C alico saved me. Not only from the fire but also from the constant longing I had for my mother. It was Calico that I counted on to be home every day after school as I walked down our long gravel driveway. Past the blackberry bushes, past the pink tea roses. She was always there. For eighteen years Calico was the mother cat in our big yellow house. Twenty-three kittens. Seventy-eight (at the very least) field mice, birds, and blue-bellies that she captured out in the pasture. An occasional alligator lizard and close to a dozen tailless voles. Every day, she watched us diligently with her big gold and black eyes.
The fire was an accident. It was close to three in the morning when Calico pounced on my bed and began the distinct yee-oowl sound that came from deep in her throat whenever she’d caught a prize out in the field. Annoyed by her loud cries, I shoved her off my bed. Sometimes she’d bring me a mouse that was still alive and then play chase with it on the borders of my quilt. Usually though, she’d crouch on the dark blue carpet, and I’d hear her crunching up tiny bones like she was eating a whole walnut shell.
But on this particular night, she pushed her nose hard against my face. Between her cries, I heard the crackling and popping coming from outside my window. I turned and saw the glow of flames twelve inches from the head of my bed. Our house was on fire.
I swept up Calico in my arms, ran to the foot of the stairs, and screamed for my dad to wake up. In a frantic scramble, my father ran to the back of the house and began to douse the fire with our garden hose. The flames were burning the outside of my bedroom walls, turning the thick yellow paint black and brittle.
The fire chief later scolded my father for leaving the pile of chemical-soaked rags outside my window, and for not having smoke detectors in the house. “You know how fast this old house would have burned down?” he asked.
My dad shook his head.
“Twenty-four minutes and there would have been nothing left,” said the fire chief.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to lose everything in twenty-four minutes. I knew then that Calico must have come to my room within seconds of the fire starting.
She saved us from losing our house that night — and maybe our lives. But it wasn’t just that night. Calico saved me all the time. This yearning I had for my mother was because she wasn’t around much. I never knew when I would see her next. Calico was always available. Her willingness to let me love her and just hang out with her on the brown velvet couch was the kind of closeness I needed most.
Sometimes she’d let down her guard and race wild through the house. She got this crazy, almost-possessed look in her wide eyes. Then she would tear around our house, galloping full speed through every room, hitting walls and racing upside down along the underside of my grandmother’s old wing chair. She made me laugh, brought me out of my contained self.
Calico had an odd routine with me. Every morning she’d study me in the shower. My father had converted an old wine barrel into an open stall but never got around to figuring out how to put a curtain around it. There was also no doorknob on the bathroom, so Calico could push her way in. Every shower I took, Calico would stand sentinel on the zinc tub across from the wine barrel and watch me. Her pupils narrowed and her eyes rarely blinked as the steam rose up around me and filled the room. I became self-conscious of her steady gaze on my naked body. It made me uneasy. I was starting to develop breasts and hips, and I felt like she was documenting the changes in me, that she quite possibly had arrived from another planet to report on the human body.
Calico gave birth to the strangest assortment of kittens. There were always two or three with tail issues — kinks and knots, and sometimes no tail at all. My brothers and I gave them silly names like Kinks One and Kinks Two and Tommy-No-Tail. My father kept saying he was going to get her fixed “once and for all,” but he was sidetracked raising my brothers and me, and inevitably Calico would show up fat and moody one more time. As soon as her litter was old enough, we’d take them down to Lucky’s Market in a cardboard box with a sign that said “Free Kittens.” I’d point out how unique their tails were, and that was always a good selling point.
Calico chose to have her last litter underneath my covers late one night when no one else was home. I curled myself up on my pillow to give her all the room she needed as I listened in the dark to the sounds of a mother cat giving birth and the tiny cries that followed. I lifted my quilt and watched the last wet black kitten slip out of her body and onto my pink sheets. I marveled at the way she licked each kitten dry. She cared for them with such natural confidence. How did she know how to take care of her kittens? I wanted to know. I wanted to know because I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for my mom to take care of my brothers and me when we were small. And how was I ever going to learn how to be a mother?
My mom was also an animal lover, but in a different way. She collected animals — cats, chickens, sheep, goats, geese, cows. You name it, and she had one running around the property at one time or another. We picked up a curly black puppy one summer at a gas station outside the airport. Mr. Wiggly didn’t live long. Most of my mom’s animals didn’t have particularly long lives — it was often some misfortune or an infection that waited too long before she took the animal to see the veterinarian.
I WAS TEN YEARS OLD when I went to visit my mom one summer in Washington State. She was living on a dairy farm with 180 cows and her new boyfriend, Roger Short. She was engrossed in her New York Times crossword puzzle at the table when I asked her if I could go down to the calf barn. She nodded her head and said that I might look for a few good chicken eggs while I was there.
The black-and-white calves shoved their heads through the wood slats of the stalls and stared at me with their big polished eyes. “Roger likes to wean them young,” my mom had told me. I decided to do a little exploring around the barn. I walked past the room filled with burlap sacks of corn and grain and peeked into several empty stalls. At the end of the walkway, there were two tall white buckets with lids on them, the plastic kind that painters use. They looked out of place to me for some reason, like maybe they were set down there and forgotten. I pried the lid off the bucket closest to me.
