Dewey's Nine Lives

FIVE

Christmas Cat

“While I stood there holding him in my hands and talking to the owner as to what to do, the kitten coughed. Or more accurately, he sputtered. That little sputter took us into a chapter of life that still brings tears to my eyes and a smile to my face.”

Vicki Kluever never liked cats. Didn’t grow up owning one, never had a friend who owned one, but she’d been around them enough to know they weren’t for her. Cats were always rubbing against you. They always wanted to sit in your lap. They always wanted to be petted or given some kind of attention. Vicki was born and raised on Kodiak, a large, mountainous island off the harsh southwest coast of Alaska, where the only milk was powdered and the only affordable meat was the fish you pulled from the freezing sea. She considered herself a strong and independent woman, from a long line of independent women, and if she had an animal, she wanted that animal to be strong and independent, too. Cats? They were soft.

But her daughter, Sweetie, was four years old, and Sweetie really wanted a pet. Vicki suggested a dog. After all, she had grown up with dogs. One of her favorite childhood pictures was of herself with two black eyes, one for each time the enthusiastically playful family dog had knocked her off the front porch with its tail. But her landlord was adamant: no dogs. He had no problem with a cat. If the little girl wanted, he said, they could even adopt two, which sounded good to Vicki because two cats could keep each other company, and she might not have to bother with them. So when a coworker’s cat had kittens in November, Vicki Kluever thought she’d found the perfect Christmas present. Or at least the best present allowed at her third-rate fourplex apartment building in Anchorage, Alaska.

Two weeks before Christmas, just as the kittens were being weaned, she drove over to meet them. They were pathetically cute, of course, tiny and uncoordinated and nestling energetically against their mother. There was one little guy that stood out, though, the one that kept biting his siblings’ tails and stepping on their heads when they tried to suckle their mother. He was a live wire, a real spunky personality. The independent type. So Vicki picked him. Then she chose his exact opposite: a cute little female that looked Siamese and seemed like the most docile kitten in the bunch.

She planned the adoption for Christmas Eve. She and her daughter were having dinner with their friend Michael, so she asked him to pick up Sweetie from day care. (The girl’s real name was Adrienna, by the way, but Vicki has called her Sweetie since she was a few weeks old.) Vicki would pick up the kittens. Her daughter was always asleep by seven, so by the time dinner was over and it was time to drive home, she’d be so dead to the world, she wouldn’t notice the box in the backseat. Sweetie wouldn’t know about the kittens until she woke up Christmas morning and found them under the tree.

It was a perfect plan, Vicki thought. The ideal surprise. But when she went to pick up the kittens, she couldn’t find them. Any of them. Her coworker had left on a vacation the day before, and in the twenty-four hours she’d been gone, the kittens had managed to escape from their box. The woman’s sister, who had met Vicki at the house with the key, didn’t seem too pleased with this development, but she helped search for them. After half an hour, they’d found all but one. The pure black one, the live wire, was gone. Vicki didn’t know what to do, but she knew she needed to make a decision because she was expected at Michael’s for dinner. Should she adopt just one kitten? Should she choose another?

Thinking back, she was never sure how or why it happened—she had to use the facilities, I suppose—but she wound up in the bathroom. She turned on the lights, looked into the toilet, and her heart collapsed through the floor. The pure black kitten was lying in the bottom of the bowl.

She reached in and pulled him out. He was no bigger than a tennis ball, and she held him easily in one hand. He lay on her palm, as lifeless and cold as a wet dishrag. There was no pulse or breathing, and his eyelids were peeled back just enough to see that he was gone. He had been such an energetic kitten. Vicki knew he was the one who had led the charge over the edge of the box. He had been jumping and swatting at it the first time she saw him; who else could it have been? He must have been peering over the edge of the toilet rim, or maybe stretching for a drink, when he slipped into the bowl. He was so tiny the water was over his head, and trying to scramble up the slick sides must have worn him down. His adventurous spirit, the fearlessness that had drawn her to him, had cost the kitten his life. On Christmas Eve.

“What are you going to do?”

The question shocked her out of her thoughts. She must have shouted when she saw the dead kitten, Vicki realized, because the sister was standing next to her, staring over her shoulder at the lifeless body.

“We should bury him,” Vicki said.

“I can’t. I’m late for work.”

“Well, we can’t leave him,” Vicki said. “We can’t just leave a dead cat lying ...”

The kitten coughed. Or more accurately, he sputtered. Looking down, Vicki realized that she had been unconsciously rubbing her thumb back and forth over the kitten’s stomach and chest. Had she forced water out of his lungs? Was that sputter a sign of life, or just the last gasp of a body settling into death? He wasn’t moving. He looked as cold and lifeless as ever. How could he possibly . . . ?

He sputtered again. Not a cough but a small hack that strangled in his throat the moment it began. But this time, the kitten twitched and spat up water.

“He’s alive,” Vicki said, stroking her thumb down his body. The kitten sputtered, spat up more water, but otherwise didn’t move. His eyes were still slightly open in a death stare, his inner flaps drawn inward. “He’s alive,” Vicki said when he sputtered a fourth time, wetting her hand.

Her friend’s sister wasn’t impressed. She looked at her watch with a grimace, a not-so-subtle signal that she didn’t have time to deal with the possible resurrection of a recently deceased cat. In her defense, she probably thought the sputtering was death throes. There was no way this bedraggled kitten, submerged in water for who knows how long, could possibly be alive.

Vicki wrapped the kitten in a hand towel, still stroking him firmly enough that he kept coughing up water, and called her longtime friend Sharon, who lived nearby. Vicki and Sharon had helped each other through challenging jobs, dysfunctional families, difficult marriages, and typical babies. When Vicki told her there was an emergency and that she needed to come to her house, Sharon didn’t even ask why.

She left the other kitten, the docile one, and rushed to her friend’s house. There was no way, Vicki thought, she could give this sickly kitten to her daughter. He was alive, but he looked horrible. Scary almost. And his chances of long-term survival were slim. When you grow up in a fishing town in Alaska, you learn about hypothermia and water in the lungs, and you know the odds aren’t good. But this little kitten was a fighter; in spite of her aversion to cats, there was no way Vicki could leave him behind.

Even if her friend was shocked by the sight of the tiny body. “I found him in the toilet,” Vicki told her. “Under the water. But he coughed and spit up water.”

“He’s cold,” the friend said. “He needs warmth.”

They wrapped a heating pad around the towel, set it on low, and put the kitten on the kitchen counter. As Sharon gently rubbed the top of the kitten’s head for comfort, Vicki carefully dried him with a blow-dryer. Halfway through, the kitten started convulsing. His mouth was hanging open; his eyelids were fluttering; he looked like he was having a seizure. He twitched, then started shivering and retching in violent dry heaves. It looked painful, as if his body was being pulled apart like Alaska’s pack ice in a spring thaw, but it was an involuntary reaction. The kitten, apart from his spasms, never stirred. More than an hour after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.

Already late for dinner, Vicki called Michael. “I’m coming,” she said. “Tell my daughter I’m coming. I’m just going to be late. And, um . . . Merry Christmas.”

Then she called every veterinarian in the phone book. No one answered. Why would they? It was late in the afternoon, and it was Christmas Eve. She couldn’t leave the kitten at Sharon’s house because her oldest daughter was allergic to cats. Even if she hadn’t been, Vicki knew she couldn’t abandon the kitten now. Not after all they’d been through. After an hour, when his convulsing slowed, she put him in a shoe box, still wrapped in the towel and heating pad, and drove to Christmas Eve dinner.

