Cleo

Patience

To wait is merely to consider the clouds for a while.

“Cleo is how old?” Rosie asked over the phone.

“Ten,” I replied.

“Amazing!” said Rosie. “I never thought she’d live that long.”

“Living with us, you mean?”

“Well, yes, frankly. You must be doing something right.”

One of the many ways in which cats are superior to humans is their mastery of time. By making no attempt to dissect years into months, days into hours and minutes into seconds, cats avoid much misery. Free from the slavery of measuring every moment, worrying whether they are late or early, young or old, or if Christmas is six weeks away, felines appreciate the present in all its multidimensional glory. They never worry about endings or beginnings. From their paradoxical viewpoint an ending is often a beginning. The joy of basking on a window ledge can seem eternal, though if measured in human time it’s diminished to a paltry eighteen minutes.

If humans could program themselves to forget time, they would savor a string of pleasures and possibilities. Regrets about the past would dissolve, alongside anxieties for the future. We’d notice the color of the sky and be liberated to seize the wonder of being alive in this moment. If we could be more like cats our lives would seem eternal.

I wasn’t sure what sort of reception we’d get from Cleo. A year is a long time to be away from someone you love. There was a chance she wouldn’t recognize us. No doubt she’d shifted loyalties to Andrea. That would be understandable. We’d fled while Andrea fed.

As the cab pulled up outside our front gate in Auckland I was relieved to see the house spread like a familiar smile behind the fence. Shrubs in the front garden were a little taller. Wisteria had increased its stranglehold around the veranda posts. I scanned the windows and the roof for signs of a small black cat. Nothing. Andrea, who’d moved out the day before, had assured us our cat was still alive. Maybe she’d tactfully forgotten to mention that Cleo had gone feral.

With a boulder in my chest I helped Philip and Rob unload our suitcases from the cab. The front gate opened with its familiar complaint. The wind in the bottlebrush flowers held its breath.

“Cleo!” Rob called in the man’s voice that had croaked its way into his larynx.

A black shape trotted down the side of the house in our direction. I’d forgotten she was so tiny. Her pace was businesslike at first, as if she might be heading out to check for spiders in the letter box. She hesitated, pricked her ears and scowled at us. For a moment I thought she might drop her tail and scurry under the house.

“We’re home, Cleo!” Lydia cried.

The cat meowed gleefully and sprinted towards us. We dropped our bags and ran to her, each of us fighting for turns to hold the purring bundle and smother her with kisses. Even though Rob and Lydia had sprouted over the past year, she remembered all four of us.

Once we were inside, the warmth of her welcome cooled. Cleo decided we needed punishment for our absence. She asked to be let outside and perched on the roof for several hours. After we’d unpacked I lured her down to ground level with a bowl of her old favorite—barbecued chicken. Halfway through her meal she looked up at me and winked as if to say So, pregnant again? Can’t you humans control yourselves? Oh well. Guess I can put up with a few more years being dressed up in baby clothes and wheeled around in a doll’s pram.

Early in the pregnancy I went to a specialist and begged him to anesthetize me from the neck down for the birth of my fourth child. He agreed. At the age of thirty-eight I even had a medical title—Elderly Multigravida (which, by the way, any aspiring rock band in search of a name is welcome to). To reinforce the notion I had everything to fear he showed me a chart of the increased rate of birth defects as mothers approach forty. I left his offices feeling old. Sick and old. Following his advice I underwent invasive tests, one of which brought on worrying contractions. The tests showed the baby was healthy. And a girl.

With Cleo curled on my lap one afternoon, I phoned Ginny in Wellington. Instead of laughing at my vision of a high-tech birth, all bright lights and scalpels, she put me onto a magnificent midwife, Jilleen.

The moment I opened our door to Jilleen the baby somersaulted inside me. Jilleen had the kindest brown eyes. Her small hands were crossed neatly in front of her body. I knew this was the woman who would deliver our child despite the fact that we’d never thought of ourselves as home birth people.

