Кроха - Dedication

Probably he was picking up lunch for himself and Ryan’s red-bearded foreman, her uncle Scott Flannery. Usually the men brought their lunches, but once in a while they splurged on burgers and fries. At the counter he paid for a bulging paper bag, pulled his cap low, turned away again from the portly couple. Double-timing back through the patio to the street, he never showed his face to them. He slid into the truck fast, started the engine, and pulled away, heading back to the job.

From atop the wall, Dulcie looked after him, her tail twitching. “What was that about? Why would Ben hide from those two, they’re tourists. How does he know them?” Leaping up the stone pine lashing her tail, she looked back at Joe, her ears flat in a puzzled frown. “This Hoop couple. The woman in the wheelchair. Betty Porter. And now . . . Is Ben Stonewell part of the puzzle? What are we seeing?”

“We’re seeing bit and pieces. Too few pieces.” The tomcat rankled at, but relished, this process of scattered hints slowly coming together, of clues falling one by one into place in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Like cornering a mouse that darted in a hundred directions before it came to ground.

“It will all fit together,” he said confidently. “All of a sudden. So simple we’ll wonder that we didn’t see it right at first.”

He glanced down again at the couple in the patio, then leaped from the wall to the roof and they galloped away across the shingles toward Ocean Avenue, heading for Misto’s cottage.

In order to cross that wide, divided street, they backed down a bougainvillea vine and entered the crosswalk close on the heels of three tourists, young Asian girls leading a fluffy brown dog. The little mutt looked around at the cats, put his nose in the air, and hurried along in disdain. The traffic halted obediently for human pedestrians, whereas drivers might not see a cat or a small dog. On the far curb Joe and Dulcie fled past the little group and up a honeysuckle vine to the roof of a furniture boutique. Only then did the dog start to bark, at the nervy cats.

But now Dulcie, trotting up and down the steep tiles, began to lag behind again. The last up-and-down climbs had been tiring. Joe Grey glanced back at her, his ears flattened in a frown.

She knew she needed to explain. She needed to tell him soon, before he started asking questions. But again unease kept her silent. How would he respond to the thought of kittens?

Joe was not an ordinary street cat to ignore, or even kill, his own young. To Joe Grey, with his wider human view of the world, new babies would be a responsibility. A burden that he might not welcome, this tough tomcat who was all about danger. Whose life bristled with spying on criminals and passing information to the cops. Would he want this tender miracle? Would he want his own affairs disrupted, his own stealthy contribution to police work shoved aside while he sat with helpless babies or taught them to hunt—instead of Joe himself off hunting human scum?

But she had to tell him. She prayed he would be glad. The kittens needed their father; they needed Joe’s down-to-earth view of life, his level-headed and sensible teaching—just as they needed Dulcie’s touch of whimsy, her bit of poetry, even her love of bright silks and cashmere. Their kittens needed both parents, they needed the contrast of two kinds of learning.

Well, she thought. Whatever he says, here goes.

She paused on the roof tiles, looking at Joe. The look in her eyes stopped him, made him turn back. “What?” he said. Suddenly worry shone in the tomcat’s yellow eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Kittens,” she said. “There will be kittens.”

Joe looked at her blankly. “What kittens? Rescue kittens? The village has plenty of those, Ryan and Charlie have been trapping abandoned kittens—”

“Our kittens,” she said. “Your kittens.”

Joe stared at her. He looked uncertain, he began to feel shaky. His expression turned to panic. He hissed, his ears flat, his paw lifted . . .

But then his whiskers came up, his ears pricked up, his eyes widened. “Kittens?” he said. “Our kittens?” He let out a yowl.

“Kittens! Oh my God.”

He backed away from her, amazed. He leaped away, raced away across the shingled peaks, twice around a brick chimney and back again, a gray dervish streaking . . . He spun twice around Dulcie, his ears and whiskers wild. Around her again and halted, skidding nose to nose with her.

“Kittens?’’

He nuzzled her and washed her face. He stood back and looked her over. “You don’t look like you’re carrying kittens.” He frowned. “Well, maybe you’ve put on an ounce or two but . . . Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said, flicking her whiskers, lashing her tabby tail. “Dr. Firetti says there are kittens.”

Joe couldn’t stop smiling. Strange that he hadn’t noticed a different scent about her. But she always smelled of the garden flowers and the pines—maybe he hadn’t paid attention to subtler smells.

She sat down on the tiles, licking her paw, watching him. He stood silently looking at her, speechless and grinning. When he could talk again he said, “Kittens! They’ll learn to hunt as soon as they can toddle, I’ll bring them mice to learn on. They’ll learn everything they need to know, to hunt, and to defend themselves. And to be the best detectives ever.”

Oh, my. Dulcie hadn’t thought of that.

“They’ll learn to read from police reports,” Joe said, “right there on Max Harper’s desk, learn so cleverly that Harper will never know . . .” On and on he went, happily planning. Dulcie watched him uncertainly, her tough, practical tomcat laying it all out . . . bragging over his clever babies, his rookie-cop babies . . . Oh, my tender little babies, she thought nervously.

