Dewey's Nine Lives (18 page)

They wrapped a heating pad around the towel, set it on low, and put the kitten on the kitchen counter. As Sharon gently rubbed the top of the kitten’s head for comfort, Vicki carefully dried him with a blow-dryer. Halfway through, the kitten started convulsing. His mouth was hanging open; his eyelids were fluttering; he looked like he was having a seizure. He twitched, then started shivering and retching in violent dry heaves. It looked painful, as if his body was being pulled apart like Alaska’s pack ice in a spring thaw, but it was an involuntary reaction. The kitten, apart from his spasms, never stirred. More than an hour after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.

Already late for dinner, Vicki called Michael. “I’m coming,” she said. “Tell my daughter I’m coming. I’m just going to be late. And, um . . . Merry Christmas.”

Then she called every veterinarian in the phone book. No one answered. Why would they? It was late in the afternoon, and it was Christmas Eve. She couldn’t leave the kitten at Sharon’s house because her oldest daughter was allergic to cats. Even if she hadn’t been, Vicki knew she couldn’t abandon the kitten now. Not after all they’d been through. After an hour, when his convulsing slowed, she put him in a shoe box, still wrapped in the towel and heating pad, and drove to Christmas Eve dinner.

“This is Sharon’s cat,” she told Sweetie when the little girl came to see what her mother had in the box. “He is really sick. But Sharon had to work, so I told her we would watch him through the night.” Sweetie was staring at the little black kitten, at his open mouth and his swollen eyes and his lifeless rag of a body, and Vicki could tell she was going to cry.

“He’s probably going to die, Sweetie,” she said, reaching out to hug her daughter. “I’m sorry. He is very, very sick, and we didn’t want him to be alone.”

“Okay,” Sweetie said, hugging her mother back.

They put his shoe box in the bathroom next to the heat register and sat down to dinner. It was a somber affair, nothing like a typical Christmas Eve filled to bursting with a young child’s noisy anticipation. They ate slowly, and their conversation seemed halfhearted. Every few minutes, Vicki and Sweetie tiptoed to the bathroom to check on the little black kitten. He had stopped convulsing and retching, but his panting was so shallow they could barely tell he was alive. He seemed to be struggling for every breath. And four hours after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.

They left Michael’s house just after nine o’clock. Vicki had finally reached a twenty-four-hour emergency veterinary phone service, and they recommended buying some kind of protein, blending it down to liquid, and seeing if the kitten would eat a few drops. So on the way home, they stopped at a convenience store that was just shutting for Christmas. Sweetie, still wide awake, waited with the kitten in the car. “We can’t leave him alone, Mommy,” she said.

The store had one jar of meat-based baby food. Vicki bought it, along with an eyedropper. She tried to give the kitten a drop of the brown mush, but he gagged. She diluted the baby food again and again, until it was practically water, and finally, about 11:00 P.M., he kept down two drops. That was his limit: two drops of protein water.

“It’s time for bed, Sweetie,” Vicki said, once the kitten was tucked into his towel.

“But, Mommy . . .” the little girl started to protest, not wanting to leave the kitten, but she was so tired she couldn’t fight any longer. She was asleep by the time she reached the bed.

Vicki kissed her good night—
Merry Christmas
, she thought—and made herself a cup of tea. Every hour on the hour, all through the night, she fed the kitten a few drops of diluted baby food. Each time, when she saw him lying motionless on his side, her heart clenched and she feared he was dead. But as she approached, he started to shift his head. He let her push open his mouth (he still hadn’t opened his eyes) and squeeze two drops down his throat. Then she went back to the couch, turned on some Christmas music, and tried to stay awake for another hour.

She must have crashed after the 4:00 A.M. feeding, because the next thing she knew, it was Christmas morning. She leapt off the couch and rushed to the bathroom, where she had left the kitten in his blanket in front of the heat register. As soon as she saw him, she gasped. He was standing on four very shaky legs, trying to tip himself over the edge of the shoe box.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Her daughter trembled in the doorway.

“Oh, Sweetie, look! He’s alive. The kitten is alive.”

Vicki put her arm around her daughter, and together they watched as the kitten gathered himself on spindly legs and, with great effort, stepped one shaking paw out of the box. He pulled a second leg over, rested for a moment, looked at them with tired eyes. Then he turned back to his task and, with one final shaking lunge, pulled himself free.

