by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
She sleeps in the sun, oblivious to all she has wrought. Her white fur glistens in the light, a stark contrast to the rich wood floor beneath her. Occasionally the breeze blowing in through the open window catches her. She raises her small triangular-shaped head, ears up, and sniffs, delicately, as if the air had a bouquet, like wine, that she could accept or reject.
Then she puts her head down, sighs heavily, and falls back to sleep. Her body twitches --dreams, I know --but their content remains a mystery. Does she have nightmares about those days she spent roadside, waiting for someone to find her? Does she run from unseen predators? Cower from yelling voices?
Or are her dreams happy places, filled with hummingbirds and flowers and all the food she can eat?
I do not know and I do not want to know. I like to pretend she is happy here, even in sleep, untormented by memories that would bother humans until the day they died.
* * * *
The first time I saw her, she was chasing sandpipers on the beach. She was fat and sleek and pampered, so fat that she couldn't catch the birds --probably a good thing, since they would have pecked her to death if she had even come close to them.
For weeks after that, she haunted the beach like a thinning white wraith. I saw her on my daily walks, flitting in and out of the rocks, or sitting roadside and staring at the highway as if waiting for her salvation. At first I didn't even try to catch her, thinking she belonged to one of the weekenders who filled the beachfront houses every summer. By the time I realized she had been abandoned, I couldn't get to her to come to me. I spent weeks bribing her with food until she learned to trust me. The day she finally came close enough to let me pet her was the day I scooped her up, put her in the cat carrier I bought just for that purpose, and took her to our small town's only vet. He stitched up gashes on her sides and back, showed me old burns on her paws, and started her on a regimen of pink antibiotics that smelled of bubblegum.
She had no tags, no data chip in her shoulder, nothing to identify her at all. Just a baseball-shaped patch of black on her belly, and eyes so green they looked like they'd been made of emeralds. No one advertised for her in the papers; no one posted signs for her in the neighborhood. The Humane Society had had no calls from anyone searching for an all-white cat with a patch of black on her belly, and none of the vets for a fifty-mile radius had either.
For good measure, I called the local radio stations, reported her found, and sent notices to newspapers all over the state, promising to return her to anyone who could list her defining characteristics. No one did. No one even called.
She was mine --and at the time, neither of us was sure we liked the arrangement.
* * * *
I had come to the Oregon Coast with half the fruits of my life's labors, spoils --if you could call them that
--of a wretched divorce. It hadn't been acrimonious; it hadn't even been rude; it had just been heartbreakingly empty. Two people arguing over the remains of a life neither of them could live any longer, not with the ghost of their son still haunting the street outside their home. One particularly bad afternoon, I had gone outside with bleach and a scrub brush, determined to remove the skid marks from the concrete, but as I scrubbed, the liquid turned red. Suddenly Jesse lay on the road, his small form crumpled and twisted in ways no body should ever be. My wife's screams still echoed in the air, along with the squeal of tires, and that horrible, horrible crash, followed by a thud which, though softer, was somehow worse.
I dropped my scrub brush, and wiped my hands on my jeans, feeling his blood, sticky as it had been that hot summer day, knowing I would never get it off.
That moment --not the accident --was the end. My wife couldn't understand why I wanted to leave the neighborhood. She saw his little frame everywhere, marveled at his happy, smiling face, and heard his laughter. She found comfort in the memories.
I seemed to have lost mine --all but one.
She took the house, and we divided the rest of the assets. I moved to the Coast because Jesse could not haunt me there; we weren't going to take him to such a dangerous place until he grew older. Which wasn't to say I didn't feel him sometimes, just behind me, his soft sweet breath on my shoulder. I would turn, and he would vanish, like a trick of light.
But he was there. I always knew he was there, watching over me, just as I should have watched over him.
* * * *
The cat and I fell into a routine. Even though I left kibble in a large bowl, she demanded that I fed her twice a day. I complied. At first, those were the only times she acknowledged me. The rest of the time, she sat in my picture window, staring down at the street.
I wondered what ghosts she saw, what she was hoping for. Often I sat beside her, and stared as well. Sometimes the traffic vanished --the Winnebagos and dusty cars with strange license plates --and all I saw was a single illuminated streetlight, and a small boy, clutching a basketball. _Dad, watch this. Dad --_
The cat would flinch, and the image would disappear.
The cat and I would look at each other, as if we were checking to see if the other had had the same vision, and then we would stare once again at the street, watching other people speed to their lives as if they were so much more important than our own.
