Love Saves the Day

12



Prudence





AT THE END OF AUGUST IS A LONG HOLIDAY WEEKEND CALLED Labor Day. Humans need holidays and calendars to tell them things cats already know—like when the summer ends, and when the air starts to smell smokier and feel cooler. After Labor Day, the littermates go back to their school and stop coming here.

It’s around then that Laura starts getting sick in the mornings. She’s been sick every morning these past two weeks. My stomach gets upset sometimes, too (and I always try to hide it in some out-of-the-way place, because it’s embarrassing when humans have to clean up after me), but Laura’s stomach has been upset every single day. After Josh has gone downstairs to start making the coffee, Laura throws up into the toilet in their bathroom—I can hear it from under the door. Then she washes her face and brushes her teeth, and the two of us go downstairs so she can give me my breakfast. Sometimes, when she opens the cans that hold my food, Laura gets a look on her face like the smell of my food is making her feel sick again. Even the way she smells is different—stronger and more sugary since three weeks before she started throwing up.

I don’t think Josh knows anything about how sick she’s been feeling, though, because if he did I’m sure he would insist she go to whatever the human version of the Bad Place is. Laura probably hates the Bad Place as much as I do, and that’s why she hasn’t said anything about it.

Still, I wish Josh would notice, because Laura’s being sick is also putting her in a bad mood. Ever since that night when Josh spread all the black disks out on the floor of my room, Laura hasn’t seemed as interested anymore in coming in here to look through the Sarah-boxes with me. Still, I keep trying to think of ways to encourage her. Like this morning. I find one of the shoe boxes with Sarah’s matchbook toys and nudge it out of the big brown box so Laura and I can look through them and she can tell me things about Sarah. It’s true that once a few of the matchbooks spill out, I start batting the rest of them around, until there are matchbooks scattered all over the floor and wedged underneath some of the big boxes. But I’m pretty sure that when she sees how much fun it is to bat the matchbook toys around, she’ll want to join me.

That’s not what happens, though. Laura is walking quickly past my room, but when she sees how the matchbook toys are strewn all over the place, she stops. I nose a few hopefully in her direction, but I can tell she’s angry by her hard, rapid footsteps as she comes into the room.

“No!” she yells. “No, Prudence! Stop pushing things out of boxes and making a mess! Why can’t you just leave me alone?” She tosses the matchbook toys back into the smaller box they’re supposed to live in, then throws the whole thing into one of the bigger Sarah-boxes. She starts going around to all the boxes and folding their flaps over so that they stay closed by themselves. Then she shoves them around on top of each other until they’re all in two big stacks that are so high I can’t possibly reach the top. She’s breathing hard from her effort, and there are dots of sweat-water on her forehead.

I’ve never had my feelings hurt by a human before, but now I feel hurt—and also confused. What did I do that was so bad? What was so wrong with wanting to play with Sarah’s matchbook toys that Laura had to yell at me and put all of Sarah’s and my old things where I can’t even get to them? How will I remember Sarah enough to make her come back and always be with me if I don’t have anything to remember her with?

I stretch out all my front claws and scratch at the floor, leaving long, angry slashes in the dark wood Laura cares about so much. I had thought that she and I were becoming close, almost like maybe I was a part of the family that’s made up of her and Josh. This is what I get for forgetting I’m just an immigrant here, and that Sarah is my one-and-only Most Important Person.


Josh hasn’t made eggs for Laura in a long time, but this morning is the one-year anniversary of when they got married, and I smell the aroma of scrambled eggs coming upstairs from the kitchen. It also smells like Josh is frying bacon and pouring orange juice—all the things Laura used to like so much on Sunday mornings.

When Laura gets close to the kitchen and smells the eggs cooking, she has to run back upstairs—probably to throw up again. Josh is whistling while he cooks, so I don’t think he notices. He scoops the eggs onto plates, and then he puts a little onto a Prudence-plate that he sets on the floor. Laura’s face looks much paler than it usually does by the time she comes back to the kitchen to sit down.

Josh stops cooking long enough to come over to her seat with a plate of eggs and bacon. “Happy anniversary,” Josh says, and kisses her on the mouth.

“Happy anniversary,” she tells him, with a smile that somehow makes her face look even paler. She pushes the eggs around with her fork.

“Are you okay?” Josh asks Laura. His forehead wrinkles in concern.

Laura tries to smile again. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just not that hungry, I guess.”

