I Wish You Happy: A Novel

by Kerry Anne King

  “I want to admit you overnight for observation. Your hemoglobin is quite low, but I don’t think we need to transfuse you. I do want to monitor your vital signs and keep the IV running. All right?”

  “That would be fabulous,” Marci says, even though nobody has asked her. “There aren’t any psych beds available, and our less restrictive alternative has fallen through.” She shoots a glare at me that holds me responsible for everything that has gone wrong with her night.

  Deep down beneath the anger, guilt stirs and bubbles, but it’s too far away to motivate me.

  “What if I don’t want to stay?” Kat asks.

  “You don’t have a choice.” Marci sounds more like the exasperated parent of a toddler than a professional, crabby and overwhelmed. “You’re here under mental health evaluation.”

  “I don’t think you can do that. Can you?” Kat ignores Marci and asks the doctor. “Don’t you need a single bed certification or something? This isn’t a psych hospital.”

  Marci’s night has clearly gone from bad to worse. She pinches the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “I have twelve hours to complete my evaluation,” she says, in a martyred tone. “If you try to leave before that time is up, I call the police and they keep you here. I also amp up my search for an acceptable psych bed to put you in, as you’re clearly not cooperative.”

  “I don’t think you have enough to hold me.”

  Kat sounds like the lawyer she is. A stab of panic pierces my comfortable anger at the thought that she might talk her way out of this.

  The doctor’s face remains compassionate and grave. “Medically, no, I can’t hold you. I do think it’s in your best interests to stay. If you leave, I would ask you to sign a document saying you left against medical advice. No, we don’t do single bed certs at this hospital. Now, I have other patients waiting for me. Let me know what you decide.”

  “It’s up to Rae,” Kat says.

  I turn on her. “No, it’s not up to Rae. Don’t you try to put that on me.”

  She flinches as if I’ve slapped her. One hand rises to her cheek and stays there. The naked hurt in her eyes unravels my anger at the edges, making room for shades of grief and love and guilt.

  “I didn’t ask to be rescued,” she says, quietly and with dignity.

  All eyes in the room turn on me, the heartless monster, and I feel the heat mounting into my cheeks as my heart picks up its tempo. My emotions, my thoughts, are a tangled mess. I can’t even guess at what choices would be right or wrong, smart or stupid. I need time to put the pieces together.

  “Just stay here tonight, okay? Rest, get better. Listen to the doctor. Tomorrow I’ll come back and we’ll talk.”

  “Are you going to shout again?”

  An involuntary smile dissolves the last of my anger. “I hope not. Can’t promise anything.”

  “I bet it felt good.”

  That I can’t argue.

  “Are we all agreed, then?” The doctor twirls her stethoscope in her hands, impatient to be moving on.

  “Katya?” Marci asks. “Are you willing to stay? And can you promise to be safe?”

  “I think we’ve established that my promises are not good currency. But yes. I’ll stay. I’ll be safe. If Rae promises to come in and talk tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be here.” The words feel suffocating as I speak them, a binding promise I don’t want to make.

  Driving home, deserted by my anger, I’m nothing more than an empty shell. Thank God I’ve sent the kittens away with Jenny. I will crash and sleep for a million years. Or, at least, until tomorrow when I’ll have to go back in and face Kat.

  When I open the door and enter my house, though, I just stand there. I’d forgotten. Blood on the couch and on the carpet. Carnage in the bathroom. Tears of exhaustion threaten, but I’m tired of tears. Tired of emotions. I want my house back. I want my life back.

  I want to just hit “Rewind” and go back to the day before Oscar died. Closing my eyes, I picture him in his cage waiting for me. My room, my bed. My parents on the other side of the country following a predictable routine. Bernie still a part of my Mondays.

  No Katya.

  And then I realize this also means no Cole. No Oscar Event. No moment of epiphany where I understand that I have friends, despite my best efforts to push them away.

  “Just do the next thing,” I tell myself out loud. “No need to think it all out tonight.”

