“No, she will be okay. Let her explore. You sit here and talk to me. Tell me how she is your cat and at the same time somehow not.”
“She’s a stray,” Raymond said. “I’ve been feeding her. I tamed her. I got her to the point where she would come to me and let me pet her. But I shouldn’t have. Because now she’s in trouble, and it would’ve been better if I’d left her alone. She should be scared of people. She was right about that all along. I made her more trusting. And I feel really bad about that now. And if something happens to her because of that, I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
“But she is right to trust you, Raymond.”
“But what if she’s more trusting with somebody else because of it?” He sat in silence for a moment. Mildred Gutermann did not answer his question. “A couple of neighborhood boys are looking for her. I don’t know what they would do to her if they caught her. But not feed her and pet her, that’s for sure.”
“I see,” she said. “So you will take her home with you.”
“I can’t. I’m not allowed to have a pet. I brought her here because I thought . . . Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You were hoping I would take her in.”
“Yeah.”
“I would if I could, my young friend. But I’m sure you see the problem. You can put tape marks on the rug like I do with the chair, so the cat knows exactly where she should be. But she is a living cat, she is not a chair, so it’s likely she will choose to be somewhere different.”
Raymond sat in silence for a beat or two, hearing himself breathe. He realized he was just at the edge of tears—that it would be so easy to let them go. It surprised him, because he never cried. But it was something about the cat. She had bypassed a boundary, some wall he’d built to keep everybody and everything out of his vulnerable places. And the idea that someone would hurt her for fun . . .
“Do you have something I could put on a cut? So it doesn’t get infected?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and pushed herself up off the couch and onto her feet. “I take lots of bumps and falls. I have everything.” She took him by the elbow, wrapping both her hands around it with surprising strength. “Come to the bathroom sink.”
“Okay,” he said.
And he rose. And followed her.
He felt better. Reassured. He would not get a terrible infection, because she would help him. She knew what to do.
“Where is the cut?” she asked as they walked together.
Surprisingly, she seemed to be leading him. Then again, it was her house. Her bathroom.
“Inside my right wrist.”
They stepped into the bathroom together, and she thrust his right forearm into the sink. Again, with surprising strength. She turned the cold water on and stuck his arm under the flow of it.
“Ow,” he said. It was a serious understatement of the pain that surged through him.
“I know. I’m sorry. But we have to take care of these things. Is it still bleeding?”
“I don’t think so. I think it stopped.”
“Good. Here. Take this.” She pulled a tall plastic squeeze bottle out of her medicine cabinet. Handed it to him. “Squeeze some of this onto the cut. And we will let it sit there for a minute.”
Raymond took it from her. Opened out the nozzle with one hand. Drenched the scratch with the reddish-brown liquid. There was another sharp blast of pain as it flowed into the wound. This time he saw it coming, and held it in. He expressed nothing.
“How did you cut your wrist?” she asked him.
“It was the cat.”
“Oh. She scratches.”
“No, it was my fault. I was trying to catch her and put her in a bag. She got scared. I can’t really blame her. But if you just let her come to you, she doesn’t scratch. She’s sweet. She wants attention. If she was here—”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Mildred Gutermann said, interrupting him. “However I would handle her if she were here. Because, sorry as I am to say so, she can’t be here. Too bad you can’t train a cat. But you can’t.”
“Not sure what I could teach her to do, anyway,” he said. “Even if you could train a cat. You know, that would keep her out from under your feet.”
“Maybe if you could teach her to make noise all the time. Meow wherever she went. Then I would always know where she is. But you can’t teach that.”
“That’s it!” Raymond cried out.
“No, no, it’s impossible.”
“I could buy her a collar with a bell on it! Then she would make noise wherever she goes!”
“Hmm. Rinse that off now. Turn on the water and rinse it. I’ll get you some tissues to dry it off, and then I have antibiotic ointment, and then we’ll bandage it up.”
“What about what I just said?”
“I am thinking about what you just said.”
“What do you think of it so far?”
“I think so far that I am kicking myself for not having a cat all these years, if it’s as simple as all that. So now I’m thinking . . . is it really? As simple as all that? And I think part of me wants it not to be. So I can stop kicking myself.”
Raymond rinsed his wrist under the cold water and dried it off with the tissues she handed him. He said nothing, because he wanted her to have plenty of time to think.
“You would have to buy a litter box. And litter.”
“Right!” he said. Too loud and anxious. “I would!”
“And cat food.”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t think this out very well. It’s getting expensive, isn’t it?”
“If you would buy the collar with the bell, and the box, and the first bag of litter, I could probably manage the rest.”
“Is that too expensive for you?”
“Not really. I don’t do too badly. I get by. I have my social security, and a little pension from a company where I worked as a seamstress for fifty years. But I’ll need cat food regularly. So you’ll need to come by every few days to walk with me to the store.”
“I would have anyway,” Raymond said. “Cat or no cat. Just because you needed me to.”