CAT’S PAW by Laurie R. King

You girls got the balls,” Lauren shouted at the girls on the court. Marisol bumped against Pilar with a stifled giggle while their coach pretended not to notice. This was a long-established, straight-faced game she played with her teams, or maybe with herself, an important part of which was keeping them in doubt as to whether their repressed spinster of a coach actually intended these outrageous double entendres, or if she was just a complete tongue-klutz.

This particular Monday afternoon, the game was proving something of an effort. Lauren’s heart wasn’t in rude jokes. It wasn’t even in the practice, which at the moment involved an intricate figure eight pattern of dribbling and passing, an exercise two of the players had worked out themselves following the Globetrotters field trip the spring before. The girls had come up with the idea, but it needed close supervision to keep it from disintegrating into a pileup, and frankly, their coach wasn’t up to it today.

The third time the tight configuration of weaving figures (one, two, three, and pass; one, two, three-) had collided and dissolved into chaos and irritation, Lauren gave up and set them to a simpler shooting practice. That was better. The rhythm and noises of their shoes and voices soothed her, allowing her eyes and mind to follow their skills and personalities, looking at both with an eye to the beginning of the season in a couple of weeks. Saturday’s informal preseason game, she saw, had helped draw them together, given them the unity of purpose she’d hoped for. The day had been a disaster in other ways, but in this it had been a success.

After a while, she called them over for a brief talk about strategy (which boiled down to Teamwork!), then allowed them a short practice game before dismissing them for the day. She watched them snag their bags and chatter their way out the doors to their waiting rides, feeling pride and affection despite her grinding fatigue. Good team, she thought. Good bunch of girls. God, I’m tired.

At the dinner table that night, bent over her solitary plate of overcooked pasta, Lauren squinted through gritty eyes as she made notes about the team. Her job was teaching social studies and history, but her love was coaching, especially basketball. It was not the girls themselves that gave her pleasure, although she had no doubt that they speculated furiously about her-she was scrupulous about avoiding physical contact, just in case. She was, however, not a lesbian. She was something far more rare, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin, and the pleasure she took in her girls was not for their bodies, but for their freedom. She craved their overheard conversations about hair and parents and boys, much as a prisoner craves a window, and if her own iron bars were made of emotional distance and a firm concentration on the game, she nonetheless secretly reveled in the social interaction of teenagers such as she had never been.

She also drew comfort and pride in knowing that she was, if not exactly liked, then at least respected and (although they might not realize it, or admit it if they did) needed. Junior high school girls were so vulnerable, so adrift on a sea of hormones and insecurities, confusion and energy, that giving them a team to cling to was far more important than just something healthy to do after school. Lauren gave them self-respect and a sense of their own strength, as individuals, as a group, and as a sex. She was aware, always, of the irony involved in their learning this from her, of all people. Hence, for her own amusement, the were-they-or-weren’t-they jokes, those faint overtures from the Lauren who might have been. Marisol coming on nicely, she noted on her pad: cocaptain? Tina, on the other hand, was getting just a bit too self-important for the team’s good: sit the bench for a while?

By ten o’clock she was aching with fatigue and her eyes felt as if she’d been through a sandstorm. Pushing away the twinge of apprehension, she filled her cat’s bowl, set up the coffeemaker for the morning, and went to bed.

And for the third night running, came awake within the hour, heart pounding over the noise that wasn’t there. She fumbled for the clock and groaned at the reading of its luminous hands. What the hell was going on, anyway? She hadn’t had insomnia for years, but for the last three nights she had. Ever since the cat.

With thought of the cat, all hope of sleep shriveled up and crept into a corner to hide. Lauren threw off the covers, felt for her slippers, and pulled on her warm robe as she passed through the dim hallway to the kitchen. By the light of the open refrigerator door she filled a mug with milk and stuck it in the microwave for a minute, added a splash of cheap brandy and a shake of nutmeg, and went to turn on the Weather Channel on the television.

