Cat’s Paw

Adieu

..--..

What now?

I’d be meditating in my room and the question would pop up suddenly. Sometimes when I am pouring milk into the cereal bowl. Sometimes when I am just sitting on the windowsill, gazing at the people passing below on the streets. The television, blaring with the rerun of an old comedy, remained unnoticed and forgotten.

So, what now?

I figured that I didn’t have the answer to that. I figured I should start looking for the answer from a more experienced, reliable source... from someone who had already gone through what I was going through. Samantha Mill’s ‘Guide to Recovering from the Loss of a Family Ghost’ stuck out on my bookshelf. It was a six-step program supposed to help you with survivor’s guilt.

Survivor’s guilt. I didn’t think it was just that.

Mill called them ‘withdrawal symptoms’.

In the two weeks that followed since the kidnapping, little happened. Life toned down, becoming a monotonous routine like another run-in-the-mill day of a hamster. But atleast the hamster was moving. And as long as you moved, you had to end up somewhere right?

I wasn’t moving. I was stagnant, caught in my own inertia of holding on to things of familiarity. I was stuck in the apartment, watching mind-numbing daytime television, chomping away on the healthy diet of Cheerios, chocolate bars and soda. Blame it on the withdrawal symptoms. Blame it on the stupid talk shows. Blame it on everything but the real reason. I didn’t like this strange place that I was in, a limbo between reality and illusion. It was like waking up from a dream, wondering whether the surreal events had happened to someone else.

But then, I’d look in the mirror and my short hair served as a reminder; a reminder of a prank played long ago by a poltergeist. The three of us used to pull straws to deem the master of the apartment. But now that I had got the short end of the deal, it felt overwhelmingly empty and I almost cheered for the showerhead to move again. I realized that I was on the verge of being pathetic. Because who in the world wishes for a showerhead to move? That wasn’t just pathetic but downright creepy. So, it was time to gather what was left of my sanity and a good way to start was by moving.

I'd visit Dory in the hospital a few times but ever since Jin and his gang got busted, I had little to worry about. Besides, Dory still had her own ghost to keep her company. Neil would visit too. But he only came to put the finishing touches to the deal we had set up.

For the first few days, the hospital was a hubbub, fluttering with press and media that tried to grapple on what exactly happened to the daughter of Victor Evans, renowned industrialist and millionaire, also my estranged father. But the secret remained behind closed doors... I found comfort in shutting myself in Dory's room, enjoying the sugarless coffee fetched by the headless boy ghost.

On one such day, Neil visited our little haven, scrunched up his nose at Dory like he loved to do and read out the statement from the police. The badass lawyer might have been the biggest kiss-up in the world but I finally understood why my father had kept him as his right hand sidekick all these years. The lawyer had single-handedly taken care of all the paperwork and got Felix released. The saxophone player was bailed out and he could now move out of the crummy neighborhood of Mercer. He was now given the lease to make a 360 in life and convert Raoul's apartment into the home Lily deserved.

That was probably the only good news I had heard all day. Next, the lawyer read out what was written in another sheet of paper, a reminder of our agreement.

To return home.

Just three words.

It wasn't a bad idea but I still needed time to come to terms with it.

Atleast, I still had Dory.

"So..." she trailed, sipping on an energy drink. One would think she was on a beach holiday rather than in a hospital ward.

I looked up at her questioningly.

"You've got a plasma screen TV?" she asked, looking at me with her hopeful doe eyes.

Material love was a besetting sin of my housemate. I bit back a chuckle while Neil looked reproachful.

"Of course, they do!” he admonished. “Mr. Evans is one of the wealthiest men in the world. Well, anyway, people like 'you' can't possibly fathom how lucky you are. It’s like casting pearls before a swine."

"Neil," I said crossly, glaring at him.

"What?" he asked innocently.

"Section 3, Clause 4."

"What about it?" he muttered, searching the document in his hand for the section named.

"You're never to pick/insult/gloat in front of my friends especially Dory."

Neil did a double take, found the so-mentioned clause in the signed document and sighed. "Fine, Miss. Evans," he replied in a subdued voice. He stuffed the papers back into his briefcase and turned to the door.

