Off Balance

The car ride to the animal shelter was only five minutes, but to Billy it felt like an eternity. At five years old, he squirmed in his graduated car seat. In the next year, he was on his way to leaving the constriction of car seats forever. Or so he had been told in response to his endless whined complaints.

“Mommy. Are we there yet, Mommy? Are we almost there yet?”

In the drivers seat, in her light blue hospital scrubs, his mother tried and failed to stifle her laughter. “Just a minute, Billy. Cool?” She met Billy’s green eyes in the rear view mirror with an honest smile.

Billy squirmed one last time and turned towards the window. “Yeah. Cool.” He couldn’t shake his own smile even despite his childish frustration. Billy’s mother eased the gold minivan into the animal shelter parking lot and parked close to the entrance. She unlocked the doors and slid from the car. Billy followed close behind in his tiny cargo pants and orange shirt. It was his favorite shirt, his favorite color.

Billy was too small to see over the front desk, so he took to pretending to read the “grown-up” magazines scattered on the various coffee tables. He skimmed the pictures of airbrushed puppies and celebrities with ingenuine smiles looking for a flash of color or some type of game. His mother laughed easily with the animal shelter worker, a tall mustached man, as she filled out forms with a bitten blue pen.

“Billy, they’re ready for us now.” Billy took his mother’s hand in his. He liked the way that his tiny fingers fit perfectly into the deep ridges of her hand. They followed the worker as he unlocked and opened one concrete door and then another. Inside, it smelled undeniably like cat pee, something Billy had never encountered before.

“Mommy, what is that awful smell?”

Before Billy’s mother could answer, the worker interjected.  “That’s the smell of animals. You’re gonna have to get real familiar with it soon, boy.”

The room was long and lit like a greenhouse. The two long walls were lined with two rows of cat-sized cages. Billy strolled down the aisle with his arm outstretched so that his fingers caught momentarily in the holes of each cage. He looked at the cats and they looked back. Most were curled in the back of their cages on top of their newspaper bedding, faces wedged into the cement walls. Some came forward to meet his hand with their wet noses.

“Most strays are tabbys, as you can see. Is there any particular color you are looking for?”

Billy froze with his fingers intertwined in the cage of a large graying tabby. He looked to his mother for permission to speak. She knelt to his level and looked into his eyes. A strand of her straight blonde hair fell onto Billy’s shoulder. “What are you thinking, bud?”

Billy hesitated, but was reassured by his mother’s nod. “Orange.”

“You want an orange cat?”

“Yeah. Orange.” Billy watched his mom’s usual smile expand slowly. “Cool?”

“Cool,” she said, straightening her legs and looking towards the worker. “You tell him, Billy.”

The worker folded his arms.

“I want an orange cat.”

“Well, Billy, you’re in luck. We do have one orange cat. He’s a kitten actually. I think you will really like him.” He turned towards the wall and scanned the cages for a minute before unlatching one on the top row and pulling out a scrawny orange creature. Billy’s eyes lit up. “This is Boots. She’s a little shy at first. You need to be gentle.”

He slid the kitten into Billy’s arms and it squirmed like Billy in his car seat, claws catching in the fabric of Billy’s polo shirt. “It’s okay, Boots.” He stroked the top of her head and her velvet ears until shaking turned to purring. “You’re coming home with me to live with my mommy and daddy. Cool?” His mother watched with tears running down her face.

__

With Billy and his kitten hidden in his room down the hall, Billy’s mother slammed her keys down onto the spotless counter. They bounced loudly and landed next to a clean stack of yellow plates. She poured herself a cup of water and sipped, listening for Billy’s father’s footsteps. And they came.

“Hey, hon. How was work?”

Billy’s mother flinched under his kindness, for she knew it was temporary. “It was alright.” She remained with her back towards her husband, clinking her glass against her teeth.

“Did you and Billy get dinner? You’ve been gone for a while.”

“Yes,” she said because it wasn’t untrue. She had driven Billy and his kitten to Duchess on the way home. Billy had tried to feed Boots vanilla ice cream from his spoon.

“Where did you guys go?” The innocence in his voice cracked her solid exterior.

“Uh.”

“Annie?” He grasped her thin shoulder in his capable hand and spun her to face him. “Is everything okay?”

She used the silence to gather her thoughts. “I got him a cat.”

Billy’s father recoiled. “You what?!”

“Billy. I bought him a cat. I thought he needed a friend.” Billy’s mother clasped her hands tightly by the hem of her scrubs.