I was not certain if what I was seeing was right or true. Kittens. Piled up to the brim. Clean white fur. Brown, black, tan, orange. Small paws with fleshy pads as soft as apricot skin. Wiry tails. Tiny pink noses. Whiskers, as fine as fishing line, almost transparent.
I pushed the lid back on. I guessed that there were more than a dozen piled up in there. I pried open the other bucket only because I wanted it to be something different. But it wasn’t. One all black, one striped orange, one smoky gray, more colors underneath. Soft triangle ears, thin as potato chips. I wanted to stop staring but I couldn’t. A small calico kitten was lying across the top of the heap. Its eyes were closed, but the shallow part of its belly moved — barely — up and down like it was in a deep sleep. I wanted to touch it, but I was afraid.
I ran up the hill through the wet grass and opened the screen door. My mom was at the table with her crossword puzzle, her coffee, and a cigarette.
“Why are all those kittens in the white buckets?” I asked.
She kept looking at her crossword puzzle like she was just about to figure something out.
“Oh, that,” she said with a frown. “You weren’t supposed to see that. Roger was supposed to dump them.”
I waited for her to say something more.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, darlin’. It’s the way of the farm here. There were just too many kittens.”
“What do you mean too many?” I asked.
“Those were feral kittens, wild and inbred — just the ugly ones. Believe me. I can tell the inbred ones right away. Their eyes are wide-set and slightly askew. Their heads are oversized.”
“But how did they die?”
My mom got up from the table with her ceramic coffee cup and walked into the kitchen. I could tell she didn’t want to listen to my questions.
“Chloroform is what Roger said to use.” She measured out a heaping spoonful of sugar into her cup. “But power steering fluid works just as well. It’s very quick. They don’t suffer.”
I felt my throat tighten up like a fist. My legs were as wobbly and uncertain as the calves down in the barn.
“Mom, I saw one breathing on the top, a calico one, not an ugly one, but a long-haired calico.”
“There were no calicos,” she said. “And you did not see any kittens breathing.”
“I did Mom, I definitely saw that one on top.”
She slammed the garbage can lid down.
“None of those kittens were breathing, you understand?”
I was strangely afraid of her. She knew how much I loved kittens. I tried to stop the image of her hands pushing those kittens into the white buckets. But I knew there was a calico. I knew that she killed them.
WHEN I RETURNED HOME, Calico was curled up on my bed. I sat down beside her and ran my fingers through the thick white patch of fur on her chest. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. I would no longer confide in my mom, but I could talk to Calico. She listened to everything. She was like me. She could keep secrets.
As the years passed, I’d tell her about the things I was afraid of and ashamed of — like getting drunk and high in eighth grade and lying to my dad about where I was going on the weekends. I also learned from Calico how to sneak back into the house late at night. I had watched her out in the field so many times that I knew exactly how to take those silent and slow, slow, stalking steps.
Shortly after I graduated from high school, my father got into a huge financial mess and our yellow house had to be sold. Close to everything in our house was auctioned off on the front porch in four and a half hours. My dad explained to me that it might be best for Calico to stay with the house, where she had spent her whole life. She had become such a part of the house and the land there. The new owners of our house agreed to sign a “cat clause” stating that they would keep Calico as long as we wanted — that we could come get her anytime. But my brothers and my father and I scattered like wildflower seeds after we lost the house. I don’t think any of us really knew where we were headed. No one had a place suitable for Calico, who had slowed down considerably but still loved to hunt out in the field.
I pushed the guilt of leaving Calico as far down as it would go.
I had to believe that my dad was right, that she was meant to stay behind. How could I have left Calico? I now ask myself. I was eighteen and trying to figure out who I was. I somehow believed that, when I figured it all out, I would have the perfect place for Calico to live out her last days. A backyard with a field of tall grass, sunshine, and lizards.
I was living in Los Angeles and going to UCLA when my dad called to let me know Calico had died. I was rushing off to a midterm in my art history class and couldn’t take the information in properly. I suppose I didn’t want to take in the news at all, because I went on for a few days not thinking about Calico. I woke up one morning four days later, and I could have sworn I was sleeping in the brass bed I had slept in while growing up. I reached up to twist one of the brass knobs that was always loose, and found nothing. Then I caught the scent of a rubbery beige flea collar and the smell of Calico’s black and tan fur. It was unmistakably Calico’s scent that filled the room. I missed her terribly.
Until that moment, I had not cried over Calico. The loss had been lying dormant inside me. It was my pattern to go underground, where it is silent, and to keep my secrets and feelings safely tucked away. My best childhood friend has told me that I was always like a cat — the observer, the quiet thinker, the one who sits at the top of stairs and listens. But it was Calico who taught me to also be fearless. To run with wild abandon when the urge struck. To be grateful for mice tails and blue-belly lizards. To sit quietly in a window filled with sunlight. To be generous with leftover cereal milk. To stand naked and unflinching while being watched.
Perhaps it is the steadiness of an animal’s presence that gives us comfort. Calico, a black, white, and tan cat, provided that steadiness for me. People could be unreliable. People could leave. But Calico stayed for eighteen years. I have to believe she had a purpose here, and it wasn’t to report back to another planet on the naked human body. She was the mother who stayed. And although I hid my grief when she left, she surfaces so often now when I write. She is within arm’s reach across the table. I can feel the stretch of her spine against the palm of my hand. She keeps showing up to tell me more. It is her indelible spirit that begs me to keep her alive for as long as I can here on the page.