* * * *
Gradually, the cat acquired a name.
"How're you, Missy?" I'd say as I carried groceries through the kitchen door.
"Did you sleep well, Missy?" I'd ask when she would show up, threading through my legs, waiting for breakfast.
"What do you see, Missy?" I'd mutter when I sat beside her on our couch, for our evening stare at the street.
She never answered, but it got the point where she would look at me whenever something that sounded like "missy" came out of my mouth. I had meant the word as a substitute. Somehow it felt rude to call her
"cat" when she had a personality all her own.
And she, in turn, gradually warmed to me.
The thaw came in little ways: a chirruped greeting for our evening sessions; a small white face in the kitchen window, waiting for me to come home; the Saturday afternoon she fell asleep, her tiny head resting heavily on my shoe.
But she didn't purr and she didn't cuddle. She rarely came close, and only then to give me instruction --a meow that meant it was nearly time for dinner; a march to the cat box to show me that it was overflowing; a paw on the arm when I stayed up past midnight, to remind me it was time for bed. It was three months before she slept heavily; six months before she stopped frowning whenever I opened the door, as if she were afraid I would toss her out; nine months before I first heard her purr. But the purr broke something loose inside her. The next morning, I awoke to find her lying on my chest, her paws kneading my shoulder, my skin wet with drool. She shivered and shuddered and purred so hard I thought she was going to hurt herself. It felt, I later said to a friend, as if she were sobbing a year of pain and anguish away.
I wrapped my arms around her and held her, and she didn't complain or squirm away. In that moment, she became my cat, and I became her person, and neither of us would let anything change that.
* * * *
The people who abandoned her came back on a Tuesday. I heard rumors that some people were looking for a white cat on Wednesday, but I got confirmation on Thursday, from Missy's vet.
"Thought you'd want to know a couple came in here asking about a white cat with a black stomach," the vet said in a low voice, almost as if the couple were still there. "Said they lost her about a year ago."
"Why are they looking for her now?" I asked.
"They're back in town. They didn't realize she was gone until they were away from the coast. By then, they weren't sure where they had lost her." The vet's tone made it clear he didn't approve.
"So they just assumed someone took care of her?"
"They're checking," the vet said. "They made it sound like they've been looking all year."
"But you don't believe them?"
"Maybe one of them has," the vet said. "But Missy had a lot of old scars. She didn't get those from being lost."
"She was also fat and sleek when I first saw her. Someone obviously fed her and groomed her."
"Who knows? Maybe she was a stray before they got her," the vet said. "All I'm doing is letting you know they're here. I didn't mention you. I have their number if you want to contact them. But I'd think about it, I really would. Sometimes one half of a couple really loves an animal, and the other half uses that animal as leverage. I think Missy's a lot better off with you." I liked to think that too. But Missy did cast longing gazes at the street, even now. I thought she was still pining for someone, someone whom she really and truly loved.
Yet, for one year, these people never called. They never checked with the Humane Society. They never did anything that made me believe she was precious to them.
I never asked the couple's name, and I ignored the paper flyers that appeared all over town with a picture of cat --perhaps Missy --on them.
She was an indoor cat who had her own life now. She was mine. And she still spent her mornings shuddering and sighing on my chest, as if I were the only safe place in her entire world.
* * * *
Oregon coastal towns seem big to tourists because most tourists come here when the towns are stuffed. The hotels are full; the streets are full; the restaurants are full. But in truth, coastal towns are tiny things -the largest only having a handful of locals year-round. The locals all know each other, and usually that's a good thing. Sometimes it isn't.
Someone clearly told Missy's former owners about me. I have no idea who, even to this day, and I'm never going to try to find out. But less than a week after they blew back into town, Missy's former owners showed up on my doorstep.
Fortunately I was home. If I hadn't been, they might have taken Missy, and I would never have known what happened to her. Unlike them, though, I would have searched immediately, done all I could to find her, done everything in my power to make certain she was all right. I knew who was at my door the moment the bell rang. Call it prescience if you will, or perhaps simple deductive reasoning. None of my local friends used the bell. The delivery services left packages outside the door, and no one else came to my house.
Missy ran from the unfamiliar noise. I waited until she was gone before I pulled the door open. I have no idea what I expected. I had built these people up in my mind into something horrible --people who abused animals; people who didn't care --but they seemed normal. He was tall and thin, awkward in an out-of-date suit, and she was short and round, with grandmotherly curls and a delicately lined face. They were in their seventies at the very youngest, and that surprised me.