“He’s got plenty of friends at school. And you know how I hate animals.” He spoke quickly, his hands slicing the air. He waited for her response but became impatient. “Why didn’t you ask me first?” His hands were rigid by his sides. “Did you hear me?” He grabbed her shoulder again, this time jerking her into him.

“I’m sorry.” She looked past him, at the family pictures on the fridge across the room. She willed Billy’s father’s white-sweatered form to disappear from her peripheral vision. But, like always, he stayed.

“Yeah? Well sorry doesn’t cut it. I want that thing out by tomorrow morning when I leave for work. Either that or I’ll get rid of it myself.” He was practically snarling.

“I can’t do that to Billy.”

“You can and you will. You hurt him the minute you put such unrealistic dreams into his little head. Do you want him to grow up spoiled? Naive?”

Billy’s mother smiled sadly. “I just want him to grow up happy.”

Billy’s father softened at the catch in his wife’s voice. He loosened his grip on her shoulder and leaned into her, sliding his hand around her waist. “Me too,” he whispered, easing his head into the crevice of her neck.

__

The car ride home from the hospital was an uncharacteristically quiet one. As a second grader, Billy had taken to constant meaningless chatter. The car was uncomfortably hot, but Billy’s father made no move to change it and Billy didn’t object. He watched the minutes pass slowly on the green analogue car clock.

When the van finally reached the driveway and thudded to a stop, Billy waited for his father to get out of the car. Or at least unlock the doors. Two minutes passed. Billy’s father sat with blank eyes and his hands unmoving in his lap. Billy leaned forward in the way he had seen his mother do and unlocked the car. After sliding open his own door, he walked around to his fathers side and stared through the window. Billy’s father was still in his stained work clothes. His hair was streaked with pale yellow paint.

Billy swung the door open and reached down to release his father’s seat belt. His father tumbled out of the car and onto the pavement, catching his fall with his outstretched arm. And he stayed, hunched over for a very long time. Eventually, he straightened in many small, painful movements. Billy followed close behind as he shuffled into the house. His father stopped to lean on the countertop.

In front of him, tacked to the refrigerator was the picture, taken on the family’s annual trip to Niagara Falls, Billy’s mother holding a much younger Billy in her arms mid-laugh, encased in the protective arms of Billy’s father, sporting a wide grin. The three of them are clad in yellow raincoats that they had bought the year before. Even Billy, mouth open, tiny fists clenched tight, had his own gear. Behind them, thousands of gallons of water were suspended in their never-ending cycle.

Billy’s father’s eyes filled hopelessly with tears. Billy looked at his father’s face, nodded, and walked quickly to the fridge. He took the picture in his sticky hands and studied it for a moment. He knew what had to be done. He flipped it over and took tentative steps across the kitchen, narrowly avoiding Boots’s sleeping form. “Billy?” And Billy answered. He creaked open the trash drawer underneath the sink and placed the photo inside, ever so carefully.

__

Boots was dead. Warm rain left sticky streaks on Billy’s window. He traced them slowly with his finger and stopped when the smooth glass gave way to painful squeaks. Billy sat atop his unmade bed but kept his knobby knees above the blankets. On his bedside table was an untouched cup ringed in hard water stains and his fourth grade homework folder. On the floor, competing for space with his handmade rug was a pile of dirty, orange cat fur-coated clothes. Shirts, pants, socks in a monotone of greys, blacks, and browns. When Billy slid from his bed, khaki pants bunching into thick bundles at the back of his oversized knees, his bare foot met a slobber-encrusted toy mouse with a deflated squeak. He just couldn’t bring himself to throw the toys away.

        The hallway reeked of silence. Billy’s clumsy footsteps created uncomfortable bursts of sound that were absorbed by the ridged wooden walls. He ran his bitten-down fingers against the dents in the wood as he walked until he reached the kitchen where a burnt glass pan of box-made lasagna had been nibbled away at the edges. There, he grabbed a spoon from the silverware drawer, which jammed as he tried to close it. After leaning his whole blue-shirted body into the drawer, Billy let his bony arms fall heavily to his bony sides and slid his feet across the white tile.

        The lasagna was cold and rough, struggling as it was shoved down Billy’s throat. He swallowed and winced, tears springing into the tired corners of his eyes; in the absence of his mother, he’d gotten used to occurrences like these. He blinked them back and swallowed once again before tossing his spoon into the already-full sink. It met a stack of yellow plates with a threatening crash. Billy winced again.

