Limbo

When you are dead certain things the living take for granted are knocked a bit loose and time is one of them. Imagine, if you will, an existence as a series of dreams, or, more precisely, of wakings: you fight with your wife and suddenly it's evening two weeks later, and you're still staring out that same window, the presence of another being like yourself the only thing tearing you from non-existence.

Ben Harmon has one of these moments, hears his name. "Dr. Harmon?" He does not move.

"Dr. Harmon?"

It hangs in the air. No longer possible to keep pretending.

"Yes, Tate." He knits his brows, massages his forehead with the hand that isn't holding a tumbler glass. "What is it?" When did he pour himself a drink? He turns around.

The dead needn't look dirty but Tate always does: pants a little too baggy under a sweater just slightly too small. Hair somehow just so: too askew to be a style. He doesn't wear shoes. He's scratching his neck and looks as if he's about to cry. But then, he always looks like that. "Come look."

Ben doesn't want to but he wonders now, about death. This is what he lives for, so to speak: see it through, Harmon. Otherwise you're standing at that window until someone wakes you up in two weeks.

Two weeks. Unless the realtor stopped changing the calendar. She's done that before. How long since that Spanish couple? She hasn't shown the place in a while.

And Tate's found a dead bird on the landing.

"There's a cat in the basement," he says. "She gets in through the window. The others don't seem to bother her, but I think–"

"Tate–"

"I think Thaddeus knows she's there, Violet might. Anyway I think it's a she because she had kittens and–"

"Tate–"

"And I think she left this here."

"So?"

He's flushed, slightly. He grins. "I think she knows we're here."

He kicks the bird down the stairs and sure enough a slight black form sneaks around the corner and faces them directly, bird in mouth ("See? She's staring right at us!"). Soon as you see her, she's gone.

—

The problem is Ben starts seeing her all the time. You don't realize how accustomed you become to the lull. The house makes you stay but there's weeks, months even, where it's like real death. There's a kind of oblivion, a kind of peace. And then a cat has a litter of kittens and the gang's stirred up again.

He sees Violet with the kittens sometimes, and Vivien more rarely. This he doesn't mind so much; ditto Moira, who he's come to like since his death (He has memories of her and his wife sipping tea. He doesn't remember this happening, merely that it did). What he does mind is Tate, who is somehow set astir by the litter in the basement. He sees him more and more coming in and out of the basement, blushing and ducking out of sight as quickly as possible. (More and more he realizes that's all he is now: a set of eyes fading in and out of existence. He used to check on the kittens, count them to be sure. Now he knows better.)

One night (in a fall that seemed to come after a winter) Chad is sitting on the back steps, smoking a cigar with the mother cat curled up in his lap. "Sweet little thing, isn't she." Ben doesn't know, she never let him get close enough, and says so. Chad arches a mammoth eyebrow and laughs. "You really don't know how to treat good pussy." A small, mean laugh.

Suddenly a creak: Tate has come dashing from the basement. You're only aware of him in his absence. Ben steps into the kitchen and closes the basement door; when he turns around, Chad has followed him inside.

"I used to check," Ben says, not looking at anything in particular. "Every time he went down there. Count the kittens. But they're always all there."

"I used to, too. It's funny I never saw you."

—

It takes Ben a month before he realizes one of the kittens isn't growing at all, maybe isn't even always there. To start with it's smaller than the rest, and has a habit of chasing its own tail and disappearing completely once it catches it. He sees Patrick playing with it on the back porch, and it falls off his knee and reappears on his head. He sees Tate, fishing it out of a trough by the scruff.

"He drowned."

The worst part ('the bitch of it,' Ben thinks) is that the boy seems so heartbroken, playing with the body's whiskers as the spirit bounds about his ankles and bites at his toes: "So he's here now too."

The cat quickly takes to spending most of its time at the foot of Violet's bed. Moira (god knows where she gets these things) leaves it out a saucer of milk every evening and tosses him scraps when she cooks. She enjoys the routine, these forays into consciousness.

"He's such a strange boy," she says with a frown, pouring Ben's tea and settling into her place at the table. "The boys like him enough, I suppose, but–"

"The boys?"

"Why, Chad and Patrick, of course! Chad thinks he's just cute as a button!"

Cavernous dimples, truly. "Didn't he," and here Ben burns his mouth on his tea and shakes his head before continuing: "Didn't he kill them?" Moira smiles thinly.

"Oh yes, of course. But look around you, dear. Who here hasn't?" She adds two scoops from the sugar bowl. Her hand shakes. How is she aging? "I saw Hayley just the other day–"

"Don't, Moira."

And so she doesn't, and sips her tea until something stops her.

—

The whole thing disturbs him. Maybe the cat drowned, maybe he was drowned, Ben isn't sure, but he doesn't like how he finds himself at that window, his own thoughts stirring him from slumber. Sometimes the mother cat is there; he is fairly sure she is still alive because she still catches mice, some of which disappear when killed while others do not. Who knew? Moira still made tea, still put out milk for the puss. Maybe dead cats do catch mice, and maybe in this house they never stop.

Whatever the case, the rest of the kittens continue to grow. Ben watches Tate watch the first of the bunch make it to the window, looking on levelly as another leaps heroically but cannot quite navigate the ledge. He nods, and makes for the stairs. Ben waits until the second cat has made it out. The last he'd seen the mother was in the attic.

—

The next he'd see her she'd be hanging from a tree. He doesn't realize he's standing at the window again and is as surprised by that as he was by the cat, swaying in the breeze. ("Dr Harmon?") At first he isn't sure what he's looking at but Moira runs in from the front and cuts it down. She carries it to the inside cradled in her arms as her ghost wraps herself sweetly about his legs.

"Oh, there she is," she says sweetly, staring at his feet. "Get the shovel, I'll find her some milk."

They dig her a grave in the time it takes to boil a pot of tea. Sitting down, Moira continues:

"I just don't know what to do about that boy," she says, blowing on her teacup before setting it back in its saucer. He's out in the yard, cutting the rope off the tree. "It's almost like he doesn't mean it."

—

And no, he doesn't seem to (those cavernous dimples). "I just couldn't let that kitten be a kitten with no mother forever," he says. "I couldn't live with myself." ('live' with himself, ha-ha.)

The worst part, (the bitch of it,) is that he's not lying. Tate means every word he says with a wide-eyed reverence to set a child to shame. You believe him. Ben suddenly believes beyond a shadow of a doubt that the kitten's death was an accident. The cat, though. That was the house. That was Tate.

The mother cat takes to Vivien immediately and seems to follow Moira around as she cleans. There are three mice of various mortalities at any time to keep her and her kitten amused, and Tate seems delighted at the result. "Look," he says, watching the mother catch and forcibly clean her eternal infant. "Look how happy they are. Now that's forever."

With a distant sort of horror Ben realizes that Tate loves this place; that this is his home.