Love Saves the Day

14



Laura





LAURA WAS IN A TEN-THIRTY MEETING IN CLAYTON NEWELL’S OFFICE when she got the call. There was a 250-page contract to review for one of their largest clients, and the client wanted notes by the end of the day. The matter was pressing enough that Clay himself had gotten involved.

The phone on Clay’s desk buzzed, and his assistant’s voice over the intercom said, “There’s a call for Ms. Dyen, Mr. Newell.”

“What is it regarding?” Clay asked before Laura could say anything.

“It’s her husband,” Clay’s assistant answered. “He says it’s an emergency.”

“I left my cell in my office,” Laura said. Her stomach, which had started to unknot after her fight with Josh that morning as the familiar routines of work took over, clenched again. “He wouldn’t call on this line if it wasn’t important.”

Clay nodded. “Put the call through, Diane.” Laura remembered the day she’d gotten the emergency call from her mother’s office, only six months earlier. She rose from the couches where she’d been sitting with Clay and Perry, and crossed the room to the ringing phone on Clay’s desk. Her hand trembled as she answered it.

“Josh,” she said. “Josh, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Prudence.” The anger of two hours ago was gone from his voice, replaced by a controlled panic. “I went out for a walk, and when I came home she was just lying there unconscious. It looks like she threw up all over the place.”

Laura, who didn’t know what she’d expected to hear, but hadn’t expected this, needed a moment to redirect her thoughts. “Is she breathing?”

“I think so,” Josh replied. “Which animal hospital should I take her to?”

“St. Mark’s Vet down on Ninth and First,” Laura responded immediately, trying to control the panic now rising in her own chest. “That’s where my mother always took her.”

“That’s all the way downtown. Shouldn’t I bring her someplace closer?”

“What if she has a medical condition they know about and we don’t?” Like my mother did, she thought. “Tell the cabbie you’ll double the fare if he can get you there in fifteen minutes. Triple if he makes it in ten.”

“Laura, I—”

“Just go,” Laura interrupted. “Go now. I’m on my way down.” She hung up and turned to look at Clay and Perry, still seated across the room and watching her closely.

“Is everything okay?” Perry asked.

“My—” Laura stopped, hearing in her own head the words she was about to say, knowing how they would sound to Clay and even to Perry. Squaring her shoulders, she said it anyway. “My cat is sick.”

At first, Clay looked more startled than anything else. “What?” he asked.

“My cat is sick,” Laura repeated. “She’s unconscious and she’s on her way to the animal hospital. I have to go meet her there.”

Having made this statement, Laura felt foolish for a moment. Not because of what she’d said, or for wanting to rush immediately to the animal hospital. She simply didn’t know how to get out of the room. If she’d had a child, and if she’d said, My daughter is sick, she’s unconscious, she could have left instantly. Nobody would have expected her to do anything else. But this was something different. Instinctively she waited either for permission, as a good underling should, or for the confrontation that would make permission irrelevant and carry her out the door.

“You’re kidding, right?” Clay glanced at Perry. Turning to Laura again, he said, “What did you say?”

Laura had fought already with her husband that morning. She’d even fought with Prudence who (her heart clutched with guilt and fear) was now on her way to the hospital. Might as well make a clean sweep of it, she thought grimly. Aloud to Clay she said, “I think you heard me just fine.”

“No, I don’t think I did,” Clay replied. “Because what it sounded like you said is that you, an associate, are walking out on a multimillion-dollar contract review with two senior partners because your cat is sick.”

“See?” Laura was gathering her notes and papers. “I knew you heard me.”

For one second, Clay gaped at her. It was inconceivable that anybody, any associate, would have the nerve to speak to Clayton Newell this way in his own office. Then his eyes hardened. “Of course I heard you.” His voice was wintry. There wasn’t an associate in the firm who didn’t tremble when Clay sounded like this. “It just never occurred to me that you were serious.”

Laura thought of all her late nights in the office, all the times she’d worked twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours, leaving Josh to stew at home, because Clay had dropped some last-minute project on her desk, demanding an immediate turnaround even as he knew—as Laura herself had known—that he wouldn’t be in the next morning until hours after the deadline he’d given her.

