Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

“I don’t care what the court says, or some judge, or even my Aunt Clem.” Truth is, that was a lie. I did care. No way I wanted to move in with my mother’s sister. Clem was a good enough person, but I had no desire to move in with her family. So Detective Jake Valari, a friend of my mother’s, was moving in with me. Until my mother...

Well, what do you say about a woman who tells her son, “Life is tough,” after hearing how he’d discovered his girlfriend with her arm around a member of the football team? What do you say about that same woman after she downs a fifth of vodka, along with a half-bottle of sleeping pills, then crawls into bed without even saying goodbye?

“She’s depressed,” Aunt Clem had said.

“Yeah, I’m depressed, too, sometimes,” I’d said. Then I left the house, walked all the way to the bay and out to the end of the jetty, where I tried to come up with ten good reasons not to jump in and swim until I ran out of energy — or breath or life.

Later I went off to a friend’s house, shot some baskets, getting home long after dark. Jake had been waiting for me. And Clem and her new boyfriend. I hadn’t said a word to any of them, just gone off to bed.

And then to school the next day. And the next. And the next. For three weeks. Like a zombie. Like a walking automaton. Counselors made appointments for me at school. I went to none of them. Teachers I’d known and liked for years tried to talk to me. I ignored each and every one. Friends came up to my locker, punched me in the arm, tried to joke around. I just asked if I could borrow their Spanish homework.

It was like there was a fog around my head and I was trying to drag, or push, or maybe plow my way through it. I dreamt at night that I was drowning — not in the bay; I knew Manamesset Bay could never hurt me, and that when I died — whenever, wherever, however — it wouldn’t be the bay that would take me. This drowning was different, like suffocating in the air around me. I’d watched a friend have an asthma attack a few years ago and had been insensitive enough to ask him what it felt like. Like trying to breathe through a wet rag, he’d said.

So that’s how I felt, like I couldn’t breathe, like someone was holding something heavy and wet and cold against my face. For three weeks I’d awakened night after night, just struggling to breathe.

And then I met Frances. Frances, who looked up at me through her pale blonde eyelashes, and entered my life.

That day I was trying to find a reason not to go home. I was just delivering Remy’s newspapers while he was in Florida for a week. My mother would be home by Thanksgiving, everyone — my aunt, Jake, the doctors — agreed. My mother was... well, she wasn’t dying. She’d be home for Thanksgiving, two short weeks away.

“Well, are you going to stand there gawking?” A voice had interrupted my thoughts. “Or are you going to help get him down?”

Him was the large gray puffball of a cat perched out on the limb of a giant sycamore about twelve feet overhead. I was the hapless paperboy looking up at him. There was no way I could just ride on by, no way I could disregard a request for help. I have a hard time refusing anyone who asks me for help. It’s one of my biggest character flaws.

“Well?” the woman snapped impatiently; she was smoking a cigarette. “Not that I care. He’s my neighbor’s.” A nod to the huge house — peeling white paint with gray shutters, central chimney and four smaller ones, probably built around 1890 — just behind her. The lawn needed mowing. The hedges were far overgrown. There were clumps of weeds, untrimmed bushes, and masses of dead flowers hugging the foundation. Even the driveway and slate stone walkway leading up to the front door had weeds growing up through the cracks. “It’s a Persian,” the woman said. “Miserable breed, so self-centered.” She gestured, cigarette in hand, toward the cat. “I suppose Frances can call the fire department.” She tossed the cigarette onto the sidewalk and stepped on it.

Then she stared at me, waiting for an answer. She was probably in her sixties, dressed in a short tan coat and dark pants that came down just above the ankles. She looked like a skinny scarecrow: bright painted face, straw-yellow hair with black roots, skinny wrists and ankles. And the look on her face? Well, that was an expression I was more apt to get from kids my own age. She was daring me to do something perfectly ridiculous and dangerous: any cat that could make it up into a tree could certainly make it down without my help.

But it was an expression I found hard to ignore. It was the same look that once had me walking through Tideman’s Marsh when the eels were migrating through it. Slipping and sliding through the tall marsh grass, they’d looked like black snakes winding over dry land. It was pretty scary stuff. That was the expression I saw on her face: half contempt, half amusement. It said to me: “You don’t dare help, do you? You’re not a man; you’re just a boy. Weak. Useless.”