The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [114]
“Do I look insane to you?” he asked the receptionist.
“Yeah, kind of,” she answered. “Do I?”
Reassured by this exchange, he sat down to wait and was distracted by a small “adoption center”—a few cages, actually, stacked on top of one another—that sat near the front desk and in which he noticed a cat that looked strikingly like Dante, i.e., small and gray, with the same bottle green eyes. Martin tried to ignore a nauseating certainty that like any obsession, his new one with Dante could be sated only by adding more to the mix, so he pretended to inquire casually with the receptionist about the cat, which he soon learned was a female; like Dante she was a Russian Blue, a year old, or slightly younger.
“And nobody’s adopted her?” Martin asked incredulously, as if the streets were not teeming with stray cats.
“Not yet,” she answered and added that the cat in question had been brought in from a Dumpster in Park Slope a few months earlier along with a litter of kittens.
“Where are the kittens?”
“They’re gone.” She shrugged. “Nobody wants a mother—she’s ‘used’—and she’s a little stunted from having kittens so early.”
Martin expressed renewed horror at the callousness of the world.
The receptionist laughed at him. “If you’re so upset, why don’t you take her?”
“I might,” said Martin, trying to sound like he needed to be convinced. But in a gesture to his more pragmatic side, he resolved to take a few minutes to ponder the idea.
He leaned back in his seat and observed an older woman sitting across from him who had four carriers in front of her, each with a different pair of eyes peering out. That’s me in ten years, Martin thought morosely as he noted her disheveled trench coat and the frayed navy blue scarf tied around her head, although on second glance he decided she was not inelegant and was even pleasantly reclusive behind a large pair of sunglasses. There was something familiar about her, and as he tried to figure out where he might have seen her, she pushed up her sunglasses and addressed him.
“You really should have more than one,” she stated, having obviously overheard Martin’s conversation.
After his earlier experience with Hank, Martin was not unprepared to recognize his dead mother, Jane, or an older version of her who had somehow moved to New York City to live with cats. It was not just her voice he recognized but her frank blue eyes, which had not aged at all. As he had done with Hank, he resisted the urge to shout or perhaps weep—or otherwise to demand an explanation for why this was happening—and instead considered how best to address her. Nor could he completely ignore a slight annoyance at the intrusive nature of the advice, which as much as he wanted to hear he had not exactly asked for.
“How many—how many do you have?” he managed in what he feared might come off as a needlessly restrained, if not paranoid tone, after deciding that—at least to start—it would be best to keep the conversation on point.
“Seven.” Jane spoke softly but also slightly rolled her eyes as if slightly mocking herself—or possibly him—just as she used to do. “They’re my children now.”
“I can appreciate that,” Martin responded more affectionately, and then he told her how he had come to adopt Dante. He considered how much easier it was to talk to his mother as an adult and felt gratified as they spent a few minutes discussing cat food and—of all things—flushable litter. Then he remembered all that they had never said to each other, and unlike when he was a teenager, he saw no reason now to hide anything from her. “I’m never having real children,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”
If his intent was to surprise her, her placid smile contained no trace of anything but acknowledgment; she clearly knew what he meant. “I think you’re being a little too literal,” she replied. “Parenting is as much about responsibility—and not just for someone else—as it is about conception.”
Martin resisted the impulse to argue with her, to tell her that, except for a few