“I should be leaving now. I have one client in ICU with a broken neck, one in a chicken suit who wants to sue his employer for defamation and an Eskimo in Greenland wanting to sue his neighbor for stealing his fish... And they all want me to fight their legal battles. I am, as you can very well see, a very busy man and should be heading off now,” he announced with a relish, brushing us off in a business-like manner.

He scrunched up his nose at Dory before leaving the room. Neil liked making dramatic exits, so I had come to realize.

The sound of the door shutting echoed in my ears for a while. A long, nerve-rattling silence consumed us.

And so we meet again. Silence. My archenemy. How nice of him to drop by every now and then.

Since only the two of us were present in the room now, Dory turned and cast me a strangely scrutinizing stare.

"Nice try. I’m not going to melt under that look, you know,” was my only retort.

"Have you see 'him' since then?"

“I don’t know whom you’re talking about.”

“Right. And I am the queen of Sheba.”

She knew me too well. Or maybe I was just too boringly predictable.

"... No," was my feeble reply as I stirred the contents of my now-cold coffee.

"You think he is still... out there... somewhere?"

"Don't know, don't care," I replied in a nonchalant tone.

"Lois..."

"What?" I asked again, getting irritated. She was ruining my mojo of being in denial. And Lois Evans did not like people ruining her mojo... or her coffee. Whichever came first.

"Nothing,” Dory said in surrender, with a quick shrug of her shoulders.

“How is your head?”

“Dandy. I’ll be out in three days, so they say. I don’t mind staying longer though,” she said with a loud yawn.

I laughed and then I remembered something I had been waiting to mention to her for a long while. “Hey, you want to know what happened to Jin?”

Her hazel eyes met mine in regret. I could read her thoughts. It was a silent message that she had moved on and that there was no need for me to make her feel better about it. “It’s over, that’s all that matters,” she said solemnly. “Anyway, you’re going to start packing once you get home?"

"Yeah, I have to shift before the new tenants move in. I don't want to cause them trouble," I explained, getting up on my feet and setting down my half-empty mug on a discarded tray.

My friend squinted at me with one eye. "Right... You just bailed the guy out. He owes you helluva lot, come on."

"No, you’re wrong there, Dory. It was just part of a promise. And I kept it for the sake of Lily," I said with a soft smile.

There was a gentle knock on the door and an attendant walked in, carrying a bouquet of colorful flowers.

“Whoa, secret admirer?” I blurted out as the attendant placed the bouquet on the table and left humming to himself a pleasant tune.

Dory leaned forward to grab the card perched amidst the flowers. She didn’t even spare a glance at it and passed it to me with a loud, exasperated sigh.

“It’s the fourth time this week,” she grumbled, plopping up against her pillows and swinging her arms to get the circulation going.

I turned the card over and laughed when I read the message.

Get Well Soon, Darling.

With Best Compliments,

Jason.

“The paparazzi prodigy doesn’t give up, does he?”

..--..

The bell announced my arrival with a familiar ring as I closed the door behind me.

Pollyanna’s antique store was the same rundown shack as the last time I had visited. The gypsy woman was busy inspecting an oriental vase with a magnifying glass. She didn’t seem surprised to see me and seemed overtly happy that I’d come. She clasped my face in her wrinkly hands, which had rings of different stones adorned in every finger.

“You’re troubled,” she declared with a long sigh.

I smiled.

“Maybe I am, maybe I am not. Does it really matter?” came the rhetorical question.

She sighed again and sat down on a chair whose age was as questionable as hers. She leaned against it, gazing at the small light bulb that hung from the ceiling. The small mirrors in her red shawl reflected in the dim light, filling my vision with dots and colors. I blinked as I stood there, feeling lost among the old artifacts surrounding me.

“I came to ask you a question. Because... you’re the only one who can answer it.”

She sensed my awkwardness and smiled comfortingly. “As long as you don’t want to know how old I am, shoot away,” she chortled with a laugh at her own joke.

“Will you give me an honest answer... even if it sounds too absurd?” I pursued relentlessly.

“Have I ever lied to you?”

