Jack Ketchum - I'm Not Sam

“Why didn’t you get me help, Patrick?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted…”

“ You just wanted. You selfish bastard!”

The microwave timer goes off and to me its routine everyday beep is suddenly as huge as a siren screaming, it angers me by its very normality, when absolutely nothing is normal anymore, and before I know it I’m standing in front of him pounding at his chest and swinging for his face so that he has to fend me off like a boxer and I’m screaming at him, you bully! you baby-fucker! you repulsive son of a bitch! and I realize my claws are out too, I’m going for his face while he’s yelling no no no no! and then suddenly I hear this other sound behind me riding high and stunning over all the sounds we’re making, shutting them down as abruptly as you turn off water from a tap.

It’s Zoey in the doorway, and her yowling is that familiar yowl we’ve heard so many times before, but there’s more to it now, it’s more complex, a kind of mournful savage screech, as though heartbreak and torment were one and the same, and as I turn to her I see why. She’s got her toy in front of her as always, her tiny counterpart, her tuxedo, but she’s tearing at it now, pulling it apart with claws and teeth and glaring at us as though daring us to stop her.

A cat can be a terror eye to eye when it seems as though she’s lost control as Zoey is now and a chill rockets up through my spine and I know my feet are immobile as solid stone, that I couldn’t budge them for a billion dollars.

But Patrick can move his.

“ ZOEY!” he shouts and claps his hands. At the same time he moves on her, stomping hard, each footfall shaking the floorboards, and then for a moment there’s a standoff, Zoey’s eyes burning at him, glittering, and Patrick advancing until she suddenly drops the toy and turns and silently runs away.

Patrick stoops and picks it up. He cups it in his hand.

“She’s had this for how many years, now?” he says.

His voice is quiet and very sad.

“We scared her,” I tell him. “We never shout. We drove her mad.”

He nods. The microwave beeps again.

This time it’s only a beep, just an ordinary beep from an ordinary machine.

“Patrick? Give it to me.”

He places it in my hand. I study it for a moment. I’m studying it but I’m also far away, months and maybe years away. For his part Patrick seems to know that. He’s silent.

“I can fix this,” I tell him. “I can fix this, Patrick.”

I can.

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