R: Finding Missy

Chapter: Kid, Finding Missy

We hear them as we're walking by a dumpster in the parking lot of our
apartment complex. The sound is so low that I can barely hear it over
the gravel crunching beneath our feet, and at first we can't figure it
out where the sound is coming from. Then my sister pushes back the lid
on the big metal trash can and there they are, three kittens, so tiny
that it looks like their eyes are still closed. They are spread out on
top of the garbage, only their heads moving as they meow, and they look
so out of place that it takes me a second to see what's going on.

"Where's the mama cat?" I say out loud.

"I don't know," my sister says, "She should be around here somewhere."
What we don't say is that the mama cat is probably nowhere around here.
If she was in the dumpster the kittens wouldn't be all over the place.
And if the mama cat was within hearing distance, she would at least be
hanging around the dumpster.

Anyway, both of us know where these kittens came from. A Vietnamese
family, one of the few families in the apartment complex with a fence
around what the landlady calls a courtyard, has a cat that just had
babies. I kind of recognize the kittens, the same meows I'm hearing now
drawing me to the fence just a couple of days before, where I climbed
up and peeked at them. I brought my sister back to the fence to see the
cat and her kittens. She pulled herself over the edge of the fence to
see them just like I did, but that time we were caught. An old woman
yelled at us in a language that sounded like chalk on a blackboard and
meant nothing to us but "go away." So we left, and now we're staring
down at what must be the same kittens but no mama cat, me
half-believing that the old Vietnamese woman is going to appear out of
nowhere and start yelling in her crazy language again.

"They must have thrown them away," my sister says, "I can't believe it.
The poor things."

"What should we do?" I ask. I can tell by the look on my sister's face
that there is now way she is leaving the kittens in the dumpster. I
wouldn't leave them, either, to be picked up by one of the noisy truck
that comes too early in the morning and causes our windows to shake. Or
to die of hunger, or be squashed by somebody throwing an old TV into
the trash.

"Get that box," my sister says, pointing to a cardboard box on my side
of the dumpster. I pull it out. It has an oily stain on one flap but
it's usable. "Now, climb in there and hand me the kittens. Be
careful."

"I'm not going in there," I tell her, "It's dirty. There's germs,
probably roaches. Why does it have to be me?" Also I wish my little
sister were here, who is small enough to be lifted in and out of
dumpsters. But she is off playing with some other kids in the complex,
all of them black and noisy and too little to notice her blond hair and
light skin, which I know will later make them leave her out of whatever
games they're playing when they run screaming and laughing between the
apartment buildings.

My sister rolls her eyes and points at her feet. She is wearing her
flip flops, the thin rubber soles hooked to her toes by pieces of
plastic that leave red marks on her skin. Her feet are dirty, like they
always are, the black between her toes so dark that her toenails look
almost clean. I have seen these flip flops fly off of her feet when she
walks on the gravel parking lot, or tries to walk on grass. In fact
there doesn't seem to be anything she can walk on where the flip flops
stay on her feet, and I know she's right. The sneakers I'm wearing
would be a lot better for digging around in the dumpster.

"Can you believe they would do this to these poor little things?" she
asks, making me feel guilty. She is good at this, making me do things
like steal her some fingernail polish or potato chips when I don't want
to. Or sitting on the couch hunched over, moaning about what she calls
a woman thing while I take the dishes out of the dishwasher for her.
Once she put the bright green dish soap by the sink into the dishwasher
and caused the entire kitchen and part of the dining room to be covered
in bubbles, then convinced me that I should tell my mother that I did
it. "Because she doesn't get as mad at you," my sister told me,
scooping up bubbles and throwing them into the sink, "And if she gets
mad she might not take us somewhere to eat."

But I would have gone into the dumpster anyway, so I use one of the
side bars to lift myself up, and then carefully throw one leg over the
edge. Like always I'm surprised at how easy it is to do something like
this, climbing into a dumpster, or up onto the roofs of the carports
around the apartment complex. One minute I am just walking past a
dumpster that is as tall as I am, and the next minute I'm inside
it.

