Monday afternoon: a bleary and out-of-control practice session; Monday night: a third set of sessions with the unknown cat. Three nights of broken sleep that reduced her to a nervous wreck-or maybe her nervous state had reduced her to sleeplessness, she could not be sure. She could not, in fact, be too sure of her own sanity. The next night was the same; following that, she knew something had to be done. During Wednesday’s prep period, Lauren picked up the phone to call for help.
Unfortunately, the only psychotherapist she knew, the woman she’d seen a decade before when she’d been an insomniac college student, couldn’t see her before Friday. Lauren’s desperation did, however, make an impression on the receptionist, because Dr. Minerva Henry herself called back twenty minutes later. Greetings, a brief catch-up, Lauren’s halting and by now embarrassed description of the cat episode and its consequences, and Min’s regrets that she had no free time until Friday.
“That’s all right, I understand,” Lauren told her. “I’m sure I’ll be okay until then. It’s just so… silly.”
“It doesn’t sound at all silly.”
“I mean, to be so upset by such an inconsequential event. I really am a very stable kind of a person. Or I was until Saturday.”
“This episode has clearly driven a wedge under some firmly shut door in your mind. You may remember, I recommended ten years ago that you remain in therapy. I take it you did not.”
“But I was fine,” Lauren protested.
“You were functioning well,” the doctor corrected her gently. “Now you’re not. We’ll sort it out beginning Friday.”
“Two more nights like I’ve been having, you might want to book me a padded cell,” Lauren remarked. As an attempt at dry humor, it fell completely flat, leaving Min Henry to take it as a cry for help. In truth, it was.
“Avoid caffeine,” the good doctor recommended. “And no alcohol, either. Eat well, get some nice healthy outdoor exercise, and drink a glass of warm milk before bed. You might also take a pen and paper to bed with you, to write down any words or images that come to mind when you wake up. We’ll talk about those on Friday.”
The mere suggestion that the problem might be sorted out was a comfort, and helped Lauren make it through the day and the practice session. She ate a balanced dinner, corrected the stack of exam papers, and phoned her mother to listen to the endless trickle of gentle complaints about the workers and neighbors in her quite comfortable retirement home.
“Mother,” she said at one point, interrupting a detailed description of the tragedy inflicted by the cook on a poor, unsuspecting piece of beef. “Did anything ever happen to me as a child that involved a cat?”
“A cat, dear?”
“Yes. The other day I saw a cat get… hurt, and it’s given me nightmares. I just wondered if maybe something similar happened when I was small, that I forgot about.”
“Oh, dear, how terrible for you. One of the ladies down the hall has bad dreams, she talks in her sleep so you can hear every-”
“Mother? The cat?”
“We never had cats, dear. Your father didn’t like them.”
“But did I-oh, never mind. How is Mrs. Peasley’s leg doing?”
She hung up twenty minutes later, knowing more than she cared to about the pernicious results of circulatory problems but little the wiser about cats. However, mention of her father, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times, seemed to drive another section of wedge into the gap opened by the cat. That night’s dream found her sitting not behind the wheel of her car as the frantic man-faced cat spun around and around on the surface of the roadway, but rather on a hard bench of a seat beside her long-estranged father. He seemed enormous in her dream, as he had not been in life, bristling with the self-importance she had believed in until college freed her of illusions, the father of her youth.
As it turned out, it was Father who took up most of the Friday session with Min Henry, not the list of words and images she had jotted down in the still of the night (wet fur and fast current; also mouth “O” in surprise and too fast for fear and thunk!). Her ambiguous feelings toward her parent, his peculiar combination of the ineffectual and the quick to anger, her jumble of respect and love and fear that must, it occurred to her, be very like the feelings her mother still bore for the man who had abandoned her with two small children and a mountain of debts.
What did all that have to do with a cat? she asked the therapist at the close of the session.
Patience, the woman said. And maybe we should meet twice a week.
The nightmare retreated a fraction, in frequency if not intensity. Once or twice a night instead of every couple of hours: cat/panic/bench, father/thud/wake.
The following Wednesday, Lauren forced herself to ask her mother again about what might lie in the past.
“The cat again, dear?”
“When I was with Daddy.” Daddy? she thought; I haven’t called him that since I was eight.
“Oh, sweetie, I wouldn’t know. I mean, your father often took you and your brother off for a while so I could go to the hairdressers’ or some such thing. You’d go to the beach or the country club. He liked to show you off. But I’d have thought that if something happened during one of those outings, he’d have mentioned it. Then again I suppose he could have told me and I’ve forgotten it, I do forget so much. But not usually from the past-isn’t it funny how I can forget where I put my book down but I can remember what dress you wore to your fifth-birthday party? No, I think I’d remember if something happened to a cat while you were out with him. There was the time your brother cut his hand at the racetrack, I remember that. And you were frightened once when you got separated from your father for a few minutes at the county fair; you clung to my skirts for a week after that. I suppose you could have seen a cat get hurt during that time, although what a cat would be doing wandering around a crowded fairground I can’t think.” (Dropping out of a shiny red tractor, maybe?) “And there was the time, when was that? Just after your brother was born, that’s right, when your father took you for the day. You went fishing with him and, um, Arty. You remember Arty?” Lauren’s antennae pricked at the casual tone of her mother’s voice. Arty? But her mother was rushing on. “I wasn’t too keen on the idea of you in a boat, you were awfully young, but your father promised me he’d keep your life vest on you every second, and with both of them to keep an eye on you, you’d be fine. Which you were.”
“Arty? I don’t remember-wait a minute. Was he a man with a red face and a mustache?”
“That’s right, fancy you remembering that! And he was always smoking a cigar. It had a lovely smell, I thought, but your father wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. You loved the smell, always followed him around, even when he went outside to smoke. He called you his little shadow,” she said wistfully. “You missed him so when he left, moped around for days.” I missed him, Lauren heard in her mother’s voice.
“Where did he go?”
“They told me he’d gone to Montana.”
Lauren waited for more; when nothing more came, she found herself sitting forward, as if to pull information out of the telephone. Her mother’s uncharacteristically brief answer seemed to echo down the line.
“Did he?” she prompted.
“Oh, dear,” her mother replied with a sigh. “I don’t know. I suppose he must have, although at the time, well, I thought he’d maybe had an accident, out hiking somewhere. He was a great one for hiking.”