by Clea Simon
“Jackie?” I could tell from her tone that this was a quiz.
“Your big sister?” I could pass this one. “She said she needed someone to get a kitten checked out. Get whatever it would need. I picked up a litter box and a scratching post, as well as a bag of kibble.”
“Play.” The kitten was getting drowsy. I could sense his eyes closing, but still, he looked out at the dark-haired woman before me.
“I could’ve done that.” The peevish tone was fading. More for her sister than for me, I suspected.
I didn’t disagree. “She seemed a little anxious.” I would give her that. “And she’d called our local veterinary hospital, and the vet there recommended me….” I shrugged, letting her reach her own conclusions. I’m not a behaviorist. I’ve never finished the training. But Beauville is a small town, and so when somebody needs a pet trained, I usually get the call. I walk dogs, too.
“Huh.” Judith pocketed her phone. “What did she say, exactly?”
“That her sister Judith from California had come by with a kitten.” I thought back to the call. The woman on the line had sounded significantly older, but there are other things besides time that can age a person. “She said you’d dropped it off—sorry, that’s what she said—and ‘disappeared.’ She sounded like she had her hands full.”
She paused and I waited, unsure whether to offer condolences, unwilling to be the one to break the news.
“I didn’t ‘drop it off.’” Her tone was peevish, her full lips pursed. Judith wasn’t angry with me, though. She knew it too, and as she ran her hand through her hair, she shook off the last of her suspicious edge. “I’m sorry. Today’s just been…Jackie called me from the hospital. I was on my way there. You said your name was Pru?”
This last was called back over her shoulder. Judith—the glossy sister, as I’d already labeled her—had wandered into a downstairs bathroom and was rummaging through the cabinet, emerging with a couple of aspirin, which she swallowed dry. “My dad’s birthday is today—was today.” So she knew. It was official. That made my role easier, and I went through the formula then, mouthing sadness and regret while she splashed some water down her throat and on her face.
“I just got in from LA.” She looked up at me. “I took the red-eye to be here in time. My luggage is still, well, I don’t know. I’m hoping it shows up at some point. The kitten was a present. He’s a purebred, some fancy breed. He came with me, carry on, and, so, yeah, I brought him here before I went to track down my bags. I left him with my dad. I thought he could use something in his life that was pretty and gentle and fun.”
I bit back my next question: why a kitten? She anticipated it anyway.
“Clearly, living with my sister Jackie, he didn’t have much of those in his life.” Another sigh. “I didn’t expect…”
“I know, I’m sorry.” I always tell clients that pets make lousy gifts. If people want animal companions, they should choose for themselves. Now wasn’t the occasion to repeat this advice.
She shook her head, stared off into the middle distance. “He’s had a bad heart for years. I thought it was under control. I thought—” She paused to swallow, as tears appeared in her eyes. “I thought Jackie was just worrying. She does that.”
“She lives here?” A nod, as she carefully caught a tear on one manicured finger. Maybe the older sister had a reason to sound tired. “Will you be staying here, too?”
“No.” She was staring at the kitten now with a look of blank lassitude. I couldn’t blame her. “Jackie and I…” She left it at that. “Though I guess I’ll have to stick around for a while.” She raised her face to mine. The tears were still there, suspended, making her eyes glitter. “I should get over to the hospital. Maybe you could bring in the litter and everything? You know, like you were going to?”
“You don’t want to take him?” I had gathered from my brief interaction with Jackie that a pet was the last thing she had wanted before her father had died. I didn’t think his loss was going to change that.
Judith looked up at me, her gray eyes sharp.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I wasn’t, but it was a convenient formula. “I know you’re going to have your hands full, but I need to know what to do with this little guy.” The kitten was sound asleep now, soft and quite fluffy, now that I’d dried him with my shirt. It seemed a pity to wake him, so I moved slowly—offering the snoozing bundle to the dark-haired woman.
