Even before the man sidled up and asked if she was alone, Cathy could feel the man watching her every move.
Cathy was at Slick Eddie’s Arcade, and it was somebody’s birthday. This meant free food, a ticket to bowl, and no having to pay for shoes. There were streamers and presents, balloons and a sheet cake piped with roses. The guests were around her age, but Cathy recognized none of them. Which one were they celebrating? There was cheering because some kid got a strike, which wasn’t a big deal because of the bumpers, and everyone knew bowling was a fat joke anyway.
Cathy smoothed her dress, black and white gingham, like a picnic blanket. She wore a rhinestone belt with it. She’d turn twelve three months from today.
“Everyone, gather around,” a lady was saying.
Cathy sidled up to the table with food and drinks. There were also party hats and streamers, treat bags and a helium balloon featuring High School Musical. She nabbed a slice of pizza.
Cathy had none of the precursors of acne or boobs that herald teenage girls. She was a beanpole of an eleven-year-old, her complexion as smooth as stone. She and her parents moved to Galveston several months before, but Cathy still hadn’t managed to make friends at school. At least Cathy was a good reader, according to her Language Arts teacher. Cathy enjoyed learning the vocabulary words Mrs. Wood gave her and made a game of finding reasons to use them:
The students were jovial at recess.
The hospitable host took her guests’ coats.
These bowling shoes are a deluge of stink.
“Sweetheart?” The lady’s mouth was a slash of red lipstick. Cathy thought of smooshed turtles on the road and how sometimes, on the beach, she’d see a crab on its back and a gull crouched over it, tearing into its belly like a Christmas present. She hesitated with her slice, debating whether to cram it in her mouth and run.
The lady smiled at her. “Can I get you something to drink with that pizza?”
Cathy carried her meal to the arcade and watched a boy playing the shooting game. The boy hadn’t made a single kill, but he whooped and jerked his head back every time a buck emerged.
Earlier, when asked if she was here for the party, Cathy had told the guy behind the desk that she was. He’d been occupied with another girl who was working. He seemed to be flirting, barely acknowledging Cathy as he handed her a pair of bowling shoes a size too small. The thing about being invisible was that Cathy could basically do what she wanted. It was through this realization that Cathy first began testing her boundaries. Returning home later than she said she would. Asking her parents separately for lunch money and using what was left to buy stuff at CVS. One time her dad gave her a twenty, and Cathy spent it all on chocolate and Pepsi.
“Pow! Pow! Pow!” the boy shouted, lurching back from the imaginary blows of his plastic rifle.
Cathy had already sensed the man’s attention when she walked through the door. But it wasn’t until now that she really felt the man watching. His eyes like stars searing into her temples.
Cathy mowed down her pizza. She slugged the warm Pepsi so fast, her throat hurt when she finished it. Her mom probably would have said, That’s enough, Cath, had she seen her like this. Taking Cathy’s trash and clucking.
“Fucktards!” The boy slammed the plastic rifle into the machine and stomped away. The abandoned game froze on a backdrop of gnarled trees, ruining the illusion that animals freely roamed that leafy green forest, ready to have a hole put through them.
Cathy wondered if the man was still watching, then decided with the certainty of a locked door that she didn’t care if he was.
“Gotcha!” The boy bonked the heads that darted from the Whac-A-Mole cabinet, and Cathy was back to being aware of her body, the man lingering around the fringes of the party. The bottom of the paper plate slimed her palm; the pizza grease had dried in the vague shape of a dog. Cathy wondered if there was such a thing as a grease horoscope and if hers would read: Today a man will follow you into the arcade.
Cathy discarded her plate.
“Are you alone?”
The man’s face was a question mark. Cathy tried and failed to look at it, settling her gaze somewhere between his chest and neck. He smelled odd, but specific. Like talcum powder and Caesar dressing.
“Little shits!” The boy crammed more tokens into the slot.
“Sorry?” Cathy asked the man’s jacket.
“You look sad. Did your mother leave you here?”