I took in a deep breath. “What happens to a soul when he’s finished his work here... among the living? Will he leave or can he stay?”

Pollyanna didn’t answer me immediately. She cast her eyes down and sifted through the sand in a bottle cap. The mirth in her eyes had died, replaced by an expression of sorrow and pity.

“Lois, my child...”

I cut her impatiently. “Just give me a straight answer, Pol.”

She looked up at me and shook her head in sadness.

“You should let him go,” was all she said. “Let sleeping ghosts lie.”

..--..

Kyle walked in through the ringing door with a stack of groceries in hand. He smiled bleakly when he saw me. I think he still felt a little disappointed that I had turned him down without giving him a chance. But ever the gentleman, he asked me to wait and fetched something from his room upstairs. With his twinkling blue eyes, he placed a beautiful locket in my palm and asked me to keep it, citing it was a good luck charm. I smiled and thanked him before leaving the little antique store on Janocek Avenue.

Even though I always felt that my social skills amounted to nil, I realized that I’d made quite a good number of friends in the short time I’d spent on my own. It was gratifying to think that people could actually like a person when he was just a nobody, stripped of green bills, credit cards, fancy cars and a social reputation. And because of that, my basic faith in humanity remained unaltered. Maybe that was the lesson.

Paul was still grumbling over the loss of his bumper but on the bright side, he was glad that Dory and I were moving out of the neighborhood. But we all knew that he would miss us... deep down. Atleast we hoped he would. He even decided to fix his car on his own expenses.

Hawkeye was still cooped up in the library but a few TV reports of how a levitating Sombrero was spotted in a pizza place left me with a wry smile. He did visit me once, asking whether I had a Frank Sinatra styled fedora to spare. But he had to leave disappointed when I told him I didn’t have one. Hawkeye’s was the start of a series of supernatural visits from his ghostly kin. Some headless, some bodiless, some missing an arm or a limb but they always came uninvited during the dead stillness of the night. Most wanted Raoul’s autograph (for what reason I couldn’t comprehend) and when they didn’t find him, left the apartment, grumbling and vowing to return again... at which point, I’d bury my head into the pillow in frustration.

Raoul, on the other hand, I didn’t see him after that night. But my mind always found itself wandering and I'd look for him in the strangest places. Everything seemed like a sign from him. The leaking faucet as I tried to watch the news. The bristling shutters due to an anonymous wind. The lights switching off on their own. The weight on my bed while I tried to sleep. The strange heaviness I felt in my heart.

..--..

It was on the second day of packing when my father dropped by in his regular disguise of a baseball fan. He was surprised to find me decked in dirty overalls, struggling with duct tape and an oversized cardboard box. He said he could arrange for the movers if I wanted. With a huff and puff, I shrugged off his suggestion. I was happy though. Happy that he’d visited and cared enough to ask for my opinion. Maybe, living under his roof again wouldn’t be half as bad as it was before. Atleast, I still had Dory.

People always had their own way of fixing things. Aunt Valencia used to chuck the problem out of the window. Broken teacup? Throw it out. Tardy maid? Throw her out. Extravagant gifts were my dad’s way of fixing things. If you asked me, duct tape was the answer to all of life’s problems. But there was one object that was immune to the wonders of duct tape. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t figure out a way to fix the kitchen counter. Not even a paint job could conceal the two words the poltergeist had inscribed on it. Fuck you. What a nice way to be remembered.

It was the third day of packing when my job there was almost done. After dropping the last of the boxes into a van, I went back to the apartment for one final glance at it. My knees went weak as I skipped upstairs and walked towards the half-open door.

Medium sized, two-bedroom apartment.

Near the city square.

Available for rent at a negotiable price.

I never thought I’d grow so attached to it.

The apartment hadn’t been just a shelter to the three of us. It had been a kindred spirit. It was the sort of place, which gave you a strange satisfaction when you arrived home after a lousy day at work. The kind of place where you could be when you had nowhere else to go. The place where every memory you dug up laboriously was more precious than any material possession you’d ever had.

It wasn’t just a crummy old place.

It was home.

When I walked into the apartment with a heavy heart, I was surprised to see a silhouette among the shadows. Of all the people I’d expected to meet that day, the writer of the ad had been the last one on my list.

