Goodbye, Freddy
They’re putting Freddy down.
11, tomorrow morning.
My Freddy.
“That’s a very specific time,” I say to Mom via Skype.
“I’ll be home by then,” Dad chimes in from a conference room in Johannesburg. “We should both be here.”
What he is not saying is that I should, too.
“Who made the call?” I ask. “The vet or the psychic?”
“Telepathist,” Dad says, cutting Mom off before she can tell me that her guy speaks to all animals.
“Fine. Who made the call?”
“We did,” Mom says, squinting into her iPad. “The people who feed and bathe her every day because she can’t anymore.”
That’s not how I remember Freddy.
She was still a happy cat when I visited four months ago.
Lumpy, toothless, confined to horrendous knitted sweaters.
Just old.
*
The telepathist bothers me.
Not as a person, just professionally.
My parents first hired him to work with Rambo, their newly adopted Jack Russell who was scratching on the back door and peeing on all the chickens.
“Don’t you remember how he picked up on Rambo’s past trauma?” Dad asks.
“You adopted him from a kill shelter. I could have told you that he has a history of trauma.”
“Don’t be so close-minded,” Mom snaps.
It’s not that I’m close-minded.
It’s just that this guy also claims to speak with the dead, to have seen his own past lives and to read energy fields. Desperate people seek him out to answer the unanswerable. And it kills me to see my parents like that.
*
“What did the guy say about Freddy?”
“Freddy is upset.”
Dad presents this as fact.
Freddy has been a member of this family for twenty-one years. I’ve seen her tackle an ibis the size of a small child, survive a hit-and-run and decapitate a mongoose.
She’s not easily upset.
“What about?”
“She’s upset with you.”
“What did I do?” This comes out sounding even more offended than I feel.
“You didn’t say goodbye when you visited,” Dad reveals.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” Mom asks, using her serious voice.
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
They sigh and stammer. Judgment pending.
“You need to speak with her and make this right.”
“That’s even more ridiculous.”
Mom sighs. “He says it’s critical.”
This is what grates me about the telepathist: Without knowing me or having to prove anything, he can convince my parents that I have wronged the family.
“Freddy doesn’t need my apology.”
“Well,” Mom says, gathering herself to make a point, “I think it wouldn’t hurt to say something.”
Typical Mom and Dad—They’ve already decided what needs to happen to make things right with the universe. I am playing their game. So is Freddy, no doubt.
“Just thank her,” Dad says, choking up. “Start there.”
*
I had just turned fourteen when Dad surprised me with a cat for my birthday. Not a kitten. A hardened tabby with a mashed-in nose and two missing fingers. Or toes. Whatever the hell you call the digits on a cat’s paw.
Her name was not yet Freddy.
Socks, the name given to her by the good people at the shelter, wouldn’t do in our household. It was too plain. A name for a pet, not a family member. Mom had told me to think hard about renaming her. Your name matters. It must be spoken with dignity. Be loved and used to nurture trust.
I thought hard about her qualities.
The broken face. The compulsive slashing. The cruel past.
And named her after Freddy Krueger.
“She’s your cat. Call her what you think is right,” was Mom’s response when I explained my reasoning to her, a lifetime ago.
When I went back to my room and found Freddy kneading holes in my pillow, I decided that the name fit perfectly.
*
“Are we doing this?” Dad asks. “Are you saying goodbye to Freddy?”
“Yes,” Mom answers for me, walking me to her.
Moving me through the home I grew up in.
A house that I can smell 10,000 miles away, navigate blindfolded and think about constantly.
It’s already been six years since I left the country.
Since I left my great family for the US. A family of people who love relentlessly. Who embrace the ugliness within ourselves. Hold one another accountable. And hire psychic telepathists to speak with our sick animals, who are similarly treated like any other family member.
The years add up quickly.
A time will come when the amount of time I’ve lived away from South Africa will equal the time that I lived there.
By then, who knows how many goodbyes I’ll have to say.
I desperately want to believe that there will be few.
Freddy is the only living animal from my childhood. She is all I have left from that time.
And I hate to admit this: I didn’t say anything to Freddy when I left.
The telepathist is not wrong.
*
Mom props up the iPad, putting me face-to-face with Freddy.
She scrunches up her nose, looks at me, yowls.
And it feels like the bloody rapture in my soul.
“We’ll give you some time together,” Mom says, walking away and leaving me with Freddy.
Dad tells me he loves me and exits.
I take a deep breath, look my cat in the eye, and prepare to have the type of conversation that I’ll keep having as long as I’m a part of this family.