Kitty's Saga Chapter Four: Friendship and Hurt Feelings

As winter pushed along, Sandy found herself beginning to enjoy Kitty's company.

She would not have admitted to becoming attached to the girl—not yet—but she had grown accustomed to the sounds of another person moving through the house. Cupboards opening in the morning. Footsteps in the hallway. The washing machine turning over in the afternoon. Even Kitty's peculiar habit of trying to move silently had become a kind of presence.

Still, Sandy found something about her strange.

Kitty never went anywhere.

Even on her days off, she lingered around the house. Sandy had expected phone calls by now, or friends knocking at the door, or some boy appearing on the porch pretending not to be nervous. Instead, there was nothing.

No visitors.

No telephone calls.

No one seemed to be looking for Kitty at all.

Sandy knew enough not to pry. She could tell the girl came from a less-than-ideal situation. At the same time, she had seen nothing to suggest that Kitty was a criminal, a delinquent, or trouble to anyone. Quite the opposite. Kitty seemed almost pathologically afraid of causing trouble.

Sandy thought about this on the weekend before Valentine's Day as Kitty served her a profoundly bland dinner of baked chicken and mashed potatoes.

"Thank you," Sandy said.

Kitty gave a stiff little nod, doing her best imitation of what she apparently believed a professional butler looked like.

As Kitty bustled around the kitchen, Sandy studied her.

The girl had changed since arriving.

Regular meals had put some color into her face. She was no longer quite so thin or ghostly pale. The permanent exhaustion around her eyes had begun to fade. Even her hair looked healthier now that she had regular access to hot water and shampoo.

A secure place to sleep had done wonders for her.

Sandy suspected the quiet had too.

The regimented, secluded existence of Sandy's house seemed to suit Kitty after what Sandy could only assume had been a lifetime of upheaval. Kitty herself seemed aware of it. She guarded her new routine with the vigilance of someone afraid that one wrong move might cause it to disappear.

Sandy decided Kitty might even be pretty if she stood up straight once in a while.

Kitty collected the dishes and started wiping down the countertops.

"Sit with me for a minute," Sandy said.

Kitty stopped.

There was a flicker of alarm on her face before she obeyed, taking the chair at the opposite end of the table.

"How are you liking it here?"

"It's good."

Kitty hesitated.

"Why? Is something wrong?"

There it was again.

That fear.

Sandy realized Kitty thought she was about to be fired.

"Nothing's wrong. I was only wondering how you're adjusting. New house and everything. I wanted to know if you needed anything."

Kitty released an audible breath.

"Oh. No. Everything's great. I'm all settled in."

She started to rise.

"You know, you can take Valentine's Day off."

Kitty nearly snorted.

Valentine's Day had never presented much competition for her time.

The only Valentine's date Kitty had ever been offered occurred while she was living in the group home. A boy named Kurt, who insisted everyone call him Wiz Man G, invited her to the movie theater.

The invitation initially surprised her.

Then Kurt explained the date.

His plan was to use the darkness of the theater to steal wallets from women's purses.

Kitty declined.

Kurt responded by calling her "Bitch Face" for the remainder of their acquaintance.

Another girl, for reasons Kitty never understood, accepted the invitation. The evening ended when Kurt attempted to rob the wife of an off-duty firefighter and received a punch in the face for his trouble. He was arrested and promptly implicated his date in exchange for leniency.

She served two months.

So Kitty did not feel particularly deprived by the prospect of spending Valentine's Day at home.

"I don't really plan on dating anytime soon," she told Sandy. "I'm mostly waiting for my birthday so I can officially drop out of school."

Sandy stared at her.

Kitty immediately realized she had made a terrible mistake.

"What?"

Kitty's shoulders tightened.

"You can't do that."

Sandy looked genuinely horrified.

"I thought you were a high school graduate. This is awful."

Kitty's stomach dropped.

She should not have said anything.

This was exactly why she kept personal information to herself. People asked questions, and questions led to explanations, and explanations gave people reasons to decide she was more trouble than she was worth.

"Why did you stop going to school?"

There was something in Sandy's voice Kitty had not expected.

It did not sound like an employer interrogating an employee.

It sounded almost parental.

Kitty had never been particularly good at evasive explanations.

"I was never much of a student. When I found out I could drop out when I turned eighteen, I figured that's what I'd do."

Sandy shook her head.

"No."

Kitty blinked.

"No?"

"You're not dropping out."

Kitty stared at her.

"I couldn't live with the guilt. You're getting your GED, and that's final."

Kitty opened her mouth.

Sandy continued before she could speak.

"I had a friend whose granddaughter became a mother as a teenager. She finished school through one of those correspondence programs. Mail-away lessons. They send you the work, you send it back. We'll do the same thing for you."

"I don't—"

"I'll make arrangements in the morning."

And with that, Sandy considered the matter settled.

She pushed herself up from the table and headed toward her bedroom, leaving Kitty sitting there with her mouth half open.

Kitty watched her disappear down the hall.

Then she exhaled.

At least she didn't ask about my parents.

She returned to the dishes.

The next morning, Sandy undertook the most interesting—and welcome—task she had faced in quite some time.

She called Lucy Anderson.

There was, Sandy had to admit, a small element of humble bragging involved.

