The Thaw

“The cat is dead…why doesn’t he just wait until spring?”

  Pam sighed deeply, sliding her mug of tea away, and lowering her face into her hands at the kitchen table. She didn't need her friend's words to confirm the fact that her husband had clearly lost his mind. They could both see him outside through one of the kitchen windows, toiling away at the edge of the family pool. It was early March, and the temperatures were still frigid during the night, although the days had been very sunny. No snow had fallen, despite the deep freeze the region had been experiencing.

  He had been out of sorts for a month now, after the disappearance of the cat one evening, the tragic ending only serving to heighten his grief when the cat was discovered frozen into the ice of the pool. The young male had obviously fallen in somehow and drowned. They had owned different pets through the years, but for some reason, this black male cat had been his. It followed him everywhere, like his shadow, waited for him to return from work, and lounged with him on the sofa as he watched television. No day was complete until the cat had climbed up on the bed at night to 'tuck Daddy in'.

  Pam had watched as he fretted day after day when the cat didn't return suddenly. It had seemed to drag every day down, her husband distant and staring out the window in the kitchen toward the backyard almost every day when she arrived back home from work.

  He had become short fused, talking through possible scenarios as to where the cat might be, or what might have happened to him. Pam had tried to be patient as he spoke, trying to understand where he was taking these thoughts. She had loved the cat as well, but for the life of her, she could not unravel why her husband could not let go, could not accept the death of his feline friend.

  Her gaze turned again out the kitchen window, watching as he surgically cut down through the ice in the pool with a chainsaw, its motor revving loudly as ice chips flew around him.  She looked away quickly, trying not to wonder what the neighbor must be thinking as he cut into the frozen surface of the pool to remove the cat's body.

  It had been in there for a month for Christ's sake!

  Perhaps it was all about having some kind of closure, she thought hopefully. Maybe once he was able to give the cat a proper burial, all of this would end. She had seen him endure many things which seemed much tougher than this simple occurrence before, but for whatever reason, this had left him damaged. He was broken. Whatever hold this animal had on him, it was obviously much deeper that she had been aware of.

He hadn't even wanted the wretched thing. It was a kitten when they first went to see it, a rescue at a family member's home. Her husband had complained about the idea of taking it in.

But over the next months and years, the cat and her husband had become pals. Inseparable. The young kitten matured, and became like a household fixture, his daily routine not shaped by humans, but adhered to none the less. Hemingway was the cat's name, 'Hemi' for short.

  Hemi would lay on the man's newspaper on a Saturday morning as he read the headlines over his first coffee of the day, purring and occasionally swiping playfully at his hand if he tried to move the cat to turn the page. The two of them were glued together when the man was home. While he was away at work, Hemi would laze about, usually napping away the late mornings in the sunshine of a window sill, or tormenting the family dog in the afternoons.

  This obsession with extracting Hemi's frozen body from the pool gave Pam the creeps a little, and she tried her best to ignore it. But out he had gone, fetching the chainsaw out of the garage, all the while wearing a strange, almost feverish look on his face, and mumbling incoherently to himself. He had not slept well in days, and Pam knew it. He had tossed and turned during the last few nights since discovering his beloved cat's corpse frozen into the pool ice, and Pam couldn't ever remember seeing him this fixated on something. She had dared not say anything negative to him about the whole affair, instead trying to offer fairly muted support to him. Most of the time she said nothing about it at all, and if she did have the chance to talk to him, she tried to stay away from the subject, and focus on something else.

  But it hadn't mattered, and here he was, refusing to accept his pet's fate, as though he could perform some act of God, and bring him back. She felt helpless in the matter, but was getting more worried by the day about her husband's mental state. He had no love of the cold, so seeing him out beside the frozen pool in sub-zero temperatures was rather disturbing to her. He was definitely not himself.

  "Maybe he should get the cat stuffed." said her friend absently, watching the ice chips fly from the chainsaw.

