard for which you insisted you had a permit. The tiger which is now gone.” I’m aware that there’s a danger in getting snippy with drug users. I’m also aware that I sound like a dick. But I can’t help myself. As it turns out, the version of me who has entered Rolson’s house has just as little control over himself and the things he says as every other version of me.
“Well, sounds