Where will they take them? What hospital? I have to tell Ryan and Clyde, but what do I tell them? A hospital somewhere in Santa Cruz, that’s where we were headed. They’ll know the hospitals, they’ll call CHP to find out, Ryan and Clyde will know where to come, and they’ll come to get me, too, she thought, comforting herself. But how soon? Soon enough, before those coyotes up there find me, soon enough to save my little cat neck?
Maybe she should go back down, slip into the medics’ van while they were busy, and the cops were all working the crash scene. She watched another set of headlights coming down the mountain on the other side of the slide, watched a lone sheriff’s car park beyond the wrecked truck. A lone officer got out and started across to join the others. The back doors of the white van stood open. In a flash she could be down the cliff and inside, hiding among the metal cabinets and oxygen tanks and all that tangle of medical equipment. I could hide in there close to Lucinda and Pedric and, at the hospital—a strange hospital, a strange town—I could hide in the bushes outside and watch the door and wait for Ryan and Clyde or maybe for Charlie to come, and then . . .
Oh, right. And if those medics spot me in their van trying to catch a ride, they’ll try to corner me in that tight space. If they shut the doors, and surround me, and I can’t get out and one of them grabs me, what then? They’ll lock me up somewhere, to keep me safe? One of the cops will shut me in his squad car? No, she was too upset and uncertain to go back. Taking the phone in her mouth again, she moved from the top of the slide on up into the bushes that stretched away to the edge of the dense pine woods, damp and dark and chill. There she laid the phone down among dead leaves and pine needles and pawed in the single digit for the Damens’ house phone. Crouched there listening to it ring, she watched the lighted road below as the medics slid Pedric into their van, working over him, attaching him to an oxygen tank. Lucinda sat on a gurney as the other two medics splinted and taped her shoulder and arm. The phone rang seven times, eight. On the twelfth ring, she hung up. Why didn’t the tape kick in? The Damens’ answering machine, which stood upstairs on Clyde’s desk, was so incredibly ancient it still used tape, but Clyde wouldn’t get a new one, he said it worked just fine, you simply had to understand its temperament. Right, Kit thought, with a little hiss.
She tried Wilma Getz, but she got only the machine. Where was everyone? She left a garbled message, she said there’d been an accident, that she had Lucinda’s cell phone, that it was on vibrate so the cops wouldn’t hear it ring. She hung up, disappointed by the failure of the electronic world to help her, and worrying about Lucinda and Pedric. What might happen to them on their way to the hospital, some delayed reaction that would be even beyond the medics’ control? Or what might happen in the hospital? If ever a cat’s prayers should be heard, if ever a strong hand were to reach down in intervention for a little cat’s loved ones, that hand should come reaching now. This was not Lucinda’s or Pedric’s time to move on to some other life, she wouldn’t let it be that time. Punching in the Damens’ number again, she was crouched with her ear to the phone when she realized that, down on the road, Lucinda had awakened and was arguing with the medics, her voice raised in anger. Kit broke off the call, and listened.
“You can’t leave her, you must find her. If I call her, she’ll come to me. I won’t go with you, neither of us will, unless you bring her with us.”
The two medics just looked at her, more puzzled than reluctant. The taller one said, “You can’t find a runaway cat, in the dark of night, it’ll be scared to death, panicked. No cat would—”
The dark-haired medic said, “We’ll send someone, the local shelter . . .”
“No,” Lucinda said fiercely. “I want her with us. You can’t take us by force unless you want a lawsuit.”
Oh, don’t, Kit thought, don’t argue. Let them take care of you. But then she realized that Lucinda, in her anger, sounded so much stronger that Kit had to smile.
But stronger or not, Lucinda didn’t prevail. Kit didn’t know what the medic said to her, speaking so quietly, but soon she went silent and lay back again on the gurney, as if she had given up, yet Kit knew she wouldn’t do that. She knows I’ll call Clyde and Ryan, Kit thought. She knows I can take care of myself. She watched them wheel Lucinda to the van, her tall, thin housemate straining up against the safety straps, trying to look up the cliff. Lucinda was so upset that Kit thought to race back down and into the van after all, but before she could try, before she knew what was best to do, they had shut the doors, two medics inside with Pedric and Lucinda, and the other two in the cab. The engine started, the van turned around slowly on the narrow and perilous road, and moved away down the mountain, heading for a strange hospital where no one knew Lucinda and Pedric, where there was no one to speak for them.
Two black-and-whites followed them. The other two sheriff’s deputies remained behind, one car parked on either side of the rockfall. Kit watched them walk the road in both directions, setting out flares, and maybe waiting to meet the wrecking crew that would haul away the truck and pickup, maybe to wait for the tractors and heavy equipment that would arrive to clear away the tons of fallen rock from the highway.
When those earthmovers start to work, when they start grabbing up boulders with those great, reaching pincers—like the claws of space monsters in some old movie—I’m out of here. Again she punched in the Damens’ number. Come on, Clyde, come on, Ryan, will you please, please answer! Crouched in the night alone, she looked behind her where the forest of pines stood tar-black against the stars. The coyotes were at it again, two of them away among the trees yipping to each other. When the machines come to move the wrecked trucks and clear the road, I’ll have to go higher up in the woods away from the sliding earth, I’ll have to go in among the trees, where those night runners are hunting. She looked up at the pines towering black and tall above her, and she didn’t relish climbing those mothers. The great round cylinders of their trunks had no low branches for a cat to grab onto, only that loose, slithery bark that would break off under her claws. And what if she did climb to escape a coyote, only to be picked off by something in the sky, by a great horned owl or swooping barn owl? This was their territory and this was their hour to hunt. She thought of great horned owls pulling squirrels from their nests, snatching out baby birds with those scissor-sharp beaks. The world, tonight, seemed perilous on every side.
She called the Damens seven more times before Clyde answered. “We just got in. I guess the tape ran out.”
A temperamental machine was one thing. A run-out tape was quite another. Now, on the phone, Kit didn’t say her name, none of the cats ever committed their name to an electronic device. They might use man-made machines, but they weren’t fool enough to trust them. Anyway, Clyde knew her voice. She pictured him in his study, his short brown hair tousled, wearing something old and comfortable, a frayed T-shirt and jeans, worn-out jogging shoes. She started out coherent enough, “Lucinda and Pedric are hurt,” but suddenly she was mewling into the phone, a high, shrill cry this time, in spite of herself, a terrible, distressed yowl that she couldn’t seem to stop.
“I’ll get Ryan,” he said with a note of panic. She heard him call out, and then Ryan came on, maybe on her studio extension. Kit imagined them upstairs in the master suite, Rock and the white cat perhaps disturbed from a nap on the love seat.