Escape (13 page)

I’m not sure how long I sat, but I greeted each cat in the same soft breath. Some had bald spots where an infection was being treated, others had scars or scabbed ears or crooked limbs. When a tiny calico, likely full-grown but malnourished, rubbed its sweet little gray-apricot-and-white head against my arm, my heart melted.

“Hello, angel,” I murmured, feeling victorious when it let me scratch it between the ears. I told another curious comer, “Aren’t
you
a handsome boy,” and a third, this one with a bright red scar where an ear had once been, “You are a
total
love.”

They were. Each one of them. They needed love, and little by little, despite their scars, bruises, and maimings, they were loving me back, each one telling me how right I was to come here. Even scut work felt good. There were no hums, whirs, or dings; the smell of cat food was preferable to that of the sub a colleague at Lane Lavash ate in his cubicle daily, and as for caring, cats had it over the firm management any day.

I had a focus here and refused to look past the moment. This wasn’t my future. But it was the very last place where I had been unequivocally happy, which made it a good place to start.

I spent all of Tuesday in the Rescue Center.
Hiding out with the cats
, Vicki accused that night, but I wasn’t deterred. Absent a clock, time passed in the most natural of ways, the quiet broken only by soft mews and my own coos.

I made headway with all but the most emotionally bruised of the cats, but it was during a short stint in Rehab on Wednesday morning that I fell in love. She was three months old, a nondescript gray kitten that could have curled up on my Kindle with no overhang at all. Smaller than the others there, most of whom had fresh scars and missing limbs, she was watching from the wall nearly a dozen feet from where I sat on the floor, and showed no outward sign of disability until she moved. Though her stance was wide enough to give her balance, her movements were jerky. She was sidling against the wall, clearly using it for support, but her eyes never left mine.

“Oh my,” I whispered, and leaned back on an elbow to be closer. “Hi, there. How are you?”

Determined
, I thought in response. Despite tremors and a near spill, she continued toward me, leaving the wall only when she was close enough to shift her negligible weight to my arm. “Oooh, pretty,” I crooned, letting her rub me, and still her eyes held mine. They were green and, like her ears, disproportionately large.
Don’t leave
, those big eyes said, piercingly plaintive.
I’m trying
,
really I am
.

With exquisite care, I lifted her and, stroking her quivering body, settled her into my lap.

The woman who headed the Rehab Center knelt beside me. “She has cerebellar hypoplasia. Her brain didn’t develop properly. The cerebellum is too small.”

“What causes that?”

“A number of things can. We’re guessing she was exposed to feline
distemper at a crucial gestational stage. Kittens like this look normal until they start to move around. Then, well, you just saw it.”

“Tremors?”

“Tremors, poor coordination, lack of balance. She falls in the litter box. She falls trying to eat and drink. They found her cowering beside a shelf in the supermarket. She must have been left there by someone who didn’t want her but couldn’t completely throw her away.”

Throw her away. My heart broke. I leaned closer to the kitten. She had the same faint barn smell as the Refuge, but her little body was comfortingly warm. “How long can she last?”

“Oh, very long. We can’t do anything about the underlying condition, but with certain adjustments, she can live well. She needs a litter box with a low entry point and high sides. She needs her water and food in raised bowls. Walkways are a danger—she’d easily fall from a high place, which is one of the reasons she’s in this room. Here, she’s in a safe environment so that she can move around. The more she moves, the better she’ll adapt to her condition.”

I stroked her tiny head, fragile beneath my fingers. Her fur was of medium length and stood on end, giving her a wild look, though she was totally docile in my lap. Eyes half shut, she was tucked in the crook of my leg with one little paw against my knee.

“She is precious,” I said. “Does she have a name?”

“We’ve been calling her Baby because she’s so small, but I like what you just said. Precious. Her birth family had low expectations of her, but she’s apt to surprise us all.”

“Precious,” I whispered, and imagined that her ears perked up, but her eyes had closed, and she slept.

Other volunteers came and went. They called me Em and had no knowledge of my history with the Bells. At times, I even forgot it myself. This was part of my therapy, supplanting old memories with new ones, and I was successful at it until Wednesday afternoon, when
I was leaving the Refuge and felt I was being watched. I half expected to see the charcoal SUV parked nearby, but it was not. Instead, glancing back at the Administration Building from my car, I saw Amelia Bretton Bell on the front porch. She was leaning against the railing holding a tall glass, and might have been leisurely enjoying a cold drink at the end of the day, had it not been for the intensity of her stare.

