For Vicki Kluever, the months after Johnny’s suicide were a fog. She has almost no memory of that summer, no recall of anything but a terrible darkness, despite twenty hours of daily sunshine. She had been in Hawaii with Sweetie, the first real vacation of their lives, when her brother died. He had called to say he loved her, to take care of herself. She had felt a terrible premonition, but what could she do? She was a thousand miles away. A few hours later, he was dead by his own hand.
The weight was crushing. She was drowning in grief. And she had no way to comfort her daughter or mother. Sweetie had loved her uncle Johnny. He rode a motorcycle; he wore a leather jacket; he was cool. She couldn’t fathom his death. Her mother couldn’t handle the loss of her child. She leaned on Vicki for support, as she always had. I remember that as well, the obligation of the good daughter, the need to be strong. When I arrived after my brother’s suicide, the first words my mother said to me were, “You can’t cry. Because if you start crying, then I’ll start crying, and I don’t know if I will ever stop.”
So Vicki Kluever held it together, as she always did. Through a terrible summer, as four more suicides rocked the small Kodiak community, she held it together for her daughter and mother. She leaned on whatever she could: work, friends, even Ted. But especially her cat.
And then, in August, Christmas Cat disappeared. He was gone three days before Vicki found his body, battered and lying in the thick undergrowth ten feet beyond her fence. She knew immediately what had happened: CC was sitting on his favorite fence post, taunting the neighbors’ dogs, when an eagle struck. The bald eagles of Kodiak had wingspans of eight feet or more; it was nothing for such a bird to pluck a twelve-pound fish from the ocean . . . or a nine-pound cat from a fence. She looked at the sky, so limitless and empty, but didn’t know what she was looking for. She remembered the sight of CC on Christmas Eve so long ago, his sputtering cough, his brave attempt to throw himself over the edge of the box. She was Vicki Kluever, strong and independent businesswoman. She didn’t cry. She definitely didn’t cry over cats. But she was crying now. She was crying so hard, and from so deep within, that she would physically ache the next day. Perhaps that seems too much, to cry so hard over a cat, but if you’ve ever belonged to an animal, you understand the grief. She had lost another family member. She had lost the friend that comforted her. What was she supposed to do now?
Noticing her despair, Ted brought her a new cat. Vicki, perhaps justifying, says he found Shadow outside his office; Sweetie, who, like CC, never cared for Ted, claims he found her outside a bar. Either way, the truth was that, only a month after CC’s death, Vicki was in no mood to adopt another cat. Not any cat. Not from anywhere. Believe it or not, there was still a part of her that didn’t like the idea of cats, and she certainly didn’t think she could just replace CC. But she accepted the tainted gift, the wedge Ted was using to push back into her life. She was too worn out and lonely to refuse.
So she was surprised to realize, when she started to come out of her fog a few months later, that she had grown quite fond of the little girl. Shadow was enough like CC, especially in her love of adventure and her mischievous eyes, to remind Vicki of what she had loved about him. But she was also very much her own cat. Unlike CC, Shadow didn’t have much interest in the outdoors. She didn’t have his cool dignity. She didn’t, if truth be told, let Vicki be the boss. And Vicki loved to be the boss. Instead, Shadow had a racing, jumping, wall-banging energy that completely disrupted, in the best possible way, Vicki’s life. She was always around, in other words, but never underfoot. Her favorite game wasn’t lap sitting; it was tag. If Vicki was in her casual clothes—there was still a prohibition against fur on the business suits—Shadow would sneak up and touch her on the heel. Then she’d take off running. Usually, Vicki tracked her down and tweaked her tail or tickled her belly, then ran away as Shadow chased after her. Sometimes, though, Shadow sprinted up the stairs. She had numerous places to hide up there, and Vicki could never find her. Shadow had no problem waiting for an hour. Then she’d come prancing out for a congratulatory hug. It was just a silly game, but Vicki liked it. It made her laugh. First Christmas Cat had touched her . . . now Shadow, too? Maybe, Vicki thought, I’m a crazy cat lady after all.
