Vicki dreaded the thought of Unalaska, especially with a young child. But her husband had made up his mind. When he left almost immediately for his new job, leaving Vicki in Valdez to care for Sweetie and pack the house, she realized for the first time how much the marriage had uprooted her sense of self. She had already left behind her career, her friends, her family, her home. Now she was losing her independence and freedom of movement, too.
But like a dutiful wife, she lugged her child on the two-week journey to their new home in the Bering Sea. She found the land more harsh and foreboding than she had imagined: rocky, barren, and crosshatched with old trails. A huge military depot, abandoned after World War II, had left the island littered with battered run-ways, crumbling docks, and rusted artillery pieces. As she drove into her new life, Vicki saw rows of old concertina wire stretched across the horizon. There was beauty there, it was hard to deny. Standing in the howling wind above crashing waves, it felt like the end of the earth, and how many people ever get a chance to stand there? But if the island offered a beautiful loneliness, it was loneliness nonetheless. And isolation. With that concertina wire, Unalaska felt like a prison in the middle of the sea.
That winter, Vicki suffered a miscarriage. It was a dark time, literally, with only a few hours of sunlight a day. Her marriage had been crumbling for years; in that long twilight, it seemed to break and sheer off like tree limbs under ice. When I was married to an alcoholic, I thought of my house as a coffin. Day after day, I was being buried by my husband’s neglect. But at least I had friends and family nearby. I had a place I could go for comfort. Vicki Kluever’s whole world was a coffin. She had no place to turn. She asked God for help, for a sign, and when she heard nothing but the howling of the wind, she lost her faith, too. By the time winter finally broke, she had made a difficult decision, one that I and many other women have agonized over: She told her husband she was leaving. When the Alaska Ferry Service arrived a month later, she returned to Anchorage with only her daughter and a handful of possessions.
There is a strength that comes from growing up in a small town. That strength is the realization, at a young age, that nothing is ever a given. More often, it is taken by things beyond your control: a flood, a drought, a storm, a pollution bloom, or an unlucky toss of the nets. You can’t worry about the bad things. Yes, they hurt. But you move on. You understand, as a life code, that you have no right to money or happiness or even stability. If you want those things, you have to earn them.
Back in Anchorage, Vicki threw herself into earning her happiness. She took an entry-level position in the mortgage industry, where she had worked before her marriage, and began to forge a career. It was the early 1980s, interest rates were plummeting, and Alaska was gripped by a wave of loan refinancing. She often worked seventy hours a week and took files home. Her boss was prone to outbursts of anger, but she was also one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable women in the field. Vicki overlooked the hostility and focused on learning. She progressed quickly from clerk to loan officer, and within a year was familiar with every wrinkle in the Alaska housing authority program, one of the nation’s best. She wasn’t just living the dream of being self-sufficient; she was helping other people reach their dreams, too.
But it wasn’t easy. Her commissions, especially in the first years, were barely enough for basic necessities. She couldn’t afford a reliable car, and she often skipped meals in order to feed her daughter. She gave Sweetie as much time as she could, but more often than she preferred, Vicki saw her daughter only long enough to tuck her into bed, kiss her on the cheek, and tell her, Mommy loves you, Sweetie. Good night. She took care of herself. She was physically strong. But she was increasingly prone to mood swings, dark thoughts, and fatigue.
I am a firm believer, from personal experience, that stress is a major factor in poor health, and there is nothing quite like the stress of being a single working mother. I know that from experience, too. But stress doesn’t cause poor health; it aggravates underlying problems. Perhaps the last hurdle for our generation of women was convincing doctors—most of whom were men—that our indigestion, bloating, headaches, memory loss, and muscle fatigue weren’t all in our heads. Just calm down, doctors told us. Relax. It’s only water retention. Take a tranquilizer.