Storms lay over the nation, although it was calm enough here. Timson, her arthritic Siamese, grumbled in to ask what the hell she was doing up this time of night. He sniffed in disapproval at the corruption of the good honest milk in her mug, curled into her legs, and went to sleep.

The other cat had been black, or maybe a dark tabby. On the fateful Saturday morning, not even seventy-two hours ago, she’d been driving through San Jose with four of her girls, heading for a preseason meet with a middle school up in the Bay Area that was famous as the home of three actual, real-life professional women players. Somewhere behind Lauren’s car was a minivan with the rest of the team, driven by one of the moms. It was a clear, sunny autumnal morning: ho hum, another beautiful day in the paradise that was Northern California, and the girls were pretending to scorn the sixties and seventies rock of Lauren’s tape collection, although they seemed to know most of the words. Traffic was moving easily enough to allow the driver’s mind to wander, moving forward to the coming game, then back to the meeting she’d had a few days earlier with a prospective sponsor for the team. She was mulling over his proposal to grace their new uniforms with the name of his software company in letters larger than the girls’ own when the cat appeared.

And it did simply appear, on the road ahead of her, as if it had been dropped from the cloudless blue sky-or more probably, she realized much later, launched from the bowels of the plumber’s truck two vehicles ahead of her. The truck was big and red and bristling with cranes, nozzles, storage tanks, and various fixtures whose purpose Lauren couldn’t begin to guess. For one cat, however, one dark, bedraggled, desperately bewildered feline, the truck had been a place of refuge against the chill of the previous night, its nooks and crannies welcome shelter.

Until the truck reached sixty on the freeway and started to bounce and rattle.

The animal hit the ground running, or trying its damnedest to run, all four feet skittering across the concrete at sixty miles an hour, its paws working automatically to find some kind of traction that would enable it to lunge for safety. It was not tumbling head over heels; its head was bolt upright, revealing eyes popped and staring with astonishment, fur spiked awry with wet or grease. Every fiber of the creature’s being was fighting to make sense of the impossible concrete and steel maelstrom into which it had been ejected, every sinew and cell in its body battling valiantly to stay upright, to find the safe haven that it knew had to be there somewhere in the hell bearing down on it, to gather itself up from the loud/fast/huge confusion and leap in haven’s direction, to survive, to live.

All this-its attitude and its youth, the wide-staring eyes and the state of its dark fur and the way its delicate paws were trying for something they could comprehend-printed itself on Lauren’s mind in about two seconds. The cat simply materialized-it hadn’t wandered out across two lanes of traffic from the shoulder, that would have been impossible-it just appeared, having passed miraculously without harm under the rattletrap old Chevy that separated Lauren from the plumber’s truck, skating down the roadway between that oblivious car’s four tires and shooting out from under the back bumper like some macabre version of Bambi on ice. It had not been afraid, she decided on the tenth or hundredth time those two seconds replayed themselves in her mind’s eye: it wasn’t fear that had bugged those eyes and given such desperate strength to its fragile muscles. Somehow she knew that there had been no time for fear in the moments allotted to it, just astonishment wedded to a frantic and determined hunt for solution. She also knew, queasily, that had there been a vehicle in the next lane, half a dozen cars and a girl’s basketball team would have come to wrenching, steel-tearing grief on top of the cat. Fortunately there had been no car to meet her unthinking yank on the wheel.

The girls hadn’t seen the cat, just shrieked in reaction to the abrupt swerve and started gabbling questions at her. Lauren did not answer. She clenched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, slowing so dramatically the car behind her blared its horn in protest, and she kept her eyes glued to the rust-speckled bumper of the rapidly retreating Chevy. She did not look into the rearview mirror; she did not have to. She knew what her eyes would see there if she did look, knew that the only possible ending to the cat’s story had borne down on it with metal teeth bared and rubber wheels pounding, to give the animal’s valiant efforts a casual, two-ton swat and drive on. Lauren kept her own wide-staring eyes fixed on the road ahead of her and turned deaf ears on the demands of the girls, moving with infinite caution into the exit lane, off the freeway, and into the first convenient parking lot.