A smudge of cloud crossed the moon. Schubert’s music wrapped itself tenderly around the room. An open fire flickered shadows of Philip, Cleo and Jilleen against the wall. Time dissolved. We welcomed each muscular surge the way a surfer greets a wave, with concentration and respect. As the contraction reached its peak Jilleen taught Philip how to massage the pain away with gentle circular movements around my belly. Katharine tumbled pink and disgruntled into the world around two in the morning in her big brother’s bedroom. Our support team (including Anne Marie and a local doctor) glowed with that sense of achievement seen on the faces of people who have plunged off a bridge with elastic bands attached to their ankles. Lucky for Rob, he was staying at his dad’s house that night. We weren’t even going to tell our sixteen-year-old son exactly where the baby had been born in case he refused to ever sleep there again. Our plans were quashed when he discovered an acupuncture needle on his bedcovers and demanded to know the truth. To my surprise he wasn’t the slightest bit squeamish that his room had doubled as a delivery suite. In fact, he seemed almost proud of the fact.

Time is said to heal everything. Certainly on the surface our lives were looking good. I no longer dreaded parent-teacher interviews at Rob’s school. He’d worked hard. The tone in the teachers’ voices had changed. Instead of learning difficulties, they spoke of career options like medicine or engineering. His final-year marks were dazzling enough to earn him a scholarship to embark on an engineering degree at university.

I was happy, too, and grateful for the loving stability Philip brought us. Nevertheless, there was part of our lives that Rob and I tucked away and seldom talked about, certainly not in the company of others.

“Sometimes I feel as if our lives have been split in two,” he said one day when the house was silent except for the mews of Cleo pacing in front of the fridge. “There was the existence we had with Sam, and the one after he died. It’s almost as if we’ve had two separate lives.”

I had to agree. Few things bridged those two worlds, apart from a handful of friends and relatives, and the small black cat Sam had chosen for us all those years ago. Even though we laughed, worked and played, our grief was still real, unresolved in many ways and buried deep inside. Concerned neither of us had undergone professional grief counseling, I sometimes embarked on “Remember when Sam…” stories to encourage Rob to acknowledge our previous life. We thumbed through photo albums, talked and smiled. But to say time had healed us was a lie. Although we’d encompassed the enormity of losing Sam, we were still emotional amputees. We’d lost a limb when he died. After so many years the stump was invisible to almost everyone, apart from Rob and me.

Rob sprouted into a tall, handsome young man. He was a strong swimmer and, with Philip’s encouragement, a triathlete and yachtsman. While I sometimes worried about his emotional well-being his physical health was never a concern. He had an enviable ability to shrug off any virus within a day.

Watching him plunge into the surf I sometimes imagined his older brother alongside him. What would Sam look like by now? Probably a little shorter than his younger brother, but even-featured and no doubt handsome in his own way. I wondered what byways that unconventional streak might have taken Sam on. Maybe he’d have turned my hair grey dabbling in drugs and embarking on an uncertain career in filmmaking. Alternatively, he may have become a mother’s dream, sailed through law school and be halfway to owning a house in the suburbs. Time-wasting fantasies were no use.

During the holidays after his first university year Rob, Philip and I were walking to the local shopping center. Rob suddenly turned pale and said he felt unwell. “Sick?” I said. “You’re never sick.” Rob was equally bewildered. Such a stranger to illness, he had no idea about the etiquette of throwing up in public. Instead of bending discreetly over the gutter, he spun about, showering us with his breakfast. I assumed he’d eaten a dodgy hamburger and would recover in no time. I assumed wrong.

He took to his bed and was unable to eat or drink for several days. His GP assured us it wasn’t serious and wouldn’t last long. But by the end of the week he was severely dehydrated and admitted to hospital, where he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel condition, cause unknown. Rob’s attack was diagnosed as very severe.

