Ash
I’m standing on Francesca Giovanni’s front porch.
I don’t know how it happened, exactly. She definitely didn’t invite me . . . unless you count the fact that she yelled, “Run!”
when the first fat drops of rain began to hit us.
I don’t know what caveman instinct made me think to grab the cat as I staggered through a million stinging needles of rain
toward Francesca’s front door. But I’m glad I did, because when we reach shelter and Francesca turns to look at me, I see
her gaze—which seemed annoyed at first to find me there—go to the cat in my arms.
That’s when both her gaze and her voice soften, and I see that Francesca Giovanni, for all her attempts to seem stern and
professional, is nothing but a big softie.
“Oh,” she coos. “You poor thing.”
But she doesn’t mean me, even though I’m standing there, basically soaking wet. It’s really coming down. No. She means the
cat.
To me, she says in a completely different voice, “Oh, good, you got her. Thanks.”
“Yeah, I got her, all right.”
I’m not sure for how long, though. The cat isn’t struggling to get away—yet. Instead, she only looks mildly confused. And
why shouldn’t she be? One minute she was rolling around in the dirt of Francesca Giovanni’s yard, and the next she’s in my
arms on the porch, watching the rain stream down around us. The cat blinks a few times and looks around.
Then I feel her muscles stiffen.
Uh-oh. This cat is going to make a break for it. She doesn’t care about rain. She just wants to get away from me, even though
I didn’t lie when I told Francesca I’m a cat whisperer. Cats come to me when I call them (usually).
But that doesn’t mean I can make them do anything. They’re cats. No one can make them do anything.
“Let’s take her inside,” Francesca says. I don’t know if she’d noticed my grip on the cat tightening or what.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Come with me.”
That’s when she starts walking through her house toward what I know to be the laundry room because our floor plans are identical.
Well, not exactly identical. I see right away that Francesca has built-in bookshelves on either side of her fireplace, filled
to overflowing with books of every description, from current mass-market paperbacks to thick psychology textbooks, whereas
I have built-ins filled with sound equipment for the sweet flat-screen I hung over the fireplace.
And Francesca has opted to put a stain on the wood accents throughout the house, matching it to the stain on the hardwood floors, and allowing the true grain of the wood to stand out against the white walls, whereas I had mine painted black, and all of the walls dark gray, because Guy says the focal point of any home should be the windows and the trees and sky outside them.
Still, most of the rest of Francesca’s house looks exactly the same as mine, aside from the furnishings—she seems to have
gone for a lived-in, professorial vibe, which includes not only books, but threadbare Persian carpets, spider plants bursting
from clay pots, and a lot of blue vintage Danish glass that probably cast a reflection when the sun is shining through the
windows.
“Nice place,” I can’t help murmuring as Francesca steers me past the sliding glass doors overlooking the back deck and lake,
and toward the main bedroom—the door to which is sadly closed. The laundry room is just across the hall from the main bedroom,
and this door she throws open, revealing a disappointing lack of used lingerie. “It looks weirdly familiar.”
She gives the barest flicker of a smile at my lame joke.
“Thanks,” she says. “You can put her in here.”
She points into the laundry room, which is peaceful and calm like the rest of the house . . . except for the sheets of rain
drumming against the roof and every single windowpane, skylight, and door.
“Are you sure?” With each step I’ve taken deeper into Francesca’s house, the cat in my arms has sunk its claws deeper into
my flesh. This cat is pissed and possibly not quite as domesticated as I initially thought.
“Oh, yes, it’s fine.”
Francesca doesn’t notice that I’m carrying a ticking time bomb.
She’s too busy filling two blue bowls, one with tap water from the sink, the other with high-quality kibble from a newly opened bag of cat food, and placing them carefully back on the floor.
Other than these bowls, a blue litter box on the floor of the shower, a circular, blue hooked rug, and a blue cat bed near the sink, the laundry room is all white—washer, dryer, floor, walls, shower tiles, even the shower curtain.
My laundry room has a shower in it, as well, for anyone coming in from the lake who wants to rinse off. But apparently Francesca
doesn’t mind sacrificing this convenience for the comfort of the cat currently attempting to flay my skin.
“Okay,” I say, skeptically. “If you say so.”
Then I lean down and open my arms.
For a moment, the cat stays where she is, partly because her claws are sunk too far into my skin for her to make a quick getaway,
and partly because she’s confused about what’s happening.
