Alex Chambers:  This is Inner States. I'm Alex Chambers, and I'm recording this on election day. By the time you're listening, you might know who's going to be the next President of the United States. You might be relieved. You might be devastated. Either way, it might be time to turn your mind to more local and personal questions. So, I wanted to bring you a story we aired a while back. It's called "The Third Time Rita Left". The story takes place in the fall of 2016, another election season. You might remember. That's in the background, though. In the foreground is my friend, Kayte and her cat, Rita. The story is funny and surprising. And if you haven't heard it already, I think it's worth a listen. Even if you have, it's worth a re-listen, especially right now. A good way to remind ourself of our priorities.

Alex Chambers:  There's four chapters. We'll release them over the next four Wednesdays. Chapter one starts right after this.

Alex Chambers:  Okay.

Kayte Young:  My name is Kayte Young. I am the owner of Rita [LAUGHS]. Okay, let me start again [LAUGHS]. Not an owner.

Kayte Young:  My name is Kayte Young.

Alex Chambers:  And four years ago Rita lived with Kayte, and her husband Carl, and their son Cosmo. They were happy together. Then one day, for reasons that are still hard to explain, Rita up and left.

Alex Chambers:  When I was five, my cousin's cat had kittens, and they gave us one. It was our second time getting cats. The first ones had come a year or two earlier. I'd named them Bee-Bee and Bubba. They were indoor-outdoor cats. They lived with us for maybe a couple of months, and then one day they went out and didn't come back. We never saw them again.

Alex Chambers:  So then we got Misty from my cousins. Misty was with us about a year and then she disappeared, too. It was December. After she'd been gone a week, we assumed she, too, was gone forever.

Alex Chambers:  It occurs to me that I don't remember my parents actually making much effort to look for her. I called my mom to ask her about it. Apparently we had looked for Bee-Bee and Bubba.

Alex Chamber's mom:  We went around the neighborhood looking, but no sign of them. I just assumed they found a new home. And we were all very busy because you work, two little kids, and dad had the restaurant at the time, and we'd kept waiting for them to come back, but they just never did.

Alex Chambers:  And we looked for Misty too.

Alex Chamber's mom:  Again, we went around the neighborhood, and I suppose we asked people. We were on the edge of a neighborhood, so we didn't really even know that many people.

Alex Chambers:  I don't know what that says about my parents compared to Kayte. When Kayte lost her cat, she looked for her for months. She went out night after night, morning after morning. That wasn't so much the case with Misty. But then, on my sixth birthday, two weeks after she left, there was a meowing at the door, and there she was. She'd kittens a few months later. We kept one of those kittens. I named her Gray. And Misty and Gray, mother and daughter, only about a year apart lived with us for almost 20 years until they died of old age.

Alex Chambers:  Since I moved out I haven't had any pets. I'd like to think if I did have a cat, and she escaped, I would be as dogged as Kayte was in her search, as dedicated to the possibility of my cat's return, as willing to enlist a whole community to bring a pet back home. Maybe if I'd felt like our country was falling apart and there was nothing I could do to save it, maybe then.

Alex Chambers:  In any case, we're not here to talk about me. We're talking about Kayte and her cat, Rita, who left four times.

Alex Chambers:  This is "The Third Time Rita Left", chapter one, "Losing Rita".

Kayte Young:  We were taking our cats into the vet, not because anyone was sick or anything, but they just needed check ups. Carl asked me, "Do you want me to come with you?" And I said, "No, no, I got it, I can handle it."

Alex Chambers:  Kayte figured she could handle it because they had this big pet carrier they'd gotten from a yard sale. Actually, let's focus on that carrier for a minute. It had come from a family whose kid went to school with Kayte and Carl's son, Cosmo.

Kayte Young:  I think it was meant for like a medium sized dog, and so both of our cats could fit into it. I'm not sure that we had used it for both of our cats before, but we definitely knew it was possible.

Alex Chambers:  So, I just looked up dog carrier brands and based on Kayte's description, it might have been a great choice dog carrier. The top and bottom were separate pieces held together by clamps.

