Writings

The lady from the SPCA asked me questions from her clipboard. Mostly they were easy. “Do you live in an apartment or a house?” A house. “Do you have any other pets?” No.

The interview started to go off the rails when she asked: “Is anyone home during the day?”

“What?”

“Is anyone home during the day?” She looked at me like it was the simplest of questions, which, of course, it was.

Still, I felt exposed, so I demurred stupidly. “Well I go out to the store sometimes.”

The woman scowled at me. I couldn’t figure out what was so terrible about going out to the store. But then the way she drummed her fingers on the edge of the clipboard made me realize she was getting impatient with me.

“Do you have a job, Miss Alexander?” she asked as if speaking to someone who was quite slow.

“Yes, of course I do.”

“And for this job, do you leave your house for long stretches of time?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I knew I was being defensive, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“It’s important because you are requesting just the one cat, and you don’t have any other pets, and you live alone.”

“Not always,” I pointed out before realizing that would raise even more questions.

She peered at me over the tops of her red-rimmed glasses.

“My husband travels a lot for work.”

“I see.”

“He’s on an extended tour of duty.” It was a lie, but the truth was too embarrassing to admit.

“Military?”

I winced. There were no military bases anywhere near Nelson, South Dakota.

“Kind of,” was the only reply that came to me.

Luckily the woman appeared anxious to conclude the interview. “I only ask because pets gets lonely and destructive when left by themselves too long.”

I knew how they felt.

“Even cats.” She put away the clipboard. “People think it’s only dogs that need their owners around, but cats do too.”

“Oh, well, I work at home. So it’s not a problem.” I didn’t tell her that I had taken a pay cut in order to work at home just in case Aidan came back. I mean, so that I would be home when Aidan finally found his way back. “I do accounting for a local firm, but I work from home.”

“That’s great.” She handed me a small stack of paper. “Here are some materials that will help you acclimate Patches to her new surroundings.”

“Thanks.”

#

It turned out that Patches didn’t need any help acclimating to her new surroundings. As soon as I opened the cardboard carrier, she jumped out and walked straight to the couch. She hopped up and sat on the far left side, scrunched up next to the arm.

My breath caught in my throat. Aidan preferred exactly that spot. He refused to sit anywhere else.

I imagined that he would be pleased to have a cat share the perch with him. After all, he was the one who suggested we get a cat. I pictured him scooping up the kitten, sitting down in his spot, then settling Patches on his lap.

It was a beautiful picture. One I hoped to see someday.

#

That night I dreamed of Aidan. I woke still warm and happy from his fantasy embrace. Mere moments later when my mind woke enough to realize it had all been a dream, I cried bitterly until Patches jumped onto the bed and began licking the tears from my face.

Aidan had been gone for nearly eight years. Everyone else had long since called him dead. But for me, he was always missing, lost, or delayed. I knew he was out there somewhere. I just couldn’t explain why he wasn’t here with me.

The police did their best. They looked for more than a year. But there were no clues, no indication of foul play, no sign of him in any local hospital or homeless shelter. One day he just went out to the store for ice cream and never came back.

The shopkeeper was able to confirm that Aidan came in about nine p.m., and that he bought the usual caramel ice cream for me and mint chocolate chip for himself. But that was where the trail stopped. No one saw him after that. No one who was talking, anyway.

Over the years, I explained his absence in dozens of ways. When I felt unworthy, I imagined he left me for someone better. But that wasn’t like Aidan. He had never been afraid of confrontation. If he’d wanted to leave me, he would have said so and then done it. It wasn’t like him to slip away without comment.

One time, I imagined that he had been called away on a secret mission to save the world, and by extension me, and that he could not contact me until it was over. But that too seemed implausible.

None of my explanations made sense. None of them fit. The truth was something else entirely, something I haven’t even imagined, or perhaps something that my subconscious knew but was hiding from me.

I paid extra attention to my dreams. I figured my mind might slip up and tell me the truth there. In fact, it may have already done so and I just hadn’t been able to discern the message.

I kept a notebook on my nightstand so that I could jot down the dream as soon as I awoke. Sometimes, like this time, it was a joy to recount and relive the dream. Other times, it wasn’t.

#

A couple weeks after I bought Patches, I woke to find her sitting on top on my journal, staring at me. When I moved to touch her, she jumped off onto the floor, which sent the notebook clattering to the floor as well.

Slowly I got out of bed to pick up the journal. It laid on the wood floor splayed open and face down. Patches, of course, was nowhere to be seen. She was probably hiding under the sofa; it seemed to be her preferred out-of-sight spot.

Picking up the book, I noticed one of my old notations from a couple months ago. In that night’s dream, Aidan had been hovering around the edges of the scene, silently observing. I was so frustrated because no matter how many times I tried to talk to him, he always ignored me, looked right through me like one of the guards at Buckingham Palace, utterly forbidden from reacting to anything I said or did. That morning I had stayed in bed for almost an hour, crying and ranting at the unfairness of it all. It was bad enough that Aidan was unreachable in my life. Why did he have to be unreachable in my dreams as well?