“This is Sharon’s cat,” she told Sweetie when the little girl came to see what her mother had in the box. “He is really sick. But Sharon had to work, so I told her we would watch him through the night.” Sweetie was staring at the little black kitten, at his open mouth and his swollen eyes and his lifeless rag of a body, and Vicki could tell she was going to cry.

“He’s probably going to die, Sweetie,” she said, reaching out to hug her daughter. “I’m sorry. He is very, very sick, and we didn’t want him to be alone.”

“Okay,” Sweetie said, hugging her mother back.

They put his shoe box in the bathroom next to the heat register and sat down to dinner. It was a somber affair, nothing like a typical Christmas Eve filled to bursting with a young child’s noisy anticipation. They ate slowly, and their conversation seemed halfhearted. Every few minutes, Vicki and Sweetie tiptoed to the bathroom to check on the little black kitten. He had stopped convulsing and retching, but his panting was so shallow they could barely tell he was alive. He seemed to be struggling for every breath. And four hours after his rescue, he still hadn’t opened his eyes.

They left Michael’s house just after nine o’clock. Vicki had finally reached a twenty-four-hour emergency veterinary phone service, and they recommended buying some kind of protein, blending it down to liquid, and seeing if the kitten would eat a few drops. So on the way home, they stopped at a convenience store that was just shutting for Christmas. Sweetie, still wide awake, waited with the kitten in the car. “We can’t leave him alone, Mommy,” she said.

The store had one jar of meat-based baby food. Vicki bought it, along with an eyedropper. She tried to give the kitten a drop of the brown mush, but he gagged. She diluted the baby food again and again, until it was practically water, and finally, about 11:00 P.M., he kept down two drops. That was his limit: two drops of protein water.

“It’s time for bed, Sweetie,” Vicki said, once the kitten was tucked into his towel.

“But, Mommy . . .” the little girl started to protest, not wanting to leave the kitten, but she was so tired she couldn’t fight any longer. She was asleep by the time she reached the bed.

Vicki kissed her good night—Merry Christmas, she thought—and made herself a cup of tea. Every hour on the hour, all through the night, she fed the kitten a few drops of diluted baby food. Each time, when she saw him lying motionless on his side, her heart clenched and she feared he was dead. But as she approached, he started to shift his head. He let her push open his mouth (he still hadn’t opened his eyes) and squeeze two drops down his throat. Then she went back to the couch, turned on some Christmas music, and tried to stay awake for another hour.

She must have crashed after the 4:00 A.M. feeding, because the next thing she knew, it was Christmas morning. She leapt off the couch and rushed to the bathroom, where she had left the kitten in his blanket in front of the heat register. As soon as she saw him, she gasped. He was standing on four very shaky legs, trying to tip himself over the edge of the shoe box.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Her daughter trembled in the doorway.

“Oh, Sweetie, look! He’s alive. The kitten is alive.”

Vicki put her arm around her daughter, and together they watched as the kitten gathered himself on spindly legs and, with great effort, stepped one shaking paw out of the box. He pulled a second leg over, rested for a moment, looked at them with tired eyes. Then he turned back to his task and, with one final shaking lunge, pulled himself free.

Toys and gifts were forgotten. Russian tea (a combination of powdered tea, orange drink mix, and spices that was Vicki’s favorite) and hot chocolate were neglected. For the rest of the day, they watched their Christmas miracle. The kitten spent most of the time on his side, since he was so weak, but whenever Sweetie and Vicki brought the eyedropper over, he pushed himself onto his front knees and stretched out his neck. Vicki had never seen a four-year-old child so gentle and careful, or a kitten more determined to succeed. By the afternoon, Christmas Cat, as they named him (or CC, as they called him), was swallowing three or four drops of brown protein water at a time. They were keeping him alive drop by drop, and every hour he was getting stronger. When Sweetie fell asleep that night, her last question was about CC, the Christmas Cat.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I hope so, Sweetie. You were wonderful.”

The girl smiled. Vicki tucked her in, turned off all the lights except the Christmas tree, turned on the radio, and sat on the sofa, rubbing her thumb along the kitten’s skinny side. He’s going to live, she thought, as music floated around them and the tree sparkled in the purple blackness of an eighteen-hour Alaska winter night. He’s really going to live. She shook her head in wonder, surprised both by his survival and by how much she cared.

The day after Christmas, a Saturday, she finally reached a veterinarian. The next open appointment was three days away, but the veterinarian assured her she was doing everything right. “Just keep up your regimen,” she said. “It’s worked so far.”

On Monday, Vicki went back to work. She had used up her sick days because of some recent health issues, and as a single mother she couldn’t afford to take time off. So every few hours, on her morning break, lunch hour, and afternoon break, she rushed home to feed Christmas Cat a few drops of his watery meal. Her coworkers thought it was hysterical. For weeks, she had been complaining nonstop about adopting the cats. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she’d say, shaking her head. “I hope my daughter appreciates this sacrifice,” she’d proclaim, as if she were giving her daughter one of her kidneys or something. Now here she was dashing home every few hours so that she could nurse a nearly dead kitten back to health.

“I thought you didn’t like cats,” her coworkers said, howling with laughter when they saw her tearing off her scarf and jacket.

“I don’t,” she said. “I really don’t. But what can I do?” She was telling the truth: She still didn’t like cats. She just happened to like CC. Why? Because helping him had become her project. Because he had proven himself to her. Because he had personality, toughness, and an incredible will to live. As soon as he could stand, even trembling and weak, he had thrown himself over the edge of his box. He wasn’t broken; he wasn’t giving up. He wasn’t . . . soft. And Vicki Kluever admired that.

By the time she visited the veterinarian’s office, it had been four days since the accident. Four times she had tried to give CC a bite of food with a little texture, but each time he had thrown up immediately, so she was still feeding him a few diluted drops of baby food at a time. Four drops of liquid was the most he could handle.

“Something’s wrong,” the veterinarian said. She pressed the kitten’s side and his stomach, which was almost nonexistent. There was no way Christmas Cat weighed more than a pound. “He’s never going to gain weight on a liquid diet. He can’t get enough nutrients. I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “but he’s starving to death.” She made a note on his chart, then looked at Vicki, who was clearly in shock. “Why don’t you leave him here with me?”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“We’ll run some tests,” she said. “We’ll do what’s best for him.”

Instantly, Vicki snatched CC off the table and wrapped him in her arms. He was trembling, and Vicki might have been, too. “No,” she said, turning her shoulder toward the veterinarian in a protective gesture. “No way. We have come this far, and we are going to see this through.” She could feel her anger rising, her indignation. This woman didn’t believe. This woman wanted to kill her cat!

“No,” she said. “We are not giving up.” Then, nearly shaking with fury and unable to think of anything else to say, she whirled around and walked out of the office.

She went to a specialty store and found a protein paste for cats. She compared labels. The paste had all the same nutrients as the baby food she had been using, so she started diluting it with water and feeding it to CC through the eyedropper. Sweetie helped, and she was always gentle and caring and enthusiastic, but mostly it was Vicki who squeezed the protein into CC’s waiting mouth. He was only ten weeks old, a tiny bundle of bones and fur, so six or seven times a day, she would cradle him in the palm of one hand and lower the dropper tip into his mouth with the other. As she squeezed a single morsel, he would stare up at her, his eyes still glassy, and then close his mouth over his meal with a delicate sigh. She had felt attached to him before—at the moment he sputtered in her hand, as she watched him haul himself over the edge of the shoe box on bandy legs, in the veterinarian’s office—but holding him in her hand day after day bonded them in a way Vicki Kluever never thought possible. She had saved his life. But more than that, CC had saved his own.