Pam had now reached the point where outside opinion was no longer welcome. She poured the remainder of her tea into the sink, glad to turn her attention away from what was happening outside.

"Ok, don't mean to be bitchy, but I have to get dinner going..." she said, rubbing her temples to add emphasis to her subtle point.

Her friend took the hint, finishing her last bit of tea, and placing the mug on the counter.

"Ok, sorry. I should have been going before this. I will catch up with you in the morning." she said.

  Pam smiled her best at her as she turned for the door, knowing that it would do little to keep the woman from pestering her immediately the next morning at work.

She exhaled again very deeply, and returned to watching out the kitchen window.

The chainsaw had suddenly stopped, and she watched in horrible fascination as her husband pulled a large block of ice, containing a blur of black in it, from the frozen surface of the pool. He struggled the large block over the side, dropping streams of water droplets which caught the last rays of the afternoon sun. For an instant, her eyes focused on the block, and the inert carcass of the cat frozen within. It was a terrible sight, one that she wished she could un-see. Even encased in the ice, it looked as though the animal was walking. It sent a shiver up her spine, and she turned her eyes away again quickly. ‘Why was he doing this?’ she thought to herself. The pose that the cat was locked in was probably while he was desperately trying to swim through the slushy, freezing waters of the pool in his last moments, she realized in horror. Pam felt bad thinking about it, not only for the poor feline, but for what her husband was putting himself through.

   She stepped away from the window, trying to stop the thoughts swirling in her brain, turning to preparing the evening meal for them in a vain attempt to block the images of what she had just observed from her mind. Hopefully he would simply bury the cat. Then things would finally get back to normal.

  Dinner went on in near silence, her husband’s eyes lowered but distant. He was lost somewhere with his thoughts. He spoke little, and ate about the same. Bedtime was similar, and Pam watched a movie on the television while laying in bed, to distract her from thinking about the fact that he had come to bed without barely an ‘I love you’, rolling over to go to sleep. Tomorrow will be better, she thought. Tomorrow was a day off for him. He would bury that animal, and become who he was before all this had happened. She melted into sleep herself, leaving the TV going at a point in her movie that she would have trouble remembering the next morning.

  Pam returned home from work the next day relieved to be finished the work week, looking forward to the weekend, and perhaps some work in the yard to start preparing her flower gardens for the warmth of spring. Today had been sunny and warmer, a hint that green grass and new blooms would soon be coming.

  She stepped off the driveway, and around the corner of the garage toward the house, her purse slung over her shoulder, a jacket curled in the crook of her arm. The side door of the garage was open, and she quickly peered in, seeing her husband sitting on a stool next to his workbench. He had  a cold beer in his hand and that distant look still on his face. She stepped into the open doorway, and he looked up with that strange feverish look in his eyes. There was a piece of disassembled medical looking hardware on the workbench.

  “Hi.” she said, “what’s going on?”

  “Just working on something. Something I read about on the internet.” he replied quietly.

  “Did you bury Hemi?” she asked.

  He hesitated. He lowered his eyes again suddenly.

  “Not yet. The ground is still frozen.” he said.

   Pam knew this couldn’t be true. She had stepped gingerly across the small piece of lawn just moments ago next to the driveway, to avoid getting her shoes muddy. The frost had definitely come out of the ground. She let go of the thought, instead asking the obvious.

  “So where is he?”

  Her husband slowly raised his hand, pointing at the noisy old refrigerator next to the doorway where she was standing. It was his beer fridge. Realization struck her and her eyes widened slightly in alarm.

“You put a dead cat in the fridge??” she asked incredulously, her mouth dropping open.

“In the freezer.” he corrected.

  She did not utter another word, fear creeping over her.  She just turned, wanting to get into the house and away from this scene as fast as possible. Once inside, she set her things on the kitchen counter and simply stopped dead, her mind racing. He was going mad. He must have been. ‘Who puts a dead cat in the freezer, and for WHAT??’ she thought.

