When danger is close enough to tap me on the shoulder, time slows down for me. So what followed probably took only seconds, but it felt longer.
I couldn’t seem to make my fingers work to pull the rope up, hand over hand. My arms were as heavy as bricks. So I began scooting back along the ice, tugging the rope with me. Wiggle, pull. Wiggle, pull. I was panting. My breath caught when my arms came out of the water and hit the cold air. Sweat trickled under my wool cap. But I didn’t let go, and eventually, I saw the top of the green bag. When it reached the edge of the hole, I gave a jerk and it flipped out onto the ice.
On my knees, I fumbled with the knot cinching the bag closed. “C’mon,” I whispered. The wet bag was heavier than I expected, and I realized there were rocks at the bottom. There was no movement in the bag.
Finally, I got the bag open, reached in, and pulled out a sopping wet kitten. Sympathy shot through my heart. Its fur was matted against its tiny head, and its eyes were closed. I immediately began massaging it with shivering fingers. My teeth had begun to chatter. No sign of life. What do I do? For a moment, I panicked and just knelt there, crying.
Then I began rubbing the soaked creature with my dry gloves. “C’mon, baby, c’mon.”
I looked around me for help and was shocked to see Sebastian Winter standing across the lake, at the edge, in his expensive coat and hat. His gloved hands were clasped in front of him, and he was just staring at me. I raised my hand, but he didn’t respond.
I turned to the kitten again and desperately searched for signs of life. Finally, I whipped off my Sherpa hat, gently tucked the kitten inside it, and lifted the hat to my face. I blew warm breath into the hat, over and over. I had some idea that if I could just create a chamber of warmth . . . And then I heard the tiniest sound ever. A mew so soft. I brought the hat up to my ear and felt a faint puff of air from the kitten’s wet snout. I quickly wrapped the earflaps of the hat around the kitten, swaddling it tightly, then unzipped my coat and fleece, and stuffed the bundle down the front of my shirt, between my thermal underwear and my chest.
As I got up, smiling with relief and triumph, I looked toward Sebastian, but he was gone. I searched the banks of the lake. They were empty. It had grown darker and colder. I realized I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. If I didn’t get the kitten and me inside soon, we’d both be dead. With one hand clutching the kitten securely to my chest, I scooped up my gloves and ran across the frozen lake, not toward my house but toward Heart’s. Big sister’s house was closer, and she had a heating pad.
WE SPENT THE NIGHT—HEART, Sadie, and I—in Heart’s cozy kitchen, watching a half-dead kitten sleep. We wrapped it in a heating pad and tucked it in a shoebox. None of us had a clue if it would make it. At one point, I suggested putting the kitten in the oven.
“Maya!” Sadie was aghast. “You can’t cook her!”
“To warm her,” I said. “Put the oven on low. Like two hundred.”
Heart gave me a stern look. “No cats in my oven.”
I was exhausted. Wearing some of Heart’s dry thermal underwear and two sweaters, I rested my head in my arms on the table. The kitten slept. It was such a small, helpless thing. Being on that lake, facing the boys, had prodded old memories. I’d come to the rescue of a small, helpless thing before. A woman. A cry for help snagging me off a busy New York sidewalk. That time I’d rushed down an alley. No thought to danger; no thought to consequences. I ran into a darkness of my own making, a darkness that follows me to this day.
When I slammed into the side of the man, his fist raised to hit the woman again, I just wanted to stop him. I didn’t really have a plan beyond distraction. Maybe scare him off; witnesses were never good. But he came back at both of us. He landed a punch to my jaw; my head snapped back, but I didn’t lower my own fists. I warded off one punch, another, trying to find my opening. Then there it was: he made a slight turn toward the whimpering woman curled in a pile of trash and trying to withdraw further from this nightmare. I put everything I had into the side kick. The man flew against the brick wall and stuck there, as if glued. His eyes looked at me in surprise. I took a step forward. His body went lax, and his head dropped to his chest.