After another week, he started reaching with his front paws and guiding Vicki’s hand toward his mouth. Vicki could see his throat constricting as he swallowed, and she swore she could feel every ounce of weight he gained. His fur became thicker and glossy black, and every day his eyes seemed brighter. She was so confident in his recovery, in fact, that she finally told Sweetie that CC wasn’t her friend Sharon’s cat, he was her Christmas present. The joy in the girl’s eyes! Soon after, Vicki took him to a new veterinarian for his shots. The vet was amazed when he heard the story. “You did everything right,” he said.

So did CC, she thought.

“He still can’t eat solid food,” she told the doctor. “He can’t eat anything with texture.”

“He may have been born that way,” the veterinarian said, “or his organs may have been damaged when his body shut down. Either way, he appears to be thriving. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Keep doing what you’re doing. That was the life that waited for Vicki Kluever with CC. Keep pampering a sick cat. Two months before, the thought would have been her worst nightmare. Now it didn’t bother her at all. What kind of a cat hater was she?

By March, CC was back to his old self, the adventurous fiend who had bitten the tails of his brothers and sisters and sat on their heads when they tried to suckle their mother. His coat was a gorgeous blue-black, and he had a mischievous gleam in his eye. He was supposed to be Sweetie’s cat, but he and Vicki had bonded over those eyedropper dinners, and poor Sweetie was never on his affection radar. It was Vicki he watched, and Vicki he always listened to. But he wasn’t one of those sit-on-your-lap, always-underfoot kittens. He remained fearless and independent, undaunted by death and seemingly convinced more than ever that he could survive anything the world threw at him. In short, he was her ideal cat.

But even six months later, when Vicki received the career opportunity of a lifetime to found a new branch office, CC was still eating nothing but liquids from an eyedropper. He would improve over the years, until he could eat small quantities of protein and water mixed in a blender, but Christmas Cat would never fully recover from nearly drowning in a toilet bowl on Christmas Eve.

When Vicki Kluever wrote me, she mentioned how moved she was by the similarities in our lives. And she promised: It wasn’t just that we had the same name spelled the same unusual way. After reading about Christmas Cat, I recognized the kinship between CC and Dewey. Both kittens nearly died at a young age—one in a toilet, one in a freezing library book drop. Both were rescued by single mothers who, unbeknownst to themselves, had a gap in their lives a kitten could fill. We weren’t looking for cats, or love, or companionship, but they found us. They dedicated their lives to us, and they never seemed to let the tragic events at the start of their lives define them. They kept their personalities. They took advantage of their opportunities. They found their place. They thrived, in the end, not because of the Vickis (although we helped), but because of their own inner strength.

When I talked with her, I realized Vicki and I shared that same inner strength. We both struggled through bad jobs and worse marriages, but we stuck to our moral and professional values, and we found our life’s work: I in the library, Vicki in the mortgage business. We succeeded, both of us, because we refused to settle for the ordinary; instead, we reached for a better way.

Although I have never met her in person, I can picture her in her sophisticated business suit the night she accepted the Affiliate of the Year Award from the Matanuska Valley real estate community. She had won the award, ostensibly, for turning around a struggling mortgage lender in the town of Wasilla, Alaska. The office, on the verge of being closed when she took over, was now one of the most profitable in the state. More important for Vicki, she had transformed the morals and attitudes—the very mission—of the office. In a business plunged into corruption by a housing boom (in 1980s Alaska, not 2005 America, but history repeats itself), she had stood on principle. She refused to make loans if unethical side deals had been struck; she told borrowers when a loan was not in their best interest, even if it killed the deal; she threw real estate brokers out of her office for dishonest practice. She chose the twelve most ethical and trustworthy brokers, the ones who truly cared about their clients, and told them she would always stand by them in exchange for their business because she cared about their clients, too. And from that stand, the business had boomed.

She had arrived in Wasilla with nothing but hard-won experience. She had been distrusted by the local real estate community, simply because she had taken over an office they had grown to despise. Now she was a leader of the Rotary club and prominent in fund-raisers and food drives. She was on the board of the Christmas Friendship Dinner, which served a free feast to the needy for the holidays. During the darkest moment of her life, she had lost faith in God, but through her daughter’s example she was once again an active and enthusiastic member of a church. It was nice to have the Affiliate of the Year Award because it honored not only her financial acumen—her ability to turn a profit—but her service to the community. And there are few honors greater than the respect and recognition of your peers.

But Vicki never talked about the award. I had to poke and nudge her before I even learned about it. Instead, she talked about the people she helped: the mortgage brokers who lost their values chasing the dollar and who she was able to turn around; the young men and women she mentored; the clients whose dreams she helped fulfill. She worked with one woman, who didn’t speak English, for more than two years to help fix her credit and secure an affordable loan. A year later, that woman’s son came to see her.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Well, I’ve gone to college,” he said, “and I want you to know that I’m studying finance because I saw what you did for my mother, and it changed our lives.”

That’s the recognition Vicki cherished. That’s the story that brought a tremble to her voice. That’s the mission that got her up in the morning and motivated her to work hard every day.

“I believe a house is a stabilizing factor,” she told me. “It helps create a healthy family life. That’s what I’m doing when I write a loan. I’m giving a family a better chance to succeed.”

I feel similarly about libraries. I think they are a stabilizing factor in communities. I think that, at their best, they bring people together like few public institutions can. That was always my focus: to make the library work for Spencer, by making it work for the individuals who lived there. I didn’t want money or fame; what librarian has ever gone into the business for that? But I believed, by working the right way and for the right reasons, that I could change my corner of the world. And so did Vicki Kluever. In the end, we both accomplished our goals.

And yet, for all our similarities, I remained skeptical of our sisterhood. We came from such different parts of the world; how much could we really have in common? Northwest Iowa, where I’ve lived most of my life, is spectacularly flat. The nearest ocean is more than a thousand miles away. We have frigid winters, like Alaska, but they are followed by ninety-degree summers. And while the vast fields of corn and soybeans are beautiful in their way, you are often hard-pressed to find anything more interesting than a few trees on our endless horizon.

Kodiak Island, Vicki Kluever’s home for much of her life, is a rugged wilderness, buffeted by the Pacific Ocean and covered with thick, damp plant life. Its mountains rise straight out of the ocean and often plunge straight back into the water on the other side. The shoreline slashes back and forth, marked with tide pools pounded over the centuries into the island’s volcanic rock. The landscape is spectacularly varied, ranging from flat and treeless to mountainous and blanketed by towering spruce trees. The grassy fields and mountain meadows, buried in snow half the year, turn emerald green at the first opportunity, then explode with wildflowers in the summer and locals picking wild berries in the fall. In Iowa, life is slow, defined by the seasonal accumulation and depletion of the soil; in Kodiak, life is dramatic, shaped by the ocean’s ferocious storms. In Iowa, the cycle is defined by planting, harvesting, and the rotation of crops; in Kodiak, the cycle begins with the salmon, who are eaten by the bears, who leave scraps for bald eagles and foxes, who leave scales and bones to enrich the soil. In Iowa, the land is tamed, marked out in perfectly straight mile markers and sold to the highest bidder; in Kodiak, it is wild and unforgiving, possessed by the Sitka deer and the Kodiak bear, the largest land mammal in North America and one of the biggest bears in the world. And, I hear, the whole place smells of fish.

And yet . . . Vicki and I were about the same age. We were raised in a similar blue-collar environment where boys were the future and girls were leaned on for emotional support. We were both good daughters from tight-knit extended families. When farm life overwhelmed or bored me, I found comfort in the back fields of corn, where I knew even Sputnik couldn’t find me; Vicki found refuge in the forests and on the beach, away from the arguments and chain-smoking of her parents’ home. Kodiak and Spencer, three thousand miles apart, were both classic small towns, with tiny schools and party-line telephones. Everybody at least knew of you, which meant they either gossiped about you or helped you, and often both. In Iowa, we lived off the land. In Kodiak, they farmed the ocean. The coming and going of the fishing boats was their traffic; the supply barge from the mainland, frequently delayed by rough seas and carrying only canned or powdered items, was their grocery store; the tide pools and beaches were their playgrounds. Is that so different than life on the farm, where the rumble of traffic meant tractors, and the best food was taken right out of the field?

