The next wish had gone unfulfilled until this very moment, was answered when Pan appeared, as if by magic, right out of the old cat’s dreams.
Now only the third wish remained. But this last desire would remain a dream, a longing as ephemeral as the wind itself. No cat could return to his past lives, no cat could go back to times and places he might indeed remember, to lives long since gone to dust. Misto could not step back again into some fabulous past, he could only bring those times alive by painting the stories for others.
Now as dusk pushed in more willfully, Mary rose from the grass, brushing off her jeans. When Misto led Pan up the cliff to greet her, Kit hung back, feeling suddenly out of place. Watching father and son so happy, watching Mary’s quiet joy in them, she felt shy and uncertain, and she turned away. She was headed away for home and her own family, was trotting away through the blowing grass when Pan came racing after her, “Come with us, Kit.” And Misto behind him, “Come with us.”
Kit fidgeted. “Lucinda and Pedric are waiting. Lucinda said—”
Mary caught up with them. She didn’t argue, she picked Kit up, cuddling her over her shoulder. “I’ll call her, maybe they’ll come to supper.” And, carrying Kit, she headed for the van. Oh, my, Kit thought, glancing at Pan shyly now as they all crowded onto the front seat together. Mary said, “John will be home soon, he’ll be so excited. I have steaks to cook. Shall I open the smoked salmon appetizer, and maybe some artichoke hearts?”
Kit and Misto licked their whiskers, but Pan laughed aloud with pleasure. “I didn’t eat like that in Eugene. Debbie favored the cheapest cat food. And nursing home leftovers—they run to strained squash and instant potatoes.”
“Tonight,” Mary said, “you will dine royally. And you will sleep on feather pillows, not on the bare, hard roadside.”
And that’s the way it was, dinner for seven, four humans, three cats. Seven chairs at the table, three fitted out with sturdy file boxes from John’s office, to raise the cats up so they could easily reach their plates. Kit’s tall, thin housemates came down from their hillside home, bringing a large tray of Kit’s favorite flan for dessert. Neither Lucinda nor Pedric Greenlaw, both in their eighties, a tanned, active couple, had lost their appetite for a good steak. The fillets were good, rare and tender, the artichoke hearts swam in butter, the caramel custard was so good it made a cat’s whiskers curl. And all evening, neither Lucinda nor Pedric could take their eyes from Pan. Their wonder at another speaking cat suddenly among them was overridden, perhaps, only by the suspicion that this red tomcat might have brought with him a heartbreaking change in their lives.
To see Kit and Pan together, see their looks at each other even this early on in their acquaintance, to see the sharp chemistry already sparking between the two, was to imagine a future in which Kit might draw away from them, or perhaps leave them altogether. The concept saddened the Greenlaws for selfish reasons, but it thrilled them for Kit’s sake. After all, they wouldn’t be around forever. Now at last, maybe Kit had found someone good enough, strong enough, wild but loving enough, to share the next stage of her life. Pedric gave Lucinda a smile and a wink that said all was well, all would be well. He looked down at Kit, sitting next to him, and he prayed that that was so.
When the table was cleared and they’d gathered before the fire, Pan’s russet eyes closed sometimes as he told of his travels, as he brought back the little, quirky moments, the rough fishermen in an Oregon harbor drinking a mix of wine and beer for breakfast, the story of Denise Woolsey in her U-Haul truck. But then his gaze would turn to watching Kit as she tried to imagine such feats: cadging rides from strangers, dodging fast trucks and then riding in them, nimbly sidestepping dangers that made her shiver clear down to her paws.
“One thing I wouldn’t have liked,” Kit said, “is living with the Kraft family all those months.”
Pan said, “I stayed because of Tessa. Vinnie could be mean, but she was afraid of me, I could make her back off from Tessa. Debbie never bothered. But,” he said, “it was Erik I was afraid of. I stayed out of his way. I was glad he was gone so much of the year, it was more peaceful then.” He gave her a sly smile. “Debbie liked it that way, too. When Erik was gone, or at work, she’d go through his desk, pull out files and make notes. I could never get a good look, she’d push me off the desk. I never saw her copy anything on his Xerox, I think she was afraid he’d find out. Maybe he kept track of the copy count on the machine. Sometimes she’d copy things in the files by hand, too. She sent them all to her mother, she wrote to her mother a lot. I’d jump up on the desk to look, and she’d shove me away. Letters about Erik, though, I saw that much. About his real estate transactions. When she finished a letter she’d seal it right away, drop it in her purse and be off to the post office. As if she was afraid to leave it even for a few minutes where he might come home and find it.”
Kit said, “Debbie’s nephew, Billy, told Max Harper that Debbie never wrote to Hesmerra, that Debbie would have nothing to do with her mother.” And Kit burned to tell Joe and Dulcie that there were letters, that either Billy had lied or he didn’t know about them. Between this new bit of intelligence, and the presence of Pan himself, Kit was so wired she could barely settle in Pedric’s arms, as Pan asked Misto for a tale. This was the story Misto told, of a deep cold winter such as Kit could hardly imagine.
“In a village five centuries before Dickens’s London, in the frozen cold of winter in a cottage as rude as a cow byre, a child huddled alone, chilled on the icy hearth, her father gone to fight the invaders. The cries beyond the sod walls and banks of frozen snow were the cries of pain and death. The child hugged herself with fear and cold; the only movement in the dim hut was that of a half-wild village cat, as he crept to the child and lay up against her, to share his meager warmth. She put her arms around him, and only when the shouts of the hordes drew close did the cat rouse the child, hissing and pawing; he led her out into the dark and snowbound streets, and quickly on beneath a hill of frozen snow that covered a village haymow. He led her deep into the heart of the hay, where the fermenting heap had made its own warmth. There they remained huddled as the night passed, until the screams of the dying, and the trample of hooves, at last grew faint.
“At dawn the Huns had vanished, and child and cat came out. Beside the hill of snow and hay lay a warrior, dead. The child’s own father lay there, the reins of his steed tethered among his armor. The child wept as the cat took the reins, freed the mount, and leaped into the saddle. When he pulled the child up before him, he was a cat no more, but a fine young knight dressed in catskins, with a lashing tail. And the child . . . Her cheeks grew rosy, her frail body bloomed stronger, until her beauty shone with the light of love, out over all the bodies of the dead.
“Together they left that place, knight and damsel. They rode away in the dawn to where the land grew warm and sweet and the crops lay untouched by fire. There they gathered around them strong warriors and kind, they gathered a fine army, and there among plenty they waited, armed and strong, to turn away the Goths or to slaughter them,” Misto ended, his golden eyes smiling at Kit.
The evening ended, too, with Kit still in Pedric’s arms, looking back over her shoulder where Pan and Misto stood together in the open doorway. The wind had died, but, strangely, the night air felt as cold as that medieval winter. As she looked back at the two tomcats, she could see the hearth fire blazing behind them, in a scene that seemed as magical to the tortoiseshell as Misto’s ancient tales. And then Pedric was slipping into the car, holding her, and home they went through the cold night to their own warm house, Kit carrying the tales with her, carrying dreams with her of times long past—and, perhaps, of amazing times yet to be known.