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This was normal, Alma told herself, and not for the first time.
It was normal, when you came home from a hostage situation involving a young girl to your wife, currently pregnant with what was allegedly going to be a girl, that you'd have a wee bit of trauma. That you'd fall on your wife, silently holding her close, massive body shivering with withheld tears. That you'd take the antique gun from your father that hadn't been fired in decades and throw it into the darkest depths of their storage unit, never to be seen in the household again.
It was normal, even healthy, that you'd maybe pick up an emotional support animal, and talk to it as if it understood. A stray street cat from a park, less so, but Alma was so desperate to give Jowd a shred of comfort that she agreed to take the little cat in. And to name him Sissel, for some reason.
It was probably normal, that when the little cat was found limp and unbreathing in a corner, that you'd deny to your wife's teary face that anything was wrong. That you'd claim cats just did this sometimes, sleep so hard they seemed unconscious, give it a little bit to nap and baby Sissel would come back around. His laughter at her concern made Alma want to slap him, more so when the dead cat was casually walking across the room a few hours later. Jowd made some joke about Sissel being 'out to see a friend' and never mentioned it again.
All just…totally normal. Because if it wasn't normal, Jowd's wife had no idea what to do about it.
There were few more frustrating things as a woman than a man telling you that you were wrong, and reality backing him up about it. But Alma abided. If sometimes things in the house weren't where you left them, cabinet doors open or Christmas displays turned on…well, she did have a young child, and a husband with what she was starting to suspect was OCD, with his occasional insistance on leaving items in the house in certain configurations as if to make a path throughout the apartment.
The cat seemed to bring Jowd a great deal of comfort, but even the animal itself was weird. Alma had never owned a cat, and perhaps that was why everything about Sissel seemed strange. Whenever she spoke, Sissel stared at her as if fully intent and listening. The little black cat ate little, and frolicked about the house with little interest in his own safety. Jowd let him come and go out of the window as it pleased, and to his credit Sissel always came home again.
She'd fretted about leaving a street-raised ball of claws and teeth and bacteria alone with her child, but Jowd was impossible to move. When Kamilla managed to get her arm stuck in the crib railing it was Sissel who came yowling into the room, headbutting her ankles until she followed him back to the nursery.
At least her birthday should have been her own.
Jowd had been stressed all day, refusing to leave the room, refusing to let Kamilla work on her 'secret birthday present' that she kept whispering in her father's ear about, prowling like a protective bear around the house. Instead of going out to dinner Jowd insisted they stay home, claiming an oncoming thunderstorm that wasn't in evidence on the news. By the evening he was halfway to a panic attack, carrying Sissel around the apartment like he was a protective amulet.
At 7:46pm, while Kamilla played in the living room and Alma sat working out her stress on her newest knitted capelet, it happened.
The sensation defied definition, hitting Alma's chest like a bolt of lightning. The more she tried to find a word for it - burning or stabbing or aching - the more it eluded her, as if the pain had hit her in her very soul. A feeling of overwhelming doom enshrouded her, heart racing against an unseen threat from an unknown monster. She found herself trapped in her armchair underneath her knitting, unable to breathe.
Kamilla looked up from her Kinex set, where a moment earlier she'd been happily building her little Rube Goldberg construction site, and burst immediately into tears. Jowd rushed to her and gathered her in his arms, holding her shaking body tight to his broad chest. What little Alma could hear were words like 'i'm sorry' and 'it's not your fault'.
As if something had happened.
But nothing had happened, nothing besides a sense of dread slammed into her chest like a bullet. Alma could barely move, not even to cry for help, to ask for one of those broad arms to comfort her as well. (This was probably a panic attack. She'd researched them, for Jowd, because Jowd wouldn't do it himself. Alma wasn't supposed to get them. Alma was supposed to be his rock in the storm.)
Suddenly Sissel was in her lap, feet up on her chest to nuzzle against her chin. She could almost, faintly, as if the TV were on too loud in the next apartment, hear a soft voice saying Don't worry, Alma. You're safe. I'll keep you safe.
Or something like that. The meaning came across more than the words, and perhaps she had imagined it all. Alma closed her eyes as the purring from Sissel, far louder than such a tiny body should manage, vibrated through her chest and soothed the ache inside her core.
Slowly, like a thundercloud passing over without stopping to rain, the dread began to fade. In its wake came a sense of relief that seemed to come over all three of them at once.
"What happened, Daddy?" Kamilla whimpered through snotty, shuddering sobs.
"Don't worry, pumpkin," Jowd soothed.
"No, but what happened?" Kamilla insisted. She was pushy and liked to question things, and the only real way to make her stop without a fight was to give her one. Jowd fumbled for several child friendly excuses like air pressure and tiny earthquakes.