  She turned around, conscious of something running. It was the laptop they shared, on the breakfast counter. The browser was open to a strange page with a ton of diagrams on it, and an email in another window. She stepped slowly toward it, focusing on the device in the pictures. Phillips Heartstart. It was a defibrillator. But this web page was some kind of torn down, modification of the same medical device she had seen on her husband’s workbench. Her eyes turned to the email, from a man in Haiti. It gave instructions on some strange procedure that her terrified eyes could only skim in absolute horror. She left the kitchen, heading straight up to the bathroom, locking the door behind herself as she entered. Leaning on the vanity, she looked at herself in the mirror, almost startling herself at the paleness of her complexion. A tear streamed down her cheek as she tried to calm herself, tried to understand what was happening. But her thoughts were a jumbled, fractured mess. She sat down on the toilet, worried that she might faint, trying to breathe normally.

  Later, she stood in the kitchen, lost as to what to do. She held a cigarette which had almost burned out, the long, curled ash still hanging on. She had quit smoking six months before, wrestling with the withdrawal in an attempt to make her lifestyle healthier at the urging of her husband and friends. But this evening, she really needed it. It had been several hours since she had come home, and she had managed to bring herself back down to Earth. Her husband had not come in from the garage.

  Pam looked up at the laptop screen again, wondering why all of this was happening. Was this what happened when a person became so lost in grief that they became disjointed from reality? Had his mind suddenly let go when he had found Hemi frozen into the pool? She stepped back over to the laptop again, this time holding the power button down until the screen went dark.

‘What was he doing? Did he really think this would work?’ It was crazy to even think about the details of what she had seen in that email. A word from the text flashed into her brain. Re-animation.

  The kitchen door opened, and she swung around, startled. It was the man she knew as her husband. He seemed different. His eyes were bright, and his facial expression was cheerful. He took a swig of his freshly opened beer, and actually began whistling as he stepped over to the fridge, looking inside absently.

“What should we have for dinner, babe?” he asked.

  She could only stare at him, wondering if this was some sort of joke being played on her. He seemed like he had always been, and didn’t even give her a strange look about the lit cigarette still in her hand, nor the smoke wafting through the air in the kitchen.

  “Uh, I don’t know. I thought maybe we would order in?” she stammered quietly, watching his every move. She waited for questions about the smoke. But they never came.

  “Okie-Dokie.” he replied happily, taking another sip of beer. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, just order whatever you want.”

  With that he disappeared again out to the garage, and Pam could see him enter the side door through one of the kitchen windows, the interior of the garage glowing in warm light in the gathering dusk outside. ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  She cracked open the window, listening for any sound coming from the garage, but heard nothing. This couldn’t be happening. She stayed put, trying to decide what she should do, or whether she would do anything at all. Her nerves were on fire again, and she reached for the cigarette pack she had kept in her purse for the last six months, now unwrapped. Pam lit another cigarette, hauling the smoke in deep as she tried to relax and shake the crazed thoughts from her head. ‘It was medically and physically impossible’.

  She could no longer take it. This was all some sort of insanity, some strange creation in either his mind or hers. Was she the one who was going mad? A cold sweat moistened her forehead, and she walked out the kitchen door toward the garage.

  Nearing the open door, where the light from inside traced a perfect slanted rectangle on the concrete walkway outside the garage, Pam could hear her husband saying something. He was talking to someone. The cheerful sound of his voice made her shiver suddenly, and she stopped, uncertain if she wanted to proceed further.

  Forcing herself forward, she peered slowly inside the door. Her husband was seated on a stool, beer in hand, looking down at something near floor level. She took another step forward, sucking in frozen breath at the horror that met her eyes. At that moment, the stink of death filled her senses, and her mind threatened to come unhinged as she watched the cat, still dripping wet with scraggly fur, sitting just feet in front of her husband. It listened to his every word, unmoving. Pam finally unlocked her lungs, screaming long and loud in the panic and terror that gripped her, as the black abomination on the floor turned its dead gaze in her direction, letting out a quiet, brief meow…