by Vicki Myron
Mary Nan and Larry Evans still manage the Colony Resort on the eastern end of Sanibel Island. Most of the longtime guests still come back for their week in paradise, and many of them still talk about the cats that once filled their vacations with such amusement and joy. They are a community, the guests and staff at the Colony Resort, and like any community, they share a catalogue of common experiences. Gail, Boogie, Chimilee, Maira, and the others are still with them, like ancestors or favorite television shows, kept alive in conversations on quiet nights spent under the spell of the star-filled Sanibel Island sky.
It’s not just the Colony Resort. Across Sanibel Island, once overrun with feral felines, the stray cats are gone, like those terrible bombers and their poisonous insect spray. Twenty years ago, when I first started visiting, you couldn’t walk a block without seeing the cats munching on lizards or scrounging scraps at the sidewalk cafés. Now I can drive the length of the island without seeing a single one. Mary Nan knows this is for the best. It’s better for the feral cats, many of whom were ill, scrawny, and struggling for survival. It’s better for the pet cats, who are no longer exposed to the diseases the feral community carried. It’s better for the other animals on Sanibel Island, especially the native animals and birds, so often the victims of a cat’s natural urge to hunt and kill. And if, unfortunately, one of those safer animals is the palm rat, that is a small price to pay to restore the balance of life in paradise.
But still, in her heart, Mary Nan misses them. She misses the eighty pounds of cat that used to sleep on her bed at night. She misses the ritual of feeding and grooming and petting. She misses looking out the window and seeing lounging cats sprawled all the way to the top of a ladder, or lying on the benches in the sunlight with their raccoon friends. She misses seeing them scatter in every direction when the bomber roared overhead. She misses the sight of a door opening and a cat strolling out in violation of all the rules of hygiene and property management. Most of all she misses the comradeship, the sense of being a part of something special as people mixed with cats, and cats mixed with people, and they all enjoyed themselves right down to their bones.
There won’t be any more cats. At least not at the Colony Resort. But Mary Nan and Larry are thinking about retiring and moving back to the mainland, and they’re pretty sure that when they do, they’ll adopt another cat. Larry had always been a dog person, cocker spaniels to be precise, but sharing that Thanksgiving TV dinner with Tabitha in 1969 had changed his opinion of cats forever. He loved Tabitha, and he loved every one of those twenty-eight cats at the Colony Resort every bit as much as Mary Nan had loved them. And like her, he knows that he would enjoy nothing more than to live the last decades of his life in the Florida sun, lounging with a furry friend and remembering those hectic but happy days when the world seemed little more than palm trees and friendship and cats.
FIVE
Christmas Cat
“While I stood there holding him in my hands and talking to the owner as to what to do, the kitten coughed. Or more accurately, he sputtered. That little sputter took us into a chapter of life that still brings tears to my eyes and a smile to my face.”
Vicki Kluever never liked cats. Didn’t grow up owning one, never had a friend who owned one, but she’d been around them enough to know they weren’t for her. Cats were always rubbing against you. They always wanted to sit in your lap. They always wanted to be petted or given some kind of attention. Vicki was born and raised on Kodiak, a large, mountainous island off the harsh southwest coast of Alaska, where the only milk was powdered and the only affordable meat was the fish you pulled from the freezing sea. She considered herself a strong and independent woman, from a long line of independent women, and if she had an animal, she wanted that animal to be strong and independent, too. Cats? They were soft.
But her daughter, Sweetie, was four years old, and Sweetie really wanted a pet. Vicki suggested a dog. After all, she had grown up with dogs. One of her favorite childhood pictures was of herself with two black eyes, one for each time the enthusiastically playful family dog had knocked her off the front porch with its tail. But her landlord was adamant: no dogs. He had no problem with a cat. If the little girl wanted, he said, they could even adopt two, which sounded good to Vicki because two cats could keep each other company, and she might not have to bother with them. So when a coworker’s cat had kittens in November, Vicki Kluever thought she’d found the perfect Christmas present. Or at least the best present allowed at her third-rate fourplex apartment building in Anchorage, Alaska.