The next part, in hindsight, was inevitable. Ted slowly became more controlling and abusive, and Vicki, finally, summoned the courage to break it off with him completely. He took it well at first, but then started drinking heavily. He began showing up at her office around closing time. When she went for business lunches, she often noticed him watching her. He always happened to be at the softball field or in the alley at the end of her weekly bowling league. When she refused to come back, his harassment turned to threats. She applied for a restraining order. Her application was refused until he pulled her from the table where she was eating dinner with friends and dragged her across the restaurant in front of a dozen witnesses. The restraining order was approved the next day.
For a while, he stopped coming around. The mortgage business boomed; the boats chugged; the mountains iced over and the bears took to their dens. On the coast, the ocean pounded the tide pools of Kodiak. Vicki settled in with Sweetie and Shadow, relieved by the prospect of long, slow, peaceful winter nights. Then she came home after work to find her front door open. She searched the house. A jacket Ted had given her was missing from her closet. She changed the locks, but things he had given her kept going missing, one at a time.
Just before Christmas, she and Sweetie made the journey by car, skiff, and foot to Grandma Laura’s cabin on Larsen Island. Grandma Laura had been diagnosed with cancer, but whatever was destroying her was hidden deep inside. That day, she was as strong as she had always been. She baked bread; she poured drinks; she fed logs to the fire like she had every winter for almost thirty years. Her only wish, she told her family, was to die as she had lived, on Larsen Island. When Vicki mentioned her problems with Ted, her grandmother shook her head and said, “Love isn’t blind, but it sure is cockeyed.”
Then she turned to Vicki’s cousin, who was also having relationship difficulties, and told them both, “You don’t need a man. You may want a man, but you don’t need a man. Remember that.”
The party lasted two days, and by the time Vicki arrived home late on Christmas Eve, she felt energized by her grandmother’s wisdom and energy. In a happy fog, she tucked her nine-year-old daughter, already fast asleep, into bed. She smiled as she turned off the lights, remembering how, exactly six years before, Sweetie had stayed up late for Christmas Cat. We can’t leave him alone, Mommy, she had said, even if he’s going to die. When she came down the stairs, still warm from the memories, Ted was standing in her living room.
“You’ve ruined my life,” he said. “Now I’m going to ruin yours. I’m going to burn this house to the ground, and I hope you die in it.”
She called the police. The state trooper who had helped her get a restraining order answered. By the time he arrived, Ted had disappeared.
“I know his type,” the trooper said. “I know his history. I’m sorry, but this is not going to get better.”
For two months, the trooper checked Vicki’s house twice a day, varying his routine and time of arrival. Around April, when the ice was just starting to split in the streams, he sat down with her. Ted had been visiting her neighborhood, he told her, almost every day.
“This guy knows how to pick locks,” he said. “You could change the locks every hour, and he could still get in. A restraining order is only good if someone is standing here waiting for him.” The trooper stopped. Then he said something Vicki never forgot.
“Do you have a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how to use it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you shoot to kill?”
Vicki stared at him. She could feel her heart pounding. “What are you saying?”
“He is dangerous.”
“You are asking me to shoot and kill the man I spent two years of m
y life with?”
“I’m saying that if he’s in the house, and you have a gun in your hand, you better shoot to kill.”
That night, Vicki slept with her pistol under her pillow. Shadow slept beside her, Sweetie down the hall. The next night, she stopped fooling herself. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t shoot to kill.
She called her boss in Anchorage. “I hate to do this,” she said, “but I have to leave.” She told him the reason. They discussed options and, a few weeks later, he arranged for her to transfer to Wasilla, which, contrary to popular perception, is not a small, off-the-beaten track town like Kodiak but a bedroom community of Anchorage. The company had been planning to close the Wasilla office, which was losing money. Vicki, as the new manager, would have one year to turn it around.