“I hope you’re hungry tonight. The reservation’s at eight, so if you’re running late at work we can always meet there.”

“I’ve been thinking.” The squeaky sound of Laura’s fork scraping against the plate is too high-pitched for humans to hear, but the agonizing squeal of it makes my ears twitch until the left one nearly folds in half. “Del Posto might be a little … extravagant for us right now. Maybe we should take a pass.”

“Okay,” Josh says slowly. He sounds confused. “Did you want to go somewhere else?”

“I don’t know.” She swallows hard a couple of times, like maybe the smell of the eggs is making her feel sick again. “We can talk about it later, I guess.”

“If that’s what you want.” Laura looks down at her plate while Josh’s eyes look at her face, as if he’s seeing for the first time that something might be wrong with her. They’re both silent until Josh says, “Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you about Anise Pierce. I was wondering if maybe you could get in touch with her.”

Laura looks up in surprise. “Anise Pierce? Why would I want to get in touch with Anise Pierce?”

“She recorded a couple of albums in Alphaville Studios. We’re up to ten thousand signatures on the online petition, and I’ve got a few media outlets sniffing around. I thought that if someone of her stature came on board, we might be able to nail something down.”

“I don’t want to get in touch with Anise.” Laura picks up the folded paper napkin in her lap and drops it over the uneaten plate of eggs. I can tell already that Laura is going to show her bad mood to Josh, just like she showed it to me upstairs—and I think how much luckier Josh is than I am, because he can talk back to her.

He looks confused again for a moment. “I just think it would really help us if—”

“I already told you, I don’t want to,” Laura interrupts. “I don’t think this building on Avenue A should be your priority right now. We’ve got things to worry about here.”

“What kind of things? What are you talking about?”

“If you want to worry about who can afford to live where,” she tells him, “maybe you should worry about where we’re going to live when your severance runs out next week and we can’t afford to keep this place anymore.”

Now my stomach feels upset, like somebody is squeezing it in their fist. We might have to leave this apartment? How is that possible? Why didn’t anybody tell me that something like this could happen? If Sarah doesn’t know where to find Laura, how will she know where to find me?

“Oh, come off it, Laura,” Josh says. “I know we’ve lost a chunk of our savings, but we’re still a long way from losing this apartment.”

“You come off it, Josh.” Laura’s voice gets louder. “I refuse to be the only person around here who worries about work. Do you ever think about what might happen if I suddenly lost my job? Do you even know how bad things have been at the firm lately?”

“How the hell should I know?” Josh’s voice gets louder, too. “You don’t talk to me about what’s happening at your job. You don’t talk to me about anything. For months I’ve been trying as hard as I know how to get you to open up about something—your mother, your job, anything at all—but all you do is shut me down. What am I, a mind reader?”

“I didn’t realize you had to be a mind reader to do basic math,” Laura says. Her voice sounds angrier than it sounded even when she used to get mad at Sarah. “I didn’t realize you had to be a mind reader to add the zero dollars you’ll be earning to our monthly budget and come up with zero dollars for rent.” Laura is shouting now. She stands up and slams her chair so hard against the kitchen table that it bounces off and tumbles on its side onto the floor. The loud noise and the shouting scare me so much, I skid as I run for under-the-couch. I can still see and hear Laura and Josh, but I feel safer here as I twitch the fur on my back fast-fast-fast. Laura laughs, but it’s a kind of laugh that sounds the exact opposite of when a human finds something funny. “And the truly outstanding part of the whole thing is that I never wanted an apartment this big or expensive in the first place!”

“Give me a break with your revisionist history bullshit!” I hear Josh yell. “We picked out this apartment together. We spent weeks looking for a place where we could start a family. You didn’t have one word to say against any of that, but now you turn green every time the subject of having children comes up. Maybe I’m not a mind reader, and maybe I can’t do basic math, but I’m not blind, Laura.”

“How can we even think about having children if we don’t have any money!”

“Oh, and you were just so thrilled when you got pregnant the first time.” Now his voice sounds mean. “Your happiness and absolute elation were written all over your face. How stupid do you think I am?”

“Don’t mix things up! That was then, and this is now, and now we can’t have children without worrying about how we’ll pay for everything.”

“Enough already!” Josh roars. “Everything with you is about money! Stop with the money! We have money!”

“Not enough!” Laura yells back at him. “You have no idea how terrifying it is to have no money at all! You don’t know what it’s like when—” Suddenly Laura stops yelling and is silent.

