“Sam!” She sat bolt upright. “Yes, look at—”
He swung back. “Anyway, they don’t think it’d be good to move her right now.”
“No, that’s the last thing she needs. And she’ll get the best of care here, Sam, believe me. We take care of our own.”
“Yeah…yeah, I’m sure you do.”
The catch in Sam’s voice made Mac shy like a nervous horse. “Well…” He socked Sam on the bicep, then took a step backward toward safety. “Gotta go. The wife, you—” He stopped abruptly. “Supper…” he added lamely.
“Good idea,” Sam said with a parting lift of the chin. “Me, too.” He turned and—
“Don’t!” she cried as he stepped off the curb, his eyes focused on nothing. Springing into the path of the oncoming car, she crouched, teeth clenched, eyes wide, staring it down. Tires screeched. The car loomed horrifically, then lurched to a stop some ten feet from them.
“Holy…” Sam’s voice trailed away. His spread hands were still raised to fend off the hood. He dropped them abruptly.
The driver leaned out his window. “Would’ve served you right, you moron! You wanna walk around blind, go get yourself a cane!”
Jessica dodged over to almost sit on Sam’s feet as the car swerved around them and roared on by, its driver still swearing. She let out a shaky breath.
“Whew!” Mac called from the sidewalk. “Take it easy, Sam. Maybe I should give you a lift?”
“Nope. I’m fine. Catch you tomorrow.” Sam turned away, looked both directions, then plunged on across the street.
Jessica caught her breath and bounded alongside. “You…idiot!” It wasn’t the first time he’d done that. His mind was often three jumps ahead of itself, off in the clouds somewhere, leaving the rest of him to muddle on behind. It was one of the reasons you tended to underestimate him. “You want to get yourself killed? Or end up in a bed beside me? Maybe they’ll give us the family suite.”
“What are you meowing about?” Sam muttered, striding along. “That car would’ve squashed you flat, cat, if it hadn’t been for me.”
“Oh…” She stopped short with outrage, then galloped after him. “That’s rich! You saved me?” She’d forgotten how long his strides were. She’d always had to step double time to keep up, when she was hu—She winced. This was no time to be yelling at him, not when she needed his help.
And they were nearing the parking lot. Sam cut down a slope, through a bed of low rhododendrons, toward the sub-street level of the lot. Scurrying in his footsteps, she caught a branch full in the face, let out a squeak of exasperation.
Sam glanced back, but kept on striding. “Weren’t you headed the other way? I mean, don’t let me change your plans or anything. I’m sure you’ve got mice to catch, people to see.”
“It’s you I need to see! Sam, would you just stop for a second and look at me?”
“Look…” He stopped and looked down at her. “I’ve had a rough day. I’m not in the mood for company, okay?”
“Sam, just look at me! Hear me.”
“You hear? Go bug somebody else.” He turned and walked on.
If anyone—anyone in the whole world—could see her for who she really was, it was this man. And if he couldn’t— “Sam!” She tore after him.
“Give me a break, cat.” He fumbled a set of keys from his pocket, then stopped beside a car with rental plates.
If she could only get closer to him. Look him straight in the eye. When Cattoo needed to do that, she…Jessica threw herself at the hood of his car, quite the highest jump she’d attempted so far.
If she hadn’t thought about it, the leap would have gone fine. But thinking about Cattoo’s hindquarters launching them gracefully off the ground, and whether it was her front feet or her back that were supposed to land firstJessica hit the dew-damp metal, fumbled and, claws screeching, skidded to an inglorious pileup against the windshield.
Sam blinked, then threw back his head and hooted.
She’d never liked to make a fool of herself. Without competence, you were nothing at the best of times. And right now, on this, the most humiliating day of her life… Picking herself up, she glared at him. Her tail slashed the air, once, twice. She glanced back and flattened her ears at it. Stop that! I’ll handle this myself.
“I thought cats’ one excuse for living was that they were graceful!” The laughter had returned to his voice for the first time that day. “So what happened to you? New feet?”
