Julia Reed didn't see the cat until it was too late, and even then she wasn't really sure she had seen it at all.
     What she did see were the children's hands raised, not exactly in greeting, and the looks on their faces: terror (the youngest), shock (the middle), indifference (the oldest). The last worried her the most. There was a thump under the right front wheel, followed quickly by another on the same side but in the rear. B'dump. Like going over half-buried railroad tracks. A sound she didn't ordinarily think about, except at the bottom of the gently curving, smooth-paved road that led to her driveway, which is one place she had never heard this sound before.
     The cat was dead. That was plain. Unbloodied, on its side, legs extended straight and neat the way a child would arrange a toy animal for sleep. Julia had thrown the car into park and jumped out to see what happened, for a split-second fearing an even worse possibility-a fourth child she had not spotted in time. She felt instant relief when she realized it was only Winston or Wynton or Winslow, or whatever name they had given to the long-limbed calico that seemed to have spent much of its now-truncated life defecating beneath the rhododendrons and boxwood lining the front of her house.
      The youngest child-the girl-had her fists pressed to her face, and she hadn't moved from the spot at the edge of the front lawn where she'd been standing when Julia had seen her from the car. The other two-the boys-huddled over the limp form, and Julia could hear in their voices a calm analysis of the situation. Boys playing at being men.
      "I think he's dead."
      "I don't know. We could try something."
      "Think it's not too late?"
      "Only one way to find out."
      And then to her mild revulsion the older boy pressed his mouth to the cat's and breathed into the obviously lifeless body.
      It was a cool day but not cold, a Tuesday, the kind of April afternoon that could make you believe the winter really was giving up its deathlike grip. Julia wore the coat she had purchased that morning, a spring coat the color of sand. She had been so excited about it that when she stopped for lunch on the way home she took it out of the bag and put it on. She wasn't normally like that-she liked to believe she had a little more willpower and was a little less consumptive than the raging shopaholics who typically crowded the mall. But it was a nice coat, with flat front pockets and an intermediate length that complimented her shape. She looked sleek in it. That was her assessment when she saw herself in the mirror, and it had been the assessment of the salesclerk too. It made her feel ready for better days, warm days after a long cold winter. And as she lifted it out of the bag, carefully removing the white tissue paper in which it was folded, she knew she had made the right choice. She wore it into the restaurant, took a seat by the window, and ordered an omelet. She paged through the book she'd been carrying around the last couple of weeks while she picked at her meal. Then she got back in the car and drove to the thrift shop, where she donated the old but reliable navy-blue spring jacket that had served her faithfully to now. Her mood had flattened. The realization that she had spent nearly two hundred dollars on a piece of fabric she didn't need nagged at her conscience like a mosquito she was unable to kill, buzzing unseen in the darkness that slowly settled on her.
      Then the noise under her tires. Instinctively, she thrust her hands into the deep pockets of the new coat and pulled it in against her. The oldest boy's life-saving efforts seemed to go on for far too long, and she had the urge to rush over and make him stop. But he finally pulled away. He kneeled with his hands on his thighs, the pose of an exhausted paramedic, and stared up at her.
      She knew their names but had trouble keeping them straight. The girl was Sarah, but was the boy on his knees Daniel or Sean? "Is it dead?" she asked, because even though she knew the answer it was the only possible thing to say at the moment.
      "Of course he's dead."
      "Don't you even look where you're going?" the middle one asked. His face was stretched into what seemed an imitation of anger-was he mimicking someone?-but the sound of his words was real enough.
      She appealed to the oldest, who after all would be the most mature among them, and so at least somewhat acquainted with the nature of accidental events. "I didn't even see it in the road," she said. "I'm so sorry. It's a horrible accident."
      "You were driving pretty fast." He paused, seeming to search for something even more condemnatory. "Pretty damn fast," he amended. He climbed to his feet and approached the car. He was at that age-thirteen or fourteen, she guessed-when a child's delicate limbs can turn overnight into flippers and paddles, appendages more amphibian than human. All his parts were out of proportion, from hands that seemed the size of oven mitts to feet that flopped, loose and unhinged, over the hard dark stones littering the edge of the street. His hair clung to the sides of his oversized head in greasy plaits. There was a fringe of dark mustache above his wet upper lip. She thought of his mouth on the cat's. "Why do you drive so fast on a road like this?" he asked. "You're always driving too fast." He touched one of his huge hands to the rear fender of the car, spreading his fingers wide across the panel.
