Before Michael could even introduce himself, Ron had slipped his hands behind Tabor’s shoulders and pulled her into his arms.
“Oh, Mata, Mata, my sweet potata, I wish I may, I wish I oughta,” he sang to her, cradling her in the crook of his arm. “It’s a song I wrote for her.” He looked up at Michael. “Cats love being sung to.”
Michael thought, She looks seasick.
For a minute, everyone stood around as Ron fawned over the cat, who for once seemed overwhelmed by the attention.
In the patch of garden alongside the house, another cat appeared, a sleek, long-legged tuxedo with a crooked mustache and silvery-green, leaf-shaped eyes like Tabor’s. Behind him was a big, buff chocolate-faced Siamese with two different-colored eyes. But when Creto and Jim caught sight of the dogs in front of the house, they got spooked and took off to the neighbor’s back garden.
“The black-and-white cat’s mine,” Ron explained. “He’s Mata’s brother.”
All of a sudden Tabor, who’d been writhing in Ron’s arms, hissed at him and scrambled away to crawl up Michael’s leg onto his shoulder. Ron looked a little sad, but his lodger, Steve, came out of the house to see Mata, ruffling her fur as she lay in Michael’s arms.
Ron introduced Steve, who smiled at everyone and then left on his own business.
“Come inside,” Ron said, motioning his visitors into his pristine house. Michael’s friends made a beeline for the porch, their dogs scrambling behind them.
Still carrying Tabor, Michael reluctantly followed. He felt kind of embarrassed. What could he say? “I’m sorry, Ron, here’s your cat. Sorry I took her to California and Montana.” As he walked by the porch swing sheltered by a trellis of jasmine, he imagined Tabor lounging there with Ron and the other cats on warm summer nights, watching the world go by.
Ron welcomed them all with a gracious and easy charm. “I bought pizza and soda so we could have a little shindig for Mata.”
The squadron of homeless people and their three dogs swept into the creamy-white living room and arranged themselves on Ron’s snug couches. Stinson settled between the stone fireplace and the glass coffee table, sitting cross-legged on the polished honey-wood floors. The two bigger dogs, a brown mongrel and a gray brindle pit bull cross, circled around him.
The scent of freshly cut freesias wafted from a vase on the mantelpiece. Wind chimes rattled above the opened window. The living room was full of cat art. Silver sculptures of lions and leopards sat beneath a glossy green asparagus fern whose fronds spilled off a bookshelf. Prints of nineteenth-century Parisian Le Chat Noir lithographs lined the wall, along with a silver-framed photo of Mata. Plumper and more kittenish, she had the same glow in her eyes.
Michael sat on the sofa by the bay window. “There you go,” he said to Tabor as he put her down on the floor. She looked confused and hid under his legs.
Buzzing around excitedly, Ron was all smiles. He headed to the kitchen to get his guests some Cokes but got distracted, worried that his cat didn’t recognize him anymore. He quickly rang his friend Stefanie, the former neighbor who’d found Mata and her litter under her porch and had their tabby brother Hank.
“Come quick, the party’s started earlier,” he said quietly down the phone. “I feel like I’m on drugs. Mata hates me. And all the homeless people in Portland, and their dogs, are in my living room.”
When Ron returned, he had forgotten the Cokes. “So tell me some of your stories,” he said. “Where has Mata been this whole time?”
“I’m in a daze right now . . . can’t even think,” Kyle said, slumped on the arm of a corner armchair by the stone fireplace. Whip Kid was sitting in the chair with Bobby in his lap, and Madison had propped herself on the other arm of the chair.
Michael couldn’t answer. He was staring down at the cat and fighting hard to hold back tears.
Stinson could tell that his friend was hurting, so he jumped in for him, saying, “Well, we were heading down Hawthorne for a sleeping spot late one night, and we saw her under the picnic table of a café. She was kinda freaked out when we found her. I grabbed her, thinking she was a stray, and thought my friend who lost a cat might want her. She hung out with us and then we put her picture on Craigslist. It was the most used lost-pet section.”
