What He'd Had to Bear

The sphinx cat sat on his father's bedspread, hairless and improbable as a creature from another world. James stared at it, remembering how his father—a bear of a man who'd never shown affection to anyone—had somehow loved this strange, naked thing. The cat blinked its enormous eyes, demanding nothing, expecting everything.

James felt like a zombie moving through the house. Three weeks since the funeral and he still couldn't cry. He'd performed the rituals: called the contacts, filed the papers, sat shiva with relatives who offered him casseroles and pity in equal measure. But inside, he was hollow—going through the motions of grief without the grief itself.

The family dog, Buster, followed him from room to room. His father had adopted the golden retriever in his final year, a concession to loneliness James had never acknowledged until now. Buster pressed his warm side against James's leg, and James bent to scratch the velvet ears, feeling a sudden, crushing weight in his chest.

"You had to bear him," his mother had said once, years ago, after one of his father's rages. "We all did."

That was the story they'd told themselves: the father as burden, the children who endured. But here was this hairless cat his father had stroked with those same rough hands, this dog who'd slept at his feet. Here was the sphinx-like paradox his father had never been able to speak aloud: that the man who couldn't bear to be touched had somehow needed it most.

James sank onto his father's bed. The sphinx cat crept closer, curled into the hollow of his hip. Buster rested his chin on James's knee. For the first time since the phone call, the zombie feeling cracked open. James let himself feel it—not the anger he'd expected, but something older and more complicated. Not what he'd borne, but what his father had carried. Not just the difficult man, but the lonely one who'd surrounded himself with creatures who couldn't speak.

Outside, a sphinx moth beat against the window, drawn to the lamp. James watched it, feeling his own heart beating against the cage of his ribs, alive and complicated and terrible.

He buried his face in the cat's alien warmth and finally, finally wept.