Her four girls were gibbering frantically; in a moment the minivan carrying the rest of the team swerved behind them into the lot. All the occupants of both vehicles went abruptly quiet when Lauren flung open her door, stumbled over to the ivy strip bordering the lot, and vomited up her breakfast.

The girls subsided and let the other adult take over. Gwen jumped out of the minivan and trotted over to Lauren’s side, where she stood with one hand on the coach’s sweating back until she was sure the spasms were finished. Then she went back to the van, dug a bottle of water from the cooler, and came back to hand it to Lauren.

“Thanks, Gwen,” Lauren managed when the icy clean water had reduced the awful taste to a burning in the back of her throat.

“Are you coming down with something?”

“You didn’t see it?”

“See what?”

“The cat. It just… appeared in front of me on the road.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Lauren realized how pitiful they were: for this she had endangered the lives of four students? But Gwen seemed inclined to be sympathetic rather than disapproving; after all, nothing had happened.

“Oh, how awful,” she said. “I ran over a dog once, I know how you feel.”

“Just the shock of it,” Lauren said. Gwen thought she was saying that she’d run over the thing herself. Let it be, Lauren thought: her extreme reaction might be more easily understood if guilt were thought to be the culprit, not the weird, almost anthropomorphic link of empathy she’d felt for the animal during those two terrible seconds.

“You going to be okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lauren said heartily, standing straight to add assurance.

“I could run my load up and come back for yours; it’s only about twenty minutes away.”

“No, I’m fine. Really.”

And she was. She downplayed the death of a stray cat for the girls and turned the conversation to the game ahead, she drove at a normal speed the rest of the way, she greeted the other coach (a high school acquaintance) with the right balance of friendliness and good-humored threat, and she worked her girls up into enough of a lather that they bounced out onto the court with that attitude she loved. And if she hugged her jacket around her in the warm auditorium to stifle the shivers running up and down her arms all that day, no one commented.

Her girls didn’t win, but the final score was by no means humiliating, and they sure as hell learned a lot from the others. They even loved the funky pizza parlor the two teams had taken over for the afternoon, and left town with a dozen new best friends and an exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

In the excitement of the day, the cat was forgotten. Lauren drove her quartet of tired players back over the hills, dropped each at the correct front door, and wearily steered herself home. She let herself in, gathered up old Timson, and buried her face into his fur for a minute until he mewed his bones’ protest, then walked into her kitchen, dug through the cupboards for the dusty bottle of brandy, and poured a generous two fingers into a glass and down her throat.

After a while the trembling sensation under her skin subsided.

You’re such a wimp, she told herself. Cats die all the time, sad but true.

Except that she wasn’t a wimp. She’d done hard things when necessary: she’d once beheaded and buried an agonized, broken-back garter snake that some kid had run over on the sidewalk, and she had no particular squeamishness when it came to trapping mice or performing first aid to the goriest of cuts.

Low blood sugar, she decided. She slopped a couple of eggs around in a frying pan and ate them on toast, and felt better. She took another jolt of the brandy to the television and fed an old favorite movie into the VCR; that, too, helped. Pleasantly woozy from the unaccustomed booze, she scrubbed the day away beneath a hot shower, towel-dried her short hair, and fell blithely into bed before the clock’s hands rested on ten.

Only to find the cat waiting for her, riding the undulating concrete on four outstretched paws like a water strider riding the surface of a fast, deep river. Under something it flew-car bumper? tree limb?-with a look of startled, outraged confusion on its near-human features. One front paw came up in a gesture of supplication, and then a sharp noise somewhere in the reaches of the house jerked Lauren out of the nightmare to stare into the dark room, feeling all the cat’s panic on her own face.

