9 Lives, 1 Cat

“Ow!” Amy yelped, as a claw found its way into her thigh through her faded nightshirt. “Umbra, bad cat!” She set her book on the bedside table carefully to hold her place and fixed her cat with an irritated glare. He had been friskier today than she could remember him being in years; at first it was cute to see his grayish whiskers twitching like a kitten as she teased him with a feather. Now, it was becoming annoying. This was the fourth time he had managed to draw a pinprick of blood from her in the past two hours, and she had enough.

She picked Umbra up from the end of the bed where he had turned his grey-and-black striped back to her and begun calmly licking his paws and preening his whiskers. The only sign of his previous attack was a twitching tail moving like a separate creature attached to the rest of his body by chance. He lazily regarded her with his grey-gold eyes, yawning widely, showing a pink tongue and sharp feline teeth. She crossed the room and turned the knob of her bedroom door, opening and tossing Umbra out in one smooth motion, only to realize as soon as he left her arms that this wasn’t the door to the hallway—it was the door to outside. This new house was weird, she thought; whoever heard of having a back door in a bedroom?

She and her father had just moved in three days ago so she hadn’t yet updated her mental map from the last house. She was constantly finding herself opening the wrong doors; she thought her poor navigation was due more to the constant moves than any failing in herself. They’d never lived in one house for more than six months or the same town for more than one year; she had lost count of the number of hotel rooms they’d lived in between moves and temporary houses. Amy understood her father’s job required they move so often, but she often wished they could just live in a hotel room, giving up the pretense of the white picket fence, garden, and garage. They always stayed at The Big Sleep; her dad has a membership to the nationwide hotel chain, and their rooms were always exactly the same, which meant no guessing which door led where.

Umbra hit the back porch with a solid thud. Without pausing, he streaked across the backyard in a grey-black blur of motion, then came to a standstill in front of a tree. Umbra leapt onto the tree trunk, digging his claws into the rough surface. Umbra’s great escape had taken less than three seconds by Amy’s count. She watched helplessly as Umbra clawed his way from the trunk to a lower branch, conveniently two or three feet higher than she could reach from the ground. Still standing in the doorway, Amy cursed her luck and looked at her watch. Her dad would be home in less than an hour, and he wouldn’t be pleased that she’d let Umbra loose.

He’d not wanted a pet, but when they’d found Umbra as a kitten she’d only been four and he couldn’t bring himself to deny her request. What he never told her was the first night he had tried to remove Umbra from her childish sleeping grip; the kitten had growled then hissed at him while imitating Velcro, sticking to her sheets. When he’d finally peeled the kitten off the bedding, thanking the Sandman for the deep sleep of small children, Umbra went limp and silent in his hands. At first, he’d just meant to take the kitten out of her room, but after Umbra had attacked him, he took him straight to the animal shelter, dropping him off with the night attendant.

The next morning he’d almost dropped his coffee cup in shock when Amy came stumbling to the table with Umbra purring in her cupped hands. As she climbed her way onto one of the yellow-backed adult-sized kitchen chairs, holding Umbra in one hand and using the other to balance, he could have sworn the look the cat gave him had a smugness that went beyond normal feline snobbery. He’d never tried to separate Umbra from Amy again and had soon let the memory fall to the place in his mind where everything that didn’t fit his practical view of the world came to rest. Amy herself could be found here, but that was also something he didn’t let his mind linger on for very long.

While her father may have been displeased about her insistence on this pet, he never passed up a chance to impress upon her the need for rules and guidelines—he’d read somewhere children needed structure in order to grow, and some unconscious part of his mind compensated for their geographic inconsistencies by enforcing these without fail. One of the rules—guidelines were subject to variables, rules were cut in stone—was Umbra was never to be let out of a house until they lived there at least a month. Sometimes Umbra didn’t set paw in the outside world for a year at a time if they’d moved more than twelve times. Amy sighed to herself, thinking of the lecture that would be sure to come if she didn’t bring Umbra in before her dad came home. He’d been quiet lately; sometimes saying less than ten words in a day. The line that ran vertically between his eyes had been deeper and darker the past few weeks. When he did talk, his words had a monotonous dullness to them that sounded the way old black and white movies looked to her.

