Thunder ripped and rain, mixed with summer hail, pounded the window. The suitcase lay in the corner, her two business suits hidden from cat hair in the closet. She reached out and stroked Shadow, who was lying nearby. Her kittens were tottering around her on the dirty carpet, knocking each other over and nuzzling for milk. The runt was black and orange, but the others were jet black like Shadow and Christmas Cat. She stuck her finger near one of them; he rolled over and sniffed it. His paws were like tissue paper, delicate and almost soft. She started to cry. She hadn’t known she was going to until the tears were on her cheeks.
How could she have made the same mistake twice? How could she have allowed another man control over her? She had been raised by a difficult father, and she had fallen into the same pattern again and again. Her husband. Ted. She was strong, independent, smart, hardworking, successful, and yet bad relationships had left her sitting on the floor in a dingy apartment, without a stick of furniture, in a town she didn’t know. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so . . . weak? The rain beat against the window. She sniffled, then wiped the tears from her face. The kittens wrestled on the floor, content and playful, completely oblivious to the situation around them. Shadow looked at her, her eyes half open in a sleepy expression, then turned back to her babies.
And for some reason, that made Vicki smile. And then, because she was smiling, she started to laugh. Here she was, an avowed cat hater—or at least cat ignorer—for most of her life, and she had chosen to bring her kittens instead of her daughter on a life-changing five-hundred-mile trip. Instead of Sweetie, she was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment with a cat and her kittens for company. And not just any cat—the cat her stalker had used to win her back. A cat that, in a way, represented the worst betrayal of her life. But a cat she loved just the same.
Some people say loving a cat is about circumstance. The right cat, the right time, the right story. It’s about projecting our desires; it’s about having a crisis big enough to create a need. But that’s not true. That’s not true of Christmas Cat, the first cat Vicki loved. That’s not true of Dewey, who won me over not by launching my career but with a playfully obstinate disposition and a sweet and abiding love. That’s certainly not true of Shadow, who had appeared in Vicki’s life at the wrong time and, more important, for the wrong reason.
We don’t love cats out of need. We don’t love them as symbols or projections. We love them individually, in the complex manner of all human love, because cats are living creatures. They have personalities and quirks, good traits and flaws. Sometimes they fit us, and they make us laugh in our darkest moments. And then we love them. It’s really as simple as that.
All her adult life, Vicki hadn’t wanted to own a cat. She was divorced; she was a single mother; she didn’t want to be that lady. But leaving her daughter behind to make room for her cats . . . sitting in an empty apartment and laughing at their antics . . . she was clearly that cat lady now.
And it was okay. She wasn’t beaten. Sitting in that dark apartment, with the rain slamming the window, and the kittens mewling on the floor, she knew she was going to make it. As she wiped the tears from her cheeks, there was no doubt in her mind. She would move out of the dumpy apartment. She would go to the office and fire the smallest number of people possible and then sit down with the others and lead them to success. At the end of the summer, when everything was in order, she would bring Sweetie to Wasilla and raise her as a proud single mother. Nothing is ever a given; Vicki Kluever had always known that. She had learned, more than once, that things could be taken away. But things don’t matter. The importance stuff—your faith, your dignity, your will to succeed, your ability to love—those are yours until you choose to let them go.
The next day, she found a better apartment. She fired two employees but managed to keep four. Within five months, the Wasilla office was turning a profit. Eighteen months later, she was standing in front of an audience of her peers, accepting her award for affiliate of the year. And even now, eighteen years later and two thousand miles away, I am proud of her, because I know how hard she worked for that honor and how far she had come.
The next three years, from a professional standpoint, were the best of Vicki’s life. Sweetie, at first reluctant to move, soon met two lifelong friends and learned to love Wasilla. Ted called a few times, but Vicki ignored him. He couldn’t get to her now, not even emotionally, and eventually he stopped trying. She kept two of the kittens from Shadow’s litter, the black and orange runt and a jet-black kitten who looked just like his mother, and when Shadow died of cancer at the age of nine, Rosco and Abbey kept Vicki company. She had owned several cats by then, most of them pure black, and although none moved her like CC the Christmas Cat, she loved every one. Ten years after leaving Kodiak, she broke the pattern and married the right man: one her cats and Sweetie loved, and who loved them all in return.
“Please don’t see nor portray me as a victim or some poverty-stricken person,” she begged me after our initial conversation. “Yes, there were lots of tough times, but doesn’t everyone have tough times? Based on some of the people I worked with during my career, I see my life as a cakewalk!”
A cakewalk? Not really. A successful life well lived? Absolutely. By 2005, when she retired because she no longer believed in the practices of the mortgage industry she had spent twenty-two years championing, Vicki Kluever was one of the most accomplished Alaskan women in her field. She had coauthored and implemented a statewide program to help disabled adults secure discounted financing; she had managed several offices to unprecedented success; she had mentored a generation of female mortgage officers; she had spent her career, she felt, helping thousands of families make their dreams come true.
She lives with her husband now in Palmer, Alaska, another bedroom community of Anchorage. She is happy. She has the marriage she always wanted: the kind that strengthens instead of maims. She has the freedom to spend as much time as she needs in Kodiak, where the salt air, the heartbeat of life in a fishing town, and the sight of boats in the morning sailing off to the deep waters continue to energize and inspire her. Her daughter Adrienna lives two thousand miles away, in Minnesota, but mother and daughter talk all the time. After some rough years when she was a teenager, they are now the best of friends.
And through it all, there have been the animals: eleven cats for this former cat hater, and even a couple of dogs. They were always there whenever Vicki needed them, just as Christmas Cat had always been. Until 2006, that is, when Shadow’s kittens Rosco and Abbey both passed away within months of each other at the age of sixteen. Nine months later, Choco, a dog Vicki had nursed through severe injuries after he was hit by a car and who had remained devoted to her for the rest of his life, died at the age of twelve. For the first time since she pulled CC from the water almost twenty-five years before, Vicki had no critters around her. It was an empty feeling, especially with her daughter in Minnesota and her husband often away on long business trips, but one she felt ready to endure. Perhaps even enjoy. Then, on a trip to Kodiak to care for her aging mother, a friend introduced her to an elderly dog whose owners had recently died. Bandit, a loving and energetic Border collie mix, now sleeps in her bed every night. In her heart, she knows, she couldn’t possibly love a dog more.
And yet, on those dark Alaska nights, when Vicki Kluever sits in her bentwood rocking chair with the woodstove lit against the long cold hours, a cup of Russian tea in her hand, her husband reading a book on the couch with Bandit at his side, it is the memory of CC the Christmas Cat to which she returns. His lush black fur. His mischievous eyes. The way he would disappear into the forest behind the back fence. The way he would run to her and hold her cheeks and nuzzle his head against her chin. You never forget your first love, I suppose. Especially when his personality embodied everything you believe in. Especially when he taught you to love, when so much of your previous love, outside of family, had been misplaced and flawed. Especially when you saved his life on a quiet Christmas Eve.