Dewey's Nine Lives (17 page)

With most of the cats neutered, and, thanks to PAWS, fewer feral cats roaming the gorgeous palm-lined streets and sea grass-covered dunes of Sanibel Island, the cat colony at the Colony Resort began to dwindle. Mary Nan’s favorite cat, Chimilee, died of leukemia and was buried beside the screened porch next to Tabitha, the beloved Siamese that had started it all. A striped cat with lips so black they looked drawn on with Magic Marker was buried outside their bathroom window, where he often sat. Two cats were buried by the fountain in the center of the courtyard, which they had always treated as their personal water bowl. Dr. Kimling stopped visiting in the late 1990s, after the death of her husband. Her beloved Gail died soon after, at the age of twelve. She was buried outside the door of number 34, the unit Dr. Kimling had rented every year.

The last cat to live at the Colony Resort was Maira, a direct descendant of Boogie, the dappled gray that Mary Nan had so innocently given a dish of milk almost twenty years before. Maira was always a loner, and even when the cat colony was at its height, she had gravitated to Mary Nan and Larry. Now, with the others gone, Maira moved into the bungalow and deeper into the daily routine of their lives. She wasn’t an overly sentimental cat, but she was always there on the fringes, a shadow that followed them through their busy days. As the years went by, she became quieter, but also sweeter, as if she knew she was the last link to precious days, and that it was her obligation to slowly wind to a close those two decades spent in a joyous, laughing, whirlwind community of fur. She died in 2004, having spent five years in Mary Nan and Larry’s home as the last living member of the beloved cat community of Colony Resort.

 

 

Mary Nan and Larry Evans still manage the Colony Resort on the eastern end of Sanibel Island. Most of the longtime guests still come back for their week in paradise, and many of them still talk about the cats that once filled their vacations with such amusement and joy. They are a community, the guests and staff at the Colony Resort, and like any community, they share a catalogue of common experiences. Gail, Boogie, Chimilee, Maira, and the others are still with them, like ancestors or favorite television shows, kept alive in conversations on quiet nights spent under the spell of the star-filled Sanibel Island sky.

It’s not just the Colony Resort. Across Sanibel Island, once overrun with feral felines, the stray cats are gone, like those terrible bombers and their poisonous insect spray. Twenty years ago, when I first started visiting, you couldn’t walk a block without seeing the cats munching on lizards or scrounging scraps at the sidewalk cafés. Now I can drive the length of the island without seeing a single one. Mary Nan knows this is for the best. It’s better for the feral cats, many of whom were ill, scrawny, and struggling for survival. It’s better for the pet cats, who are no longer exposed to the diseases the feral community carried. It’s better for the other animals on Sanibel Island, especially the native animals and birds, so often the victims of a cat’s natural urge to hunt and kill. And if, unfortunately, one of those safer animals is the palm rat, that is a small price to pay to restore the balance of life in paradise.

But still, in her heart, Mary Nan misses them. She misses the eighty pounds of cat that used to sleep on her bed at night. She misses the ritual of feeding and grooming and petting. She misses looking out the window and seeing lounging cats sprawled all the way to the top of a ladder, or lying on the benches in the sunlight with their raccoon friends. She misses seeing them scatter in every direction when the bomber roared overhead. She misses the sight of a door opening and a cat strolling out in violation of all the rules of hygiene and property management. Most of all she misses the comradeship, the sense of being a part of something special as people mixed with cats, and cats mixed with people, and they all enjoyed themselves right down to their bones.

There won’t be any more cats. At least not at the Colony Resort. But Mary Nan and Larry are thinking about retiring and moving back to the mainland, and they’re pretty sure that when they do, they’ll adopt another cat. Larry had always been a dog person, cocker spaniels to be precise, but sharing that Thanksgiving TV dinner with Tabitha in 1969 had changed his opinion of cats forever. He loved Tabitha, and he loved every one of those twenty-eight cats at the Colony Resort every bit as much as Mary Nan had loved them. And like her, he knows that he would enjoy nothing more than to live the last decades of his life in the Florida sun, lounging with a furry friend and remembering those hectic but happy days when the world seemed little more than palm trees and friendship and cats.

FIVE

V
icki 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.”