“Clay,” Laura said, turning to face him, “you know how committed I am to this firm. I didn’t even take time off when my mother died.” She heard her own words echo in her head. I didn’t take time off when my mother died. My mother died, and I came right back to work. As if nothing had happened. “I’ve never put anything else first. You know I haven’t. Not once in all the years I’ve been here. But this is something I have to do, and I have to go now.”

“Don’t throw your commitment in my face like it was a special favor you conferred on us.” Clay was angry now. “You were committed and you worked hard because that’s the price of admission in a firm like this, and you know that.”

“Clay—” Perry attempted, but Laura interrupted him.

“No, Perry, he’s right. I was back in this office one hour after my mother’s funeral. I didn’t want anybody to think that I wasn’t man enough to handle it.”

“You could have taken all the time off you needed,” Perry remonstrated gently. “We would have given it to you. I would have given it to you. All you had to do was ask.”

“I know.” Laura took a shaky breath. “I do know that. I’m not blaming anybody. But I came back here anyway. And I was back here after my husband lost his job, even knowing that every single one of you knew it was about to happen and didn’t tell me. I thought I knew where my loyalties were supposed to be. I made a choice.” She remembered the day Sarah’s and her apartment had been torn down. You can’t make me! she’d cried when Sarah had tried to get her to leave. She thought of Josh, who only this morning had yelled at her about how they never went out, never had enough time together, because of her job. She had been outraged, unable to believe that Josh could be so unreasonable as to act as if she had any choice in the matter, any control over the number of hours she spent at the office.

Except that she did have a choice. She always had.

“I made a choice,” she repeated. “And I’m making one now.” She walked to the door.

“Don’t assume you’ll be welcome here if you decide to come in tomorrow,” Clay said to her back. “I’ve got résumés for at least a hundred people as good as you are who’d kill to take your place.”

“Clay,” Perry said quietly. Always the voice of reason. “Don’t say things you don’t mean.”

Laura paused in the doorway but didn’t turn around. What had she expected to find in this place, anyway? Had she thought Perry was her father? Perry had his own family, his own children. If she lost Josh, if they couldn’t get past the things they said to each other that morning, and if she lost this pregnancy like she’d lost the last one … If this office was truly all she had left, then what was it, really, that she would have? Some money. A bit of tenuous security, so long as she said yes and no at all the right times and was properly obedient. Late nights of stumbling home, bleary-eyed, to an empty apartment and a phone that didn’t ring once all weekend.

She remembered the day she’d gotten the official offer from Neuman Daines. How proud she’d been! She had called Sarah to let her know, but not in the way a daughter calls her mother to share in the glow of her accomplishments. Just matter-of-fact. Here’s where I’ll be working. Here’s where you can reach me if you need me. Except that Sarah had needed her. And she had needed Sarah. It wasn’t confusion over phone numbers that had kept them apart.

“She was my mother’s cat, Clay.” Laura’s voice was no longer argumentative. “She’s all I have left of my mother.”

She didn’t wait to hear if Clay or Perry responded. She walked out.


In the back of the cab that sped down a rain-slick Park Avenue, Laura pressed her right foot impatiently against the floor as if there were an imaginary accelerator beneath it, willing the car to go faster. When it slowed down behind another cab making a turn, Laura leaned forward and said desperately to the driver, “Go around him, go around.” She knew, somehow, that this was her fault. She’d yelled at Prudence only this morning. Why can’t you just leave me alone? Laura’s stomach lurched in agony, and she pressed her hand, cool from the rain outside, against her forehead. If this was her fault, if she had done this to Prudence somehow, then surely she could undo whatever it was, if only she got there quickly enough.

When had it happened—how long had it been since Prudence, nearly unnoticed, had crept into that place in her heart once held by Honey, a place she had kept resolutely closed for so many years? Prudence with her black tiger stripes and dainty white paws. Prudence waiting patiently outside her bathroom when she was sick in the mornings, then following at her heels, turning in eager circles as Laura prepared her morning meal. Prudence sitting up with her night after night, purring melodically next to her on the couch, her only comfort—the only reason she was finally able to fall asleep—on so many nights during these past few months. Laura thought about Prudence’s peremptory, guttural meows as she demanded some treat of tuna or cheese. Why hadn’t she given those things to Prudence from the first day she’d arrived in their home? Why had she needed to be asked? She had known the things cats liked, that made them happy. And she had known how it felt to lose Sarah.

