Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

She was not able to drive past a school yard without breaking down, and she could not prevent herself from cruising school yards, from going by that comic book shop. The boy had never been to a Hooters, but he had known that men liked Hooters, and whenever Lorraine used to drive past, he had enjoyed chanting Hooters, Hooters, and therefore she no longer could turn right on Lindell. She could not look across a grass field without thinking of trying to get him to play outside, and she could not look upon a skyscraper because it was not grass. The news broadcasted reports about what appeared to be the remains of a human hand being found in the Mojave Desert. Court TV had daily coverage of a drifter on trial (he was accused of taking a nine-year-old girl from a Stateline casino's child care center, then raping her in a bathroom stall). Lorraine could not look away. Even when exhaustion finally took her, she had complicated nightmares, and upon waking could not remember a moment of them. Instead she harangued her son in extended mental monologues, remaining angry at him for that last comment in the car that afternoon, for disappearing, for causing this ache, this hole inside of her. Never a barrel of laughs in the best of times, Lorraine became humorless, grim, her eyes growing haunted, even as she continued to hoard images that reminded her of reminders of her son, filling her purse with snapshots, and copies of the police report, and three randomly selected action figures from his shelf, her world shrinking by the day, reaching a point where any news that suggested the world did not revolve around Newell's absence repulsed Lorraine, and any object that could not facilitate his return was useless to her. Whether pushing a cart in the market or locked in her own bathroom, Lorraine would start bawling — inconsolable, gut-wrenching heaves. For a time she became militant about yoga, and grimly chanted the ninety-nine names of a god she alternately did not believe in and despised, praying to this god nonetheless.

Interest on Newell's college fund accrued unabated.

The days started getting dark earlier; and although it was still unusual to see people wearing light sweaters or jackets, the air had cooled noticeably, with the first carved pumpkins appearing in windows. The boy was just old enough to disdain trick-or-treating, but still was young enough to covet bags of candy. Lorraine remembered him in costume as a pirate. As the action hero from some movie whose plot she had pretended to follow. On something more than a whim, but certainly less than a plan, she found herself near the main branch of the public library. She could have visited a bookstore and asked for help. She could have looked online. She'd brought her son to this library for story time and after-school programs; went upstairs with him and watched puppet shows when he was just learning how to walk. Lorraine had checked out books from this library that had helped Newell learn to read and she had dropped him off and gotten all her shopping done and then come back to pick him up and found him underneath the stairwell, pretending to be a bank robber with one or two other children, hiding from patrons as if the adults were policemen, using their fingers to point and shoot as the supposed cops marched up to the periodicals. Entering the large open arboretum that marked the building's entrance, it occurred to Lorraine that she had not been inside a library without Newell for the entirety of her adult life. She took the elevator to the main floor. Senior citizens sat at tables, reading newspapers and magazines; middle-aged women listlessly pushed carts. Books about missing children. Memoirs on how person X got through tragedy Y. Lorraine eschewed the computer system and waited at the information counter behind a stooped old man, trying to be patient as he asked for help finding a book whose title and author he could not recall. She stared at the flyers on a nearby bulletin board. Tutoring Services Offered. Senior Citizen Reading Group. The gray image of a kitten. The many hardships stray felines had to endure during winter. Poor little darlings. Attracted to the taste of antifreeze, they foraged through trash bags outside auto body stores, licked the toxic remains from discarded plastic containers. In search of warmth they nestled underneath the hoods of parked cars, got mangled in engine gears.

Just taking the flyer would have been disrespectful so Lorraine purchased a copier card. She drove home and, for the first time in two months, thought about something other than her own pain. When Lincoln came home, she showed him the copy. He looked it up and down, considered the information, and did not appear to enjoy reminding Lorraine that Las Vegas winters rarely dipped below fifty degrees. He calmly explained that antifreeze automotive liquids were not necessary in desert environs, and that it was unlikely cats could find much of the stuff sitting around to lick. Evenly and with much sympathy he said that warmth-nestling wasn't really imperative in fifty-degree weather, and besides winter was a good two months away. What was she proposing, anyhow?

She did not answer. What good did it do to tell Lincoln her plans? Why tell him anything when he would shoot her down in that passive-aggressive shit-eating manner of his? Being around Lincoln exasperated Lorraine, and made her lose it, and made her so sad as to render her mute. And inevitably, once she had no more fury inside of her, once her sadness had been out in the sun for too long and had fermented, it made Lorraine hard. She could no longer tolerate Lincoln's throat clearing, his cautioned inquiries on her state of mind, pep talks so soggy that he barely pretended to believe them. He could talk until the end of time for all she cared, the facts remained: people needed to dispose of their antifreeze containers in a sealed and safe manner; drivers had to honk before starting their engines. Something had to be done for all the helpless kittens wandering those hard cold streets. Lorraine placed calls to local shelters, found out about vaccination laws, even started buying twenty-five-pound bags of cat food, fifty-pounders of kitty litter. And if her husband happened to feel a measure of relief in the sight of her beginning to come out of her shell, great. But by the same token, if the prospect of wholesale volumes of stray animals in his home concerned Lincoln, freaked him out, and/or made him wonder about her mental health, Lorraine told herself, she did not care. If Lincoln noticed what was going on and would have liked to talk with her about this whole, you know, rescue deal; if he himself was exasperated and near the end of his tether; if he felt all sorts of anger — toward himself, toward Lorraine, toward the whole stupid world — and was literally swimming in regrets, and as such was in no shape to deal with his own grief, let alone his wife's; if Lincoln knew he was a fucking mess and understood that Lorraine also was wrecked; if, to him, this meant they needed each other more than ever, if any of these possibilities, or a combination of them, or every single one, was true, it also was true that, at the end of the business day, the guy was around the house less and less. Said he was at the office. And Lorraine, she did not particularly feel the need to verify the truth right about then. She had cats to save here, dammit.

So let him judge her with cordial silence. Let him dig at her through his absence. Let him tell himself she had driven him away. But that son of a bitch was going to find out about the grand opening of the Newell Ewing Animal Rescue Shelter the old-fashioned way: his trifling ass was going to come home in the middle of the night and find twenty strays in that spare bedroom.

After couches had been shredded and neighbors had circulated a petition about the illegally zoned cat compound, and no less than three felines had met gruesome fates at the jaws of the Nelsons’ Rhodesian ridgeback, finally, Lorraine was forced to admit the futility of her noble endeavor, and send the cages back to the ASPCA, at which point kittens gave way to a very strange flirtation with the Mothers United for the Protection of Unborn Children, and a bizarre meeting in a classroom at a church, where Lorraine sat uncomfortably in a metal folding chair and listened to a bunch of otherwise normal-looking people spew hatred with an intensity that was truly unsettling.