"Mr. Triwell?" the man asked. Polite, but then, you'd expect polite from someone of his generation.
"Yes?" I said, pretending I didn't know what this was about.
"I understand you have our cat."
The sympathy their appearance engendered, the momentary lapse in which I actually thought I could talk with these people, vanished.
"Your cat?" I said, pretending ignorance again.
"Yes." The woman stepped forward and peered around me, as if she were looking for Missy. Missy had been her cat, not his. I could tell from the longing in her face, the softness around her eyes. "We heard you found her. I --we --"
"We can pay you for your trouble," the man said.
"I'm sorry," I said, biting back anger. Where did they get the right to barge into our lives and pretend like nothing happened. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Arabella," the woman said, her voice a coo. She was answering my query and calling the cat at the same time. "We lost her last year, and even though I looked for her, I --we --couldn't find her. We've been searching everywhere."
"Really?" I crossed my arms, hoping Missy wouldn't appear. I blocked the woman's view of the door.
"Last year? Did you call the vets? The humane society? Did you do anything at all to help this cat survive a year outside?"
"So you do have her," the man said with deliberate obtuseness. "We'll take her now."
"I never said I had your cat," I snapped, and slammed the door shut. Then I turned and leaned against it. Missy hadn't appeared after all, but I felt an irrational fear, the kind that used to plague me after Jesse died. Maybe Missy had slipped out while I was talking to those people. Maybe she was going to get lost all over again.
Even though I knew that was nonsense. Even if Missy had slipped out, someone would find her. She wore a collar now, even though she was an indoor cat, and I had gotten her an I.D. chip. Missy would never get lost again.
Still, I searched for her and found her in her favorite hiding place --beneath my bed. She stared at me with wide eyes, and I could sense fear.
I just didn't know if it was hers or mine.
* * * *
They came back several more times, and I never again opened the door to them. I stayed home so that they wouldn't be able to sneak inside and steal her. For some reason, I put nothing past these people. I ran an antiquarian bookshop by appointment only, and during that week, I left it closed, canceling what few appointments I had. Missy had become the most important thing in my life, and I wasn't going to let these people, no matter who they were, take her away from me.
Even though I didn't leave the house, I learned several things. I found out that the couple lived in a giant recreational vehicle --the kind that is a moving home on wheels. Their names were Kilpatrick, and they had been coming to the coast for two weeks every summer for fifteen years. Locals did remember them. They also remembered a dog the couple had had --a small, yapping dog, the subject of many complaints. The dog did not return the following summer. From that point on, the Kilpatricks had cats --never one the same.
The woman doted on them. The man couldn't care less. Apparently, they had had Missy for two summers, since one or two of the other summer residents of the RV park remembered her peering out of the window of the RV's main bedroom long before she became a resident of the streets. Missy was peering out one of my bedroom windows when the Kilpatricks returned for the last time. She squealed and jumped to the floor, running for my bed. I saw her go by my study, her ears flattened, her body low to the ground. I knew someone was outside even before the doorbell rang. I debated answering. The bell rang again, and I finally went to the door. As I entered the living room, an envelope fell through the old mail slot and slid across the hardwood floor. I pulled the door open to see Mr. Kilpatrick get into an ancient Cadillac. He put the car into gear and pulled into the street without checking his mirrors, peeling off before I could stop him. My breath caught and my heart pounded. The man was a reckless driver on top of everything else. After Jesse had died because a driver had gone too fast down our suburban street, too fast to stop, to fast to even honk before Jesse rolled over the hood, smashed his window, and rolled off the back of the car, I had no tolerance for any kind of recklessness behind the wheel. I eased my door closed and walked to the couch where Missy and I spent our evenings. I sat down gingerly, turning the envelope over and over in my hands.
My name was written across it in precise, spidery writing. I slipped my finger under the flap, and found that it hadn't been well sealed. The envelope opened easily.
The letter inside was written on expensive but yellowing paper, with a law firm's logo embossed into the fibers themselves. The law firm's name, _Kilpatrick and Associates_, was printed along the top, followed by an address in Denver, Colorado. The address was so old that it had no zip code, and the phone number below used letters instead of numbers as its first three characters. The street address had been crossed out, leaving only the Post Office Box, and a zip code had been written in.
The letter itself was typed on a manual typewriter.
Mr. Triwell:
We have attempted to contact you many times. You refuse to see us about our cat, Arabella, whom you have cared for this past year.
