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When I get out of the car in the driveway of the house, I notice the doors of the barn are open. I walk over and look inside. No traps. No cats. No eyes shining from the shadows.
I stand there, looking for a long moment, trying to understand what happened. Then I run to the house and yank open the door.
“Where are the cats?” I yell.
“Your brother called the animal shelter,” Grandad says, looking up from a pile of moth-eaten linens. “They came this afternoon.”
“What about the white cat? My cat?”
“You know you couldn’t keep her,” he says. “Let her go to people that can take care of her.”
“How could you do that? How could you let them take her?”
He reaches out his hand, but I step back.
“Which brother? Who called the shelter?” My voice is shaking with rage.
“You can’t blame him,” he says. “He was just trying to do right by this place. They were making a mess of the barn.”
“Who was it?” I ask.
“Philip,” he says with a defeated shrug of his shoulders. He’s still talking, explaining something about how the cats being gone is a good thing, but I’m not listening.
I’m thinking about Barron and Maura and my stolen memories and the missing cat and how I’m going to make Philip pay for it. All of it. With interest.
9
I HATE WALKING INTO shelters. I hate the smell of urine, feces, food, and wet newsprint all tangled up together. I hate the desperate whining sound of animals, the endless crying from the cages, and the guilt at not being able to do anything for them. I’m already feeling a little crazy when I walk into the first shelter, and it takes me until the third to find her. The white cat.
She looks at me from the back of the cage. She’s not howling or rubbing her face against the bars, like some of the other animals. She looks like a snake, ready to strike.
But she doesn’t look like anything that was ever human.
“What are you?” I say. “Lila?”
That makes her stand up and come to the front of the bars. She meows once, plaintively. A shudder runs through me that’s part terror and part revulsion.
A girl can’t be a cat.
Unbidden the memory of the last time I saw Lila rises. I can smell the blood. I can feel the smile pulling at my mouth when I look down at her body. Even if that memory’s false, it feels real. This—the idea that she’s alive, that I can still save her—feels like playing pretend. Like lying to myself. Like losing my mind.
Her mismatched green and blue eyes are very like Lila’s, though. And she’s looking up at me. And even though I might be going crazy, even though it feels impossible, I’m certain it’s her.
I turn, and she yowls again and again, but I make myself ignore her and walk out of the animal housing area. I go up to the desk, where a heavyset woman in a schnauzer-print sweatshirt is telling some guy where to hang flyers promising a reward for his missing ball python.
“I’d like to adopt the white cat,” I tell her.
She slides me a form. It asks me for the name and address of my veterinarian, how long I’ve lived at my current address, and whether I approve of declawing. I put down the answers that I think they want to hear and I leave the vet part blank. My hands are shaking and I feel the way I did after my father’s car accident, when time seemed to move differently for me than for other people. It’s too fast and too slow, and all I can think is that if I walk out of here with the cat, then I’ll be able to sit and wait for time to catch up with itself again.
“This is your birthday?” she asks me, tapping the paper.
I nod.
“You’re only seventeen.” She points to where it says in bold print at the top of the page: Must be 18 to adopt. I just stare at the words. Normally I pay attention to things like that. I prepare. Map out the variables. But instead I’m sucking air like a fish.
“You don’t understand,” I say, and I watch a frown pinch her brows. “That didn’t come out right. That’s my cat—I mean, the one I wanted to adopt. Someone must have brought her here, but she’s really mine.”
