Dewey's Nine Lives (14 page)

Bill Bezanson is better now. The fear and isolation triggered by the events of September 11, 2001, sent him to the local Veterans Affairs (VA) center for counseling, and he finally confronted his memories of Vietnam, and especially of September 1968. He had been experiencing the “fight or flight” syndrome so common with PTSD, a biological response triggered by a subconscious conviction that the world is unsafe, that to survive, you must either run or defend yourself. For more than thirty years, Bill Bezanson had been running.

“What would you have told me about your life before that breakthrough?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

It was as simple as that.

A few months later, in late 2001, Bill retired. He adopted another kitten so that the cat he brought home when Spooky was sick would never feel alone. After decades of rental houses, he purchased a condominium in northwestern Washington. He no longer felt the urge to flee, but that September he painted his entire condominium. Painting was a good middle ground.

In 2002, he bought a house outside Maple Falls, Washington, a small town near Mount Baker and the Canadian border. He’s still not sure he’s truly let anyone in, not all the way, but he’s found a home for life, and he’s made good friends in the neighborhood. Mr. Helpful, they call him. He built a porch for his neighbor, who is battling cancer. He drives another neighbor, a ninety-year-old former schoolteacher with macular degeneration, on her errands. His father died ten years ago after a long battle with cancer, having told only one story to the nurses who cared for him—the story of how a raccoon loved his son Bill so much that it jumped out of a tree to greet him and brought its babies onto the porch to meet him—but Bill has reconnected with his mother. He calls her in Michigan two or three times a week.

Every now and then, he has friends over: fellow retirees, neighbors, people he met on the job or in the past few years. They share a few drinks, laugh, chat. At some point during the evening, someone always reaches down and brushes the back of their leg. “I thought I felt something,” they say, when they see Bill watching them. “A cold spot. But there was nothing there.”

Bill doesn’t say anything, but he knows there was something there. “It might be Zippo,” Bill told me, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. That’s just a kindness to an old friend. In his heart, he knows it was the cold nose of Spooky. The cat has never left him. He still comes around, sometimes, to say hello. He is waiting for Bill to come home.

FOUR

I
love Sanibel Island, Florida.I’vetraveledall over the country to library conferences—and enjoyed every dancing, laughing minute of it—but nothing, for me, compares to that special island. Thanks to my brother Mike, who was friends with the former manager, I’ve been visiting a resort there called Premier Properties of Pointe Santo de Sanibel for more than twenty years. I was there the week after Dewey died, in fact. Brother Mike’s daughter was getting married, and I was packing for the trip when I got the call. Dewey wasn’t acting like himself.

I immediately rushed to the library to pick him up and take him to the vet. I thought it was constipation, a frequent problem for our elderly cat. I was stunned when the doctor used words like
tumor
,
cancer
,
intense pain
, and
no hope
. I felt as if I had been flattened by a hammer blow, but when I looked into Dewey’s eyes, I could tell it was true. He had been hiding it from me for weeks, possibly months, but he wasn’t hiding it now. He was hurting. And he was asking for my help.

I signed the paperwork. I held him in my arms and against my heart. I watched his eyes close. I arranged for his cremation, numb from the shock. Then, still in a fog, I rushed home to finish packing, picked up my father at his house half a day later than planned, and drove to Omaha. I rushed to my daughter’s house, hugged my twin grandchildren, and hustled everyone to the airport. Our bottoms didn’t hit our seats, I think, until a second before the airplane took off. And then of course the twins, who were only two, needed juice and crayons and a hug until the plane leveled out and their ears stopped hurting. When I finally caught my breath somewhere in the sky over Missouri, I picked up the ratty old airline magazine. Someone had already filled in the crossword puzzle. In pen. Ugh. On the next page, though, was a picture of a cat. I started crying, and cried all the way to Sanibel Island.

There is no better place to mourn. Sanibel Island, and in particular Premier Properties of Pointe Santo, is the most relaxing spot on earth. The beach is crystal white, and there is hardly anyone on it. Well, except “no-see-ums,” evil little creatures that will bite you mercilessly if your bare flesh touches the sand. But, really, that is a small price for a paradise where you can walk (in flip-flops) along the surf, picking up coral-colored seashells, and sit on your balcony, watching mother dolphins and their babies leaping offshore. In the afternoon, I like to relax to the arguing of the mockingbirds that call back and forth to each other “Whhhaat?” (that’s the male, I’ve decided) and “Uh-uh” (that’s the sass-talking female). Even the four-foot alligator on the property is cool. You see him sometimes shuffling lazily across the lawn, completely ignoring the lounge chairs.

Then there are the sunsets. In Iowa, once in a while you get a blast of color at the end of the day, with pinks and oranges and gold. On Sanibel Island, it’s always like that, the vivid colors dominating the sky and then sinking slowly into the gorgeous blue gulf waters and bringing out the stars. You look up from the beach, or from the wine you’re sipping on your balcony, and feel happy and free, awed by the natural beauty and ready to toast a perfect end to another glorious day.