Her questions became more disjointed as she beat her little fists against his shoulders, rising to a shriek. "Why do I feel sad? Why is Mama in a chair instead of the ground? Why am I here? Why is it different now?"
Why is it different now?
The question made no sense, and yet it felt like the same one Alma wanted to ask.
When Cabanela showed up twenty minutes later, breathing hard as if the devil himself had chased him there, Alma didn't question it. She did question why Lynne, the little red-headed teenager that had become a sort of niece to Jowd after the Temsik Park incident, had also shown up, and why she had a Pomeranian tucked under her arm.
Missile, who seemed to get on with Kamilla based on her being the tiniest human around, launched himself at Kamilla in a frenzy of barking. The little dog nestled himself into Kamila's sweater and let her hold him as tight as she pleased.
"Sorry to drop in without calling, I just happened to be in the area and thought I'd pop over to wish you a happy birthday in person," said Cabanela, whose low-cut shirt was soaked with sweat.
"Haha, yes, me too. Happy Birthday, Miss Alma!" said Lynne, who had left the house so quickly she'd forgotten to put on socks.
Alma, still trapped in her chair with Sissel purring on her chest, looked suspiciously from one to the other. "Thank you, but—why did you come here so fast? And with a dog?"On the floor, Kamilla had picked up Missile bodily and taken him back to her room, face still pressed into his tear-stained fluff.
"Well, because—well, it seemed—" Lynne looked to Jowd for help, and them for some reason to Cabanela, and still provided nothing.
"Look, give us a second?"
Just to make it worse, the lot of them stepped into the kitchen and closed the door.
Men liked to talk to each other in private. This was normal. Lynne, less normal. None of this was at all normal. Alma absently stroked Sissel until she realized the cat wasn't moving.
Above her, the ceiling fan began to turn a little faster. One of the sconce lights flickered. A picture frame sagged slightly to the right.
Alma gave Sissel's little body a shake. His eyes were still open, which always made his little 'out to lunch' moments even worse to look at it. "Sissel?" she whispered. "Sissel, not you too, please don't go coma right now." She wanted someone to stay with her, someone to at least be there with her in the confusion and fear that attached to nothing at all and made her doubt her own senses.
The picture frame sagged back upright. The light flickered. The coiled windowshade suddenly uncoiled.
It was as if a strange wind had passed through the room, moving things one after the other, until Sissel blinked his little eyes and stretched his tiny limbs. He meowed, and Alma made a little mew back, and he seemed to crinkle his nose as if she'd done something silly.
Alma chuckled bitterly. Sissel had never taken well to being talked to as anything other than an equal, had he?"
"Sissel, I feel like I'm losing my mind," she confessed in a soft whisper, patting his little head. "Everything is so strange. It feels as if…something terrible nearly happened. As if everyone but me knows what's going one."
"Prrp," Sissel said. He climbed up onto the table next to her, head tilting to the side as if listening.
At least someone was listening.
"Jowd knows something he's not telling me," Alma continued, to her only confidant. "He knew this would happen, didn't he? But I don't even know what did happen. I just feel as if—as if someone shot me in the chest, and everyone else is panicked but no one wants to talk to me about it. Why does Cabanela know, and that Lynne girl, and why everyone but me? Sissel, am I the crazy one?"
Sissel stared at her for a long, long moment. His yellow eyes seemed to be scrutinizing her.
And then, very deliberately, he shook his head.
Alma laughed. "Really, you're sure?" she asked, and was taken aback to find Sissel nodding at her.
"You know what's going on?"
Another nod.
Oh gods, this is just getting worse. Now I'm talking to a cat.
Sissel flicked an ear and announced "Prrhm!", before abruptly crumpling into a little heap. This time Alma was watching for it - the windowshade curl, the light, the picture frame tilting. Not the wind, not when everythign else remained untouched. It was as if something had departed Sissel and traveled through the wall ornaments like electricity through a power line.
Whatever conversation was happening in the kitchen turned into a soft, heated argument just barely audible. Alma was starting to get out of her chair when the door to Kamilla's room creaked open. Her daughter looked calmer now, Missile still held in her arms like an obliging plush toy.
"Mama?" she said, looking very solemn.
"Yes, sweetie?"
"Mama, I understand what's different now. Missile told me."
"That's wonderful, sweetie."
"But you can't talk to Missile." She frowned for a moment, then brightened up, as if a little angel had whispered an idea into her head. "But you can talk to Sissel! Sissel can explain it all."
"Of course, sweetie, but he's asleep right now." It was easy to slip into mom mode, to offer the easy answers, even if her own mind was struggling to comprehend the cat simply turning himself on and off while the decor moved about.