While we appreciate the care you have given Arabella, she is ours, and we would like her returned. We will take this to court if we have to. You may not be aware that there is precedent in Oregon which favors the original owner of any pet in a custody dispute.
Please return Arabella to us so that we may settle this amiably. John D. Kilpatrick
Attorney at Law
My stomach twisted, and I clutched the letter closely. I was familiar with the case he referred to. People still talked about it whenever someone took in a stray animal.
Several years ago, a man found a Jack Russell terrier on a beach in Seaside. He took the terrier to the animal shelter. When no one claimed the dog, he legally adopted it. Months later, the original owner contacted him, claiming she had been out of town and a caretaker had lost the dog. The new owner refused to give the dog back. The case went to court, and the terrier went home with his original owner. Since then, two other cases had been tried over similar circumstances --one here in Seavy County -and had been settled for the original owners each time. It was clear that Missy had been theirs initially. I had no idea why they were fighting so hard for her return now when they hadn't seemed to care for her before.
I folded the letter in my pocket, and called my neighbor to ask her to watch the house for any suspicious activity, requesting that she call me on my cell phone should anything happen. Then I left, locking up tight, and I walked to the RV park near the beach access at the bottom of the hill.
* * * *
It wasn't hard to find the Kilpatrick's superdeluxe RV because it had been described to me so many times. It was parked near the mouth of the park, and was not plugged into the water or electric services. The RV looked like it was ready to leave, not like it was here for the long haul. Outside, a grill was cooling, the charcoal inside turning to ash. The metal rack on top was still covered with fat from the meat cooked for that day's lunch. An half empty beer bottle of Heineken leaned against one of the legs, long forgotten.
I mounted the metal steps beneath the pull-out awning, and knocked. After a moment, the door opened. Mr. Kilpatrick blocked my entrance.
"So," he said, "changed your mind?"
"I'd like to talk with you," I said.
He stepped aside to let me in, but he left the door open, as if h didn't trust me. Old scents of garlic, onions, and cooked meat filled the small living area. Mrs. Kilpatrick stood in the nearby kitchen, dry-wiping dishes. She set down a large cast iron skillet when she saw me.
"You have Arabella?" Her voice was soft and I heard hope in her voice.
"I don't have a cat with me," I said, still unwilling to admit that Missy was theirs. "What I do want to know is why it took you a year to start searching for yours." Mrs. Kilpatrick looked at her husband.
"That's not your concern," he said.
"It is if you threaten to sue me for custody of my cat," I said.
"Our cat," he said.
"We tried to look for her." Mrs. Kilpatrick's voice rose over his. He shot her an angry glare. "We just -couldn't find her."
"A year," I said. "No contact to the shelters. No contact with the vets. All the stuff you're doing now you could have done then."
"We did," she said.
"I checked," I said. "No one ever asked about a white cat with a black belly." Mrs. Kilpatrick looked at her husband, and her face went pale. "You said you called. You said --"
"Shut up," he said. "What matters is she's our cat, and we'll do what we can to get her."
"Why?" I asked. "It's clear you don't care for her. It's clear you never have. How did she get those burn marks on her paws, anyway?"
The question came out before I could stop it, and I cursed silently. It was a tacit admission that I had the cat they wanted.
"Burn marks?" Mrs. Kilpatrick's voice rose again. "She had burn marks?"
"Old scars on her paws," I said. The mistake was made. There wasn't much I could do to correct it.
"They had nothing to do with her weeks of starvation. They happened when she lived with her previous owner."
Tears filled her eyes, and before I realized what she was doing, she grabbed the cast iron skillet with both hands and swung it like a club. It hit Mr. Kilpatrick so hard that it made a smacking sound, like grapefruit dropped on concrete. He stood for half a second, his eyes suddenly empty, and then fell forward. I had to step aside to keep him from landing in my arms. His head thumped against weather stripping, his mouth open and dripping blood. The back of his skull was a mass of bone, black blood, and thinning hair.
His eyes were open. He was dead. I knew it as clearly as I had known Jesse was dead. Sometimes checking for breath, for a pulse, was simply redundant.
"You're a rich man, aren't you, Mr. Triwell?" Mrs. Kilpatrick asked. Her voice sounded reasonable again. In fact, if I weren't looking at her, I would have thought she was an extremely rational woman. But she was standing next to her husband's body, holding a skillet like a baseball bat, as if she were waiting for someone to throw another pitch. Her face was covered with a fine spray of blood, and her hair had come free of the tight bun that had held it in place.
I had no idea what she planned next. That, and sheer shock made me answer her.