Then she realizes I’m letting her go.
The cat explodes out of my arms. She lands on the blue hooked rug, where she freezes for a second or two before realizing
the only way out of the room is through the open doorway in which Francesca and I are standing.
That’s when the cat turns and, her ears flattened against the back of her head, makes a beeline for the door . . . and us.
“Run!” Francesca yells again.
This time, I don’t hesitate. I turn and flee down the hall, not stopping until I hear the laundry room door slam closed behind
me.
It’s not that I’m scared of cats. I’m not. I just have a healthy respect for teeth and claws.
“Phew.” Francesca is leaning her back against the closed door as if she expects the cat to come bursting through it like the alien out of that guy’s stomach.
There is no sound coming from the laundry room, but any cries the cat makes would probably be drowned out by the pounding of the rain anyway.
“I’ll keep her in there for a while, at least until she calms down, and I can get her to the vet.
I guess she’s a little more feral than I thought. ”
“Yeah.”
I’m standing awkwardly in Francesca’s dining room, which in my place features a modern glass-topped table large enough to
seat eight beneath a chandelier I found made of genuine deer antlers.
In Francesca’s dining room, there’s nothing but a small tasteful pendant lamp hanging over a round wooden table with mismatched
chairs. The table is piled high with papers, books, magazines, a laptop, and a green leather Filofax open to the calendar
for the day. The calendar has large fifty-minute chunks of the day crossed out in red pen, but no legible writing on it.
“Well, thank you for your help,” she’s saying as she comes away from the laundry room door. “I guess I’ll see you later.”
I’d been subtly checking my arms for blood, though none of the cat’s claws appear to have broken my skin. But now I look up.
“Wait.” I stare at her incredulously. “Are you kicking me out?”
She is. She’s walking away from the laundry room and toward the front door, outside of which the rain is still coming down
in a heavy stream. No more thunder or lightning, but the downpour is rat-a-tat-tatting against the skylights like a drumline.
She pays no attention to this, however.
“Not at all! I just know you have important things to do right now. Weren’t you going to call Mrs. Baumgarten to let her know about her refund?”
“Yeah, but I thought I might wait for a break in the deluge before heading home.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad out there.” She’s smiling at me, which is great. But she’s also pulling open the front door. There,
the sound of the rain is more of a steady roar than a rat-a-tat-tat. It sounds like Niagara Falls. “Just a little drizzle.”
“Are you kidding me right now?”
She looks at the thick curtain of rain streaming down past the overflowing gutters along the roof of her porch and bites her
lower lip. “Well . . .”
“You can’t even see my house through that rain,” I exclaim. The only thing you can see through it is her yard, which has turned
into a river of mud thanks to its lack of vegetation—or rather, any vegetation except for weeds.
“Right,” she says pleasantly. Every word out of her mouth sounds pleasant, including what she says next: “But like I said,
I have patients—”
“No, you don’t.” I point to the calendar. “This says you’re done for the day. You don’t have anything crossed out after four,
which means you’re free, right?”
I watch as her face falls. I can tell she’s not used to people calling her out on her shit, maybe because so few others have
dared.
Well, I dare.
“Oh,” she says, looking even more uncomfortable. “I do have appointments, I just didn’t write them on that. I use electronic
medical record software to—”
“Sure you do,” I say, in as pleasant a tone as she’s using. “Look, I get it. You don’t want me here. And that’s okay. I don’t want to be here either.”
This isn’t a lie. I don’t want to be here in Francesca’s living room. I want to be in her bedroom.
“But I’m not going back out there,” I say, striding over to the deep, comfortable-looking couch in front of her brick fireplace.
“You know, most people would offer me a beer or something out of gratitude for helping them catch their cat.”
“I told you,” she says. “That’s not my cat. I’m going to take her to the vet tomorrow to—”
“I know, I know. To see if she has a microchip. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if I hadn’t come along when I did and
used my extraordinary superpowers to lure that cat inside.”
I flop down onto the sun-faded couch. It’s clear that when it isn’t raining outside, this living room, like mine, gets a lot
of light. Despite the faded color, the sofa is a good one, very soft and wide.
I sink down into the cushions and wonder if this is the same place Dr. Dick used to sit when watching TV at night. There is a TV in the room but it’s small and tucked into a corner, unlike the eighty-five-inch flatscreen I have hanging over the
mantel next door.