The Kitty Committee Read online

  The Kitty Committee

  Kathryn Berla

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York | Idaho

  Amberjack Publishing

  1472 E. Iron Eagle Drive

  Eagle, Idaho 83616

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Kathryn Berla

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Berla, Kathryn, 1952- author.

  Title: The kitty committee / by Kathryn Berla.

  Description: New York : Amberjack Publishing, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018000194 (print) | LCCN 2018003382 (ebook) | ISBN 9781944995768 (eBook) | ISBN 9781944995751 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Friendship--Fiction. | Secrets--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.E75745 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.E75745 K58 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000194

  Cover Design: Mimi Bark

  “Whatever love we receive always comes as a form of grace.”

  —Magda Szabó

  If this was a horror movie, the screen of my laptop would fade to black. A grinning skull would materialize and burst into hideous peals of laughter before dissolving into the hacker’s moniker. But this isn’t just any horror movie. It’s my horror movie, the one I’m living. There’s no black screen, just the body of an email from an innocuous, seemingly untraceable sender.

  I’ve been waiting for it—searching for it, if truth be told. Checking my spam just in case I missed it this year, always arriving at the same time, always with a subject that’s just innocent enough to lull an unsuspecting reader into opening it and reading further. I’m not innocent. I’m not unsuspecting. I know it’s coming. I know I could delete every email that arrives in late February to early March that isn’t conclusively from someone I know. I know I could change my own email address and never look back. Close my old account.

  But I won’t.

  The email will find me somehow.

  Although I’m prepared for its contents, or at least its implied threat, a transfer of fluids causes my mouth to go suddenly dry and my palms to become suddenly wet. My heart squirms like a scared kitten trapped in a clutched hand. I bring my fingertips to my cheeks which feel thin, hollow, though I know they’re not. The light is unbearably bright, my eyes unable to focus. Everything is virtual visual nonsense. I’m locked in a cell from which there’s no apparent escape.

  Maggie died only just yesterday? Is it possible it was only just yesterday?

  Having no paper bag handy, I cup my hands over my nose and breathe slowly, feeling my stomach rise and fall.

  Maggie.

  Maggie.

  Was that really you? They told me you could hear me, though I doubted it. Still I spoke to you, and, since no one else was in the room, I even sang to you. I doubt you would have enjoyed it if you actually could hear me.

  How will I manage without you, Maggie? Your soft brown eyes that held me until the end. Wouldn’t let me go until they closed the final time.

  My carbon dioxide levels rise, pushing me from panic into pure sadness.

  I reach for the phone and tap out a text to a number I should have lost long ago.

  Did you get the email?

  No response.

  One minute.

  Two minutes.

  My phone rings.

  “Hi, Grace. We really shouldn’t text about this. Call next time if you need to talk.”

  “So, did you get the email?” I ask Carly.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? I deleted it like you should’ve. Didn’t read it.”

  I hear the clattering of computer keys in the background, and I know Carly is working, only half listening to me. Placating in that way she does that makes me feel like an annoying child.

  “Maggie died.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I called. Spoke to someone at the nursing station. They told me.”

  “I didn’t know you were keeping in touch.” These words are meant to punish. I know that. Carly will know that. And yet, it won’t have the effect I intend it to have.

  “Grace, she was my friend too. You’re not the only one who’ll miss her,” she says in a way I want to believe is compassionate.

  “It’s just that . . . when was the last time you visited her?” I try again. It’s futile, I know. Carly has an armor so thick that it can’t be pierced. Especially by me. And yet I continue to fling my puny words against it.

  “Grace . . .”

  She’s annoyed with me. I can tell by the way she speaks my name.

  “It’s not fair. She didn’t deserve this.”

  “Who deserves death, Grace? And yet it comes to us all.”

  The clattering of computer keys continues in the background.

  “Do you think,” I start. “Do you believe there’s something to it? To the email?”

  “What email? I told you—I didn’t read it.”

  “It said ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

  “Thanks, Grace. I just told you I deleted it because I didn’t want to know what it said.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Now I know. Thanks to you.” A phone rings nearby. “Grace, what is it you want me to say to you?”

  Why did Maggie have to die? Why couldn’t it have been Carly? Or me?

  “There’s no one else I can talk to,” I say, aware of how pathetic that sounds.

  “I don’t get what you’re saying. Do I think there’s something to the email? You’re the religious one. I don’t believe in that mumbo jumbo. You tell me.”

  I lower my voice to barely above a whisper as though the walls themselves could capture and turn my words against me.

  “I’m not religious anymore either, and you know it. But Maggie’s cancer. Her anorexia. Do you ever wonder if—”

  “Do I believe in fairy tales? No, Grace, I don’t believe in fairy tales. There’s no giant man in the sky who woke up yesterday and decided to turn his murderous attentions on Maggie. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Forty is so young. To die.”

