But her daughter, Sweetie, was four years old, and Sweetie really wanted a pet. Vicki suggested a dog. After all, she had grown up with dogs. One of her favorite childhood pictures was of herself with two black eyes, one for each time the enthusiastically playful family dog had knocked her off the front porch with its tail. But her landlord was adamant: no dogs. He had no problem with a cat. If the little girl wanted, he said, they could even adopt two, which sounded good to Vicki because two cats could keep each other company, and she might not have to bother with them. So when a coworker’s cat had kittens in November, Vicki Kluever thought she’d found the perfect Christmas present. Or at least the best present allowed at her third-rate fourplex apartment building in Anchorage, Alaska.
Two weeks before Christmas, just as the kittens were being weaned, she drove over to meet them. They were pathetically cute, of course, tiny and uncoordinated and nestling energetically against their mother. There was one little guy that stood out, though, the one that kept biting his siblings’ tails and stepping on their heads when they tried to suckle their mother. He was a live wire, a real spunky personality. The independent type. So Vicki picked him. Then she chose his exact opposite: a cute little female that looked Siamese and seemed like the most docile kitten in the bunch.
She planned the adoption for Christmas Eve. She and her daughter were having dinner with their friend Michael, so she asked him to pick up Sweetie from day care. (The girl’s real name was Adrienna, by the way, but Vicki has called her Sweetie since she was a few weeks old.) Vicki would pick up the kittens. Her daughter was always asleep by seven, so by the time dinner was over and it was time to drive home, she’d be so dead to the world, she wouldn’t notice the box in the backseat. Sweetie wouldn’t know about the kittens until she woke up Christmas morning and found them under the tree.
It was a perfect plan, Vicki thought. The ideal surprise. But when she went to pick up the kittens, she couldn’t find them. Any of them. Her coworker had left on a vacation the day before, and in the twenty-four hours she’d been gone, the kittens had managed to escape from their box. The woman’s sister, who had met Vicki at the house with the key, didn’t seem too pleased with this development, but she helped search for them. After half an hour, they’d found all but one. The pure black one, the live wire, was gone. Vicki didn’t know what to do, but she knew she needed to make a decision because she was expected at Michael’s for dinner. Should she adopt just one kitten? Should she choose another?
Thinking back, she was never sure how or why it happened—she had to use the facilities, I suppose—but she wound up in the bathroom. She turned on the lights, looked into the toilet, and her heart collapsed through the floor. The pure black kitten was lying in the bottom of the bowl.
She reached in and pulled him out. He was no bigger than a tennis ball, and she held him easily in one hand. He lay on her palm, as lifeless and cold as a wet dishrag. There was no pulse or breathing, and his eyelids were peeled back just enough to see that he was gone. He had been such an energetic kitten. Vicki knew he was the one who had led the charge over the edge of the box. He had been jumping and swatting at it the first time she saw him; who else could it have been? He must have been peering over the edge of the toilet rim, or maybe stretching for a drink, when he slipped into the bowl. He was so tiny the water was over his head, and trying to scramble up the slick sides must have worn him down. His adventurous spirit, the fearlessness that had drawn her to him, had cost the kitten his life. On Christmas Eve.
“What are you going to do?”
The question shocked her out of her thoughts. She must have shouted when she saw the dead kitten, Vicki realized, because the sister was standing next to her, staring over her shoulder at the lifeless body.
“We should bury him,” Vicki said.
“I can’t. I’m late for work.”
“Well, we can’t leave him,” Vicki said. “We can’t just leave a dead cat lying ...”
The kitten coughed. Or more accurately, he sputtered. Looking down, Vicki realized that she had been unconsciously rubbing her thumb back and forth over the kitten’s stomach and chest. Had she forced water out of his lungs? Was that sputter a sign of life, or just the last gasp of a body settling into death? He wasn’t moving. He looked as cold and lifeless as ever. How could he possibly . . . ?
He sputtered again. Not a cough but a small hack that strangled in his throat the moment it began. But this time, the kitten twitched and spat up water.
“He’s alive,” Vicki said, stroking her thumb down his body. The kitten sputtered, spat up more water, but otherwise didn’t move. His eyes were still slightly open in a death stare, his inner flaps drawn inward. “He’s alive,” Vicki said when he sputtered a fourth time, wetting her hand.
Her friend’s sister wasn’t impressed. She looked at her watch with a grimace, a not-so-subtle signal that she didn’t have time to deal with the possible resurrection of a recently deceased cat. In her defense, she probably thought the sputtering was death throes. There was no way this bedraggled kitten, submerged in water for who knows how long, could possibly be alive.
Vicki wrapped the kitten in a hand towel, still stroking him firmly enough that he kept coughing up water, and called her longtime friend Sharon, who lived nearby. Vicki and Sharon had helped each other through challenging jobs, dysfunctional families, difficult marriages, and typical babies. When Vicki told her there was an emergency and that she needed to come to her house, Sharon didn’t even ask why.
She left the other kitten, the docile one, and rushed to her friend’s house. There was no way, Vicki thought, she could give this sickly kitten to her daughter. He was alive, but he looked horrible. Scary almost. And his chances of long-term survival were slim. When you grow up in a fishing town in Alaska, you learn about hypothermia and water in the lungs, and you know the odds aren’t good. But this little kitten was a fighter; in spite of her aversion to cats, there was no way Vicki could leave him behind.
Even if her friend was shocked by the sight of the tiny body. “I found him in the toilet,” Vicki told her. “Under the water. But he coughed and spit up water.”
“He’s cold,” the friend said. “He needs warmth.”
They wrapped a heating pad around the towel, set it on low, and put the kitten on the kitchen counter. As Sharon gently rubbed the top of the kitten’s head for comfort, Vicki carefully dried him with a blow-dryer. Halfway through, the kitten started convulsing. His mouth was hanging open; his eyelids were fluttering; he looked like he was having a seizure. He twitched, then started shivering and retching in violent dry heaves. It looked painful, as if his body was being pulled apart like Alaska’s pack ice in a spring thaw, but it was an involuntary reaction. The kitten, apart from his spasms, never stirred. More than an hour after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.
Already late for dinner, Vicki called Michael. “I’m coming,” she said. “Tell my daughter I’m coming. I’m just going to be late. And, um . . . Merry Christmas.”
Then she called every veterinarian in the phone book. No one answered. Why would they? It was late in the afternoon, and it was Christmas Eve. She couldn’t leave the kitten at Sharon’s house because her oldest daughter was allergic to cats. Even if she hadn’t been, Vicki knew she couldn’t abandon the kitten now. Not after all they’d been through. After an hour, when his convulsing slowed, she put him in a shoe box, still wrapped in the towel and heating pad, and drove to Christmas Eve dinner.
“This is Sharon’s cat,” she told Sweetie when the little girl came to see what her mother had in the box. “He is really sick. But Sharon had to work, so I told her we would watch him through the night.” Sweetie was staring at the little black kitten, at his open mouth and his swollen eyes and his lifeless rag of a body, and Vicki could tell she was going to cry.