I flipped the pages, looking for a happier dream. I knew they were there. I stopped when I got to October 30th. That had been a particularly good dream.

I re-read the entry, savoring every word, every memory.

I was watching TV in the den. Aidan came in and sat next to me. Even in the dream, I was surprised. He looked exactly as I remembered. More importantly, he looked at me like he knew me, like he remembered who we were to each other, like it was before the tragedy of his disappearance.

“Kate,” he said in the most everyday of ways. “Where is the cat?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she is upstairs, under the bed.” I didn’t want to chance upsetting dream-Aidan by telling him we didn’t have a cat.

“That’s odd. Usually she likes to stay down here with me.”

Me too, I thought.

He put an arm around me and I felt faint from the blissful shock. I closed my eyes and reveled in the warmth of his body against mine. It had been a long time. I laid my head on his shoulder. I could smell the minty scent of his favorite soap.

“So, what are we watching?” he asked casually, as if it didn’t matter. But I knew it did. I had been watching something he wouldn’t be interested in.

“Nothing in particular,” I answered, handing him the remote. “Watch whatever you want.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, ever careful to be polite.

“Sure. I don’t feel like watching anything. I just want to sit here and rest.” All I wanted was to be near him for as long as I could.

“Okay, I’ll watch the news, then we can watch whatever you want.”

“Fine.”

Waking had been particularly hard that morning. I tried desperately to get back into the dream. I closed my eyes tight and focused on every detail. But it didn’t work.

After sleeping in Aidan’s arms, it was a terrible shock to be back in my lonely, confused life. Aidan’s scent faded with every waking breath. I threw the journal across the room. Moments later I realized I should get the dream down on paper before it faded completely.

I smiled at the bittersweet memory. I hadn’t experienced such a vivid and romantic dream of Aidan since then. It was the dream that convinced me to get a cat.

I thought somehow that a cat might draw him home. I knew the very idea was ridiculous, but I was desperate.

Patches came back into the bedroom. Apparently I had been quiet for long enough that she felt safe to come out of hiding.

“It’s not your fault, girl. I know that.”

The cat meowed in response. But I suspect it was nothing more than a cry for food.

I got up and went to the kitchen to feed her.

I stopped in the living room. A man was sitting at the kitchen table, his back to me. I knew immediately that it was Aidan even though he didn’t look anything like him. What I wasn’t sure of was my own sanity. I had dreamed him for so long…had my mind finally given way and decided to grant my wish?

The man’s hair was long and matted, like it hadn’t been washed in ages. His clothes were tattered and dirty. The back of one shoe was almost completely gone, the upper hanging onto the sole by a mere thread of worn leather. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that might have been navy at one time.

Aidan had been wearing a navy sweatshirt the night he disappeared. It too had a hood.

My voice trembled. “Hello?”

The man turned to me and my heart forgot to beat. It was Aidan. New creases lined his face and dirt smeared his cheeks, but his eyes were the same bright blue they had always been.

I wanted to run to him, embrace him. But there was hesitation in his voice.

“I think I live here.”

“You do. But you’ve been away a long time. How did you get here?”

He looked out toward the backyard. “I was walking, and I turned onto a street, and I realized I knew the place. I kept walking until I… I recognized the house.”

“But how did you get in?”

“The fake rock in the garden, the one with the key in it.”

“You remember that?”

“I guess so.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not I should ask where he had been, but I couldn’t help myself. “Where were you?”

He turned away for a second, letting his gaze scan the room. “I… I got lost.”

When he turned his head I noticed a scar running down the side of face, along the hairline, all the way down to his ear. It hadn’t been there before.

Patches boldly sauntered into the kitchen and brushed up against Aidan’s stained pant leg. He reached a hand down to pet the cat. “I don’t remember the cat at all,” he said sadly.

“I didn’t get her until after you… After you got lost.”

“Oh.”

I sat in the chair next to him.

He looked at me with a strange mix of confusion and longing. “Do you sing? I remember a woman singing in the kitchen while she did the dishes.”

“Yes, that’s me.” I reached for his hand. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Me too. I don’t remember everything. But this feels like home. And I’ve been looking for home for a long time.”

“Everything is going to be fine now. Don’t worry.”

“Can you make me breakfast?”

“Of course, I used to do that everyday. You always hated to cook.”

He nodded. “I remember that. What did I like to eat for breakfast?”

“Sausage and cheese omelets.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. I remember that. And when the weather was warm, we would take our breakfast out onto the porch and watch the sun rise over the fence.”

“Yes, we did.”

“There’s something else.”

“What? What is it?”

“Do you have any ice cream? I’ve had the strangest craving for ice cream. For mint chocolate chip ice cream.”

I smiled. “Yep, we’ve got some in the freezer. I knew you’d want some when you got back.”

Selena Thomason writes mostly science fiction, but sometimes feels called to other genres. She has had more than thirty stories published in magazines such as bending spoons, Every Day Fiction, Anathema, The Literary Bone, AlienSkin Magazine, and VerbSap. Selena is also Managing Editor of MindFlights magazine. Her published works are available at http://selenathomason.com/

Share This Article »