“You’re probably wondering what happened to my compassion, or maybe you’re not because you’ve already figured that part out. Compassion is a Christian virtue and yet the Old Testament preaches an eye for an eye. You know about Christian virtues, don’t you, Grace? To err is human, to forgive is divine. But I’m not divine, Grace. I’ll leave the forgiveness part up to the divinity, if there is one. Who said “Vengeance is mine?” Oh yes, it was the Lord. But sometimes he might need a little help, don’t you think?”
“You’re crazy,” I said, but still I couldn’t resist. “And how did I fit into your insane plan?”
“Have you ever heard of swatting?” Tim leaned forward, his bony elbows resting on his knees. He seemed twenty years younger. Alert. Enthusiastic. “Have some fun with it. Call the NYPD anonymous crime reporting number. I’ll give you a phone that can never be traced. Tell the police you’re the housekeeper and accidentally came across five kilos of cocaine hidden in the back of Carly’s closet. Give them specific details so they can’t ignore it. I can provide very specific details of the house. They’ll figure it out sooner or later, but in the meantime, it’s guaranteed to mess with Carly’s head.”
“How do you know details about Carly’s house?” I asked. “And wouldn’t the housekeeper lose her job or worse once Carly found out? Don’t you at least care about the housekeeper?”
“That’s child’s play,” Tim said. “For a child.” A chill ran up my spine. I was the kid sister, Tim had said. Was this the designated role he’d planned for the kid sister? “Carly’s housekeeper is on my payroll, although she doesn’t know it’s me. I give her more in a month than she’d earn in ten years of working for Carly.”
“So that’s your big plan?” I asked. “Carly will brush that off once it’s straightened out. It won’t even phase her.”
“No, that’s not my big plan,” he said. “That’s my little plan for you, if you want to join forces. Just to give you a taste. My big plan has been methodically put together over many years. I’ve documented every wrongdoing—every instance of insider trading, every Securities & Exchange violation, every time Carly’s taken a shit in the wrong bathroom.”
“And you’ve done that how?”
“Please, Grace, don’t embarrass yourself. My company’s the largest cyber security network in the world. We provide cyber security for the NSA. I’m a passionate man. A driven man. I don’t ever stop until I’ve gotten what I want. And what I want is to destroy Carly. But I want to do it right, so I bide my time.”
I stood up and reached for my purse that was hanging over the bedpost. “Destroy her?” I said. “You should marry her.”
Tim didn’t move to stop me. He pulled his phone from his pocket and smiled. “That’s something I hadn’t considered,” he said. “Might not be a bad idea.”
“Goodbye, Tim,” I said. “Please don’t ever try to contact me again. And please take your money for the clinic in Guatemala and shove it up your ass.”
“Can’t do that, Grace,” he said. “It’s an irrevocable trust.” His phone was at his ear, ringing for someone. “Simon,” he said. “Can you please take Miss Templeton home?”
“Did you do it?” I asked, pausing at the door. “Set me up for the herpes talk in health class?”
“Of course.” He smirked.
“Why me?”
“You were the only one gullible enough to fall for it.”
“And the others? The guys who shoved you out of the locker room? Why just single us out?”
“I dealt with them years ago.” Timothy winced, but his eyes remained hard. “They’re ants. Not like Carly. No one’s like Carly.”
“I won’t ask what you did,” I said. “I don’t even want to know.”
“That’s good because I didn’t plan on telling you.” His phone beeped with an incoming text, and he glanced at the screen. “Simon’s waiting for you,” he said. “Goodbye, Grace.”
The following day, I drove to Sacramento where Mom was visiting for two weeks. After that, she’d be moving to Guatemala to supervise the rebuilding of the clinic that had burned down in an electrical fire—the reconstruction completely funded by Tim’s irrevocable trust. Anything I had to say to Mom, I had to say now. And Luke—waiting for answers from me for most of my life. He was confused by me, by my inability to hold onto happiness the way he could. I sensed that I was his biggest frustration. His failure to locate the thing inside of me that was broken and fix me was his biggest disappointment. But he never stopped trying.
I drove in silence with no music to distract me, only Maggie was by my side.
It was too late, wasn’t it? I’d asked her.
Maybe not for you, she’d said.
I had to answer that question before Maggie could rest in peace.
