Cherished (8 page)

He had, at nine months, already caused enough trouble that he got kicked out of someone's house. This appealed to me.

Seamus had been gone exactly twenty-one days when my friend Cindy and I drove ninety miles east of Los Angeles to get Thomas. He had not been house-trained and had no idea what a leash meant. He appeared to be perilously close to his wolfish, rat-hunting origins, with little interest in humans. On the way home, we stopped at Jamba Juice, and we sat outside on a little strip of mall grass, sipping our pomegranate smoothies and staring at the strange, puzzled dog, who looked around at everything but us.

Thomas turned out to be a hard one, not biddable at all, which did not release me from my do-over deal with the universe. I enrolled him in the first class available on the schedule at the West Los Angeles Obedience Training Club, and kept him there until he stopped slipping his lead to run off with the soccer players who shared the park. I trained him to take tunnels, jumps, and teeters. I took him to an Earth dog trial, where rodent-hunting terrier breeds prove their gameness by burrowing underground in search of a rat. At one of those trials, a woman with some expertise in the terrier world grabbed him away from me. “This dog needs to be stripped!” she yelled, and proceeded to school me in the art of stripping a cairn terrier.

One week at the end of August, I left Thomas at the puppy camp, where he'd fallen hard for a spindly Italian greyhound. I
packed a truck full of gear, tents, and wigs and drove a
thousand miles north to the Burning Man festival near Reno, Nevada. It was time to give up and start over, to find another place to live and another way to live it. I cried, danced, slept far too little, and walked until my legs ached. Late one night, I wandered out to the Temple, the place at Burning Man where people remember their loved and dead. With a Sharpie, I wrote verses in big block letters to my two little dogs. “I'm sorry,” I wrote, “for not seeing you.”

And with that, I began a new year. Drawing on the failed experiment of all the years that had come before, I wrote up a list of intentions — a design for a new life — and threw it into a bonfire. My wish, above all: a life full of love. I would put my foot down and settle for nothing less.

Two months later, I walked up a mountain under a full November moon with Thomas at my heels, surrounded by friends, one of whom had brought his neighbor, Billy. By the time the night was over, Billy and I had split off from the group and talked for eight hours straight. Two years later, to the day, we got married with less fuss and forethought than it takes to plan a vacation.

We do carry our sticks: our struggle over our shared desire to write something true and profound; our ideas about how to change the world; our sometimes divergent opinions about the care of the baby pit bull we adopted after Molly's death. (Never much of an animal person before, my husband has become a relentless spoiler of dogs.) I was inclined to think that meeting him was magic, but it was not: if I didn't find him before, it was because of the simple fact that none of us can recognize what we haven't already seen. In his death, Spud had shown me how to live.

C
alico saved me. Not only from the fire but also from the constant longing I had for my mother. It was Calico that I counted on to be home every day after school as I walked down our long gravel driveway. Past the blackberry bushes, past the pink tea roses. She was always there. For eighteen years Calico was the mother cat in our big yellow house. Twenty-three kittens. Seventy-eight (at the very least) field mice, birds, and blue-bellies that she captured out in the pasture. An occasional alligator lizard and close to a dozen tailless voles. Every day, she watched us diligently with her big gold and black eyes.

The fire was an accident. It was close to three in the morning when Calico pounced on my bed and began the distinct
yee-oowl
sound that came from deep in her throat whenever she'd caught a prize out in the field. Annoyed by her loud cries, I shoved her off my bed. Sometimes she'd bring me a mouse that was still alive and then play chase with it on the borders of my quilt. Usually though, she'd crouch on the dark blue carpet, and I'd hear her crunching up tiny bones like she was eating a whole walnut shell.

But on this particular night, she pushed her nose hard against my face. Between her cries, I heard the crackling and popping coming from outside my window. I turned and saw the glow of flames twelve inches from the head of my bed. Our house was on fire.

I swept up Calico in my arms, ran to the foot of the stairs, and screamed for my dad to wake up. In a frantic scramble, my father ran to the back of the house and began to douse the fire with our garden hose. The flames were burning the outside of my bedroom walls, turning the thick yellow paint black and brittle.

The fire chief later scolded my father for leaving the pile of chemical-soaked rags outside my window, and for not having smoke detectors in the house. “You know how fast this old house would have burned down?” he asked.

My dad shook his head.

“Twenty-four minutes and there would have been nothing left,” said the fire chief.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to lose everything in twenty-four minutes. I knew then that Calico must have come to my room within seconds of the fire starting.

She saved us from losing our house that night — and maybe our lives. But it wasn't just that night. Calico saved me all the time. This yearning I had for my mother was because she wasn't around much. I never knew when I would see her next. Calico was always available. Her willingness to let me love her and just hang out with her on the brown velvet couch was the kind of closeness I needed most.

Sometimes she'd let down her guard and race wild through the house. She got this crazy, almost-possessed look in her wide eyes. Then she would tear around our house, galloping full speed through every room, hitting walls and racing upside down along the underside of my grandmother's old wing chair. She made me laugh, brought me out of my contained self.

Calico had an odd routine with me. Every morning she'd study me in the shower. My father had converted an old wine barrel into an open stall but never got around to figuring out how to put a curtain around it. There was also no doorknob on the bathroom, so Calico could push her way in. Every shower I took, Calico would stand sentinel on the zinc tub across from the wine barrel and watch me. Her pupils narrowed and her eyes rarely blinked as the steam rose up around me and filled the room. I became self-conscious of her steady gaze on my naked body. It made me uneasy. I was starting to develop breasts and hips, and I felt like she was documenting the changes in me, that she quite possibly had arrived from another planet to report on the human body.

