There is no better place to mourn. Sanibel Island, and in particular Premier Properties of Pointe Santo, is the most relaxing spot on earth. The beach is crystal white, and there is hardly anyone on it. Well, except “no-see-ums,” evil little creatures that will bite you mercilessly if your bare flesh touches the sand. But, really, that is a small price for a paradise where you can walk (in flip-flops) along the surf, picking up coral-colored seashells, and sit on your balcony, watching mother dolphins and their babies leaping offshore. In the afternoon, I like to relax to the arguing of the mockingbirds that call back and forth to each other “Whhhaat?” (that’s the male, I’ve decided) and “Uh-uh” (that’s the sass-talking female). Even the four-foot alligator on the property is cool. You see him sometimes shuffling lazily across the lawn, completely ignoring the lounge chairs.
Then there are the sunsets. In Iowa, once in a while you get a blast of color at the end of the day, with pinks and oranges and gold. On Sanibel Island, it’s always like that, the vivid colors dominating the sky and then sinking slowly into the gorgeous blue gulf waters and bringing out the stars. You look up from the beach, or from the wine you’re sipping on your balcony, and feel happy and free, awed by the natural beauty and ready to toast a perfect end to another glorious day.
Or that’s usually how it is. With a wedding to attend and long-absent relatives to soothe (and sometimes pretend to ignore), the week after Dewey’s death was going to be crazy, even before the emotional bombshell of his passing. Fortunately, my granddaughter Hannah, the flower girl, distracted me in the unique manner of children: She gave me the flu. Along with twenty-seven other people at the rehearsal dinner. I spent most of the week watching cartoons with Hannah on the sofa, and I spent more time on my knees staring into the toilet bowl than I did watching dolphins frolic in the surf. I was too weak for the telephone, television, or e-mail (I was barely strong enough to follow Dora the Explorer’s mind-numbing adventures, in fact), so I had no idea that back home, Dewey’s popularity was exploding and the library phones were ringing off the hook. I could only look out the window at the ocean and think what a small piece of the world we all were, and how nice it was that the bathroom was only ten feet from the television. Even when you’re vomiting five times a day, there is nothing quite like the peace of Sanibel Island.
So I know what Mary Nan Evans meant when she told me that her thought, on seeing Sanibel Island for the first time, was: “There is no way I could ever afford to live here.” Paradise, after all, had been reserved long ago for the rich and powerful, and like me, Mary Nan was a small-town girl from the Midwest. Her husband, Larry, a maintenance man at a hospital in Waverly, Missouri, had won employee of the year for the state’s western district, and the prize was four days on this small island off the southwest coast of Florida. Mary Nan had been to Florida many times before—she had an aunt who lived in Fort Myers, just up the coast—but the merging of the brilliant blue sky and the brilliant blue water around the tight green strip of Sanibel Island was like nothing she had ever seen. Even the white buildings visible on the horizon looked like the sharpened edges of clouds. As she crossed the long causeway linking the island to the mainland, she thought to herself, Remember this, Mary Nan, because you’ll never be back.
Four years later, in 1984, she and Larry were back, at least in Florida. This time, they weren’t looking for a four-day break from their ordinary lives; they were looking for a job. With Larry’s fifteen years in maintenance, they felt confident he could find work at one of the many resorts that dotted the coast. And the resorts offered accommodations, since being the maintenance director for a large complex of buildings full of tourists who can’t survive a busted ice machine for twenty minutes, let alone two hours, was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job full of people making demands and odd requests. But there was one problem. When Larry mentioned that he owned a cat, the resorts turned him down. Sorry, they said. No animals allowed.
Getting rid of Tabitha, their beloved Siamese, was out of the question. Larry and Mary Nan had adopted her fifteen years earlier, in 1969, when Larry was stationed in California at the end of his military service. Just before Thanksgiving, Mary Nan had seen an ad in the base newspaper: newborn kittens available for adoption. They only had twenty dollars, saved by serious scrimping on an enlisted man’s pay, but Mary Nan convinced Larry to have a look. As soon as they arrived at the apartment, a bundle of tiny Siamese kittens came tumbling out of a back room. Most of them were wobbling and falling over, but one came straight to Mary Nan and stumbled into her arms. Mary Nan held the kitten to her chest, and it stretched up and nuzzled her chin.