“And that was the only one I hadn’t checked,” Ron said. “Isn’t that strange?”
At that moment, Tabor peeped her head out behind Michael’s legs, anxiously glancing around the room, and jumped on a low-slung, midcentury sideboard in the alcove hall opposite the front door. She sat there, a little agitated, staring down at the two dogs that were still milling around Stinson.
Michael walked over to her and stood by the sideboard, stroking her, trying to calm her.
“The first week or two we were hanging out with Tabor, or, um, Mata,” Kyle said, “we were squatting in a parking lot at night on Hawthorne, and for the first few days she’d go off at night and come back.”
“Yeah,” Ron laughed, “she’d wander a three-block radius around here just making friends and influencing people.”
Jane chimed in, “When I met Groundscore a couple of weeks after he found her, she acted like she’d been his cat forever. And she became a bit of a celebrity around Hawthorne. Everyone loved her.”
“Oh, Maaata, sweet girl, Honey Bunny,” Ron cooed at her.
“Michael took good care of her,” Kyle added. “When we got to Montana, Michael’s dad, or, um, foster dad, took us to the vet to get the cat checked out. And he said that she was in perfect health, a pristine cat. Apart from her teeth, which were a little dirty.”
Turning around to look at his cat, who hadn’t moved from the sideboard, Ron could see that Michael was getting more upset. For a mad split second, he thought that if Mata was unhappy and preferred to be with Michael, he would give her to him. But then he thought about how much Creto missed her and how much they both loved her, and decided that she just needed a little time to remember where she was and settle back in.
“And there’s Groundscore with Mata,” he said anxiously, trying to draw Michael into the conversation. “I thought it was funny how you told me she’d grab your beard and then kiss you on the mouth.”
“She did that to Stinson, to Kyle, too,” Michael said, without taking his eyes off Tabor.
Stinson laughed. “Sometimes I’d wake up with her paws in my hand.”
“Anybody else have any stories?” Ron asked. “I heard you went camping in Yosemite. How was that?”
“It was pretty cool,” said Stinson, who was still on the floor tussling with the two dogs. “Madison and Bobby were there,” he added, pointing toward them in the corner chair. Madison smiled at Ron and waved. “We saw a bear. Michael started yelling, ‘There’s a bear.’ And I was like, ‘There’s no bear.’ And Tabor and Bobby were freaking out. In the end, it was okay, the bear didn’t eat us.”
“We got run out of a squat in Montana by a herd of angry cows, too,” Kyle said.
Ron looked across the room at Michael as he stood quietly beside Tabor, stroking her. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said to Michael. “I’ll always be grateful to you for treating Mata so well.”
“She was good to me, too,” he said, without looking up. “I carried her for thirty-six hundred miles on my back. All over Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana. And she’s probably only walked about half a mile. She was like the Queen of Sheba.”
“The Queen of Sheba—I love it.” Ron smiled. “This is so great.” He was proud of his mad, beautiful cat.
“I read that she’d run off before and ended up in a trunk of a car,” Stinson said.
“She was kidnapped by a neighbor,” Ron said, and told them the story. “What’s mystifyingly weird is that you brought her back today on June twenty-first. The first time Mata went missing, it was December twentieth, 2011, and the animal shelter in Vancouver called on June twenty-first to say she’d been found. Poor Mata ended up living alone in the woods for six months.”
�
��So how did she survive in the woods for that long?” Kyle asked.
“I guess she must’ve hunted and lived on mice.”
They must’ve been arthritic mice, Michael thought to himself. He had never seen Tabor hunt, apart from harassing seabirds and the deer mouse that she’d caught in the long grasses and let go. He couldn’t imagine her surviving alone in the wilderness for more than a day.
“What’s really incredible is that she survived all the coyotes, hawks, and God knows what else,” Ron rambled on. “There was this black tomcat who lived across the street called Raoul, who was friends with my cats. His owner moved away and took him back to her hometown by Yellowstone Park. He got out and was eaten by a coyote. She found his head.”
This gave Michael the chills, and he flashed back to the night those coyotes circled him and Tabor under the trees in Ventura. She’s definitely better off here, he thought.