Cat: noise. Timson must be-but no, Timson was asleep against her feet. She sat frozen among the tangled sheets, the threat of vomit raw in the back of her throat, straining her thudding ears for the sound to repeat itself. After a minute she got up, took her old hockey stick out of its corner, and crept through the house to see what had invaded. She found nothing, and when she got back to her bedroom again, she saw that the ever-nervous Timson was still fast asleep, which he would not be if there was a stranger anywhere in the house. She propped the stick back in the corner of the room, went back to bed and eventually to sleep.

The doomed cat came through her dreaming mind twice more before dawn, and Lauren spent the next day in a thick-limbed daze, alternating between empty-minded half-sleep over the Sunday paper and unnecessarily vigorous housecleaning. By evening she had barely enough energy to perform her always-on-Sunday task of the phone call to her mother.

She did so at the kitchen table, knowing that if she listened to her mother’s endless monologue from a comfortable chair, she’d soon be snoring. As it was, she drifted in and out of awareness with her chin resting on her hand, grunting responses into the pauses provided and wondering how long this creepy cat thing would take to fade.

When she had fumbled and nearly dropped the phone twice, she cut into her mother’s epic narrative of the retirement center’s inefficient postman, told her she’d call again Wednesday, and went to bed.

The cat was waiting for her.

In the morning she felt so utterly wretched at the idea of the new week that she thought about calling in sick. Except that she was not sick, she was haunted, by an idiotic feline who hadn’t had enough sense to know an unsafe resting spot when it found one. For some ungodly reason, those vivid moments had been seared onto Lauren’s mind as if it had been her own life passing before her eyes. She groaned, held an ice-filled cloth to her inflamed eyelids while the coffee brewed, and went to work.

Monday afternoon: a bleary and out-of-control practice session; Monday night: a third set of sessions with the unknown cat. Three nights of broken sleep that reduced her to a nervous wreck-or maybe her nervous state had reduced her to sleeplessness, she could not be sure. She could not, in fact, be too sure of her own sanity. The next night was the same; following that, she knew something had to be done. During Wednesday’s prep period, Lauren picked up the phone to call for help.

Unfortunately, the only psychotherapist she knew, the woman she’d seen a decade before when she’d been an insomniac college student, couldn’t see her before Friday. Lauren’s desperation did, however, make an impression on the receptionist, because Dr. Minerva Henry herself called back twenty minutes later. Greetings, a brief catch-up, Lauren’s halting and by now embarrassed description of the cat episode and its consequences, and Min’s regrets that she had no free time until Friday.

“That’s all right, I understand,” Lauren told her. “I’m sure I’ll be okay until then. It’s just so… silly.”

“It doesn’t sound at all silly.”

“I mean, to be so upset by such an inconsequential event. I really am a very stable kind of a person. Or I was until Saturday.”

“This episode has clearly driven a wedge under some firmly shut door in your mind. You may remember, I recommended ten years ago that you remain in therapy. I take it you did not.”

“But I was fine,” Lauren protested.

“You were functioning well,” the doctor corrected her gently. “Now you’re not. We’ll sort it out beginning Friday.”

“Two more nights like I’ve been having, you might want to book me a padded cell,” Lauren remarked. As an attempt at dry humor, it fell completely flat, leaving Min Henry to take it as a cry for help. In truth, it was.

“Avoid caffeine,” the good doctor recommended. “And no alcohol, either. Eat well, get some nice healthy outdoor exercise, and drink a glass of warm milk before bed. You might also take a pen and paper to bed with you, to write down any words or images that come to mind when you wake up. We’ll talk about those on Friday.”

The mere suggestion that the problem might be sorted out was a comfort, and helped Lauren make it through the day and the practice session. She ate a balanced dinner, corrected the stack of exam papers, and phoned her mother to listen to the endless trickle of gentle complaints about the workers and neighbors in her quite comfortable retirement home.