      "I didn't see it," she protested. "I'm really, honestly sorry, but you have to understand it was an accident. I didn't see it."
      The girl screamed; it made Julia jump.
      "You keep saying 'it'!" she cried. "It's not an 'it.' It's Winslow! It's a he! Winslow!"
      "Sarah," the oldest boy reprimanded. He looked at Julia. "She's pretty upset. We all are, I guess."
      She looked around from face to face. The younger boy stared at her, and even if it was only a mask of anger it did the trick. He couldn't have been older than nine, yet how had he learned to put his face that way? Sarah was crying-it had blossomed into a hiccupping, hysterical jag in the seconds since her outburst. Julia felt under siege. This was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen to her on this street, on one of the first warmish days of spring. She hurried back around the front of her car and climbed behind the wheel. The song that had been playing on the radio when she was back at the top of the hill was only now coming to an end; she realized that strands of it had been cycling through her head while she'd stood on the road. It seemed as if four or five minutes of an April afternoon had taken hours to pass.

     The cat lay there for most of the day, in the spot where it had gone under her tires. Every time she passed a window she saw it, a heap of white and gray fur in the middle of the pavement. So few cars came down here that there was no urgent need to clear it out of the way, but still-why didn't they do something? She had assumed from their reactions that there would be a speedy removal of the remains, followed by an elaborate burial ceremony at the edge of the woods behind their house. Finally, the oldest came out with a snow shovel and a canvas beach bag. The sound of the shovel's edge on the pavement reached her ears. The boy scooped up the cat, let it slide into the bag, and took it away.
      "Where are the parents is the real question." That was Mike's reaction later that night, and it was something that had not occurred to her. Looking out their kitchen window she saw all the lights in the house across the street ablaze-every window a bright panel of incandescence. April, only a week away from changing the clocks, but darkness still seemed to drop as suddenly as it did in January.
     There were fourteen windows on the front-facing side of the house across the street; she had counted them and committed the figure to memory, just as she had made mental note of any number of features of the nine houses besides their own that comprised this small, secluded development. Mike made a good point; the children had all seemed a little unkempt, and standing at the side of the road exhibited the directionlessness of the unsupervised. Loitering, she wanted to say. And now that she thought about it, things had seemed that way for at least a couple of days, since well before the events of that afternoon.
      "They're probably going to sue us." Mike spoke with the energy of the creatively inspired-it was a eureka of despair. He was a vice president of risk management at a major bank and well compensated for imagining the worst. "Are you ready for that? Great. Just great."
      "I'm not sure they can sue for an accident. On a public street. Right? I mean, can they do that?"
      "I suppose we'll find out." He pushed the remnants of his meal around his plate-chicken and chickpeas, from a takeout Indian place he passed on the drive home every night. "So what do you think?" he asked after a moment. "Were you speeding?"
      She scoffed. "Hardly." But it was a question she couldn't honestly answer. Did either of them ever actually check their speed coming down the smoothly paved hill? They lived on a street without sidewalks, without pedestrians, and all ten houses had front yards about a hundred feet deep. The very lack of activity-or visible signs of life, for that matter-is what had brought them here. Freedom to drive how they wanted, not to mention play their music outside as loud as they liked or even make love on the back patio in broad daylight. Mike himself was prone to gaze hungrily through the windshield as he brought his Lexus to the lip of the hill, where he usually also said something stupid, like, "I'm loving this street," before hitting the gas pedal and propelling them over the edge. The seclusion and quiet had also played into their notions of family planning; this, they agreed upon purchase of the place, is where we will raise our children.
      "It's not like a couple of kids could say for sure how fast a car is going," he said, considering.
      "Look." For the second time that day she felt on the defensive. "What I'd like someone to remember here is that this was an accident. Can we keep that at least a little bit in mind? Pets are killed like this every day. I feel bad enough about it as it is. But let's remember it was an accident. And why, the by the way, is the cat even out there with them by the side of the road?"
