Cat Bearing Gifts

5

IN THE LITTLE wooded neighborhood below Emmylou Warren’s house, the red tomcat was indeed crouched on Tessa’s windowsill looking into the dark bedroom where she and her big sister slept head to foot in the one twin bed. The other bed was unoccupied. A light shone under the closed bedroom door, from the kitchen. When, approaching Debbie’s ragged cottage, he’d looked in through the kitchen window, Debbie sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the dark-haired, sullen-faced young woman sorting through a stack of new purses and sweaters with the tags still dangling from them, items that he knew she hadn’t paid for, beautiful clothes and gaudy ones laid out across the oilcloth as she clipped the tags from them.

At the bedroom window he reached a silent paw in, through a hole he’d made in the screen months before. Silently he flipped the latch and pulled the dusty screen open. Sliding in under it, he pushed the window casing up with infinite care and finesse so as not to make even the smallest sound and wake twelve-year-old Vinnie. Tattletale Vinnie, who would let her mother know at once that he had followed and found them.

Not even Tessa herself knew that he had arrived in Molena Point against all odds, like a cat in some newspaper story traveling across the country to follow his family. Pausing on the sill, at the head of the bed, he watched the two sleeping girls, listening for sounds from the kitchen. When he was sure that both children slept soundly, and that Debbie remained occupied sorting through her stolen bounty, he eased down onto Tessa’s pillow, the tip of his red striped tail barely twitching.

He sat quietly watching her, the flicker of her dark lashes against her smooth cheeks, her pale hair tousled across the pillow. And softly, as she dreamed, he pressed his nose close to her small ear and began to whisper, to send gentle but bold words into the child’s dreams, painting strong visions for her.

Tessa was only five, hardly more than a baby, and a silent one, at that, a timid little girl who seemed always fearful, never eager for life, a drawn-away, wary child. Perhaps only Pan knew how watchful she was beneath the shyness, how aware of what occurred around her. Few grown-ups ever saw Tessa smile or saw her reach out to embrace the bright details of life that so fill a normal child’s world, few ever saw her pluck a flower from the garden, snatch a cookie from the plate and run, laughing, or tumble eagerly across a playground screaming and shouting. Tessa Kraft clung to the shadows, bowing her head at her mother’s voice, backing away from the overbearing tirades of her sister. Her father wasn’t there to stand by her, not that it had ever occurred to him, even when he was home, that Tessa might have feelings that he should nurture, fears that he might have soothed and healed. Tessa’s mother didn’t bother to explain about her pa going to prison, or to help with her daughter’s loss. Eric Kraft’s final absence from their home, which had begun long before his arrest and sentence for murder, had left a deep hollowness within the child that, Pan thought, nothing in her future could ever erase. But he meant to try.

Since Tessa and her family had arrived in the village, and then Pan had followed them there, the other four speaking cats had come to know the child, too, and to care about her, as had their human friends. Maybe only they saw Tessa’s hidden joy in life, saw the secret pleasures that she so carefully concealed from the dominance of her mother and sister. They watched and waited. They stood by Tessa when they could, hindered by a tangle of legalities specific to the human world, rules that no cat would pay attention to.

But Pan, with his own goal clearly in mind, sought to lead Tessa with his whispered suggestions, to slowly strengthen and transform the silent little Cinderella into a bold young princess. “Don’t let their talk hurt you,” he told her over and over as she slept. “Inside yourself, you can laugh at them. You are stronger than they are, that’s your secret. You are your own strong person, and you never need to be afraid.

“You can be quiet and secret in your thoughts, but all the while you can see the world clearly. You can be wary of others but strong in yourself, and you will grow up stronger than they are. One day, you will pity their stubborn ignorance.

“You’re little now, Tessa. But you grow bigger every day and already, on the inside, you’re bigger than they are. You’re stronger than they are, you have a wall of strength inside you that no one’s meanness can hurt. Your mother and sister can’t hurt you, they can’t touch the part of you that’s whole and bright and that loves the world around you.”

As Pan whispered, reaching deep into Tessa’s sleeping mind, he thought about his pa, too, and about that other little girl so long ago. That child far back in time who had also needed a special friend, the little girl Misto remembered from an earlier life among his nine cat lives.

How strange, Pan thought, the mirroring of father’s and son’s connections with the two little girls from two different times. Tessa here in this time. Misto’s friend, Sammie, from sixty years past and from the other side of the continent.

How strange that Sammie, now dead, lay buried right here in this village, a continent away from where Misto had known her. Sammie Miller, found shot to death right there beneath her own house, that she had willed to Emmylou Warren. What a strange tale it was and a convoluted one, a saga of three generations, Sammie’s part of it ending here, in this village.

It had been young Sammie Miller’s photograph that had stirred Misto’s memory of his earlier life, a picture that the yellow tomcat discovered when he visited Emmylou, a childhood picture that had drawn him back again and again to look at little Sammie, his visits generating a comfortable friendship with the old woman though he never spoke to her, he never breached the cats’ secret.

The grown-up Sammie Miller, having no family but her wandering brother who could never stay in one place, had willed her cottage and the old stone building in the woods above to Emmylou. She told Emmylou more than once that Birely had no use for a house, that he preferred to travel footloose and free. Nice euphemisms, Pan thought, for a man with no ambition, for a drifter who let the world do with him as it would.

In the warm bed beside him, Tessa stirred suddenly and Pan drew back, crouching on the pillow. But the child only whimpered and turned over, dreaming. Often Kit came with him on his nighttime visits, she was his lookout, watching Debbie through the kitchen window, ready to hiss a warning if the woman rose and headed for the bedroom. But this night Kit was off up the coast with her humans, visiting the city. Or maybe they were already on their way home, after a week of shopping in what Kit said were “elegant stores that smell so good.” How long it seemed, and how he missed her.

He had loved Kit since that first day he arrived in Molena Point, hitching the last leg of his journey on a tour bus, and then making his way through the small village to the sea cliff. Pushing through the tall, blowing grass above the sea, he’d seen the tortoiseshell hiding, watching him, her yellow eyes so bright with curiosity that even in that instant he knew that he loved her. Now he not only loved her and missed her but, as he crouched beside the sleeping child, his thoughts left Tessa suddenly and uneasily, the fur down his back stood stiff, his thoughts suddenly all on Kit. What was this shivering fear he felt, what was happening?

His ears caught no sound save Tessa’s soft breathing, yet he heard Kit’s silent cry. His fear made him abandon the child, sent him flying out the window knowing that Kit was in trouble, that she was afraid and alone. He sensed her crouched shivering in the black night and he was filled with her terror, he wanted to run to her but she was far away, she was in danger and far away and he had no way to find her or help her.

But maybe the disaster had already happened, he thought sensibly. Maybe he was feeling her fear from a moment already gone, maybe now she was safe. Maybe she and Lucinda and Pedric had already returned to the village, maybe he was feeling her residual fear telegraphed between them. Maybe if he raced up across the rooftops to her tree house he’d find her already there, safe and dreaming among her pillows. Willing this to be so, Pan scrambled to the roof and took off fast, racing through the night across the peaks and shingles, praying Kit was home and safe—but knowing, deep down, that she was not, that Kit was still in danger.