Strays (19 page)

Sarah reached into the car and grabbed her pack.  She turned and Tom was there at her side, smiling at her.  It was the most peaceful he had looked since they met in the woods two nights earlier.

“Hey,” he said.  “You hungry?”

“Yes,” Sarah said.  “Very much so.”

Tom took her by the shoulder and led her away from the car.  He reached over and pushed the car door shut, and at once the children came.

From underneath the wraparound porch, working their way past a loose spot in the white lattice, a grey short-hair cat appeared, green eyes blinking, followed at once by two more white long-hairs that looked like Persian mixes.  On the small front yard, a half-dozen more cats dropped from the branches of the two trees—a beige-and-black Ragdoll with gray eyes; two calico Munchkins seeming to sink as they landed on their unusually short legs; a gray Norwegian forest cat, its face streaked with gray and white; and three British short-hairs, each a mix of brown and cream. 

Sarah heard rustling to her right and glanced along the eastern edge of the house.  Off against the shelterbelt that lined the northern edge, a small platoon of cats came creeping from around a narrow building that looked like an old chicken coop but with a newer roof made of metal frames and glass.  Sarah counted at least twenty different cats, every mix of color like the leaves of autumn.  The tall grass next to the glass-topped coop swayed and parted, spilling cats out like a circus clown car, a mass of yellow-and-green eyes framed in a sea of fleece, ash and tan and pale, cats so thick that Sarah could not see the grass beneath them.

She stopped in her tracks, and Tom took her by the elbow to steady her.  The spillage of cats, seeming to trickle from every pore of the earth, flowed as one, pooling itself about Sarah’s and Tom’s feet.

“Tom,” she whispered.  “What’s going on?”

“They’re here for you,” Tom said.  “All of them are waiting to see you.”

“It’s all right, Sarah.”  It was Trudy who spoke.  She was already on the porch.  At the hem of her skirt, a wooly Siberian forest cat the color of coffee with two creams crouched, assessing Sarah with flat eyes.  “You’re among friends.”

“How many are there?”

“I’ve lost count,” Trudy said.  “Come on inside.  You’re probably famished.”

Minutes later, Sarah and Tom sat in at an old kitchen table with cool steel legs and a faded porcelain top with a rose pattern in it.  Trudy stood at the white gas stove, working omelets in two cast-iron skillets.  On the wall above the stove hung a plaque that read:

CATS ARE JUST ANGELS IN DISGUISE.

“My father built this house,” she said.  “Well, this part of it, the one-level you’re sitting in now.  The west half, the part with the second story … that was built by my great-grandfather.”

“Oh,” Sarah said.

“Your room is upstairs,” Trudy continued.  “I imagine you didn’t get much sleep on that bus.”

“No,” Sarah said.  “I had bad dreams.”

“So you’ll be wanting to retire after breakfast.”

Sarah nodded and traced the rose patterns on the table top.  At the window next to her, the Siberian forest cat peered in from the front porch, pressing his nose against the glass, flanked on each side by two of the British short-hairs.

“You have a lot of cats,” Sarah said.

“I don’t have
any
cats,” said Trudy.  “I just look after them.  But I still call them my children.”

“So many.”

Trudy reached to a small dish next to the stove filled with sliced mushrooms and avocado.  “It was my father’s idea actually,” she said.  She sprinkled the mushroom-and-avocado mix into each of the omelets.  “We moved out here after my mom died.”

“When was that?” Sarah asked.

“When I was ten.”  The skillet scraped the pan, and the omelets sizzled.  Trudy sat down the spatula and went to a cupboard next to a cedar door that had to be the pantry.  She opened the cupboard and drew out two plates, then returned to the stove.  “This farm had sat empty for years before that,” Trudy said.  “Dad owned it—it was left to him by his own father—but he didn’t know what to do with it.  Then after mom died, he got this idea.”

She paused in her story to lift an omelet out of on pan and place it on a plate.  She garnished it with bacon she had cooked that now sat on a double-ply paper towel.  She did the same with the second omelet on the second plate, and when she was finished, she placed both on the table before Sarah and Tom.

Sarah stabbed the omelet and cut off a small bite.  Tom was digging in much harder, scraping forkfuls of egg off the plate and jamming it into his mouth.  There was something inhuman about the way he gobbled, and Sarah remembered that he wasn’t that human at all, not entirely.

