“Yeah, he’s telling me how horrible I was to leave and how he suffered with Wyatt and Barry. Did you sufferso much?” he asks, presumably to the cat. There’s another meow.
“What kind of footprints?”
“Little ones. Ooh, or snakeprints. Little slithery squiggles in your bathtub that disappear after two feet.”
A chill runs down my spine because I do, in fact, really hate this idea.
“I’m not convinced this is worse than a tiger,” I point out. “Tigers are the size of a small car or something, and youknowcats don’t give a fuck.”
Meanwhile, I can hear purring.
“If a tiger fell through your roof, you’d know it right away and deal with the problem within, like, hours,” Javier points out. “If all you had was a hole and snakeprints, it would tortureyou for days. You’d shower for a week wondering whether there was something lurking in there. Every time you went to the bathroom, you’d be on edge. After a while, you’d start thinking maybe you were crazy and it was just the ceiling, there was no snake. Then you’d tear the place apart trying to find it. But by then it would have moved on into the walls of your bedroom. It would be like that movie where the guy thinks there’s surveillance equipment in his apartment, so he destroys everything and the last shot is him playing his saxophone in his ruined living room.”
I have to process that for several seconds.
“I don’t play the saxophone,” I finally point out.
“There would be slight differences.”
“I would also call an exterminator or animal control as soon as I saw snake prints and a caved-in ceiling, rather than continuing to shower in there.”
Javier just sighs. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Madeline?”
“Not in my bathroom.”
“I guess that’s fair,” he admits. “Why were we talking about this?”
“To get your mom to renovate her kitchen so she stops bugging you about your dad.”
“A tiger’s probably a bad idea, then. I could probably cause a flood, but she’d get suspicious if it happened while I was visiting.”
“How hard is it to cause a flood?” I ask. I’ve got my eyes closed and my face in the sun, and it’s nice, even though I’m getting a little sweaty.
“Not hard at all.”
“Well, let me know if she starts bringing it up,” I say. “I bet I could help you out.”
There are several seconds of near-silence, with nothing but the low rumble of a cat purr coming down the line.
“Thanks, Madeline,” he says, and his voice is quiet and thoughtful and somehow he soundscloser, like he’s saying it right into my ear instead of into a phone a hundred miles away. I ball my other hand into a fist.
“Yeah, of course,” I say, like I didn’t just get all fluttery over two words. “We gotta stick together, right? Since we’re…” I nearly sayfamilybut holy shit, what a minefield. “Co-conspirators!”
“Yup,” he agrees, and then makes a surprised noise. “Shit, sorry—you’re in the middle of something. I’ll let you go.”
I want to tell him I don’t mind. That I like talking about animals in bathrooms while I’m standing in the sun with my toes in the grass, imagining him and his enormous cat lounging on a couch, one foot up and one on the floor, his head back and his throat exposed, stubble on his chin—but yeah, going down that path does nobody any good.
“Talk to you later,” I say instead, and we hang up.
They’reall talking about something when I quietly come back in and attempt to make my way back to my cushion as inconspicuously as possible.
It does not work.
“Madeline!” Emily says, slightly pink and a little too loud. Her wineglass is empty. “Whowasthat? You’re smiling!”
“I smile all the time,” I say without looking her in the eye.
“No, you’re, like. Silly smiling,” she says, raising her glass to her lips, then making a face when she realizes it’s empty.