Mom cooked, and I cleaned up from dinner. Although her voice and step were as youthful as ever, Mom was getting old. That realization was hard to face. Mom always being around was a given, until that night when it wasn’t anymore—too much had happened in the past year. My nephews were both out of the house, busy forging new identities as independent young college men. Soon they’d have families of their own. Linda was involved with a late-in-life career as a financial planner; Luke, nearly fully gray-haired but handsome as ever, was getting closer and closer to the time when he could retire with a pension. Life was coming full circle.
Once the dishes were done, Mom and I joined Luke and Linda in the family room. Bob the cat had been gone for three or four years. He’d lived to be a very old cat and I missed him.
Linda poured wine for us, Mom at first refusing and then agreeing. “I don’t usually,” she said. “But in Grace’s honor tonight.” She took a sip and then placed it on the coffee table where it would remain untouched.
I took a deep breath and steeled myself. It was my time now. I knew I had the stage if I wanted it.
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Maggie died.”
“No, Grace!” Linda got up and came to where I was sitting. She hugged me and pressed her cheek against mine. “I’m so, so sorry. I know she was your best friend.”
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” Mom asked. “I’m awfully sorry, Honey.” She scooted closer to me on the sofa and took my hand. Hers was as soft as an old glove. Pale. Nearly translucent.
Luke looked at me and then inclined his head toward the ground. I think he sensed more was coming and was waiting to see what it would be.
“Maggie was my best friend,” I went on. “But we had a terrible secret . . . and I just don’t want it to be a secret anymore. Maggie didn’t want that either.”
Luke raised his eyes level with mine. Linda left my side and perched on the arm of his chair.
“A secret?” It wasn’t the moment Mom had been hoping to share with her children that night. It wasn’t the moment any mother would want for her child. “What kind of secret?”
And so I told the entire story. Carly. Jane. The inevitable power struggle between the two titans, and how Maggie and I, caught in the middle, vacillated first one way and then the other. The weak ones who allowed Carly to thrive. I told of the awful thing I’d done to Kerry and implied, without telling, that Carly and Maggie had similar misdeeds. I told of the night we waited on the side of the road so Carly could have it out with Jane. How we’d been drinking. How we’d startled Jane and caused the accident that led to her death. How I’d scrambled down the hill, seen the blood on the window, and allowed Carly to pull me back to her car, how we had stopped at a pay phone to alert the police. I explained how this terrible secret had eaten away at my soul—rendering happiness an impossibility in my life. How I was afraid that no matter what I did going forward, I could never honestly consider myself to be a good and decent person. I would never be worthy of the family I’d been given, I explained. I’d always known that.
I told them almost every
thing, leaving out the prurient details of my brief sexual encounter with Carly and my misguided feelings of love—Mom could never understand that if she lived another two lifetimes. I left out the annual letters, later annual emails. I left out everything about Tim’s involvement. And I couldn’t bring myself to tell them the name of our sisterhood—the Kitty Committee—such an innocent and silly name for the incubator of such evil thoughts and deeds.
“We should never have left you at such a young age,” Mom said once I’d reached the end of my confession, punctuated by several minutes of heavy group silence. “We shouldn’t have skipped you ahead. You were too young. You didn’t know what you were doing. It was all my fault.” Tears drizzled down the thin, wrinkled skin of her cheeks, but I just shook my head, over and over again for every excuse she made on my behalf. I stood up abruptly, as though sitting was somehow complicit in lessening my guilt. Let them see me for who I really was. Let them open their eyes to a reality none of us in the room wanted to admit.
“No, Mom. It was me. I made these decisions. I did these things.” And then I told them the story of how Jane had jumped into the ice-cold water of Lake Tahoe to save my life without a thought to her own safety. “Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Jane was only a kid herself, but she did this thing for me. For me, Mom. Not because she was older, but because she was good.”
Mom covered her face with both hands, as though willing the vision from her mind. Luke rose from his chair and stood facing me. He put two steady hands on my shoulders to ground me to Earth.
“You did a terrible thing, Grace. Jane didn’t deserve that, even if you couldn’t save her. But your past doesn’t define your future unless you choose to let that happen. I see that in my job every day. People who come out of jail and turn their lives around. It happens.”
I looked helplessly up at him. My cheeks were wet, but I didn’t remember crying. “Maybe I should’ve gone to jail. Maybe that would’ve helped me to move on.”