Jane, who’d been sitting quietly at the end of sofa and looking out the window, saw that three news vans had pulled up outside the house. She suddenly rose to her feet and said, “We gotta go.”
The others got up, too, and quickly shuffled toward the back door, the three dogs in tow, legging it down the road.
“I just don’t wanna deal with those people,” Michael explained to Ron, who suddenly realized that was why he had arrived an hour early.
Tabor jumped down from the sideboard and sat in the living room doorway. She looked directly into Michael’s eyes as if she sensed he was leaving her.
At that moment, all his conflicted feelings hit him. It was like freeing a bird after nursing her back to health and seeing her fly—sad but certain that it was the right thing.
Michael picked her up one last time, burying his face in her silky fur. He couldn’t stop the tears as he kissed her good-bye. “You be good, Tabor,” he murmured into her fur. “Love you.”
“Hey, you can come visit her anytime you want,” Ron said, touched. “That’s no problem at all.”
“Yes, I’d like to,” he said, glancing up at Ron. “I’m gonna split town soon, but I’d like to see her again before I leave.”
When he handed her to Ron, she hissed at her owner. When Michael had left and Creto shyly peeped his head into the room, she hissed at him, too, and dived under the sofa. Only her eyes showing, Tabor watched Michael slip out the back door.
Soon after Michael and his friends had gone, Mata fled from under the sofa into the quiet of Ron’s bedroom off the little hallway between the dining room and kitchen. Ron closed the blinds so it was nice and dark and she could have a little peace and calm to settle in. He had put down food and cat milk there for her. He had made her favorite treat—ground-up raw chicken with egg yolks and vitamins that he used to feed her and Creto as kittens—but she refused it.
When he set out a litter box, she immediately went and sat in it, looked up at him sadly, then sank deeper in the litter and buried her head in her paws. She was showing withdrawal behavior—she was distressed that Michael was gone.
Creto swung his head around the bedroom doorway, sniffing around cautiously. Jim trotted in after him and, muscling his way past Creto, padded toward Mata, suspicious and challenging. Mata stood up, spat and snarled, and Jim wailed. They had a brief yowling standoff.
“Jiii-immm, stop it! Don’t be such a brute.” Ron snatched him up before he could get his claws out and pushed him out of the bedroom, shutting the door.
Then he flicked through his LP records. His cats loved music. A cat’s taste in music was a mysterious thing, but all the household kitties, past and present, seemed to favor melodic ’60s stuff, particularly the Beatles. Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, which Ron used to leave on repeat for Mata and Creto whenever he left them alone as kittens, was another favorite.
Ron put a Beatles 45, “And I Love Her,” on the turntable and said, “This is for you, Honey Bunny.” When she heard the crackly sound of the needle on the vinyl and the soft strum of guitars, she looked up at him as though it jogged her memory.
Creto hopped on the bed, watching quietly with his huge searching eyes, purring. She stared back at him from the litter box, a glint of recognition in her eyes.
Ron sat on the bed with Creto.
After a little while, Mata jumped on the bed, and before long she and the tuxedo tom were sniffing each other and touching noses. Then she looked at Ron and suddenly seemed to realize she was home. She rolled over on her back and purred away.
She was finally home. Ron wanted to let everyone know the happy news. He pulled his phone out of his shorts’ pocket and snapped a picture of Mata sprawled out on the bed, posting it on Facebook:
Missing: 12/20/11. Found: 6/21/12
Missing: 9/1/12. Found: 6/13/13
Thank God for pet chips.
He watched the two cats snuggled together on the bed, thinking this was the best summer of his life. Then he posted an old picture of Mata and Creto, both staring up into the camera, from beneath a scarlet rosebush in his garden, and jotted out another quick post:
Mata Hairi, Creto Von Bruiser and I thank everyone for all your prayers and kind thoughts for her safe return. The three of us are a team once again.