We were strong by necessity, Vicki and I, proud of our descent from a long line of independent women. My great-aunt Luna Morgan Still founded and taught at the first school in Clay County, a one-room sodbuster constructed of grass and dirt because, even in homesteading days, there were no trees to build with. My grandmother was the rock of my family, holding it together after her husband’s early death, with a toughness and generosity that inspired me. My mother ran her family’s restaurant when she should have been in elementary school; she raised six kids on a farm with no air-conditioning or washing machine; she battled cancer for thirty years, suffering pain and indignity without complaint. She leaned on me, her eldest daughter. And by doing that, she made me strong.

Vicki Kluever’s ancestral line stretches six generations on Kodiak Island, back to the Alutiiq natives who had survived in that harsh land for ten thousand years. She has fond memories of walks in the Kodiak woods with her dog and of late summer outings with her mother and aunts to pick berries, but it was her grandmother who inspired her. Laura Olsen was Alutiiq-Russian-Norwegian, a product of the great melting pot of Kodiak. At sixty-two, already a widow, she moved from the town of Kodiak back to her ancestral land on tiny Larsen Island. The island was named after her father, Anton Larsen, a Norwegian who had immigrated to Kodiak alone on a steamship when he was twelve years old. For Vicki, traveling to Grandma’s house meant a long drive over a mountain pass and down a rough dirt road to Anton Larsen Bay, a twenty-minute skiff ride, and a hike up the beach to a steep embankment. Grandma Laura had no telephone, no electricity, no central heat or running water. She had a large garden and a well, washed her clothes in a hand-cranked ringer washer, chopped her own wood, and kept chickens and a goat. She set her own fishing nets, and she maintained her own fishing gear. The door to her tiny house was always open, her rooms were always neat, and Vicki rarely climbed from the skiff without smelling fresh cookies and bread. Grandma Laura had no use for cigarettes or powdered milk or electric lights, the staples of existence in the Kluever home. She subsisted off the land and the ocean, like the Alutiiq and the early settlers, and she was happier than anyone Vicki had ever known.

Old sod schools. Unheated wood homes. Vicki and I never lived that hard, but that didn’t mean our lives were easy. Life in farming and fishing country was marked by tragedy. Early death. Accidents. Foreclosure. Financial crisis. The town of Spencer burned to the ground in the 1930s, an event that still defines both the precariousness of rural life and the hardiness of the community that, on pure willpower and muscle, rebuilt itself better than before.

In Kodiak, the defining events were the 1912 eruption of Mount Novarupta, which blanketed the island in ash, and the earthquake of 1964. The tremors from that quake rocked the island, causing the land to heave six feet. But it was the three massive tidal waves on Good Friday that destroyed the town. Vicki’s father, who was at work at the power facility, was trapped up to his neck in water for two days. The day after his escape, Easter Sunday, Vicki’s cousin roared up to their house in his truck and told them another wave was coming. That’s when Vicki saw fear for the first time. She saw it on her grandmother’s face. The whole town spent the day on top of Pillar Mountain, watching the ocean. Finally, around dusk, Vicki’s mom said, “I need my cigarettes,” and hopped in her nephew’s truck. The rest of the town followed until, by nightfall, they had all drifted home. The last tidal wave was a false alarm.

The houses were torn down and rebuilt. The boats were scrapped or salvaged, depending on their anchorage. That’s when Vicki’s grandmother, whose home was wiped out by the waves, built her primitive residence on Anton Larsen Island and moved away from Kodiak. Vicki, all of seven years old, felt her innocence recede with the tide. She had seen the power of nature and the fragility of life.

At eighteen, Vicki and I both left home. Life was short; opportunities in our hometowns were limited; we wanted to stretch ourselves and see the world. As Vicki put it, “I needed to bruise my knees, skin my face, make mistakes—and not have mom’s family watching. I couldn’t do anything in Kodiak that my mom didn’t know about before I got home.”

I wanted to attend college, but my parents didn’t have the money. As class valedictorian, Vicki was awarded a scholarship to the University of Alaska, but she preferred to work and support herself instead of living four more years on her parents’ tab and under her parents’ rules. We both found entry-level jobs in larger cities—I at a box factory in Mankato, Minnesota, Vicki at a bank in Anchorage—and settled into an independent life. A few years later, in our early twenties, we both got married. Were we in love? That’s difficult to say. In our day, small-town girls got married young. What else did we know? It wasn’t until we were pregnant that we realized how much, for better or worse, your marriage defines your life. Unfortunately for us, it was for the worse.

Shortly after their wedding, Vicki’s husband took a security job on the Alaska pipeline and moved his wife one hundred miles east (three hundred miles by the only road) to Valdez, in a mountainous region known as the Alps of Alaska. Their daughter, Adrienna—known as Sweetie—was born there in a vicious Thanksgiving blizzard that dumped four feet of snow in a single day. Two weeks later, Vicki’s husband accepted a position as a police officer at the far end of the Aleutians, the long chain of islands that extend almost a thousand miles off the southwest corner of Alaska. Valdez was remote and snowbound, but Unalaska, where they were moving . . . that was beyond the edge of the earth. That was five hundred miles down a spine of rock into the Bering Sea, one of the blackest, angriest, deadliest bodies of water in the world. The Alaska State Ferry service to the island sailed only three times a year, and the trip took seven days. The only airplane that went there was prohibitively expensive, and it only flew twice a week. Your groceries had to be ordered and delivered by mail.

Vicki dreaded the thought of Unalaska, especially with a young child. But her husband had made up his mind. When he left almost immediately for his new job, leaving Vicki in Valdez to care for Sweetie and pack the house, she realized for the first time how much the marriage had uprooted her sense of self. She had already left behind her career, her friends, her family, her home. Now she was losing her independence and freedom of movement, too.

But like a dutiful wife, she lugged her child on the two-week journey to their new home in the Bering Sea. She found the land more harsh and foreboding than she had imagined: rocky, barren, and crosshatched with old trails. A huge military depot, abandoned after World War II, had left the island littered with battered run-ways, crumbling docks, and rusted artillery pieces. As she drove into her new life, Vicki saw rows of old concertina wire stretched across the horizon. There was beauty there, it was hard to deny. Standing in the howling wind above crashing waves, it felt like the end of the earth, and how many people ever get a chance to stand there? But if the island offered a beautiful loneliness, it was loneliness nonetheless. And isolation. With that concertina wire, Unalaska felt like a prison in the middle of the sea.

That winter, Vicki suffered a miscarriage. It was a dark time, literally, with only a few hours of sunlight a day. Her marriage had been crumbling for years; in that long twilight, it seemed to break and sheer off like tree limbs under ice. When I was married to an alcoholic, I thought of my house as a coffin. Day after day, I was being buried by my husband’s neglect. But at least I had friends and family nearby. I had a place I could go for comfort. Vicki Kluever’s whole world was a coffin. She had no place to turn. She asked God for help, for a sign, and when she heard nothing but the howling of the wind, she lost her faith, too. By the time winter finally broke, she had made a difficult decision, one that I and many other women have agonized over: She told her husband she was leaving. When the Alaska Ferry Service arrived a month later, she returned to Anchorage with only her daughter and a handful of possessions.

