If he hadn't brought the cat home, his mother might have stuck around. As it was, she was gone by lunchtime, taking Kevin's younger brother with her. Kevin would forever after ponder what it meant that she'd left him behind but taken Rusell. He understood why she'd left his father and his older brother, but the fact that she'd left him? Well, much of life was a mystery, wasn't it? He'd always thought mysteries were fun--loved that show Unsolved Mysteries, anything with crimes and supernatural hauntings and aliens--but when the mystery happened to him? It wasn't so fun.

He'd driven into Detroit with some friends (or, at least, other teenagers he associated with) to photograph graffiti in train yards and abandoned buildings, to skate on the tracks and in the massive drain pipes. Nowhere they'd gone was reputable, and they'd spent the night in their cars, drinking and smoking weed and making out, before driving back the next day. But in the middle of all of it, when it'd begun to rain somewhere around one o'clock in the morning, Kevin had wandered off on his own. He'd found solace in the soft mist against his skin, enjoyed the cool sensation of it slipping into the front of his hoodie, down onto his collarbone. The quiet of the empty parts of the city at night . . . there was nothing like it. He was both too young and too old to know real fear, had passed through the childhood of monsters and strangers but hadn't yet met the adulthood of monsters and strangers; he was in that perfect glimmering liminality of adolescence, where the world was malleable and he could never die. So he'd ambled through the darkness, tagged a few brick walls and train cars himself, and then, while walking through a huge metal pipe beneath a short underpass, been surprised to hear a soft mewling sound echoing through the water drips and occasional traffic above. The kitten had been damp, fur matted with mud and a bit of blood, though it'd been unclear where the blood had come from. Kevin had picked it up, taken it back, and--against the cautioning of his peers--brought it home.

The moment he'd taken it into the house, he'd bathed it and fed it with a tenderness even he didn't know was in him. It'd turned out to be white, though the mud hadn't at first allowed him to make out that color, and it'd lapped up a bowl of milk and gobbled some leftover chicken so fast he'd hardly turned around before it'd finished.

He'd named it Arthur.

But his father hadn't wanted it, and his mother had. Their initial trivial argument over the kitten had turned into something far larger and deeper, each pulling out buried angers and regrets and long-simmering resentments as ammunition, adding hateful words to a tempestuous tangle, and by the time the woman had put an end to it by driving off with Russell, a cold, empty void had opened around the house.

In the end, the kitten had stayed.

Kevin lay on his bed with it, now; Arthur was asleep on the boy's chest, the kitten's purring a slight but constant vibration against his ribs. Rain had begun to fall again, right around the time Kevin's mother had pulled out of the drive, but it was a harder and more thunderous rain than the mist of the night before. He couldn't even hear his father banging away on the cars in the garage next door. The boy wasn't sure how his father felt about his mother leaving. The woman had left more than once, but she'd always come back. This one . . . it felt more final. And she'd taken Russ.

Staring at the ceiling, Kevin couldn't help but wonder what his mother saw in Russ. The boy was all of eleven, and he was already on a trajectory to turn out like Mike, their oldest brother. Why had she taken him? Kevin would've loved nothing more than to get out of Port Killdeer. He was seventeen, about to graduate that stupid high school, and had no prospects. His grades had never been great, so scholarships were pretty much off the table, but he'd hoped his mother at least would've helped him find a way to get financial aid so he could attend some college or university out of town. His father wouldn't do it, that was for sure. Kevin's dad wanted him to work in the shop, just as he'd allowed Mike to drop out of school and do. But Kevin knew that working with his father meant cementing himself to Port Killdeer for the rest of his life, and he was hellbent on getting out.

"Hell's wrong with you?"

Kevin stayed where he was, entirely familiar with his older brother's abrasive tone.

"You're sitting here, like you didn't just break this family?"

Facing the wall, Kevin felt free to roll his eyes. If Mike had been able to see him, it would've been problematic. He stroked the soft back of the kitten. Somehow, he felt brave. "This family was already broken."

A thick silence fell. It lasted a little too long. It was unlike Mike not to respond--the twenty-year-old was far more prone to overreact than underreact, usually using his fists or his feet or at least swearing. Kevin began to fear maybe his brother was sneaking up behind him, something sharp in his hand, maybe something heavy . . . but when he did finally get up the courage to look, no one was there.

Well, that was lucky. Unexpected, but lucky.

The kitten would need things, Kevin realized after playing with it for a while. It would need actual cat food, a litter box and litter, probably some shots. He needed to go talk to someone at the pet store. There was one in town, he was pretty sure, and it was within an hour's walk. Rain or no rain, he felt compelled to go. He needed to get out of the house, anyway; Mike's weird behavior had unsettled him, and his father was probably in a volatile mood. It might even be a little dangerous to stay put. Yeah, he had to go. He wouldn't even ask to borrow a car--he'd just walk.

Leaving the kitten in his room, hoping it would stay put in the box he'd found and lined with towels for it, Kevin managed to locate an umbrella in the downstairs hall closet. After putting on some boots and a thick hooded raincoat, he trudged out into the storm.