“Mother,” she said at one point, interrupting a detailed description of the tragedy inflicted by the cook on a poor, unsuspecting piece of beef. “Did anything ever happen to me as a child that involved a cat?”

“A cat, dear?”

“Yes. The other day I saw a cat get… hurt, and it’s given me nightmares. I just wondered if maybe something similar happened when I was small, that I forgot about.”

“Oh, dear, how terrible for you. One of the ladies down the hall has bad dreams, she talks in her sleep so you can hear every-”

“Mother? The cat?”

“We never had cats, dear. Your father didn’t like them.”

“But did I-oh, never mind. How is Mrs. Peasley’s leg doing?”

She hung up twenty minutes later, knowing more than she cared to about the pernicious results of circulatory problems but little the wiser about cats. However, mention of her father, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times, seemed to drive another section of wedge into the gap opened by the cat. That night’s dream found her sitting not behind the wheel of her car as the frantic man-faced cat spun around and around on the surface of the roadway, but rather on a hard bench of a seat beside her long-estranged father. He seemed enormous in her dream, as he had not been in life, bristling with the self-importance she had believed in until college freed her of illusions, the father of her youth.

As it turned out, it was Father who took up most of the Friday session with Min Henry, not the list of words and images she had jotted down in the still of the night (wet fur and fast current; also mouth “O” in surprise and too fast for fear and thunk!). Her ambiguous feelings toward her parent, his peculiar combination of the ineffectual and the quick to anger, her jumble of respect and love and fear that must, it occurred to her, be very like the feelings her mother still bore for the man who had abandoned her with two small children and a mountain of debts.

What did all that have to do with a cat? she asked the therapist at the close of the session.

Patience, the woman said. And maybe we should meet twice a week.

The nightmare retreated a fraction, in frequency if not intensity. Once or twice a night instead of every couple of hours: cat/panic/bench, father/thud/wake.

The following Wednesday, Lauren forced herself to ask her mother again about what might lie in the past.

“The cat again, dear?”

“When I was with Daddy.” Daddy? she thought; I haven’t called him that since I was eight.

“Oh, sweetie, I wouldn’t know. I mean, your father often took you and your brother off for a while so I could go to the hairdressers’ or some such thing. You’d go to the beach or the country club. He liked to show you off. But I’d have thought that if something happened during one of those outings, he’d have mentioned it. Then again I suppose he could have told me and I’ve forgotten it, I do forget so much. But not usually from the past-isn’t it funny how I can forget where I put my book down but I can remember what dress you wore to your fifth-birthday party? No, I think I’d remember if something happened to a cat while you were out with him. There was the time your brother cut his hand at the racetrack, I remember that. And you were frightened once when you got separated from your father for a few minutes at the county fair; you clung to my skirts for a week after that. I suppose you could have seen a cat get hurt during that time, although what a cat would be doing wandering around a crowded fairground I can’t think.” (Dropping out of a shiny red tractor, maybe?) “And there was the time, when was that? Just after your brother was born, that’s right, when your father took you for the day. You went fishing with him and, um, Arty. You remember Arty?” Lauren’s antennae pricked at the casual tone of her mother’s voice. Arty? But her mother was rushing on. “I wasn’t too keen on the idea of you in a boat, you were awfully young, but your father promised me he’d keep your life vest on you every second, and with both of them to keep an eye on you, you’d be fine. Which you were.”

“Arty? I don’t remember-wait a minute. Was he a man with a red face and a mustache?”

“That’s right, fancy you remembering that! And he was always smoking a cigar. It had a lovely smell, I thought, but your father wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. You loved the smell, always followed him around, even when he went outside to smoke. He called you his little shadow,” she said wistfully. “You missed him so when he left, moped around for days.” I missed him, Lauren heard in her mother’s voice.

“Where did he go?”

“They told me he’d gone to Montana.”

Lauren waited for more; when nothing more came, she found herself sitting forward, as if to pull information out of the telephone. Her mother’s uncharacteristically brief answer seemed to echo down the line.