Two weeks before Christmas, just as the kittens were being weaned, she drove over to meet them. They were pathetically cute, of course, tiny and uncoordinated and nestling energetically against their mother. There was one little guy that stood out, though, the one that kept biting his siblings’ tails and stepping on their heads when they tried to suckle their mother. He was a live wire, a real spunky personality. The independent type. So Vicki picked him. Then she chose his exact opposite: a cute little female that looked Siamese and seemed like the most docile kitten in the bunch.
She planned the adoption for Christmas Eve. She and her daughter were having dinner with their friend Michael, so she asked him to pick up Sweetie from day care. (The girl’s real name was Adrienna, by the way, but Vicki has called her Sweetie since she was a few weeks old.) Vicki would pick up the kittens. Her daughter was always asleep by seven, so by the time dinner was over and it was time to drive home, she’d be so dead to the world, she wouldn’t notice the box in the backseat. Sweetie wouldn’t know about the kittens until she woke up Christmas morning and found them under the tree.
It was a perfect plan, Vicki thought. The ideal surprise. But when she went to pick up the kittens, she couldn’t find them. Any of them. Her coworker had left on a vacation the day before, and in the twenty-four hours she’d been gone, the kittens had managed to escape from their box. The woman’s sister, who had met Vicki at the house with the key, didn’t seem too pleased with this development, but she helped search for them. After half an hour, they’d found all but one. The pure black one, the live wire, was gone. Vicki didn’t know what to do, but she knew she needed to make a decision because she was expected at Michael’s for dinner. Should she adopt just one kitten? Should she choose another?
Thinking back, she was never sure how or why it happened—she had to use the facilities, I suppose—but she wound up in the bathroom. She turned on the lights, looked into the toilet, and her heart collapsed through the floor. The pure black kitten was lying in the bottom of the bowl.
She reached in and pulled him out. He was no bigger than a tennis ball, and she held him easily in one hand. He lay on her palm, as lifeless and cold as a wet dishrag. There was no pulse or breathing, and his eyelids were peeled back just enough to see that he was gone. He had been such an energetic kitten. Vicki knew he was the one who had led the charge over the edge of the box. He had been jumping and swatting at it the first time she saw him; who else could it have been? He must have been peering over the edge of the toilet rim, or maybe stretching for a drink, when he slipped into the bowl. He was so tiny the water was over his head, and trying to scramble up the slick sides must have worn him down. His adventurous spirit, the fearlessness that had drawn her to him, had cost the kitten his life. On Christmas Eve.
“What are you going to do?”
The question shocked her out of her thoughts. She must have shouted when she saw the dead kitten, Vicki realized, because the sister was standing next to her, staring over her shoulder at the lifeless body.
“We should bury him,” Vicki said.
“I can’t. I’m late for work.”
“Well, we can’t leave him,” Vicki said. “We can’t just leave a dead cat lying ...”
The kitten coughed. Or more accurately, he sputtered. Looking down, Vicki realized that she had been unconsciously rubbing her thumb back and forth over the kitten’s stomach and chest. Had she forced water out of his lungs? Was that sputter a si
gn of life, or just the last gasp of a body settling into death? He wasn’t moving. He looked as cold and lifeless as ever. How could he possibly . . . ?
He sputtered again. Not a cough but a small hack that strangled in his throat the moment it began. But this time, the kitten twitched and spat up water.
“He’s alive,” Vicki said, stroking her thumb down his body. The kitten sputtered, spat up more water, but otherwise didn’t move. His eyes were still slightly open in a death stare, his inner flaps drawn inward. “He’s alive,” Vicki said when he sputtered a fourth time, wetting her hand.
Her friend’s sister wasn’t impressed. She looked at her watch with a grimace, a not-so-subtle signal that she didn’t have time to deal with the possible resurrection of a recently deceased cat. In her defense, she probably thought the sputtering was death throes. There was no way this bedraggled kitten, submerged in water for who knows how long, could possibly be alive.