The walk was long, but it wasn't unpleasant. It was early December, and though snow was common as early as late October, the weather had seen fit to rain--again. Freezing rain was all they'd had for weeks, now. Kevin felt that maybe it had started the day of that kid's funeral--Ryan. He'd always thought that guy was an idiot, one of those people who flourished in high school and only in high school, who would graduate to realize the rest of the world wouldn't care for his asinine sense of humor and his overinflated ego. It wouldn't care about his football records or his homecoming king status. Not that Kevin had room to talk, really--he'd never done anything notable at all. At least, perhaps, Ryan had been fully living, embracing his youth and surroundings for what they were. And whatever his flaws, he hadn't deserved to die . . . not like that.

The resigned consensus was that Ryan had drowned. Apparently, his torso and head had never been found to confirm that, but they'd done autopsies on his arms and feet (or whatever parts of him had washed up on the shore), and something about his blood--Kevin didn't know what--had revealed he'd drowned. How that could be determined from some spare parts and where exactly the rest of his body had gone were anyone's guess. The lake was too huge, too deep to search thoroughly, though diving teams had scoured the coast, and now it was too cold to get out into it (not that anyone was still trying, at that point). Kevin had heard talk at school about Ryan's family doing some investigating, but his own peers didn't talk much about such things, and anything else he'd heard had been in passing.

Poor kid, no matter how obnoxious he was. It was a nasty way to go out of the world. The real horror of it hadn't quite affected Kevin; it was all more like a novel he'd read, one of those Unsolved Mysteries episodes--something that created a rippling disturbance across the surface of his being but didn't actually dip beneath the waters.

Full of wandering thoughts, Kevin at last arrived in the town center. He hadn't even used the umbrella, so the parts of him uncovered by the coat and boots (namely, his knees) were soaked, but that didn't bother him at all. Once inside, he was momentarily overwhelmed by the aisles of dog and cat food that all looked the same. For a small town, Port Killdeer took care of its numerous pets. But he soon found what he needed and quickly realized what a mistake he'd made in walking. It hadn't occurred to him that the litter would be so heavy; nor had it occurred to him that the bag of cat food would be paper. Nevertheless, he'd have to figure it out. Arthur needed both.

Kevin approached the checkout, where someone was paying for something. The two of them stood under the flickering fluorescent lights, the only customers in the relatively small store, their wet raincoats dripping onto the linoleum. Kevin didn't pay much attention to the other person until she dropped some of the change she was returned, and when he reached down to help her pick it up, something about her gripped him. She was younger than him, surely--probably went to the middle school, he thought. Her hair was a blonde nest of damp string, piled up on her head with some sort of thick plastic clip, and something about her seemed far too small for her raincoat, even though she wasn't particularly short. She returned his glance with almost cartoonishly wide, doe-ish eyes, and he realized when she turned back to the cashier that he hadn't been looking at any sort of startled expression but at her actual features, as they were.

Remaining silent after dropping the coins into her open palm, Kevin watched the girl pick up what he thought looked like a bag of dog treats. When she turned and left the store, he felt a strange annoyance, as if he'd missed out on something, so he was pleased to find that upon exiting the store, the girl was standing beneath the awning, looking out into the rain, presumably waiting for a ride.

The awning was small. Kevin stood beneath it, trying to keep a reasonable distance from the girl, while he opened up his coat to stuff the bag of cat food inside. She didn't seem to notice him at all, which illogically upset him, so when he finished, he asked rather stupidly, "Do you have a dog?"

Turning to him abruptly, the girl seemed to realize she wasn't alone. "What?"

Kevin nodded toward the dog treats in her hand. "For your dog, right?"

"Oh," she replied indifferently. "No." Her eyes went back to the rain.

What was different about her? Kevin couldn't help but feel drawn to the small thing. She exuded some sort of . . . of ingenuousness, of fragility, but she was in no way afraid of or even interested in him. Before he could think too much about it, though, a car pulled up, a navy mini-van, and the door slid aside while a man's deep voice called "Hurry up! You're letting in the water!" and she climbed in and they were off.

With a sigh and some unidentifiable emotion moving in his chest, Kevin picked up the cat litter and, foregoing the umbrella, started the walk home.

He thought of the girl most of the way; she kept his mind off his own soaked self and the slippery plastic handle cutting into his fingers as he switched the litter back and forth to rest his arms. He'd never felt so curious about another person and decided that he'd make a point to try to figure out her name, to find out if she did indeed go to the middle school. He'd do it discreetly, of course--no need to be creepy about it. What exactly he'd found notable about her was hard to say. That aloofness interested him, for one thing, and she'd had a strange look, like one of those elves in a fantasy movie or something, kind of pointed and airy and perpetually frightened. And what was that about not having a dog but buying dog treats?

When he arrived home, Kevin went all the way upstairs before removing any of his wet gear, knowing his father was sure to yell at him but not caring; he had a kitten to console. But Arthur wasn't in his box, and as much as Kevin coaxed and searched for him, the fuzzy little snowball-of-a-creature remained hidden. Kevin grew flustered, then anxious, and then, suddenly, he knew.

Out the room, down the stairs, into the rain, and toward the shop. Mike--that ominous silence! But maybe Kevin would be in time . . .

Passing along the side of the garage, Kevin ignored most of the random junk and equipment he saw rusting there, but something caught his eye a ways down, something white, and when he stooped to examine the open bucket that'd filled with rainwater, he was unsurprised to find Arthur floating facedown inside.