Kamilla shook her head, excitedly patting herself on the chest. "No, he's not asleep. He's here. He wants to talk to you."
"Where? Sweetie, I don't understand."
Kamilla's tiny form went ramrod stuff. Her eyes blinked slowly as Missile slipped out of her limp arms. Her jaw worked open and closed a few times and she made a rough, yowling noise that put Alma in mind of a horror movie she'd seen a few years ago. Something about a posssessed girl and a well, and an evil television?
"Eeer," Kamila said, slowly, as if her lips were unsure of how to form words. "Ayyyy-muh…hyeer."
"I don't…what?" It wasn't acting. She'd seen Kamilla playing pretend. This was something else. Alma reached out to Kamilla but then hesitated, as if unsure what Kamilla would do next.
Missile trotted about her legs, tail waggling excitedly. Alma's hand idly went to his head to pat it. Strangely, it provided a comfort. If Missile wasn't bothered by the behavior, it probably wasn't bad, right?
"Sorry…I don't…do this often. Don't like…controoo-lollling…the liiiiving." Kamilla offered her a wide, unnatural smile that dropped as soon at the sight of Alma's horrified face. "This is…complicaaaated. Don't mean to scare."
"Oh gods," Alma whispered, feeling the racing of her own heart tearing at the inside of her chest.
Then it was Kamilla's smile again, soft and bright and shining. She put both her hands on Alma's, patting them hard to comfort her.
"Don't worry, Mama," she reassured. "Sissel's just borrowing me to talk to you! I'm right here, I'm very safe. It's like I'm the car and Sissel is the driver."
"Honey, Sissel is a cat," Alma responded, as if that helped any matters.
"No, he's a ghost!" Kamilla paused, as if considering. "And he's also a cat!" she added, as if the two were both normal things to be. She sat down on the floor, cross legged in a rough imitation of the meditation poses she'd seen Alma do, and closed her eyes. When they opened again, Alma fanced she could see flecks of gold in them.
"Eyyy," said the rough, croaking of Kamilla's borrowed throat.
Alma's other hand stroked over the soft, limp form in her lap. it felt empty, like a toy with its stuffing knocked out. Nobody home.
"Sissel?" Alma asked, resigning herself to the storm-tossed seas. On another day she'd have ignored Alma's budding horror actress skills, ignored the pain as indigestion, ignored the strange reactions of Jowd as yet another burden a detective's wife was forced to bear. But the strange sense of 'something is different' made her surge forward, hunting any gasp of a fringe theory that would make this all make sense.
"Nyaayep, that's me," said the thing inside her daughter, raising a single stiff hand.
Alma took a deep breath. "Okay. So you're our cat. Possessing my daughter. At least tell me what's going on?"
As alien and stuff as Kamilla's body was was, speaking without moving another muscle of the rest of Kamilla's face, Alma couldn't sense malice from the thing puppeteering her. The gold-flecked eyes eyes seemed almost sad.
Sissel-in-Kamilla paused, tilting Kamilla's head from side to side as he pondered. The more he talked, the steadier his voice seemed to get, as if he was gradually grasping the essentials of piloting a human body.
"There's a timeline, a world, where things went worse. In that timeline, tonight was your last night on Earth. We went back, we fixed it….we reset the timeline. Ten years ago in the park, where it all started. We fixed it."
Chaotic thoughts flickered through Alma's mind.
Ten years ago in Temsik Park, Jowd saved a child's life - but he still came home so haggered, with death in his eyes, a hole right through his leg. And that man he chased, who put a gun to a little girl's head, stabbed right through the back by a fencepost, ..the news said he shouldn't have been able to move, pinned as he was, but he pushed that child out of the way. Saved the same child he'd taken hostage, Lucky to live. Made no sense. What would be so much worse, that this was 'fixing it'.
"Most people don't remember, " Sissel continued, voice still hesitating between sentences. "The world was wiped clean. But the ones closest to it, they remember shards, pieces. Echos, like a scar on the psyche. We thought you'd forget too. You didn't."
Ghosts. Ghosts and…time travel, and weird cats. Okay. Focus on what's easiest to understand.
"Who's 'we'?"
Kamilla's head turned very slowly to gaze at the kitchen door. "I think you know."
When Alma finally entered the kitchen, Jowd was leaning against the counter, face turned away from her and forehead braced against the fridge. Cabanela was standing next to him, also braced against the counter. He had one arm lightly resting on Jowd's back and his chin on Jowd's shoulder, whispering quietly to him. Theirs was the kind of bond that would make a wife curious, maybe even jealous, were she not keenly aware of Men and their need to have Close Manly Bonds.
(Later, when it was all settled, when the open wounds began to scar over, she would be curious again. And things would get very interesting for the three of them. But that was further up the timeline.)