        “Hey! What was that?” The words were thrown carelessly from the TV Room, a room that used to be the family room. Apart from the artificial glow of the TV screen, the windowless box was unlit, harboring an old dog crate and a collection of empty beer bottles in the corner. Since Thursday, it had become a crate of its own. Billy’s father never left; Billy never entered. It was more than an unspoken rule.

        Billy’s chair screeched against the white linoleum underfoot. His crooked legs moved in long, sloping steps towards the beat-up doorway to the TV room. “I said, what was that you ignorant bastard of a kid?” Billy forced his trembling fingers into his pants pockets. Inside, the sweat from his hands squirmed like the lukewarm leftover water from a closed water park slide.

        “It was an accident.” The words barely left his mouth and his attempts to speak were reduced to kitten-like whimpers. They bounced off his father’s stubbly cheeks in the form of empty, destructive snorts of laughter. Tears fell from Billy’s tight line of a face into the creases of his shirt. He jammed one of his quivering hands into his tangle of dark curly hair, grasping desperately at nothing at all.

        Recorded laughs surged through the room with the soft light of the TV’s flailing characters. Billy’s father only smiled. A barely smile, though. A guilty smile. The color in his face came only from the whizzing pixels in front of him. At the commercial break, he swiveled his bulging neck to look for his son. And he found him in the doorway, eyes cast towards the ground, powerless against the force of grief and gravity. He found the fading tear stains in the deep creases of his 11 year old face. Billy’s father watched Billy’s gaunt body shake in wracking sobs and he understood.

        “Come over here.”

Despite Billy’s father’s fat and Billy’s years of isolation, the door to the TV room worked as a mirror, the reflection anchored by their identical green eyes. Billy moved quickly towards the decaying couch and stopped short in front of his father’s sprawling form. There was no room for him amidst the faded pink fabric. The TV show had resumed playing, so Billy was left to slouch towards the edge of the couch with his fragile arms folded protectively across his chest.

As the show faded into a commercial break again, Billy’s father brought his fist to the center of his Cheeto-rimmed mouth and unloaded the remnants of the day’s smoke into the thick crevices between his fingers. Billy took tiny steps backwards towards the doorway until his foot met a creaky floorboard and the noise temporarily overcame the drone of the TV. Billy’s father, having recovered to the best of his abilities from his coughing fit, unfurled his fist and removed it from his lips, letting it hang in the air like an unanswered question.

“Just come over here, kid.” Once again, Billy quickly twitched towards the couch. He watched in disbelief as his father gracelessly shifted his position to allow for a Billy-sized portion at the end of the couch. Billy slid himself into the spot and wrapped his alienated arms around the armrest. His thumb snagged in one of the many tears that Boots had cut with her claws. He rubbed the fraying fabric between his thumb and pointer finger. Stuffing fell onto the floor in cloud-shaped clumps. Billy fell onto his father like a dead branch in the woods meeting a thick layer of leaves.

“Alright, alright.” Billy’s father struggled for a few tense moments before giving in and collapsing underneath Billy’s hurting body. “Alright.” Billy nestled into the folds of his father for the first time in years. He felt the large man’s heartbeat fall into sync with his own and thought carefully before he spoke.

“She was a good cat.” Billy fingered the collar of his shirt anxiously.

“Good cat my ass. Look at this couch. It used to be the nicest thing in this shit hole.”

Billy’s chin trembled. He said nothing in response.

His father was laughing already, spit flying messily onto Billy and the back of the couch. “What a great cat alright. The only great part about that little orange fuck is that it is finally dead. I don’t have to buy that stupid food for it anymore. What a fucking waste of money that was.” He trailed off lazily. Billy refused to meet his eyes.

“Sorry kid. I know you loved that thing.” And Billy’s ears were bombarded by yet another round of phlegmy deafening laughter. He straightened in his seat and took deep breaths to collect himself. Eventually, he shuffled gradually towards the doorway and then the hallway. The sound of the TV, some commercial for an updated Easy Bake Oven, clattered against the emaciated walls.  In the TV room, Billy watched his father reach for the beer bottle next to him and raise it to his lips before setting it down carefully next to the last cracked picture of his wife.

“Goodnight,” Billy whispered, but Billy’s father had already succumbed to another episode of lung-wrenching coughs. Billy turned quickly, entered his room, and shut the door tight.