There is a strength that comes from growing up in a small town. That strength is the realization, at a young age, that nothing is ever a given. More often, it is taken by things beyond your control: a flood, a drought, a storm, a pollution bloom, or an unlucky toss of the nets. You can’t worry about the bad things. Yes, they hurt. But you move on. You understand, as a life code, that you have no right to money or happiness or even stability. If you want those things, you have to earn them.

Back in Anchorage, Vicki threw herself into earning her happiness. She took an entry-level position in the mortgage industry, where she had worked before her marriage, and began to forge a career. It was the early 1980s, interest rates were plummeting, and Alaska was gripped by a wave of loan refinancing. She often worked seventy hours a week and took files home. Her boss was prone to outbursts of anger, but she was also one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable women in the field. Vicki overlooked the hostility and focused on learning. She progressed quickly from clerk to loan officer, and within a year was familiar with every wrinkle in the Alaska housing authority program, one of the nation’s best. She wasn’t just living the dream of being self-sufficient; she was helping other people reach their dreams, too.

But it wasn’t easy. Her commissions, especially in the first years, were barely enough for basic necessities. She couldn’t afford a reliable car, and she often skipped meals in order to feed her daughter. She gave Sweetie as much time as she could, but more often than she preferred, Vicki saw her daughter only long enough to tuck her into bed, kiss her on the cheek, and tell her, Mommy loves you, Sweetie. Good night. She took care of herself. She was physically strong. But she was increasingly prone to mood swings, dark thoughts, and fatigue.

I am a firm believer, from personal experience, that stress is a major factor in poor health, and there is nothing quite like the stress of being a single working mother. I know that from experience, too. But stress doesn’t cause poor health; it aggravates underlying problems. Perhaps the last hurdle for our generation of women was convincing doctors—most of whom were men—that our indigestion, bloating, headaches, memory loss, and muscle fatigue weren’t all in our heads. Just calm down, doctors told us. Relax. It’s only water retention. Take a tranquilizer.

Vicki knew there was something more fundamentally wrong. So instead of giving in, she spent hours at the library (this was before the Internet) studying her condition. After years of reading, researching, and diligently maintaining a daily journal of food intake and physical symptoms, she discovered a physician in London studying female hormone imbalances. One of her protégés happened to work in Anchorage, so Vicki made an appointment. The woman studied Vicki’s journals and performed a series of hormone measurements. The problem, the young woman assured her, wasn’t in her head. After her miscarriage, her body had failed to restart sufficient hormone production. The recommendation was an ultrahigh dose of hormones administered by a well-known male physician. The procedure, while used in England, was not yet FDA-approved.

Vicki accepted the recommendation. Even today, she vividly remembers signing the waiver form. She was so happy to have her condition taken seriously, after so many years of suffering, that she would have signed practically anything. Her insurance wouldn’t cover the treatments, so she went into debt to pay for them.

Luckily, they worked. For three months. Then Vicki began to feel sharp pains in her abdomen. Soon after, she was diagnosed with uterine tumors. She was too stunned and scared to ask questions or seek second opinions. A few days later, at the age of twenty-seven, she was on the operating table, her abdomen cut open, her uterus torn out.

It was a terrible setback, but it was something else, too: freedom. By the spring, despite her surgery, Vicki Kluever felt stronger and more balanced than she had in years. Her symptoms had eased. But more important, her sense of purpose—her vision of the future—had returned. She had made hard decisions. They had cost her dearly, but she had survived them. She was confident she could succeed in her career; she knew she could succeed as a mother. She was ready for her chance.

There was one more step. She enjoyed mortgage lending, but she didn’t want to stay in a toxic work environment. And, she realized, she didn’t want to raise her daughter in Anchorage. She wanted Sweetie to experience the life she had grown up with: the tight community, the strong women, the beauty and power of the ocean. When she heard the company was opening a branch office, she applied for the manager position. They offered her Kodiak or Ketchikan.

She knew where she wanted to go: home.

It was just before Vicki’s surgery, in the summer of 1986, that she and Sweetie had moved into the apartment in Anchorage, where they were allowed to adopt a cat. They had owned an outdoor cat in Unalaska, mainly for catching rats (which were numerous and huge, having traveled to that barren land in the hulls of ships), and perhaps that’s why Sweetie was so insistent. Vicki, never having liked that cat (or the rats), was less enthusiastic. But at that point, she would have done almost anything for her daughter. She was still recovering in November when she chose Christmas Cat. And she was still not quite herself, physically or emotionally, when she rescued him from the toilet bowl on Christmas Eve.

It would be hard, then, not to draw a line between Vicki’s personal journey and CC’s dramatic rescue. People often say love is a matter of luck and timing. The right person (or cat) comes along at the right time and—bang—your life is changed. Many people believe that about Dewey and me, that our love was based on circumstances. After all, I was new to my position as library director, and I was eager to establish myself. I desperately wanted to make the library a more inviting place, and I had been working on that goal for months.

Then Dewey dropped into my arms and, instantly, I knew that he could transform my world. He was friendly. He was confident and outgoing. He tried to include everyone, even when they were leery of his attention. He was loving. He was perceptive. He was dedicated, body and soul, to the Spencer Pubic Library. He was, you might say, the better part of my soul. He inspired and set an example. And not just for me—for an entire town.

Maybe that’s what happened with Vicki Kluever and CC. Maybe she saw herself in that cat: adventurous, independent, determined. And when he suffered tragedy and survived? Maybe she saw herself there, too. After all, it’s not easy to have your body rebel against you. It’s not easy to lose your way, to forget your goals, to have your greatest assets (trust and a desire to explore) lead to your greatest loss. But Christmas Cat didn’t quit. As soon as he gained the strength, CC pushed himself to his feet and toppled back into the world. Maybe it was this attitude, this will to succeed, that Vicki admired. Even more than his outgoing personality, even more than his luscious fur and mischievous gold eyes, Vicki saw a kindred spirit in the little black cat. She told me as much numerous times, although she never used quite those words.

It also helped, I’m sure, that CC fit perfectly into her new life in Kodiak. Subsistence, Vicki tells me, is an important concept in Alaska. It conveys both the simplicity of life in the small towns that dot the coast and the internal fortitude needed to survive there. Subsistence, in its purest form, means living from nature and producing with your own hands. It was the way of life for countless generations of the natives of Kodiak and other rugged Alaskan islands. It was the way of life Vicki’s great-grandfather Anton Larsen practiced when he homesteaded the island now named for him, and it was the life his daughter, Vicki’s grandmother Laura, returned to after the devastating tidal waves of 1964.

Vicki didn’t live like her grandmother, but she certainly embraced a simpler lifestyle when she returned to her old hometown. She rented a small house in the woods. She ran the new mortgage office alone, working hard to create a strong foundation before adding staff. She provided her daughter, with the help of her mother (who, unlike Vicki, owned a television, much to Sweetie’s delight), a “skinned-knee” kind of childhood, free from the overprotection and overscheduling so common among modern parents. Instead, Sweetie enjoyed long walks in the woods and scavenger hunts along the rocky Kodiak shore.

Christmas Cat, likewise, loved to explore the vast forest beyond the back fence. He hunted mice and spiders and other things he could nose out of the brush, often bringing them home as presents or playthings to be kicked around for an afternoon. He climbed trees with Sweetie and followed Vicki and Sweetie a few hundred yards on their hikes until they disappeared into the woods. There is an enormity and solitude to Alaska, a state more than double the size of Texas with a population of just under 700,000 (about the same as Louisville, Kentucky, and less than half of Columbus, Ohio.) In Kodiak, Vicki loved the way the mountains towered over the river valleys, and the huge eagles soared in an endless sky. But she also appreciated the way the forest closed around her and the familiarity of the shops in town. When she and Sweetie walked the beach, they were drawn to the power of the ocean. But there were also the snails clinging to the sides of the tide pools, the impressions in the rocks, the way the running tide “set the table” by exposing mussel beds and fishing nets. When the salmon were running, Vicki and Sweetie were gone for days, because although Vicki loved fishing for everything, she loved the salmon best, because a hooked salmon would fight. Most of all, she loved to watch Sweetie’s face burst into a smile every time the girl caught a fish.