  “She had an aggressive form of breast cancer, and you should know about that stuff more than anyone. Lots of people die young. It’s a cruel irony of life, among many others.”

  “It’s a well-documented fact that stress can lower your resistance . . . it can lead to physical as well as mental illness. The constant stress in Maggie’s life. What we did.”

  “Yeah, and if you keep it up, you’re going to psych yourself into something too, real or imagined. So just relax, okay?”

  “You didn’t see her, Carly. Talking to her on the phone is one thing but seeing her . . .”

  “Okay, Grace, if it makes you feel any better, they just arrested a guy in . . . someplace, I can’t remember where. And he was in his mi
d-nineties and responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Auschwitz more than seventy fucking years ago. And he was doing just fine, thank you very much. So much for the email. And your loony fears.”

  I allow the loony fears remark to slide.

  “Maybe he didn’t have remorse. Maybe he didn’t feel like he’d done anything wrong. But Maggie did, that’s the difference.”

  Silence.

  “I’m slammed here at work, Grace, I really am. I gotta go, but you take care, okay? Do yourself a favor and pull yourself together.”

  “You’re never worried, are you? You never think about your part in everything. How do you manage it?”

  I don’t really want to know how she manages it. She manages it without a conscience. Again, I try to wind her up but am unsuccessful.

  “No, I’m not worried. Same old whack-job with a chip on his shoulder. Or her shoulder. One of these days hopefully they’ll drop dead and we’ll never hear from them again.” The clattering stops, and her voice drops to a husky whisper. “Until that happy day, no one knows anything. No one can prove anything. We technically did nothing wrong. And there’s such a thing as statute of limitations, even if we did. Okay? Got it? Oh, and Grace? Are we really going to do this every year? How many years has it been? Twenty?”

  Before the call, I’d hoped this would be the time when I’d make her number disappear from my phone and never speak to her again. But now I know it won’t be. As long as Carly continues to take my calls, I’ll continue to make them. Why do I care so much what Carly thinks? Because she doesn’t care at all.

  Maggie was the only one who stayed in Indian Springs. She had family there—roots like the daffodils. Roots that went back generations. But eventually, she too was in San Francisco, spending more and more time at the university hospital. She’d been there before, twenty years earlier when her already slender frame was reduced to nothing more than a reminder of who she had been. Anorexia. Then, twenty years later, the relentless cancer that whittled away at her like a carving knife.

  When I last visited Maggie, I was struck by the cruel similarity in appearance from two decades earlier. The taut skin over her cheekbones, tight like a mask. The unhealthy pallor. The terrible thought that a too-heavy blanket would crush her fragile bones, leaving only a pile of dust behind.

  Was that only two days ago?

  I brought a bouquet of daffodils the day I sang for Maggie in her hospital room. Her parents, reunited long ago by her difficulties, slipped out of the room, taking advantage of my presence for a brief mental-health respite. I knew Maggie couldn’t see the daffodils, but I told her they were there.

  Maybe she heard me, and it brought her some comfort.

  Maybe the daffodils were really meant for me.

  Chapter One

  Indian Springs: Twenty-Two Years Earlier

  I was born to be the perpetual new girl. I don’t mean that I was quick to adapt and loved new situations. On the contrary, change was hard for me, and I didn’t have the effervescent personality that could smooth my transitions. So I was born to be the new girl because I met everyone’s expectations.

  My brother, Luke, was the opposite. He was handsome, yes. He was athletic, yes. Not too much bothered him, and he wasn’t even required to have a winning personality. But he did. So while Luke was busy deciding how to fairly distribute himself and his many talents as a senior at Indian Springs High, I was busy trying to disappear as a sophomore.

  As the children of missionaries, our education had been carried out mostly through homeschooling and mission schools, wherever they were available, but I was far enough ahead in my studies that my parents, with the school’s blessing, decided to skip me ahead a grade. Every five years we were required to spend a year back home, although it didn’t feel anything like home to me. But when Dad broke his back falling off a ladder in Guatemala, we returned three months early. My only other experiences living in the states had been when I was eight and we spent a year in rural Georgia where my mother grew up. And another year in that same small town when I was only three. This time, because of my father’s medical condition, my parents moved us to Indian Springs, which was close to San Francisco, where Dad grew up, and yet far enough away to be affordable. The main reason, though, was the access to good medical care for Dad and, as always, the church community to ease our transition back into the first world.

