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By ten o’clock she was aching with fatigue and her eyes felt as if she’d been through a sandstorm. Pushing away the twinge of apprehension, she filled her cat’s bowl, set up the coffeemaker for the morning, and went to bed.
And for the third night ru
With thought of the cat, all hope of sleep shriveled up and crept into a corner to hide. Lauren threw off the covers, felt for her slippers, and pulled on her warm robe as she passed through the dim hallway to the kitchen. By the light of the open refrigerator door she filled a mug with milk and stuck it in the microwave for a minute, added a splash of cheap brandy and a shake of nutmeg, and went to turn on the Weather Cha
Storms lay over the nation, although it was calm enough here. Timson, her arthritic Siamese, grumbled in to ask what the hell she was doing up this time of night. He sniffed in disapproval at the corruption of the good honest milk in her mug, curled into her legs, and went to sleep.
The other cat had been black, or maybe a dark tabby. On the fateful Saturday morning, not even seventy-two hours ago, she’d been driving through San Jose with four of her girls, heading for a preseason meet with a middle school up in the Bay Area that was famous as the home of three actual, real-life professional women players. Somewhere behind Lauren’s car was a minivan with the rest of the team, driven by one of the moms. It was a clear, su
And it did simply appear, on the road ahead of her, as if it had been dropped from the cloudless blue sky-or more probably, she realized much later, launched from the bowels of the plumber’s truck two vehicles ahead of her. The truck was big and red and bristling with cranes, nozzles, storage tanks, and various fixtures whose purpose Lauren couldn’t begin to guess. For one cat, however, one dark, bedraggled, desperately bewildered feline, the truck had been a place of refuge against the chill of the previous night, its nooks and cra
Until the truck reached sixty on the freeway and started to bounce and rattle.
The animal hit the ground ru
All this-its attitude and its youth, the wide-staring eyes and the state of its dark fur and the way its delicate paws were trying for something they could comprehend-printed itself on Lauren’s mind in about two seconds. The cat simply materialized-it hadn’t wandered out across two lanes of traffic from the shoulder, that would have been impossible-it just appeared, having passed miraculously without harm under the rattletrap old Chevy that separated Lauren from the plumber’s truck, skating down the roadway between that oblivious car’s four tires and shooting out from under the back bumper like some macabre version of Bambi on ice. It had not been afraid, she decided on the tenth or hundredth time those two seconds replayed themselves in her mind’s eye: it wasn’t fear that had bugged those eyes and given such desperate strength to its fragile muscles. Somehow she knew that there had been no time for fear in the moments allotted to it, just astonishment wedded to a frantic and determined hunt for solution. She also knew, queasily, that had there been a vehicle in the next lane, half a dozen cars and a girl’s basketball team would have come to wrenching, steel-tearing grief on top of the cat. Fortunately there had been no car to meet her unthinking yank on the wheel.
The girls hadn’t seen the cat, just shrieked in reaction to the abrupt swerve and started gabbling questions at her. Lauren did not answer. She clenched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, slowing so dramatically the car behind her blared its horn in protest, and she kept her eyes glued to the rust-speckled bumper of the rapidly retreating Chevy. She did not look into the rearview mirror; she did not have to. She knew what her eyes would see there if she did look, knew that the only possible ending to the cat’s story had borne down on it with metal teeth bared and rubber wheels pounding, to give the animal’s valiant efforts a casual, two-ton swat and drive on. Lauren kept her own wide-staring eyes fixed on the road ahead of her and turned deaf ears on the demands of the girls, moving with infinite caution into the exit lane, off the freeway, and into the first convenient parking lot.
Her four girls were gibbering frantically; in a moment the minivan carrying the rest of the team swerved behind them into the lot. All the occupants of both vehicles went abruptly quiet when Lauren flung open her door, stumbled over to the ivy strip bordering the lot, and vomited up her breakfast.
The girls subsided and let the other adult take over. Gwen jumped out of the minivan and trotted over to Lauren’s side, where she stood with one hand on the coach’s sweating back until she was sure the spasms were finished. Then she went back to the van, dug a bottle of water from the cooler, and came back to hand it to Lauren.
“Thanks, Gwen,” Lauren managed when the icy clean water had reduced the awful taste to a burning in the back of her throat.
“Are you coming down with something?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
“The cat. It just… appeared in front of me on the road.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Lauren realized how pitiful they were: for this she had endangered the lives of four students? But Gwen seemed inclined to be sympathetic rather than disapproving; after all, nothing had happened.
“Oh, how awful,” she said. “I ran over a dog once, I know how you feel.”
“Just the shock of it,” Lauren said. Gwen thought she was saying that she’d run over the thing herself. Let it be, Lauren thought: her extreme reaction might be more easily understood if guilt were thought to be the culprit, not the weird, almost anthropomorphic link of empathy she’d felt for the animal during those two terrible seconds.
“You going to be okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” Lauren said heartily, standing straight to add assurance.
“I could run my load up and come back for yours; it’s only about twenty minutes away.”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
And she was. She downplayed the death of a stray cat for the girls and turned the conversation to the game ahead, she drove at a normal speed the rest of the way, she greeted the other coach (a high school acquaintance) with the right balance of friendliness and good-humored threat, and she worked her girls up into enough of a lather that they bounced out onto the court with that attitude she loved. And if she hugged her jacket around her in the warm auditorium to stifle the shivers ru