Vicki knew there was something more fundamentally wrong. So instead of giving in, she spent hours at the library (this was before the Internet) studying her condition. After years of reading, researching, and diligently maintaining a daily journal of food intake and physical symptoms, she discovered a physician in London studying female hormone imbalances. One of her protégés happened to work in Anchorage, so Vicki made an appointment. The woman studied Vicki’s journals and performed a series of hormone measurements. The problem, the young woman assured her, wasn’t in her head. After her miscarriage, her body had failed to restart sufficient hormone production. The recommendation was an ultrahigh dose of hormones administered by a well-known male physician. The procedure, while used in England, was not yet FDA-approved.
Vicki accepted the recommendation. Even today, she vividly remembers signing the waiver form. She was so happy to have her condition taken seriously, after so many years of suffering, that she would have signed practically anything. Her insurance wouldn’t cover the treatments, so she went into debt to pay for them.
Luckily, they worked. For three months. Then Vicki began to feel sharp pains in her abdomen. Soon after, she was diagnosed with uterine tumors. She was too stunned and scared to ask questions or seek second opinions. A few days later, at the age of twenty-seven, she was on the operating table, her abdomen cut open, her uterus torn out.
It was a terrible setback, but it was something else, too: freedom. By the spring, despite her surgery, Vicki Kluever felt stronger and more balanced than she had in years. Her symptoms had eased. But more important, her sense of purpose—her vision of the future—had returned. She had made hard decisions. They had cost her dearly, but she had survived them. She was confident she could succeed in her career; she knew she could succeed as a mother. She was ready for her chance.
There was one more step. She enjoyed mortgage lending, but she didn’t want to stay in a toxic work environment. And, she realized, she didn’t want to raise her daughter in Anchorage. She wanted Sweetie to experience the life she had grown up with: the tight community, the strong women, the beauty and power of the ocean. When she heard the company was opening a branch office, she applied for the manager position. They offered her Kodiak or Ketchikan.
She knew where she wanted to go: home.
It was just before Vicki’s surgery, in the summer of 1986, that she and Sweetie had moved into the apartment in Anchorage, where they were allowed to adopt a cat. They had owned an outdoor cat in Unalaska, mainly for catching rats (which were numerous and huge, having traveled to that barren land in the hulls of ships), and perhaps that’s why Sweetie was so insistent. Vicki, never having liked that cat (or the rats), was less enthusiastic. But at that point, she would have done almost anything for her daughter. She was still recovering in November when she chose Christmas Cat. And she was still not quite herself, physically or emotionally, when she rescued him from the toilet bowl on Christmas Eve.
It would be hard, then, not to draw a line between Vicki’s personal journey and CC’s dramatic rescue. People often say love is a matter of luck and timing. The right person (or cat) comes along at the right time and—bang—your life is changed. Many people believe that about Dewey and me, that our love was based on circumstances. After all, I was new to my position as library director, and I was eager to establish myself. I desperately wanted to make the library a more inviting place, and I had been working on that goal for months.
Then Dewey dropped into my arms and, instantly, I knew that he could transform my world. He was friendly. He was confident and outgoing. He tried to include everyone, even when they were leery of his attention. He was loving. He was perceptive. He was dedicated, body and soul, to the
Spencer Pubic Library. He was, you might say, the better part of my soul. He inspired and set an example. And not just for me—for an entire town.
Maybe that’s what happened with Vicki Kluever and CC. Maybe she saw herself in that cat: adventurous, independent, determined. And when he suffered tragedy and survived? Maybe she saw herself there, too. After all, it’s not easy to have your body rebel against you. It’s not easy to lose your way, to forget your goals, to have your greatest assets (trust and a desire to explore) lead to your greatest loss. But Christmas Cat didn’t quit. As soon as he gained the strength, CC pushed himself to his feet and toppled back into the world. Maybe it was this attitude, this will to succeed, that Vicki admired. Even more than his outgoing personality, even more than his luscious fur and mischievous gold eyes, Vicki saw a kindred spirit in the little black cat. She told me as much numerous times, although she never used quite those words.