“I really want a girl,” she told the woman with the cats.
“Well, you’re holding the only one,” the woman replied.
Mary Nan gave the woman ten dollars for her expenses and left with Tabitha. She spent most of the rest of their life’s savings on litter and cat food. That Thanksgiving, Mary Nan and Larry Evans sat down at the dinner table and said grace over two aluminum-tray TV dinners. Mary Nan can’t exactly recall, but it was probably Swanson’s turkey and gravy. With that little cherry pie on the side. After buying cat food, it was the only Thanksgiving dinner they could afford.
But Tabitha was worth it, because she was the sweetest, most loyal cat any couple could ask for. She never wanted anything but her food. She never made more than a polite sound. She never craved the company of anyone but her parents but was never rude to visitors or handymen. As long as she was in the house, Tabitha wasn’t worried about anything. She slept. She lounged. She let Larry vacuum her neck and the top of her head—yes, with the hose from the vacuum cleaner—closing her eyes as the blast of air sucked away her loose fur. “She even made friends with a mouse,” Larry told me in amazement. More than once, he found her in the living room just staring as an ancient, gray-whiskered mouse (according to Larry, who is apparently an expert on mouse whiskers) tottered off to his hole. I have no idea how Mary Nan put up with that. I would have demanded my cat—or at least Larry—get rid of that mouse. But she never held this act of clemency against Tabitha. Every night, the cat slept in the center of the bed, right between Larry and Mary Nan. If Mary Nan awoke during the night, she’d often find Tabitha sitting on her chest, staring into her face. Completely mouse-free.
Mary Nan wasn’t shy about telling herself, Larry, or any of her friends about Tabitha’s role in the family. She and Larry weren’t able to have children (Tabitha couldn’t either, although that was her owner’s decision), and Tabitha was like the daughter they’d never have to argue with or beg not to date that “bad boy” all the girls were cooing over. For a while, Mary Nan even carried Tabitha around in a baby blanket her grandmother had crocheted for her.
Of course, cats aren’t children, and they also weren’t allowed in their military-base apartment, so Mary Nan was careful to keep Tabitha a secret from the neighbors. When she took Tabby to the car for a vet’s visit, she carried her not in a cage but in a brown paper bag, like a sack of groceries. Tabitha never complained. Not once. In fact, she loved it. Brown paper bags became her favorite toys, and she’d roll around with her head inside them for what seemed like hours. She also loved the car. Often, she would meow at the apartment door, begging to be taken down to the car. On mild weather days, and there were a lot of those in Southern California, Mary Nan would leave the cat curled up on the hump in the backseat, which Tabby had torn to shreds with her claws. A little food and water, and Tabby would have lived in the car. She loved it that much.
But by the time Mary Nan and Larry visited Sanibel Island, Tabby was getting older. After Larry left the military, the family moved back to his hometown of Carrollton, Missouri, a little community of about four thousand people, where he had seen Mary Nan for the first time at the skating rink when she was almost sixteen and he was barely twenty. In Missouri, Larry worked as a maintenance man; Mary Nan kept the house. They were content. But the cold Missouri winters were hard on Tabby’s joints, and after twelve good ye
ars, she began slowing down. Mary Nan took a blanket Larry’s grandmother had knitted and folded it on the floor in front of the heater vent. Tabby sat on the blanket until she was steaming hot, but the cat sauna didn’t help her aching joints. Tabby was the love of their lives, and she was in decline.
There was no way Larry and Mary Nan were leaving her behind. Not for a month, not for a week, not even if it meant the end of Mary Nan’s dream of a life in Florida (and it was her dream, not Larry’s) and a long trip back to Carrollton, Missouri, in defeat.
“I have one more place to call,” Larry told his wife after two weeks of searching. “If this doesn’t work out, we’ll head home.”
He made the call. “I just want to tell you up front,” he said, “that I have a cat, and I’m not getting rid of her.”
“So what?” the man on the other end of the line replied. “I have two.”
