There was a note in the kitchen when I got home. I read it out loud as I pulled off my itchy wig. “‘Mia, I’ve got a house showing at 4:30. I’ll pick up dinner on the way home. Love, Dad.’” I grabbed a can of cat food.
“I guess it’s just you and me, Jinx.” But despite the humming can opener, she wasn’t twining between my legs.
“Jinx?” I carried the can over to her bowl. It was full with food from the morning. Maybe she’d gotten shut in my room. It’d happened before; I’d come home from practice to find her yowling. She’d also shredded a shirt out of boredom. I hoped I hadn’t left anything on my bed.
But my door was open. “Jinx? Jinxsy?” She was curled up on the spare pillow. When I nudged her, she raised a lethargic paw toward me.
“Hey, bud, aren’t you hungry?” She sneezed in my face. “Gross! Jinx!” Instead of stretching or leaping from the bed, she shut her eyes. I stopped wiping off cat snot and looked at her: nose and eyes streaming green mucus.
“Jinx?” I picked her up; she didn’t curl closer or fight to get down. She lay limp. I called Dad. No answer. Mom’s cell was off. Gyver didn’t pick up, but his car was back in his driveway.
“Hang on, Jinx.” I tucked my sweatshirt around her before walking out my door and across my driveway to the Russos’.
I pounded and pounded before he answered. I could see my mess of a reflection in the door’s window; tears had painted my cheeks three tints of splotchy sadness. Jinx hadn’t reacted to the cold or the noise of my banging.
Gyver had been mid-workout. His black T-shirt was adhered to his chest with sweat, but I launched myself at him anyway. Or tried to; he held me off with one hand. “What do you want?”
My breath seized in my lungs, caught on his physical and verbal rejection.
I pulled back a flap of sweatshirt sleeve to expose Jinx’s oozy face. “She’s sick. No one’s home. I don’t know what to do.”
Gyver looked from her pathetic furry face to my pathetic sobbing one and pulled me into his kitchen. He told me to “sit,” took Jinx in one arm, looked up the vet’s number, and picked up his phone. He spoke assuredly in the receiver, pausing to ask me, “Has she eaten?”
“Not today. Dad gave her dinner last night; I don’t know if she ate.”
“We’ll be right in.” Gyver hung up the phone, grabbed his keys and a sweatshirt, and headed out. He didn’t look back, but paused on the porch to shut and lock the door behind me.
I opened the passenger door. Gyver handed me his sweatshirt. “Put this on. It’s too cold.”
“You’re wear—” I started to protest, but agreement was faster. I pulled on his sweatshirt. It pooled around me in piles of excess fabric. I shoved the sleeves up my arms, and Gyver handed me the bundle containing Jinx. She opened an eye and yowled.
“Do you want to go get a hat or your wig?” he asked, his hand paused on the ignition.
I shook my head. “We need to go. Please, please be okay, Jinx.”
Gyver fastened his seat belt and looked at mine. As soon as I’d buckled it, he pulled out of the driveway and tore through the streets to the animal clinic.
I attempted one conversation. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”
Gyver looked over—made eye contact for the first fractional second since he’d opened his door—then turned back to the road with a clenched jaw and white-knuckled grip. “I don’t know. God, she’s thin. How long’s she been sick?”
“She hasn’t. I didn’t …” Guilt kept me mute for the rest of the drive.
Chapter 44
The guilt grew to tremors as the vet examined Jinx and gave me options: put her down humanely or try and manage her pain with medications that would make her groggy and disoriented.
“Maybe you should wait until your parents are here before you make any decisions.”
“But she was fine yesterday,” I protested.
The vet’s eyes examined me as well: my stubbly, patchy head, circled eyes, tiny frame drowning in Gyver’s sweatshirt. His voice was full of pity. “Jinx is a very sick cat, Mia. She’s in the final stages of kidney failure. Maybe if you’d caught this sooner, but a lot of cats don’t have outward manifestations. We have no way of knowing, and unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do at this stage.”
I hadn’t noticed. When was the last time I’d made time for Jinx? Done more than complain about her shedding? She used to sit on my lap while I did homework, but I hadn’t done any in a while. I saw her when she slept on the pillow next to mine, but Jinx had become impatient with my nighttime mania and started sleeping downstairs.