Vicki wrapped the kitten in a hand towel, still stroking him firmly enough that he kept coughing up water, and called her longtime friend Sharon, who lived nearby. Vicki and Sharon had helped each other through challenging jobs, dysfunctional families, difficult marriages, and typical babies. When Vicki told her there was an emergency and that she needed to come to her house, Sharon didn’t even ask why.
She left the other kitten, the docile one, and rushed to her friend’s house. There was no way, Vicki thought, she could give this sickly kitten to her daughter. He was alive, but he looked horrible. Scary almost. And his chances of long-term survival were slim. When you grow up in a fishing town in Alaska, you learn about hypothermia and water in the lungs, and you know the odds aren’t good. But this little kitten was a fighter; in spite of her aversion to cats, there was no way Vicki could leave him behind.
Even if her friend was shocked by the sight of the tiny body. “I found him in the toilet,” Vicki told her. “Under the water. But he coughed and spit up water.”
“He’s cold,” the friend said. “He needs warmth.”
They wrapped a heating pad around the towel, set it on low, and put the kitten on the kitchen counter. As Sharon gently rubbed the top of the kitten’s head for comfort, Vicki carefully dried him with a blow-dryer. Halfway through, the kitten started convulsing. His mouth was hanging open; his eyelids were fluttering; he looked like he was having a seizure. He twitched, then started shivering and retching in violent dry heaves. It looked painful, as if his body was being pulled apart like Alaska’s pack ice in a spring thaw, but it was an involuntary reaction. The kitten, apart from his spasms, never stirred. More than an hour after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.
Already late for dinner, Vicki called Michael. “I’m coming,” she said. “Tell my daughter I’m coming. I’m just going to be late. And, um . . . Merry Christmas.”
Then she called every veterinarian in the phone book. No one answered. Why would they? It was late in the afternoon, and it was Christmas Eve. She couldn’t leave the kitten at Sharon’s house because her oldest daughter was allergic to cats. Even if she hadn’t been, Vicki knew she couldn’t abandon the kitten now. Not after all they’d been through. After an hour, when his convulsing slowed, she put him in a shoe box, still wrapped in the towel and heating pad, and drove to Christmas Eve dinner.
“This is Sharon’s cat,” she told Sweetie when the little girl came to see what her mother had in the box. “He is really sick. But Sharon had to work, so I told her we would watch him through the night.” Sweetie was staring at the little black kitten, at his open mouth and his swollen eyes and his lifeless rag of a body, and Vicki could tell she was going to cry.
“He’s probably going to die, Sweetie,” she said, reaching out to hug her daughter. “I’m sorry. He is very, very sick, and we didn’t want him to be alone.”
“Okay,” Sweetie said, hugging her mother back.
They put his shoe box in the bathroom next to the heat register and sat down to dinner. It was a somber affair, nothing like a typical Christmas Eve filled to bursting with a young child’s noisy anticipation. They ate slowly, and their conversation seemed halfhearted. Every few minutes, Vicki and Sweetie tiptoed to the bathroom to check on the little black kitten. He had stopped convulsing and retching, but his panting was so shallow they could barely tell he was alive. He seemed to be struggling for every breath. And four hours after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.
They left Michael’s house just after nine o’clock. Vicki had finally reached a twenty-four-hour emergency veterinary phone service, and they recommended buying some kind of protein, blending it down to liquid, and seeing if the kitten would eat a few drops. So on the way home, they stopped at a convenience store that was just shutting for Christmas. Sweetie, still wide awake, waited with the kitten in the car. “We can’t leave him alone, Mommy,” she said.
The store had one jar of meat-based baby food. Vicki bought it, along with an eyedropper. She tried to give the kitten a drop of the brown mush, but he gagged. She diluted the baby food again and again, until it was practically water, and finally, about 11:00 P.M., he kept down two drops. That was his limit: two drops of protein water.
