“Yeah,” I said flatly. “Couldn’t be better.”
CAT’S PAW by Laurie R. King
You girls got the balls,” Lauren shouted at the girls on the court. Marisol bumped against Pilar with a stifled giggle while their coach pretended not to notice. This was a long-established, straight-faced game she played with her teams, or maybe with herself, an important part of which was keeping them in doubt as to whether their repressed spinster of a coach actually intended these outrageous double entendres, or if she was just a complete tongue-klutz.
This particular Monday afternoon, the game was proving something of an effort. Lauren’s heart wasn’t in rude jokes. It wasn’t even in the practice, which at the moment involved an intricate figure eight pattern of dribbling and passing, an exercise two of the players had worked out themselves following the Globetrotters field trip the spring before. The girls had come up with the idea, but it needed close supervision to keep it from disintegrating into a pileup, and frankly, their coach wasn’t up to it today.
The third time the tight configuration of weaving figures (one, two, three, and pass; one, two, three-) had collided and dissolved into chaos and irritation, Lauren gave up and set them to a simpler shooting practice. That was better. The rhythm and noises of their shoes and voices soothed her, allowing her eyes and mind to follow their skills and personalities, looking at both with an eye to the beginning of the season in a couple of weeks. Saturday’s informal preseason game, she saw, had helped draw them together, given them the unity of purpose she’d hoped for. The day had been a disaster in other ways, but in this it had been a success.
After a while, she called them over for a brief talk about strategy (which boiled down to Teamwork!), then allowed them a short practice game before dismissing them for the day. She watched them snag their bags and chatter their way out the doors to their waiting rides, feeling pride and affection despite her grinding fatigue. Good team, she thought. Good bunch of girls. God, I’m tired.
At the dinner table that night, bent over her solitary plate of overcooked pasta, Lauren squinted through gritty eyes as she made notes about the team. Her job was teaching social studies and history, but her love was coaching, especially basketball. It was not the girls themselves that gave her pleasure, although she had no doubt that they speculated furiously about her-she was scrupulous about avoiding physical contact, just in case. She was, however, not a lesbian. She was something far more rare, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin, and the pleasure she took in her girls was not for their bodies, but for their freedom. She craved their overheard conversations about hair and parents and boys, much as a prisoner craves a window, and if her own iron bars were made of emotional distance and a firm concentration on the game, she nonetheless secretly reveled in the social interaction of teenagers such as she had never been.
She also drew comfort and pride in knowing that she was, if not exactly liked, then at least respected and (although they might not realize it, or admit it if they did) needed. Junior high school girls were so vulnerable, so adrift on a sea of hormones and insecurities, confusion and energy, that giving them a team to cling to was far more important than just something healthy to do after school. Lauren gave them self-respect and a sense of their own strength, as individuals, as a group, and as a sex. She was aware, always, of the irony involved in their learning this from her, of all people. Hence, for her own amusement, the were-they-or-weren’t-they jokes, those faint overtures from the Lauren who might have been. Marisol coming on nicely, she noted on her pad: cocaptain? Tina, on the other hand, was getting just a bit too self-important for the team’s good: sit the bench for a while?
By ten o’clock she was aching with fatigue and her eyes felt as if she’d been through a sandstorm. Pushing away the twinge of apprehension, she filled her cat’s bowl, set up the coffeemaker for the morning, and went to bed.
And for the third night running, came awake within the hour, heart pounding over the noise that wasn’t there. She fumbled for the clock and groaned at the reading of its luminous hands. What the hell was going on, anyway? She hadn’t had insomnia for years, but for the last three nights she had. Ever since the cat.
With thought of the cat, all hope of sleep shriveled up and crept into a corner to hide. Lauren threw off the covers, felt for her slippers, and pulled on her warm robe as she passed through the dim hallway to the kitchen. By the light of the open refrigerator door she filled a mug with milk and stuck it in the microwave for a minute, added a splash of cheap brandy and a shake of nutmeg, and went to turn on the Weather Channel on the television.
Storms lay over the nation, although it was calm enough here. Timson, her arthritic Siamese, grumbled in to ask what the hell she was doing up this time of night. He sniffed in disapproval at the corruption of the good honest milk in her mug, curled into her legs, and went to sleep.
The other cat had been black, or maybe a dark tabby. On the fateful Saturday morning, not even seventy-two hours ago, she’d been driving through San Jose with four of her girls, heading for a preseason meet with a middle school up in the Bay Area that was famous as the home of three actual, real-life professional women players. Somewhere behind Lauren’s car was a minivan with the rest of the team, driven by one of the moms. It was a clear, sunny autumnal morning: ho hum, another beautiful day in the paradise that was Northern California, and the girls were pretending to scorn the sixties and seventies rock of Lauren’s tape collection, although they seemed to know most of the words. Traffic was moving easily enough to allow the driver’s mind to wander, moving forward to the coming game, then back to the meeting she’d had a few days earlier with a prospective sponsor for the team. She was mulling over his proposal to grace their new uniforms with the name of his software company in letters larger than the girls’ own when the cat appeared.
And it did simply appear, on the road ahead of her, as if it had been dropped from the cloudless blue sky-or more probably, she realized much later, launched from the bowels of the plumber’s truck two vehicles ahead of her. The truck was big and red and bristling with cranes, nozzles, storage tanks, and various fixtures whose purpose Lauren couldn’t begin to guess. For one cat, however, one dark, bedraggled, desperately bewildered feline, the truck had been a place of refuge against the chill of the previous night, its nooks and crannies welcome shelter.
Until the truck reached sixty on the freeway and started to bounce and rattle.
The animal hit the ground running, or trying its damnedest to run, all four feet skittering across the concrete at sixty miles an hour, its paws working automatically to find some kind of traction that would enable it to lunge for safety. It was not tumbling head over heels; its head was bolt upright, revealing eyes popped and staring with astonishment, fur spiked awry with wet or grease. Every fiber of the creature’s being was fighting to make sense of the impossible concrete and steel maelstrom into which it had been ejected, every sinew and cell in its body battling valiantly to stay upright, to find the safe haven that it knew had to be there somewhere in the hell bearing down on it, to gather itself up from the loud/fast/huge confusion and leap in haven’s direction, to survive, to live.
All this-its attitude and its youth, the wide-staring eyes and the state of its dark fur and the way its delicate paws were trying for something they could comprehend-printed itself on Lauren’s mind in about two seconds. The cat simply materialized-it hadn’t wandered out across two lanes of traffic from the shoulder, that would have been impossible-it just appeared, having passed miraculously without harm under the rattletrap old Chevy that separated Lauren from the plumber’s truck, skating down the roadway between that oblivious car’s four tires and shooting out from under the back bumper like some macabre version of Bambi on ice. It had not been afraid, she decided on the tenth or hundredth time those two seconds replayed themselves in her mind’s eye: it wasn’t fear that had bugged those eyes and given such desperate strength to its fragile muscles. Somehow she knew that there had been no time for fear in the moments allotted to it, just astonishment wedded to a frantic and determined hunt for solution. She also knew, queasily, that had there been a vehicle in the next lane, half a dozen cars and a girl’s basketball team would have come to wrenching, steel-tearing grief on top of the cat. Fortunately there had been no car to meet her unthinking yank on the wheel.