Luca and I go on walks and chart the rotting of the station wagon in the lot by the corner of the block. Blue grass knotting in its tires, hubcaps vamoose.
It’s been a good walking summer. This summer. I’ve been carrying a camera—that’s what Ginsberg did. The station wagon is Luca’s favorite thing, and we chart the degradation of it; at the same time, his growth. He always poses beside it. He promises not to cut his hair, the whole summer. So we’ll document the progress: the process.
It’s been a good cat summer too. We counted eleven cats one evening, while walking. Today so far, four.
Right behind the station wagon, a modern home is getting built. A tall cuboid with long windows and wood-paneled walls. “I want to go inside there,” Luca says. “Do you?”
I do. It’s so at odds with everything on our street. “I don’t know why we haven’t done this before. The door isn’t locked.” He turns the knob. “And there’s nothing in here yet, so we’re obviously not trying to steal.”
I agree with Luca. If they were worried about trespassers, they would keep the door locked.
It’s three floors, including a basement. We stare out the windows of the main floor, the middle. It’s dusk, so the sky is pink. Luca says, “Hey, let me get a picture of you.” I stand at the window, and he takes one. I look at it. I’m a ghost backed by purple light in it
dead, true. But it’s been a good cat summer.
“I like it,” I say. I was a ghost backed by purple light. “It’s weird,” I say, “you know, like there’s no soul here yet.”
“Exactly.”
“People have to live in it first.”
“We could do them a favor.”
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“Add some soul.”
He smiles.
The basement. Loose tiles on the floor, and so much white dust. It looks like where chalk dust goes to die, along with wood shavings. We’re stripped so our moms won’t know. The clothes on the stairs leading down.
There’s a bizarro Krystal to-go coffee cup buried in dust. Unidentifiable foam chops, of insulation, white & pink fluff. The dust is really something severe. Mounds against wood frame like leaves to dive in.
We won’t. But maybe. His ass is what you call “bubble.” Everything else is even better than what you call that.
He kisses me. “It’s unlocked,” I say.
“Not,” he says, bounding up the stairs, “—for long!” I keep my underwear on. I snap a picture of him when he gets back.
“Confidential!” he demands. And we kiss. And where do we lie? Right on the floor. We push ourselves through dust. Ass scratches. Knees, scratches. My teeth graze the bone of his hip. We deem it
worthy. Took the year to get here. I’ll kiss you. I’ll kiss your neck, kiss your thigh. Get the camera out: of here:
it’s been a good cat summer: cats on car roofs, in windows, in beds of straw: and in fact, in this last year, something miraculous happened.
Luca happened upon a small cat, barely a kitten but still, like the last to leave the nest, whose mother had died. Luca knew because the kitten was at the mother’s side. I wrote a “threnody” in honor of her. I dedicated it to Luca. A “threnody” is a song or a poem for someone who has died. And I like the word, how it looks like “nobody.”
I haven’t shown it to him yet, still need to revise:
“Threnody to a Mother Cat”
for Luca
When I asked Mother was she afraid, she said she was not. “My only fear is that it will be a vegetarian feast,” she said. She laughed and licked the sore spot where it had grown.
Some nights ago I’d asked her if she believed in the man who kept coming around. He would always be stirring my tail, and I would wake up and hiss, and then he would stop and beam; he was smug and an annoyance, and by the light of his head, I never got to sleep.
“My dear, hrrrr,” Mother said, “of course I do. That is Saint Francis, my sweet. He has to come around.”
“Why does he have to come around?”
“Because one of us,” she said, “is getting very old.”
I am, I thought. Getting very old. I will be seven months soon.
Saint Francis came the next night. He stirred his finger next to my tail. I decided every time the tail flicks and it is not my intent, then it is him. Mother said he could go invisible if he wanted.
“Like we might do hunting or do climbing or do knowing, Saint Francis might go invisible.”
She yawned.
“He might also be a good hunter, if he chose to be,” she added, “but he chooses not.”
“Why does he choose not?”
“Because, hrrr,” Mother said, “Saint Francis loves all the animals.”
I woke Mother when I woke one night fidgeting, and felt bad.
Saint Francis was there. “Only in dreams,” he said knowingly, “from now on.”
Mother gave two hurt, quiet hiccups. “Hrrrr,” she said.
I lay my head high near her shoulders. There were divots on her body, into which pain pooled.
She tried more to sleep. “You tell me, sweetheart.”
“I can, I can,” she said.
“She doesn’t want to do it now,” I said to Saint Francis. “She can’t.”
“Not since I gave birth,” Mother said.
“And how long ago,” I asked, to prove that Mother and I were neither that old, “was that?”
“Years,” Mother answered, tiredly. “How many years, Saint Francis? I can’t …” But Mother never forgot before.
“Six months,” Saint Francis answered. “She is only six months old. A whole life ahead of her. Just tell me when, sweetheart … You’ve done only good here, brought nothing but goodness and light and love into this world.”
“And when I go, it doesn’t go?” she asked.
“Oh, heavens no,” Saint Francis said.
(I hissed at him. He was making it happen.)
“And it is true about the feast?” Mother asked. “And I can eat meat?”
“And true about my loved ones holding me? Holding more than just the memory of me?”
“Yes …”
“Because you know, just like I know, that memory is fallible. And there is something else, something after?”
“Well, obviously,” Saint Francis said.
“And it is true we reconnect in time?”
“You cannot reconnect when you have never been apart.”
And I said, “Mother, you can,” and it was horrible, and it was hard, and I wept—I am still weeping.
I am still weeping, even as the boy comes up and crouches down next to Mother.
Saint Francis is holding me, keeping me still. I am invisible in St. Francis’s arms. “Ready now?” Saint Francis asks me. “I can let you go.”
“I can, I can,” I weep, and am let go, and am crying as I circle the body of my mother and investigate—Can you hear me?
“It is more than hearing,” Saint Francis says.
But I am not ears right now, not hearing. I need to be left alone. And he obliges me—he’s gone.
The boy waits until I am done checking on Mother. Then he scoops me up.
Months passed before I could run. When the summer hit, I was running every day.
I put on gym shorts and sometimes no shirt and hit the road. One morning Mom woke up and said, “I feel like singing.” And so she went to church. She went with Gia. I didn’t go, and Luca stayed with me, thinking we’d give them both some time.
Gia called after church and said they were staying for Sunday school, but could Luca pick up something for lunch. He left to go grab us all something and I stayed home:
It comes out of nowhere, except that I am reading beside the window. I put the book down. It hits me.
I miss you. I wish you were here.
I let it hit me, and it hits me hard.
I’m not scared of the feeling. It has shown up, and I am facing it. I let everything happen, and I am facing it.
I let everything happen as it’s supposed to.
I lean forward and brace my head against the windowsill. It is cool against my brow line.
Like a hand testing for fever.
A thing a parent does.
A reminder: I’m here, I’m here.
At the corner of the sill, the thin fold where shadow meets wall
I whisper—
I know you are. I can feel you. I put on gym shorts. I put on “Afterlife.” I go running to it, nonstop. For a long time, I go—
I think, a high (a runner’s).
I think, Hi!
I think, Heaven.
I don’t turn around. If I don’t turn around, if I don’t see them (if I don’t not see them), then how will I know they’re not (and even if I did, and didn’t see them) there.
Pal, Mom, Luca, Gia, Ms. Poss.
Even Sia, the singer, because why not? Even Sia, the cat. Even her mother cat. Even Anne, Sylvia, John Berryman,
Allen G., and the others.
Even if they all file in toward the back
of the “heap,”
of the “family,”
my family
ongoing,
they’re
there,
there,
there.