After a year, when she’d saved a little money, Vicki bought a ramshackle house in town. The roof leaked and the walls were noticeably leaning, but she owned it, and that made her feel grounded and whole. The first winter, a pipe burst and the basement flooded. A few days later, a storm knocked three trees through the roof, and she and Sweetie spent a year arranging pots and pans to catch drips when it rained. When she had money, she fixed the house, piece by piece, but she never felt alarmed. After all, Christmas Cat loved drinking out of those rain pans, at least when he wasn’t running up and down the stairs. And as long as Sweetie was comfortable, Vicki could happily subsist, like her grandmother, within the limits of her own capabilities.

New house, new forest, owners gone for a few days: Whatever happened, CC never seemed to mind. He wasn’t a needy cat. He had his own life and his own habits, and except for his dietary problem—he still ate nothing but paste and, possibly, insects—he could take care of himself. Half the time, Vicki wasn’t sure what he was up to, but she always assumed he was doing it with style, even when he was just rummaging for cave crickets in the crawl space under the house. Often when she returned home from the beach, or on lazy Saturday afternoons, she would see CC sitting in his favorite spot on top of the six-foot fence post at the end of the yard, taunting the neighbors’ dogs. They would bark and snap, futilely trying to reach him, while he looked out toward the forest, occasionally glancing down at them with confident disregard. CC knew there was no way they could touch him.

But he was loyal, even in his independence. Almost as soon as Vicki arrived home from the office, CC would appear on the ledge outside the kitchen window. More often than not, his black fur was matted with tree sap or mud or crawl space dust. Vicki brought a towel to the door to wipe him down, but CC always barreled inside, leaving filthy footprints all over the house.

And yet he wouldn’t rub against her. Vicki was very conscious of her professional image, and she splurged on her clothes. CC knew she wouldn’t tolerate cat hair on her business suits, much less muddy paw prints. So he waited until she changed into her sweater and jeans, then stood on his hind legs, with his front paws on her upper leg, waiting for her to pick him up. When she did, he put a paw lightly on each of her cheeks, as if to hold her steady, and looked into her eyes.

“Hi, CC,” she whispered. “How are you?”

He put his cheek against her chin, then bent forward and nuzzled her neck. She pushed him to her shoulder, where he lay against her neck and purred, and that is how they spent the first five minutes of every evening. He wasn’t a lap cat by nature, but if Vicki wanted company, she simply sat in her bentwood rocker, purchased when she learned she was pregnant with Sweetie, and CC came running to curl up on her lap. They spent many a long winter night in that chair by the woodstove, Vicki reading a book and CC purring lightly in his sleep after Sweetie had gone off to bed.

“It was his unconditional love,” Vicki said, when asked what made the relationship special. “He was always there. But he let me be the boss.”

Eventually, she started dating a man named Ted (not his real name). He was charming and attractive and, to be honest, she enjoyed his attention. It made her feel wanted, I suppose, in a way other things never had. Her friends weren’t sure about Ted, and his relationship with Sweetie was rocky at times, but Vicki didn’t worry. Even Christmas Cat’s obvious dislike of him didn’t deter her. Later, she learned to trust the cat’s instincts. If her cat didn’t like a man, or vice versa, that man was out the door. But at the time, still relatively new to this whole cat thing, she considered CC’s attitude nothing more than jealousy. For three years, he had been the man in her life. He had been the one to make her feel wanted. Now he had to share.

A few months later, when Ted started opening her mail and reading her appointment calendar, Vicki made excuses. When he started showing up at restaurants where she was having business meetings, she dumped him. Twice. But each time he begged for forgiveness, saying he just worried about her safety because he loved her so much, that he had learned his lesson, that he wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t realize she was losing control until he started verbally abusing her. But by then it was too late.

“A bad relationship is like a funnel,” Vicki says. “It’s easy to slide into, but very hard to climb out of. And it’s always pulling you down. The more I struggled for independence, the more he tried to control me.”

To the outside world, Vicki was thriving. Her mortgage office was booming, adding staff and quietly becoming one of the best producers in the state. She had harbored some fears about returning to her family, where bad memories crowded the good, but Sweetie grew so close to her grandmother that they spent all their afternoons together, freeing Vicki from worry about her long work hours and giving her daughter a link to her past. She bowled on Wednesdays; she joined a softball team. After two years of work, even her ramshackle residence, once a tilting, leaking mess, was on the verge of becoming the house of her dreams. But her love life was shaking those solid foundations.

“I can run a million-dollar business,” she often muttered to Christmas Cat when he jumped on the edge of the bathtub where she soaked away the day’s fatigue, “but I can’t figure out my love life. What’s wrong with me?”

Christmas Cat always leaned over to sniff her, and more often than not, Vicki could see the crawl space dust still powdered in his jet-black fur.

“Do you want to come in?”

He just stared at her. He wasn’t coming in, but he also didn’t appear to be afraid of the water.

“Suit yourself.” She laughed, closing her eyes so that she didn’t have to look at the bruises on her arms and feeling her worries about Ted float away on a kitten’s soft purr.

Then, in April, her brother committed suicide. I know that pain, because my brother committed suicide, too. There is the horror of suddenly losing someone you love. There is the terror of the details; the memory, in my case, of driving to his apartment and seeing the blood. And there is the nagging belief that you could have done something more, that you had the power to prevent it. I remember the day, ten years before his death, when my brother walked four miles in the cold, in the dead of night, without a jacket in subfreezing temperature, to knock on my door and tell me, “There’s something wrong with me, Vicki. Don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I was only nineteen. I didn’t say a word. I wish I had.

For Vicki Kluever, the months after Johnny’s suicide were a fog. She has almost no memory of that summer, no recall of anything but a terrible darkness, despite twenty hours of daily sunshine. She had been in Hawaii with Sweetie, the first real vacation of their lives, when her brother died. He had called to say he loved her, to take care of herself. She had felt a terrible premonition, but what could she do? She was a thousand miles away. A few hours later, he was dead by his own hand.

The weight was crushing. She was drowning in grief. And she had no way to comfort her daughter or mother. Sweetie had loved her uncle Johnny. He rode a motorcycle; he wore a leather jacket; he was cool. She couldn’t fathom his death. Her mother couldn’t handle the loss of her child. She leaned on Vicki for support, as she always had. I remember that as well, the obligation of the good daughter, the need to be strong. When I arrived after my brother’s suicide, the first words my mother said to me were, “You can’t cry. Because if you start crying, then I’ll start crying, and I don’t know if I will ever stop.”

So Vicki Kluever held it together, as she always did. Through a terrible summer, as four more suicides rocked the small Kodiak community, she held it together for her daughter and mother. She leaned on whatever she could: work, friends, even Ted. But especially her cat.

And then, in August, Christmas Cat disappeared. He was gone three days before Vicki found his body, battered and lying in the thick undergrowth ten feet beyond her fence. She knew immediately what had happened: CC was sitting on his favorite fence post, taunting the neighbors’ dogs, when an eagle struck. The bald eagles of Kodiak had wingspans of eight feet or more; it was nothing for such a bird to pluck a twelve-pound fish from the ocean . . . or a nine-pound cat from a fence. She looked at the sky, so limitless and empty, but didn’t know what she was looking for. She remembered the sight of CC on Christmas Eve so long ago, his sputtering cough, his brave attempt to throw himself over the edge of the box. She was Vicki Kluever, strong and independent businesswoman. She didn’t cry. She definitely didn’t cry over cats. But she was crying now. She was crying so hard, and from so deep within, that she would physically ache the next day. Perhaps that seems too much, to cry so hard over a cat, but if you’ve ever belonged to an animal, you understand the grief. She had lost another family member. She had lost the friend that comforted her. What was she supposed to do now?