I frowned, puzzled, then I saw it. The piece of rusted rebar. It was protruding from the old brick wall, about chest height, a perfect tool to hang a hat on or impale a man.
That’s how quickly the world can change. One moment you are strolling amid the night lights of a big city, happy, free, not really thinking at all, and the next you have taken a life. And you can’t stop thinking.
You have killed.
You have dimmed the world. When all you have ever wanted to do was add to this sublime existence. You have ripped a massive hole in your karmic fabric. You have violated the yogic principle of ahimsa—do no harm to any creature. To someone raised as I was, it was a devastating realization.
I helped the battered and bloody woman to stand, waving away her thanks again and again. As we parted ways, we were both crying, for different reasons.
I staggered home and called Evie and Larry in near hysterics. I killed a man, I sobbed. It was an accident, crooned Evie. I’ll take care of it, said Larry. To my protective, ever security-conscious father, taking care of it meant keeping me out of the hands of the law. So Larry made me disappear; I no longer existed. With a fake passport, I ran from the events in that New York alley to India to the ashram of Guru Bob. There, I was sure I would find what I had lost. But I didn’t. That was seven years ago. I am thirty-five now, and my actions on that night still follow me. I still smell the rubbish; I still see the man’s eyes; I still feel the rough brick against my forehead as I leaned against the wall and wept.
I LIFTED MY HEAD from the cradle of my arms on the kitchen table and looked into a pair of slightly crossed blue eyes. Now that the kitten’s fur had dried, I realized it had some Siamese in it. It was a champagne shade with brown-tipped tail and ears.
I nudged my eight-year-old niece awake and nodded toward our patient. “What will you name her?”
“Really?” Sadie threw her arms around my neck. Heart, standing in the morning light at the counter, paused as she poured steaming water from a teapot into two cups. She raised an eyebrow.
“Thanks, Maya,” she said.
Heart is not a pet person. I blame it on that month when she was assigned to feed the chickens at Whispering Spirit. She let those hens run all over her.
I shrugged. “What’s a sister for?”
Chapter 8
There Were Never Such Undevoted Sisters
HOW WAS I TO know that David was allergic to cats? Sadie cried when I had to take the feline Popsicle, which she had named Bellarina, to my house. But what could we do? David started sneezing the moment he walked into the kitchen, high-decibel expulsions that made us all jump. For such a small thing, Bella packed a punch.
She also turned out to be a resilient little creature. She was barely in my house twenty-four hours before she was running things. At first, she was baffled by the spiral stairs and mewed until I carried her up them, but soon she was racing up and down the stairs and dangling upside down from them. If the stairs were Bella’s personal jungle gym, the hardwood floors were her ice rink. She got going so fast that when she tried to stop, she tumbled rear over head and slid under the rug. She was a speedy ball of fur everywhere but the yoga studio. There she was a different cat. Mysterious. Secretive. She moved calmly around the edges of the large space, dusting the walls with her tail. Her favorite spot was under the table behind my mat, where she could watch the class with a Sphinx-like solemnity.
In addition to Bella, the Monday afternoon yoga class had gained two new people: Sebastian Winter and Sasha Danilova, the visiting sister of Julia Lune. The first time Sasha met Bella she picked up the kitten, which was rubbing its ears on Sasha’s handbag; held the cat in front of her face; and said in a stern voice, “No using the expensive P
rada for a scratching post, sugar.” Bella got one snoot full of Sasha’s strong perfume and sneezed until Sasha dropped her to the floor.
While Bella steered clear of Sasha after that, she liked Sebastian Winter, for some reason, and he liked her. He never flinched when she climbed up his silk pants with her sharp little claws. As soon as he entered the studio, he scooped her up, laid her like a blanket over his arm, and began stroking her. “I love cats,” he told me. “I always wanted one, but Mother claimed she was allergic. Of course, she wasn’t, but I didn’t know that when I was little.”
“What about a dog?” I asked.
“Mother didn’t like those either. And dogs just aren’t the same. They’re followers. Where’s the challenge in that?”
