Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (8 page)

Days later, Godfrey’s arms still ached from the adrenaline rush that had allowed him to climb the side of the bookcase, but most of his pain came from within. He had just popped two aspirin when Chloe knocked on his office door.

“Hi,” Godfrey said, glad to see her, but unable to muster a smile after everything that had happened.

“Hey,” she said. “Has anybody said anything?” Godfrey shook his head. “A couple of people asked what happened to my desk, but other than that, I think we did a good job of cleaning up.”

“Good,” she said, standing in silence for a moment.
“Listen, I just wanted to thank you for coming though for me. I know it must not have been easy.”

Godfrey gave a sad smile. “Forget about it. Besides, I was just returning the favor . . .”

Chloe looked at him quizzically. “What favor?”

“When you pulled my face away from my desk, when she . . . when
it
blew that initial puff of flame at me?” he reminded. “So let’s just call it Damsel: 1, Prince: 1, okay?”

“Fair enough,” she said with a smile. “You know, that’s the funny thing about fairy tales. Rarely is there just one version of the story.” Her other hand had been hidden by the door, and she pulled it out from behind her. A tiny red and gold wyrm was wrapped around her hand, blissfully sleeping with a shred of half-eaten notebook paper wrapped in its tiny claws.

“My God,” Godfrey said. He sat up and put down his notebook. “Where did you find her, err, him . . . ?”

Chloe shrugged. “Damned if I can tell what sex it is.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s beautiful,” he said, then paused. “I don’t think I should keep it, though. Not after what happened.”

“You did everything right that you could,” she said. “I was wrong when I asked you about getting rid of them all together.”

“How can you say that?” Godfrey said, shaking his head. “We almost died.”

“But the reward you got out of knowing her, of knowing Lizzie for the time you did, that was worth it. Life is about risk. It’s the only way you get any reward out of it. Take her, him, whatever it is . . . please.”

Godfrey reached for Chloe’s hand and the wyrm wrapped around it. Chloe opened her hand, and he took her fingers into his palm, lowering her slowly toward the empty terrarium.

“Careful,” he said, “watch the sides.”

Only when Godfrey looked up, Chloe wasn’t watching the terrarium at all. She was staring at him and smiling.

“What?” he said.

“See? I suppose even princes can be trained,” she said, and leaned in to kiss him. The warmth of her lips was comforting.

T
he Game of Life takes over the kitchen table one little stack of colored money at a time. The tiny writing in the squares jumps around when I try to read it, so I look at the pictures instead. I spin the dial hard enough to pop it loose from its lumpy green plastic dish, the one that’s supposed to look like a clump of trees.

I think it looks more like green goo erupting in a volcano from the cardboard, but no one asked me.

I spin a seven, push my little pink car along the road, and park at the mandatory wedding chapel. I’ve already been condemned to a career as a teacher, which irks me.
Nothing against teachers, but the salary is $12,000, an awkward number to me. Not nice and round like the $25,000 doctor salary. After that disappointment, I’m in no mood to do the pink and blue peg dance.

“What if I don’t want to get married?”

Laura shrugs. “Don’t think it matters. You can still get kids. You just miss out on the money at the end when you trade in your family.”

“I just want a friend in my car.” I pluck another blue peg from the box and pop him in next to me. Laura gives me a pondering look, but I’m used to that and ignore it. With the marriage issue resolved, my mind wanders back to the elephant in the room.

Our father is out back with my kitten, Bernie, who seems to be sick. He just up and started hiccupping. After I got upset, Daddy suggested he sit with Bernie. That suited me. Daddy can fix anything.

I’m still worried, though. My mother suggested playing a game. I know it’s a distraction. It works and doesn’t work by turns. They know how attached I am to Bernie. I only stopped being allergic to cats last year. He’s my first kitty.

The heavy tread of my dad’s boots carries from the next room, and I forget the game. He walks into the kitchen, and he and Mom must have some signal because she ushers Laura out, and they’re off down the hall. I look up at my dad, hoping so hard but already feeling a little sick.

