Cleo

The surgery was put on hold. Rob’s condition slowly improved. We knew he was on the mend the night we found him sitting in the ward’s television room.

“How do I look?” he asked Philip.

Not great, to tell the truth. Rob had lost more than twenty pounds through his ordeal. His skin glowed white against his red bathrobe, and he was still attached to a drip. Nevertheless, the return of masculine vanity was the best sign yet.

He was prescribed hefty doses of steroids for the foreseeable future and warned that his colon might eventually have to be removed. By the time he was allowed home Rob was a skeletal version of his former self. Just weeks earlier he’d been waterskiing, rising from the lake like a young Apollo. It was hard to believe all that muscle and tan could evaporate so quickly. He was too weak to walk to the parking lot. He waited on a bench outside the hospital doors while I collected the car.

We’d tidied and freshened up his bedroom at home, but more than anything he wanted to be outside. I set up a chair and blanket for him in the garden, where Cleo quickly joined him.

“I never realized the sky was such an intense blue,” he said as the cat nestled into the folds of his trousers that were now several sizes too big for him.

He examined the grass, trees and flowers with the peeled-back clarity of one who has been close to death.

“The colors are so bright,” he said. “The birds, the insects. I used to take them all for granted. It’s a miracle. I hope I always see the world this clearly.”

As soon as he was strong enough, Rob packed his ancient car to the roof and drove south. Miraculously, the car held together long enough to get him to the far end of South Island. He spent the winter skiing and making coffees in a ski field cafe near Queenstown. After that, he was ready to get back to university and finish his degree.

But his health was far from perfect. Although he suffered regular “flare-ups” the steroids ensured none were as bad as the first attack. With a stony sense of dread I noticed the steroid doses had to be increased every few months to keep his condition under control.

In case we were lapsing into an assumption that life was dull, Philip arrived home from work one evening to announce he’d had a promotion. The only complication was the job was in Melbourne, Australia.

Missing

A cat reserves the right to disappear without explanation.

My habitual terror of flying was replaced by a different neurosis—cat-in-the-hold anxiety. What if Cleo was freezing back there? Or if her carrier had been placed alongside a pit bull terrier with anger management issues? My ear was cocked for the sound of muffled meowing from the plane’s rear. A pair of stewards performed the flight instructions with the flourish of chorus members from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—“Should an oxygen mask appear, bat your eyelashes, swoosh that plastic tube and gyrate those hips!” Clattering trolleys, yelling babies and pilot’s announcements drowned all hopes I had of hearing distress calls from Cleo.

I tried not to worry. There was a chance she wasn’t even on our plane. We’d been told she might arrive up to twenty-four hours later than us.

The parched continent spread like a giant poppadom beneath us. Engines whined as we descended into Melbourne. Fear flipped into excitement and back again. As we climbed into a cab I savored the dry air and the giant blue sky. Everything about Australia was magnified, more confident and outgoing. I hoped we could burrow out a life for ourselves on its sun-burnt expanse.

The girls regarded the move with almost as little enthusiasm as the convicts who’d been shipped to the country one hundred and fifty years earlier. Unlike the British penal system, we’d gone out of our way to make their transportation to Australia seem attractive. In short, we’d bribed them. Shamelessly. Katharine, who’d initially insisted on a kangaroo farm, settled for a Barbie house with a motorized elevator. Lydia was still working a deal to be driven to her new school in one of the horse-drawn carriages she’d seen trotting around the central city (“the one with red feathers on the horses’ heads”).