Their Cat Came Home Six Weeks After the Flood. The Note on Her Collar Had Their Missing Dad’s Name
Six weeks after an Iowa flood swept their dad away, the family cat limped home with a note on her collar. Under the thank-you was a phone number and his name.
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The phone rang three times on the porch of the old white farmhouse in Palo, Iowa. Eleven-year-old Ellie Vance was holding Mittens, the gray tabby that had vanished with her father the night the Cedar River levee broke six weeks earlier. Her mother, Karen, was holding the note that had been taped to the cat’s collar. It said, “She kept my son alive in the flood. Thank you.” And at the bottom, next to a phone number, it said “Tom Vance.”
On the fourth ring, a woman answered.
“He’s Been Asking for You Every Day”
“Hello?” The voice was tired and careful.
Karen could barely speak. “This is Karen Vance. Our cat just came home. There was a note. It has my husband’s name on it.”
There was a long silence on the line. Then the woman started to cry.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “Oh, thank God. I’m so sorry. We didn’t know who he was. We didn’t know who to call. He’s alive, Mrs. Vance. He’s alive. He’s been asking for you every day since he woke up.”
Ellie heard it. She heard every word. She would say later that it was the moment she understood what people meant when they said their knees gave out. She sat down hard on the porch steps, holding the cat, and screamed.
The Night of the Flood
The woman’s name was Rosa Delgado. She lived alone with her eight-year-old son, Mateo, in a small rental house in a low neighborhood downstream, near the place where the Cedar bends toward Cedar Rapids. When the levee broke at four in the morning, the water came into her house so fast that she and Mateo barely made it up the pull-down ladder into the attic.
Tom Vance had been going door to door on her street when the wall of water hit. It swept his truck off the road and carried him and the cat down the flooded street. He grabbed the edge of Rosa’s roof. He punched through a loose attic vent and pulled himself inside, with Mittens clinging to his yellow coat.
He had a deep gash on his head from the debris. He was conscious for about an hour. In that hour, he wrapped Mateo in his coat, kept the boy talking, and kept telling Rosa the boats would come. Then he passed out.
They were trapped in that attic for almost two days as the water kept rising. Rosa said later that the only thing that kept her son from panic was the cat. Mittens curled up on Mateo’s chest and didn’t move. When the boy shook from cold, the cat stayed. When he cried, the cat purred. “She knew,” Rosa said. “She knew he needed her.”
A Man With No Name
A rescue boat finally reached the roof on the second afternoon. Tom was unconscious and had no wallet; it had been lost in the water. The crew rushed him to a hospital in Iowa City, where he was listed as an unidentified adult male. He had a severe brain injury. He spent four weeks in a medically induced coma.
Meanwhile, the search for Tom Vance was focused on the river near the bridge where his truck had been found, more than a mile from Rosa’s street. Nobody connected the missing firefighter to the unknown man in the hospital two counties away. In the chaos after the flood, with hundreds of people displaced, the records simply never met.
Rosa and Mateo moved into a shelter, and Mittens went with them. Rosa visited the unknown man in the hospital every few days. She didn’t know his name. She just knew he had saved her son.
One Word, Then Two
When Tom finally woke up, he couldn’t speak for days. His first word, to a nurse, was “Ellie.” His second, a day later, was “Mittens.”
It took almost another week before he could say his own full name. By then, Rosa and Mateo had moved back to their damaged house. Rosa wrote the hospital’s number on a note, and the words “Tom Vance” next to it, intending to call the sheriff. But that same afternoon, Mittens disappeared from her porch.
The cat had walked eleven miles, along a river she had nearly drowned in, back to the only home she knew.
Home
Karen and Ellie drove to Iowa City that same morning. Ellie brought Mittens in a cardboard box with holes punched in it, against all hospital rules. A nurse looked the other way.
Tom was sitting up in bed, his head shaved and stitched, much thinner than before. When the door opened, he looked at his wife, then at his daughter, then at the box. He started crying before anyone said anything.
“Back by sunrise,” he whispered. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
Tom spent another two months in rehabilitation before he came home to Palo. His speech came back slowly. He still struggles sometimes to find the right word. He no longer fights fires, but he teaches flood safety classes at the firehouse.
Rosa and Mateo come to dinner at the farmhouse once a month. Mateo always asks to sit next to Mittens. And every night at exactly nine o’clock, the cat still climbs into Ellie’s bed and sleeps on her feet.
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