  This gets me across the threshold and closes the door behind me. It might be only my imagination, but the house smells of blood and loss. I go around and open the windows, letting the cool night air flow in. And then I start cleaning.

  I clean the bedroom first. All the while I’m packing Kat’s belongings into her backpack, stripping the bed and throwing the sheets into the washing machine, I’m braced to find the body of the kitten. It doesn’t show up in the bedroom, and when every trace of Kat has been removed, I go to the living room and survey the couch. It’s a lost cause. I have enough money put away to get a new one. Maybe this time I’ll get one that is truly new, and not Goodwill new. For now I just throw an old blanket over it.

  Hydrogen peroxide takes care of the carpet, although it leaves weird bleached-out spots my landlord isn’t going to like. Probably he’d find them preferable to bloodstains, but either way, this isn’t going to be pretty.

  With the lesser tasks done, there’s no more excuse to avoid the bathroom.

  It occurs to me, a little late, that I know nothing about Kat’s health prior to the accident. What if she has AIDS, or hepatitis C? I’ve got gloves stashed away with my first aid supplies, and I glove up and put on an old shirt I can throw away when I’m done.

  The towels will never be clean again. I pick them up by the edges and reach for the trash can, but just as I start to shove them in something glints in the light, and I freeze. Half-obscured by a piece of tissue is a shard of glass. One end, dagger sharp, is stained with blood.

  I look down at the bandaged cut on my finger, remembering how easily the broken glass sliced into my flesh. I remember Kat, bent nearly double in the chair as she leaned forward and then rocked onto her feet. And I wonder if the night of our fight was the night she planned a second attempt.

  Careful of blood and sharp edges, I retrieve the glass and set it out on the side of the sink. Evidence.

  Then I get the mop and scrub the floor, dumping the wash water twice, and then get down on my hands and knees to get at the cracks and crevices. Blood pooled on the floor beneath the sink has spread into a narrow space between the floor and the vanity. I’m trying to reach in there with my rag when my gloved hand brushes against something soft and inert.

  All I can see is shadows, but even before I strip off my gloves to get a better grasp on the object, I know I’ve found my missing kitten. He doesn’t move when I pull him out into the light. He’s cold to the touch. Dried blood crusts the fur on his back and the top of his head.

  “I’m so sorry, little one.” I pick up his tiny, limp body and cradle it in my hands.

  And then I feel it, a faint, rhythmic movement of his ribs. He’s still breathing. His tiny heart is beating. I run through the differential diagnoses in my head.

  Hypothermia. Dehydration. Low blood sugar. His tongue and gums are pale but not yet blue, which means there’s a chance to still save him.

  I tuck him up under my shirt for warmth and run for my phone.

  The first call is to the veterinarian emergency line. This is a small town, and there is no twenty-four-hour animal hospital. I leave a message and my callback number, knowing that by the time somebody responds it’s going to be too late. Besides, the truth is, anything a vet could do for a cold, hungry kitten, I can do myself.

  And then I dial another number, delete it, and dial it again before I finally let it ring through. I lecture myself about standing on my own two feet and being my own woman. I remind myself that help always comes with strings attached. But I don’t want to be alone, not
tonight.

  What I want is Cole. His quiet strength, his support, his companionship.

  He answers on the first ring, sounding muffled and sleepy, and I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake.

  “Sorry to wake you.”

  “I was dreaming about giant winged snakes. So thank you. What’s up?”

  “Can you come over?”

  My voice trembles, but he doesn’t ask questions. “I’ll be right there” is all he says.

  While I’m waiting for the vet to call me back, for Cole to show up, for some sort of miracle to fall out of the sky and make my world okay, I do everything I can for the kitten.

  The first priority is getting him warm.

  Jenny has my heating pad, so I wrap the little scrap of bedraggled fur in a towel warmed in the dryer, leaving only his mouth and nose exposed. An empty jar filled with warm water and wrapped in a towel substitutes for the heating pad.