Amy went to her dresser to pull out a pair of faded blue jeans and a grey sweatshirt with the logo “build it and we will staff it” in blue black letters across the front over a circular design that showed silhouettes of genderless figures with briefcases at their sides. Her dad’s business sweatshirt he gave out at expositions. She pulled her tennis shoes from where she had placed them under the foot of her bed—she always put her personal items in the same places no matter where they lived—and she slipped them on without socks, tied her laces quickly, and went out the back door. She peered up into the tree and she could see that Umbra had not moved and appeared to be dozing in the crook where the branch met the trunk about 15 feet above the ground.

“Damn cat!” she muttered to herself, relishing the feel of one of the “forbidden” words her dad could say but she was denied. Although she still said it softly, despite knowing her dad was at a business dinner and wouldn’t arrive back for at least another hour. She kept her voice low out of habit more than fear; “A lady speaks at a lady-like decibel” was one of her father’s many well-meant maxims for the rearing of a little girl into a lady. She had recently begun to think her dad kept such strict rules about manners and “ladylike” behavior as a way of compensating for leaving her alone so often. He seemed to think that as long as she was generally polite, appeared well-fed, and neatly dressed, then he was fulfilling his role as a parent without any need for him to spend any extent of time with her, or at least not more than absolutely necessary. They had existed like this, in this way, since her mother had died when she was three; she just hadn’t noticed it before. She’d begun noticing a lot of things about her Dad lately she’d never noticed before.

The teacher at her last school had separated the boys and girls one afternoon and shown a sexual education video which had told Amy nothing she hadn’t already learned from her books and one distant cousin one summer when she was six. She did catch herself wondering why when the bland blonde spokeswoman listed the changes a girl could expect as she entered puberty, why they hadn’t included the dangers of becoming aware of exactly how damaged your parents really are. This frightened her more than the need for training bras and razors, for she depended on her father for her very life – and if her Dad was unable to cope with raising her, what was she to do? She’d already begun missing her childhood, and she was only eleven.

These thoughts scattered through Amy’s mind as she crept towards Umbra, making no sound other than the quick in-out of her shallow breaths, gulfing the distance as quickly and quietly as the fall of dusk. As she looked up at Umbra’s resting place from the vantage of the base of the tree, she saw that he appeared to be relaxed and even napping.

She cursed a silly sing-song syllable under her breath, “Witches and drumsticks,” as she saw that he had somehow climbed a full four feet higher than she would be able to reach. This meant she would have to climb up after him if she wanted him inside before her dad arrived. Umbra, like most other cats, enjoyed climbing up trees, and like most other domesticated cats, did not enjoy climbing down from there anywhere near as much. The first time he had climbed a tree was when she was four or five, and she recalled how upset she had been when he wouldn’t come down to her call. Her dad explained often the best way to get a cat out of a tree is to wait; climbing up after them can result in injuries to both you and the cat, but if you just wait, a cat will usually get hungry and come down on its own.

When it was ten o’clock, a full two hours past her bedtime, and Umbra had been in the tree for eight hours, her dad insisted she go to bed and that Umbra would climb down on his own before morning. She reluctantly donned her nightclothes as her father listened to the late news. She found herself still staring at the ceiling as the light first began to creep across the horizon, signaling the dawn of a new day. Amy waited until the early morning light had given the sky a light dusky blue shadow before jumping out of bed and searching for her tennis shoes. As her hand slipped under her bed instead of feeling the canvas of her Converse, she felt soft warm fur and the brief sandpaper moistness of a cat’s tongue on her palm. She looked under the edge of the bed and found Umbra’s grey-gold eyes staring back at her, one corner of his mouth turned up a little higher than the other, giving him a knowing smirk that would have been unsettling to an adult but went unnoticed by her four-year-old eyes.