My heart fell. My link to Amelia should have been Vicki, but it was the specter of Jude that stood between us.

I smiled, waved. When she returned neither, I thought of simply climbing into my car and driving off. I had been hoping to make tea at the inn. After a long day of work, I was tired.

But it was a good tired. I felt mellow. And she was Vicki’s mother, the matriarch of the family, the Grand Dame of the Refuge. Out of respect alone, I slipped the keys back in my pocket and crossed the parking lot.

Halfway to the Colonial, I called, “How are you, Amelia?”

“Surprised,” she replied in the bold alto I remembered so well. An attractive woman with salty hair and eyes whose gold was a mere dusting on fawn, she didn’t look surprised. She looked
annoyed
. “I hadn’t thought you’d come back here. How did the big city spare you? Isn’t scooping cat litter a tad beneath lawyering in New York?”

“Litter is the least of it,” I said, humoring her as I climbed the porch steps. “Working with cats is emotional. It’s refreshing.” And exactly what I had missed. There was nothing intellectually taxing here, just plenty of heart and soul. “Besides,” I added, making light of her dig, “I shovel my share of waste in New York.”

“But you’re used to excitement. I hate to tell you this, honey,” she said, cutting to the chase, “but Jude is gone.”

Not for long
, I thought as I had when Vicki had made a similar remark. But Vicki didn’t want to tell Amelia, and I respected her reasons.

“I didn’t come here for Jude,” I replied now.

“Of course not. You have a husband. It didn’t take you long to find one after you dumped my son.”

The charge startled me. “I didn’t dump him, Amelia. He dumped me.”

“And you ran.” I was searching for a response while she drank from her glass, but she was quick. “You could have fought for him. But you never planned to stay here. All along, you had your eye on something bigger.”

I sputtered a facetious laugh. “Bigger than Jude? Jude Bell was bigger than life.”

“The expression is ‘
larger
than life,’ ” Amelia corrected, and frowned at her glass. “He was my son. He was the light of my life.”

When he was younger, certainly. When he faced a life of promise. Jude the Adult had been an everyday thorn in her side, though Amelia wouldn’t be thinking of that. She spoke as though he were dead, and her pain was very real. Vicki Bell might be right. If he didn’t show, it would kill her again.

Thinking that he was a selfish bastard, I said, “I’m sorry, Amelia.”

Her eyes flew to mine. “Excuse me?” she asked with feigned politeness. “Is that an apology? For what? Running away? Not fighting to keep him here?” Her face held the same coldness I had seen in the Bell family portrait. “You were selfish. It was all about Emily. You hung around only as long as it suited you, then you ran. I always wondered why your parents never came here. If you were so in love with my son, wouldn’t they have wanted to meet him?”

“That summer was a bad one for them.” Mom had just bought her own place, Dad was not happy in his, and I was trying to straddle the chasm. Bell Valley had been an escape for me that summer, too.

Maybe Amelia was right. I had run from Jude’s betrayal just as I’d run from my parents’ divorce. And now I had run from New York.

I was wondering what that said about me as a person, when Amelia asked, “Why are you here?”

Good question. Running was fine, as long as there was a point.
Not wanting to say how bad my city life was, I simply said, “I felt the need to reconnect.”

“To Vicki? To cats? To Jude? He didn’t love you, you know. He loved Jenna Frye. They would have married if you hadn’t come along. You were a toy, an impulse buy.”

“He went back to Jenna.”

“But not for marriage. She wouldn’t have him, not after you.”

The words hurt not because they were unfair—I hadn’t been able to control Jude any more than she had—but because I had grown to respect Amelia the summer I was here. She was a smart woman, the first female at the helm of the Refuge, and a good businessperson. I hated that I evoked something so mean-spirited in her.

Saddened, I said, “Would you rather I not work here?” I wasn’t offering to leave Bell Valley. After accusing me of repeatedly running from adversity, I wouldn’t let her run me out of town. Only Vicki could do that.