“When what?” Josh demands. “When what, Laura? What happened to you that was so terrible you can’t even talk about it?”

Laura is silent. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, but it sounds cold. “What happened is that my husband started caring more about strangers, and about playing babysitter to his niece and nephew, than he does about our future.”

Josh’s voice gets lower, too, but somehow that makes his words crueler. “You are not the person to give me lessons on how to treat family. You left your mother alone in that miserable apartment you could barely bring yourself to visit once a month. You didn’t even take time off work when she died. Think about that, Laura. And don’t talk to me about family.”

Laura’s breathing gets loud and hard, the way mine does when I’m chuffing. “What the hell do you know about it?” Her shriek makes all the fur on my back stand up, and no matter how fast I twitch it I can’t make it lie down again. “What do you know about me or my mother or anything? With your normal, happy, perfect family where everybody pulls together and helps each other out and just loves each other so much!”

“Do you even hear what you’re saying?” Josh yells. “Is that what you think? You think there’s such a thing as a perfect family? Sometimes my dad’s the greatest guy in the world, and sometimes he pisses me off so much I want to strangle him, but I won’t spend the rest of my life blaming him for everything that goes wrong in it.” I hear the sound of Josh’s shoes clopping against the kitchen tile as he paces. “Whatever it is you think your mother did that was so awful, get over it! I can practically hear you fighting with her in your head, like she’s still here and you’re still fourteen. Your mother is dead, Laura! Grow up already!”

Now I realize it—what Josh said before about Laura not taking time off from work. Sarah is dead. Sarah is dead, and nobody ever told me. Sarah is dead, and I’ll never see her again. She’ll never feed me or hold me or stroke my fur again. Never never never never. No matter how much time I spend with her boxes or my memories, nothing will ever bring Sarah back to me. The ache in my chest from Sarah’s being gone rips back open so suddenly that I can’t breathe. I curl up in a tight ball under the couch with my nose pressed into my tail, trying to make my ripped-open chest stay together.

“First I’m not grieving enough,” Laura yells, “and now I can’t get over it. Which is it?”

“Stop with the logic games, Counselor. I’m not your client and we all know you’re not my lawyer.”

“Maybe you’re the one who needs to grow up! Stop trying to be the king of community activism and get a job. Charity begins at home.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a job right now?” Josh shouts. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch your profession crumble up and blow away into nothing, and have people telling you day after day how the only job you know how to do doesn’t exist anymore? When you’re nearly forty? Does it occur to you at any point during the fifteen hours a day when you aren’t here to think about how that feels? Or are you too busy totting up in your head exactly what you contribute and exactly what I contribute?”

“Who’s the oblivious one, Josh?” Laura yells back. “When’s the last time I worked a fifteen-hour day? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder what might be going on with my job?”

“No, I don’t wonder about your job!” It sounds like Josh has slammed his fist down on the kitchen table. I curl into a tighter ball under the living room couch, thinking, Please stop, please stop, please stop. Sarah is dead. I can’t take this, too. “Just like you don’t sit around your office all day wondering what’s going on with me. You know what I wonder about? I wonder why I never get to go out to dinner, or make plans with friends, or talk about a vacation. I wonder why I sit around here night after night alone. I think about the night we met—we danced, we talked, we had fun. We had a lot of nights like that. When was the last time we did any of those things? And I guess we don’t have to do anything on our anniversary, either, because another night at home will be such a blast! If you ever once came home and suggested we go out and do something, I think I’d have a heart attack.” I can hear Laura breathe in sharply when Josh says heart attack. “I know how important it is to you to make partner. But what are we doing here?”

“That’s not fair.” Laura’s voice has tears in it. “You knew how demanding my job was. You told me it was one of the things you loved most about me, and now you’re second-guessing it when my job is the only thing bringing any money into this house. How can we do any of those things if we don’t have money to do them with?”

Josh’s voice is quieter now. “What’s the point of having all the money in the world, Laura, if we’re miserable?”

When Laura speaks again, she sounds hoarse. “I didn’t realize I was making you miserable,” she says.

“Laura, I—” Josh starts, but Laura doesn’t let him finish.

“I have to go,” she says. “I have to get to my job while I still have one.” She walks to the closet, and I hear her open it to pull out her purse and heavy shoulder bag. Then she walks out the front door, slamming it shut behind her.


