Ed McBain - Goldilocks

“The cat’s out,” Susan said.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

But Sebastian only leaped up onto the little ledge inside the rear window, and sprawled there to watch the scenery going by. Never made a sound, didn’t scramble all over the place like most lunatic cats do in a moving automobile. Just sat there with those big green eyes taking in everything. Automobiles never frightened him. One morning — this was after we’d been living in Calusa for almost a year — I got into the Ghia and had driven halfway to the office when I heard a sound behind me. I turned to look, and there was Sebastian sitting on the back seat. I grinned and said, “Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing there, huh?” He blinked. Joanna played with him as if he were a puppy. Hide-and-seek, games with string or yarn, races across the lawn. One time she came into the bedroom, beaming, to describe a game she and Sebastian had been playing. “We had the most fun,” she said. “I was chasing him around the sofa, and he was laughing and laughing.” She really did believe he was laughing. I guess I believed it too. For some reason, perhaps because we’d got him close to St. Patrick’s Day, we all thought of Sebastian as Irish. I’d sometimes talk to him in a thick Irish brogue, and he’d roll over on his back to reveal the whitest, softest, furriest belly, and I’d tickle him — and yes, he was laughing, I’m sure he was laughing. I loved that cat with all my heart.

The veterinary hospital was set on a street with three used-car lots and a store selling model airplanes. I parked the Ghia alongside a Chevy station wagon I recognized as Mrs. Tannenbaum’s, and then began walking across the parking lot toward the front door. From the kennel behind the red brick building, I heard a chorus of barks and yelps. My immediate reaction was to wonder what all that canine clamor might be doing to Sebastian’s nerves. And then I realized he was no doubt still unconscious, and my step slowed as I came closer to the door. I did not want to open that door. I was afraid that once I stepped inside, someone would tell me Sebastian was dead.

There was a desk immediately facing the entrance door. A nurse in a starched white uniform sat behind it; she looked up as I came into the room. Joanna and Mrs. Tannenbaum were sitting on a bench against the wall on the left. A framed painting of a cocker spaniel was on the wall above their heads. I went immediately to my daughter, and sat beside her, and put my arm around her.

“How is he?” I asked.

“They’re still working on him.”

We were whispering.

I leaned over and said, “Mrs. Tannenbaum, I can’t thank you enough.”

“I’m glad I could help,” she said. Her first name was Gertrude. I’d never called her that. She was seventy-two years old, but she looked sixty, and knew more about boats than any man I’d ever met. Her husband had died ten years back, leaving her a twin-dieseled Matthews Mystic she did not know how to operate. She enrolled promptly in the Auxiliary Coast Guard’s boating safety course, and a year later took that boat from Calusa past Charlotte Harbor, into the Caloosahatchee River and then into Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie Canal, across the state to Stuart and Lake Worth, where she’d jumped off across the Gulf Stream for Bimini. She had lavender hair and blue eyes and she was tiny and wiry, but when she wrestled that forty-six-footer into a dock you’d think she was on the bridge of an aircraft carrier.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“I got home from school about three-thirty,” Joanna said, “and I looked for Sebastian, but he wasn’t anywhere around. I was going to the mailbox to see if there was anything for me, and I just happened to look across the street — do you know where that big gold tree is on Dr. Latty’s lawn? Right there, near the curb. Sebastian was... he was just lying there in the gutter. I thought at first... I don’t know what I thought. That he was... playing a game with me, I guess. And then I saw the blood... oh God, Dad. I didn’t know what to do. I went over to him, I said, ‘Sebastian? What... what’s the matter, baby?’ And his eyes... he looked up the way he sometimes does when he’s napping, you know, and he still has that drowsy look on his face... only... oh Dad, he looked so... so twisted and broken, I didn’t... I just didn’t know what to do to help him. So I came back in the house and called your office but they told me you were out on a boat — what were you doing on a boat, Dad?”

“Talking to Michael’s girlfriend,” I said, which was true enough. But by three-thirty, I had left the boat and was in bed with Aggie. I thought again of Jamie’s alibi for last night. Would his wife and children have been slain if he’d gone directly home at eleven, rather than to the beach cottage he shared with the surgeon’s wife? And similarly, would I have been able to help Sebastian if I’d been at my office when Joanna called?

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t know where Mom was, and I couldn’t get in touch with you, so I just went in the bedroom and hit the panic button. I figured that’d bring everybody running. Mr. Soames from next door came over, and then Mrs. Tannenbaum—”

“I heard the siren, I thought at first it was some crazies come to rob your house in broad daylight. It could happen, believe me.”

“She drove the wagon to where Sebastian was against the curb—”

“We picked him up very careful. We made a stretcher from a board I had in the garage. We lifted him only a little, enough to get him on the board.”

“Then we came right here. I knew where it was from when he had his shots last time.”

“What did Dr. Roessler say?”

“Daddy, he doesn’t think Sebastian’s going to live.”

“He said that?”

“Yes, Dad.”

There seemed nothing more to say. I told Mrs. Tannenbaum I was sure she wanted to get home, and I thanked her again, and she asked me to please call her as soon as we got back. We sat alone on the bench then, my daughter and I. I held her hand. Across the room, the nurse was busily inserting what I supposed to be bills into envelopes. To her right was a closed door. To the left of that was an aquarium with tropical fish in it. Air bubbles tirelessly climbed the inside of the tank.

The last time I’d been inside a hospital was two years ago, when Susan’s mother died. She was fifty-six years old, and had never smoked a cigarette in her lifetime; but both her lungs were riddled with cancer. They’d performed the biopsy, and then closed her up, and told us there was nothing they could do for her. It was Susan’s uncle who made the decision not to tell her she was dying. I’d disliked him before then, but that was when I began hating him. She was, you see, a marvelous woman who could have accepted the news, who would in fact have welcomed the opportunity to die with at least some measure of dignity. Instead... ah, Jesus.

I remembered going to the hospital one afternoon, I went alone, I don’t remember where Susan was. I think she simply had to get away from the vigil for just a little bit, it was taking so much out of her. I went there, and my mother-in-law was propped against the pillows, her head turned to one side, where sunlight was coming through the slatted Venetian blinds. She had Susan’s features and coloring exactly, the same dark eyes and chestnut hair, the full pouting mouth showing age wrinkles around its edges now, the good jaw and neck, the skin sagging somewhat — she’d been a beauty in her day, and she looked beautiful still though ravaged with disease, and rapidly dying. She was weeping when I came into the room. I sat beside the bed. I said, “Mom, what’s the matter? What is it?”

She took my hand between both hers. Tears were streaming down her face. She said, “Matthew, please tell them I’m trying.”