Toys and gifts were forgotten. Russian tea (a combination of powdered tea, orange drink mix, and spices that was Vicki’s favorite) and hot chocolate were neglected. For the rest of the day, they watched their Christmas miracle. The kitten spent most of the time on his side, since he was so weak, but whenever Sweetie and Vicki brought the eyedropper over, he pushed himself onto his front knees and stretched out his neck. Vicki had never seen a four-year-old child so gentle and careful, or a kitten more determined to succeed. By the afternoon, Christmas Cat, as they named him (or CC, as they called him), was swallowing three or four drops of brown protein water at a time. They were keeping him alive drop by drop, and every hour he was getting stronger. When Sweetie fell asleep that night, her last question was about CC, the Christmas Cat.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I hope so, Sweetie. You were wonderful.”

The girl smiled. Vicki tucked her in, turned off all the lights except the Christmas tree, turned on the radio, and sat on the sofa, rubbing her thumb along the kitten’s skinny side.
He’s going to live
, she thought, as music floated around them and the tree sparkled in the purple blackness of an eighteen-hour Alaska winter night.
He’s really going to live
. She shook her head in wonder, surprised both by his survival and by how much she cared.

The day after Christmas, a Saturday, she finally reached a veterinarian. The next open appointment was three days away, but the veterinarian assured her she was doing everything right. “Just keep up your regimen,” she said. “It’s worked so far.”

On Monday, Vicki went back to work. She had used up her sick days because of some recent health issues, and as a single mother she couldn’t afford to take time off. So every few hours, on her morning break, lunch hour, and afternoon break, she rushed home to feed Christmas Cat a few drops of his watery meal. Her coworkers thought it was hysterical. For weeks, she had been complaining nonstop about adopting the cats. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she’d say, shaking her head. “I hope my daughter appreciates this sacrifice,” she’d proclaim, as if she were giving her daughter one of her kidneys or something. Now here she was dashing home every few hours so that she could nurse a nearly dead kitten back to health.

“I thought you didn’t like cats,” her coworkers said, howling with laughter when they saw her tearing off her scarf and jacket.

“I don’t,” she said. “I really don’t. But what can I do?” She was telling the truth: She still didn’t
like
cats. She just happened to like CC. Why? Because helping him had become her project. Because he had proven himself to her. Because he had personality, toughness, and an incredible will to live. As soon as he could stand, even trembling and weak, he had thrown himself over the edge of his box. He wasn’t broken; he wasn’t giving up. He wasn’t . . . soft. And Vicki Kluever admired that.

By the time she visited the veterinarian’s office, it had been four days since the accident. Four times she had tried to give CC a bite of food with a little texture, but each time he had thrown up immediately, so she was still feeding him a few diluted drops of baby food at a time. Four drops of liquid was the most he could handle.

“Something’s wrong,” the veterinarian said. She pressed the kitten’s side and his stomach, which was almost nonexistent. There was no way Christmas Cat weighed more than a pound. “He’s never going to gain weight on a liquid diet. He can’t get enough nutrients. I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “but he’s starving to death.” She made a note on his chart, then looked at Vicki, who was clearly in shock. “Why don’t you leave him here with me?”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“We’ll run some tests,” she said. “We’ll do what’s best for him.”

Instantly, Vicki snatched CC off the table and wrapped him in her arms. He was trembling, and Vicki might have been, too. “No,” she said, turning her shoulder toward the veterinarian in a protective gesture. “No way. We have come this far, and we are going to see this through.” She could feel her anger rising, her indignation. This woman didn’t believe. This woman wanted to kill her cat!

“No,” she said. “We are not giving up.” Then, nearly shaking with fury and unable to think of anything else to say, she whirled around and walked out of the office.

She went to a specialty store and found a protein paste for cats. She compared labels. The paste had all the same nutrients as the baby food she had been using, so she started diluting it with water and feeding it to CC through the eyedropper. Sweetie helped, and she was always gentle and caring and enthusiastic, but mostly it was Vicki who squeezed the protein into CC’s waiting mouth. He was only ten weeks old, a tiny bundle of bones and fur, so six or seven times a day, she would cradle him in the palm of one hand and lower the dropper tip into his mouth with the other. As she squeezed a single morsel, he would stare up at her, his eyes still glassy, and then close his mouth over his meal with a delicate sigh. She had felt attached to him before—at the moment he sputtered in her hand, as she watched him haul himself over the edge of the shoe box on bandy legs, in the veterinarian’s office—but holding him in her hand day after day bonded them in a way Vicki Kluever never thought possible. She had saved his life. But more than that, CC had saved his own.