Strange, to hear the word “mother” in a grown man’s mouth. Even stranger to picture her own mother, what she could be up to, just now. Probably, she’d gone to the gym. Was picking up and putting down bars, heavy plates stacked on them. There was a time when Cathy’s mom didn’t work out, didn’t do anything. But that all changed once things between Cathy’s dad and her stopped working.
Cathy felt as if she were preparing to step onto a stage, having spent the day in the wings. Then she managed to say, “She did.” The words raked her throat. “I’m stuck here.”
“Want a ride?”
Something happened to Cathy when the man asked her that. She nodded her head and counted to ten before trailing after him.
She walked past the guy working the desk, the party guests giving the birthday girl her presents. Cathy was already paying the price for another person’s inattention. The bowling shoes were too narrow and chafed the backs of her ankles. Probably Cathy should have slid back into her sandals, but it was too late to turn back. The last thing she heard was a girl shouting, “Mommy! Look what Olivia got me!” Then the sun hit her face and the arcade door thudded shut behind her.
Pulled along by the man’s retreating form, Cathy wondered mildly how old the birthday girl was. She couldn’t remember the last time she called her mom, “Mommy,” or when she’d last had a birthday party.
*
The kind of man Cathy imagined would pursue an eleven-year-old should be tall and fit. He ought to wear fitted washed jeans, his button-up sleeves rolled loosely. His fingers should be stacked with rings, and a tattoo should climb the side of his neck, his forearm or bicep.
But the man who’d sought out Cathy was short and stocky. His pasty skin had a sheen that made it look extra malleable, like putty. His hair was thick, fair, furry. His clogs clapped against the blacktop loudly. Topping these were cargo pants, an Astros shirt. The man was almost dressed like Cathy’s dad on weekends.
The fact that Cathy’s mom and dad had been arguing was what brought them to Galveston. Goodbye, Houston. Cathy didn’t know much about geography, but she felt there was a strange logic in their moving to an island. When Cathy was younger, she’d burst in before school to ask if they’d seen where she’d left her backpack, her shoes. Once, she came in to find her dad reaching into the folds of her mom’s bathrobe.
Things were different now. The last time she made the mistake of barging in on her dad and her mom, Cathy found them sitting on opposite ends of their bed, their faces both wet.
Cathy hadn’t walked in on them since.
*
Long, wide, and boat-like: the man’s car looked like a toy, banana yellow with wood paneling. Though maybe, Cathy thought, it was just deceivingly cheery. Designed to sweep up girls, only to later appear with their pictures on the evening news.
The man swung into the driver’s side, opening the passenger door from the inside. Cathy slid in, tugged the hem of her dress. The seats were tan with a waffle texture, the floorboard a mire of Fanta cans and crumpled fast food containers. Cathy could feel the rapid thump of her heart, but she wasn’t sure what for. The possibility of the man’s advances? The spark of adventure, having lined up the pieces that brought her to this moment? From the Lifetime movies she’d seen, Cathy knew it was important for victims to take note of everything—later, they could describe their captor to the police. This is what his car looked like. This is what he looked like. But Cathy wasn’t sure if the same rules applied to girls her age. And what about for girls who buckled themselves into strangers’ cars willingly?
The man had to concentrate to get the car to start. “Damn it,” he whacked the dashboard. Tried the key again, cursed. Once the engine purred on and he drove out the lot, he spoke with the formality of an actor in a Turner Classic, only awkward and not romantic. “Where would you like to go?”
Cathy exhaled, the air sharp. “How about your house?”
*
Cathy’s mom wasn’t the only one who stopped noticing Cathy. Her dad had always struck Cathy as a teddy bear of a person. Cordial sweet, and unintimidating; stuffed, like he had no real personality. His glasses, briefcase, and tie as his daily accessories. Before her mom started changing—spending her free time working out and shopping, rubbing creams briskly into her face while Cathy watched from the doorway—Cathy’s dad had a habit of staring off at nothing. Saying “please” and “thank you” and “yes, honey,” like a toy programmed to say only a handful of things. Once, Cathy saw him sitting in his car on her walk home. This was back when they were living in Houston, and something inside Cathy told her not to let him see her, to never mention she saw him idling down the block in his Impala eating a paper-wrapped sandwich and wearing sunglasses. Lately, the landline rang all the time, and he was always in a hurry to check it.
