Part 2
“I did,” Ben said, and Eli’s bare feet appeared in the hallway behind her.
The boy had one hand pressed to the center of his pajama shirt, an old habit from the months when every unfamiliar beat had sent them toward the emergency department. His hair stood up on one side. He looked at the carrier, not at his parents.
“Is something in there?”
Claire stepped between him and the door. “Back to the living room, please. Give us five minutes.”
“It’s a cat.”
“Five minutes, Eli. And don’t touch the carrier.”
He retreated, but only as far as the other side of the glass-paneled mudroom door. Ben saw his pale reflection hovering there while Claire pointed to the utility sink.
“Set it down. Wash your hands. Then take off that jacket and put it straight in the machine.”
She moved fast when she was frightened. During Eli’s transplant admission, she had learned the names of every drug before Ben learned which elevator reached the cardiac floor. She could hear a change in Eli’s cough from two rooms away. What strangers called overprotective was, in their house, nine months of keeping a child alive after somebody else’s family had suffered the worst day of theirs.
Ben set the carrier in the far corner of the mudroom. “He’ll stay in here tonight. I have a vet appointment at eight-thirty. Eli won’t come in.”
“You already made the appointment.”
“I tried every foster within thirty miles first.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Skipper shifted inside the carrier. The brass tag touched the mesh door with a small, irregular tick.
“Animal Services was coming at eight,” Ben said. “He was lying beside the bus lane in sleet.”
“County Animal Services scans strays and calls fosters.”
“They couldn’t promise a foster.”
“Neither could we.” Claire kept her voice low for Eli, which made each word land cleanly. “You had choices. You just didn’t like the one where I could say no.”
Ben reached for the repaired zipper. Claire caught his wrist.
“Not until we have a litter box, food, and a way to keep him in this room. And you handle every bit of it until the vet and the transplant coordinator say otherwise.”
It took him a second to understand that she had not ordered him to take the cat back.
“All right.”
“That is not the same as my saying this was all right.”
They found an old roasting pan in the basement and filled it with shredded newspaper. Claire donated a ceramic bowl with a chip in its rim. Ben opened the carrier while she stood at the door, making sure Eli remained behind the glass.
Skipper emerged slowly. He sniffed the baseboard, drank for nearly a minute, and then walked past the blanket Ben had spread for him. He settled against the glass door instead, facing Eli.
The boy lowered himself on the other side. He did not tap the pane or make the kissing noises adults made at animals. He simply sat cross-legged, his hands loose in his lap. After a while, Skipper put one gray paw against the glass.
Eli lifted his hand and placed it over the same spot.
Ben glanced at Claire. Her face changed, but not enough to name.
“One night,” she said.
At the animal clinic the next morning, Skipper endured the exam with the grim patience of an employee being asked to cover somebody else’s shift. He objected once when Dr. Nisha Patel looked in his ears, then allowed himself to be weighed, vaccinated, treated for fleas, and scanned.
The microchip reader beeped.
“There you are,” Dr. Patel said. “Walter Pike. Same address you found on the incident report?”
Ben nodded. The registration listed a disconnected home number and a cell that rang to a full mailbox. Skipper was nine, neutered, and only modestly overdue for routine care. His coat hid the beginning of weight loss but no obvious injury. The clinic began routine parasite screening, completed the veterinary checklist Eli’s transplant team had requested, and promised the remaining results the following day.
“Until then, separate room,” Dr. Patel said. “Your son doesn’t handle litter or food bowls. No face licking, no scratches, and everybody washes their hands. If the screening stays reassuring, this becomes a question for his medical team and your family, not a reason to panic.”
“He’s not our cat.”
“His chip agrees with you. For now, the registered owner can’t be reached, and you signed the county’s temporary foster form. That makes him your responsibility, not your property.”
Before they left, Ben bought a hard-sided carrier from the clinic. He moved Walter’s masking-tape label and the dispatch sweatshirt into it and left the torn soft carrier for disposal.
On the way home, Ben tried Walter’s buzzer on Harbor Street. No one answered, and the building manager would not let him upstairs or discuss a tenant, so Ben left his number in a sealed envelope.
During the following day, Eli held watch through the mudroom glass. He read there, did math there, and ate half a grilled-cheese sandwich there while Skipper slept with his back against the other side. When the clinic called with reassuring results and the transplant coordinator approved supervised contact, Claire laid down rules. Skipper would remain indoors. Ben would manage the litter. Eli would wash his hands after touching him, and the cat would not sleep in Eli’s bed.
“Can he come out now?” Eli asked.
Claire looked at Ben before answering. She was giving him a chance to step back into the decision he had stepped around.
“For half an hour,” Ben said. “Then we see how everybody does.”
Claire opened the door.
Skipper did not rush through the house. He walked the perimeter of the kitchen, inspected the legs of each chair, and paused when the refrigerator motor came on. Eli remained on the floor near the doorway. When Skipper finally approached, the boy offered the back of his hand exactly as Dr. Patel had shown him.
The cat sniffed it, stepped past him, and sat on a folded dish towel beneath the radiator.
Eli laughed. It was no more than a surprised breath, but Ben had not heard that sound from him in weeks.
“He doesn’t like me,” Eli said.
“He met you yesterday,” Claire said. “Give him room to have an opinion.”
Eli did.
Over the next week, Skipper shed on the couch. He refused the expensive bed Claire ordered and slept in the cardboard lid it came in.
But ordinary things began happening around him. Eli completed the short hallway walks his physical therapist had assigned because the cat followed three paces behind, stopping whenever Eli stopped. One night Ben checked the old video monitor he and Claire had never quite managed to pack away and found the boy asleep on his side, with Skipper curled on the rug below. Ben watched long enough to see that neither of them stirred.
Every time Eli laughed, Ben glanced at his phone and hated himself for fearing the call he had asked the hospital to make.
On the ninth afternoon, he came home to find Eli at the dining table drawing a map of the bus routes that ran out of Breakwater. The lines were crooked, the scale impossible, and every route curved back toward a black square marked GATE 2. Skipper sat on the chair beside him, watching the pencil.
“Is that where I work?” Ben asked.
“It’s where he waited.”
Eli shaded the square until the paper thinned. “If Walter comes back, does Skipper have to go?”
Ben pulled out a chair. He had spent the week asking the same question without using those words.
“Walter is his person,” he said. “If we find him, we tell him the truth.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. It isn’t.”
Eli looked at the cat. “Then don’t promise me he can stay.”
Ben had expected pleading. The restraint in his son’s voice was harder to bear.
His phone rang before he could respond. The number belonged to Casco Regional Medical Center. Ben went to the kitchen, but Eli could still see him from the table.
The caller introduced herself as a hospital social worker. She had permission, she said, to speak about Walter Pike. He had been transferred to their cardiac unit after collapsing at the terminal. He had spent his first night under intensive monitoring, undergone a valve procedure a few days later, and was now medically stable and beginning rehabilitation.
“Mr. Pike received your message this morning,” she said. “He asked me to call right away. He wants to know when he can have Skipper back…”
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