“Did he?” she prompted.

“Oh, dear,” her mother replied with a sigh. “I don’t know. I suppose he must have, although at the time, well, I thought he’d maybe had an accident, out hiking somewhere. He was a great one for hiking.”

“Didn’t anyone go looking for him?”

“No, honey, that was only for a couple of days. And then he called your father to tell him he was quitting-a middle-aged crisis I guess they’d call it today. Anyway, he just quit, threw it all over of a sudden and left town. It must have been right after that fishing trip, come to think of it. That’s right-your brother was just born, you were moping around and having tantrums at the drop of a hat, your father was even more short-tempered than usual. We thought it really was very thoughtless of Arty, to leave him in the lurch like that, and at such a difficult time. Then a few weeks later the accountant found that Arty’d been siphoning off cash. He was your father’s manager, you remember. Young for the job, but capable. Later the police decided he’d panicked, thinking they were on to him, and that was why he left in such a hurry. He probably moved to Mexico or something-your father had a few phone conversations with him, asking him to take care of some things, but those stopped after a few months.”

“I might have seen something that day he took me on the boat?” Lauren asked, trying to tug the conversation back to where it had begun.

“You might have, I suppose. I wasn’t in any shape to take notice of much right then. I’d had all these stitches, down there, you know, and they were so uncomfortable, and then you were going through this phase of being jealous of your new brother and so kept waking me up at night with your bad dreams and forgetting your toilet training and bursting into tears at the least thing. Which was perfectly normal with a new baby in the house,” she hastened to say, “even if maybe a little extreme. In the end I had to agree with my mother and your father that the best way to let you get over your naughtiness was to ignore it as much as possible. And you did settle down, after a while. In fact, you became a new child, so quiet and obedient. You were always so good with your brother, too.”

Her mother dithered on for a while, recounting in intimate detail the extensive difficulties the stitches had caused, even going so far as to speculate aloud (Does she even remember that she’s got her daughter on the other end of the phone? Lauren wondered) that the lingering discomfort, and at a time when her husband needed her most, what with the embezzlement and Arty’s treachery and all, had contributed to the divorce.

Lauren interrupted desperately, before her mother could go into any greater detail. “Well, think about it, Mother, see if you can remember anything traumatic involving a cat.”

“I’ll try, dear. You could call your father and ask him. I have a number for him somewhere.”

Lauren cut her off, knowing that she was about to take the phone over to the desk and begin a search. She had no intention of asking her father about it; she hadn’t talked to him in so long she’d forgotten the sound of his voice, and she wasn’t about to resume their relationship with a revelation of her psychic distress. Maybe her mother’s approach was best and would work as well now as it had then. Ignore it. and it’ll go away.

Her mother’s approach, to ignore distress. Look at their conversations centering around the cat: She’d been fond of Arty, that was obvious, but expressed neither resentment nor even puzzlement at his abandonment. Then must have come a hellish time-a newborn and a jealous three-year-old, a demanding husband and the first threats of bankruptcy, the revelation that a trusted friend (or more than a friend?) had stolen them blind. Creditors, an abrupt change in lifestyle, a husband fleeing infamy and leaving her behind to raise two children on a secretary’s pay. Lauren’s father, meanwhile, had salvaged enough out of the whole mess to afford a nice house on a tropical island, complete with a twenty-four-year-old “housekeeper.”

Ignore it, and it’ll go away. Only it didn’t. The nightmares continued. Not every night now, but at least every other, she would see the spinning cat with the human face, hear a startlingly loud and completely imaginary thud, and come heart-poundingly awake in the dark. It was beginning to make her angry. And just a little bit worried. Insanity didn’t run in her family, so far as she knew-although come to think of it, her father’s final loss of stability had come when he wasn’t much older than she was now.

