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Her girls didn’t win, but the final score was by no means humiliating, and they sure as hell learned a lot from the others. They even loved the funky pizza parlor the two teams had taken over for the afternoon, and left town with a dozen new best friends and an exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
In the excitement of the day, the cat was forgotten. Lauren drove her quartet of tired players back over the hills, dropped each at the correct front door, and wearily steered herself home. She let herself in, gathered up old Timson, and buried her face into his fur for a minute until he mewed his bones’ protest, then walked into her kitchen, dug through the cupboards for the dusty bottle of brandy, and poured a generous two fingers into a glass and down her throat.
After a while the trembling sensation under her skin subsided.
You’re such a wimp, she told herself. Cats die all the time, sad but true.
Except that she wasn’t a wimp. She’d done hard things when necessary: she’d once beheaded and buried an agonized, broken-back garter snake that some kid had run over on the sidewalk, and she had no particular squeamishness when it came to trapping mice or performing first aid to the goriest of cuts.
Low blood sugar, she decided. She slopped a couple of eggs around in a frying pan and ate them on toast, and felt better. She took another jolt of the brandy to the television and fed an old favorite movie into the VCR; that, too, helped. Pleasantly woozy from the unaccustomed booze, she scrubbed the day away beneath a hot shower, towel-dried her short hair, and fell blithely into bed before the clock’s hands rested on ten.
Only to find the cat waiting for her, riding the undulating concrete on four outstretched paws like a water strider riding the surface of a fast, deep river. Under something it flew-car bumper? tree limb?-with a look of startled, outraged confusion on its near-human features. One front paw came up in a gesture of supplication, and then a sharp noise somewhere in the reaches of the house jerked Lauren out of the nightmare to stare into the dark room, feeling all the cat’s panic on her own face.
Cat: noise. Timson must be-but no, Timson was asleep against her feet. She sat frozen among the tangled sheets, the threat of vomit raw in the back of her throat, straining her thudding ears for the sound to repeat itself. After a minute she got up, took her old hockey stick out of its corner, and crept through the house to see what had invaded. She found nothing, and when she got back to her bedroom again, she saw that the ever-nervous Timson was still fast asleep, which he would not be if there was a stranger anywhere in the house. She propped the stick back in the corner of the room, went back to bed and eventually to sleep.
The doomed cat came through her dreaming mind twice more before dawn, and Lauren spent the next day in a thick-limbed daze, alternating between empty-minded half-sleep over the Sunday paper and u
She did so at the kitchen table, knowing that if she listened to her mother’s endless monologue from a comfortable chair, she’d soon be snoring. As it was, she drifted in and out of awareness with her chin resting on her hand, grunting responses into the pauses provided and wondering how long this creepy cat thing would take to fade.
When she had fumbled and nearly dropped the phone twice, she cut into her mother’s epic narrative of the retirement center’s inefficient postman, told her she’d call again Wednesday, and went to bed.
The cat was waiting for her.
In the morning she felt so utterly wretched at the idea of the new week that she thought about calling in sick. Except that she was not sick, she was haunted, by an idiotic feline who hadn’t had enough sense to know an unsafe resting spot when it found one. For some ungodly reason, those vivid moments had been seared onto Lauren’s mind as if it had been her own life passing before her eyes. She groaned, held an ice-filled cloth to her inflamed eyelids while the coffee brewed, and went to work.
Monday afternoon: a bleary and out-of-control practice session; Monday night: a third set of sessions with the unknown cat. Three nights of broken sleep that reduced her to a nervous wreck-or maybe her nervous state had reduced her to sleeplessness, she could not be sure. She could not, in fact, be too sure of her own sanity. The next night was the same; following that, she knew something had to be done. During Wednesday’s prep period, Lauren picked up the phone to call for help.
Unfortunately, the only psychotherapist she knew, the woman she’d seen a decade before when she’d been an insomniac college student, couldn’t see her before Friday. Lauren’s desperation did, however, make an impression on the receptionist, because Dr. Minerva Henry herself called back twenty minutes later. Greetings, a brief catch-up, Lauren’s halting and by now embarrassed description of the cat episode and its consequences, and Min’s regrets that she had no free time until Friday.
“That’s all right, I understand,” Lauren told her. “I’m sure I’ll be okay until then. It’s just so… silly.”
“It doesn’t sound at all silly.”
“I mean, to be so upset by such an inconsequential event. I really am a very stable kind of a person. Or I was until Saturday.”
“This episode has clearly driven a wedge under some firmly shut door in your mind. You may remember, I recommended ten years ago that you remain in therapy. I take it you did not.”
“But I was fine,” Lauren protested.
“You were functioning well,” the doctor corrected her gently. “Now you’re not. We’ll sort it out begi
“Two more nights like I’ve been having, you might want to book me a padded cell,” Lauren remarked. As an attempt at dry humor, it fell completely flat, leaving Min Henry to take it as a cry for help. In truth, it was.
“Avoid caffeine,” the good doctor recommended. “And no alcohol, either. Eat well, get some nice healthy outdoor exercise, and drink a glass of warm milk before bed. You might also take a pen and paper to bed with you, to write down any words or images that come to mind when you wake up. We’ll talk about those on Friday.”
The mere suggestion that the problem might be sorted out was a comfort, and helped Lauren make it through the day and the practice session. She ate a balanced di
“Mother,” she said at one point, interrupting a detailed description of the tragedy inflicted by the cook on a poor, unsuspecting piece of beef. “Did anything ever happen to me as a child that involved a cat?”
“A cat, dear?”
“Yes. The other day I saw a cat get… hurt, and it’s given me nightmares. I just wondered if maybe something similar happened when I was small, that I forgot about.”
“Oh, dear, how terrible for you. One of the ladies down the hall has bad dreams, she talks in her sleep so you can hear every-”
“Mother? The cat?”
“We never had cats, dear. Your father didn’t like them.”
“But did I-oh, never mind. How is Mrs. Peasley’s leg doing?”
She hung up twenty minutes later, knowing more than she cared to about the pernicious results of circulatory problems but little the wiser about cats. However, mention of her father, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times, seemed to drive another section of wedge into the gap opened by the cat. That night’s dream found her sitting not behind the wheel of her car as the frantic man-faced cat spun around and around on the surface of the roadway, but rather on a hard bench of a seat beside her long-estranged father. He seemed enormous in her dream, as he had not been in life, bristling with the self-importance she had believed in until college freed her of illusions, the father of her youth.