“That was never going to happen,” he said. “No DA would have charged you, let alone tried you as adults. Especially not back then. What was the crime? You were kids. It wasn’t intentional. You left the scene of an accident, but you stopped and called for help.” He ducked his head so I couldn’t help but look right at him. “You want my advice?” he asked.
I nodded yes. I’d never wanted anyone’s advice so much in my life.
“Move past it,” he said. “Forge ahead until you break through the other side. You can choose the rotten beams for the foundation of the house you build,” said the man who’d built a cabin in the woods with his own hands. “Or you can decide to choose the strong ones instead.”
Epilogue
MONTE VERDE, GUATEMALA
It’s been two years since I moved out here with Mom. I’m the midwife, also known as the crazy dog lady by the locals. I have my own dog Tramp, a rescue from the streets. Tramp’s been neutered, vaccinated, and undergoes regular flea treatments. He sleeps at the foot of my bed. I started my own unofficial rescue operation, funded by my earnings. At any given time, I feed and care for up to ten dogs who all get the same medical treatment and food as Tramp.
There’s a hand-painted sign that hangs over the front door of the tiny cottage I call my home—Jane & Maggie’s Dog Rescue. The locals know to bring the most pitiful of the street mutts to me. Whenever someone asks who Jane and Maggie are, I tell them they were two ladies who had a soft spot for cats but wouldn’t hesitate to help a dog in need. If they ask where they are, I tell them they’re in Heaven with the angels because that’s what most people around here would want to believe.
En el cielo con los ángeles.
Mom lives down the street, and we see each other every day at work and at home. The clinic was built with enough money left over to build a new school. Occasionally, I fill in as a substitute teacher. I keep a copy of The Wizard of Oz by my bedside because it reminds me, like Dorothy, that grace wasn’t something I had to seek—it was there all along. All I had to do was believe in its power, in my power to forgive and to love, myself as well as others.
A few weeks ago, Luke sent a newspaper clipping about Carly’s arrest by the FBI. How her lawyer claimed she had been set up, and none of the charges were true. How they would fight it every step of the way and eventually prevail. How they knew things about illegal wiretapping and who was behind it. I threw the article in the garbage and emailed Luke, asking him to never send me news about Carly or her case again.
Sometimes I miss California and think that one day I might like to return. But then I look at my life and wonder if I could ever find anything to complete me in the same way my life completes me now.
But I miss the long walks through Golden Gate Park when the fog moves in and a stillness descends that seeps straight to the heart. I miss standing at Land’s End and watching the waves crash against giant boulders while huge freight ships glide by as silently as cats on velvet paws. I miss the daffodils springing forth from the anonymity of winter, their improbable sudden appearance alight with the vibrancy of life. Reminders of the eternal and unfathomable optimism that resides somewhere within us all.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thank you to my husband, George Berla, who keeps me writing through his expectations, love, and belief in me. In marriage, I won the lottery.
My family is the bedrock from which I launch all endeavors. Jeremy, Lucas, Corey, Samantha, and Nishita, thank you for your support, feedback, glitch-fixing, and general superior abilities.
Eternal gratitude to Amberjack Publishing. Dayna, Kayla, Cherrita, and Cassandra. I couldn’t ask for a more hardworking and talented group behind me.
Macy, your insights are thought-provoking and motivating. Thank you for caring about The Kitty Committee and for summarizing it in four words. Vicky, thanks for being there for The Kitty Committee and all its book siblings.
To Orange Dog. We are in awe <3
About the Author
Kathryn Berla likes to write in a variety of genres including light fantasy, contemporary literary fiction, and even horror. She is the author of the young adult novels: 12 Hours in Paradise, Dream Me, The House at 758, and Going Places.
The Kitty Committee is her first novel written for adult readers.
Kathryn grew up in India, Syria, Europe, and Africa. Her love for experiencing new cultures runs deep, and she gives into it whenever she can. She has been an avid movie buff since childhood, and often sees the movie in her head before she writes the book.
Kathryn graduated from the University of California in Berkeley with a degree in English. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Other Titles by
Kathryn Berla
Going Places
Dream Me
The House at 758
A Journey of Ordinary Proportions
12 Hours in Paradise
La casa 758
The Kitty Committee Page 27