He was dressed fairly with a white woolen muffler wrapped across his neck. The silver hair was gone and replacing it were the black locks that contrasted his attire so much. He was just sitting in the corner, trying to juggle a tennis ball in his hands while a soft, melancholic smile played at his lips. And those beautiful gray eyes staring at me with a curiosity unmatched. He looked peaceful and so satisfied that he’d have inspired any artist to paint a portrait of him in that precious moment.

“You look surprised,” Raoul said, his smile broadening into a grin.

My eyes widened. I stood at the doorway, looking flabbergasted, angry and a mixture of many other peculiar emotions. It took me a long moment to regain my composure before I closed the door behind me quietly and settled in to the corner opposite his. Pulling my knees up to my chest, I let my head recline on my folded arms. I continued staring at him, unable to cast my eyes away from his twinkling ones.

“You’re awfully quiet today,” he remarked, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “What’s wrong? Ghoul got your tongue?”

An involuntary smile broke out on my lips. “Nice makeover,” I replied with a grin.

He lowered his right hand to the floor and rolled the tennis ball towards me.

I looked at the ball with a raised eyebrow, wondering what he wanted me to do with it.

“I thought... “ I trailed hesitantly, sending the ball bouncing back to him. “... you wouldn’t come. I thought you’d forgotten all about us... about me.”

He leaned against the wall and let out an overtly dramatic sigh... something he’d probably picked from a show that Dory and I used to watch on Saturdays. What was its name again? For some strange reason, I couldn’t even remember it right then. It was as if an eternity had passed since then, letting me forget the trivialities of a lost time.

The shadows shifted with the sun until his face hid in the darkness. He toyed with the ball. “I won’t be able to forget you even if I tried, Lois. And trust me, I’ve tried so much.”

His confession led to the onslaught of an awkward silence. I fiddled with a strand of hair that had come loose from my bun and was hanging in front of one eye in rebellion. The living room was painfully empty and barren when stripped of all its furnishings. It was a different sight without the half-eaten pizza box lying in a corner, without the moth infested carpet and the springy couch.

Without the curtains to hinder it, the setting sun of the evening shone through the glass windows, illuminating the room in a radiance of orange and yellow. We sat there in silence for what felt like an hour, the shadows moving with the passage of time but we never did. His presence was strangely comforting, like an answer to all my self doubts.

I was the first to break the quiet.

“Can I ask you something?”

He gave me a small nod of his head.

“Are you going to leave... just like that?”

“Isn’t that what you always wanted? Getting rid of me. What happened to those ghostbusting books you always kept your nose buried in?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He let out another sigh and sent the ball rolling back at me.

“If you didn’t want to get rid of me, why did you help me?” he asked in a blunt voice.

I looked up at him and opened my mouth, ready to deny the accusation. But when my eyes met his sharp gray ones, I shut up and my attention retreated to the floor once again like a surrendered soldier. “Fine, it started out like that... The stupid bet. I was a selfish prick. I admit it. I got it, Raoul. But you had no right to disappear on us just because you’d got your vengeance. Was it really just about that? About using us as a cat’s paw?”

His silence surprised me. I mustered the courage to face the ghost again and found him looking at me in childlike naivety.

“It wasn’t,” was all he said at first. “I stayed... because I felt incomplete.”

“Incomplete?” I echoed in a whisper.

“Yeah... You see. There was this guy once, some called him a reckless idiot and others just wanted him dead. In his lifetime, he’d done his own share of grotesque, heartless things... This guy was just like Jin, Lois. Exactly like him. They were two sides of the same coin. And he was always worried that his little sister will find out one day, about all the shit he used to do. And she’ll hate him, wouldn’t she?”

“Raoul-“

“No, sshh. I am not done yet. But then this idiot died. But even after death had claimed him, he had nowhere to go. He was stuck in a goddam limbo. So, what does he do? He asks Death for a little bit more time. A little bit more time to get over this dreadful hangover that he’s been having. And that’s when he meets these two funny girls... one is a wannabe opera singer and the other... well, I don’t really know what to say about the other. At first, he thought she was a wannabe exorcist who kept poking her nose into everything she shouldn’t be. A pest. A really annoying pest who cared too much. But days passed and he realized something. Guess what that was?”

