Cattitude (7 page)

She nodded. She knew what engaged was from
The Love Chronicles
. They got engaged and married all the
time.

“You must have a home somewhere. There’s an
address on your driver’s license. Your car’s totaled, but I can
drive you there.”

She shook her head.
This
was her home.
She was never leaving. Ever.

“You can’t stay here,” Caroline said. “You’re
taking advantage of Max’s generous nature. He doesn’t owe you
anything.”

Spit from Caroline’s mouth hit Belle’s face.
Belle’s muscles tensed and she scooted closer to the edge of the
mattress. If Caroline spit on her again, Belle would make her
sorry.

Max’s grip on her hand tightened. “Caroline,
I appreciate your concern, but it’s my decision to keep her here
until she’s well enough to leave.”

Caroline’s cheekbones flushed the same color
she painted her lips. “I’m sorry. I appreciate so much all you’ve
done for me. I guess I’m trying to make things a little easier for
you in return.”

If Max hadn’t been holding Belle’s hand so
tightly—as if he knew what she was thinking—she would have leapt up
and scratched Caroline’s face.

“She’ll be okay soon and out of here,” he
said.

Caroline smiled weakly. “Maybe I should stay
until that happens.”

“Better not. She seems to have taken a
dislike to you.”

Caroline backed up, keeping her mouth in a
smile. “Don’t hesitate to call if you need me for anything.” She
swiveled and strode past Ted, who stood just inside the
doorway.

Belle and Max stood with cocked heads while
they listened to Caroline’s footsteps tap on the wooden hallway
floor. Then Max dropped Belle’s hand and Ted strolled into the
bedroom.

“What’d I miss? A cat fight?”

“Go back to bed,” Max said. “You’re not
helping.” He bent over Belle, his tone coaxing, the way he talked
to her when she was a cat and he was ready to sit back and pet her,
his eyes half closed, his body relaxing, a slight hum in his throat
as if in that second he felt like everything was good.

Of course it was good. She straightened her
head. It was good because he was petting her.

“I want to help you,” he said, “but if you
don’t give me any information, I’ll have no choice but to go to the
authorities. Someone might be frantic about you. Even if you don’t
have a fiancé,” he glanced at her ring, then back into her eyes,
“you might have a family. A mother or father.”

She looked down at her lap. What if someone
were looking for Sorcha? What if they found Belle and wanted her to
leave with them? If she refused to go, Max couldn’t make her
go.

“Maybe you can write. You want to give it a
try?”

She shook her head.

“Are you hungry? Do you want food?”

She shook her head again.

He straightened. “I’ll leave you for now. If
you want anything, I’ll be in my office. Take the hall straight
down until you reach the door. That’s the office wing. Don’t knock,
just walk on in.”

She nodded. If he only knew, she could find
her way through the house with her eyes closed. And why not? It was
hers.

“I’ll give you until after dinner.” His voice
grew stern. “Understand?”

She didn’t nod and didn’t look at him, her
eyes on his shoes. He only talked to her with this hard voice when
she ate a plant or chased a bird. She didn’t like it. Not at
all.

His shoes made a circle and he walked out of
the bedroom. Ted’s shoes followed.

“Want me to close the door?” Ted asked. “Keep
away unwanted visitors?”

She lifted her head. He was grinning at her,
as if he knew—but of course he didn’t. She nodded and her lips
curved. She guessed she must be smiling. As soon as the door was
closed, she clapped her hands to her cheeks and opened her
mouth.

“Waaa,” she said. No, that wasn’t right.
Maybe she needed to shape her mouth differently, the way humans
did, and move her tongue around. “Haaa.” No. “Taaa. Caaa. Raaa.
Maaa.” Yes! She had it!

Going to the mirror, she looked at herself
while making the word again. So that’s how she held her lips.
Together but not too tight. “Mmmaaa. Mmmaaa. Mmmaaa.” Still not
Max
. She needed more sounds.

A TV sat on the end of the dresser, about the
size of one of Max’s large books. She picked up the thing that Ted
used and poked at buttons, the way she’d seen him do so many times.
On the fifth button, the screen lit up. A man came on, and she felt
a spurt of recognition. Beau from
The Love Chronicles
.