I sat helpless at his bedside, watching him grow weaker by the day. Once again I mustered all my life-giving power as his mother and willed him to get better. Yet again it seemed to fail. Several times I excused myself to find an alcove to weep in. The prospect of losing another son was unbearable.

A young surgeon in a green gown fresh from theater stood over the bed. If Rob didn’t respond to the drugs and his already swollen colon expanded another centimeter, he said, the entire lower bowel (more than two meters long) would have to be removed. The surgeon described the operation as Big.

A tower was under construction outside Rob’s hospital window. I willed time to pass, so we could move forward to a happier phase, when the building was finished and Rob (please every deity that ever existed) was well again. The more I bullied the minutes to speed into hours, the more begrudgingly they crawled. Sometimes they seemed to stop altogether, like belligerent donkeys on a mountain pass.

Rob and I reenacted his babyhood. I stroked his hair and helped him sip an unpalatable canned drink that contained essential nutrients. I tried to find ways to help him feel better. Reducing his fear was difficult when I was almost equally terrified. A rose quartz crystal on his stomach seemed to help soothe violent seizures of pain. His face always lit up when he was told someone was praying for him or sending healing energy. Rob welcomed a visit from Patrick, a psychic healer. When Patrick took his hand Rob said he felt an invisible force holding his other hand.

I stuck a photo of a mountain glowing pink in a sunset above his hospital bed. Rob looked up at it and said he’d get there someday. He’d always dreamed of taking time out to work on a ski field.

Fleets of doctors and surgeons visited Rob in the mornings. While they claimed to be using blood tests and X-rays to determine if Rob needed surgery, they seemed to rely more on how he looked and responded to them.

As they drew close to making the grim decision, I urged Rob to drag himself out of bed and walk down the corridor when the doctors were due. The effort of struggling fifty meters to the showers was enormous. Rob could hardly walk, let alone wheel the drip he was attached to. As we glided painfully past the team of doctors, their faces froze with astonishment. Rob’s triumph at that moment was up there with winning an Olympic marathon.

The surgery was put on hold. Rob’s condition slowly improved. We knew he was on the mend the night we found him sitting in the ward’s television room.

“How do I look?” he asked Philip.

Not great, to tell the truth. Rob had lost more than twenty pounds through his ordeal. His skin glowed white against his red bathrobe, and he was still attached to a drip. Nevertheless, the return of masculine vanity was the best sign yet.

He was prescribed hefty doses of steroids for the foreseeable future and warned that his colon might eventually have to be removed. By the time he was allowed home Rob was a skeletal version of his former self. Just weeks earlier he’d been waterskiing, rising from the lake like a young Apollo. It was hard to believe all that muscle and tan could evaporate so quickly. He was too weak to walk to the parking lot. He waited on a bench outside the hospital doors while I collected the car.

We’d tidied and freshened up his bedroom at home, but more than anything he wanted to be outside. I set up a chair and blanket for him in the garden, where Cleo quickly joined him.

“I never realized the sky was such an intense blue,” he said as the cat nestled into the folds of his trousers that were now several sizes too big for him.

He examined the grass, trees and flowers with the peeled-back clarity of one who has been close to death.

“The colors are so bright,” he said. “The birds, the insects. I used to take them all for granted. It’s a miracle. I hope I always see the world this clearly.”

As soon as he was strong enough, Rob packed his ancient car to the roof and drove south. Miraculously, the car held together long enough to get him to the far end of South Island. He spent the winter skiing and making coffees in a ski field cafe near Queenstown. After that, he was ready to get back to university and finish his degree.

But his health was far from perfect. Although he suffered regular “flare-ups” the steroids ensured none were as bad as the first attack. With a stony sense of dread I noticed the steroid doses had to be increased every few months to keep his condition under control.

In case we were lapsing into an assumption that life was dull, Philip arrived home from work one evening to announce he’d had a promotion. The only complication was the job was in Melbourne, Australia.