It also helped, I’m sure, that CC fit perfectly into her new life in Kodiak. Subsistence, Vicki tells me, is an important concept in Alaska. It conveys both the simplicity of life in the small towns that dot the coast and the internal fortitude needed to survive there. Subsistence, in its purest form, means living from nature and producing with your own hands. It was the way of life for countless generations of the natives of Kodiak and other rugged Alaskan islands. It was the way of life Vicki’s great-grandfather Anton Larsen practiced when he homesteaded the island now named for him, and it was the life his daughter, Vicki’s grandmother Laura, returned to after the devastating tidal waves of 1964.
Vicki didn’t live like her grandmother, but she certainly embraced a simpler lifestyle when she returned to her old hometown. She rented a small house in the woods. She ran the new mortgage office alone, working hard to create a strong foundation before adding staff. She provided her daughter, with the help of her mother (who, unlike Vicki, owned a television, much to Sweetie’s delight), a “skinned-knee” kind of childhood, free from the overprotection and overscheduling so common among modern parents. Instead, Sweetie enjoyed long walks in the woods and scavenger hunts along the rocky Kodiak shore.
Christmas Cat, likewise, loved to explore the vast forest beyond the back fence. He hunted mice and spiders and other things he could nose out of the brush, often bringing them home as presents or playthings to be kicked around for an afternoon. He climbed trees with Sweetie and followed Vicki and Sweetie a few hundred yards on their hikes until they disappeared into the woods. There is an enormity and solitude to Alaska, a state more than double the size of Texas with a population of just under 700,000 (about the same as Louisville, Kentucky, and less than half of Columbus, Ohio.) In Kodiak, Vicki loved the way the mountains towered over the river valleys, and the huge eagles soared in an endless sky. But she also appreciated the way the forest closed around her and the familiarity of the shops in town. When she and Sweetie walked the beach, they were drawn to the power of the ocean. But there were also the snails clinging to the sides of the tide pools, the impressions in the rocks, the way the running tide “set the table” by exposing mussel beds and fishing nets. When the salmon were running, Vicki and Sweetie were gone for days, because although Vicki loved fishing for everything, she loved the salmon best, because a hooked salmon would fight. Most of all, she loved to watch Sweetie’s face burst into a smile every time the girl caught a fish.
After a year, when she’d saved a little money, Vicki bought a ramshackle house in town. The roof leaked and the walls were noticeably leaning, but she owned it, and that made her feel grounded and whole. The first winter, a pipe burst and the basement flooded. A few days later, a storm knocked three trees through the roof, and she and Sweetie spent a year arranging pots and pans to catch drips when it rained. When she had money, she fixed the house, piece by piece, but she never felt alarmed. After all, Christmas Cat loved drinking out of those rain pans, at least when he wasn’t running up and down the stairs. And as long as Sweetie was comfortable, Vicki could happily subsist, like her grandmother, within the limits of her own capabilities.
New house, new forest, owners gone for a few days: Whatever happened, CC never seemed to mind. He wasn’t a needy cat. He had his own life and his own habits, and except for his dietary problem—he still ate nothing but paste and, possibly, insects—he could take care of himself. Half the time, Vicki wasn’t sure what he was up to, but she always assumed he was doing it with style, even when he was just rummaging for cave crickets in the crawl space under the house. Often when she returned home from the beach, or on lazy Saturday afternoons, she would see CC sitting in his favorite spot on top of the six-foot fence post at the end of the yard, taunting the neighbors’ dogs. They would bark and snap, futilely trying to reach him, while he looked out toward the forest, occasionally glancing down at them with confident disregard. CC knew there was no way they could touch him.
But he was loyal, even in his independence. Almost as soon as Vicki arrived home from the office, CC would appear on the ledge outside the kitchen window. More often than not, his black fur was matted with tree sap or mud or crawl space dust. Vicki brought a towel to the door to wipe him down, but CC always barreled inside, leaving filthy footprints all over the house.