I’d grown up with numerous dogs and cats. Whispering Spirit never turned away a stray.
Sebastian said, “I’m glad you saved this little one.”
“So you did see me that day on the lake,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Yet, you didn’t help me.”
“You had everything under control.” Sebastian smiled down at the purring kitten in his arms. “I went after the boys but lost them.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
IT WAS A THURSDAY, and Bella had been a maniac since she woke me at 5:00 a.m. ready to play. Finally, I wore her out with an incessant game of chase the feather on the end of the stick. Curled in a ball in the middle of the bed, Bella was down for the count. I was just about to crawl in beside her for an afternoon nap when the phone rang. It was a desperate-sounding Julia Lune. “I need help,” she said.
I found Julia in her office, a small backyard studio connected to her house by a series of tiered decks. It was an adult-size dollhouse with large round windows peering out onto Julia’s private lake, which had that frozen look of isolation that water assumes in Minnesota winters. This was where Julia the romance writer dreamed up her sassy dialogue and steamy scenes. There was nothing cold about Julia’s writing.
Or her decorating. The office, which had walls of tightly packed bookcases in every direction, was awash in passionate shades from the merlot wool rug to Julia’s deep purple alpaca shawl draped across a big leather sofa. Photos overlapped each other on a large magnetic board over the desk. Not one of them was of her husband, Jean-Luc. Mostly, they featured jaw-droppingly sexy men: muscle-bound firemen with no shirts, scrumptiously sculpted doctors with no shirts, hot-bodied archeologists with no shirts.
The room also was plastered with Post-It Notes—on the books, the windowsills, the laptop computer, the chiseled face of a hunk. Don’t ever mess with Julia’s notes. Ranging from plot ideas to reminders to pick up Jean-Luc’s dry cleaning, they kept Julia on track. Once she told me that all her heroines were her alter egos; they looked nothing like her, never left their cell phone in the refrigerator, and were fully capable of turning down a Kit Kat bar. “My readers have dreamy standards,” she said. “They want their women cute and spunky, and their men steamy and mysterious.”
Today Julia was making no pretense of emulating her heroines. The tendrils escaping her chignon appeared more forlorn than stylish, and she clutched a candy bar in each hand. I leaned across the leather sofa and gently pried one of the chocolate bars from her fingers. I placed the melting blob on the coffee table in front of us and out of reach.
“Okay, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I want you to get rid of her,” said Julia, her eyes intent on mine, peering desperately through chocolate-smudged round glasses in black frames. She took another bite.
“Her?”
“Sasha.”
At thirty-two, Sasha was ten years younger than her sister Julia and the baby of the seven Danilov children. A petite package of Southern sass, Sasha dressed like a Powder Puff girl with an addiction to Prada and pink. She had already been through three rich husbands.
“Why?” I inched closer to Julia. “What has she done?”
“She’s been just . . .” Julia swept a lock of hair from her eye, letting out an exasperated sigh and leaving a streak of chocolate on her cheek. “I never thought my prayer would feel like this. I had forgotten how Sasha she is.”
“Back up,” I said. “This all began with the cleansing ceremony we did last month?”
Julia nodded, loosening more strands of hair. “I was feeling low, that desperate-for-sun feeling. Every year February hits me like this—and I just wanted it to go away. I was missing warm North Carolina and lonesome for family, for someone who drops their g’s, for crying out loud.”
“And then Sasha appears on your doorstep.”
“Out of the blue. I hadn’t seen her in months. She’d missed the family gathering at Thanksgiving, which was like breaking twenty-nine laws in my mother’s eyes. If I can drag Jean-Luc down to Carolina for my mother’s borscht, which he hates, Sasha can haul her size-two butt out of the spa du jour and get on a plane.”
“Julia, I don’t know if the ceremony really had anything to do with this . . .”
Julia held up a hand. “All I know is I wrote, ‘Family, please,’ on that paper we burned and Sasha shows up, standing in my foyer in a snow bunny pink parka, Uggs, and enough luggage for an ocean crossing.”