Chapter 26
Portland Again: Sweet Emotion
Nine months after Tabor became Mata again, Michael came back to Portland, this time on Amtrak. It was March 2014, and he had spent the winter with Walter in Montana. He returned to share a house with Kyle and his two roommates. He took a spare room in their tumbledown bungalow with worn furniture and a wild garden full of weeds and occupied by a family of raccoons. But the place was peaceful, and it was a chance to live another life.
The first thing Michael had done when he arrived, though, was to head straight to the corner house on SE 37th Avenue where Tabor lived. Halfway down the street, he saw her on the picnic table lazily stretched out in a ray of sun, grasping at the sky with her paw, her white tiger-striped fur glistening in the morning light.
She looked in his direction and watched him intently, and he could see her ears twitching back and forth.
“Ta-bor . . . Ta-bor,” he shouted, and then he whistled the Tabor whistle once he was at the corner. She jumped off the table and ran toward him, meowing.
Before he could put down his backpack, she had sprung up on his shoulder the way she used to with a kittenish prrrrp sound. Hot tears streamed down his face as she nudged and licked his cheeks and dug her soft muzzle under his chin, all the while purring. He wept from joy that she hadn’t forgotten him.
He cuddled her like an infant. As he looked down at her, bathed in sunlight, her silvery-green-gold eyes gleaming like jewels, he thought she was the most beautiful thing alive.
After he had returned Tabor to Ron the year before, Michael had got blackout drunk for the better part of two weeks. For many teary and sleepless nights, he sat out in their old UPS squat, imagining her shooting out of the bushes, tail up in the air, trilling.
He had made it through that dark time, and although he still missed her, she had enriched his life, and changed him—he was calmer, more at peace with himself and the world.
Michael sat at the picnic table on the front lawn. Tabor shot straight onto his lap, mewling softly and kneading his stomach. He noticed that she still wore the red-and-orange-checked dog collar that he’d bought her, but her heart-shaped ID tag had been replaced with a new copper one. She was back to being Mata Hairi again.
Her littermate, Creto, stared out from the blaze of fire-orange wildflowers in the corner garden. A kitten shadowed him, a yellow-eyed calico beauty in a patchwork coat of orange, brown, and black. She was a tiny parcel of eyes, limbs, and fur as wispy as a dandelion. With a high-pitched squeak, the baby cat leapt on the bench beside Michael and played with his bag strap. Tabor licked the kitten’s head and put a protective paw on her neck as she edged her way into Michael’s lap, too.
Michael assumed Ron had gotten another cat. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten a third cat after he’d lost Tabor twice
, and though he was happy to see Tabor, he was surprised Ron still let her roam outside.
A voice behind him said, “Her name’s Puzzle.”
He looked up at the porch where Steve was standing, and recognized him from their fleeting meeting outside Ron’s house on the day he’d returned Tabor. He was clearly keeping an eye on the cats and might’ve thought he’d come back to get the cat.
“I was just saying hello to Tabor,” Michael said wearily, half-expecting Ron’s young lover, or whoever he was, to pull out the cutlery and start throwing it at him.
Steve smiled and said, “She’s the new addition to the house. Somebody moved away and left her in an empty house, so I rescued her as a sister for Jim.”
Shifting on the bench uneasily, Michael smiled and set Tabor down on the picnic table in her spot of sun. He got up to start walking back up the road but turned to look back. Tabor was following him with the calico kitten trailing behind her. But Steve chased after them in his bare feet and scooped them both in his arms.
Just seeing Tabor happy in her old life was enough.
Chapter 27
Seven Steps to Heaven
The following fall, just after seven in the morning on October 15, 2015, Michael stood in front of a dozen homeless kids who were sprawled out on the green in front of the old military pavilion of Colonel Summers Park. Many of his old street pals had moved on. Stinson was off the street and living with his girlfriend and had a job working in an Asian food factory. Whip Kid and Jane were also happily settled in new jobs and their own apartment. But there were plenty of kids still out there, living rough, who, like him, were troubled and lost, and he couldn’t turn his back on them.
It had been two years, three months, and three weeks since he had returned Tabor to Ron. Now, when talking about the cat, he would smile and tear up, but he would always collect himself and say, with some perspective, “We all miss things in our lives.”
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