And yet he wouldn’t rub against her. Vicki was very conscious of her professional image, and she splurged on her clothes. CC knew she wouldn’t tolerate cat hair on her business suits, much less muddy paw prints. So he waited until she changed into her sweater and jeans, then stood on his hind legs, with his front paws on her upper leg, waiting for her to pick him up. When she did, he put a paw lightly on each of her cheeks, as if to hold her steady, and looked into her eyes.
“Hi, CC,” she whispered. “How are you?”
He put his cheek against her chin, then bent forward and nuzzled her neck. She pushed him to her shoulder, where he lay against her neck and purred, and that is how they spent the first five minutes of every evening. He wasn’t a lap cat by nature, but if Vicki wanted company, she simply sat in her bentwood rocker, purchased when she learned she was pregnant with Sweetie, and CC came running to curl up on her lap. They spent many a long winter night in that chair by the woodstove, Vicki reading a book and CC purring lightly in his sleep after Sweetie had gone off to bed.
“It was his unconditional love,” Vicki said, when asked what made the relationship special. “He was always there. But he let me be the boss.”
Eventually, she started dating a man named Ted (not his real name). He was charming and attractive and, to be honest, she enjoyed his attention. It made her feel wanted, I suppose, in a way other things never had. Her friends weren’t sure about Ted, and his relationship with Sweetie was rocky at times, but Vicki didn’t worry. Even Christmas Cat’s obvious dislike of him didn’t deter her. Later, she learned to trust the cat’s instincts. If her cat didn’t like a man, or vice versa, that man was out the door. But at the time, still relatively new to this whole cat thing, she considered CC’s attitude nothing more than jealousy. For three years, he had been the man in her life. He had been the one to make her feel wanted. Now he had to share.
A few months later, when Ted started opening her mail and reading her appointment calendar, Vicki made excuses. When he started showing up at restaurants where she was having business meetings, she dumped him. Twice. But each time he begged for forgiveness, saying he just worried about her safety because he loved her so much, that he had learned his lesson, that he wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t realize she was losing control until he started verbally abusing her. But by then it was too late.
“A bad relationship is like a funnel,” Vicki says. “It’s easy to slide into, but very hard to climb out of. And it’s always pulling you down. The more I struggled for independence, the more he tried to control me.”
To the outside world, Vicki was thriving. Her mortgage office was booming, adding staff and quietly becoming one of the best producers in the state. She had harbored some fears about returning to her family, where bad memories crowded the good,
but Sweetie grew so close to her grandmother that they spent all their afternoons together, freeing Vicki from worry about her long work hours and giving her daughter a link to her past. She bowled on Wednesdays; she joined a softball team. After two years of work, even her ramshackle residence, once a tilting, leaking mess, was on the verge of becoming the house of her dreams. But her love life was shaking those solid foundations.
“I can run a million-dollar business,” she often muttered to Christmas Cat when he jumped on the edge of the bathtub where she soaked away the day’s fatigue, “but I can’t figure out my love life. What’s wrong with me?”
Christmas Cat always leaned over to sniff her, and more often than not, Vicki could see the crawl space dust still powdered in his jet-black fur.
“Do you want to come in?”
He just stared at her. He wasn’t coming in, but he also didn’t appear to be afraid of the water.
“Suit yourself.” She laughed, closing her eyes so that she didn’t have to look at the bruises on her arms and feeling her worries about Ted float away on a kitten’s soft purr.
Then, in April, her brother committed suicide. I know that pain, because my brother committed suicide, too. There is the horror of suddenly losing someone you love. There is the terror of the details; the memory, in my case, of driving to his apartment and seeing the blood. And there is the nagging belief that you could have done something more, that you had the power to prevent it. I remember the day, ten years before his death, when my brother walked four miles in the cold, in the dead of night, without a jacket in subfreezing temperature, to knock on my door and tell me, “There’s something wrong with me, Vicki. Don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I was only nineteen. I didn’t say a word. I wish I had.