Another Friday and Monday in Min Henry’s soothing office, a Sunday and a Wednesday correcting papers and grunting replies while her mother rambled on in her ear, practice three afternoons and the beginning of the season on Saturday, plus her regular schedule of classes. A person could grow accustomed to anything, Lauren said to herself; even being haunted by a cat. Still, regular as clockwork it came: hard bench under her bottom, cold wind on her face, wet fur and the “O” of shock, a thud and the roaring sound of blood beating through her ears in the still house. Then the following Monday, Min Henry tapped the wedge in a little further, with a couple of questions.

“Tell me again about the sound you hear in your dream,” she said in this, their sixth session. “Was it the car behind you hitting the cat?”

“In my imagination, maybe-I didn’t actually hear anything. I couldn’t have, since I know I didn’t hit it, and the car windows were up and the tape player going.”

“Then what is the sound?”

“That is weird, isn’t it? In the dream, it’s the sound that panics me more than anything.”

“You described it as a clunk?”

“Sort of a hollow thud. A little like… Jeez. Is it like…? No, not really. I was thinking it reminded me of the sound of a basketball bouncing, but that’s not it. Other than a sort of hollowness. Brief, final-God, Min, I don’t know. Why does it matter, anyway?”

“Okay, Lauren, take a couple of deep breaths. The tissues are on the table next to you.”

I’m crying, Lauren realized with a shock. Why am I crying? What the fuck is going on, a stupid frightened cat causing some damned psychosis or something. “Why is this so awful?” she pleaded. “I mean, I could understand if I’d watched a person get run down, that would be enough to haunt you, but cats get killed all the time. And it wasn’t even me that hit him!”

One of the things she had always liked about Min Henry was that the doctor actually answered her patients’ questions instead of turning the questions back around. Now she said, “Lauren, you are assuming this scene with the cat has triggered off some traumatic episode or emotion that you’ve hidden from yourself. That may be so, or it may simply represent some state of mind you’re having trouble acknowledging. In either case, the key may lie with that anomalous sound. You say it doesn’t belong with your memory of the actual cat incident; if that’s the case, then it must have snuck in from elsewhere.”

“But where? I told you that my mother had no idea of a trauma with a cat.”

“Could it have been something other than a cat?”

The simple question reverberated softly through Lauren’s mind, stirring up an odd and unidentifiable series of feelings, excitement and confusion and a peculiar stillness, as if she were a rabbit hiding from a circling hawk. She blinked, and found that the therapist was watching her closely.

“We’re running short on time today,” Min Henry told Lauren, “but I can see that sparked something off.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it, for next time.”

“How about trying hypnosis?” Lauren blurted out. “This not knowing-it’s making me crazy.”

“Lauren, I’d rather see if your memory can loose this on its own. We can try hypnosis, but let’s give the mind a while longer to work it out.”

“How much longer?”

“Give it a month, two at the most. Your doctor gave you the prescription for sleeping pills, didn’t he?”

He had, although they left Lauren feeling as groggy as sleeplessness did. Two months?

But in the end it didn’t take anywhere near that long.

The week passed. Wednesday a conversation with her mother, Friday a session with Min, two more practices, four broken nights, and all the while Lauren’s mind fretted over the question.

Could it have been something other than a cat?

Oh, yes. But what?

Saturday dawned, four endless weeks after the cat had fallen from the sky and into Lauren’s mind. There was a game this morning, and Lauren dragged herself reluctantly from bed, made herself a pot of forbidden coffee, and drove to school. The girls were excited, the new uniforms looked good, the other team was strong enough to challenge but with definite exploitable weaknesses, and the bleachers were full of enthusiastic supporters. Lauren’s own problems, for once, retreated.

It happened in the last quarter, the blow that hammered the wedge all the way home and split her memory clean up the middle.

