just follow the cat

Factor 14: perfect numbers

Weat's 1st year

the morning of his death

No matter who you are, you can only see what you are ready to see and only say what you are ready to say. It is like one number that divides perfectly into another. In that immaculate case, there is no fraction hanging off the decimal point like the loose end of a story untold. You know all there is to know.

Weat Quisling was "a beautiful baby." If Jolie said that once, she said it a dozen times a day. He had Sam's eyes, his dark eyebrows, a shock of beautiful brown hair, and his lips were as kissable as any she had ever seen.

In the days after Weat was born, Jolie carried her son around the house like a sentry doing rounds. Throughout the day, she would walk the same path regardless of whether the infant was awake or sleeping. And she talked to him constantly. When her father made a shushing sound, she told him that babies need to hear their mother's voice.

"It makes them happy," she said.

While she was almost certainly right about that, she would talk to him instead of sleep, talk instead of eat, and talk instead of bathing herself.

"He's so small," she said. "He needs my full attention."

She also fed him far more often than was absolutely necessary and she swaddled, unswaddled, and reswaddled him so frequently that the infant had to be dizzy. The blue swaddling blanket was always wrapped tight around the boy's small body and Mary Quisling wondered if the baby was also turning blue.

Within a matter of weeks, the house grew quieter. On some days, all you heard were Jolie's footsteps as she walked the stairways and hallways. During this time, Alba began to hide from her sister. After hearing Jolie repeatedly tell her how beautiful, smart, and good tempered her son was, Alba shut her bedroom door and only came out for meals or to leave the house. Shortly afterward, John and Mary were also spending much more time in their rooms. Mary played chess against herself and practiced the game alone each day. "I need quiet if I'm going to concentrate." John discovered how much he liked to read. Each day, he read the newspaper cover-to-cover, including all the advertisements. "You never know when you might find exactly what you needed all along."

In the days after Weat was born, Sam stayed in the basement almost all the time. On a whim, he removed the old sock that covered the bell beside his bed. The sock was dusty, filled with holes, and all stretched out. Although he rummaged through his collection of mismatched socks, none seemed like a good replacement.

"I'll deal with this later," he said to himself.

But the next time Flora pulled the string beside her bed to summon him, he was startled at the sound of the tinkling bell. That sound was so pleasant that he actually wondered why he had muffled the bell in the first place. Before climbing the stairs, he sat for a minute or two on the edge of his bed and listened. Everything on the first floor was quiet. He heard no one walking and no one talking. When he pulled back the sheet to enter his wife's room, he said, "It's so much easier to talk together when no one else is downstairs."

Jolie spent the morning of Weat's death watching the neighbors come and go from their homes on Austin Street. During her pregnancy, she became so familiar with their schedules that she could time her trips to the window almost perfectly to see them leave or return from work. She knew which neighbors had new clothes, which ones had gotten a haircut, and who was in a hurry and didn't have time to iron a shirt or a skirt. She watched their pets, too, so she knew which ones preferred cats or dogs and who had both. She even sensed when someone's pet might have died. Though she didn't send notes to those who lost a pet, she always thought that she should. More than anything, she liked watching the children on Austin Street. She had grown up here and recalled the same reckless fun of flying on a bicycle around a street corner without checking for cars.