Clapping her hands, she sat down to listen.
Since she was still stuck in this body—she shuddered—it appeared
necessary for her to speak like a human. Who better to teach her
than the characters from Tory’s favorite TV show?

She stared at Beau’s mouth. Other animals
would find human speech hard to learn. Dogs, for instance. But she
was a cat, gifted at birth with a vocal range that went from a roar
to a hiss, a purr to a yowl. Learning human speech would be a piece
of tuna.

Sorcha hid in the woods all afternoon,
watching the road. Twice she saw a gray car drive up and down
slowly, the person inside searching for someone. This was a rural
road, lightly traveled. It had to be Deavers. Besides the gray car,
only a dozen cars and SUVs, a Sears van and a cable TV truck had
sped past. After a while, she nodded off until the roar of a school
bus engine woke her.

Rustling sounds came to her ears, something
coming through the trees. She lifted her nose and sniffed, smelling
another animal. A bear perhaps? Did bears eat cats? As her
heartbeat tapped a hip-hop dance, a raccoon jumped out from between
two trees and dashed straight toward her.

Sorcha squealed and took off, running so fast
she felt as if she flew. About a quarter mile from Fletch’s wrecked
car, she lost the scent of the raccoon. She kept running but more
slowly. From the pads of her four feet to her tail to her whiskers,
she trembled. She wasn’t sure if raccoons ate cats but didn’t want
to find out the hard way.

Another quarter mile or so she came upon a
cast iron fence. She followed it...and followed it...and followed
it. A smell floated by her nose. Turkey. Smoked. Her human mind
said
yech
. Her cat body said
yum
.

Saliva gathered in her mouth and she looked
at the bars of the fence. Could she squeeze through? Somehow she
had to get into the grounds. She’d been ready to die only a few
hours ago, but the needs of this new body were too strong to
resist.

Licking her mouth, she spotted the gates.
They were open, which meant they couldn’t have dogs. Or maybe they
had ones that let themselves be trained by their humans to stay
inside an unlocked gate.

She sniffed, then wondered where this disdain
came from. She liked dogs. Didn’t she?

She was so confused.

Oh, Fletcher, if you’re in heaven watching
me, I hope you realize what you caused.
A thought wiggled into
her mind, like a worm in an apple, that maybe Fletcher wasn’t in
heaven. She sniffed again, this time with sadness. The hell she
believed in was life on earth without Fletcher, the only person
who’d ever claimed to love her.

The curved driveway was long and concrete. In
the distance, she could see the outline of a structure. She
squinted but it didn’t get clearer, as if these cat eyes needed
glasses. Although the cat brain had to be much smaller than her
human one, it seemed to be holding all her human knowledge. She’d
read somewhere that humans used a small percent of their brain. Too
bad no one except herself knew for sure how true this was.

Was the cat inside her body having similar
problems adjusting? How wonderful it must be for the cat to be a
human. It probably never wanted to be a cat again.

The smell of smoked turkey grew stronger and
she detected a hickory taste. Her body wanted it with the same
urgency that made her gobble a package of chocolate chips on the
night before her period. She dashed toward the smell, whipping
along the driveway like a racehorse.

A dozen yards away from the house, she slid
to a stop and stared, her hunger forgotten in her amazement. It
looked like a small castle. She imagined what Fletcher would say:
“Some folks throw money around like it’s candy. See anything in
their future, honey? We could use some of that sweet
stuff.”

And she could never lie to Fletcher. If she
saw or felt something, she told him. And she always saw or felt
something. Sometimes it was the blackness of death, purple of
sickness, red of anger, pink of passion or green of money.
Sometimes it was a series of pictures she didn’t understand—but the
family members did. As they drove away afterward, Fletcher would be
chortling while she clasped her head, trying to turn off the
pictures of other people’s lives.

They were turned off now. Looking at the
house, she felt nothing, saw nothing. The only emotions she’d felt
since she’d become a cat were her own.

Her grief and sadness diminished. Her
heartbeat skipped. She wanted her hands back so she could clap them
together. Her tail went up, waving in the air like a victory flag.
No more visions, no more emotions, no more blinding headaches.

She felt lightheaded. As though a gorilla had
sat on her shoulders her whole life and had suddenly leapt off and
disappeared.

