to ask her to move in with him. The hope lit in her. They had been engaged for nearly a year, and Gregory was good to her, an attentive lover, a man only a few years older who was both cultured and successful. They hadn’t set a date, and Gregory put it off when she tried bringing it up. Clara remembered dabbing at her mouth with a napkin, tilting her chin, when his fist cracked her in the jaw.
She remembered how her mouth filled with blood, how she lay stunned and gasping for breath for only a moment, and then he was pulling her toward him, begging forgiveness, saying “I don’t know what came over me” as he tried wrap her in a smothering embrace. Frightened, Clara had kicked him, her heel striking him in the ribs, and scrambled away on her knees. She only got a few feet before he grabbed her by the ankle, and when she fell she knocked over the lamp stand and everything on it, the bulb bursting, imploding really, his set of keys jingling when they struck the hardwood floor. He had her by the ankle, his words harder now, and he was pulling her toward his bedroom. Clara grabbed the keys and threaded them through her knuckles, like metal claws. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I didn’t mean to do it.” She curled into herself, playing wounded, but when he leaned down near her, Clara punched him with the sharp keys in her fist. The blow ripped skin from his cheek, and he screamed and reeled away. She had run out of the apartment, right through the broken bulb’s glass, in her bare feet, and then walked all the way home, constantly looking behind her, sure that he was going to come punish her for fighting back.
The faucet was still running, so Clara reached among the shards to shut it off, her thoughts jumbled as something struggled to stand up inside her on newborn foal legs. She walked over to Logan and adjusted the tongue of white plastic, which had gone crooked in his black collar. She concentrated to keep her hands from shaking. “There, you can go now,” she said, because she couldn’t think right with him so close. “I’ll clean this up.”
He touched her face. He swallowed, tried to find his words.
“Go,” she said. “The old fogies are waiting for you.”
CLARA DIDN’T CLEAN up the dishes right away, despite what she had promised Logan. Downstairs the kittens cried out to her. They had heard the uproar and must have been upset. On the stove she heated up milk in a saucepan. This she poured into a collection of medicine droppers for the kittens before trudging down to the basement.
Even in the heat of early autumn the basement remained a cold, whispery place. Stairs painted red, a lipstick smear. Whitewash splashed on the walls to keep down mold, green copper pipes dripping, and the darkness at the bottom yawning like a mouth. There was no rail, so she braced herself against the wall every time she went down, one hand holding the medicine droppers, the other her belly.
The kittens waited, ravenous. They needed their mother. Clara understood. The kittens’ mother, the cat she’d named Sorena, spent most of her time outdoors hunting gophers in the cemetery or sunning herself below the neighbor’s bird feeder. She did not waste time on feeding her babies. She knew winter was coming, and her babies were too small. They would have been dead if Clara hadn’t prepared a box for them, made a nest from torn newspapers, and moved it behind the old oil furnace where sunlight trickled in through a greasy window. Clara knew next to nothing about raising baby animals but was determined to keep them alive. And all that effort, what was it for? Logan was going to take them to some farm, where they’d surely die, though several days had passed, and he had not loaded them up to take them to the Nelsons.
This was the same window where she’d looked out and seen Seth’s shoes, the ragged hem of his coat. That day she had felt a hand on her shoulder when she saw him. Icy breath on her neck. A voice inside her head. Don’t answer the door. Stay with me. The baby inside her going still. A quiet, commanding voice. What Clara had always imagined her mother sounding like.