“No.” She backed away. “I’m staying at the Mont.” The Mont Chateau, new and very ritzy, presumably did not take pets. Not even pedigreed ones. “You could leave him here, I guess,” she said, before I could respond. “Unless you provide boarding?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“He’ll be fine here, then.” She hiked her bag up on her shoulder, signaling that the interview was over. “You can lock up after you get everything set up,” she said. “Jackie will know what to do.”
“Wait, no.” Kitten still pressed against my chest, I reached out to stop her. “You can’t just take off.”
She turned back toward me, and I shut up. It wasn’t the tears, or not only. It was the despair, the awareness of loss that stopped me. Judith Canaday might not be the best sister, but she was a daughter, too.
Chapter Four
Judith took off, and I was stuck standing there, a pint-sized dilemma on my hands.
The younger Canaday sister had said to leave the kitten, but I couldn’t see locking him in here, all alone. It wasn’t as if I’d be abandoning him—not with food, water, litter, and shelter—but it wouldn’t be fair to the little guy to strand him alone just yet. Not a kitten this young. On closer examination, he seemed undersized and a little, well, ratty-looking. His soft fur, downy now that it was drying, made him look rounder than he was. I revised my earlier opinion. He was more like six weeks old. Young to be adopted out. No, leaving him alone wouldn’t be fair to him.
Not to mention, to the woman who would come back to find him here. I knew something about death, about hospitals, and I suspected Jackie Canaday wasn’t going to be home for a while. When she was, I doubted if she would be in any shape to appreciate—or to care for—a needy infant. A kitten might be cute comfort at some point, but right now? No. I could too clearly recall the day of my mother’s death. Grief takes a while to kick in, but exhaustion—that’s there from the start. Especially if, as it appeared, Jackie had been her father’s caregiver. Her kid sister might not understand, but I did: Jackie was going to be busy with hospital bureaucracy and funeral plans. Going to be busy with the buzz and flutter of her own confused thoughts, while life as she knew it dissolved and rearranged itself around her. The kitten was going to be one more responsibility, a duty she didn’t want.
Not that I did, and I found myself stalling as I hauled in the brand-new litter box, the twenty pounds of the fancy no-dust filler, and all the other paraphernalia I’d picked up at the big box store, two towns over. A ’74 GTO—two doors, a custom baby-blue—wasn’t made for large loads, but it is big by today’s standards, which is useful for my job. Sometimes, I think about trading in my car for a truck. It wouldn’t use much less gas. Then I think how much of my time I spend on the road, and I know it’s never going to happen. Living out here in the boonies, you have to drive. And if you’re going to drive, you may as well have some fun.
Four trips later, I’d brought everything in. Still, I didn’t want to take off. I told myself I was becoming sentimental—the kind of weakness the rest of the animal kingdom wouldn’t tolerate. But it was more than that, and I knew it. Cats vomit for any number of reasons. Sometimes I suspected Wallis—the tabby who shares my house—of bulimia. But kittens are as vulnerable as any baby, and that brief episode—the heave and the shudder—had worried me. No matter how thoroughly this downy kitten seemed to have recovered from his episode, I didn’t like leaving him alone.
I also couldn’t see hau
ling him across town to the closest emergency clinic, hanging in the waiting room with every animal that came in. Not yet, anyway. A kitten as young as he was? He’d be exposed to more danger there, not to mention stress and confusion. Instead, I called Doc Sharpe again, getting his voice mail, to see about setting up a proper—private—appointment. Then I took the kitten into the litter box, which I’d installed in the mudroom; these old Victorians were made for real people and real animals, too. Once he’d sniffed that—without sneezing, I was happy to note—I’d opened a can for him, leaving the rest stacked on the counter, right by the bag of kibble. Water, too…check; I’d done it all, even assembled the sisal-draped scratching post.