She rented an apartment in Wasilla and started packing. She wanted to leave quickly, but she had to talk to her clients, finish her remaining work, sell her house, say good-bye to her family and friends, and make arrangements for her daughter. Five days before they were scheduled to leave, Sweetie woke up screaming in the middle of the night.
“There’s something wrong with Shadow,” she said when Vicki came running into her room.
The kitten was lying on her side on Sweetie’s pillow, panting heavily. Blood was smeared on her fur and the pillow case. For some reason, when Ted gave her the kitten, Vicki assumed she was fixed. By the time she took Shadow to the vet, it was too late, and in the last few frantic, terrifying months that fact had slipped her mind. Now her cat was giving birth on her daughter’s pillow.
“It’s fine,” Vicki said. “It’s just the babies, Sweetie. Shadow’s having babies.”
She got a packing box. Carefully, she placed Shadow on a blanket in the box and carried her to the empty walk-in closet. Vicki and Sweetie grabbed pillows and lay quietly on the floor beside her. They assisted Shadow with the breaking of the sac on one of the kittens and, despite the chaos of their lives, felt renewed by the five new lives that wiggled on the floor beside them when morning finally came.
A few days later, when Vicki flew to Anchorage, she left Sweetie in Kodiak with her mother but took Shadow and her kittens with her. She had rented her new apartment sight unseen. She had no furniture. She had no child care lined up. She didn’t know if she even wanted to live in Wasilla. She knew, at least for the moment, Sweetie would be better off in Kodiak. But Shadow? She didn’t trust anyone else to care for her kittens.
The apartment was awful. It had ratty carpet, unscreened windows, a broken stove, and holes in the walls. She had packed only one suitcase, so there were no plates to eat from or cups for water. The ferry from Kodiak was grounded for repairs, so she had flown with Shadow and her kittens tucked in a carrier under her seat. Now, without her car, she had no good way to get around Wasilla. (The six of them would fly back and forth to Kodiak four times to visit Sweetie and complete the move; Vicki always joked that it would have been a lot easier if the cats had qualified for frequent flyer miles.) She went to her new office and realized the only hope was to lay off half the staff and hope the rest could turn the branch around. That afternoon, a severe Alaska summer storm blew in and plunged the world into twilight. She sat in her empty apartment, without dinner, and listened to the rain. She missed the old house in Kodiak. The one she had bought and remodeled and cared for on her own. She missed her old job and her comfortable community. Most of all, she missed her daughter.
Thunder ripped and rain, mixed with summer hail, pounded the window. The suitcase lay in the corner, her two business suits hidden from cat hair in the closet. She reached out and stroked Shadow, who was lying nearby. Her kittens were tottering around her on the dirty carpet, knocking each other over and nuzzling for milk. The runt was black and orange, but the others were jet black like Shadow and Christmas Cat. She stuck her finger near one of them; he rolled over and sniffed it. His paws were like tissue paper, delicate and almost soft. She started to cry. She hadn’t known she was going to until the tears were on her cheeks.
How could she have made the same mistake twice? How could she have allowed another man control over her? She had been raised by a difficult father, and she had fallen into the same pattern again and again. Her husband. Ted. She was strong, independent, smart, hardworking, successful, and yet bad relationships had left her sitting on the floor in a dingy apartment, without a stick of furniture, in a town she didn’t know. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so . . . weak? The rain beat against the window. She sniffled, then wiped the tears from her face. The kittens wrestled on the floor, content and playful, completely oblivious to the situation around them. Shadow looked at her, her eyes half open in a sleepy expression, then turned back to her babies.
And for some reason, that made Vicki smile. And then, because she was smiling, she started to laugh. Here she was, an avowed cat hater—or at least cat ignorer—for most of her life, and she had chosen to bring her kittens instead of her daughter on a life-changing five-hundred-mile trip. Instead of Sweetie, she was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment with a cat and her kittens for company. And not just any cat—the cat her stalker had used to win her back. A cat that, in a way, represented the worst betrayal of her life. But a cat she loved just the same.
