The Silver Kiss (23 page)

“I
will never love again,” Zoë said to herself.

It was Christmas Eve and she was the only one home. All the tenants had gone away for the holidays and her landlady was out visiting. Zoë sat on the floor of her creaky old apartment in the shambling Victorian house, in the city of San Francisco, far from the eastern suburb where she had grown up, far from the father she still had, far from the ashes of the mother she had no more.

The lights flickered as if the ancient wiring were protesting the load. The fuses in this house had blown three times since she had started college in the fall.

She had applied to San Francisco State partly because of the stellar creative writing program they offered and partly because of the happiness in the eyes of her mother when she had told Zoë stories of magical concerts in Golden Gate Park and clubs full of swaying hair, fringes, and beads. Being here connected Zoë to the girl who had become her mom, the girl who had majored as much in partying as she had in anything at the San Francisco School of Art.

But Zoë wasn't a partier. She valued her privacy and didn't want to share a dorm room with some “whatever” stranger with no personal boundaries. She had a small inheritance from the sale of her mother's paintings and lithographs, enough to allow her to rent an apartment. Zoë's father had reluctantly helped her to search.

When it quickly became obvious that all she could afford was a boardinghouse room in one of the seedier areas, the reality of peeling paint, mildew, and roaches had almost changed her mind. But then she'd walked into this shabby Victorian at the edge of the Mission District, and there was something about the high ceilings, ornate woodwork, and decaying splendor that called to her. The windows of the third-floor, one-bedroom apartment looked over a garage that might have been a carriage house once. The alley was strewn with trash but was cobbled. A tabby cat had sat on the garage roof washing itself. It had looked up at the window as if it expected to see Zoë there. That was when Zoë decided this was home.

I could paint this room, she had thought. Do some stenciling. That Oriental rug on my bedroom floor at home would look good in here.

The apartment was still sparsely furnished, and her only nod to Christmas was some holly she had picked from a bush in the neighbor's yard at his urging. It was easier than saying no. The berry-strewn branches were arranged in a large peanut butter jar on the mantelpiece. Next to the jar sat a fat red candle and a book of
matches, waiting for her to feel festive. The only painting she had brought with her sat propped against the boards that blocked the impotent fireplace. It wasn't one of her mother's works but a small oil portrait of a seventeenth-century family—a proud father with a five-year-old boy at his knee and a merry-eyed wife at his side, holding a sturdy baby in her arms, a baby who solemnly stared at a vase of flowers on the table.

The baby was Simon, who had never grown beyond nineteen years old yet had lived to be three hundred or more. Who would ever believe that a vampire had touched her life, let alone stirred her heart? People thought she was odd already, a loner; yet, during a crazy, crisp, star-spun autumn the year before last, she had defeated death, and yet had been forced to accept it too. Simon had accepted, anyway. He had surrendered to the sun and drifted off to the sky. His task done, he couldn't tarry in a world that rejected him with every drop of rain, every ray of light.

He was the last boy she had kissed.

All she had left of those she loved were paintings, it seemed.

Simon had mentioned that he had lived in this town once. He had given no details, only that there had been moments here when he didn't feel so alone. She hoped that she would have moments like that too.

A faint cat mew drifted up from below. The tabby must be in the yard again. She saw it often, a shadow outside at dusk, a silhouette at the window, but the
landlady had never seen a cat, didn't know where it would belong.

Even though she had never really wanted a pet, now she almost wished she had a cat—an independent puss who wouldn't care how much time Zoë spent with her books and her computer as long as she made a lap available and put down a bowl of food twice a day. But … all sorts of things could happen to cats. Even cats got cancer.

She shivered. Her mother had died of cancer on Christmas Eve two years ago, slipped out the door that the Christ Child entered and was gone.

Last Christmas had been the first without her mother, and it had been so dreadful that Zoë couldn't face another holiday of harsh forced laughter punctuated by uncomfortable silences. She had told her father that her grades were slipping and it was better that she stay at school and study rather than make the long trip home. He gave in too easily. “I don't understand,” he said, but he had mailed her a present and a check. He would call on Christmas Day.

All gone—the ones who understood her. She loved her father, yes, but he was remote. He could never know her the way her mother had, would never take the time. She looked too much like her mother—the same dark eyes, now made fathomless by sorrow, the same unruly dark hair—perhaps that similarity made him shy away in fear and pain. That was another reason to stay away. She didn't like hurting him.

There was a time for everyone to go, she knew, but she couldn't believe in a cruel God who took away those she loved so soon, and if there were no God then heaven didn't exist either, and she would never see the ones she loved again. Life was so pointless.

She missed the cold of an East Coast December; this damp Northern California winter seeped into her chest, clogged her heart and weighed it down.

She should go online. Maybe Lorraine would be there. They could IM the night away and close the distance between California and Oregon as if it didn't exist. Lorraine had no patience for dark matters of the soul, and she could make Zoë laugh.

Zoë was halfway to her desk when the lights went out. “Damn!” Was the whole neighborhood out or was it just this house? she wondered. She stepped slowly, carefully to the nearest gray rectangle of window, her arms out slightly in front of her as if obstacles might leap into her path. The neighbors' Christmas lights flashed merrily around windows and dripped like twinkling icicles from eaves. The fault was the ancient electrical box, blown again, and no one home to replace the fuses.

Down below, the shadow of a cat rounded the garage and headed for the house. Why was it always here? The landlady didn't feed it. Was the hunting good?