“Here, kitty.”

Sorcha squealed and darted into the evergreen
bushes bordering the front of the mini-castle. Green needles
brushed against her thick fur, a piney smell penetrated her
nostrils. Quivering, she pressed against the rough brick.

“Don’t be scared.” Through the branches,
Sorcha saw patches of blue denim as someone knelt in front of the
bushes. The voice was pitched high and sounded like a child’s. “You
can come out. I promise not to hurt you. Here, kitty, kitty.”

A face pressed to the ground, peering at
Sorcha through an inch gap between two of the bushes. A girl. Small
face and nose, big ears and eyes. “Come out, kitty. I’ll give you
food. I left my sandwich on the porch. Wait here, I’ll get it.”

Food.
Sorcha stretched her neck to see
the girl better.

The face disappeared. The girl scampered
away. A moment later she was back, waving a sandwich in front of
the bushes. The smell of turkey wafted into Sorcha’s nostrils.

A hum reverberated inside her. She tried to
stop but it got louder.

“Are you purring?” The girl’s voice sparkled.
“For me or the sandwich?”

Sorcha’s front legs began doing an odd dance,
patting the ground in front of her one foot at a time, as if she
were kneading bread. She’d never had much to do with cats but it
was something this small feline body needed to do. The same way she
needed to move her hips when she played a Beyoncé song.

“I can leave it here.” The girl slid backward
on the grass.

Sorcha’s kneading slowed.

“I’m at the sidewalk now. You can come out
and eat.”

The voice sounded farther away. Sorcha
stopped her kneading and pressed against the brick wall. The smell
was calling to her to come and eat it. Her body urged her to go,
her mind argued to stay. It was the same way she felt before every
client’s reading.

Still shaking, she took a tiny step forward.
Was she walking into a trap? Her cat ears heard the wind slap
against the leaves. If the girl moved, surely she’d make more noise
than the wind, giving Sorcha time to run back to the wall.

She took another step. Another. And another.
Still huddled between the two bushes, she stopped, needles bunching
against her fur. She stretched out her neck. The half sandwich lay
on the ground inches away. Like bait for a fish. Sorcha peered
around instead of rushing forward, even though her empty stomach
protested.

The girl sat cross-legged beneath a maple
tree, her elbows resting on her knees, her hands cupping her
cheeks. She beamed at Sorcha.

“It’s okay.” The girl’s voice pitched high
and gentle in the singsong way people spoke to babies. “I promise
not to hurt you.”

Sorcha darted out the last few inches,
grabbed the bread with her teeth, ripped off the top layer, tossed
it aside, then bit into a slice of shaved turkey. Carrying it in
her mouth, she dashed back between the long-needled branches to her
refuge against the brick. She tore at the turkey, chewing and
swallowing with gusto.

It wasn’t enough. She raced for another
piece, taking it back with her. She did this again and again. And
all the while she watched the girl through spaces between the
bushes, because she never completely trusted anyone. Not even
Fletcher.

After gobbling half the meat, she was sated,
her stomach puffed out. She made one last run. This time she
grabbed the bottom slice of bread with the shaved turkey piled on
it and dragged it back with her into the bushes.

“I’ll get you water.” The girl scrambled to
her feet and ran off into the overlarge house.

The ground was hard and cold but Sorcha
curled next to the turkey-covered bread. She never napped during
the day, not since she was a child, but like eating meat it was
another need she couldn’t fight.

She closed her eyes. Visions came but they
were her own: Fletcher lying on the sidewalk, his eyes like glass.
A sad faced CEO chasing her; crashing her car into a ditch. A cat
switching bodies with her.

One thing was certain, she’d reached the
bottom. It couldn’t get any worse than this.

***

A cat! A cat! Gwen ran into the house, the
words humming a happy song in her mind. This morning when she’d
awakened, she’d tingled all over. She’d thought maybe the feeling
meant something good was going to happen today. Maybe her mom and
dad would come home from Greece.

But Katie, her nanny, had been grouchy, her
eyes red. She said she was up until three in the morning studying
for her calculus class. Gwen had sat huddled in the chair, feeling
guilty because Katie had to get up to make her oatmeal—that Gwen
didn’t even like—then take her to her private school, a twenty-five
minute drive.