“My father loved cats,” Trudy said, pulling a chair out and easing herself into it.  A fresh cup of coffee steamed in her hands.  “Whenever we were out and about, running errands for Mom, he always had to stop by the local animal shelter, just to see the cats on death row.  It broke his heart.  Sometimes he’d come home with eyes red from crying, but he kept going back, over and over again.”

She took a sip of her coffee and continued.

“He wanted to adopt one, kept saying that he would take me down and pick it out myself, but Mom had allergies, so that wasn’t happening.”  Trudy shook her head, remembering.  “Mom was pretty sick those days.  I don’t remember a day she was healthy in all those first years of my life.”

“So when your mom died,” Sarah said, “your father set this place up for … the cats?”

“For the children, yes,” said Trudy.  “It was funny really.  It was his way, I think, of staying alive.  Losing Mom almost killed him, and he had to do something to take his mind off it, so he got it in his head to save all the cats.  In the end, they saved him.”

Sarah nodded.  “So all these cats were rescued from the shelter.”

“Not all,” said Trudy.  “Just the first twenty or so.”  She smiled, remembering.  “Dad set everything up in the barn out there, lots of straw and warm places for them to sleep, and he set out food dishes and such, and then one day he marched into the shelter.  I was there by his side, holding his hand, coming up to almost his shoulder as I was tall for my age.”

“What did he do?” Sarah asked.

“He said, ‘I want to adopt your cats,’” Trudy said.  “When they told him to go back and look at the ones on death row, he said, ‘You don’t understand.  I want to adopt all of them.”  She had not stopped smiling as she spoke, and now she shook her head, remembering.  “There was hemming and hawing and all of these issues of safety and such.  In the end, they stopped him short, so he went right downtown to this attorney friend of his and said he wanted to draw up papers for a charity to rescue abandoned cats.”

“So this is all a charity.”

“It is,” Trudy said.  “We get a lot of donations, believe it or not.  Any time someone finds a stray, we take her in.  We get her spayed, make sure she has her shots, and then she gets to spend her days in what dad called the Feline Taj Mahal.”

“You should see Miss Trudy’s place,” said Tom.  “The barn is huge, and there’s plenty of trees behind the house to hunt mice.”

“The best part,” Trudy said, “there are no more cats on death row.  Oh, the shelter will keep a cat for awhile to see if it gets adopted, but if nobody wants it, the cat comes here.”

Sarah glanced out on the porch, past the big Siberian and the two British short-hairs.  The yard was carpeted with cats, all of them staring up at the house, blinking their eyes.  “Where’s your father now?” Sarah asked.

“I think you know,” said Trudy.  “You saw him earlier.  When you touched my hand.”

Sarah nodded.  “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was you,” said Trudy.  “It’s what you do.”

Sarah shook her head.  “I don’t do much of anything.  Except run, that is.”

“You do plenty,” Trudy said.  “You don’t know it.  But I do.  So do they.”  She motioned to the window, where the army of cats stood at the ready.

Sarah turned and looked at Tom.  “Are any of them like you?”

Tom shook his head.  “Not many.  Most are just strays.”

“Strays?”

“That’s what I call them,” said Tom.  “Just cats.  Not like me.  Not like my kind.”

“Is your kind here?”

“They come and go.”

“Tom is a regular,” said Trudy.  “He first came to me, oh, I’d say five or six years ago.”

“Was he on death row at the shelter?”

“No way,” said Tom.  “They couldn’t keep me in a cage.”

“He showed up one day,” Trudy said.  “Just a kitten, big ears, huge eyes.  I took him in, of course, even made an appointment to get him his shots and get him fixed.”

“That’s when I showed Miss Trudy that I was one of The Glaring,” Tom said.  “I had to nip that one in the bud before I was the one got nipped.”

Sarah laughed at this, snorting through her nose, and Tom and Trudy joined in.  Soon, the laughter was beyond their control, deep and rich from the belly.  They shared the joy for several minutes, and when at last it passed, Sarah looked at Trudy and narrowed her eyes.

“Why am I here?”

“Because Tom brought you.”

“I know that.  But why?”

“You needed looking out for,” Tom said.  “I saw where you were and what was happening to you, and I decided to protect you.”