“I’m sorry, Evan. Your kitty died.”

The rumble of that deep, gentle voice tosses me over the edge, and I burst into tears. He catches me up in a hug, settling at the table with me on his lap. “I’m sorry, punkin’. I don’t know what to tell you.” He hugs me close, and I can feel his chest tremble as his voice
catches. “Sometimes these things just . . . happen. It’s not fair.” I can’t say anything because I’m crying too hard.

His voice picks up again with a slight shake. “I remember when I had this little dog, back when I lived up on the hill. He went everywhere with me, to work, to the barn. Then one day he broke his leg. I think a car must have hit him. I took him to the vet, who fixed him up with a splint and said he was fine. I thought he was going to be okay. He stayed home while he was getting better, and when I got home later in the week, he was dead. I didn’t know why. The vet said maybe it was a blood clot. But I just didn’t understand why. He was fine when I left.”

I hug him tight. It hurts to see him cry and makes me cry harder, but at the same time I’m somehow glad he’s crying too. It makes me feel less alone, even though the despair still sits like a rock in my stomach. He’s a quiet guy, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him cry. That he’s crying with me over this, over a little black and white cat I’ve had less than two months . . . it makes me warm, somehow.

After Bernie, it’s a small procession of gray tabbies and black cats, but my luck doesn’t improve. Once I figured out my healing thing—that I can heal with my hands if the conditions are right—you’d think I’d have been all set. Unfortunately, car strikes or simple disappearances don’t respond to hands-on healing. I can’t raise the dead, I can’t heal long distance, and healing ability doesn’t help find something lost.

It sounds strange, but people don’t have
house
cats in our neck of the woods. Every cat I know is an outdoor cat. A lot of them are barn cats. It never even occurred to me to keep a cat inside. So it goes over the next couple years . . . Gherkin, Picky, Inky Pool, Felicity, Periwinkle. It gets downright depressing.

Not to mention? Unfair. I honestly don’t get why schools and adults make such a big deal about kids acting fair, when nothing else is fair.

Nothing.

The disappearances are the worst, because I just don’t
know
. Don’t know whether to hope or give up. Sometimes a cat will be gone two days and show up. So every time I watch for days. Walking up and down the dirt road in front of our place, shaking a box of Meow Mix and trilling, “Here, kitty kitty,” until my throat aches. Waiting.

My dad knows how to handle these things. He grew up a farmer and spent a lot of time farming before he married my mom and went to work at the lumberyard. He developed that practical approach to animals that farmers get. When you spend your life with a lot of animals, some of which are headed for the table, things happen. You get used to saying goodbye.

The funny thing is, as practical as he is? He hates it.

He’s good about my cats. Never tells me not to cry, always hugs me and helps. Builds little wooden boxes to bury the cat if we have a body, encourages me and helps me look if they’re missing.

So when he finds me sitting on the back steps, staring down over the steep bank in back of the house because that’s where Periwinkle appeared last time, he sits down beside me. We sit silently for a few minutes, before he puts an arm around me.

“She’d come home if she could.”

He knows I worry that the cats just don’t want to stay with me for some weird reason, that they desert. I can’t help thinking it. It’s second only to the fear that they’re hurt and unable to come home.

“Probably a fisher cat got her.”

It’s the logical conclusion in Vermont, especially when you live in the woods. Which most of Vermont does. I’ve certainly heard it suggested, about my cats and when neighbor cats go AWOL. Just as before, my mind buzzes at the thought of these mysterious beasts. There’s a taste of the weird about them, like stories about wood nymphs or haunted hunting shacks. I’ve never seen a fisher cat, and I’m not entirely sure what one looks like, but the idea of these
things
lurking out there, invisible to us, lying in wait for our pets, blazed itself into my brain long ago.

I think . . . maybe I’d like to get a look.

“I’m sorry,” he adds, softer.