      Mike held up his hands. "Honey, I understand. You don't have to convince me."
      She didn't believe him. He may have been patronizing her again, but when she saw him looking at her through his round glasses it seemed he was serious. "This ever happen to you, in all your years behind the wheel?"
      He didn't have to stop to think. "I hit a chicken once, senior year of high school. It flapped out into the road from out of nowhere. I hit the brakes so hard the car went into a spin. The chicken bounced along the hood, up the windshield, and right over the roof of the car. It walked away, or did whatever chickens do when they leave the scene of an accident. And I swore that from then on I would never brake for anything smaller than a rhino. So I think you were right in not putting yourself into danger just to save a cat. A cat, I might add, that shat in the shrubs all last year."
      Julia didn't tell him that she had not even tapped the brakes, and that because of that she was never in danger; she hadn't seen the damn thing in the street at all. And at his mention of the shrubs she recalled something else, something that he didn't know and that she herself had forgotten. She wished it hadn't come back to her, wished now it never happened at all-but the previous summer she had bullied the younger boy into cleaning up after the cat. Strolling among the plantings she had encountered a mess-a still-damp coil atop the woodchips-for what must have been the eighth or ninth time that week. She was tired of it. It was late on a Friday afternoon; the boy was in his driveway, watching her from astride his bicycle, and she was tired of it. She hadn't even stopped to think. She simply stormed over to him and demanded he clean it up. And he had. He brought a shovel over from his garage and cleaned it up. Watching him carry it back across the street and toss it into the woods, she felt regret pulling at her sense of vindication. She fought it; she was right to do what she did, she was right! And though regret slowly won out in the days that followed, eventually too much time passed; fall came, and then their first Christmas here, and they were so caught up in events and work and obligations of all kinds that that Friday receded into nothingness without leaving a ripple behind, so that it was if she had never done anything so horrible at all in the first place.
      But she had. And she wondered now whether the reminder hadn't been Mike's mention of the shrubs, but the scraping sound of the shovel on the pavement earlier, for hadn't it been the same one the angry middle child had used the previous summer?

      "They've never been all that welcoming, let's remember that." Mike spoke from behind his magazine as they lay in bed that night. "I feel bad about it, I suppose. I feel as if I want to do something, say something. I wouldn't even know how to approach them."
      "I wish we could talk about something else." Julia stared through the words in the book she had opened at lunch that day. She felt as if she had said her piece, and that having been there at the scene and enduring the response of those three horrible children was penance enough. And she had apologized, numerous times. Why couldn't anyone see that?
      Suddenly Mike lurched over. Before she could stop him, he was on the phone, over-enunciating the name of the family across the street as he sought the listing.
      "Mike," she said.
      He waved her away and stared at the wall with expectancy. She could see the words of solicitous greeting forming on his lips, and behind that the frank and precisely phrased acknowledgement of wrongdoing, following which would come the official apology-along with an offer to do anything, anything, to help make amends. It was like watching planes taking off-a grim, orderly pattern of ascent. But after a moment he said, "Answering machine," and hung up.
      "So you think you need to do the dirty work for me?" She gazed at the book, searching for the words she knew were on the page but seeing nothing. All she sensed was the blood rising inside her, from her chest and into her neck and up through her jaws until her eyes stung. Her fingertips trembled as the anger coursed through her. And it wasn't as if she wanted to apologize anyway.
      "It would have been from us," he corrected. "Us." He turned to look at her. With his glasses off, which was how he read, he looked like a completely different person. He looked good, either way, but the glasses really did have a way of changing him. She didn't know which she liked better-only that now, seeing those deep eyes unshielded, she wished she didn't have to look at him at all. "It's the neighborly thing to do."
      "Neighborly," she repeated.
      He went back to his magazine, but this didn't keep him from speaking. "In case you haven't noticed, it's not the closest of communities, our little block here. I thought I could do at least a little reach-out, a little something to narrow the distance among us all."
      "I thought we liked the distance."
      "I just figure that if we're going to be here for a while, that if you're going to be here alone-you know, in a situation where you need help…." He let it hang.