The taxi passed a green apartment building awning, beneath which a woman held the hand of a chubby, diapered infant, clearly in the early bowlegged days of learning to walk. Laura thought of Prudence’s funny little kitten waddle in her mother’s kitchen, Prudence rising on fuzzy, unsteady legs to snatch some treat or tidbit from Sarah’s outstretched hand. The cab was racing down Second Avenue now, past Baby Bo’s Cantina. Sarah had loved their quesadillas. They’d been a Sunday ritual for her, along with the fried plantains she’d known Laura enjoyed and had made a point of having when she knew Laura would be coming over. Laura had noticed when Sarah stopped bringing the quesadillas home, sharing the sour cream and pulled chicken with Prudence. But she hadn’t thought to ask why.

A garbage truck turned a corner to emerge and stop in front of them. The cabbie slammed the brakes, flinging Laura—still leaning forward—against the Plexiglas partition separating the front seat from the back. Rubbing her forehead, she was about to make another impassioned plea for him to go around the wretched thing, but the driver was already looking over his left shoulder and sliding into the next lane. They made better time after that, easing into the rhythm of the lights and making it through a few yellows at the last possible second. St. Mark’s Church, where she and Sarah had gone every New Year’s Eve to listen to all-night poetry readings, flew by on their right. At Second and Ninth they passed Veselka, where she and Sarah had sometimes treated themselves to borscht in the summer, mushroom-barley soup in the winter. The restaurant and the church remained, but Laura would never go to either of those places with her mother again.

With one loss, Laura realized, others multiplied. Suddenly she wanted her mother with a desperate want that sat on her chest and wouldn’t let her breathe. She wanted to feel her mother’s arms around her, to press her face into the graceful bend between her mother’s neck and shoulder and inhale the comforting scent of her mother’s hair. More than anything, she wanted to hear her mother sing. She hadn’t heard Sarah sing in sixteen years, not since that June day when Laura was only fourteen.

But she would never hear her mother sing again. For the first time since Sarah died, Laura truly understood—felt all the way down to the pit of her stomach—the awful finality of the word never. She would never hear Sarah’s voice again. She would never have her mother’s comfort again. She hadn’t felt the loss as deeply as she should have because Prudence had been there, a living piece of her mother that was still with her. And now she didn’t know if Prudence would survive the day.

For months Laura had been unable to cry for her mother’s death. For one dreadful moment, she felt herself on the verge of breaking down completely, right here in the back of this cab. She bent forward to put her head between her knees, willing herself to hold it together.

With a squeal of rubber against wet pavement, the cab skidded to a stop. “Twelve dollars, miss,” the driver told her. Laura handed him a twenty from her purse and hastily murmured, “Keep the change.” She drew the jacket of her suit over her head to protect it from the rain as she ran from the car and down the short flight of metal stairs to the basement-level entrance of the animal hospital.


The waiting room was tiny. Blond-wood floors and recessed lighting created what probably had been intended as a warm, comforting atmosphere. But it was the kind of gray, rainy day when even lighting the lamps seemed to enhance the gloom rather than dispel it.

As Laura shook the rainwater from her jacket, she saw Josh pacing the small room. He had turned a stranger’s face to her that morning. It had been like that other day all over again, when her mother had turned on her with a stranger’s eyes and slapped her across the face. Worse than seeing their home destroyed, worse even than losing Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum, had been seeing a person she didn’t know wearing her mother’s face. It had seemed impossible that she and Josh could ever again speak to each other kindly, with love in their voices, after the things they’d said.

But Laura could see at once that all that had been put aside, at least for the moment. Josh’s face was as taut as her own, his eyes red. “Josh,” she said. She quickly crossed the room to where he stood and, without thinking, put her hand on his arm. She felt the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt. “Josh, what happened?”

“It was the lilies,” he said, and Laura’s heart turned over at the haggard look on his face.

“What lilies? What happened?”

Josh sank onto one of the benches in the waiting room, wooden benches that suggested festive outdoor activities where people might bring their dogs, and that held wicker baskets containing magazines like Cat Fancy and Best Friends. “For our anniversary, I went to the florist who made your wedding bouquet. I had him make an identical one. It was supposed to come before you left for work today.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “Nothing this morning has gone the way I’d planned.”