When she padded to the breakfast table with Umbra clasped to her chest, her dad raised his eyebrows but said little else. When she asked him if he’d gotten Umbra out of the tree in the middle of the night and put him in her room, he distractedly said no, but it was an old house and who knew what entrances and exits were available to an eight-pound cat. He said this every time this happened, which had ended up being a total of fourteen times over the past seven years. Umbra would run up a tree, stay just out of reach of attempts to retrieve him, and reappear under Amy’s bed before dawn—once appearing despite the locked doors and hermetically sealed windows of a modern condo. Amy had been seven when that Houdini act had happened. Her dad had mumbled something about air conditioning ducts. When pressed further, he’d only turned the page of his newspaper and told her to go wash her face and brush her teeth before school. After this, Amy noticed her dad didn’t so much avoid Umbra as he seemed to forget Umbra existed; he’d forget to buy cat food or litter so often that eventually Amy began buying these out of her allowance. If Umbra walked across her dad’s path, he’d absentmindedly step over the feline without ever looking directly at him. If for some reason he did acknowledge Umbra’s presence—once during a veterinarian visit and one morning after an escape—he did so with a look of unconscious revulsion and distaste which left him in a snappy mood for days afterwards. She tried to avoid this as much as possible by keeping Umbra out of his way and under his line of sight.

Amy went to the yellow plastic picnic table that had come with the rental, dragging it under the branch Umbra was nestled near. Her 4’6” height would never bridge the gap on its own, but with a boost from the table, she thought she could capture him without too much fuss. Clambering onto the table’s tacky surface, she was almost eye level with her wayward cat who had woken from his cat-nap and was regarding her with an uninterested gaze.

“Fine, if you won’t come down on your own, I will come up and get you—and don’t think you are getting any wet cat food tonight, buddy; it's dry food and water for you,” Amy said as she started hoisting herself up onto the lower branches with the ease of an eleven-year-old tomboy. When she looked up from a hand hold, she saw Umbra had moved and was now even further up in the tree, still looking at her with that annoyingly self-aware stare. As if he was making her climb this tree on purpose, for his amusement—“See the two-legs climb,” she thought, “climb, two-legs, climb!” She loved cats in general and her cat in particular, but they always gave her the impression that they were laughing to themselves over some inside joke only felines are aware of, and humans, while unaware, are most assuredly the punch line.

Thinking increasingly anti-feline thoughts, she continued climbing doggedly, relieved when she looked up again after a few feet and Umbra had remained in place. When she was once again in arm’s length, she positioned herself as securely as the branches would allow and reached with her right hand. “Come on, Umbra, and let’s go back down now.” He neither moved towards her nor away from her, just placidly blinked, and meowed once again. She leaned in to try and snatch him from his perch, and as she did, her foot slipped, scraping her bare ankle against the rough bark. She reflexively bit down on her lip from the pain and grabbed the branch Umbra occupied with both hands as her other foot slid out from under her. She swung for one extended moment, both legs pumping the air for purchase and finding none, her small form twisting and turning, a human mobile revolving 30 feet in the air.

Amy’s mind had frozen as her feet kicked wildly in the air without rhyme or reason. She screamed for her dad without realizing it, unnoticed tears streaming down her face from the jarring pain in her shoulder sockets. All thought fled as her consciousness tunneled down to just her two hands tight around the branch that had become her lifeline—all else forgotten. She squeezed tighter, the bark cutting into her skin deeply along the soft palms of her hands, adding an echo of agony to the screeching of the muscles in her shoulder. She found herself instinctively taking in deep breaths, ragged deep sobs tinged with fear. With each breath her thoughts warmed, unfroze, and she looked around for a way out of this precarious perch. She could drop, but she didn’t know if even the rubber bones of childhood could stand a 30-foot drop to hard packed ground. If she couldn’t swing back to a branch, she’d have to attempt it, she realized, thinking of her gymnastics teachers’ tumbling instructions and wondering if it could help at all here.

Before she was able to build much momentum, she felt a warm moistness on her right wrist, followed by a sharp pain and her yelp of surprise. Umbra had moved from his perch and was biting into the soft part of her wrist, hard. Almost more with shock than pain, Amy let go of the branch and now dangled from the creaking and groaning branch by one hand, and she could feel that shoulder stretching and straining under the entire weight of her body. Before she could even try to rebalance, Umbra reached down and bit her other wrist, harder than before. This was absurd. It had to be a bad dream, she thought. This couldn’t be happening, some small rational part of her brain kept repeating, despite all evidence to the contrary. Amy felt the fingers of her left hand slipping. As she lost her grip, her last sight before a branch hit her head and all went black was Umbra crouching to leap, somewhere farther and farther above her. As her vision began to close in, she saw Umbra jump, and as he left the branch, she saw wings, leathery bat wings unfolding from his back. Then she saw nothing more for a while.