Dewey's Nine Lives

“There’s something wrong with Shadow,” she said when Vicki came running into her room.

The kitten was lying on her side on Sweetie’s pillow, panting heavily. Blood was smeared on her fur and the pillow case. For some reason, when Ted gave her the kitten, Vicki assumed she was fixed. By the time she took Shadow to the vet, it was too late, and in the last few frantic, terrifying months that fact had slipped her mind. Now her cat was giving birth on her daughter’s pillow.

“It’s fine,” Vicki said. “It’s just the babies, Sweetie. Shadow’s having babies.”

She got a packing box. Carefully, she placed Shadow on a blanket in the box and carried her to the empty walk-in closet. Vicki and Sweetie grabbed pillows and lay quietly on the floor beside her. They assisted Shadow with the breaking of the sac on one of the kittens and, despite the chaos of their lives, felt renewed by the five new lives that wiggled on the floor beside them when morning finally came.

A few days later, when Vicki flew to Anchorage, she left Sweetie in Kodiak with her mother but took Shadow and her kittens with her. She had rented her new apartment sight unseen. She had no furniture. She had no child care lined up. She didn’t know if she even wanted to live in Wasilla. She knew, at least for the moment, Sweetie would be better off in Kodiak. But Shadow? She didn’t trust anyone else to care for her kittens.

The apartment was awful. It had ratty carpet, unscreened windows, a broken stove, and holes in the walls. She had packed only one suitcase, so there were no plates to eat from or cups for water. The ferry from Kodiak was grounded for repairs, so she had flown with Shadow and her kittens tucked in a carrier under her seat. Now, without her car, she had no good way to get around Wasilla. (The six of them would fly back and forth to Kodiak four times to visit Sweetie and complete the move; Vicki always joked that it would have been a lot easier if the cats had qualified for frequent flyer miles.) She went to her new office and realized the only hope was to lay off half the staff and hope the rest could turn the branch around. That afternoon, a severe Alaska summer storm blew in and plunged the world into twilight. She sat in her empty apartment, without dinner, and listened to the rain. She missed the old house in Kodiak. The one she had bought and remodeled and cared for on her own. She missed her old job and her comfortable community. Most of all, she missed her daughter.

Thunder ripped and rain, mixed with summer hail, pounded the window. The suitcase lay in the corner, her two business suits hidden from cat hair in the closet. She reached out and stroked Shadow, who was lying nearby. Her kittens were tottering around her on the dirty carpet, knocking each other over and nuzzling for milk. The runt was black and orange, but the others were jet black like Shadow and Christmas Cat. She stuck her finger near one of them; he rolled over and sniffed it. His paws were like tissue paper, delicate and almost soft. She started to cry. She hadn’t known she was going to until the tears were on her cheeks.

How could she have made the same mistake twice? How could she have allowed another man control over her? She had been raised by a difficult father, and she had fallen into the same pattern again and again. Her husband. Ted. She was strong, independent, smart, hardworking, successful, and yet bad relationships had left her sitting on the floor in a dingy apartment, without a stick of furniture, in a town she didn’t know. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so . . . weak? The rain beat against the window. She sniffled, then wiped the tears from her face. The kittens wrestled on the floor, content and playful, completely oblivious to the situation around them. Shadow looked at her, her eyes half open in a sleepy expression, then turned back to her babies.

And for some reason, that made Vicki smile. And then, because she was smiling, she started to laugh. Here she was, an avowed cat hater—or at least cat ignorer—for most of her life, and she had chosen to bring her kittens instead of her daughter on a life-changing five-hundred-mile trip. Instead of Sweetie, she was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment with a cat and her kittens for company. And not just any cat—the cat her stalker had used to win her back. A cat that, in a way, represented the worst betrayal of her life. But a cat she loved just the same.