Kayte Young:  So you can sort of take it apart and clean it or something. I don't know.

Alex Chambers:  But relying on that carrier maybe wasn't a great choice.

Kayte Young:  I should also note that we had had trouble with the pet carrier once before.

Alex Chambers:  That time it was Rita's sister, Pingu, who escaped the crate.

Kayte Young:  She had gotten out of it. She just sort of stood there and kind of froze and looked around and walked very slowly, and Carl managed to catch her and put her back in the crate.

Alex Chambers:  But Kayte was mentally prepared this time. She and Carl wrangled their cats into the carrier, and Kayte drove down to the vet on her own with the cats in the carrier in the car. It was about three miles directly south of her house. She passed the high school, she passed the National Guard Armory. She passed the animal shelter. Was the animal shelter that Rita had come from? No one knows, except for Kayte and Carl. They probably know.

Alex Chambers:  She pulled into the parking lot of the vet clinic, that same one where Pingu had gotten out. It's in a commercial part of town, pretty busy. There's a Subway and a crib around the corner, a funeral home across the street. Not a place where you'd want a pet to wander around on her own. But that's what the carrier was for.

Alex Chambers:  Kayte got them out of the car.

Kayte Young:  And as I was carrying them, and I was a little conscious of the fact that those clips might not hold the weight of these two fairly large cats. So I was kind of holding it from the bottom, I wasn't just carrying it by the handle. In any case, it broke open in the parking lot and I screamed [LAUGHS], and fell down on top of it. I don't know, it was sort of like I knew this was going to happen or something.

Kayte Young:  Anyway, I sort of threw myself on top of it and it was too late because Rita had just bolted. I just remember looking up and seeing her backside just hightailing it around the corner of the building.

Alex Chambers:  She managed to get the other cat, Pingu, back into the carrier and then back into the car. She was panicking a little. She ran into the vet's office and told them what had happened.

Kayte Young:  They were trying to help. I remember one of the vets recommending that you should use a pillow case when you're trying to either catch or carry a cat because it's comforting for them and it's a way for you to really have good control.

Alex Chambers:  By the way, remember this recommendation. It's going to come back.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, back to the story.

Kayte Young:  And then I called my boss, Amanda, who's also my friend, and she said, do you want me to come down there and help you look, and I said yes, and so she came down there.

Alex Chambers:  Like you were taking time off work at this point to go do this?

Kayte Young:  Yes, it was some time during the day and I should have been at work, but I was doing this. So, Amanda comes down there. Maybe she brought some cat food with her or something, and--

Alex Chambers:  So she was leaving work also.

Kayte Young:  She was leaving work also, yes.

Alex Chambers:  And so they started searching. Rita had run behind the Subway at the end of the strip mall. So Kayte and Amanda followed her path. At the back of the strip mall, they were loading docks and a retaining wall. Beyond that, a field and a couple of houses.

Kayte Young:  And they were both abandoned. There was nobody living in either of the houses which I thought was nice because then I felt like I could traipse around there without disturbing anybody. And at one point Amanda was like, I think I found her and so I go over there to where she is and she's like peering under the house, and there is a cat under the house.

Alex Chambers:  And for a minute there, Kayte thought that was it.

Kayte Young:  I mean I was like wow, that's amazing, we found her, oh my God, you know. I mean in those moments before I got over there, I was certain that this was going to be a really quick situation.

Alex Chambers:  Then Kayte looks under the house.

Kayte Young:  And it's not my cat and then there's kittens.

Alex Chambers:  And you know that feeling when reality is suddenly wrong? Like when you were a kid visiting your grandparents and you'd wake up thinking you were in your bed at home, but the walls were in all the wrong places, or when everyone knows for sure who's going to get elected President. I mean there's no way, to the point where Kate McKinnon is doing preemptive victory dances on Saturday Night Live and you wake up in the morning ready for her victory speech and it turns out the orange face TV character is about to be the leader of the free world. Anyway.

Alex Chambers:  Was it surreal or anything or weird to see this cat with kittens? Did you have to adjust?