  I inject some warmed IV fluid under the loose skin at the back of his neck to rehydrate him and replace electrolytes and then start in making an emergency glucose formula.

  When Cole shows up, he takes in the situation with the kitten, the sheet-covered couch, the open door to the empty bedroom, but his first question is “What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. I shouldn’t have called. It just . . . all got too big for me.”

  “How about if I just hang out, then? Where are the rest of them? Where’s Katya?”

  “The kittens are with another rescuer. Katya is in the hospital.” My hands move as if they have a life and intelligence apart from my own scrambled brain. Sure and steady, I insert a tube into the kitten’s stomach and slowly push glucose solution through it with a syringe.

  “Why not formula?” Cole asks, leaving the more difficult questions alone.

  “He can’t digest it until he warms up. Sugar water every thirty minutes for now.”

  “Will he live?”

  “Doubtful.”

  The kitten doesn’t move when I insert the tube, or when I pull it out. I check his temperature. He’s warming, but any inanimate object will warm with radiant heat. It doesn’t mean his body is working.

  I lean back against the sofa and let my eyelids fall closed over my burning eyes.

  “Come here,” Cole says, settling beside me. He puts an arm around me and draws me over beside him, nestling my head on his shoulder. I breathe him in and allow my body to relax against him. Even in the dark, exhausted as I am, he smells like a summer day. My mind drifts along mountain trails, bright with flowers. A lake, water limpid and clear, reflecting diamonds back to a blue sky. Nighttime, with a crackling campfire beside a tent, a velvet sky studded with stars. Cole is part and parcel of it all.

  “Thirty minutes,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Time to feed the kitten. I’d do it, but I can’t do that tube thing.”

  My eyes feel glued shut. I scrub at my face with my hands and manage to unstick my eyelids.

  “What were you thinking of just now?” My body weighs about a million pounds, and I can’t make myself move.

  “My favorite place in the Colville forest. Where I want to take you camping.”

  That wakes me. He blurs in and out of focus through my sleep-clouded vision. “A mountain trail,” I say. “A lake. There’s a loon calling.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Better question. How did you do that? Put the pictures in my head?” I feel like I should be spooked. I’m not. A quiet hum of energy runs through me. I’m alert. Calm. Able to get up and prepare another infusion of glucose for the kitten.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Cole says. “Other than wish you could be there. With me.”

  This time the kitten’s eyes open when I insert the tube. His legs push back against my restraining hand. When I check his temperature it’s closer to normal. At my direction, Cole refills the bottles with hot water before I lay the little one back in his nest.

  “Where did you learn to do all this?” Cole asks. “Seems like it goes a little above and beyond the average pet owner.”

  “I worked for a vet part-time while I was in college.”

  “I’m pretty sure all vet assistants don’t have your ninja skills.”

  “Probably they weren’t all pushy and demanding to be taught. You want coffee?” Much as I want to snuggle up against him again and drift off to sleep, the waking up is too hard. It will be easier to just stay awake.

  “Coffee sounds awesome. Are you going to tell me about Kat?”

  Please. Don’t let them lock me up. Loyalty binds my tongue, but only for a minute. The whole thing spills out of me. Everything. The very first promise I made to her. The visit with my parents. The reason I took on the kittens in the first place. The blood, the glass, the kitten under the vanity. His coworker’s take on the situation.

  He sighs. “Marci’s a fill-in. Good therapist, I think, but crisis isn’t her thing. I’m back on duty tomorrow.”

  “Oh God.” I stare at him, stricken. “And I’m keeping you up all night when you have to work. Go home. Get some sleep.”

  “Not on your life.” He settles back against the blanket-draped couch. “I’m part of the kitten vigil now.”

  “It will probably die.”

  “And yet, here we are.” He gives me an inexpressibly sweet smile. “What I do. What you do. Maybe it’s the trying that matters more than the saving.”

  “How could that be true? If the kitten dies, all of this is a useless expenditure of energy.”

  “Or not. Maybe it’s like the butterfly effect. Just the act of love shifts something in the balance of light against dark.” He flushes under my scrutiny and shrugs. “Or I’m just playing head games with myself to make what I do make sense.”

