Dewey's Nine Lives

And yet he wouldn’t rub against her. Vicki was very conscious of her professional image, and she splurged on her clothes. CC knew she wouldn’t tolerate cat hair on her business suits, much less muddy paw prints. So he waited until she changed into her sweater and jeans, then stood on his hind legs, with his front paws on her upper leg, waiting for her to pick him up. When she did, he put a paw lightly on each of her cheeks, as if to hold her steady, and looked into her eyes.

“Hi, CC,” she whispered. “How are you?”

He put his cheek against her chin, then bent forward and nuzzled her neck. She pushed him to her shoulder, where he lay against her neck and purred, and that is how they spent the first five minutes of every evening. He wasn’t a lap cat by nature, but if Vicki wanted company, she simply sat in her bentwood rocker, purchased when she learned she was pregnant with Sweetie, and CC came running to curl up on her lap. They spent many a long winter night in that chair by the woodstove, Vicki reading a book and CC purring lightly in his sleep after Sweetie had gone off to bed.

“It was his unconditional love,” Vicki said, when asked what made the relationship special. “He was always there. But he let me be the boss.”

Eventually, she started dating a man named Ted (not his real name). He was charming and attractive and, to be honest, she enjoyed his attention. It made her feel wanted, I suppose, in a way other things never had. Her friends weren’t sure about Ted, and his relationship with Sweetie was rocky at times, but Vicki didn’t worry. Even Christmas Cat’s obvious dislike of him didn’t deter her. Later, she learned to trust the cat’s instincts. If her cat didn’t like a man, or vice versa, that man was out the door. But at the time, still relatively new to this whole cat thing, she considered CC’s attitude nothing more than jealousy. For three years, he had been the man in her life. He had been the one to make her feel wanted. Now he had to share.

A few months later, when Ted started opening her mail and reading her appointment calendar, Vicki made excuses. When he started showing up at restaurants where she was having business meetings, she dumped him. Twice. But each time he begged for forgiveness, saying he just worried about her safety because he loved her so much, that he had learned his lesson, that he wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t realize she was losing control until he started verbally abusing her. But by then it was too late.

“A bad relationship is like a funnel,” Vicki says. “It’s easy to slide into, but very hard to climb out of. And it’s always pulling you down. The more I struggled for independence, the more he tried to control me.”

To the outside world, Vicki was thriving. Her mortgage office was booming, adding staff and quietly becoming one of the best producers in the state. She had harbored some fears about returning to her family, where bad memories crowded the good, but Sweetie grew so close to her grandmother that they spent all their afternoons together, freeing Vicki from worry about her long work hours and giving her daughter a link to her past. She bowled on Wednesdays; she joined a softball team. After two years of work, even her ramshackle residence, once a tilting, leaking mess, was on the verge of becoming the house of her dreams. But her love life was shaking those solid foundations.

“I can run a million-dollar business,” she often muttered to Christmas Cat when he jumped on the edge of the bathtub where she soaked away the day’s fatigue, “but I can’t figure out my love life. What’s wrong with me?”

Christmas Cat always leaned over to sniff her, and more often than not, Vicki could see the crawl space dust still powdered in his jet-black fur.

“Do you want to come in?”

He just stared at her. He wasn’t coming in, but he also didn’t appear to be afraid of the water.

“Suit yourself.” She laughed, closing her eyes so that she didn’t have to look at the bruises on her arms and feeling her worries about Ted float away on a kitten’s soft purr.

Then, in April, her brother committed suicide. I know that pain, because my brother committed suicide, too. There is the horror of suddenly losing someone you love. There is the terror of the details; the memory, in my case, of driving to his apartment and seeing the blood. And there is the nagging belief that you could have done something more, that you had the power to prevent it. I remember the day, ten years before his death, when my brother walked four miles in the cold, in the dead of night, without a jacket in subfreezing temperature, to knock on my door and tell me, “There’s something wrong with me, Vicki. Don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I was only nineteen. I didn’t say a word. I wish I had.