“It’s time for bed, Sweetie,” Vicki said, once the kitten was tucked into his towel.
“But, Mommy . . .” the little girl started to protest, not wanting to leave the kitten, but she was so tired she couldn’t fight any longer. She was asleep by the time she reached the bed.
Vicki kissed her good night—Merry Christmas, she thought—and made herself a cup of tea. Every hour on the hour, all through the night, she fed the kitten a few drops of diluted baby food. Each time, when she saw him lying motionless on his side, her heart clenched and she feared he was dead. But as she approached, he started to shift his head. He let her push open his mouth (he still hadn’t opened his eyes) and squeeze two drops down his throat. Then she went back to the couch, turned on some Christmas music, and tried to stay awake for another hour.
She must have crashed after the 4:00 A.M. feeding, because the next thing she knew, it was Christmas morning. She leapt off the couch and rushed to the bathroom, where she had left the kitten in his blanket in front of the heat register. As soon as she saw him, she gasped. He was standing on four very shaky legs, trying to tip himself over the edge of the shoe box.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Her daughter trembled in the doorway.
“Oh, Sweetie, look! He’s alive. The kitten is alive.”
Vicki put her arm around her daughter, and together they watched as the kitten gathered himself on spindly legs and, with great effort, stepped one shaking paw out of the box. He pulled a second leg over, rested for a moment, looked at them with tired eyes. Then he turned back to his task and, with one final shaking lunge, pulled himself free.
Toys and gifts were forgotten. Russian tea (a combination of powdered tea, orange drink mix, and spices that was Vicki’s favorite) and hot chocolate were neglected. For the rest of the day, they watched their Christmas miracle. The kitten spent most of the time on his side, since he was so weak, but whenever Sweetie and Vicki brought the eyedropper over, he pushed himself onto his front knees and stretched out his neck. Vicki had never seen a four-year-old child so gentle and careful, or a kitten more determined to succeed. By the afternoon, Christmas Cat, as they named him (or CC, as they called him), was swallowing three or four drops of brown protein water at a time. They were keeping him alive drop by drop, and every hour he was getting stronger. When Sweetie fell asleep that night, her last question was about CC, the Christmas Cat.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I hope so, Sweetie. You were wonderful.”
The girl smiled. Vicki tucked her in, turned off all the lights except the Christmas tree, turned on the radio, and sat on the sofa, rubbing her thumb along the kitten’s skinny side. He’s going to live, she thought, as music floated around them and the tree sparkled in the purple blackness of an eighteen-hour Alaska winter night. He’s really going to live.
She shook her head in wonder, surprised both by his survival and by how much she cared.
The day after Christmas, a Saturday, she finally reached a veterinarian. The next open appointment was three days away, but the veterinarian assured her she was doing everything right. “Just keep up your regimen,” she said. “It’s worked so far.”
On Monday, Vicki went back to work. She had used up her sick days because of some recent health issues, and as a single mother she couldn’t afford to take time off. So every few hours, on her morning break, lunch hour, and afternoon break, she rushed home to feed Christmas Cat a few drops of his watery meal. Her coworkers thought it was hysterical. For weeks, she had been complaining nonstop about adopting the cats. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she’d say, shaking her head. “I hope my daughter appreciates this sacrifice,” she’d proclaim, as if she were giving her daughter one of her kidneys or something. Now here she was dashing home every few hours so that she could nurse a nearly dead kitten back to health.
“I thought you didn’t like cats,” her coworkers said, howling with laughter when they saw her tearing off her scarf and jacket.
“I don’t,” she said. “I really don’t. But what can I do?” She was telling the truth: She still didn’t like cats. She just happened to like CC. Why? Because helping him had become her project. Because he had proven himself to her. Because he had personality, toughness, and an incredible will to live. As soon as he could stand, even trembling and weak, he had thrown himself over the edge of his box. He wasn’t broken; he wasn’t giving up. He wasn’t . . . soft. And Vicki Kluever admired that.