“It’s more than that,” said Sarah.  “This is a place for cats, not 15-year-old girls.”

Tom shrugged, but then he looked away. 

“You said something on the bus,” Sarah said.  “Something about that boy I keep dreaming about.”

“I don’t recall.”

“You said it,” she insisted.  “You said something like you could protect me, and you said, ‘Why can't they see that?’  Who is they?”

“I don’t remember saying anything of the sort,” Tom said.

“And you,” Sarah continued, turning her gaze to Trudy.  “You said that I was
her
.  What do you mean by that?”

Trudy stopped with her cup of coffee halfway to her lips and rolled her eyes at Tom.  Tom grimaced but nodded.

“We’ll explain everything,” Trudy said.  “Very soon.  But first, I need you to do something for me.”

Sarah arched her eyebrows and cocked her head, a lazy form of a shrug that always annoyed her mother.  She was used to adults asking for favors, and seldom were they very nice.  “What?” 

“There’s someone you need to meet,” she said.  “Someone very special to me.”

Strawberry

The cat lay in the middle of a high double bed with a wrought-iron frame that lifted the mattress a good two feet off the ground.  She was seated on her belly, rear haunches tucked, front paws out in front of her chest, her head dipped down to push her nose deep into the fur of her forelegs.  Her back was arched, but her tail, no doubt once beautiful and thick in better days, now hung limp, its fur thinning and flat.  Her coat was a dirty sort of blonde with a tinge of amber, looking as if she had once been a full-bodied redhead who had spent too much time bleaching herself in the sun.

They were at the top of the stairs in the west half of the house, and Trudy led Sarah into a low-ceilinged room that faced the front of the building.  Through the three open windows that graced the south wall, Sarah could see a perfect view between the interlacing branches of the two trees in the front yard.  The landscape rolled away beyond, the hills green and dotted with more trees, and at last Sarah could see them growing taller as they reached for the first traces of mountains in the distance.

But her attention was drawn to the cat.  She had never seen a cat sit like this, on its front with paws outstretched but back arched high as if it were frightened.  The cat did not lift her head when Trudy and Sarah entered, and its breathing was so slow and drawn that Sarah wondered if the creature were still alive.

“Her name is Strawberry,” Trudy said.  “She has a tumor.  It’s pretty much eating her up inside.”

“Oh no,” Sarah whispered.

“The vet drove out to see her, offered to …” 

Trudy let the thought trail off, but Sarah got the gist of it.

“I told him no,” Trudy said.  “I asked him to make her comfortable and let Strawberry go out on her own terms.”

Sarah swallowed, and her throat was so dry it seemed to grind like sandpaper.

“I want you to stay with her,” Trudy said.

“Why me?”

“You need rest.  This is your room.”

“But the cat.”

“Strawberry.”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

“You have something,” Trudy said.  “Something amazing inside you.  Like I said.  You don’t know it yet, but when you find it … oh my, the world is in for a truckload of special, you know what I’m saying?”

“No,” Sarah admitted.  “Not really.”

“The other cats,” Trudy said.  “They see it.  They feel it.  Look out the window.”

Sarah walked to the south wall and pulled back a curtain.  The squadron of cats was still there, a multicolored quilt blanketing the front yard, all of them looking up at the house now, at her room on the second floor.  Their yellow and green eyes were wide but gentle, yearning, and although it should have given Sarah the shivers she was somehow comforted by their faces.

“You make them feel something,” Trudy said.  “Peace, joy, I don’t know.  All the feelings cats are supposed to bring to us, you bring to them.” 

Sarah turned and saw Trudy reach across the bed to lay her hand on Strawberry’s head.

“I want my Strawberry to feel that,” Trudy said.  “She doesn’t have much time left, maybe not even the rest of the week.  I want her to feel that special thing inside you with what’s left of her time.”  She looked up at Sarah and blinked.  “Will you stay with her awhile?”

Sarah saw Strawberry’s back arch as Trudy tried to stroke her head.  The wasted muscles in the cat’s side twitched, and the head flinched.  Even the slightest touch was causing her pain, but she was either too weak to complain or longed too much for a human’s touch to let even an agonizing moment of it go to waste. 

“Yes,” Sarah said.  “I’ll stay with her.”

Trudy lifted her hand and smiled.  “Thank you,” she said.  “You lie down here, and I’ll get your things.”