Wallis would have had a field day with that. A mature tabby with a history I could only guess at, she looks askance at much of what we humans do, particularly at the ways we attempt to restrict the behaviors of the animals around us. If I’d brought something like this post into our house, it would be seen as an invitation to shred—the sofa, the bedspread. Anything, really, except the rope-covered wood.
But Wallis wasn’t here, and I needed to do what I could to ease the transition of this small animal into a household that didn’t expect and most likely didn’t want him. A kitten too young to successfully wash himself. A kitten still calling for its mother. Damn Judith Canaday. Didn’t the woman have any sense of what was going on here? Of what her sister was actually dealing with?
The kitten didn’t seem to mind. Still sleeping where I’d put him, on an old-fashioned wing chair upholstered in burgundy velvet, he looked as princely as his pedigree. Now, I don’t care about papers—as Wallis would remind me, I’m as much a mutt as anything in the shelter. But eyeing the little fellow, the beginnings of the long, silky coat already apparent in the downy fuzz that made him resemble nothing so much as a dandelion gone to seed, I felt relief. Someone—Judith, apparently—had paid for him. That meant he’d be valued by somebody, if not the intended recipient. I don’t like how humans think, but I’ve come to accept it. Besides, it helps with the training.
I took one last glance around. Close to noon, I was already late for my next appointment. I should get going.
I couldn’t. Call me crazy. No, never mind, I knew too many people who would be willing to do just that, if they knew the truth. Call me soft and you’d be closer to the reality. I couldn’t see abandoning that ball of fluff alone in a house where, unwanted and unexpected, he’d as likely get stepped on as fed.
Scooping up the kitten, I scrawled a note of explanation, complete with my contact info. I didn’t need to be accused of stealing a valuable animal. I also didn’t want to deal with my own conscience, leaving this little guy here alone. It wasn’t his fault that his intended person was dead. At that point, I didn’t have any reason to believe the old lawyer had suffered anything but a natural death.
Chapter Five
“Kittens? I don’t do kittens.”
Wallis is cool in the best of circumstances. When I walked into the kitchen, the still-sleeping ball of fluff clutched against my body, she became icy.
“Wallis, I’m not—” I didn’t have a chance to finish. She’d turned her back on me and began to wash. “I’m not asking you to take care of—whatever his name is.” It was true. My concern was more basic than that. Wallis does not take kindly to interlopers.
“I’m not going to kill the thing, either,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I’m not a…” The pause was more for dramatic effect, I suspected, than because she had trouble choosing her words. “I’m not a human, you know.”
“Thank you.” There was no point in apologizing. Wallis knew me well enough to sense my relief, as I told her about the sneezing and then the vomiting. “It might be nothing. Mint might smell like catnip to him, right?”
“Waste if it is,” she muttered as she sauntered off. “Baby that young…”
Of course. Kittens start off immune to catnip. Some are actively averse to it, which could have explained the reaction. I silently thanked Wallis for the reminder, as I followed her upraised tail into the living room, where I deposited the kitten on my mother’s old sofa. I knew from previous experience that it would be pointless to try to isolate the kitten. Wallis could get into every room in the house, and she’d consider any attempt at quarantine a personal affront, and so I did my best to clear my mind of lingering fears and went to catch up on my day.
Wallis might seem cruel, but she had her moments. And I owed her. She’d saved my life, after all, rousing me to drink some water when I’d been felled by a combination of exhaustion and the flu—and, okay, one too many nights of booze and whatever—several years before. I’d passed out, alone by chance, after making it back to our tiny walkup. Could’ve died, too, not that my date that night would’ve known or cared, once he’d left me at the curb. That’s how I was living then. A big life in the big city.
But I hadn’t. I’d heard Wallis—not that I knew who she was—speaking to me. Telling me to drink something. Telling me to move. I had recognized the sense of what she was saying, even if I didn’t know where the voice came from. And I’d staggered to the bathroom to put my face under the tap. I’d slept, then, right on the bathroom floor, and after some more water, it had hit me. I wasn’t hallucinating. I was hearing my cat.