But then she thought, Okay. They’ll grow bigger, they’ll grow strong. Kittens grow up, you know. Cop cats, she thought tremulously. Well, I guess I can live with that. I’m pretty good at cop work myself.

But they’ll learn more than what Joe teaches them, she thought stubbornly. They’ll learn about poetry. About literature . . . and so much to know about the ancient past. They’ll learn to dream,Dulcie thought. They’ll learn to dream from me.

5

Misto didn’t spend his waning days in the veterinary clinic, but next door in the Firettis’ cottage, tucked up in John and Mary’s king-size bed among a tangle of soft pillows. Since John had discovered Misto’s fast-growing cancer, which was already too widespread for surgery, he and Mary had kept their beloved companion as comfortable and well tended as any ailing human could ever be.

The Firettis’ bungalow sat back from the side street, down a long stone walk through Mary’s flower garden. The clinic was off to the right, its original two cottages joined now by a glass-domed solarium that had turned the structure into a tall and airy hospital. The rooms of one cottage offered the feline clinic, lobby and office; the other cottage held the surgery and examining rooms. The solarium itself housed the dog hospital and exercise yard. Dr. John Firetti, tall and slim and quiet, had made the clinic a safe and welcoming sanctuary for his treasured patients.

But for John and Mary, their own Misto was the most beloved of all. He had come to them when he was an old cat, returning, after a long journey, to his kittenhood home. The instant love between the three was solid and deep. The Firettis were heartbroken when John did not discover the old cat’s disease early on. They were distraught that Misto had kept his secret as the illness fast progressed, that the old cat had hidden his early pains. Those first days, the yellow tom had shown no weight loss, no loss of appetite, no dullness of eyes or of coat. Certainly he showed no flatness of spirit; he was as lively as ever. Misto had no clue himself until, quite suddenly, he began to feel weak, deeply tired. Then the pain was fierce, and he knew.

For some time, he kept that malaise to himself. When at last he told John that something was wrong, the cancer had spread and was not operable. Indeed, Misto told them, he would not have wanted surgery. The big yellow tom seemed far more at peace with his illness, with the numbering of his last days, than were his human and feline friends.

But now as the end of Misto’s life drew near he had much to speak of. He remembered his earlier deaths more clearly, just as he remembered his earlier lives. He shared bright fragments with John and Mary from times long past and from distant places, the old cat lying before the hearth fire of an evening, telling his exotic tales.

Some days John would carry him over to the clinic, to a comfortable bed on his desk. And when, at dawn, John drove the few blocks to the shore to feed the band of feral cats he cared for, Misto rode with him, tucked up in the front seat in a warm blanket. Misto loved the shore and the roiling sea. Those gleaming waters brought back times living among the fishing wharves on the coast of Oregon; the sight of the sea brought back earlier lives, too: a strange life at the edge of the Aegean Sea; the Welsh and Scottish coasts. But the best was here, on the shore of Molena Point where the yellow tom had been born, this very stretch of shore where John now fed the strays.

Here, as a kitten, Misto had been taken far away from the village by a caring couple. Now in old age after so many adventures he had traveled back again to his first home, to the long white beach and the little dock where the ferals still gathered. Now, even in illness, he was satisfied to be back where he was born. Sometimes John carried him up the rocky coast where the waves crashed wild and where, when the tide was out and the sea sucked away, little pools among the rocks reflected the changing sky; where with a careful paw he could tease small rock crabs and tiny, trapped fishes.

Venturing to the shore with John on his better days, he stayed in the cottage with Mary on bad days, tucked up before the fire, and at night he slept warm between them. The Firettis woke each time Misto woke; they doled out pain medication and brought him cool water, offered custards and warm fish broth; they tried not to show their grieving.

But just as the old, speaking cat had come back to the Firettis on his own, the arrival of Misto’s son Pan, some months later, was a second wonder to John and Mary.

The Firettis had known about speaking cats for many years; John, since he was a boy. They had kept the secret well, but they had longed to share their home with just such a one. Now their family included both Pan and Misto—though the four had had only a short time together before Pan was off on his journey and before Misto began to fail. How deftly the old cat had kept his secret, to give Pan his freedom; and soon now Misto himself would face a new adventure. The yellow tom knew that when his pain grew too severe John would help him sleep, and sleep more deeply until his spirit rose up and he would fly free.

“We will be together again,” he told John and Mary. “We will come round together again, in one life or another, as we are meant to do. This is the way of the universe,” Misto told them. Mary had wiped a tear, cuddling him, and she couldn’t answer.

Now Misto, alone for the moment in the Firettis’ bedroom, was dozing when Joe Grey and Dulcie padded across the big rag rug, slipped up onto the bed, and settled among the pillows beside him. Only slowly did Misto’s ragged ears lift, his whiskers twitch. Only when he was alert again did Dulcie touch a soft paw to Misto’s paw.

“I told him,” she said. “I told Joe about the kittens.”

Misto grinned at Joe Grey. “About time you knew.”