“I have a perfectly reasonable excuse. In fact, that’s precisely the problem. If you’d just let me explain—”
He turned the key in the car-door’s lock. “Okay, enough of the fun and games, cat. Beat it.” He opened the door.
“Sam!” She let out a wail of pure desperation.
One foot inside the car, he paused, then sighed. “What is it, cat? You subscribe to that Chinese theory—once you save somebody’s bacon, you’re stuck with the bozo for the rest of your life?”
“Yes—I mean, no… but that’ll do for now!”
“Go sell it somewhere else, cat. I’m tired, I’m sad. I’m outta here.” He slid into the car and slammed the door.
This could not be happening. This, this was the final nightmare, that Sam could look at her and not know her. “Don’t go! Please don’t go, Sam.” She put her nose to the windshield, peered straight into his eyes.
She jumped as the engine started with a roar—her tail puffed up in alarm. Inside the car, Sam smiled and shook his head. The car edged out of its parking place.
Jessica hooked her claws—at least tried to hook them— to his windshield wiper. “Where you go, I go. You’re my only hope.” The car picked up speed, gliding between the rows of parked cars. Jessica hunkered down, hung on.
Sam rolled down his window. “Cat, I’m warning you…”
She flattened her ears, narrowed her eyes, hung on.
The car coasted to a halt. They stared at each other through the glass. Sam rammed the car’s shift lever into park. He stepped out, strolled around the door to the hood, loomed overhead.
She’d forgotten how much she’d always loved his bigness. On some shamelessly unliberated, purely instinctive level, it had always thrilled her how much taller and wider and stronger he was than she.
It wasn’t a thrill tonight. He looked enormous. Dangerous. She gulped and stood her ground. “Sam, I…need you.” There. She’d never been able to say that before. Saying it now was…a relief. I need you! The magic password that must surely open his heart.
“I don’t need this, cat. Not tonight.”
For a moment she felt only the pain, worse than any blow. Then hearing the words, she stared up at him. “You do hear me, don’t you? At least a little bit?”
“So hear me and hear me good.” He bent till their eyes were on a level. “I…don’t…like…cats.“
If he’d said he approved of cannibalism, she couldn’t have been more astounded—then dismayed. She’d never known that! But then, why would she? In their first six months together, they’d been engrossed in each other. The issue of pets had simply never come up. Nor had it in their last six, with her commuting a hundred miles a day to med school, and Sam settling into his new research lab—when he wasn’t jetting around the country giving papers—while their life as a couple stretched and stretched till it shredded.
“Nothin’ personal,” Sam continued, his drawl soft and deadly earnest. “But I’m a dog man. I want a hood ornament, I’ll put a hound up there—got it?”
You don’t like cats? With all the things she’d called him in her mind, all the reasons she’d made up for hating him, she’d never once dreamed he was tasteless enough not to like cats. Why, anyone with half an ounce of poetry or sensitivity in his veins liked cats!
“So now that we’ve got that straight—unless you want me to set a new record in the cat-toss—WILL YOU GET OFF MY DAMNED CAR?”
She’d never been able to take it when he roared. She couldn’t take it now. She was
literally blown off the hoodlanded in a hissing, puffed-up stance some twenty feet away.
His door slammed, the car raced off toward the exit.
“Sam…” She couldn’t believe it. “Sam! If you won’t help me…”
The car squealed to a halt. He leaned to the passenger side and opened the door.
“Oh, thank you! Thank God!” She scurried after him, trilling Cattoo’s little hum of hope and joy.
Sam tossed something to the ground. “No hard feelings, cat. Maybe this’ll help?”
She stopped beside the object, bewildered. The car rolled away.
Jessica stood, blinking down at a half-eaten doughnut. But the tears wouldn’t come, no matter how they fell inside.
IN THE END, crouching under a bush, she ate his horrid doughnut. Her teeth weren’t made for it and her pride revolted, but her stomach was more practical. This would have to do until morning, unless she wanted to check out the Dumpster behind the hospital cafeteria. Which I most emphatically do not! she told Cattoo when that thought roused a quickening interest.