      "You're talking about something else."
      He rattled the pages of the magazine. "Well, when is it going to happen anyway? You talked about liking the distance. What was the whole point of it anyway? Sex outside under the big blue sky? Is that all there is to it? An outdoor adventure?"
      A day that with the simple purchase of a new coat had seemed so hopeful was beyond curdled by now. In the space of a few minutes he had given her at least two more things to feel bad about. How had this happened? He was supposed to console her, stand by her-be her ally in the aftermath of something that would probably stick with those kids forever. She killed their pet, and right in front of them. And now Mike had taken it and added something entirely unrelated to it-had attached it like an unneeded limb.
      "It will happen when it's meant to happen," she whispered. "I'm just not there yet."
     But she had been there, hadn't she? When they made the move she was convinced she was ready for it. It was why she had left the job. She didn't want to be like those women who waddled through the halls on legs swollen to the size of tree trunks, didn't want to be in the middle of a client meeting at the moment her water broke. She wanted to have a split-a definitive break-off, so that she would be in the right frame of mind, the proper place physically, emotionally, and mentally. So that she could have time to adapt to the new role before she was simply thrust into it. They had wanted that, she and Mike. They had seen how the change had blind-sided other couples, had seen it tear some of them apart. And they didn't want that. They wanted to be prepared for it. That's why they had made such a big down-payment on the house, so that her salary would not be needed so much after its purchase, so that she could leave the firm and settle into the role of motherhood the way it was meant to be-or at least the way she, with his help, would redefine it.
     Only now almost a year had passed and here she was in no role, really. After an initial three-month burst of remodeling and redecorating bordering on mania, she now wandered through the rooms she had worked on, wondering why she had expended all the energy. Sometimes she tried to re-read the books she had loved in college, sometimes she took walks out into the silent woods, and on certain days after she had spent her husband's money on clothing she didn't need she ran down children's pets for the hell of it. To quell her boredom. To fill the empty hours. Obviously.
      "Yeah, well." Mike lurched again, causing the bed to roll beneath them like a raft in heavy surf. He turned off the light. "Let me know when you arrive."

      In the morning he leaned in close to kiss her goodbye, but the words between them were as dry as the toast that caught in her throat. She had any number of projects she could get started on-from hauling out the patio furniture to stowing the skis for the summer-but found herself at ten o'clock in front of a movie channel with her third cup of coffee.
     Sun streamed through the wide windows at the east side of the living room, and gazing at the illuminated panels stretching across the oak-colored floor she knew was on the verge of having a dangerously bad day. She didn't hear the dialogue in the movie so much as the hyper-fidelity of the sound, words so refined into digital perfection they seemed to catch on the edge of her brain like tiny metal filings. When she flicked the television off there was an aural after-image, a buzz that made her teeth hurt and that dissipated only when she stood up and left the room.
     Julia had raised several of the front windows and opened the back door right after Mike left, and the smell of the April morning on the cross-breeze made her feel, at least for the moment, better. She ran her tongue through her mouth to wipe away the taste of the coffee and knew from the little dip her stomach took that she had had one cup too many. She was about to go upstairs to take a shower when she heard it. It was like a gunshot only not as sharp, and it stopped her where she stood. It came again. And then once more.
     She had learned, in the space of a year, how a sound could carry when there were so few others to contend with it. No matter that just a few windows were only part-way open, or that the house across the street was half a football-field's length away-she could still hear it in her front hall. It was the middle boy, the one who had looked so angry the afternoon before. He had a lacrosse stick, and as she watched through the small pane of glass beside the front door he whipped a hard little ball against the house he lived in. Over and over he slung it, each time harder than the previous, it seemed. Whack. Whack. Whack. He moved like an assembly-line robot, each set of motions the same: Step, throw, catch. Yet he somehow hurled the ball with more velocity each time. So, she knew it would happen, saw it happen before it did: His first errant toss shattered a window. She could hear the collapsing glass from where she stood. The boy stared for a moment, as if the ball would somehow rematerialize from the void into which it had disappeared. And when it didn't, he dropped the lacrosse stick on the front lawn and walked away.