I’d called an ambulance at that point, scared out of my wits. And once the hospital had pulled me back further, rehydrating me and pumping me full of antibiotics, I’d checked myself into the psych ward. Three days. Observation, they call it, by the end of which I knew I preferred madness. So I signed the forms and blamed the flu. And I came home, to one very angry cat.
That remained a sore point. She hadn’t roused me only to have me abandon her. Three days, locked in a city apartment, and she’d been scared, too. These days, I tried to be more sensitive to how my decisions affected her. She, meanwhile, had perfected her aloof attitude, but we relied on each other, still. I knew she cared.
The kitten would be safe with her. I had to believe that. Would I owe her? Sure. But not much more than I already did.
Chapter Six
Not everyone thought as my cat did.
“Kitten? Interesting.” With the kitten stashed, for now, I’d gone about my day. But out of sight didn’t mean out of mind—as this latest interaction proved. I hadn’t realized I’d even been thinking of the little fellow as Frank looked up at me, the question in his eyes. “Tasty?”
“No.” I spoke out loud, making my voice as firm as I could. Frank’s a ferret, and his query had sounded in my head as his quivering nose sniffed my outstretched hand. I spoke out loud to make a point, however. Mustelids are omnivores and, while I wasn’t entirely sure of his intentions—Frank might simply have been asking if I had any spare Cheese Doodles on my person—I didn’t like the level of curiosity that was radiating from his shiny button eyes.
“What?” Alfred, Frank’s person, sat up with a start. He’d been dozing in his seat when I walked in, his beard cushioning his head as he slumped behind the desk at the town shelter. Alfred is Beauville’s animal control officer, but Frank is the brains of the operation.
I’d stopped into the shelter after my afternoon visits—pilling an elderly Siamese and working out an athletic young terrier, whose behavior had improved dramatically once his family paid me to give him the run he craved. Partly, I wanted to see if Albert needed me. I’m not employed by him or by the town. But since Albert himself very rarely does any actual work, he directs a fair amount of assignments my way. The good ol’ boy network being what it is, nobody has yet asked why the town is paying a freelancer, like myself, when Albert is getting a salary. Or maybe they do know and don’t care. Life is simple here in Beauville.
Partly, I’ll confess, I’d come by here to avoid going home. I trusted Wallis with my life. I could certainly trust her with the kitten’s. But I knew I’d put her out, dumping that little one into her care. She’d take it out on me, one
way or another. What I hadn’t counted on was Frank’s sharp sense of smell. The masked face looked up at me expectantly, and again, I got an impression of the white kitten I’d left hours ago.
“Not sweet?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know exactly what Frank meant, but his persistence unnerved me. Animals don’t taste things the way we do. “Sweet,” for example, will register to a dog, but not to a cat. Ferrets’ taste buds were a mystery to me. Still I didn’t like the association of the kitten with anything edible.
“It’s nothing.” I said, as much to myself as to Alfred, who blinked up at me like a not particularly bright goldfish. “Never mind.”
Even as I spoke, I stared at Frank. His moist nose continued to twitch and I could feel his warm breath on my outstretched fingers. But the shiny black eyes that looked up at me read the emotion in mine. I felt the questing of that nose, the curiosity, but also a sense of remove. A recoil, expressed as if he had tasted something bitter. I’d offended the little animal.
“I’m sorry,” I addressed them both, as I drew my hand back, and Frank ducked into one of Albert’s desk drawers. “I was wondering if you had any more calls?”
Spring is baby season in the animal world. Even up here in New England, the climate grows a little kinder, and food more plentiful. Of course, some of that food is the young of other, smaller animals. I may have insulted Frank by my inference, but it wasn’t out of the blue.
Spring is also the time of year that humans notice the other inhabitants of this planet of ours. They hear the raccoons nesting in the attic, the skunks under the porch. They call Albert. And most of the time, he calls me.