  And what a transition it would prove to be. Nothing prepared me for this country that claimed me on my passport as one of its own. I was accustomed to dusty roads and stray dogs and people whose smiles bore no evidence of orthodontia; market days and clothes my mother sewed on her old Singer from fabrics dyed in brilliant shades of fruit and sunsets and a jungle that creeped up to your window if you allowed it; the Sunday morning serene but blissful faces of worshippers seated on splintered planks in tiny wooden churches; languages I understood spoken side-by-side with languages I didn’t; having the ability to interpret a person’s meaning by listening to the cadence of their tongue. The movement of their hands. The crinkle at the corner of their eye. This is what I knew.

  In Indian Springs, we arrived at night. And when I woke the following morning, I already suspected what a colossal task lay ahead of me. It was almost impossible for me to believe I belonged there with its delineated properties and paved streets that intersected each other at right angles.

  The property manager stopped by with the lease and an extra set of keys. A neighbor returned a garden hose he’d borrowed from the last tenants and kept because the house was unoccupied. The mailman pushed his cart along the sidewalk, pausing at our box where he sorted through his bag before selecting a few items to leave behind. Mail addressed to past occupants. Names we didn’t know.

  I had imagined a life in the states one day, but I didn’t think it would be until I was much older. My vision of that life came from old magazines I managed to salvage in the villages where I grew up. The occasional snippets of television I caught during visits to the central medical clinic or the rare family outing to a restaurant which could claim status beyond glorified street vendor. But the magazines didn’t prepare me for an entire new set of social cues. A new way of communicating with strangers who spoke precisely and politely but never gave away anything beyond just their words. How to reconcile this world with the one I’d left behind, one I would come to view as a golden time in my life. That I had to figure out on my own, and there was no time to waste.

  In preparation for my new life at a new school, I’d gotten the notion that a pixie cut would favorably frame my round face, making me more appealing to others. I’d come up with the idea by myself, inspired by a very outdated teen magazine. Mom would never have thought to impart fashion advice, which was the furthest thing from her mind. Growing up, my hair hung shoulder length and natural as it dried and was shaped by the tropical humidity. Mom would lop it off with a pair of old scissors whenever it got too long. I sensed this wouldn’t be enough for first-world respectability, so using the same old scissors, with one eye on the magazine and the other on a mirror in front of me, I recreated the cut as best as I could. Mom helped with the back, claiming she loved not only the modesty of the cut but the look of it too.

  What I hadn’t foreseen was that the baby fat which made my face round also made my body round. And without the aid of any makeup to hint at my gender (and no breasts to speak of), my pixie cut had the effect of transforming me into a chubby boy—at least, at first glance. While other girls blossomed, I was stuck in prepubescence. Had I not insisted on wearing a skirt my first day at Indian Springs High, I most likely would have been taken for a boy. I was wholly unprepared to be a modern American teen, and yet that’s just what I was about to become.

  Mom dropped us off across the street on our first day of school. Luke flew out of the car and melded so seamlessly into the crowd, it seemed he’d done it a thousand times before. First day of school for us was February tw
enty-third, which was going on the 160th day for everyone else.

  Still, I felt my chest swell with optimism at the sight of thousands of daffodils lining every conceivable walkway around and leading up to Indian Springs High. Their humble, bowing heads melded into a bright sea of such intense color, I was certain it could shame even the sun. I was Dorothy skipping along the yellow brick road toward the Emerald City and all the adventures awaiting me. Any school of this size was a totally unfamiliar concept to me. Prior to this, the largest school I’d attended numbered thirty students max. Children of missionaries, locals, and the occasional son or daughter of an American diplomat, preferring a religious education.

  But somewhere between my mother’s car and the intimidating entrance of my new school, my legs grew heavy, my heart sodden with dread. It seemed that pixie cuts were not in style, after all. I didn’t see one girl with hair short enough to reveal her ears. Hair was styled, not air-dried like mine which I had lauded for the absolute genius of convenience it would bring to my life. The source of my fashion inspiration had been terribly out of date. I felt deceived by my mother’s reassurance.

  How had I so badly misjudged this most basic of all teen fashion tenets—the acceptable hairstyle? But it didn’t end there because it was soon obvious the pixie cut wasn’t my only fashion crime. Blouses tucked into pleated skirts were nowhere to be seen, except on me. The girls wore pants, jeans mostly. Tight-fitting tops revealing developing figures instead of baggy blouses. And if there were skirts, they were unlike any skirt that was part of my wardrobe, which up until that point was a mish-mash of donations of used clothing from strangers, last-minute purchases from Goodwill, and some colorful ethnic fashions picked up on the cheap in countries where we’d lived. I wondered how I was going to convince Mom to let me wear makeup—jeans, I was sure she’d go along with for their modesty. I didn’t have a clue as to how to apply makeup and, even if I could convince Mom, she wouldn’t be of any help having never touched the stuff herself.