Cattoo seemed to be rousing in general as the darkness closed in. While Jessica was growing numb with despair. What would happen to her if she couldn’t make Sam see who she was? What could he do, even if she did make him see? More to the point, what would she do tonight, with the temperature falling toward the forties and no place to sleep?
We need a warm, safe spot. Jessica couldn’t have said whose thought that was, and the memories that followed were melded. Cattoo lay curled in a warm, soft lap, purring and safe. Jessica lay wrapped in Sam’s arms, her cheek pressed to his beating heart. Oh, they knew what safe was, even if they couldn’t find it.
It’s out there somewhere. This was a conviction more than a worded thought. Cattoo stood. Rocking forward on her forepaws, she extended first one back leg, then the other, in a sensuous stretch. That done, she padded off into the night. Too tired to argue or advise, Jessica rode within, dimly aware of taut muscles sliding rhythmically beneath silken fur. Of the brush of wind, then leaves, across her whiskers…a feeling of guarded hope, unblinking watchfulness, then…darkness.
JESSICA AWOKE shivering, one paw cupped round her nose to slow loss of body heat, her back pressed to a brick wall. Dreaming, she told herself without much hope, and looked around. An expanse of tar and gravel stretched to the dawnpink horizon. She lay on a roof, which topped some sort of extension from the taller building at her back.
A warm draft ruffled her fur. She lay curled directly below a heating vent, somewhere at the back of RI Gen. The smells exhausted from within were a nose-wrinkling blend of bleach and disinfectant, bodies washed and unwashed, an onslaught of detergent and floor wax and cooking food. The cafeteria roof, she realized. How did I get up here?
No answer.
And Cattoo was no help in finding the way down, either. Jessica had to pick her own path from ledge to wall to a loading dock, and thence to the ground.
What time do visiting hours start in the intensive-care unit? she wondered, skirting the building at a hurried trot. Have I missed Sam?
Because, in spite of his response last night, Sam was still her only hope. Though his love for her had been nothing but one of his passing whims, she’d never once doubted his friendship, even when she’d have sooner died than accept it. But this was no time for pride now.
But how do I make him see?
By the time visitors began to hurry up the front walk and into the hospital lobby, their faces bright with hope or tight with worry, Jessica had figured the way. She’d spent the time since dawn scouring the well-raked lawns at the front of RI Gen.
Cattoo had roused enough to decide she was nuts—you couldn’t eat sticks, after all, and this business was too methodical for play. Then she had figuratively rolled over and gone back to sleep, paws in the air, leaving Jessica to grip each twig she found carefully between her teeth and carry it to her staging site some twenty feet to the side of the walkway.
There she nudged and dragged her branches into a rough arrangement, which, if you looked carefully and ignored the digressions made by twigs shooting off in the wrong directions, spelled HEL. Having run out of branches just as she got to the P, Jessica had roamed to the far side of the lawn when she heard a familiar step striding uphill from the parking lot.
“Sam!” Grabbing the twig she’d just discovered, she scampered back toward her message. Sam Kirby! she called, beaming the thought at her moving target. Come to me. I know you hear me, if you’d only believe your ears. Come.
But Sam wasn’t even focused on the doors he approached. He was somewhere far away, decoding a sequence of DNA perhaps, or no, something much less pleasant, judging from the look on his face. Sam! Jessica dropped the branch beside her crude SOS just as his steps faltered. He stopped, glancing around with the puzzled look of a dreamer awakened in strange surroundings.
Yes! Yes, I knew you could hear me! In her joy, Jessica tucked her chin, dropped her shoulder and rolled a clumsy forward somersault—one of Cattoo’s tricks when she wanted attention. She landed sprawled in the midst of her own message. “Come!” she called again.
Sam laughed and shook his head. “You’ve got a serious problem, cat.”
“Oh, if only you knew!” Come. Sam, come to me.
“Come here, then,” he invited, snapping his fingers as if she were a dog.