After another week, he started reaching with his front paws and guiding Vicki’s hand toward his mouth. Vicki could see his throat constricting as he swallowed, and she swore she could feel every ounce of weight he gained. His fur became thicker and glossy black, and every day his eyes seemed brighter. She was so confident in his recovery, in fact, that she finally told Sweetie that CC wasn’t her friend Sharon’s cat, he was her Christmas present. The joy in the girl’s eyes! Soon after, Vicki took him to a new veterinarian for his shots. The vet was amazed when he heard the story. “You did everything right,” he said.

So did CC
, she thought.

“He still can’t eat solid food,” she told the doctor. “He can’t eat anything with texture.”

“He may have been born that way,” the veterinarian said, “or his organs may have been damaged when his body shut down. Either way, he appears to be thriving. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Keep doing what you’re doing.
That was the life that waited for Vicki Kluever with CC.
Keep pampering a sick cat.
Two months before, the thought would have been her worst nightmare. Now it didn’t bother her at all. What kind of a cat hater was she?

By March, CC was back to his old self, the adventurous fiend who had bitten the tails of his brothers and sisters and sat on their heads when they tried to suckle their mother. His coat was a gorgeous blue-black, and he had a mischievous gleam in his eye. He was supposed to be Sweetie’s cat, but he and Vicki had bonded over those eyedropper dinners, and poor Sweetie was never on his affection radar. It was Vicki he watched, and Vicki he always listened to. But he wasn’t one of those sit-on-your-lap, always-underfoot kittens. He remained fearless and independent, undaunted by death and seemingly convinced more than ever that he could survive anything the world threw at him. In short, he was her ideal cat.

But even six months later, when Vicki received the career opportunity of a lifetime to found a new branch office, CC was still eating nothing but liquids from an eyedropper. He would improve over the years, until he could eat small quantities of protein and water mixed in a blender, but Christmas Cat would never fully recover from nearly drowning in a toilet bowl on Christmas Eve.

 

 

When Vicki Kluever wrote me, she mentioned how moved she was by the similarities in our lives. And she promised: It wasn’t just that we had the same name spelled the same unusual way. After reading about Christmas Cat, I recognized the kinship between CC and Dewey. Both kittens nearly died at a young age—one in a toilet, one in a freezing library book drop. Both were rescued by single mothers who, unbeknownst to themselves, had a gap in their lives a kitten could fill. We weren’t looking for cats, or love, or companionship, but they found us. They dedicated their lives to us, and they never seemed to let the tragic events at the start of their lives define them. They kept their personalities. They took advantage of their opportunities. They found their place. They thrived, in the end, not because of the Vickis (although we helped), but because of their own inner strength.

When I talked with her, I realized Vicki and I shared that same inner strength. We both struggled through bad jobs and worse marriages, but we stuck to our moral and professional values, and we found our life’s work: I in the library, Vicki in the mortgage business. We succeeded, both of us, because we refused to settle for the ordinary; instead, we reached for a better way.

Although I have never met her in person, I can picture her in her sophisticated business suit the night she accepted the Affiliate of the Year Award from the Matanuska Valley real estate community. She had won the award, ostensibly, for turning around a struggling mortgage lender in the town of Wasilla, Alaska. The office, on the verge of being closed when she took over, was now one of the most profitable in the state. More important for Vicki, she had transformed the morals and attitudes—the very mission—of the office. In a business plunged into corruption by a housing boom (in 1980s Alaska, not 2005 America, but history repeats itself), she had stood on principle. She refused to make loans if unethical side deals had been struck; she told borrowers when a loan was not in their best interest, even if it killed the deal; she threw real estate brokers out of her office for dishonest practice. She chose the twelve most ethical and trustworthy brokers, the ones who truly cared about their clients, and told them she would always stand by them in exchange for their business because she cared about their clients, too. And from that stand, the business had boomed.