Something about this conversation gave Patricia an idea: If her parents wouldn’t let her go back to the woods, maybe she could get them to agree to something else? Like maybe she could get a cat. At dinner, Patricia forked steamed kale around her plate while her mom asked what everybody had done to Improve themselves today. Roberta, the perfect straight-A student, always had the best Improvements, like every day she’d aced some crazy-tough assignment. But Patricia was stuck at a school where all you ever did was memorize stuff and fill out multiple-choice ovals, so she had to lie, or else learn something in her spare time. For three or four days in a row, Patricia kept coming up with Improvements that sounded kind of impressive, storing up credit, and then she started mentioning that she wanted to get a cat.
Patricia’s parents disliked animals and felt certain that they would be allergic. But at last, they relented—so long as Patricia promised to do all cat-related labor, and if the cat got sick they wouldn’t have to rush to a vet or anything. “We have to agree in advance that all veterinary care will be scheduled far ahead, in a time window that’s convenient for Roderick and myself,” said Patricia’s mother. “There will be no such thing as a cat-related emergency. Are we in agreement?”
Patricia nodded and crossed her heart.
Berkley was a fluffy black kitten with a huge white stripe on his stomach and a white smudge across his scowly face. (Patricia named him after a cartoonist.) They got Berkley already fixed, out of a litter of kittens from their neighbor, Mrs. Torkelford, and right away Patricia noticed something familiar about him. He kept giving Patricia the stink-eye and running away from her, and after a few days she realized: He must be the grandson, or grandnephew, of Tommington, the cat she’d stranded up a tree when she was little. Berkley never spoke to her, of course, but she couldn’t shake the impression that he had heard about her.
Also, even though Roberta had expressed no interest in getting a cat beforehand, she wanted to share Berkley. She would hoist Berkley by his little shoulders and carry him up to her bedroom, then close the door. Patricia would hear a pitiful groaning, even over Roberta’s loud music. But the door was locked. And the one time Patricia told her parents she thought Roberta was mistreating the cat, they referred back to the “no cat-related emergencies” clause. All Roberta would say was, “I’m teaching him to play the bongos.”
Patricia wanted to protect Berkley from her sister, but he hissed if Patricia even came close. “Come on,” Patricia kept pleading in her human voice. “You have to let me help you. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to keep you safe.” But the cat fled whenever Patricia approached. He’d taken to hiding in a million nooks and crawl spaces in the spice house, emerging when his bowl was full or he needed the litter box. Roberta had an uncanny ability to know when Berkley was out, and astounding reflexes for scooping him up.
*
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER Improvement. After lights-out, Patricia heard yowls that started high and got lower and more tragic, coming from Roberta’s room.
The next day, after school, Laurence came over to Patricia’s house, where he’d gotten used to the musty aromas of old seasonings. The two of them sat in the front parlor, where you could still see the outlines on the wall where spice bins had once hung, and worked on a solution to the problem of Berkley.
“If we could capture the cat, we could rig some kind of protective exoskeleton,” Laurence said.
“He’s suffered enough,” Patricia said. “I don’t want to torture him any more by prodding him and attaching some kind of gear to his body.”
“If I knew how to build nanomachines, I would make a swarm of them follow him around and form a shield when he was in distress. But my best attempts at nanomotors were sort of, um, lazy. You wouldn’t like lazy nanobots.”
They caught a glimpse of Berkley in the unilluminable darkness of the spice house’s upper attic, behind a great support beam. A glimmer of fur, a bright pair of eyes. Another time Berkley ran down the stairs, just as they threw themselves in his path. The two children wound up in a bruised heap at the bottom of the stairwell.
“Listen,” Patricia said from the bottom of the stairs. “Tommington was a good cat. I didn’t have anything against him. He was just doing his cat thing. I never meant him any harm, I swear.” There was no response.
“Maybe you should do a spell,” said Laurence. “Do some magic or something. I dunno.”
Patricia felt sure Laurence was laughing at her, but he didn’t have that kind of guile. She would have seen it on his face.
“I’m serious,” Laurence said. “This seems like a magic kind of problem, if there ever was one.”
“But I don’t know how to do anything,” Patricia said. “I mean, the only time I did anything magicky in years was when I ate too much spicy food. I’ve tried every kind of spice a hundred times since then.”
“But maybe you didn’t need to be able to do anything those other times,” Laurence said. “And now, you do.”
Berkley watched them from atop a bookcase full of Patricia’s mother’s Productivity Assessment books. He was ready to flee, fast as a bullet train, if they came too close.
“I wish we could just go into the woods and find that magic Tree,” Patricia said. “But my parents would kill me if they found out. And I know Roberta would tell them.”