Seeming to realize it, she made a dismissive sound and, turning away, murmured, “Do what you want.” As she headed back inside, she took a drink from her glass. The liquid was clear. I had assumed it to be water. It struck me now that it was not.

Of course, that was wishful thinking. Blaming her hostility on liquor made the words easier to take.

You were selfish. It was all about Emily. You hung around only as long as it suited you
,
then you ran
.

Amelia’s words haunted me, because they so related to what was happening right now with my marriage and my job. As revived as I had felt leaving the cats, I was suddenly filled with self-doubt.

But I did want to think of myself as brave, which was why, on my way back to town, I turned off the main road onto a nearly hidden dirt path, a rutted logging lane that had once been tamed by the wheels of Jude’s pickup. In ten years’ time, the forest had begun to reclaim it. As my car began the climb, it was lashed by branches
and jostled by rocks, not exactly what my husband had envisioned for the BMW, but this was the easiest way of getting where I had to go. It was also the safest. These woods were farther from town and climbed higher than those behind the Red Fox. There were moose here—harmless unless confronted even inadvertently, at which point they could charge. There were fisher cats and bobcats, foxes and porcupines. And bears.
And
coyotes. Vicki still denied it, but I had heard them again Tuesday night. They were talking to me.

I jounced upward at a painstaking five miles per hour, sun low, headlights on. With aspens watching and ferns crowding in, the road seemed way too long. I was starting to wonder whether the clearing I sought had vanished—been reclaimed by a wilderness that hadn’t wanted humankind here at all—when the road leveled and the foliage fell back.

As I eased my foot off the gas, the brush under my tires brought the car to a stop. My eyes were a minute adjusting, separating the darkest of forest green from pied granite, but then I sat, hands gripping the wheel against a wave of memory.

Jude’s cottage was made of stone, a one-room deal with a narrow porch, dollhouse windows, and a steep-pitched roof. It remained much as I remembered, if ten years wilder. Ferns hugged the porch, keeling despite their support. Large patches of moss had spread to most of the roof. And the windows I had tried in vain to scrub clean wore a veil of birch flowers, stuck there by spring rain.

Touching the gas, I inched forward. I parked where I always had, in the spot that was barely a spot anymore, beside the pickup that was no longer there, and half expected Jude to stride through that thick wood door to greet me.

Actually, no. He had never done that. He might stand at the door and wait, a half smile on his handsome face the only sign of pleasure. Amelia had called me a toy, in which case the pleasure was amusement. Whatever, he wasn’t there now. The door remained closed, its wrought iron latch dusted with pollen.

I was reaching to open my car door, when I paused. We were still
hours from dark this time of year, but with the sun now on the other side of the mountain, the woods were dusky. There was something eerie about this place. I definitely felt a chill.

But time was short. I couldn’t come here in the dark and I couldn’t come once Jude was back. If I was to be brave, it had to be now. Besides, those dollhouse windows were watching me, daring me, amused in a cocky way, as perhaps Jude had been.

Determined, I opened the door and climbed out. The air smelled of pine, pungent and viscerally familiar. As I crossed a rough bed of needles and dirt, I heard the rustle of underbrush, but the sound was too small to be something to fear. I had barely swatted at a swarm of no-see-ums when I slapped a mosquito dead on my arm.

I had forgotten about the bugs. Spring had been moist that year, too, raising a bumper insect crop in the stream that gurgled just over the rise, and I was their favorite meal. Jude blamed my shampoo, my soap, my body cream, but I hadn’t been able to give any up.

Waving a hand around my head to keep the flyers at bay, I heard the stream, the flap of a startled hawk, the snap of debris as I walked. The porch steps were intact, though littered with woodland waste. Stepping over a dead branch, I approached the oak door and raised the latch. I had to put my whole body into moving the thick wood, and a few inches was all I got, but it was enough to slip through.

The air was stale. That hit me. Then the gloom. With the two front windows giving only spotty light, the place was dark. But not
that
dark. Ignoring the scarred desk, I saw the old sofa and, behind it, the shelves stuffed full of books on foreign lands and distant ports. Photos tacked to the pine walls had curled at the edges, but there he was, hang gliding into the Grand Canyon in one and, in another, planting a flag in Antarctica.