I lean my head on his shoulder. I never feel quite so safe as when I’m with him. He’s not afraid of the dark, which is the coolest thing ever. I’m not afraid of the dark either, if he’s outside with me. But it still amazes me that he’ll just walk down over the bank toward the brook in full dark. I’d
never
go over the bank after dark. Ever since I read that Bigfoot book from the school library, I keep expecting to see Bigfoot just walking out of our trees, which freaks me out. Only at night though. For some reason I never expect to see Bigfoot during the day, which is strange since I’ve never heard that Bigfoot is nocturnal.

Daddy stands up, ready to start the backyard fireplace to grill hamburgers. I follow him across the yard and watch him set up the fire and start it with old newspaper and kindling. I love watching fire, and this means toasted marshmallows later. He lays the old metal grill over the cement block sides. “Get the burgers from your mother?”

“Sure.” I run inside and wait while Mom finishes pressing the meat into burgers, with baggies on her
hands. She hates to touch raw hamburger. Balancing the plate of meat and a beer for him, I walk back outside and settle in a little way off on the moss to watch him cook. It takes my mind off things, even though we don’t talk.

The fire pops and sparks. I think about Bigfoot fighting off fisher cats, protecting my kittens.

Over the next week I continue to think about fishers, Bigfoot, and our back bank. Something has me hooked. I just need to wait for my brain to figure out how to tell me what. Finally, I’m sitting in my swing, listening to the faraway rumble of the brook, when my brain decides it’s time to lift the curtain.

Fishers. They’re called fishers.

We go fishing. Down over our bank. Where my cats go and then disappear.

Maybe if we go fishing, I could get a look at one. I picture something big and furry—I know that much—catching fish and washing it in its paws, like a raccoon.

I start in on my dad that night. Standing over him where he’s stretched out on his back to get his spine back in line, I lean forward so I can see down into his face. “Can we go fishing?”

He ponders. “It’s a little early, but I don’t see why not, if it doesn’t rain. I work Saturday morning, but maybe in the afternoon.”

I nod, happy. “Do you need me to walk on you?” Sometimes I walk on his back.

“No, it’s pretty good tonight, just a little tired.”

“Should I dig the worms?”

“Don’t have to until Saturday morning, but you can if you want. If you do it early, remember to put dirt in the can with them.”

Right. Nothing more irritating than finding a bunch of great worms—not those little piddly things you can barely get on a hook—only to have them be dried-out dead on fishing day because you forgot the dirt. I mostly remember not to do that anymore, but sometimes I get overexcited.

“And poke holes in the plastic top.”

Oh, right. I forgot about that bit.

I wait to dig worms until the next day, turning over the dirt in the garden patch. Daddy hasn’t planted yet. It is early, but the ground is soft enough. The Maxwell House can at my feet starts to fill. I leave the ones that are too small, and I even leave the giant purpley night crawler I find under a rock. Partly because the last time I used one, the fish totally ignored it, but mostly because they’re gross.

I do take his rock away, though, and roll it over the bank. Daddy needs the rocks out of the garden. He says most all of Vermont is like that, and our best crop is rocks. Fields and fields of rocks. When we learned about the Great Wall of China in school, I started thinking we should have a great wall of Vermont. We’ve got the rocks for it. Maybe I’ll suggest it when I grow up and can vote.

I fill the can half-full of dirt clumps that hold about ten worms altogether, then take the little walk down to Bernie’s piece of slate and sit on the ground. It’s the spot we bury all the cats. I sit here to talk to them. I use this spot to talk to the ones that disappeared, too. Daddy planted a little pine tree next to it. “I’m going to go fishing this weekend and find a fisher,” I tell my dead cats. I’m not sure what else to say. I don’t know what I’m going to do once I find one. Still, I get a nice purring sensation, like they’re rubbing up against me in approval.
They like the idea; I know they do. That’s encouragement enough for me.

I leave the worm can in the shadow of the propane tank at the end of the house so it doesn’t bake in the sun and go on inside.