"No," I said.
"The house, your bookstore. You have money." Her voice wasn't reasonable. It was flat. I had mistaken softness for calm.
"I suppose it might look that way." I waved a hand toward her husband. "We have to help him. Where's your phone?"
"We don't have one," she said. "We can't afford it. Just like we can't afford a parking space here. They're going to make us move. John can't manipulate them any more. He used to be so good at manipulating, after the law firm went under. But people don't see him any more, so they won't listen to the promises. They just see an old man now, and they all think old men are poor. And we are." She blinked, then looked at me. The tears still floated in her eyes.
"He just wanted your money." She sounded so disappointed. "I thought this time he was actually doing it for me. For Arabella. But I should have known after he kicked Daisy like that. I should have known he couldn't care about anyone but himself."
"Daisy was your dog?" I had to keep her talking while I backed out the door. She wasn't thinking clearly, and I needed to get out of there, needed to get help.
"My dog. The animals were mine. They always ran away. He said they hated me." A tear ran down her cheek. "All but Daisy. She wouldn't leave, so he kicked her. And kicked her. And kicked her. Arabella hid from him. But not enough."
My left foot found the second step, and I put my weight on it. Then I jumped to the ground, away from that skillet.
"I'm getting help," I said, and ran.
* * * *
I ran to the office, called the authorities and waited. They showed up a few minutes later. An officer stayed with me while others went to find Mrs. Kilpatrick. They arrested her and took his body away. Then they asked me why I had been in the RV, and I told them about everything but the letter, which remained in my pocket until I got home. Then I tore up the letter and flushed it down the toilet. Even without the letter, it wasn't hard to verify my story. Every local in town knew about Missy and the Kilpatricks' strange arrival one year later.
The police stated, and some psychiatrist agreed, that my arrival at the RV was a catalyst for years of repressed anger on Mrs. Kilpatrick's part. She had clearly loved her animals --they had been a substitution for her children --and her husband's abuse and murder of them had been more than she could bear.
When she learned that he had done the same thing to a cat she had loved beyond all others, as well as lied to her about trying to find it, then doing a reversal by setting up a blackmail scheme with me, she had snapped.
The blackmail was just a guess, of course. The lawsuit --which I never mentioned --probably would not have happened. Kilpatrick would probably have settled with me for an undisclosed sum. I had ruined his plan by coming to the RV and confronting him in front of his wife. As a catalyst, I did feel responsible. I found Mrs. Kilpatrick a good lawyer who was willing to work pro bono. Under his advice, she claimed she suffered from battered spouse syndrome, and pleaded to a lesser charge. She was given probation and placed in a resident care facility, the profits from the sale of her RV and her belongings providing her entry fee.
I intervened one more time, making sure that the home had a program that involved pets. People brought specially trained dogs and cats once a week, and apparently that was the highlight of Mrs. Kilpatrick's new life.
She asked me for Missy --Arabella as she called her --but I couldn't part with my girl. I knew there had been a bond between them; that had been clear in Missy's longing for her owner. But I also knew that victims of batterers often learn to batter.
I couldn't risk Missy's life with a woman who had murdered her own husband.
* * * *
I wonder what she would think of all this, my pretty little white cat with the black spot on her belly. As we sit at night on our couch and stare into the street, I think of ways to talk with her. But Missy, for all her intelligence, is not a child. She cannot tell me what she wants. She can only tell me how she feels.
She still runs when the door opens, and she's terrified of the outdoors. She avoids hot objects, and she purrs at the sound of female voices.
But she cuddles with me now, and in the mornings, she crawls into my arms, seeking comfort. I think she has nightmares of being alone, of being abandoned, of being tortured by the husband of the woman who loved her.
I have never allowed anyone to speak of the tragedy in Missy's presence, nor have I brought copies of the local paper into the house. I kept the radio off until the case ended. I know that cats aren't human. I know that they have different brains, different ways of perceiving the world. But I also know that Missy understands language --certain words and sounds, such as her name, mean something to her. I believe she heard Mrs. Kilpatrick call for her that day, and I believe that Missy remained under the bed.
Not even love could triumph over the hurts my poor cat suffered. And I do not want her to suffer any more. So we spend as much time together as I can manage, living our quiet little lives. She remains in her house, and I stay in my small town, letting our boundaries define our existence.
I watch her sleep and pray she is dreaming of happy things, of hummingbirds and flowers and all the food she can eat. I like to pretend she is happy here, even in sleep, untormented by memories that will bother me until the day I die.
--END --