The apartment is silent after Laura leaves. The only thing I hear is the sound of Josh pacing and rain pounding on our windows. Josh walks around and around the kitchen and living room, and then he walks up the stairs and back down the stairs and up the stairs again. I hear him opening drawers and slamming them back closed, and once it sounds like he kicks something. Every so often I hear him say, “Dammit!” under his breath. I don’t think he’s looking for anything specific as he walks around and opens drawers. I think he’s trying to find a way to feel less anxious. He must feel anxious, because I don’t think I’ve ever been this upset. I haven’t heard humans yell like that since I lived outside with my littermates. The doorbell rings, and I can hear Josh open the door and say a curt, “Thanks,” to whoever is there. He walks into the kitchen, and I hear him set something on the counter. Then he grabs an umbrella from the tall stand near the front door like he’s angry at it and goes out. The apartment is silent once again.

Sarah is dead. Sarah is never coming back. I’ll never see her again. Maybe we were just roommates, but we loved each other. All those times Laura told me things about Sarah, how could she not have told me this? And then I have an even worse thought: What if Laura and Josh don’t want to be a family anymore because of the vicious words they just said to each other? What if they don’t want to live with each other? What if neither of them wants to live with me, either? They might not love me like Sarah did, but if Sarah is really gone forever then there’s nobody else in the whole world to care even a little about where I live or what happens to me.

What I should do now is finish my breakfast, like I do every morning. If I do everything the way I usually do, Laura and Josh will have to come back and be happy together the way they usually are. Except I can’t quite manage it right now. My chest is hurting and so is my stomach. The hole in my chest from Sarah’s not being here has moved down to my belly. Now it’s in both places.

It’s the new smell from the kitchen that finally draws me out from under-the-couch. There’s a bunch of flowers on the counter, arranged in a glass vase. The flowers have little drops of water on them from the rain outside, and the spicy-earth scent of them fills the whole downstairs of our apartment.

I know what kind of flowers these are. They’re the same kind as Laura is holding in the pictures from when she and Josh got married.

The smell of the flowers pulls me up. Almost before I’ve made the decision to do it, I’m sitting on the counter next to them. I remember the cat grass Sarah used to keep for me when we lived together. When my stomach felt upset like it does now, the cat grass would help make it feel better.

Josh must know how upset I am, and that’s why he had the man at the door bring flowers for me to eat. He knows I like to eat the things he leaves on the counter.

So I put my whole face into the middle of those flowers and breathe in their delicious smell. Then I start to eat. I chew on the leaves and stems and the soft parts of the flowers themselves. I eat and eat and wait for my stomach to stop twisting around so much, and when my stomach doesn’t feel better right away I eat some more …


… and now there’s nothing except Badness. I feel the Badness all over my whole body. My stomach heaves and spins trying to get the Badness out of me, but it doesn’t work. I throw up and catch my breath and throw up again, and still I can’t get the Badness out. I’m thirsty and try to drink from my water bowl, but the Badness rises up and throws the water out of my mouth as soon as I take it in. It’s making everything look funny. Small things look too big and things that are far away look too close and my legs won’t work right and my mouth won’t stop making water. I bump into things because I can’t see them right and they’re playing tricks on me, sneaking closer when I’m not looking, on purpose to make me trip over my own feet. All these things are happening, but none of them is making the Badness go away.

I try to meow for help, so that somebody can hear me, like that day when Sarah and I first found each other. But when I open my mouth I throw up again and it just makes me feel dizzier. I try to walk to a cooler part of the room, maybe under-the-couch or down the hall away from the big windows, but my legs aren’t working right. I fall over once and then twice, and then I realize I’m not getting closer to where I’m trying to go because I’m walking in circles.

When I lived with Sarah and my belly felt upset, she would stroke my forehead and say, Shhh, little girl. Don’t worry. Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be just fine …

But everything’s not going to be just fine, because now Darkness comes to work with the Badness. It’s like a black sack has been thrown over my head. Except after a few moments, I notice that my body feels lighter, like I don’t weigh anything. The closer the Darkness comes, the farther away the Badness feels.

And then, it’s the strangest thing. Sarah is here! I can’t see or hear or smell her, but I can feel her in the room, like the silent hum when a TV is turned on even if there isn’t any sound or picture. Sarah! I think. But now the Darkness is going away again, and I know somehow that if it goes, Sarah will go, too. I struggle to keep my eyes closed, to stay inside the Darkness where Sarah and I can find each other.

Sarah! I think. Don’t leave me, Sarah! I knew you’d come back for me! I knew you’d find me again! I knew you’d

And then everything is Darkness and Silence.