Laura felt tears sting her eyes. “Oh, Josh,” she murmured, and sank down onto the bench next to him.

“Prudence ate some of the lilies.” Josh seemed to address this to the bulletin board with flyers for lost dogs and kittens for adoption that hung on the wall across the tiny room, unable or unwilling to look her in the face.

“Okay,” Laura said, confused. “Cats eat plants sometimes.”

“Yes,” Josh said. “But lilies are toxic to cats. There’s something in them that shuts their kidneys down.”

“But she’ll be okay, right?” Laura willed Josh to look at her, but his eyes stayed fixed on the wall. “You got Prudence here quickly and they’ll be able to … to fix her, won’t they?”

Josh’s hands rose to cover his face. “I don’t know. They’re still working on her. Nobody’s been able to tell me anything yet.” Josh rose and began pacing the room again. When he finally turned to Laura, his eyes were outraged. “Why doesn’t anybody tell you something like this? There should be a … I don’t know, a manual or a warning label that gets sent home with every cat, with a picture of a lily in one of those big red circles with a line through it. I didn’t know.” His voice was ragged. “I had no idea. I would never have let those flowers into our house if … if I’d …”

“You couldn’t have known, Josh,” Laura said, softly. “I had a cat growing up, and I didn’t know, either. You did the right thing. You brought her here, and that’s the best possible thing you could have done for her.”

Josh nodded, although he looked unconvinced, and came to sit by Laura once again.

The minutes ticked by, marked by an oversized clock above the reception desk, until Laura was so tense from the ticktock ticktock she thought she might scream and hurl the nearest blunt object at the thing. Twice she walked over to the reception desk and asked, in a hushed voice, if there was any word yet about Prudence Broder? The first time, the dark-haired woman—wearing blue scrubs and a nose ring—pressed Laura’s hand and said, “I was sorry to hear about your mother, mamí.” Laura was unable to respond beyond nodding and leaving her hand in the receptionist’s for a moment. As she returned to her seat, a black-skinned man in a white guayabera walked in with a large green parrot perched on his shoulder. “Hello, this is Oliver. Hello, this is Oliver,” the parrot squawked. “Hello, Oliver,” the receptionist greeted the parrot in a cheerful, trilling voice, and the three of them—man, woman, and bird—disappeared through a swinging door into an exam room. The receptionist returned in time to welcome a large woman carrying a tiny dog of indeterminate breed, wearing a pink sweater and attached to a rhinestone-studded leash. “Dr. Luk is waiting for you and Pancake in exam room three,” the receptionist told the woman. “You can go on back.”

Laura rose and walked to the reception desk again. Was there anything the receptionist could tell them? Any news about Prudence at all? “Dr. DeMeola is with her right now.” The receptionist’s voice was so sympathetic that it made Laura’s heart lurch, certain the news could only be bad. “She’ll be out to update you as soon as she can.” Laura nodded once more and returned to her seat next to Josh. She tried flipping through one of the magazines in the basket next to her, but page after glossy page filled with photos of other people’s happy, healthy cats did nothing to ease the knot in her stomach. Finally, she gave up and tossed the magazine back into its basket.

“You never told me you had a cat when you were growing up,” Josh said suddenly.

“Well, she was our upstairs neighbors’ cat.” Laura smiled wanly. “But we were close. She … died. When I was fourteen.”

Josh’s long legs were stretched out in front of him, and Laura studied his jeans. They’d come home one Sunday afternoon to find Prudence sleeping comfortably on them where Josh had tossed them across the bed, and Josh hadn’t had the heart to make her move. There were a couple of snags where Prudence’s claws must have caught them. “I had a cat when I was a kid, too,” Josh said after a moment. “For about five minutes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was fifteen. I had my first after-school job at a Sizzler near our house, but I didn’t have my driver’s license yet. So my dad would come to pick me up at the end of my shift. One night we found this cat, sitting in the middle of the street. He had been hit by a car. He was just kind of wagging his head, you know? People were honking and honking at him, but he wouldn’t move. I got out of the car and wrapped him up in this blanket we kept in the trunk. My father drove to the nearest emergency animal hospital as fast as he could.”