A few weeks later, Larry, Mary Nan, and Tabby Evans had moved all of their possessions into a little bungalow across the street from the Colony Resort on Sanibel Island. This time, Mary Nan knew she was in paradise to stay. The resort was on the eastern, residential end of the island, away from the crowded shops and high-rise developments. The individually owned bungalows and condominiums of Colony Resort were scattered around a property filled with palm trees, bushes, and the grassy areas between them. To the east, a boardwalk led across 160 feet of sparsely overgrown sand dunes to a wide white beach and the gorgeous blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A short walk down the beach was the tip of the island, with its famous light-house. After dark, the sky was black and full of stars since no street-lights have ever been allowed to mar the quiet wonder of a Sanibel Island night.
Even Tabby, fifteen years old and increasingly arthritic, was rejuvenated. Mary Nan donned a pair of khaki casual shorts and a permanent smile, bought a fat-tired bicycle with a basket on the front, and Tabitha rode with her everywhere. While the girls were out on their leisurely errands, Larry used his weekends to screen in the porch on the back of the bungalow, and after a strenuous morning of basket-sitting (that wind can be murder on a cat’s fur!), Tabitha would lay out there all afternoon, warmed by the sun and refreshed by the cool island breeze. Mary Nan and Tabby spent hours together on that porch, Mary Nan with her cross-stitch and Tabby with nothing to do but enjoy her old age.
Maybe it was the sight of Tabby luxuriating on her private porch that attracted the little dappled cat. Maybe it was the obvious love (and food) Mary gave her sweet Siamese. Or maybe it was just inevitable. Sanibel Island in the 1980s was crawling with feral cats. You would see them everywhere: running through the bushes beside the street, poking around backyard barbeques, scrounging through the sea grass-covered empty lots that would, over the years, be turned into oceanfront estates, hotels, and high-rise condominiums. Maybe the dappled cat was just trying to find an easier way to survive in paradise when she followed Mary Nan and Larry home from their walk one night. She couldn’t get onto the porch, but she was hanging around the front door every time they came out.
“I’m going to give that kitten some milk,” Mary Nan told Larry after a few days of watching the cat watching her. The poor thing was as skinny as a sandpiper and nearly as skittish, but once Mary Nan started feeding her, she never left the yard.
“I figured,” Larry muttered, rolling his eyes with a bemused smile.
“What should I name her?” Mary Nan asked the two little boys who lived next door.
“Call her Boogie,” they said.
“What’s a boogie?”
The boys looked at each other. “I don’t know,” one of them replied.
“Okay,” Mary Nan said with a smile. “Boogie it is.”
Two months later, Larry stopped outside the front door on his way to work. “Mary Nan,” he called to his wife, the good-natured exasperation evident in his voice, “you better come out and see what you’ve done.”
On the front porch were three gorgeous, wiggly, sop-eared kittens. Boogie’s kittens.
“I guess we have five cats now,” Mary Nan said, going inside for a jug of milk. Four for the yard, and Tabitha asleep on the porch.
A year later, the resort manager retired. Larry became the manager, Mary Nan took over the front desk, and the whole family moved across the street to a bungalow on the resort property. By then, Tabitha had passed away. Her health had been in serious decline for months, but Mary Nan and Larry couldn’t bring themselves to put her down. In her last week, Larry had to go to the mainland for business. Mary Nan and Tabitha went for the car ride. Riding on that torn-up seat hump was still Tabby’s favorite activity, even better than the bicycle or the porch. To sneak her into the hotel, Mary Nan had to swaddle her in a blanket and pretend she was their child, just as she had when Tabby was a kitten, but the effort was worth it. While Larry worked, Mary Nan drove Tabitha around Fort Myers and twenty miles up and down the coast.
When they got home, they took Tabby to the vet. “It’s time,” he said simply. Mary Nan and Larry didn’t reply. They knew he was right, and it was the hardest thing they had ever endured. Tabitha had been like a daughter to them. She had comforted them with her presence, her persistent love, and her refusal to date the wrong men. Even though they knew she was suffering, putting her down was like tearing away a piece of their hearts. That afternoon, Larry and Mary Nan sat together on a bench, just staring at the ocean and crying in each other’s arms.