Kayte Young:  Yes. It was like, wait, there's a cat but it's not mine. How can that be? [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Throughout all this Kayte was panicked. She was crying, worried about Rita. Would she be okay? And then, at the entrance to the basement of one of the abandoned houses...

Kayte Young:  Just hanging from a piece of tall grass.

Alex Chambers:  ... she saw a chrysalis: a monarch.

Kayte Young:  And I'd never raised a monarch butterfly from a chrysalis before. I've raised some other butterfly types and so I was kind of excited to see it and I picked it up and took it with me [LAUGHS], and ended up putting it in a jar and watching it go through its whole cycle. I don't know what possessed me to think like that that's something I have time to deal with right now [LAUGHS], while I'm looking for my cat. But I just really couldn't resist it, it was such a cool thing to see.

Alex Chambers:  Kayte said she took the chrysalis because she wanted to protect it from predators. But she never intended to keep the butterfly. You might say she was fostering it. Maybe she was missing Rita.

Alex Chambers:  Chrysalis notwithstanding, it was getting clear they weren't going to find Rita. There was just too much tall grass, brush, these kind of wild abandoned yards.

Kayte Young:  And it just felt overwhelming and impossible to try to find a hiding cat.

Alex Chambers:  A cat who tended to be skittish anyway.

Kayte Young:  I just knew that she wasn't going to just come out and start meowing at us, and we were going to pick her up and take her.

Alex Chambers:  So they went back to the parking lot. Kayte stopped at every place in the strip mall asking them to keep an eye out, and gave out her phone number. Then she went home and made a poster with Rita's photo and contact info for herself. She even promised a reward, although she didn't say how much. She took the stack of posters back to that area, brought them into all the businesses, taped them to lampposts, put them up at the bus stop, anything she could find. And that evening she and Carl and Cosmo all went back, searched some more, got more worried.

Kayte Young:  And it wasn't the same as your cat's missing and you're just waiting for them to come back. We knew that she wasn't going to be able to come back.

Alex Chambers:  It was just too far away. There was too much traffic. It was three miles of strip malls and high schools, armories and nightclubs. If she was going to make it home, they were going to have to find her.

Kayte Young:  We also knew that she was scared and in an unfamiliar place and didn't know her way around, and so he was going to be hard to find, but also that she wasn't finding another home or hanging out somewhere. It was just felt like she was experiencing trauma and we needed to find her.

Alex Chambers:  That's where the first day ended. She posted on the Bloomington Lost and Found Pets Facebook Group.

Kayte Young:  Escaped from a failed pet carrier. Round the corner of the building and probably-- She's a large dilute calico. Ran off Monday. Please call me at nine four zero-- Cash reward for information leading to her rescue. Thank you.

Alex Chambers:  And went to bed, still worried.

Alex Chambers:  What would you do if your cat went missing? How hard would you search? How many months or years would you hold out hope? What I find kind of amazing was that in the days and weeks after that, Kayte's family didn't lose hope. They were convinced Rita was okay, or alive at least and wanting to come home. There was some panic, plenty of worry, lost sleep. But at that point, it was still just about Rita. Kayte knew there were other problems in the world. But in some ways things were looking up. We were about to elect our first female President, after all. The country she lived in was still recognizable, still something like home.

Alex Chambers:  But as she kept looking for Rita, all of that would change.

Alex Chambers:  That's it for chapter one. Chapter two will be out next week. Chapter two has Rita's first and second appearances in Kayte's life. It also has strangers...

Kayte Young:  So I was texting with this person and at some point I realized--

Alex Chambers:  ... and questions...

Kayte Young:  How do I know who this person is and what--

Alex Chambers:  ... and questions about strangers.

Kayte Young:  Could this be a trap of some sort? If so, I am falling right into it.

Alex Chambers:  That's it for "The Third Time Rita Left", chapter one, "Losing Rita". You can listen to chapter two, "Finding Rita", right now wherever you got this one.

Alex Chambers:  This has been a production of Inner States, from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. For Rita, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks for listening.