“Lower yourself,” I breathe out, a reminder of how to handle frightened animals.
Towering over the animal only makes you intimidating. I crouch, so does Scarlett, and the cat thankfully stays in place. I glance over at Scarlett, and she’s doing all that I’ve taught her through the years: don’t make direct eye contact—just fleeting glimpses to assess the situation. Don’t give the animal a reason to bolt.
The cat watches Scarlett more than me, which allows me to slip in for a closer look.
There’re no wounds I can see, no blood gushing from anywhere, but there is a rip in its ear—a sign of at least one past fight. I pay extra attention to the rib cage to see if the cat is skin and bones, or if it has had the ability to do well on its own. My forehead furrows as parts of the cat show signs of malnourishment—it’s thin and its rib cage sticks out. Then my stomach sinks as I notice its protruded belly, with several enlarged pink spots on the abdomen.
I watch the abdomen. The cat’s stomach moves up and then down. I keep staring, intently, so much that my eyes start to burn as I fight the urge to blink. Then there it is—the rolling in the stomach.
“The cat’s pregnant, Tink,” I say softly.
Her head snaps in my direction, making the cat sit up. “Are you sure?”
“It’s either that or she has one hell of a tape worm, but I’m betting pregnant.”
“Can we catch her?” Scarlett asks. “Put her in one of the barns to keep her, and eventually her kittens, safe?”
I slowly extend my arm and the cat scrambles away with its back arched. I withdraw my arm to make myself smaller. It’s a bonus that the cat doesn’t dart. “If we go for her now, she’ll probably run off. Why don’t you go on home, and I’ll get some food from Gran’s.”
“Are you going to trap her with food?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want her to get hurt. I’m going to get her to trust me with food. Hopefully she’ll like me and let me pick her up. If not, I’ll consider using a raccoon trap. But something tells me once we start feeding her, she’ll warm up.”
“What if she’s not here when you get back?”
“She will be.”
“How do you know?”
I meet Scarlett’s eyes. “I don’t, but I think she will be. Plus, it’s the best option we have at the moment.”
She nods. We slowly ease back and are silent as we walk back toward her house. Once again, at the bottom of the tree, we look at each other.
“You promise we’ll help her?” Scarlett asks, and the ache of leaving the cat behind is noticeable in her voice.
“I promise.” I don’t break those. She knows that. I especially would never break a promise to her.
Scarlett gives me a soft smile. Then without another word, she jumps up to the lowest branch and starts scaling for her bedroom window.
There’s a lot of things screwed up in my life, but I have Scarlett and somehow, that makes everything else okay. Once safely inside, Scarlett waves down to me. I lift a hand in goodbye and then head back to my land, to Gran’s trailer, so I can find some food for our new cat.
Only a Breath Apart Original Opening
Chapter 46
Jesse
Wind whips through the tree outside the window. The thrashing limbs give the shadows on the wall the appearance they’re alive—poltergeists, ghosts. I’m a realist, so I don’t believe in spirits beyond the grave, but I do believe in memories. Some memories are so real they’re overpowering. That’s the black hole I’m sinking into tonight, memories come back to life.
Except for the soft light from the lamp next to my grandmother’s bed, the trailer is dark. Rain taps against the tin roof, and the last song on the vinyl record that’s been playing for the past twenty minutes ends. The room fills with the sound of dead air and the needle scratching on the paper label.
Gran loves listening to records, and that record player has been in her room for as long as I can remember. No matter how many times I’ve tried to bring her musical tastes into this century, she refuses. “Nothing sounds as good as it does playing from vinyl. Stop trying to change me, Jesse. I like who I am fine.”
It’s three in the morning. I rolled in at midnight, and something in the way she was dreaming kept me from going into my room across the hall. Gran had been in a wrestling match with an unseen force, and she appeared to be on the losing end. But I started playing her favorite albums on low, and she’s eased into a better sense of peace.
Everything seems normal again, except for her breathing. It’s shallow, labored, a wheeze. Her chest moves up and down, but I don’t like the sound of it. The doctor told her in April that her heart wouldn’t make it past July. It’s August. I reach over, place the needle back into the groove, and Johnny Cash sings once again. His voice is deep, the lyrics heavy, and the crazy growling in my brain becomes harder to ignore. I’m slowly losing my mind.
“You can feel it, can’t you, Jesse?” Like she’s a damn ghost herself, Glory’s pale face is the first part of her I see before she enters the light of Gran’s room. Her wild, wet blond hair sticks to her face, and water drips onto the worn carpet from the hem of her long dress. “The air is different, weighted. The doors between this world and the next are converging here—ready to take another soul.”
Glory is full of crap. She was born in the wrong era, wrong generation, or maybe she drank too much or smoked too much weed when she was my age of seventeen. Any way I look at it, her forty-year-old mind is shot. There isn’t some magical, mystical realm full of fairies and unicorns. There’s the real world and real problems. I can’t help it if Glory can’t deal with reality.
“I don’t remember inviting you.”
“I have an extended invitation,” she says.
“Three in the morning is beyond visiting hours.”
“Visiting hours are for conventional people, and there’s nothing conventional about any of us.” Glory float-walks to the other side of Gran, sits on the edge of the bed and gently takes her hand. “She’s going to pass tonight.”
“You don’t know that,” I snap.
She flips Gran’s hand over, traces her fingers over Gran’s palm and concentrates as she silently does a “reading.” I don’t bother to hide the roll of my eyes as I cross my arms. I lean back in the wooden chair as if I’m cool and calm instead of seconds away from losing my temper. If Gran didn’t love Glory so much, I’d kick her out.
Glory is family in the eighteenth-cousin-twice-removed way, and because of that, Gran has permitted Glory to live rent-free in the rundown cottage at the other side of the six hundred acres Gran owns. There, Glory-the-Con-Artist runs her tarot-card/palm-reading business. People pay her money so she can scam them and tell them lies.
There are three Lachlins left in this world: me, Glory, and Gran. Glory possesses a hint of the Lachlin bloodline, but Gran and I are the last full-blood heirs. This meant so much to Gran and my mom that they refused to give me my father’s last name. Instead, I have my grandmother’s maiden name: Lachlin.