"Careful," my sister reminds me, but I know I'm far enough away from
the kittens, so I drop down into the trash. There is a wet thud
underneath the dry trash I'm standing on, but I keep my balance. When I
crouch down to grab the first kitten, I see another kitten, tucked away
under a piece of trash and hidden from above. It hits me that this
kitten is already dead, even if it just looks like it's sleeping. I
lift up the piece of paper covering it and poke it with my finger. It
feels soft, but its stomach doesn't go up and down.

"What are you doing?" my sister asks. "Hand me one." I drop the paper
back over the dead kitten. I decide not to tell my sister about it, and
suddenly I don't want to be here at all, in this dumpster with these
kittens who don't have a mama and are sure to die. The smells around me
become more rotten, and I feel closed in while the kittens cry louder.
Somewhere in the back of my head I hear a door slam, and the skin
across my chest gets tight. I look down, and the gray and white striped
kitten has crawled over to my shoe. I pick it up, its little claws
digging into my fingers, and I stand up slowly to hand it to my sister.
I start thinking about being found in this dumpster, that somehow we
might get in trouble, and I move faster. When my sister has all three
kittens I pull myself back over the edge of the dumpster and drop down
to the ground, feeling relieved and something else, something back
where I heard the door slamming in my head.

"They're starving to death," I tell my sister, who starts to say
something but then doesn't. Instead she looks at me for a second, then
picks up the box of kittens and starts walking back to our apartment,
her flip flops slapping the asphalt. I follow, waiting for her to trip
on the shoes that I suddenly hate because of how cheap and flimsy they
look. I hate the buildings rising up on either side of us, with their
muddy patches of grass and rusty metal railings along their fronts that
are full of cobwebs and trash.

And I hate the family that threw away the kittens, the old woman who
shooed us away when all we wanted to do was see the mama cat's new
family. I feel dizzy, and want to sit down, but I keep following my
sister. When we pass the apartment where the girl lives who slapped me
because I said her face looked like the front of a Pontiac car, I start
to feel less mad, because I can still feel that sting on the side of my
head, and because it dawns on me why she slapped me.

At our apartment, my sister puts the box of kitten in her bedroom
closet. Her closet has the most clothes and unopened boxes from our
move here, so this is a good choice. My mother probably won't notice,
at least not until it's too late. My sister gets bossy, running water
over a dirty pan from then sink and then heating up milk. She finds an
old blanket and stuffs it into the box while I watch the kittens try to
stand on their wobbly legs, their crying getting louder and
louder.

"I don't think we have a lot of time," my sister says, "Can you go to
the store and get an eye dropper? Like that one we had from the
chemistry set? I can't find it." That she has asked me to go, instead
of telling me, is a surprise.

I run to the store, a U-Totem that's only a block from our building.
The woman behind the counter knows me, and tells me hello, and then
goes back to reading her magazine. I pretend to look at bottles of
aspirin, holding them in my right hand while my left grabs an eye
dropper hanging from a metal peg sticking out between the shelves. It
has a picture of a smiling baby on it. I put it in my back pocket, set
down the aspirin I'm holding, and walk to the candy aisle. As always, I
buy exactly five cents worth of candy. We've learned that it's best to
buy something even when our pockets are full of whatever it was we came
in for originally.

At home my sister takes the eye dropper and sucks up some of the heated
milk with it. The pan of milk sits on her nightstand, on top of the
magazines she reads about teenage singers and actors. She has taken the
gray and white striped kitten, a girl, out of the box and holds her in
her lap. She squeezes one drop at a time into the kitten's mouth, and
the kitten drinks it. She does, and I can't believe it. Her claws are
stuck all the way into the fabric of my sister's shorts, but my sister
doesn't complain.

"Let's call this one Missy," she says, looking up at me. She refills
the eye dropper, and I wonder if naming the kitten, after taking her
out of the dumpster and feeding her milk, will be enough.

But then my sister's eyes grow wide, and she leans into the kitten.
"She's purring! She's purring!"

I lean over, and sure enough, Missy's insides are sending out a tiny
rumble, like thunder that's miles away. Her whole body seems to shake
with it as her paws knead my sister's leg.