The next part, in hindsight, was inevitable. Ted slowly became more controlling and abusive, and Vicki, finally, summoned the courage to break it off with him completely. He took it well at first, but then started drinking heavily. He began showing up at her office around closing time. When she went for business lunches, she often noticed him watching her. He always happened to be at the softball field or in the alley at the end of her weekly bowling league. When she refused to come back, his harassment turned to threats. She applied for a restraining order. Her application was refused until he pulled her from the table where she was eating dinner with friends and dragged her across the restaurant in front of a dozen witnesses. The restraining order was approved the next day.
For a while, he stopped coming around. The mortgage business boomed; the boats chugged; the mountains iced over and the bears took to their dens. On the coast, the ocean pounded the tide pools of Kodiak. Vicki settled in with Sweetie and Shadow, relieved by the prospect of long, slow, peaceful winter nights. Then she came home after work to find her front door open. She searched the house. A jacket Ted had given her was missing from her closet. She changed the locks, but things he had given her kept going missing, one at a time.
Just before Christmas, she and Sweetie made the journey by car, skiff, and foot to Grandma Laura’s cabin on Larsen Island. Grandma Laura had been diagnosed with cancer, but whatever was destroying her was hidden deep inside. That day, she was as strong as she had always been. She baked bread; she poured drinks; she fed logs to the fire like she had every winter for almost thirty years. Her only wish, she told her family, was to die as she had lived, on Larsen Island. When Vicki mentioned her problems with Ted, her grandmother shook her head and said, “Love isn’t blind, but it sure is cockeyed.”
Then she turned to Vicki’s cousin, who was also having relationship difficulties, and told them both, “You don’t need a man. You may want a man, but you don’t need a man. Remember that.”
The party lasted two days, and by the time Vicki arrived home late on Christmas Eve, she felt energized by her grandmother’s wisdom and energy. In a happy fog, she tucked her nine-year-old daughter, already fast asleep, into bed. She smiled as she turned off the lights, remembering how, exactly six years before, Sweetie had stayed up late for Christmas Cat. We can’t leave him alone, Mommy, she had said, even if he’s going to die. When she came down the stairs, still warm from the memories, Ted was standing in her living room.
“You’ve ruined my life,” he said. “Now I’m going to ruin yours. I’m going to burn this house to the ground, and I hope you die in it.”
She called the police. The state trooper who had helped her get a restraining order answered. By the time he arrived, Ted had disappeared.
“I know his type,” the trooper said. “I know his history. I’m sorry, but this is not going to get better.”
For two months, the trooper checked Vicki’s house twice a day, varying his routine and time of arrival. Around April, when the ice was just starting to split in the streams, he sat down with her. Ted had been visiting her neighborhood, he told her, almost every day.
“This guy knows how to pick locks,” he said. “You could change the locks every hour, and he could still get in. A restraining order is only good if someone is standing here waiting for him.” The trooper stopped. Then he said something Vicki never forgot.
“Do you have a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how to use it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you shoot to kill?”
Vicki stared at him. She could feel her heart pounding. “What are you saying?”
“He is dangerous.”
“You are asking me to shoot and kill the man I spent two years of my life with?”
“I’m saying that if he’s in the house, and you have a gun in your hand, you better shoot to kill.”
That night, Vicki slept with her pistol under her pillow. Shadow slept beside her, Sweetie down the hall. The next night, she stopped fooling herself. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t shoot to kill.
She called her boss in Anchorage. “I hate to do this,” she said, “but I have to leave.” She told him the reason. They discussed options and, a few weeks later, he arranged for her to transfer to Wasilla, which, contrary to popular perception, is not a small, off-the-beaten track town like Kodiak but a bedroom community of Anchorage. The company had been planning to close the Wasilla office, which was losing money. Vicki, as the new manager, would have one year to turn it around.
She rented an apartment in Wasilla and started packing. She wanted to leave quickly, but she had to talk to her clients, finish her remaining work, sell her house, say good-bye to her family and friends, and make arrangements for her daughter. Five days before they were scheduled to leave, Sweetie woke up screaming in the middle of the night.
“There’s something wrong with Shadow,” she said when Vicki came running into her room.
The kitten was lying on her side on Sweetie’s pillow, panting heavily. Blood was smeared on her fur and the pillow case. For some reason, when Ted gave her the kitten, Vicki assumed she was fixed. By the time she took Shadow to the vet, it was too late, and in the last few frantic, terrifying months that fact had slipped her mind. Now her cat was giving birth on her daughter’s pillow.
“It’s fine,” Vicki said. “It’s just the babies, Sweetie. Shadow’s having babies.”
She got a packing box. Carefully, she placed Shadow on a blanket in the box and carried her to the empty walk-in closet. Vicki and Sweetie grabbed pillows and lay quietly on the floor beside her. They assisted Shadow with the breaking of the sac on one of the kittens and, despite the chaos of their lives, felt renewed by the five new lives that wiggled on the floor beside them when morning finally came.
A few days later, when Vicki flew to Anchorage, she left Sweetie in Kodiak with her mother but took Shadow and her kittens with her. She had rented her new apartment sight unseen. She had no furniture. She had no child care lined up. She didn’t know if she even wanted to live in Wasilla. She knew, at least for the moment, Sweetie would be better off in Kodiak. But Shadow? She didn’t trust anyone else to care for her kittens.
The apartment was awful. It had ratty carpet, unscreened windows, a broken stove, and holes in the walls. She had packed only one suitcase, so there were no plates to eat from or cups for water. The ferry from Kodiak was grounded for repairs, so she had flown with Shadow and her kittens tucked in a carrier under her seat. Now, without her car, she had no good way to get around Wasilla. (The six of them would fly back and forth to Kodiak four times to visit Sweetie and complete the move; Vicki always joked that it would have been a lot easier if the cats had qualified for frequent flyer miles.) She went to her new office and realized the only hope was to lay off half the staff and hope the rest could turn the branch around. That afternoon, a severe Alaska summer storm blew in and plunged the world into twilight. She sat in her empty apartment, without dinner, and listened to the rain. She missed the old house in Kodiak. The one she had bought and remodeled and cared for on her own. She missed her old job and her comfortable community. Most of all, she missed her daughter.