Noticing her despair, Ted brought her a new cat. Vicki, perhaps justifying, says he found Shadow outside his office; Sweetie, who, like CC, never cared for Ted, claims he found her outside a bar. Either way, the truth was that, only a month after CC’s death, Vicki was in no mood to adopt another cat. Not any cat. Not from anywhere. Believe it or not, there was still a part of her that didn’t like the idea of cats, and she certainly didn’t think she could just replace CC. But she accepted the tainted gift, the wedge Ted was using to push back into her life. She was too worn out and lonely to refuse.

So she was surprised to realize, when she started to come out of her fog a few months later, that she had grown quite fond of the little girl. Shadow was enough like CC, especially in her love of adventure and her mischievous eyes, to remind Vicki of what she had loved about him. But she was also very much her own cat. Unlike CC, Shadow didn’t have much interest in the outdoors. She didn’t have his cool dignity. She didn’t, if truth be told, let Vicki be the boss. And Vicki loved to be the boss. Instead, Shadow had a racing, jumping, wall-banging energy that completely disrupted, in the best possible way, Vicki’s life. She was always around, in other words, but never underfoot. Her favorite game wasn’t lap sitting; it was tag. If Vicki was in her casual clothes—there was still a prohibition against fur on the business suits—Shadow would sneak up and touch her on the heel. Then she’d take off running. Usually, Vicki tracked her down and tweaked her tail or tickled her belly, then ran away as Shadow chased after her. Sometimes, though, Shadow sprinted up the stairs. She had numerous places to hide up there, and Vicki could never find her. Shadow had no problem waiting for an hour. Then she’d come prancing out for a congratulatory hug. It was just a silly game, but Vicki liked it. It made her laugh. First Christmas Cat had touched her . . . now Shadow, too? Maybe, Vicki thought, I’m a crazy cat lady after all.

The next part, in hindsight, was inevitable. Ted slowly became more controlling and abusive, and Vicki, finally, summoned the courage to break it off with him completely. He took it well at first, but then started drinking heavily. He began showing up at her office around closing time. When she went for business lunches, she often noticed him watching her. He always happened to be at the softball field or in the alley at the end of her weekly bowling league. When she refused to come back, his harassment turned to threats. She applied for a restraining order. Her application was refused until he pulled her from the table where she was eating dinner with friends and dragged her across the restaurant in front of a dozen witnesses. The restraining order was approved the next day.

For a while, he stopped coming around. The mortgage business boomed; the boats chugged; the mountains iced over and the bears took to their dens. On the coast, the ocean pounded the tide pools of Kodiak. Vicki settled in with Sweetie and Shadow, relieved by the prospect of long, slow, peaceful winter nights. Then she came home after work to find her front door open. She searched the house. A jacket Ted had given her was missing from her closet. She changed the locks, but things he had given her kept going missing, one at a time.

Just before Christmas, she and Sweetie made the journey by car, skiff, and foot to Grandma Laura’s cabin on Larsen Island. Grandma Laura had been diagnosed with cancer, but whatever was destroying her was hidden deep inside. That day, she was as strong as she had always been. She baked bread; she poured drinks; she fed logs to the fire like she had every winter for almost thirty years. Her only wish, she told her family, was to die as she had lived, on Larsen Island. When Vicki mentioned her problems with Ted, her grandmother shook her head and said, “Love isn’t blind, but it sure is cockeyed.”

Then she turned to Vicki’s cousin, who was also having relationship difficulties, and told them both, “You don’t need a man. You may want a man, but you don’t need a man. Remember that.”

The party lasted two days, and by the time Vicki arrived home late on Christmas Eve, she felt energized by her grandmother’s wisdom and energy. In a happy fog, she tucked her nine-year-old daughter, already fast asleep, into bed. She smiled as she turned off the lights, remembering how, exactly six years before, Sweetie had stayed up late for Christmas Cat. We can’t leave him alone, Mommy, she had said, even if he’s going to die. When she came down the stairs, still warm from the memories, Ted was standing in her living room.

“You’ve ruined my life,” he said. “Now I’m going to ruin yours. I’m going to burn this house to the ground, and I hope you die in it.”

She called the police. The state trooper who had helped her get a restraining order answered. By the time he arrived, Ted had disappeared.

“I know his type,” the trooper said. “I know his history. I’m sorry, but this is not going to get better.”

For two months, the trooper checked Vicki’s house twice a day, varying his routine and time of arrival. Around April, when the ice was just starting to split in the streams, he sat down with her. Ted had been visiting her neighborhood, he told her, almost every day.

“This guy knows how to pick locks,” he said. “You could change the locks every hour, and he could still get in. A restraining order is only good if someone is standing here waiting for him.” The trooper stopped. Then he said something Vicki never forgot.

“Do you have a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how to use it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you shoot to kill?”

Vicki stared at him. She could feel her heart pounding. “What are you saying?”

“He is dangerous.”

“You are asking me to shoot and kill the man I spent two years of my life with?”

“I’m saying that if he’s in the house, and you have a gun in your hand, you better shoot to kill.”

That night, Vicki slept with her pistol under her pillow. Shadow slept beside her, Sweetie down the hall. The next night, she stopped fooling herself. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t shoot to kill.

She called her boss in Anchorage. “I hate to do this,” she said, “but I have to leave.” She told him the reason. They discussed options and, a few weeks later, he arranged for her to transfer to Wasilla, which, contrary to popular perception, is not a small, off-the-beaten track town like Kodiak but a bedroom community of Anchorage. The company had been planning to close the Wasilla office, which was losing money. Vicki, as the new manager, would have one year to turn it around.

She rented an apartment in Wasilla and started packing. She wanted to leave quickly, but she had to talk to her clients, finish her remaining work, sell her house, say good-bye to her family and friends, and make arrangements for her daughter. Five days before they were scheduled to leave, Sweetie woke up screaming in the middle of the night.

“There’s something wrong with Shadow,” she said when Vicki came running into her room.

The kitten was lying on her side on Sweetie’s pillow, panting heavily. Blood was smeared on her fur and the pillow case. For some reason, when Ted gave her the kitten, Vicki assumed she was fixed. By the time she took Shadow to the vet, it was too late, and in the last few frantic, terrifying months that fact had slipped her mind. Now her cat was giving birth on her daughter’s pillow.

“It’s fine,” Vicki said. “It’s just the babies, Sweetie. Shadow’s having babies.”

She got a packing box. Carefully, she placed Shadow on a blanket in the box and carried her to the empty walk-in closet. Vicki and Sweetie grabbed pillows and lay quietly on the floor beside her. They assisted Shadow with the breaking of the sac on one of the kittens and, despite the chaos of their lives, felt renewed by the five new lives that wiggled on the floor beside them when morning finally came.

A few days later, when Vicki flew to Anchorage, she left Sweetie in Kodiak with her mother but took Shadow and her kittens with her. She had rented her new apartment sight unseen. She had no furniture. She had no child care lined up. She didn’t know if she even wanted to live in Wasilla. She knew, at least for the moment, Sweetie would be better off in Kodiak. But Shadow? She didn’t trust anyone else to care for her kittens.