     She waited to see if he would come back. There was no response from inside the house-no one came rushing to the broken window, no words of anger or scolding reached her ears. Maybe the boy was getting punished inside, but she doubted it. The place seemed dead, silent and looming and now with a shattered window a little foreboding. She wondered again where the parents might be, and why the boy wasn't in school.
     In the shower, she thought to herself: And Mike wonders why I'm hesitant to have kids. It had always been her belief that boys who played sports loved to play them. She remembered the faces of her brothers during games of offense-defense in the backyard, her father launching pass after pass as Stevie and Kevin took turns receiving and defending, diving, jumping, and crashing into each other as they reached for the ball. They were red-faced and out of breath but their half-open mouths seemed always to be in the shape of smiles. There was nothing even approaching a smile on the face of the boy across the street. She saw that face, hard and twisted. She thought of the mechanical motion of his body.
     The warm water crashed around her. She was happy that it had only been a lacrosse stick. It could have been a gun. She didn't believe she was being melodramatic in thinking that if it had been a gun, he wouldn't have stopped with shooting out the windows.

      The back of her neck was still wet when she returned to the kitchen, and as the shape between the counter and the back door moved into her field of vision she stopped, thinking it had to be the shadow of a passing cloud or wind-bent tree.
      "What are you doing here?"
      It was the boy, not the middle one but the oldest. He turned to face her, and though for a moment he seemed surprised as she was, he quickly recovered. "There was a package. On your front step." He smiled and presented a brown-wrapped box but she couldn't remember if she'd ordered anything-was way too rattled, in fact, to do more than glance at it. The sight of that little damp mustache reminded her of the accident, and she thought again of his mouth on the cat's.
      "How did you get in here?"
      "The back door was unlocked." He gestured with the box. "I called through the screen but you didn't come. So I thought I would just bring it in. I didn't want anyone to take it." He placed the box on the counter. "So, here's your delivery."
      Julia thought he might move to the door then-what else should he do but leave? But he didn't. Instead, he looked around the kitchen. "Wow. You have a really nice house."
      "I think you should go now. Right? Don't you?"
      "You know," he said. "I've forgiven you. For yesterday. I guess, you know, it was accidental and everything." He laughed. "But Eric and Sarah." He shuffled his feet a bit, and his shoulders seemed to collapse-whatever he was thinking about or was about to say he obviously found hilarious. "They're saying crazy things. Like, 'Let's kill her!' And I'm, like, 'C'mon, we can't.' But, you know, they're kids and all, and they don't know better. They sometimes have a hard time corralling their emotions."
      Corralling. She knew he was parroting whatever guidance counselor or therapist had used the same words in evaluating him. Her young neighbor, as if she'd had any doubts, was trouble.
      "Anyway," he said. "They're just kids."
      "It's time for you to go, okay?" She came closer and took his elbow. He was taller than she, and that surprised her-his chin was level with her forehead. Just as surprising was his lack of resistance. He allowed himself to be escorted toward the door. She could feel his grin, could smell the sweat on him, could hear his oversized feet hitting the floor-each sound a sign he was one step closer to being outside. She didn't look at him; she didn't want to see that mustache again.
      "All right, then." He smiled up at her from the back step. The neighborly thing to do. She pulled the screen door shut. "Like I told you. Don't worry about yesterday. It's forgotten. Forgotten and forgiven."
      "Thank you," she said, working to make it sound meaningful, and as she had expected this worked: He smiled once more and took his heavy limbs and oversized feet and wet mustache and left the property.
She bent down. The back door had not been unlocked. This she knew, and though it didn't matter-locked or unlocked what right did he have to come through it, into her kitchen while she was upstairs in the shower?-she needed to prove it to herself anyway. Mike had taught her once how to slip the edge of the screen from the rubberized lip of the frame. "All you have to do," he had said, demonstrating, "is peel it open, and it's out." He had rolled it back like loose netting, creating an opening big enough to put his arm through, then looked up at her from behind his glasses. "Easy, right? In case of emergency." She was a little disappointed by her husband's apparent familiarity with methods for entering a locked house, but now she realized that maybe it wasn't so sophisticated a trick after all. It was obviously how the boy had let himself in. There was still a half-inch or so of loose screen; too sloppy or too hurried, he hadn't covered his tracks.