Blast—they were so close, and yet so far. “No. You come to me. You’ve got to come here. ”
“Come here, puss.”
“You come to me.“ Jessica’s tail lashed its frustration. Come!.
“Just like a cat.” Sam glanced toward the doors, then back. “Won’t even come when it’s called. And you wonder why I prefer dogs?”
“What else would I expect from a deaf and dumb Texan?” she exploded. “Talk about not coming when you’re called!”
He shrugged. “Okay, be that way. Don’t come. Who wants to talk to a cat, anyway?”
“Please come here.” She put her heart and soul into that meow.
He scowled. “Is something the matter with you?”
“You could say that.” And the surest way to Sam’s heart—no one should know better than she—was to appeal to his protective instincts. Already lying down, she allowed her head to droop pathetically to the ground. She closed her eyes. Come. Listen to me. I need your help.
“Dammit,” Sam muttered under his breath. He took one tentative step in her direction.
Yes! She kept her eyes closed, her breathing shallow, her thoughts focused. Come. Help me?
Another hesitant step, then another. At last he gave in and strode toward her, his steps heavy with self-disgust. “Cat?”
Of course, she was lying in the midst of her own message. She waited till he was only feet away, then rolled carefully to her stomach. Don’t move a branch, she warned her tail.
Sam stopped. “What is this? You’re playing possum?”
Look at the ground, Sam. Jessica stood, retreated carefully, treading between the branches. She looked back anxiously. Even upside down, the word was still legible. HEL. Read it, she implored. “Please read it.”
“Cat?” Sam took three steps forward. “What do you want?” He took another step—which was precisely one too many.
“No!” she yelled, darting at him as she realized what he was doing. Twigs crunched as he stopped—directly in the middle of her message.
“No!” She spun around and stalked away, ears flattened, tail slashing. If she’d had hands, she would have torn her hair. “You…you…”
“Make up your tiny mind, cat. Do you want attention, or don’t you?”
“Never mind. Forget it.” She threw herself down on the grass. “You blew it, Kirby. Smashed a morning’s work to useless bits.”
He stared at her, then brushed a hand up through his dark hair. Shook his head.
“You look terrible,” she added ungraciously, really seeing him for the first time. Her tail thumped the ground. How had he put it that time
early on, after a sleepless night of loving? You look rode hard and put up wet. That was it, drawled with a touch of male smugness. Not that Sam didn’t manage to look good, even exhausted. He had one of those angular faces that age and wear would only render more interesting, darn him.
“Looks like you slept rough,” Sam said, looking down at her. “What are you doing here, anyway? Got a friend in there?” He jerked his chin toward the hospital. “Is that it? It’s hell, isn’t it?”
Is it for you, Sam? Somehow, in spite of her frustration, she felt her spirits rise a fraction. Just to know he cared…
He glanced at his watch. “Blast, cat, look at the time! I wanted to catch her doctor before he disappears. Good mousing.” He turned on his heel and left.
What am I going to do? Jessica flopped back to stare at a forest of grass blades, which fused in the distance to a wall of frost-burned green. How to get through to him? Even with someone as mentally flexible as Sam, there reared between them a nigh unbreachable wall of preconceptions. A cat was a cat, a dumb animal, unable to communicate on anything but the most primitive level. Feed me. Pet me. Play with me.
That was all she’d ever assumed Cattoo was saying. It was presumptous—downright insulting—now that she thought of it. For all I know, maybe you wanted to discuss the latest theories on quantum mechanics?
Cattoo wasn’t saying. Jessica caught her feeling of tolerant, sleepy amusement, then the cat drifted away again.
She needed time with Sam, time when she had his undivided attention. If only he’d give her that, she would get through to him, she was sure she could. Because they were attuned. Still. As they’d been from the first time they’d met. Not that they’d spoken the same language, even back then…
“LET ME get this straight. You want to take organic chemistry over again?” He hadn’t taken his boots down from the desk where they were propped. His chair was tipped back so far on its hind legs he might’ve had some private arrangement with gravity. Or maybe a death wish.
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