The apartment was awful. It had ratty carpet, unscreened windows, a broken stove, and holes in the walls. She had packed only one suitcase, so there were no plates to eat from or cups for water. The ferry from Kodiak was grounded for repairs, so she had flown with Shadow and her kittens tucked in a carrier under her seat. Now, without her car, she had no good way to get around Wasilla. (The six of them would fly back and forth to Kodiak four times to visit Sweetie and complete the move; Vicki always joked that it would have been a lot easier if the cats had qualified for frequent flyer miles.) She went to her new office and realized the only hope was to lay off half the staff and hope the rest could turn the branch around. That afternoon, a severe Alaska summer storm blew in and plunged the world into twilight. She sat in her empty apartment, without dinner, and listened to the rain. She missed the old house in Kodiak. The one she had bought and remodeled and cared for on her own. She missed her old job and her comfortable community. Most of all, she missed her daughter.

Thunder ripped and rain, mixed with summer hail, pounded the window. The suitcase lay in the corner, her two business suits hidden from cat hair in the closet. She reached out and stroked Shadow, who was lying nearby. Her kittens were tottering around her on the dirty carpet, knocking each other over and nuzzling for milk. The runt was black and orange, but the others were jet black like Shadow and Christmas Cat. She stuck her finger near one of them; he rolled over and sniffed it. His paws were like tissue paper, delicate and almost soft. She started to cry. She hadn’t known she was going to until the tears were on her cheeks.

How could she have made the same mistake twice? How could she have allowed another man control over her? She had been raised by a difficult father, and she had fallen into the same pattern again and again. Her husband. Ted. She was strong, independent, smart, hardworking, successful, and yet bad relationships had left her sitting on the floor in a dingy apartment, without a stick of furniture, in a town she didn’t know. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so . . . weak? The rain beat against the window. She sniffled, then wiped the tears from her face. The kittens wrestled on the floor, content and playful, completely oblivious to the situation around them. Shadow looked at her, her eyes half open in a sleepy expression, then turned back to her babies.

And for some reason, that made Vicki smile. And then, because she was smiling, she started to laugh. Here she was, an avowed cat hater—or at least cat ignorer—for most of her life, and she had chosen to bring her kittens instead of her daughter on a life-changing five-hundred-mile trip. Instead of Sweetie, she was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment with a cat and her kittens for company. And not just any cat—the cat her stalker had used to win her back. A cat that, in a way, represented the worst betrayal of her life. But a cat she loved just the same.

Some people say loving a cat is about circumstance. The right cat, the right time, the right story. It’s about projecting our desires; it’s about having a crisis big enough to create a need. But that’s not true. That’s not true of Christmas Cat, the first cat Vicki loved. That’s not true of Dewey, who won me over not by launching my career but with a playfully obstinate disposition and a sweet and abiding love. That’s certainly not true of Shadow, who had appeared in Vicki’s life at the wrong time and, more important, for the wrong reason.

We don’t love cats out of need. We don’t love them as symbols or projections. We love them individually, in the complex manner of all human love, because cats are living creatures. They have personalities and quirks, good traits and flaws. Sometimes they fit us, and they make us laugh in our darkest moments. And then we love them. It’s really as simple as that.

All her adult life, Vicki hadn’t wanted to own a cat. She was divorced; she was a single mother; she didn’t want to be that lady. But leaving her daughter behind to make room for her cats . . . sitting in an empty apartment and laughing at their antics . . . she was clearly that cat lady now.

And it was okay. She wasn’t beaten. Sitting in that dark apartment, with the rain slamming the window, and the kittens mewling on the floor, she knew she was going to make it. As she wiped the tears from her cheeks, there was no doubt in her mind. She would move out of the dumpy apartment. She would go to the office and fire the smallest number of people possible and then sit down with the others and lead them to success. At the end of the summer, when everything was in order, she would bring Sweetie to Wasilla and raise her as a proud single mother. Nothing is ever a given; Vicki Kluever had always known that. She had learned, more than once, that things could be taken away. But things don’t matter. The importance stuff—your faith, your dignity, your will to succeed, your ability to love—those are yours until you choose to let them go.

The next day, she found a better apartment. She fired two employees but managed to keep four. Within five months, the Wasilla office was turning a profit. Eighteen months later, she was standing in front of an audience of her peers, accepting her award for affiliate of the year. And even now, eighteen years later and two thousand miles away, I am proud of her, because I know how hard she worked for that honor and how far she had come.

The next three years, from a professional standpoint, were the best of Vicki’s life. Sweetie, at first reluctant to move, soon met two lifelong friends and learned to love Wasilla. Ted called a few times, but Vicki ignored him. He couldn’t get to her now, not even emotionally, and eventually he stopped trying. She kept two of the kittens from Shadow’s litter, the black and orange runt and a jet-black kitten who looked just like his mother, and when Shadow died of cancer at the age of nine, Rosco and Abbey kept Vicki company. She had owned several cats by then, most of them pure black, and although none moved her like CC the Christmas Cat, she loved every one. Ten years after leaving Kodiak, she broke the pattern and married the right man: one her cats and Sweetie loved, and who loved them all in return.

“Please don’t see nor portray me as a victim or some poverty-stricken person,” she begged me after our initial conversation. “Yes, there were lots of tough times, but doesn’t everyone have tough times? Based on some of the people I worked with during my career, I see my life as a cakewalk!”

A cakewalk? Not really. A successful life well lived? Absolutely. By 2005, when she retired because she no longer believed in the practices of the mortgage industry she had spent twenty-two years championing, Vicki Kluever was one of the most accomplished Alaskan women in her field. She had coauthored and implemented a statewide program to help disabled adults secure discounted financing; she had managed several offices to unprecedented success; she had mentored a generation of female mortgage officers; she had spent her career, she felt, helping thousands of families make their dreams come true.

She lives with her husband now in Palmer, Alaska, another bedroom community of Anchorage. She is happy. She has the marriage she always wanted: the kind that strengthens instead of maims. She has the freedom to spend as much time as she needs in Kodiak, where the salt air, the heartbeat of life in a fishing town, and the sight of boats in the morning sailing off to the deep waters continue to energize and inspire her. Her daughter Adrienna lives two thousand miles away, in Minnesota, but mother and daughter talk all the time. After some rough years when she was a teenager, they are now the best of friends.

And through it all, there have been the animals: eleven cats for this former cat hater, and even a couple of dogs. They were always there whenever Vicki needed them, just as Christmas Cat had always been. Until 2006, that is, when Shadow’s kittens Rosco and Abbey both passed away within months of each other at the age of sixteen. Nine months later, Choco, a dog Vicki had nursed through severe injuries after he was hit by a car and who had remained devoted to her for the rest of his life, died at the age of twelve. For the first time since she pulled CC from the water almost twenty-five years before, Vicki had no critters around her. It was an empty feeling, especially with her daughter in Minnesota and her husband often away on long business trips, but one she felt ready to endure. Perhaps even enjoy. Then, on a trip to Kodiak to care for her aging mother, a friend introduced her to an elderly dog whose owners had recently died. Bandit, a loving and energetic Border collie mix, now sleeps in her bed every night. In her heart, she knows, she couldn’t possibly love a dog more.

And yet, on those dark Alaska nights, when Vicki Kluever sits in her bentwood rocking chair with the woodstove lit against the long cold hours, a cup of Russian tea in her hand, her husband reading a book on the couch with Bandit at his side, it is the memory of CC the Christmas Cat to which she returns. His lush black fur. His mischievous eyes. The way he would disappear into the forest behind the back fence. The way he would run to her and hold her cheeks and nuzzle his head against her chin. You never forget your first love, I suppose. Especially when his personality embodied everything you believe in. Especially when he taught you to love, when so much of your previous love, outside of family, had been misplaced and flawed. Especially when you saved his life on a quiet Christmas Eve.