*
Cathy recognized the Sea Wall with its bus stops and surf shops, the rainbow of sherbet storefronts and restaurants. On the other side of the road was the sea, where years ago, Cathy’s mom and dad used to bring Cathy, back before Galveston wasn’t home and her parents were happy.
For some reason, Cathy couldn’t hold together an image of the man. She’d chance a look at him, absorb his features. Then she’d return her gaze to the windshield and forget them. Was the man’s hair short or long? How to define the shape of his mouth? What Cathy sensed but failed to comprehend was how it felt to be near him. It was like a bad math problem, how the elements didn’t make a proper fraction. It didn’t matter who the man was, what dangers he represented; Cathy felt alarmingly present beside him.
The man was asking her a question.
“What?” said Cathy.
“You like country?” The man thumped the dashboard and Cathy thought of fingerprints, strands of hair, saliva of past conquests. A song about walking a line blistered from the speakers, and Cathy saw a manhole, her bowling shoes falling down it. She groped for a button to roll down the window.
“You okay?”
“The window,” said Cathy.
“The window.”
“How do you open—?”
The man’s arm crossing hers was like a hook pulling from the inside of Cathy’s navel. The man pumped the handle, hot air blew against her face. Hospitable man, she thought as she looked away.
Then he asked, “What’s your name?” and rolled through a stop sign.
A van screeched to a halt before them, a horn honked.
“Leslie,” said Cathy.
The lie rang truer than any she’d told lately.
*
The first lie of the day happened shortly before Cathy left for Slick Eddie’s Arcade. Cathy’s parents had been having an argument. Something about Cathy’s mom hiding shopping bags from Cathy’s dad. “The bills are piling up, how do you expect Cathy to go to college?” At which point Cathy’s mom had said, “then maybe you should spend less on your girlfriend.”
None of this would have happened when Cathy was younger. Then, her parents wouldn’t have been fighting. They would have cared where Cathy went, too. Dropping them off themselves or asking her to call them as soon as she arrived whatever short distance that she said she was going. Back then, she would have told them the truth, without thinking.
But that morning, Cathy told them she was going to the CVS, be back soon.
*
It wasn’t until he turned down her parents’ street that Cathy wondered if the man was playing her. As he cruised right past her house, she imagined him slowing to a halt, opening the passenger door. Gotcha! he’d shout.
But her mom and dad would have thought nothing of her returning. They wouldn’t have noticed that banana car pulling up or away, her emerging from the passenger seat and stepping back into normalcy.
This journey is futile, thought Cathy. This journey is inefficacious, fruitless, hollow.
Lately, when her mom wasn’t returning from the gym—her ponytail sticking, her skin all sweaty—she came through the door swinging shopping bags that crinkled loudly. She’d model each new outfit before the full-length mirror, looking like a different mom as she beckoned Cathy to her. What do you think? she’d ask, or, Do you like this one, Cath? Always, it would take Cathy a beat before she could answer.
*
The man’s street was the opposite of Cathy’s, with its looming houses with large porthole windows and garden patios, sea grass and shell gravel. His house was colorless and squat, just like him; its face peeling strips of faded tangerine paint, its yard a blanched square of grass fenced by chain link. There were no flags printed with sailboats or anchors, no starfish ornaments or seahorse statues. Had it not still smelled like the sea, the man’s house might have belonged back in the city, landlocked and sun-bleached.
“We’re here, Leslie.”
Cathy got out the moment he parked. She needed fresh air. She needed —
“This way,” the man offered his hand, which Cathy pretended not to see. She looked down as she walked. The awful bowling shoes were unfamiliar, like they belonged to another girl’s feet.
*
The first time Cathy saw the man wasn’t all that long ago. It was after her mom started working out, got muscles, but before her gaze started tracking slightly past Cathy whenever Cathy spoke.