Calico gave birth to the strangest assortment of kittens. There were always two or three with tail issues — kinks and knots, and sometimes no tail at all. My brothers and I gave them silly names like Kinks One and Kinks Two and Tommy-No-Tail. My father kept saying he was going to get her fixed “once and for all,” but he was sidetracked raising my brothers and me, and inevitably Calico would show up fat and moody one more time. As soon as her litter was old enough, we'd take them down to Lucky's Market in a cardboard box with a sign that said “Free Kittens.” I'd point out how unique their tails were, and that was always a good selling point.

Calico chose to have her last litter underneath my covers late one night when no one else was home. I curled myself up on my pillow to give her all the room she needed as I listened in the dark to the sounds of a mother cat giving birth and the tiny cries that followed. I lifted my quilt and watched the last wet black kitten slip out of her body and onto my pink sheets. I marveled at the way she licked each kitten dry. She cared for them with such natural confidence. How did she know how to take care of her kittens? I wanted to know. I wanted to know because I couldn't understand why it was so hard for my mom to take care of my brothers and me when we were small. And how was I ever going to learn how to be a mother?

My mom was also an animal lover, but in a different way. She collected animals — cats, chickens, sheep, goats, geese, cows. You name it, and she had one running around the property at one time or another. We picked up a curly black puppy one summer at a gas station outside the airport. Mr. Wiggly didn't live long. Most of my mom's animals didn't have particularly long lives — it was often some misfortune or an infection that waited too long before she took the animal to see the veterinarian.

I
WAS TEN YEARS OLD
when I went to visit my mom one summer in Washington State. She was living on a dairy farm with 180 cows and her new boyfriend, Roger Short. She was engrossed in her
New York Times
crossword puzzle at the table when I asked her if I could go down to the calf barn. She
nodded her head and said that I might look for a few good
chicken eggs while I was there.

The black-and-white calves shoved their heads through the wood slats of the stalls and stared at me with their big polished eyes. “Roger likes to wean them young,” my mom had told me. I decided to do a little exploring around the barn. I walked past the room filled with burlap sacks of corn and grain and peeked into several empty stalls. At the end of the walkway, there were two tall white buckets with lids on them, the plastic kind that painters use. They looked out of place to me for some reason, like maybe they were set down there and forgotten. I pried the lid off the bucket closest to me.

I was not certain if what I was seeing was right or true. Kittens. Piled up to the brim. Clean white fur. Brown, black, tan, orange. Small paws with fleshy pads as soft as apricot skin. Wiry tails. Tiny pink noses. Whiskers, as fine as fishing line, almost transparent.

I pushed the lid back on. I guessed that there were more than a dozen piled up in there. I pried open the other bucket only because I wanted it to be something different. But it wasn't. One all black, one striped orange, one smoky gray, more colors underneath. Soft triangle ears, thin as potato chips. I wanted to stop staring but I couldn't. A small calico kitten was lying across the top of the heap. Its eyes were closed, but the shallow part of its belly moved — barely — up and down like it was in a deep sleep. I wanted to touch it, but I was afraid.

I ran up the hill through the wet grass and opened the screen door. My mom was at the table with her crossword puzzle, her coffee, and a cigarette.

“Why are all those kittens in the white buckets?” I asked.

She kept looking at her crossword puzzle like she was just about to figure something out.

“Oh, that,” she said with a frown. “You
weren't
supposed to see that. Roger was supposed to dump them.”

I waited for her to say something more.

“I'm sorry you had to see that, darlin'. It's the way of the farm here. There were just too many kittens.”

“What do you mean too many?” I asked.

“Those were feral kittens, wild and inbred — just the ugly ones. Believe me. I can tell the inbred ones right away. Their eyes are wide-set and slightly askew. Their heads are oversized.”

“But how did they die?”

My mom got up from the table with her ceramic coffee cup and walked into the kitchen. I could tell she didn't want to listen to my questions.

“Chloroform is what Roger said to use.” She measured out a heaping spoonful of sugar into her cup. “But power steering fluid works just as well. It's very quick. They don't suffer.”

I felt my throat tighten up like a fist. My legs were as wobbly and uncertain as the calves down in the barn.

“Mom, I saw one breathing on the top, a calico one, not an ugly one, but a long-haired calico.”

“There were no calicos,” she said. “And you did
not
see
any kittens breathing.”

“I did Mom, I definitely saw that one on top.”

She slammed the garbage can lid down.

“None of those kittens were breathing, you understand?”

I was strangely afraid of her. She knew how much I loved kittens. I tried to stop the image of her hands pushing those kittens into the white buckets. But I knew there was a calico. I knew that she killed them.

W
HEN I RETURNED HOME
, Calico was curled up on my bed. I sat down beside her and ran my fingers through the thick white patch of fur on her chest. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. I would no longer confide in my mom, but I could talk to Calico. She listened to everything. She was like me. She could keep secrets.

As the years passed, I'd tell her about the things I was afraid of and ashamed of — like getting drunk and high in eighth grade and lying to my dad about where I was going on the weekends. I also learned from Calico how to sneak back into the house late at night. I had watched her out in the field so many times that I knew exactly how to take those silent and slow, slow, stalking steps.