A few years later, Lynda decided to finish her basement. Jennifer was now in high school, and without the basement, there wasn’t enough room in the little town house for her friends to hang out. The job would take a few days, and the workmen would be going in and out of the house, so Lynda made sure to lock Cookie and Snuggles in her bedroom before leaving for work. On the second day, after the workmen had left, she unlocked the door to let the cats out. Snuggles was sitting on the windowsill, disdainful as usual. But Cookie didn’t come running. And she wasn’t anywhere in the room. As she searched the closet and under the bed, it dawned on Lynda that sly, sneaky Cookie must have slipped out the door when she was closing it that morning.
She called to Jennifer. They immediately began searching the house, calling for Cookie. They looked in the closets, under the sofa, in the kitchen cabinets. No Cookie. Lynda checked the television cabinet and under her quilting supplies. She scoured the construction debris stacked in the basement. She examined the windows, but all the screens were locked. There wasn’t a single place she didn’t search, then search again, then search one final time.
“Ohmygod,” she told me, “I was absolutely hysterical.”
Jennifer was crying. Lynda was worse. Her Cookie had gotten out. The workmen had propped open the outside doors; they had rummaged around all day with drywall and saws and wooden studs. They had clomped and banged. With no way back into the locked bedroom, Cookie would have been terrified. Of course she ran. Why wouldn’t she run? And once she was outside . . .
Ohmygod, she was gone. She was such a baby and Lynda had cured her of all those terrible ailments and she had loved her and they had loved each other and ohmygod, how could she be gone? How could her baby disappear?
“Search one more time,” Lynda told Jennifer.
Twenty minutes later, hysterical and tired and desperately pushing pieces of drywall around the basement, Lynda heard it. At first, she thought it was her imagination. Then she heard it again. The faint sound of feet. Then a meow, very soft and far away. She scrambled through the construction debris, yelling, “Cookie! Cookie!” She heard the meow, still far away, like it was coming from the first floor. But how could that be? She had searched and searched and . . . she looked up and there, above her, was a fresh layer of drywall.
“Ohmygod, ohmygod,” she yelled to Jennifer. “Ohmygod, she’s in the ceiling!”
She climbed up on a small stepladder. “Cookie,” she called, banging her hand against the drywall. “Cookie!” She heard the sound of feet running toward her, then a faint meow. Every time she called Cookie’s name, she was answered with a meow from just above her head.
She called one of the workmen. “The ceiling,” she yelled into the telephone. “In the ceiling!”
“What’s in the ceiling?”
“My Cookie.”
“Your what?”
“My cat. She’s trapped in the ceiling.”
She was so hysterical, the contractor came straight over. Sure enough, Cookie had jumped into the partially completed ceiling and been sealed between the joists when the men applied the last of the drywall. The workman cut a hole above the window where the drywall hadn’t been sealed, and together he and Lynda, by banging the ceiling and calling Cookie’s name, managed to coax the kitten to the hole. Suddenly, there she was, Lynda’s little Cookie, peaking over the edge of the drywall. She looked around, as if seeing the basement for the first time, and then leapt down into Lynda’s arms, completely covered with dust and construction debris. Lynda was crying and kissing her, overcome with both horror and relief. Cookie didn’t care. She jumped down and ran off, as if she’d known all along that Lynda would find her.
Before he left, Lynda made the workman patch the drywall hole and seal every inch of the ceiling. She didn’t care that it was the middle of the night. She wasn’t taking any more chances.
The first bump in Cookie’s life began when Snuggles died. A tumor wrapped suddenly around her heart and lungs, and within forty-eight hours, Snuggles went from seemingly perfectly healthy to gasping for her last breath on the veterinarian’s table. It was over before Lynda realized what was happening.
Soon after, she noticed a tiny, stumbling kitten nosing around her front door. The cat was clearly too young to be weaned, but no mother was in sight, so Lynda started feeding her. She fed her on the front porch for nine months, with no intention of ever letting her into the house. She had Cookie. She didn’t want or need another cat. But after a while, she realized that Chloe—as she named the little runt—was being terrorized by the big hunting dog next door. Several times a day, he’d come barreling out of his house and chase her across the street, barking and rampaging and scaring her half to death. The neighbor didn’t like the situation any more than Lynda did. He worried his precious dog was going to get hit by a car. So he came up with the perfect solution: shoot the kitten with this hunting rifle. Needless to say, Lynda immediately brought Chloe inside and made her a house cat.
Cookie wasn’t happy about this at all. She was six years old, and she was used to having the house to herself. She didn’t attack Chloe—Cookie was not an aggressive cat—but she turned up her nose at the newcomer and refused to pay her any mind. Chloe was a shy cat, the kind with a habit of lowering her head and staring up at you with big sad eyes, and she readily accepted the role of second cat in the Caira household. She seemed to understand that she could live in the house, but only on Cookie’s terms. Cookie ate first. Cookie drank first. And Cookie was not sharing Lynda. That was the line, the one rule that stood above all others. Cookie looked scornfully if Chloe even tried to approach Lynda, and she wasn’t above smacking her once to let her know her behavior was not condoned. And if Chloe tried to jump onto Lynda’s bed? Unforgivable. One foot on the bedspread, and Cookie arched her back and hissed. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but she would have fought to defend that bed because Lynda—Lynda was hers. Lynda was sacrosanct.
Eventually, though, Cookie mellowed. She was a friendly cat at heart, and constant vigilance wasn’t in her nature. She was a lover, a happy-go-lucky companion, and once she knew she was still the love of Lynda’s life, she began to warm up to sweet, subservient little Chloe. Mind you, it took years. Three years to be exact. But in the end, Cookie and Chloe were wonderful friends.
The second bump came a few years later. Lynda had long since settled into a comfortable life: twenty years in her town house, seventeen years as a divorced mom, sixteen years managing a successful catering business, ten years with her beloved Cookie. After twelve years of fund-raisers, she had donated more than a million dollars to St. Mary’s hospital, which used the money to open a traumatic brain injury unit for children—the only such specialized unit on the East Coast. The next year, Lynda organized a fund-raiser for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which had not only killed her aunt but was now affecting one of the soap opera stars who had been instrumental in helping her fund-raisers: Michael Zaslow. He had been fired by Guiding Light after his condition was revealed, and, as his health deteriorated rapidly, he told his wife that his biggest regret was not being able to see the friends he had made on that show one last time. Thirty-five of those friends showed up to see him at Lynda’s benefit, which raised more than twenty-six thousand dollars. Michael Zaslow died ten days later.
But even as she enlisted the help of her close-knit family and friends, as she always had for a worthy cause, Lynda knew her life was changing. With her father semiretired, the catering business downsized its work space and staff, adding to Lynda’s workload and putting an end to her fund-raisers. Her daughter was growing up and would soon be out on her own. Her grandmother died, and the family sold the house where Lynda had spent so many wonderful afternoons with grapevines, canned tomatoes, and a matriarch who never turned anyone away, from WPA highway builders to down-on-their-luck strangers in need of a cup of joe. It was as if her death closed the book on Lynda Caira’s Bayside, a community that had long ago paved over most of its orchards and grape arbors, and where nobody talked to strangers anymore—much less invited them inside for a meal. For decades the original immigrants had been leaving, squeezed by newer immigrants and refugees from the City, as the locals called Manhattan, looking for affordable places to live. As the century closed on the old Bayside, Lynda Caira cashed out. She sold her town house for more than ten times what she had paid for it in 1973 and bought a three-bedroom, two-story, stand-alone Victorian in Floral Park.