The Catswold Portal

He wished he had a cup of coffee. Alice used to bring the pot into the bedroom at night, plug it in when she woke. He got up finally, went into the kitchen, filled the coffee pot and stood barefoot on the cold floor while it brewed, thinking about the work, the show, and Rye Chapman. By the time he carried the pot and a mug back to bed, his feet were freezing and the sunrise was past its peak. The cat hadn’t moved. He got back in bed and slid his feet under her, feeling her warmth like an oven. She woke suddenly and turned her green stare full on him, her expression chilling. Then she got up, stalked across the bed, and resettled herself where his feet couldn’t reach her.

He grinned. Alice would be amused. A sense of Alice, a sense of the empty spaces where she should be, lay behind all other thoughts.

He got up finally and got to work, not stopping until the cat rubbed against his leg, startling him because he’d forgotten her. He looked down, rigid with the shock of fur against his ankles. “What the hell do you want?”

She headed for the kitchen.

After nearly a week the cat was still there. Braden wouldn’t admit she had moved in. She came and went at her pleasure, clawing at the door to get in, leaving deep scratches on the wood frame, waiting outside impatiently if he wasn’t home or didn’t come right away. He bought a few cans of cat food—he could always give them to Morian. The cat slept on his bed at night but was not allowed on the pillow; house rules began to grow up in spite of his insistence that she was temporary. She paid little heed to rules; though she did not get into the paint again after being cuffed lightly, probably because she didn’t like the smell. And she had never offered to claw the canvases. He was completely caught up in the work again, the cat and everything else existing outside the real world of the paintings. He woke, painted, ate, slept, painted. He fed the cat and let her in and out to avoid her insistent yowling and scratching, or her insouciant rubbing against his legs. Twelve paintings were finished. Chapman came by and was pleased, and took some photographs for the papers. Braden wasn’t on a real high, but he was working. Alice used to say the house could burn down around him when he was working.

Alice hadn’t been so single-minded, shutting out everything else. She had been able to juggle several things at once—painting, print making, etching, housework, lectures. She had been such a careful draftsman, had always known what she was going to do before she did it, known what the work would look like. He could never manage that; his pleasure was in the exploration, in the discovery of forms unrevealed until he touched the right combination to free them. Alice had marveled at that. Well, Alice had been organized. She always said he lived by intuition—it was a standing joke between them. Alice put things where she could find them, then found them there. He put things where he could find them, then forgot where that was. He missed her. His occasional nights with Morian were warm and caring and completely casual. Morian was the earth mother—giving, loving, but not involving herself. They were good friends, as Morian had been with Alice. He couldn’t stop thinking of Alice; he was thinking of her more now than he had done for months.

It had taken him a long time to learn to escape the raw memories that tore at him. Now again they were like a fresh wound—he was thinking of her again as he had just after she died, lonely for her in the way he had been those first months. As if she would walk into the room, as if when he looked up she would be there working. Now again when he woke at night he reached for her—and was startled and angry when he touched the damn cat.

Bob maintained that patients in depression could be helped by having a pet, a living creature that they would hold and talk to, to let them know they were still among the living. With that thought Braden almost chucked the cat out. But she gave him the rolling over, green-eyed coquette treatment, and he ended up stroking her. And he thought, as she watched him so intelligently, that sometimes her eyes didn’t seem like a cat’s eyes. Sometimes her green gaze seemed to hold a greater knowledge. Braden studied her, puzzled and intrigued.

Maybe Alice would know what that look was, maybe Alice would be able to explain what he found so strange about the small cat.

Chapter 32

Dawn. Melissa woke lying next to Braden deliciously warm curled on the blanket. Outside the bedroom window the sky was barely light. She stretched lazily, her toes touching the foot of the bed and her fingers tracking across the headboard. She jolted awake filled with panic: she wasn’t a cat anymore.