Cleo

A few weeks after Rob’s birthday, there was a phone call from newspaper editor Jim Tucker. Jim was starting up a national broadsheet, the Sunday Star, and wondered if I’d like to join his team as a feature writer. Listening to Jim’s energy-charged enthusiasm, I had to concentrate on his voice to convince myself I wasn’t dreaming. A fresh start in an exciting work environment was something I’d longed for. Up till now, I’d been confident that would never happen. After all, my weekly pieces about family life in the Wellington newspaper were hardly Pulitzer Prize material.

Jim was offering every mother’s dream—flexible working hours. But there was one thing he wasn’t prepared to negotiate. If I wanted the job we’d have to pack up the family, cat and all, and move six hundred kilometers north to Auckland. Heart throbbing in the back of my throat, I thanked Jim and asked if he could give me some time to think.

Cleo glided into the kitchen and stared up at me through crescent-moon eyes. I lifted her up and ran my fingers through her silky fur. We’d made good friends in Wellington. How could we leave Ginny and Jason? Rob was happy at school. The success of his birthday party proved the great progress he’d made. Lydia was young enough not to notice, but even then I’d have to find quality care for her while I was working. And what about Cleo? Cats are famous for being more attached to places than people.

Then there was the job. Jim was obviously confident that I could write about subjects other than babies, carpet fluff and supermarket trolleys, but what if he was wrong? After a decade languishing in the ’burbs, I’d forgotten most of my journalism training. Parts of my brain had almost certainly shriveled. Why else would I scribble shopping lists in code I couldn’t decipher by the time I reached the supermarket? Failure would be embarrassingly public.

I loved Wellington and had learned to appreciate the character-building aspects of its weather, hills and earthquakes. On the other hand, the allure of a larger, warmer city was appealing. I sometimes wondered if the zigzag bungalow was built on an unlucky fault line and doomed to bring sorrow to whoever lived within its walls. Even though Steve and I had sailed a cloud of elation around Lydia’s conception and birth, we were starting to drift back into old patterns of withdrawal and resentment. Love was on ice again. Maybe the romance of hibiscus flowers and long summer nights would muster our strength for one last try.

Always supportive of my writing “career.” Steve was prepared to put up with the inconvenience of selling the house and commuting to his ship every few weeks. Accepting Jim’s job offer was risking a lot. Turning him down, however, would be taking other, possibly more dangerous, risks.

I’d seen Cleo in a similar dilemma, with her back legs wedged in the fork of a tree and her front paws stretched down and perched perilously on the top of a fence. She knew she had to get down from the tree, and the fence was the only viable option. Her confidence wavered every so often, and she’d try to twist herself back up into the tree. But it was too late—she’d made the move, stretched her body across the space between the tree and fence and there was only one way to go. She had to use every ounce of concentration to land her back legs accurately on the fence. If not, a humiliating tumble into the garden would be involved. Cleo was a risk expert. She took them every day and they nearly always paid off.

We’d survived two Christmases without Sam, and two of his birthdays. The days when grief was still raw were interspersed with a slowly increasing number of “good” days. Optimism was fragile, though. Like a shoot forcing itself through the earth after a long winter, I was easily crushed.

Bolstered by Jim’s offer, I was walking through the city center one morning feeling unusually buoyant. Valerie, an acquaintance from Sam’s preschool, approached, arranging her face in that funeral-parlor expression that had become so familiar. “How are you?” she asked in the old terminal-diagnosis voice. “I was thinking of you the other day when my great-aunt Lucy died…”

After listening to Valerie’s story (great-aunt Lucy dropped dead digging potatoes, aged ninety-seven) I hurried home and picked up the phone. “Jim? I’ll take the job.”

Resilience

There are no changes in a cat’s life. Only adventures.

The saddest thing about leaving Wellington was saying good-bye to Ginny. She stood at the top of the zigzag, wind blowing her earrings horizontal. But with the house sold and the car packed to the roof, it was too late to change my mind. I sensed we’d always be part of each other’s lives.

“You’ll be fabulous, darling,” she said, blowing a kiss through the passenger window. “Byeee!”