      The box he'd brought in was still on the counter. Her name and address were scrawled across it in black marker, but it didn't look like anything that had come through the mail. She pushed at it, her open hand like a cat's paw batting a toy. Whatever it was, it wasn't heavy.
      Later, fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, she still hadn't returned to the kitchen, but she could see the box from where she sat in the living room. It remained open on the counter, flaps up, welcoming anyone passing by to take a look. She had managed to call Mike, but the stool she had crashed into as she backed away from the sight of the dead cat was still on its side, the four straight legs like pointed rifles pinning her to the couch.

     She wanted to look ahead but kept turning back, in search of something that might tell her about the future. She thought of her mother's pouch-like straw bag on the front seat of the old car, left there when the woman had run back into the house to get something. Julia, accompanying her on some ordinary errand, had waited, and watched as a glistening brown wasp fell through the open window and began to pick its way across the bag's patterned weave. It investigated the small dark crevices where the strands gapped, inserting its twitching body into each, and then simply slipped inside the bag itself, in which her mother's compact, Kleenex, and lipstick were gathered.
      She didn't know what brought this to mind, this scene from some long-ago morning when she was a girl. Maybe it was the trees at the top of their street now, and the smell of the leaves and flowers and fertile soil that came through the open windows of Mike's Lexus as he made the turn and brought them to the lip of the hill. A smell of late spring, like that morning in the old car. After debating it, Julia had said nothing to her mother, thinking, maybe secretly hoping, that she would reach into the bag, searching blindly with groping fingers for the lipstick tube….
      So they all had it in them, right from childhood. But maybe it was a matter of degree: A penchant for mischief or sly deceit at one end of the spectrum; at the other, lies, malice, brutality. Her mother had not been stung, had never even known, as far as Julia could tell, that there was something moving around inside the bag.
      "Our home," Mike said from behind the wheel, looking out at the house as it came into view.
      That night, after speaking with the police, Mike had poured them each a glass of wine and led her upstairs. It had seemed like the right thing; the void that had yawned open before them was there to leap into. She was as enthusiastic as he, or at least she made herself feel that way as he pinned her arms to the mattress. They had survived, the police were handling it, and the bed felt like a concrete slab beneath her-no rolling ocean beneath them this night. When he lifted himself off her she took this as a sign. Stability. Solidity. A firm surface on which everything could rest. They were doing the right thing, if only to show how the right thing was done.
     A pattern emerged over the next week: dinner, wine, up the stairs, she on her back, he on top, as dutiful as you were supposed to be when the cycle accommodates. And still doing the right thing. They would never leave their children behind for a selfish vacation of their own. They would never create an environment that gave birth to such behavior. They would never be in a position where police and social workers and a court would have to intervene to set things right. No, no, no. Neither of them acknowledged it; the words were never spoken. But now, nine weeks later, their complicity in the mission was undeniable. It was no accident, and the evidence was in her hands.
      Mike pulled the car into the driveway. "I can't believe it," he said, over the sound of the ticking engine. It seemed like the only sound for miles, and except for his voice, maybe it was. He smiled at her. "Can you?"
      Diamond-shaped signs stood up from the soil beneath the rhododendrons and boxwoods: The security system had been in place for a couple of weeks now. Julia peered down at the curling printouts she had been given, but the odd white cloud at the center of each still made no sense to her. A crescent moon, a curved cat's tail, an almond sliver. Wasn't that what the photos showed? She could have accepted any of these as explanations, would have preferred them to what logic, an ultrasound, and a smiling technician insisted was the truth. It was all too much to contemplate. They rested in her palms, face up, pictures of an idea into which she was somehow supposed to breathe life.

 

Author Bio
Dominic Preziosi has published fiction in the Beloit Fiction Journal, The Brooklyn Review, Italian Americana, and other journals. He has also served as an editor at such organizations as McGraw-Hill and Forbes. He has taught at CUNY, New York City, and at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Dominic holds a B.A from Fordham University, an M.A. in Liberal Studies from CUNY, New York City, and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Brooklyn College.