Or that’s usually how it is. With a wedding to attend and long-absent relatives to soothe (and sometimes pretend to ignore), the week after Dewey’s death was going to be crazy, even before the emotional bombshell of his passing. Fortunately, my granddaughter Hannah, the flower girl, distracted me in the unique manner of children: She gave me the flu. Along with twenty-seven other people at the rehearsal dinner. I spent most of the week watching cartoons with Hannah on the sofa, and I spent more time on my knees staring into the toilet bowl than I did watching dolphins frolic in the surf. I was too weak for the telephone, television, or e-mail (I was barely strong enough to follow Dora the Explorer’s mind-numbing adventures, in fact), so I had no idea that back home, Dewey’s popularity was exploding and the library phones were ringing off the hook. I could only look out the window at the ocean and think what a small piece of the world we all were, and how nice it was that the bathroom was only ten feet from the television. Even when you’re vomiting five times a day, there is nothing quite like the peace of Sanibel Island.

So I know what Mary Nan Evans meant when she told me that her thought, on seeing Sanibel Island for the first time, was: “There is no way I could ever afford to live here.” Paradise, after all, had been reserved long ago for the rich and powerful, and like me, Mary Nan was a small-town girl from the Midwest. Her husband, Larry, a maintenance man at a hospital in Waverly, Missouri, had won employee of the year for the state’s western district, and the prize was four days on this small island off the southwest coast of Florida. Mary Nan had been to Florida many times before—she had an aunt who lived in Fort Myers, just up the coast—but the merging of the brilliant blue sky and the brilliant blue water around the tight green strip of Sanibel Island was like nothing she had ever seen. Even the white buildings visible on the horizon looked like the sharpened edges of clouds. As she crossed the long causeway linking the island to the mainland, she thought to herself,
Remember this, Mary Nan, because you’ll never be back
.

Four years later, in 1984, she and Larry were back, at least in Florida. This time, they weren’t looking for a four-day break from their ordinary lives; they were looking for a job. With Larry’s fifteen years in maintenance, they felt confident he could find work at one of the many resorts that dotted the coast. And the resorts offered accommodations, since being the maintenance director for a large complex of buildings full of tourists who can’t survive a busted ice machine for twenty minutes, let alone two hours, was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job full of people making demands and odd requests. But there was one problem. When Larry mentioned that he owned a cat, the resorts turned him down. Sorry, they said. No animals allowed.

Getting rid of Tabitha, their beloved Siamese, was out of the question. Larry and Mary Nan had adopted her fifteen years earlier, in 1969, when Larry was stationed in California at the end of his military service. Just before Thanksgiving, Mary Nan had seen an ad in the base newspaper: newborn kittens available for adoption. They only had twenty dollars, saved by serious scrimping on an enlisted man’s pay, but Mary Nan convinced Larry to have a look. As soon as they arrived at the apartment, a bundle of tiny Siamese kittens came tumbling out of a back room. Most of them were wobbling and falling over, but one came straight to Mary Nan and stumbled into her arms. Mary Nan held the kitten to her chest, and it stretched up and nuzzled her chin.

“I really want a girl,” she told the woman with the cats.

“Well, you’re holding the only one,” the woman replied.

Mary Nan gave the woman ten dollars for her expenses and left with Tabitha. She spent most of the rest of their life’s savings on litter and cat food. That Thanksgiving, Mary Nan and Larry Evans sat down at the dinner table and said grace over two aluminum-tray TV dinners. Mary Nan can’t exactly recall, but it was probably Swanson’s turkey and gravy. With that little cherry pie on the side. After buying cat food, it was the only Thanksgiving dinner they could afford.

But Tabitha was worth it, because she was the sweetest, most loyal cat any couple could ask for. She never wanted anything but her food. She never made more than a polite sound. She never craved the company of anyone but her parents but was never rude to visitors or handymen. As long as she was in the house, Tabitha wasn’t worried about anything. She slept. She lounged. She let Larry vacuum her neck and the top of her head—yes, with the hose from the vacuum cleaner—closing her eyes as the blast of air sucked away her loose fur. “She even made friends with a mouse,” Larry told me in amazement. More than once, he found her in the living room just staring as an ancient, gray-whiskered mouse (according to Larry, who is apparently an expert on mouse whiskers) tottered off to his hole. I have no idea how Mary Nan put up with that. I would have demanded my cat—or at least Larry—get rid of that mouse. But she never held this act of clemency against Tabitha. Every night, the cat slept in the center of the bed, right between Larry and Mary Nan. If Mary Nan awoke during the night, she’d often find Tabitha sitting on her chest, staring into her face. Completely mouse-free.

Mary Nan wasn’t shy about telling herself, Larry, or any of her friends about Tabitha’s role in the family. She and Larry weren’t able to have children (Tabitha couldn’t either, although that was her owner’s decision), and Tabitha was like the daughter they’d never have to argue with or beg not to date that “bad boy” all the girls were cooing over. For a while, Mary Nan even carried Tabitha around in a baby blanket her grandmother had crocheted for her.