I broke into a teary smile. “What?” I echoed again.

“She was it. She was the cure to his hangover.”

He paused and I could feel the weight of that confession on my heart. His hand moved up to his collar and with the sleight of his hand, he lifted the lapel to reveal a red pentagram glowing on his neck. The sign of the Moirés that I had seen on his grave.

The sun had set, a calm dusk settling in its wake. Outside, the streetlights were switched on one by one until the room was lit in a faint yellow luminescence. I rolled the ball back at him, letting myself get lost in this silly game that we were playing.

“Do you feel complete now?” I asked him, cutting through the silence.

“Yeah...” he said. “There’s only one thing I wish I could do now. But I can’t.”

“And, what’s that?”

He winked but didn’t answer me. Instead, he let out a chuckle when his attention drifted to my shoes. “Your laces are untied, Sybil.”

I looked down and they indeed were. A pout flitted its way across my lips but I didn’t make any effort to fix them. What surprised me more was the name that he’d called me. It was painful to hear him say it... almost as if I’d never hear him say it again. A loud rattle in Dory’s room broke through the quiet. I turned to Raoul with raised eyebrows but he didn’t seem perturbed at all. The ghost was busy juggling the ball in his two hands, watching it keenly as it went up in the air and he caught it swiftly in one hand.

I rose and walked to Dory’s room. Before turning the knob, I looked at Raoul again. There he was... unmoved from his position on the floor, sitting like a tired king. It was his apartment, after all. His black hair glimmered against the faint lights and his dreary smile had reduced to a small quirk of the lips. Like he knew something, I didn’t. He turned sideways and blew a half-hearted kiss at me.

I rolled my eyes at the prankster and walked into what had once been Dory’s room.

My eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness and now found a box sitting innocently in the middle of the room. It was a small shoebox. It seemed familiar... strangely familiar. I hovered over it before leaning forward to open the flap. The contents sent a memory of a washed out afternoon spinning forward. I’d forgotten all about the little treasure chest that Dory and I had discovered in the back of her cupboard.

I took the faded photograph out of the box and recognized the smiling face of Lily and her tabby cat staring back at me. The harmonica was gone surprisingly but the music box remained untouched. With a smile, I took the music box into my palm and opened the lid. After a dull pause, the music of a piano flowed out, drowning the sounds from the living room. The same nostalgic tune. But something inside the box caught my attention. Something we hadn’t noticed the first time when we discovered it. There was a sliver of a velvet cloth sticking out. I nudged it and the false bottom came through. My breath got caught in my throat and my heart skipped a few beats. Under the false lid of the music box, sparkling gems glittered in the darkness, resonating to the music belting out. There must have been a hundred of them... I couldn’t even count how many.

In my attempt to share my excitement with him, I broke out into nervous laughter and rushed out of the room.

“Raoul, you won’t believe it. But I’ve found the-“

I stood in my spot, frozen and numb. The room was empty... all except for the ball that sat in the middle of the floor.

“Raoul?” I called out, my voice echoing in the emptiness.

He didn’t answer me. There were none of his signs either.

A wind bristled through the closed shutters. Nothing else.

I walked to the middle of the room and with a shaking hand, I picked up the yellow tennis ball. There were just two words scribbled across it in black ink.

Thank you.

I cried a million times that night.

..--..

The next day, the book of Samantha Mills stuck out of the trashcan. Aunt Valencia once told me that giving flowers to the dead was like giving them a compliment for not being alive. I didn’t agree with her and so, her words didn’t stop me from visiting his grave every second Sunday. Not hers but his. And I knew he had never been the mushy romantic type but still, I always brought red roses along.

He’d probably never appreciate them. He’d probably say I was too sentimental. But he’d understand why and that’s all that mattered, didn’t it?

Adieu.

It's been two years. If you’ve read this far, then thank you for sticking with the story even though I've always been late with updates. All the reviews have been appreciated. Thank you really. Hope you’ve enjoyed this as much as I’ve felt writing it. :)