Софи Келли - Final Catcall

“I’m happy to get a chance to see her,” I said. “She’s been so busy.”

“I’m just glad Wild and Wonderful is going dark for the next ten days so she could come. The timing couldn’t be better.” He shrugged. “Otherwise New Horizons would have had to be canceled. You probably know some people think the festival is jinxed?”

“I heard.”

He sent me a sideways glance. “He tried to text me, you know.”

“Hugh?”

Ben nodded. “Before he died. It was around six thirty and we were still rehearsing, so I didn’t have my phone with me.”

My stomach did a little flip-flop. “What did the text say?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t go through and the police wouldn’t tell me.” He exhaled loudly. “He didn’t deserve this.”

“What was Hugh like as a director?” I asked, mostly to change the subject.

Ben gave a snort of laughter. “Hughie could be a royal pain in the ass. He was meticulous, bordering on obsessive. He had this way of breaking down actors so they could get inside the characters. It was ugly, but it seemed to work for him.”

My mother was nothing like that. She nudged and coaxed and pushed her actors, sometimes gently, sometimes loudly. She didn’t believe in breaking anyone down.

Ben stopped beside his silver SUV. “I know that’s not Thea’s style,” he said.

“Dad says her style is ‘hovering mother.’ She stands over you until she gets what she wants.” I laughed. “That’s pretty much how she got me through calculus in high school.”

“That’s her strength, you know,” Ben said.

“Hovering?”

“Making the actors feel like she believes in them.”

I nodded without saying anything. It was also my mom’s strength as a mother. Growing up, my life had been far from conventional and sometimes I’d felt like I was the most responsible person in the house—probably because a lot of the time I was—but I’d never once doubted my mother’s faith in me. She really did believe that Sara and Ethan and I could do anything. I remembered all those weeks that I struggled with calculus. Her certainty that I would eventually master it had been unshakable. Every night she told me, “Every day, in every way, you’re getting better and better.”

It had annoyed the heck out of me then. Now all I could think was that it really was going to be good to see her on Tuesday.

I saw Ben sneak a look at his watch. “Are the boxes in the back?” I asked.

“They are.” He pulled a set of keys out of his jeans pocket and popped the hatch. He grabbed one of the cardboard cartons and I got the other.

I dipped my head in the direction of the truck, parked half a dozen spaces away. I could see Owen watching out the driver’s-side window. “That’s my truck,” I said.

“And I assume that’s your cat,” Ben said as we crossed the pavement.

I smiled. “That’s Owen.”

My keys were in my sweater pocket. I set the box on the hood of the truck and fished them out.

Owen stayed where he was, watching with curiosity as I set one carton on the floor and the other on the seat.

“Is it okay to pet him?” Ben asked, leaning around the door frame to look at the cat.

“Only if you want to pet the Tasmanian devil,” I said. “Owen was feral. He doesn’t like being touched by pretty much anyone else but me.”

“Okay.” He straightened up. “How did you end up with a feral cat?”

“Two feral cats, actually. Would you believe they followed me home?”

He laughed. “I would. You’re a lot like your mother, although she was always rescuing two-legged strays.” He gestured at the cartons. “Thanks for going through those boxes for me.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ll sort everything and bring it back tomorrow.”

Have a good evening, Kathleen.”

“You too,” I said.

When we got home I put both boxes on the kitchen table. Owen immediately jumped up onto one of the chairs. He slid one gray paw under the flap of the closest carton, trying to get the top open.

“You’re wasting your time,” I said over my shoulder.

“Merow,” he said. I knew that meant he wanted me to come and open the boxes for him. Owen loved boxes, mostly because he was incredibly nosy.

I went over to the table, picked him up and set him on the floor. He made a huffy noise and glared at me.

“I’m going to make the brownies first,” I told him. “Then you can see what’s inside these boxes.” We had a brief staring contest and then he decided to see what was happening in the living room.

I waited until the brownies were cooling on a wire rack to start on the boxes. I pulled the first one closer and Owen immediately appeared in the doorway. “C’mon,” I said.

He trotted over, jumped up on the chair next to me and gave me an expectant look.

“You can look, but keep your paws off the papers,” I warned. That got me a wide-eyed who-me? look of innocence.

I opened the flaps of the first box with Owen at my elbow craning his neck for a look inside. The heavy smell of smoke, like an ashtray full of wet cigarette butts, had settled inside the carton. Owen made a face and shook his gray head.

I pulled out a handful of papers and started going through them. “Hugh has—had—very small, angular handwriting,” Ben had told me. Anything that looked like it might have been written by the dead director I put in one pile so I could take a better look at it later; everything else I tried to sort by general category. Owen watched, sniffing at everything and poking the odd pile with one paw.

The stack of pages in Hugh’s scratchy script began piling up at my elbow. How could one man generate so much paper? I couldn’t believe that he’d kept all his notes and thoughts on paper. A laptop or a tablet would have been a lot more efficient.

I should have realized that Owen would get bored pretty quickly. He started sniffing the second box. Then he put one paw on the table and the other on the top edge of the carton. The small difference in weight was enough to shift the box’s center of gravity. It toppled sideways off the table as the cat jumped back, almost falling off the chair.

The box landed on its side, the contents spreading out across the floor like a fan.

“Owen!” I said sharply. He ducked his furry head as I moved around the table to pick up the scattered papers. One page had floated over by the back door. Owen jumped down and poked his head in the upended carton.

“Get out of there!” I snapped, bending down to grab the stray piece of paper.

He jumped at the sound of my voice and I heard his head bump the top of the box. Then he backed out, sliding a piece of paper onto the floor with his right paw. He shook his head, looked at me, and meowed loudly.

I knelt on the floor next to him. “I think you’re okay,” I said. “Let me see.” He bent his head and I felt the top of it. He was fine. He didn’t even have a bump. It was just a cardboard box that he’d made contact with, and a saggy one at that. I leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “You’ll live,” I said.

He licked my chin, then pawed at the piece of paper he’d pulled out of the overturned carton.

“What is that?” I asked, putting my hands on the floor and leaning in for a closer look.

A newspaper clipping was stuck to the top of a page of Hugh’s cramped writing. The clipping, from a New York paper dated ten days before, was a brief article about casting for an upcoming off-Broadway play. But it wasn’t the clipping itself that held my attention. It was the words written across it with thick black marker in large, square letters: DROP DEAD. I got that roller-coaster-racing-around-a-curve feeling in my stomach as I realized that the boxy printing looked familiar. I was pretty sure it was Hannah’s.