The score was 47-45, the home team hanging on to its slim lead through the quarter, when the visitors called a time-out and sent in three new players, girls who separately were a threat, but together bonded into something formidable. A tipped-in rebound tied the score, a gorgeous shot from what seemed like center court put Lauren’s girls three points behind. They made up two, the others matched it, then got two more, and with ninety seconds left on the clock, the struggle was in earnest. As the visitors brought the ball down, Marisol’s hand darted out to slap it away; Juana was there as if by magic, and the two girls flew down the court with a stampede on their heels. The crowd stood and roared as Juana leaped up to drop the ball through the hoop. Then the other team had possession, sprinting down toward the basket with the determination of aristocrats threatened by the lower classes. They slammed into the home players, tried for a shot, missed, and as Marisol struggled to position herself for a rebound, the opposition’s six-two forward rose past her, spiked the ball in, and came down again with her elbow centered squarely over the top of Marisol’s skull.

The crack must have been more imagined than actual, since the noise level in the auditorium was so high only a gunshot would have risen above it, but the impact was nearly as great. Marisol’s knees turned to water and she staggered back into the girls behind her, collapsing slowly until she was sprawled flat on her back, her short hair spiky with sweat, eyes wide, mouth in an astonished “O.” Three hundred throats went abruptly still as the girl lay briefly stunned, then Lauren, in a narrow gap between two players, saw the comprehension come back into Marisol’s eyes, saw the girl’s focus snap onto the clock to see if she had time, saw the determination to regain those points, to get back into play, to win.

The tall forward was nursing her elbow with stifled curses and the other coach was racing across the court to see if either girl was badly hurt, but Lauren stood rooted in place. Thud; bewilderment; spiky hair; a determined struggle to rise. The faint lapping of waves against wood reached Lauren’s ears. Marisol sat up, the opposing forward stopped hugging herself to reach down and pull Marisol to her feet, the crowd applauded its relief, and players from both sides gathered around the two girls.

Nobody was expecting one of the coaches to collapse. No one even noticed Lauren at first, standing rigid on the sidelines, both hands clapped over her mouth, her face as bleached as the team’s new shorts. She stared at Marisol, who was rubbing her head and shrugging off the concern of her teammates, and then Lauren’s knees gave way and she dropped to the court, completely limp. It was Lauren for whom the paramedics came.


***

In the hospital emergency room, with the curtains drawn and a call in to Min Henry, Lauren saw it again and again, a twenty-six-year-old movie playing itself out in her mind’s eye.

The bench beneath her had been the unpadded seat of an old wooden skiff, her tiny shoes dangling free of the boards; the gray expanse of concrete was really the cold surface of a wooded river in winter. The young man in the water had been, she could only assume, Arty. She had adored him-that she remembered-not just his fragrant cigars, and he had gone into the river with a huge and bewildering splash, to surface, spluttering, head bolt upright and eyes popping at the shock of cold, a look of astonishment on his face. He had shaken his head like a dog, making his dark hair go spiky; his naked hand, surprisingly delicate without the glove, had reached up, in supplication or to ward off the next blow of the upraised oar. His eyes had been frantic, locked into a determined search for support, for haven from the icy water. He had been about to lunge for the boat when the oar hit him a second time, with a weird, hollow thunk.

She had been little more than a baby, too immature to make any sense of what her eyes had witnessed, too young to remember this confusing event in a confusing world. Until the cat had dropped in front of her and shaken loose her father’s deed.

Lauren looked up at the rattle of the curtain being pulled back. Min Henry’s kind face was pinched with concern.

“The sound was an oar,” Lauren told her without preamble, reaching out for the therapist’s hand. “I was too young to make any sense of it, but it was an oar, hitting the head of a man in the water. A man named Arty, my father’s manager, whom I loved, and used to follow around like a shadow. I think my mother was having an affair with him. My father set him up, made it look like Arty was the one who stole the company into bankruptcy. When Arty was never found, everyone assumed he had fled to Mexico.”

It explained an awful lot, Lauren thought, about what I became. When I was two and a half years old, a young man with spiky hair passed in front of me, and was gone.

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