Josh shifted slightly, leaning his head back to rest it on the wall behind their bench. “I remember holding this cat, his eyes were open and staring up at me, and he was panting so hard. He must have been in shock. The whole time my father was driving, I kept thinking, Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. When we got to the hospital, the vet on duty examined him and said he could save the cat, but it would cost a lot of money and the cat would need a lot of looking after while he was recovering. My dad explained that he wasn’t our cat, and that we couldn’t take him home with us because of our dog. That’s when the vet said that maybe the best thing to do would be to euthanize him, so at least he wouldn’t suffer anymore.”

Josh fell silent. Laura didn’t know if the pity choking her throat was for the cat in the story, or for the boy Josh had been—the boy who was now a man and still didn’t understand why there should have to be such a thing as suffering in the world.

“But I thought, no. I thought if I could go home and call all my friends, surely one of them would offer to take him. I had a girlfriend, Cindy, and she had cats, and I thought maybe her parents would agree to take him. My father wanted to euthanize the cat while we were there, but I talked him into taking me home and letting me try. I thought I at least had to try.

“Of course,” Josh continued, “I couldn’t find anybody who was willing to take on the financial burden of some cat they didn’t know who might require all kinds of long-term care. I called everybody I could think of, but they all said no. I guess it was stupid of me to think someone might take him. I was only fifteen, what did I know? My dad called the vet hospital and told them to go ahead and euthanize the cat. But they couldn’t do it without my dad coming in to sign some paperwork first. And my dad, who’d been working all day, was so angry. Here it was, nearly midnight, and he had to drive all the way back to the animal hospital. I was in my bedroom on the phone with Cindy, and my father came in and yelled at me for all the trouble and inconvenience I was putting him through, and to tell me how selfish I’d been.

“Cindy could hear him shouting. I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse. The cat was going to die. I’d made all this extra work for my father, and he was yelling at me. And my girlfriend could hear him yelling. You know how the most embarrassing thing in the world when you’re a teenager is for your friends to hear your parents yell at you.” Laura, who had only ever been yelled at by Sarah once, and never in front of her friends, nodded anyway. “When he left, Cindy said, Listen to me, Josh. Listen to me. You’re a good person. You’re a good person, Josh, and you did a good thing. Don’t listen to what your father said.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I ever came as close to hating my dad as I did that night.”

“I can understand that,” Laura said softly.

Josh looked up at her. “My parents were having money problems then, although they didn’t tell us at the time. That’s why he was working such long hours, why he was so tired at the end of his day. He worried about me so I could have the luxury of worrying about a stray cat.” He held her gaze. “I can see where you might think I was doing the same thing now, letting you worry about money so I can worry about other things. That’s not what I’ve been doing, but I understand how it could look that way.”

Laura was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You never told me that story.”

“No,” Josh agreed. “I guess I try to only tell you the good ones.” His left hand plucked at the folds on the sleeve of his sweater. Laura saw the glint of his wedding band as it caught the light. “There are a lot of stories you haven’t told me. I wish you would.”

Her chest and throat were so heavy with tears that wouldn’t come out, she could hardly speak. She looked down at her own hands. “What if my stories aren’t good?” she whispered.

He laughed. The sound incongruous in the humid air of the waiting room. “What do you think, I got married so I could hear interesting stories for the rest of my life?” Laura lifted her eyes to his face and saw that he was smiling at her.

Josh slid closer to her on the bench, putting one arm around her shoulders and drawing her to his chest. She rested her head in the curve of his neck and smelled the familiar scents of his aftershave, of their home. “She’ll be okay, Laura,” Josh said, and Laura didn’t know if he was trying to convince her or himself. “Prudence is tougher than we give her credit for. We’ll take her home, and she’ll go right back to throwing things on the floor and bossing us around.” Laura tried to laugh, although it came out sounding strangled. She felt Josh’s hand stroke her hair. “We love her too much for anything bad to happen to her.”

“That doesn’t always matter.” Laura’s voice was still thick. “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”

“This isn’t one of those times.” He kissed the top of her head, murmuring against her hair. “You’ll see.”

The door behind the reception desk swung open and a young woman with curly brown hair wearing a white coat emerged. “Mr. and Mrs. Broder?”

“Yes,” Laura said, rising quickly to her feet.

Josh rose, too. “How’s Prudence? Will she be okay?”

