Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

“Hello,” said Sharon over the telephone. “We have your cat. Yes, yes, yes. We found him by the creek. At St. Junior’s. We’ll bring him right over. What’s your address? Oh God, that’s really close.”

Sharon ran out of the dorm; I ran after her.

“Slow down,” I called after her, but she ignored me. Maybe Sharon wasn’t a good Apache or Catholic, but she was religious when she found the proper mission.

We sprinted through a residential neighborhood, which may or may not have been a good idea for two brown kids, no matter how high our grade-point averages. But it felt good to run fast, and I dreamed about being a superhero. Fifteen minutes later and out of breath, Sharon knocked on the front door of a small house. An old couple opened the door.

“Lester,” shouted the old man and took the cat from Sharon. The old woman hugged the man and the cat. All three cried to one another.

“How’d you find him?” asked the old man, weeping hard now, barely able to talk, but unashamed of his tears. “He’s been gone for a month.”

“I heard him crying,” I said (I lied) and stepped into the doorway. Sharon stood behind me and peered over my shoulder.

“Oh, thank you, bless you,” said the old woman.

“I pulled him out of some blackberry thorns,” I said. “And then I remembered your ad in the newspaper, and I found the paper in the garbage, and I called you, and here I am.”

The old man and woman hugged me, holding the cat between us, all of us celebrating the reunion, while Sharon stood silently by. I think I lied because I wanted to be briefly adored by strangers, to be remembered as a handsome and kind man, a better man, more complete, even saintly. But it was Orwell who wrote that “saints should be always judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

All during this time, Sharon never spoke. I can only guess at her emotions, but I imagine she was shocked and hurt by my disloyalty. Standing in the presence of such obvious commitment between two people and their damn cat, she must have lost faith in me and, more importantly, in herself.

“How can we ever repay you?” asked the old woman.

“Nothing,” I said. “We need nothing.”

“Here, here,” said the old man as he opened his wallet and offered me a twenty.

“No, no,” I said. “I don’t need that. I just wanted to be good, you know?”

He forced the money into my hand; I accepted it.

“You’re a good man,” said the old woman.

I shook my head, took Sharon’s hand, and walked away, leaving those grateful strangers to their beloved pet.

“Why did you do that?” Sharon asked as we walked.

“I needed to,” I said. That was the best answer I could give her. It wasn’t enough.

“You lied to me, you lied to them, and you took their money,” she said. “How could you do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Sharon broke away from me and ran.

I didn’t see her that night as I got ready for graduation, and I didn’t see her the next morning.

“Where’s Sharon?” asked my mother as she adjusted my cap and gown.

“She’s with her parents,” I said, which was a true statement, I suppose, but hardly close to the truth.

I went through the ceremony alone; Sharon went through the ceremony alone; we sat ten chairs apart.

The day after graduation, Sharon was still missing. I didn’t know where she was. When my mother asked me about her absence, I said she was on a spiritual retreat.

“One month of silence,” I said, lying to my mother, to another woman who loved me. “After a big event, like a graduation or birth, the Apaches leave for a month. It’s an Apache thing.”

“I wish I could do that,” she said. “I think everybody should do that. Make it a law. Once a year, everybody has to be silent for a month. We’d all rotate, you know? You have to be quiet during your birth month.”

“It’s a good idea, Mom, I’m sure it would go over well.”

“Sarcasm is a sin, honey.”

After another day of unceremonial silence, I assumed Sharon had left me forever, and I finally confessed my fears to my mother.

“Mom,” I said. “I love Sharon and I destroyed her.”

Was I overreacting to Sharon’s overreaction? I’d told such a small lie, had taken credit and reward for such a small act of heroism. But then I wondered if Sharon had always had her doubts about my character, and perhaps had always considered me an undependable braggart. What if she’d been gathering evidence against me all along, and I’d finally committed the last unpardonable crime?

“You have to go find her,” my mother said.

“I can’t,” I said, and it was true and cowardly.

My mother turned away from me and cried while she fixed dinner. Later that night, while she washed dishes and I dried, my mother told me how much she still missed my father.

“He’s been gone twenty-two years,” she said. “But I can still feel him right here in the room with us. I can still smell him, his hair, his skin.”

My mother didn’t call my father by name because she wanted the dead to stay dead; I wanted to learn magic and open a twenty-four-hour supermarket that sold resurrection and redemption.

The next morning, Sharon came to see me. I was so grateful for her presence that I leaned against the wall to keep from falling down. My mother hugged Sharon until they both cried. Then Sharon asked my mother to give us some privacy. After my mother left, Sharon took my face in her hands.

“You’re a liar,” Sharon said. “I’m going to marry a liar.”

I didn’t want to ask her why she came back. We were so fragile, I worried that one wrong word could completely break us.

For the next twenty-nine years, we lived as wife and husband, as the mother and father of four kids (Sarah, Rachael, Francis, and Joshua) who suddenly grew into adults and became wives and husbands and mothers and fathers. During our long marriage, Sharon and I buried her mother and father and my mother, all of our grandparents, and many of our aunts, uncles, and cousins. I covered high school sports and reviewed movies for the local alternative weekly; an odd pair of beats, I suppose, but I enjoyed the appearance of being odd while living a sedate life. Sharon ran her own coffee shop and wrote lyric odes she never published. We paid our taxes, owned a modest home, and made love an average of three times a week. We didn’t have nearly as much money as our parents, and that could be viewed as our failure, but we felt successful. We weren’t triumphant, by any means, but we lived a good and simple life, and I often wondered if I deserved it.

All during those years, at every house party, group dinner, family gathering, and company picnic, Sharon told the story of the lost cat.

“My husband, the liar,” she always called me. At first, she told the story to hurt me, then she told it out of habit, and then she told it because she’d turned it into a wildly funny and exaggerated adventure: And then he fell in the creek! She loved to make people laugh, and so they laughed at my small sins. I wanted the laughter to absolve me, but I’m not sure if that was its purpose. I never asked to be forgiven, and Sharon never offered her forgiveness. We never talked about the lost cat in private; it was our most public secret.

But there were other secrets, of course. Sharon kept most of hers, and I kept most of mine. Those kept secrets were small and ordinary, having to do with broken diets and hidden pornography, and they were of little consequence, but one evening, a decade into our marriage, Sharon confessed to an extramarital affair.

“I don’t love him,” she said. “It’s over now. I only slept with him three times. To be fair, you can ask me three questions about it, and I’ll answer them as honestly as possible, and then I don’t ever want to talk about it again.”