  “It’s a beautiful idea.” I find myself wanting it to be true but knowing that an idea is nothing compared with an actual life. The kitten’s. Or Katya’s.

  Twice more I tube-feed the kitten glucose solution. Each time it struggles a little harder. By three in the morning Cole has collapsed on the floor and is snoring slightly. Both of us have been avoiding the couch. I fetch a blanket and cover him.

  The kitten wakes on its own, yawns, and opens its eyes. Its tongue is pink again. Its temperature is back in the safe zone. It’s still very weak, but it licks my hand when I caress its fuzzy head. This time I mix up a little formula, keeping it at half-strength. Using a syringe, I squirt a few drops into the kitten’s mouth.

  He swallows.

  It’s a miracle. A small one, maybe, important to nobody but me, but a miracle all the same. And then it dawns on me that maybe the kitten is important to somebody else as well.

  I put my hand on Cole’s shoulder, call his name.

  His eyes pop open, and he bolts upright as if I’d lit a cannon next to his ear instead of whispering. “I’m awake, I’m awake. What?”

  “Easy.” I can’t help laughing. He’s so serious, so intense, so ready for some sort of disaster when there’s nothing bigger going on than a kitten with an appetite. His hair stands straight up on top of his head, and the look—half man, half boy—turns my heart upside down and shakes it for lunch money.

  “Watch.”

  Again, I give the kitten a few drops of milk. Again, he swallows.

  Cole scoots over beside me. Ever so gently, he strokes the top of the kitten’s head with a single finger.

  “Have you named him?”

  “It’s too early. I mean, this is a good sign, but—”

  “He should have a name. Even if he’s only here for a minute, he should still be named. Don’t you think?”

  His face is very close to mine, both of us bent over the kitten. The intensity in his eyes makes my head swim. My breath flutters in my throat, my heart sets off tap-dancing to a rhythm I don’t know and can’t follow.

  “All right,” I whisper. “He’s such a little bit of a thing. Not much more than a wish and a prayer.”

  “Call him Wish, then,” Cole say
s.

  There’s no way he can know all of the ways this name is not a good idea for me. “I’m not sure about that” is all I say.

  “Did you want to call him Prayer?” He grins, that mischievous, crooked, little-boy grin, and I can’t catch my breath.

  “Wish it is.” I give the kitten a few more drops of formula.

  “Rae.”

  Cole’s voice is low and husky. I can’t look up. I can’t move. His hands cup my face, strong and oh-so-gentle, and tilt it up toward his. Our eyes lock. I don’t think I’m breathing anymore, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He leans forward and rests his forehead against mine.

  For a long minute he holds me there, an intimacy between us that goes beyond a kiss.

  My heart slows and steadies into a strong surge, my breathing eases. The energy between us finds a steady state, heightened, but not erratic and wild. I’m exquisitely aware of my own boundaries, That Which Is Rae, and his, That Which Is Cole, and the place where the two intertwine to make That Which Is Us.

  “Thank you,” he whispers.

  “For what?”

  “You are a light in the dark.” He draws a deep breath and releases me, leaning back on his heels and breaking the moment. “If I was an artist, I’d paint you and that kitten. The Madonna of Cats.”

  “You’re a funny guy. Here, hold Wish for a minute.”

  I hand him the kitten and dampen a cotton ball at the sink. As I take the kitten back from Cole and massage him with the cotton ball to stimulate elimination, Cole laughs, a low, throaty sound halfway between amusement and desire.

  “Who knew rubbing a kitten’s butt could be romantic?”

  This sets me to giggling so hard I can barely keep on, and when the kitten rewards my efforts with a few drops of urine, I giggle even harder.

  “His kidneys are working,” Cole says, when I settle down. “That’s good, right?”

  “Very good.”

  He yawns. “God, I’m tired.”

  “You and me both.”

  “You more than me, I suspect. Go sleep for a bit.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.