Lynn was leaning on the wall across from them, biting her thumbnail with an expression of deep concern. Despite her perky nature there had always been something odd about her, as if she were far too keenly aware of her own mortality for a teenager. As with Jowd, Alma had assumed it was the trauma.
When the door opened all three sets of eyes looked up to her with an identical panic. Alma stood with her hands folded before her, manicured nails crossing, smiling pleasantly.
"Cabanela? Lynne? Thank you for coming over, but I'd like to have the house alone with my husband right now. It would be a lovely birthday present if one of you could take Kamilla out for a bit."
"Of course, Mrs. Alma! I'll take Kamilla to my house, she can play with Missile."
Cabanela made some salacious comment about why they'd need the privacy, barely quarter-hearted in its enthusiasm. "I'll accompany the little ladies, just in case. Give us a call when you want her brought back."
"Of course. Thank you, Cabanela." She didn't ask in case of what.
Jowd looked panicked at the idea of them leaving. He was still clinging to the countertop, his eyes following Cabanela as he left with Missile under one arm. Good, thought Alma, as unkind as the thought felt. It was his turn to feel alone.
When the door clicked shut, Alma finally let her hands drop.
"Sissel told me what happened."
Jowd jerked upwards in shock, then slowly untensed again, leaning into the fridge with a resigned slump. "Huh. Did he now."
"About my death. About the other timeline. About everything." Mostly. There'd been a lot of places where Sissel had offered a stiff little shrug and 'I don't really know how this works, I'm just a cat', but there had been enough. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Jowd chuckled weakly. "I'd sound insane, for starters."
"I already feel like I've been going insane. I trust you. I've always trusted you. I wanted to help you!"
"I didn't want to put this burden on you. I didn't think you'd remember anything-"
"I didn't need to remember!" Alma thumped her chest, where the strange ache was slowly fading away. The soft clack of her nails against the jewel of her broach made Jowd flinch. "You're strange, my daughter is strange, the damn cat is strange, and everyone knows the big secret but me! And you didn't think I'd notice it?"
Jowd hung his head, broad shoulders hunched inward. Bless his heart, he'd never been good at sharing the weight. You had to force it off him, ounce by ounce.
Alma slid next to him against the counter, letting her sharp edged shoulder meet his thick bicep.
"I don't have a good answer," Jowd muttered. "I wanted to shield you from that pain, same for Kamilla. So much pain fixed, no reason to keep it going in the timeline. But everyone close to it kept finding small things wrong, small ways their souls remembered how the world used to be. A psychic scar, I guess yo'ud call it. A mark on the soul. I had no idea it would affect you, though. Cabanela, Lynne, Kamilla, they remember small fragments. Missile more so."
"Missile? Missile the…the Pomeranian. The dog?" Sure. Why not. Alma blurted out a chuckle, and Jowd laughed with her, and the two of them sagged further against each other.
"I remember…more than I'd like," Jowd muttered. "Things I regret. People I failed to save. I couldn't protect either of you."
"But we're safe. We're here now."
"I know. It's just I remember how easy it was to lose you…makes a guy paranoid, you know?" Jowd gazed down at her, a silent plea in his eyes, until Alma leaned into him and let Jowd embrace her so tightly the ache of it canceled out the lingering remains of her phantom gunshot.
Alma drew in a long, slow breath. "What happens after this?" she asked.
"In this timeline? I don't know. Everything changed that night, this night." Jowd squeezed her tighter, his face buried in the crook of her neck. "But you're alive, and that means anything can happen. What do you want to happen?"
"You know, that's the first time tonight anyone's asked me that."
"Heh. Sorry about that."
"No, it's—" Not fine. Don't say it's fine. "It's in the past." Her hand came up and stroked over Jowd's thick, clurly hair as it spilled down his temples to meet his beard. "I think right now I'd like a nice hot cup of tea, with brandy and honey and lemon, and I want to sit with my husband, and I want to talk to him. Just the two of us."
Jowd lifted his head, and Alma followed his gaze to the little black creature sitting in the doorway of the kitchen, yellow eyes bright and earnest.
"You hear that, Sissel?" Jowd called. "Go wait at Lynne's house. We'll call when it's all clear."
Sissel gave an agreeable little mew and hopped up to the kitchen counter, next to the phone. He curled up beside it and Alma watched, still with a bit of trepidation, as the light went out of the kitten's eyes. Empty as the body was, she still gave it a gentle pat on the head as she passed it to reach the electric kettle.
"Thank you, Sissel," she whispered.
"Wait, how can Sissel get to Lynne's house?"
"Oh, he goes through the phone lines."
"Oh. Of course. Obviously."