Eight years earlier, Lucy had briefly become the talk of the town when her granddaughter returned from vacation pregnant. The girl had finished school at home while planning to give the baby up for adoption after the birth.

The pregnancy had been the worst-kept secret in town.

Sandy remembered all of it.

More importantly, she remembered the correspondence course.

The telephone conversation began with the usual pleasantries. Questions about health. Questions about family. A little gossip carefully disguised as concern.

Eventually, Sandy arrived at the reason for her call.

She explained that she had a young woman staying with her who needed to finish her education.

Lucy, delighted to possess useful information, told her everything she remembered.

Sandy wrote it down.

Addresses.

Names.

Forms.

Who to contact.

What to request.

When the call ended, Sandy remained seated beside the telephone for a moment, looking at the notes in her hand.

She felt different.

It had been a long time since anyone had needed something from her that she could actually provide.

Since her fall, Sandy's life had increasingly become a catalog of things she could no longer do. She could not stand too long. She could not keep up with the house. She could not tend the garden properly. She could not even rely on herself to get through an ordinary day without calculating when she might need to sit down.

Without realizing it, she had begun thinking of her remaining years as little more than a waiting room.

She was waiting for another fall.

Waiting for another diagnosis.

Waiting for the "big one" to finally finish her off.

But that morning, Sandy was not waiting.

She had something to do.

Someone needed her.

It was such a simple revelation that she almost laughed at herself for having forgotten it.

There was still life in her.

Not merely breath.

Life.

Purpose.

Sandy gathered the necessary papers and sent off the letters with more determination in her step than she had possessed the morning before.

Kitty, meanwhile, spent most of the day trying to stay out of Sandy's way.

She had somehow convinced herself that Sandy must secretly be annoyed with her for dropping out of school, despite all available evidence suggesting precisely the opposite.

So Kitty announced that she needed to make one final trip to her old apartment.

"I should tell my parents I'm not dropping out anymore," she said.

It was a useful lie.

Sandy gave her the bus pass.

Fortunately, no one ever bothered checking the name on it.

The trip took Kitty back through increasingly familiar streets until she reached the apartment building she had once called home.

She climbed the stairs.

Before she even reached the old apartment, she could hear a television blasting from behind the door.

For one hopeful second, Kitty wondered if Ben was inside.

She knocked.

The door opened.

A scruffy middle-aged man stood there wearing a stained white T-shirt and sweatpants.

"What?"

Kitty recoiled slightly.

He smelled as though someone had poured a keg of beer over him.

"Um...has somebody named Pam been by here?"

The man frowned.

Then he turned away, leaving the door hanging open.

"Hold on."

Kitty remained on the threshold.

A moment later, he returned holding an envelope in one greasy hand.

"This Pam?"

He pointed at the return address.

Kitty looked down.

The letter was addressed to her.

The return address was a state penitentiary.

Her stomach tightened.

"Yes."

The man handed it over.

Kitty thanked him and hurried away.

She did not open the envelope until she was safely aboard the bus.

The postmark was two weeks old.

Kitty tore it open.

Pam had been charged as a dealer.

According to the letter, police had caught her carrying enough heroin to trigger a trafficking charge under a recently changed law. Pam had apparently taken the food-stamp money, the rent money, and what she could get from charity-donated Christmas gifts and converted nearly all of it into what she described as the high of a lifetime.

She never got the chance.

The same CVS employee who had caught her shoplifting before recognized her and helped bring the police down on her again.

Pam would remain in jail until her trial in the fall.

And that was not the worst of it.

On the night of her arrest, Pam had bitten an officer.

She explained it in the letter as though the circumstances made it perfectly reasonable. She knew withdrawal was coming. She was terrified she would go into convulsions. She believed the officer was dragging his feet about getting her medical attention, and in her panic and fury, she attacked him.

Kitty read that paragraph twice.

Then she lowered the letter.

Pam wrote about the drugs.

She wrote about the officer.

She wrote about the trial.

She did not write about all the arrests that had come before.

Kitty knew enough to understand those would matter too.

The bus carried her farther from the apartment.

Kitty looked through the window.

Buildings slipped past. Then intersections. Then neighborhoods.

The letter remained open in her lap.

She should have been frightened for Pam.

Perhaps she was.

She should have been devastated.

Perhaps some part of her was that too.

Pam had been there for nearly as long as Kitty could remember. Pam had been chaos and anger and hunger and shouting and slammed doors. She had also been familiar. In Kitty's life, those things had become so tangled together that she sometimes had trouble distinguishing familiarity from love.

For years, Pam had disappeared and returned.

Jail.

Hospitals.

Benders.

Boyfriends.

Weeks when nobody knew where she was.

But she always came back.

Kitty looked down at the penitentiary address again.

Trial in the fall.

Trafficking charges.

Assaulting an officer.

Her previous arrests.

For the first time, Kitty understood that this disappearance was different.

Outside the window, the city continued passing by, carrying Kitty toward Sandy's quiet house, toward her little bedroom, toward the correspondence course she had never asked for and a future she had barely begun to imagine.

Behind her was an apartment that already belonged to someone else.

There was nothing there to return to.

Kitty folded Pam's letter along its original creases and held it tightly between her fingers.

One thought remained with her for the rest of the ride.

It was frightening.

It was sad.

And buried beneath both of those things was a feeling Kitty was not yet willing to name.

Pam isn't coming back.