The girls hadn’t seen the cat, just shrieked in reaction to the abrupt swerve and started gabbling questions at her. Lauren did not answer. She clenched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, slowing so dramatically the car behind her blared its horn in protest, and she kept her eyes glued to the rust-speckled bumper of the rapidly retreating Chevy. She did not look into the rearview mirror; she did not have to. She knew what her eyes would see there if she did look, knew that the only possible ending to the cat’s story had borne down on it with metal teeth bared and rubber wheels pounding, to give the animal’s valiant efforts a casual, two-ton swat and drive on. Lauren kept her own wide-staring eyes fixed on the road ahead of her and turned deaf ears on the demands of the girls, moving with infinite caution into the exit lane, off the freeway, and into the first convenient parking lot.
Her four girls were gibbering frantically; in a moment the minivan carrying the rest of the team swerved behind them into the lot. All the occupants of both vehicles went abruptly quiet when Lauren flung open her door, stumbled over to the ivy strip bordering the lot, and vomited up her breakfast.
The girls subsided and let the other adult take over. Gwen jumped out of the minivan and trotted over to Lauren’s side, where she stood with one hand on the coach’s sweating back until she was sure the spasms were finished. Then she went back to the van, dug a bottle of water from the cooler, and came back to hand it to Lauren.
“Thanks, Gwen,” Lauren managed when the icy clean water had reduced the awful taste to a burning in the back of her throat.
“Are you coming down with something?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
“The cat. It just… appeared in front of me on the road.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Lauren realized how pitiful they were: for this she had endangered the lives of four students? But Gwen seemed inclined to be sympathetic rather than disapproving; after all, nothing had happened.
“Oh, how awful,” she said. “I ran over a dog once, I know how you feel.”
“Just the shock of it,” Lauren said. Gwen thought she was saying that she’d run over the thing herself. Let it be, Lauren thought: her extreme reaction might be more easily understood if guilt were thought to be the culprit, not the weird, almost anthropomorphic link of empathy she’d felt for the animal during those two terrible seconds.
“You going to be okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” Lauren said heartily, standing straight to add assurance.
“I could run my load up and come back for yours; it’s only about twenty minutes away.”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
And she was. She downplayed the death of a stray cat for the girls and turned the conversation to the game ahead, she drove at a normal speed the rest of the way, she greeted the other coach (a high school acquaintance) with the right balance of friendliness and good-humored threat, and she worked her girls up into enough of a lather that they bounced out onto the court with that attitude she loved. And if she hugged her jacket around her in the warm auditorium to stifle the shivers running up and down her arms all that day, no one commented.
Her girls didn’t win, but the final score was by no means humiliating, and they sure as hell learned a lot from the others. They even loved the funky pizza parlor the two teams had taken over for the afternoon, and left town with a dozen new best friends and an exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
In the excitement of the day, the cat was forgotten. Lauren drove her quartet of tired players back over the hills, dropped each at the correct front door, and wearily steered herself home. She let herself in, gathered up old Timson, and buried her face into his fur for a minute until he mewed his bones’ protest, then walked into her kitchen, dug through the cupboards for the dusty bottle of brandy, and poured a generous two fingers into a glass and down her throat.
After a while the trembling sensation under her skin subsided.
You’re such a wimp, she told herself. Cats die all the time, sad but true.
Except that she wasn’t a wimp. She’d done hard things when necessary: she’d once beheaded and buried an agonized, broken-back garter snake that some kid had run over on the sidewalk, and she had no particular squeamishness when it came to trapping mice or performing first aid to the goriest of cuts.
Low blood sugar, she decided. She slopped a couple of eggs around in a frying pan and ate them on toast, and felt better. She took another jolt of the brandy to the television and fed an old favorite movie into the VCR; that, too, helped. Pleasantly woozy from the unaccustomed booze, she scrubbed the day away beneath a hot shower, towel-dried her short hair, and fell blithely into bed before the clock’s hands rested on ten.
Only to find the cat waiting for her, riding the undulating concrete on four outstretched paws like a water strider riding the surface of a fast, deep river. Under something it flew-car bumper? tree limb?-with a look of startled, outraged confusion on its near-human features. One front paw came up in a gesture of supplication, and then a sharp noise somewhere in the reaches of the house jerked Lauren out of the nightmare to stare into the dark room, feeling all the cat’s panic on her own face.
Cat: noise. Timson must be-but no, Timson was asleep against her feet. She sat frozen among the tangled sheets, the threat of vomit raw in the back of her throat, straining her thudding ears for the sound to repeat itself. After a minute she got up, took her old hockey stick out of its corner, and crept through the house to see what had invaded. She found nothing, and when she got back to her bedroom again, she saw that the ever-nervous Timson was still fast asleep, which he would not be if there was a stranger anywhere in the house. She propped the stick back in the corner of the room, went back to bed and eventually to sleep.
The doomed cat came through her dreaming mind twice more before dawn, and Lauren spent the next day in a thick-limbed daze, alternating between empty-minded half-sleep over the Sunday paper and unnecessarily vigorous housecleaning. By evening she had barely enough energy to perform her always-on-Sunday task of the phone call to her mother.
She did so at the kitchen table, knowing that if she listened to her mother’s endless monologue from a comfortable chair, she’d soon be snoring. As it was, she drifted in and out of awareness with her chin resting on her hand, grunting responses into the pauses provided and wondering how long this creepy cat thing would take to fade.
When she had fumbled and nearly dropped the phone twice, she cut into her mother’s epic narrative of the retirement center’s inefficient postman, told her she’d call again Wednesday, and went to bed.
The cat was waiting for her.
In the morning she felt so utterly wretched at the idea of the new week that she thought about calling in sick. Except that she was not sick, she was haunted, by an idiotic feline who hadn’t had enough sense to know an unsafe resting spot when it found one. For some ungodly reason, those vivid moments had been seared onto Lauren’s mind as if it had been her own life passing before her eyes. She groaned, held an ice-filled cloth to her inflamed eyelids while the coffee brewed, and went to work.