She edged her way to the fireplace. It took three matches to light the candle. The damp sulfur heads of the first two crumbled uselessly. The candlelight created dancing shadows on the walls, but the corners of the
room remained dark and mysterious, rounding the room into a ball of yellow light centered on the unused hearth, where the old painting leaned. She hadn't had a radio, a TV, or a stereo on; in the bright electric light she had felt no need for sound. Now, in the waxy twilight, she was aware of the silence around her. The world was hushed, as if waiting, and warmth seemed to leave along with sound and light. The room crackled with unseen frost.

Meow?

She started and turned to the window. A cat was outlined on the sill outside. It called in a tiny questioning voice, as if asking if she was all right.

Should she let it in? She didn't want to encourage it, but suddenly she felt relieved that some other creature knew she was alive. The window opened reluctantly in jerks and jolts. The screen screeched a protest as she raised it. The cat slipped in without touching her, like a shred of fog detached from the night. With the cat came a faint smell that reminded Zoë of the garage at home—slightly musty with a tang of gasoline. She eyed the cat suspiciously, but it didn't look dirty.

“Are you hungry?” she asked as the cat explored the room at its leisure, tail high, eyes bright, intelligent, and inquisitive. She could now see that this was a female cat. What did she have for a cat to eat? Zoë carried the candle to the tiny kitchen, and darkness closed in behind her. She opened a can of tuna and dumped it into a saucer, liquid and all. She returned to the living room,
candle in one hand and saucer in the other, like some patron saint of cats.

In the flickering light she saw the cat rub her cheek against the frame of the painting. The tabby strutted in front of the picture and rubbed her jaw on the other side of the frame. Back and forth she wafted, rubbing and purring. “It's not yours,” said Zoë, knowing a little about how cats marked their territory, “and you might knock it over if you keep that up.”

Zoë put the dish of tuna on the hearth. “Look, I've brought you dinner.”

The cat sniffed the tuna, looked up at Zoë as if amused, and turned her back on the saucer.

“I guess you're not a stray,” said Zoë, feeling somewhat peeved at the rejection.

The cat found one of the cushions on the floor and kneaded it with enthusiasm, treading her pleasure to the rhythm of her purr. She climbed on board, turned three times, and settled down in a stripy ball. She closed her eyes with a trill.

Zoë's ire melted away. “I guess you're staying the night,” she said, grateful for the company. “I'm closing the window. It's cold in here.”

What else did a cat need? She took the lid from a box of books under her desk and tore up a section of yesterday's newspaper into it. “I hope this works for a litter box, cat,” she said, “else I'm in trouble with the landlady.” She lit her way to the bathroom with the candle and laid the box lid next to the claw-foot tub.

From the bathroom door she saw the tabby on her feet once more, walking toward the painting now hidden in the gloom at the edge of the candle's reach. Zoë was startled to see the little wisp of gray wander into the canvas and back out again. I must be tired, she thought. I'm seeing things. She decided to go to bed.

†   †   †

Zoë woke in the night as suddenly as if someone had spoken her name. There was a weight at the foot of the bed. The cat? As she rose on her elbow her quilt slid away and the chilly air stung her neck like a bite. Her breath caught in her throat.

Simon sat on her bed. Not the baby in the painting, but the youth she had known—pale hair, black jeans, leather jacket—beautiful in a light that couldn't exist. The tabby cat was in his lap, purring. His long white fingers stroked her gently; a smile played about his lips.

She yearned to reach for him but was afraid that he would vanish if she did.

He looked up from the cat. “More than once I was sure that love had abandoned me forever,” he said in a voice she had thought never to hear again. “I was always wrong. A little cat showed me that. You showed me that too.”

The cat stood up and swatted him with a paw to regain his attention. Simon chuckled and tickled the cat
behind her ears. An unbearable sweet longing ached in Zoë's chest.

“And we never truly lose the ones we love,” he said. “We find each other eventually. See? Grimalkin found me. We'll be together again.” He bent and kissed the cat's nose. “Don't fret, Zoë. Don't let yourself be lonely.” His voice caressed her.

Warmth like a blanket of love wrapped around her, and she laid her head back on her pillow and embraced the dream.

†   †   †

Zoë woke on Christmas morning to an empty apartment. She couldn't find the cat anywhere. But the window's closed, Zoë thought. The cat couldn't get out. Was there a hole in the wainscoting? Was there a hiding place she didn't know about? Finally she gave up looking and sat amid the cushions to open her present from her father.

She held up a gray cashmere sweater, as soft as the cat's fur might have been. (She realized now that she had never touched the little cat.)

Beyond the sweater, something caught her eye. She lowered the garment slowly, her mouth dry.

The painting had changed.

That was impossible.

But there on the table where the vase had been sat a tabby cat where there had been no cat before. The
vase lay broken on the floor, and baby Simon reached for the tabby, laughter on his face.

Grimalkin. Simon had called her Grimalkin last night. The warmth of the dream came flooding back.

“I never knew you loved a cat,” she whispered, and tears pricked her eyes. She swiped at them with the back of her hand. “She's found you now—what a patient little thing.”

Warmth and hope turned to strength in her heart. I will find you one day too, Zoë promised silently. You, and my mother, and all things lost. And I'll try not to be so lonely—because you asked.

It struck her then that adopting a cat might be a good idea after all. It was a start.

In the distance bells pealed.