My sister Joan had never called me at work and so I suspected something was wrong when I picked up the phone and she said in a strained voice, “Do you have a minute?”
I looked around my immediate area, a slight anxiety building over what was coming. “Sure.”
“It’s about Mitchell.”
Mitchell was her cat. Actually, he had been my cat, until I had gotten Joan to take him off my hands about eight months ago. Had he become a problem for her too? I hoped not. Joan loved animals and had worked tenaciously with Mitchell. But maybe there had been some sort of relapse and she was going to ask me to take him back.
My boss, Ron, and Megan from IT saved me from having to deal with this immediately when they walked up to my cubicle to discuss something. Ron had a knack for coming over to stand by your chair with one of his requests whenever you got an outside call (outside calls were differentiated by our phone system with a distinctive ring tone).
“Joan,” I said. “Can I call you tonight when I get home? I have somebody at my desk now.” I felt shitty about putting her off, but Ron, undeterred, hovered a few feet away.
“Yeah, okay,” she said, and hung up. She had sounded like she’d been crying. Joan is very sensitive and very kindhearted too. The two seem to go together.
I turned to Ron. “Yeah, what’s up?”
About a year earlier I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that one cat was perfect, an almost no maintenance, hassle-free pet. Two were a little more work but worth it for the amusement they provided, and three was a bad idea, too much work and trouble. And I had three. I’d invited Joan over for dinner and during the course of the evening had hinted ever so gently that I needed to get rid of—I mean, had to reduce the cat population of my house by one. I would have to take Mitchell to the Humane Society if I couldn’t find a place for him. We both knew that that meant euthanasia, as the Humane Society no longer had the staff or money to take care of abandoned animals long-term. Joan had just moved into a big house up in the wine country and had a large backyard. I knew she had the room.
I’d never wanted three cats and the reason for having that many had a lot to do with my divorce. Almost as devastating as the death of a family member, divorce had been something I’d tried not to inflict on my kids for a long time. But finally, I’d come to the realization that our family life had become so incendiary that divorce was the radical surgery we had to have.
My son, eleven at the time, moved into an apartment with me, and my daughter, seven, continued to live in our house with her mom. The children spent the weekends together, alternating parents, and each parent had a mid-week after-school visit with their non-custody child. Odd, I know, but that’s a different story. Anyway, I thought that getting a pet for the kids would be a good way to soothe some of the pain caused by all that disruption. My ex-wife had always considered pets dirty and disease-ridden and had never allowed so much as a gerbil or a dust bunny in the house. I, on the other hand, had grown up with a serial succession of cats and dogs— Muffy and Scruffy, Tex and Rex, Tangerine and Tonto, and Gertrude and Heathcliff.
So, one sunny Saturday afternoon as I strolled down a row of cages at the Humane Society, Pearl, a half-Siamese, half-Tabby, got to her feet, stretched, and came right over to the door to make contact. I stuck my finger in and rubbed her head, then called my son over. “What do you think?”
“She’s nice.” He had a big smile on his face.
Pearl turned out to be a chubby, no-trouble lap warmer, and both my son and I quickly grew to love her. My daughter, Carly, when she came over for her every-other-weekend visit, was less enthusiastic. Clueless dad that I was, it would be much later when I realized that this was because Pearl was ‘our’ pet, mine and Andrew’s; not hers.
We’d had Pearl about three months or so when we decided that Siamese were so cool, we had to get another one. I went on the Internet. The Humane Society didn’t have any Siamese available, but I found a cat rescue outfit about seventy miles south of us. Still not realizing what Carly would think about us getting another cat and not consulting her, I searched the thumbnail pictures, finding a Siamese named, Mitchell. He had a goofy, almost comic book face and was awfully thin. I felt sorry for him.
The cat rescue was in an old warehouse. I entered the reception area and found it deserted, the radio playing softly, images of fish swimming across the computer screen. I opened the door leading inside and called out, but no one responded. I took my cat carrier and went in.
Tables lined the walls, all of them filled with cages stacked two or three high. Strangely, they were all open and empty. The cats were on the floor, everywhere, seemingly hundreds of them, hanging out in little groups like they were at some kind of crazy cat convention. I had never seen so many cats in one place in my life and there was something unsettling about it all. As I gingerly made my way along the wall, a woman in a white smock entered the warehouse from another door. She saw me and came over. “Are you here for Mitchell?”
I nodded.
“I’m Connie,” she said.
Connie led the way to Mitchell’s cage, but it was empty. “Why don’t you let me have your cat carrier and I’ll get him for you. Have a seat in the office.”
It was almost a half-hour before Connie returned with Mitchell in the carrier. She was red-faced and disheveled, and seemed eager to have me sign the papers so she could “get back to work.” I hardly got a look at Mitchell, just his back as he lay curled up inside.
Mitchell was strangely silent in the car, not a single meow during the entire drive home. I brought the carrier into the kitchen, put it on a chair, and opened it. He didn’t move as he looked up at me. He didn’t make a sound, which I thought unusual. He was all fur and tail and there was something furtive and foxlike about him. I put my hand in to lift him out and he snarled and hissed and tried to scratch me with his right front paw. That was when I noticed that his harness was only partly on, his right front leg not having passed through the opening, as if Connie had tried, but…
I put the carrier on the floor and he shot out, disappearing into the next room. I followed but couldn’t find him anywhere. I looked for a half an hour without success. Had a door been left open? Perhaps he had gotten out.
end of Part 1. To be continued...
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