But they still had four cats: Boogie, the original dappled kitten that had walked into Mary Nan’s heart, and her three babies. They were outdoor cats, of course, but they apparently had no intention of ever wandering out of sight. Since Sanibel Island summer days were often hot, Larry built a cat house outside the bungalow porch. The box was about four feet by four feet, with a wooden roof for shade and mesh walls to let the breeze blow through. It even had a fan with a mesh cover to keep the kittens cool on those rare sweltering days when the ocean winds didn’t blow.
From the comfort of her porch, Mary Nan watched her cats, thinking of those quiet days with Tabitha and wishing she had such a nice fan for her own house. She watched soon after as one of the cats gave birth to a gaggle of moist, hairless kittens on the roof of the cat house. And she watched the next day as one of the mewling babies, still with its eyes shut and too small to walk, rolled right off the roof and out of sight. Mary Nan ran out expecting an injured or dead little kitten, but the baby was alive and unhurt, lying in a bundle on the grass and crying softly for its mother.
I really should get these cats fixed, she thought.
With so many cats to feed—there were now seven—Larry placed a line of bowls outside the bungalow door. Every morning, before his own breakfast, he filled each one with food. The cats came running . . . all to the same bowl. No matter how many options they were given, they all wanted to eat out of the same bowl at the same time. The kittens would crawl over each other, stumbling, falling, getting in fights, while the older cats stuck their snouts in the bowl and gulped down food while trying to ram each other away with the top of their heads. Mary Nan and Larry couldn’t help but laugh.
Eventually, the food began to attract more feral cats. First it was ten. Then twelve. Then . . . where did that cat come from? Larry would wonder. Do I know that cat? It sure seems eager and entitled. But . . . Aww, what the heck, Larry thought, give them another handful of food. Mary Nan was the one who began to name them. It seemed the best way, in conjunction with spaying the cats she considered her own, to keep the colony organized. But the cats refused to cooperate. They kept coming and going, but mostly coming in greater and greater numbers. It wasn’t long before you couldn’t walk ten steps at Colony Resort without a cat racing across your path. Every time Mary Nan and Larry walked down the boardwalk to the beach—and they walked down to the beach holding hands every single evening after work for two decades—a parade of cats followed them like a herd of ducklings. They could hear the stampede of paws pounding along the boards, the sound mixing finally with the soft crash
ing of the waves as the little group cleared the last of the dunes. Some of the cats would wander into the dunes—you know how cats are with sand—but most waited on the boardwalk, wrestling each other or chasing invisible-to-the-human-eye “bugs” until Larry and Mary Nan returned from their evening stroll. Then the gaggle would turn back along the boardwalk and head for home.
Chazzi, Taffy, Buffy, Miss Gray.
Maira. Midnight. Blackie. Candi. Nikki. Easy.
“Can you remember any more?” Mary Nan said over her shoulder, with the phone still to her ear.
“I don’t know,” Larry said in the background. “Did you say Chimilee?”
“Of course I said Chimilee, Larry. He was my favorite.” When he was a kitten, Chimilee’s front leg was badly injured, most likely in a fight, and the veterinary bill was $160. After the surgery, Mary Nan told Larry, “That cat is mine. I’ve got too much invested in him just to let him go.” So Chimilee—who Mary Nan claims looked like Dewey—moved into the bungalow. He was a big, sweet twenty-two-pound yellow cat who loved lounging on Mary Nan and Larry but never minded sharing them with a growing assortment of furry pals. After Chimilee, Mary Nan reasoned, there was no reason to consider the indoors off-limits to the other cats, so she opened the window every night for the breeze. She figured most of the cats wouldn’t bother coming inside, since they had it so cushy outside, but a few nights later, Larry tried to turn over in bed and found himself trapped under a mound of fur.
What in the heck is going on here? he remembered thinking. “There must have been twenty cats in that bed,” Larry told me with a laugh.
“No, Larry, come on now,” said Mary Nan, “there were only five. But they were fat. We slept with more than eighty pounds of cat every night.”
After a few days, Mary Nan closed the window, so it really was only five—except on really hot days, when she left the window open and ten or twelve cats wandered in. It was never the ton of cats in the bed that bothered Mary Nan, though. Or the scratched-up sofa and hair-covered chairs. It was the lizards those cats carried into the living room to torture. And that one awful snake.