Some people say loving a cat is about circumstance. The right cat, the right time, the right story. It’s about projecting our desires; it’s about having a crisis big enough to create a need. But that’s not true. That’s not true of Christmas Cat, the first cat Vicki loved. That’s not true of Dewey, who won me over not by launching my career but with a playfully obstinate disposition and a sweet and abiding love. That’s certainly not true of Shadow, who had appeared in Vicki’s life at the wrong time and, more important, for the wrong reason.
We don’t love cats out of need. We don’t love them as symbols or projections. We love them individually, in the complex manner of all human love, because cats are living creatures. They have personalities and quirks, good traits and flaws. Sometimes they fit us, and they make us laugh in our darkest moments. And then we love them. It’s really as simple as that.
All her adult life, Vicki hadn’t wanted to own a cat. She was divorced; she was a single mother; she didn’t want to be that lady. But leaving her daughter behind to make room for her cats . . . sitting in an empty apartment and laughing at their antics . . . she was clearly that cat lady now.
And it was okay. She wasn’t beaten. Sitting in that dark apartment, with the rain slamming the window, and the kittens mewling on the floor, she knew she was going to make it. As she wiped the tears from her cheeks, there was no doubt in her mind. She would move out of the dumpy apartment. She would go to the office and fire the smallest number of people possible and then sit down with the others and lead them to success. At the end of the summer, when everything was in order, she would bring Sweetie to Wasilla and raise her as a proud single mother. Nothing is ever a given; Vicki Kluever had always known that. She had learned, more than once, that things could be taken away. But things don’t matter. The importance stuff—your faith, your dignity, your will to succeed, your ability to love—those are yours until you choose to let them go.
The next day, she found a better apartment. She fired two employees but managed to keep four. Within five months, the Wasilla office was turning a profit. Eighteen months later, she was standing in front of an audience of her peers, accepting her award for affiliate of the year. And even now, eighteen years later and two thousand miles away, I am proud of her, because I know how hard she worked for that honor and how far she had come.
The next three years, from a professional standpoint, were the best of Vicki’s life. Sweetie, at first reluctant to move, soon met two lifelong friends and learned to love Wasilla. Ted called a few times, but Vicki ignored him. He couldn’t get to her now, not even emotionally, and eventually he stopped trying. She kept two of the kittens from Shadow’s litter, the black and orange runt and a jet-black kitten who looked just like his mo
ther, and when Shadow died of cancer at the age of nine, Rosco and Abbey kept Vicki company. She had owned several cats by then, most of them pure black, and although none moved her like CC the Christmas Cat, she loved every one. Ten years after leaving Kodiak, she broke the pattern and married the right man: one her cats and Sweetie loved, and who loved them all in return.
“Please don’t see nor portray me as a victim or some poverty-stricken person,” she begged me after our initial conversation. “Yes, there were lots of tough times, but doesn’t everyone have tough times? Based on some of the people I worked with during my career, I see my life as a cakewalk!”
A cakewalk? Not really. A successful life well lived? Absolutely. By 2005, when she retired because she no longer believed in the practices of the mortgage industry she had spent twenty-two years championing, Vicki Kluever was one of the most accomplished Alaskan women in her field. She had coauthored and implemented a statewide program to help disabled adults secure discounted financing; she had managed several offices to unprecedented success; she had mentored a generation of female mortgage officers; she had spent her career, she felt, helping thousands of families make their dreams come true.
She lives with her husband now in Palmer, Alaska, another bedroom community of Anchorage. She is happy. She has the marriage she always wanted: the kind that strengthens instead of maims. She has the freedom to spend as much time as she needs in Kodiak, where the salt air, the heartbeat of life in a fishing town, and the sight of boats in the morning sailing off to the deep waters continue to energize and inspire her. Her daughter Adrienna lives two thousand miles away, in Minnesota, but mother and daughter talk all the time. After some rough years when she was a teenager, they are now the best of friends.