It was her mom, after all, that caused the man to turn.
Shortly after they moved to Galveston, Cathy and her mom had been out running errands. Groceries, school supplies, clothes for Cathy. Her new school required students to wear a uniform. Everything, she knew, was about to change and would never go back to how it had been before. Cathy had been thinking this when she saw the man, and the man saw her.
What Cathy noticed was how close he got to her mom’s face to explain things. Waving the coil of tickets, saying, “Proceeds benefit the choir at the parish.” And, “Raffle winner gets a crockpot! It is a very nice crockpot. Would you like to enter for it? Tickets benefit the choir at the parish. Raffle winner gets a—!”
Even then, Cathy had hardly been able to look at the man. It was cold out, her breath made frost, and the man was just a face with a mouth, the rest of him stuffed into a long, felt coat. Her mom had listened politely and offered to buy a couple of tickets, glad to support Sacred Heart Parish.
But that was just the start of the man showing Cathy’s mom interest. A week or so after she bought the tickets, he phoned to tell her the news. “I won the raffle, I guess,” Cathy’s mom had shrugged once she got off the phone. Telling Cathy it felt good to help the church out. The man, too: “He’s a bit off, but harmless—isn’t he?” she’d said to no one in particular.
After Cathy’s mom picked up her prize, the landline began to ring all the time. Sometimes when Cathy watched her mom answer, she saw her mom press the heel of her hand to her forehead. This happened until eventually, Cathy’s mom said firmly into the phone’s mouthpiece: “Please stop calling. I’m sorry.”
Though sometimes, even after that, Cathy’s mom would bring up the man to her dad, saying he must have a crush. Cathy’s dad never did much in response. Cathy never even heard her dad comment on her mom’s new physique once.
Anyway, the crockpot remained sealed in its box to this day, by which point it seemed the man had turned his attention to Cathy, who preferred it that way.
*
The entry fed into a kitchen that opened onto a den. There was nowhere to hide because every room pooled into the next. The air was damp, the blinds sealed. Then there was the collapsed mushroom of a beanbag chair in front of the TV. A tank with neon pink gravel and a miniature treasure chest at the bottom. No fish that Cathy could see. On the wall was a wooden cross, dried palms wound around it. An icon of a bearded man clutching a staff hung beside it.
“You hungry?” asked the man.
“Do you think…?” Cathy trailed. The man was digging around in the fridge. “Maybe I could make something?”
“Fine, sure.” The man carried a jam jar filled with juice to the den and flopped down on the beanbag, remote in hand.
Cathy found a cake mix at the back of a shelf.
“Mind if I use this?” she called over the TV. Only the man must not have heard her as he flicked through the channels before landing on Judge Judy.
One by one, Cathy kicked her bowling shoes across the floor. She looked at the time on the microwave, which blinked 3:33. She balled her hair into a scrunchie. The back of her neck slimed from the heat. The afternoon was moving so slowly.
By the time she pushed the pan into the oven, the man was snoring. His chin mushed into his neck, his shoulders hunched. A new episode of Judge Judy was about to start.
Cathy snatched the man’s phone from the wall and dialed the only number she knew.
“Hello?” There was no sense of alarm in her dad’s voice, no worry. Like Cathy’s being away was nothing.
Cathy slammed the phone into the receiver, went right up to the man to make sure he was sleeping. She waved a hand in front of his face and cleared her throat. When the man didn’t budge, she took a sip from his jam jar. The juice didn’t taste the way juice usually tasted. There was a tang beneath the sweet, something with a bite. Cathy took another sip, swishing the jar around as she walked. At the base of the staircase, she found a pair of chunky brown loafers, Velcro tabs across the tops. A quilted pink housecoat on a coat rack. She put it on, just for fun.
Up the stairs and down the hall, Cathy counted three doors in all.
The first door opened to a bathroom with a moldy glass shower and frayed lace curtains. The sink lip held a tub of Vicks VapoRub, bobby pins, and a compact mirror, its lid painted with cherubs.