Julia reached for the Kit Kat I’d dislodged from her grasp earlier. She froze as the door to the office flew open, and Sasha sauntered in on a wave of cold air. Julia’s sister didn’t bother to remove her boots at the door as I had, as was the tradition in every household in Minnesota in the wintertime. Crossing the room to the sitting area where we were, Sasha left a trail of snow prints on the Oriental rug. She unzipped her pink parka, plopped down into the wingback chair across from us, and swung a leg over the arm of the chair.
She lifted an eyebrow at the candy wrappers on the coffee table. “Julia, you’ll never get into that size-sixteen dress I just bought you if you keep sneakin’ those bad boys. Flowing fabrics can only cover so much, sugar.”
I started to say, “It’s mine,” but Julia laid a hand on my arm.
“I do not sneak,” she said, straightening, but not releasing the Kit Kat bar.
Sasha tilted her head, her blonde hair rippling around her face. “Sugar, you came out of the womb sneakin’ chocolate.” Spanish moss dripped from every word.
Wiggling in the chair, settling in for some girl talk, Sasha turned toward me and smiled. “You’ve got some nice scenery in that yoga class of yours. Tell me about this Jorn fella.” She fanned her hand in front of her face as if trying to cool herself. “Whew. I’d like to show him a pose or two.”
I ignored the funny feeling in my chest. When I noticed Sasha watching me, I made myself slow my breath. In class, Sasha positions her mat right behind Jorn. She pays more attention to his Down Dog than her own.
“Or maybe Sebastian Winter’s more your type.” Sasha’s grin was wicked. “Mr. Cool. Money. Smart dresser. Maya, sugar, he’ll eat you alive.”
“Don’t bet on that, Sasha.” I stared her down.
Sasha laughed. “Are all yoga teachers so hands-on?”
Julia cut in. “Sasha, stop.”
Suddenly, Sasha grew bored with the game. She glanced around the room then out the window at the bleak landscape. “Minnesota nice?” she pouted. “Minnesota boring. When is this godforsaken snow gonna leave?”
“May,” Julia and I said at the same time.
Sasha’s eyes widened. “May!”
I shrugged.
“I’m gonna need more clothes,” Sasha said.
As the door closed behind Sasha, silence filled up the space and eased away the tension until there was nothing left of Sasha but a trace of her Joy perfume.
“Look out, Mall of America,” I said.
Julia bit off a hunk of candy bar and chewed. I had never seen someone look so miserable while eating chocolate. “My family never comes here, you know
. This is the end of the world to them.”
“I had no idea.”
“That’s why I was so happy when I first saw Sasha. I thought, we’ll shop in The Cities and go to plays and eat out . . .”
“Sister stuff.” I understood. “All those things sound perfect for Sasha.”
“But she seems distracted this visit. Something’s on her mind. Maybe she’s having trouble hooking husband number four.”
“And when Sasha is distracted, she is cruel.”
“Sasha has never been sugar sweet. She likes her world a certain way, and women of my size don’t fit well into that world.”
Poor Julia. She didn’t know how romance-novel cute she was in her smudged glasses, frazzled appearance, and normally spunky attitude. With every word she wrote, Julia was her heroines.
She gave me a half-hearted smile. “I know I’m being silly. Sasha may like to surround herself with beautiful things, but she also is very generous.”
I doubted that, and it must have shown on my face.
“She likes spending money and giving gifts. Expensive gifts. She’s a big tipper. She’s been that way ever since she was a child.”
I asked, “Were you and Sasha close as kids?”
“I thought we were. She had trouble sleeping at night so I made up bedtime stories for her: princesses and knights. She loved my stories. Now—” Julia shrugged. Her shoulders slumped, and her eyes looked weary. “Maya, I got to admit, facing that size two every morning is getting me down.”
I hugged her. “Do you want me to kick her butt for you?”
Julia pulled back and laughed. “You? The Karma Queen? Whatever happened to helping us all find our inner peace? Besides, Sasha fights dirty.”
Down Dog Diary Page 5