Behind the second door was a futon and stacks of library books, waxy in their plastic jackets. There were also more jam jars with something orangeish filming the bottoms and a balled-up Astros comforter.
Cathy finished off the jar and set it beside the others.
The third and final room looked like a frilly old Valentine, except instead of roses and chocolate, it smelled like mothballs and garbage. Cathy picked up a lacquer-backed hairbrush, strands of gray hair snagging the bristles. Then she ran the brush through her hair, clasped a strand of pearls around her neck. She slid her feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers and stood before the full-length mirror. She pouted her mouth and fluffed her hair, the way she watched her mom do when her dad wasn’t there.
“Hello,” she said to herself.
It wasn’t long before Cathy’s eyes became very heavy, and the creamy pink bedspread beckoned her like a warm summer’s day.
The bed was too squishy, like at any moment it could swallow her whole. But the more of a nest Cathy made in the sheets, the more the bed seemed to conform to her, and she to it. As her lids fell shut, Cathy could almost convince herself she was someone else.
*
It was the burning smell that woke Cathy, who bolted down the staircase. The TV program had changed from Judge Judy to Maury. The audience was on their feet, shouting: Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!
Cathy stuffed her hands into oven mitts and pulled out the charred mound. She forgot the rule about smoke. Was she supposed to duck?
The beanbag crunched under the man’s weight as he rose, blinking drowsily at her.
“What’s the matter?”
Cathy blew her nose into her sleeve. She remembered she was still wearing the pearls and pink housecoat, which puddled her feet.
“Why are you crying?” the man asked.
Cathy blinked back dumb tears. The microwave still flashed 3:33, but that time couldn’t be true. Time must have stopped, like in Narnia after Lucy steps through the wardrobe. Cathy felt something inside her chest turn. Then, when she saw the concern on the man’s face, she brightened. “Do you have a fork?”
When Cathy dialed the house phone for the second time that day, her mom answered before the phone had a chance to fully ring.
“Hello?” Her voice was a knife scraping toast. “Hello?”
“Leslie, it’s me.” Cathy stuffed her mouth with burnt cake.
“Who is this?” The voice on the other end of the line went cold. “Cathy?”
* * *
When Cathy is a mother herself, she and her eleven-year-old daughter do everything together. At the bougiest gym in town, they walk loops around the indoor track, count each other’s crunches while passing a medicine ball between them. They wrap themselves in fluffy white towels after and claim a spot in the steam room. Once, while it’s just the two of them in the steam room, Cathy’s daughter asks Cathy what’s the thing that scares her the most.
“What scares me the most?” says Cathy, jarred by the question. Cathy’s daughter is intelligent, even precocious—her large gray eyes giving the impression of a willingness to try anything. She has an orb of reddish hair and is already wearing a bra. It is easy to forget that she is only eleven.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding vigorously. Like, duh. “What scares you the most, Mom?”
Cathy draws her towel tighter around her, wrapping herself like a burrito. She had never planned to fall in love, to be a mother. As a young woman, Cathy always considered herself too independent and selfish a person. And though she now has a perfectly good relationship with her parents—she even likes her mom’s second husband—the old anger washes over her when she considers her daughter’s question. What would have happened had she stepped into a different stranger’s car? She thinks of the boys she dated in high school, in college. How, when it came to the first boy she slept with, she hadn’t said yes, but she hadn’t said no either. And she thinks of the man from all those years ago—his shadow in the arcade, in the driver’s seat, in the beanbag chair before the TV—as her daughter presses on: “Mom? Mom?”
Only Cathy isn’t in the steam room with her daughter, not really—it is almost as if her very being has peeled away from her body. The intensity of her reaction is not unlike the one she’d had when her own heart had soared to her throat, all those years ago, standing in that hospitable man’s kitchen and saying into his phone: “Mommy, you’ll never guess where your Cathy is now.”
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of a Next Generation Indie Book Award-winning novella, On the Rocks, and a chapbook of short stories, Mother Tongues. Her poetry collection, Ghostlit, is forthcoming this spring. She teaches creative writing as an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Photo by: David East