“We’ve done what we can for her. We had to induce vomiting for a while.” At the look of dismay on their faces, the doctor added gently, “It is very unpleasant for the cat, but it was necessary. What we want is to stop the toxins from the lilies from getting into her system and reaching her kidneys. We have her on an IV fluid drip right now, to flush everything out and give her kidneys some extra support. We also have her on a charcoal drip, to coat her intestines and help prevent any further toxins from being absorbed. We’ve drawn some blood, but we won’t get the results back until tomorrow.” She paused, the hint of a frown creasing her forehead. “Prudence is unconscious right now, which is unusual. We’re not sure what’s causing it. I’d feel a lot better about her odds if she were awake.” She hesitated, then looked at them. “Generally, with lilies and potential kidney problems, we like to keep them here at least three days. There are also some additional tests we’d like to run, and that can get a bit expensive. If money is an issue …”

“Money’s no issue at all,” Laura said. “Do whatever you have to do for her. Can we see her?”

“Typically we don’t like to bring people back into the tech area.” The veterinarian looked at Laura and Josh, and Laura knew how much anxiety could be read in their eyes. “I’d feel a lot better, though, if Prudence was awake. Her vitals are shakier than they should be just from the lily toxicity. I think it’d be okay if one of you came back. Sometimes their moms can do more for them than we can.” Touching the sleeve of Laura’s jacket, she added, “We were all so sorry to hear about your mother, Mrs. Broder. Sarah was a good soul. Everybody here really liked her.”

“Thank you,” Laura murmured. Giving Josh’s arm one last squeeze, she followed Dr. DeMeola back through the swinging door and up a narrow flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a large white room filled with kennels. Prudence lay in one of them, as still as something dead. Laura could barely even see the rise and fall of her abdomen as she breathed. Her front legs had been shaved for the insertion of drips and tubes, and the flesh that had lain hidden beneath her white socks was pink and vulnerable-looking. Laura couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Prudence without her little red collar, and the fur of her neck looked naked without it.

“I’ll leave you alone with her for a few minutes,” Dr. DeMeola said, unlatching the door to Prudence’s kennel and walking noiselessly out.

Laura crouched down to bring her head closer to Prudence’s. In a low voice she said, “Hi, Prudence. Hi, my sweet girl.” Tears rose in her eyes as she saw how silent and still Prudence remained. “The doctor says you’ll be just fine in a few days, and then you can come home. But we’d all feel better if you’d wake up and say hi to us.” She waited for a sign that Prudence could hear her, a tiny meow, a twitching paw, anything. But Prudence remained utterly still.

Laura brought her face to the fur of Prudence’s neck, whispering into it, “I’m sorry, Prudence. I’m so sorry I yelled at you this morning. I don’t really want you to leave me alone.” Laura began to stroke the fur of her back, combing her fingers through the way she knew Prudence liked. “I couldn’t stand it if you left me. Please, Prudence. Can’t you try to open your eyes for me? Just a little? Josh and I love you so much. Please don’t leave us, Prudence. You don’t know how much of me you’d be taking with you if you did.”

Laura looked down at Prudence’s still, silent form, and thought of her mother, of the way Prudence had nestled in Sarah’s arms and given her the love Laura herself had always felt, even after she’d lost the words to tell her mother so. She had wanted to get past the wall of words Sarah had put up between the two of them, had desperately wanted to say something real. But everything she tried to say to her mother ended up coming out wrong. Why was it that, with a cat, issues of love and trust could be so straightforward? Was it because a cat could love you for your better self, the self you wanted to be and knew you could be, if not for the endless complications of human relationships?

Their moms, the vet had said. Was she a “mom”—could she be a mom to the baby she was carrying? For she realized now that she wanted this child, even if she was pregnant only because of the two or three morning pills she now realized she had forgotten to take a few months back. She wanted her child and she wanted Josh, even if he never worked another day in his life. And she wanted Prudence. She’d lost the Mandelbaums, and Honey, and her mother. Laura couldn’t bear to lose one more thing that she loved.

It was Sarah who’d been a mother to both her and Prudence, who would have been a grandmother to this unborn child. It was Sarah who should be here right now, for all their sakes. It wasn’t fair … it wasn’t fair at all …

For all of Laura’s young life, before all the things that had gone wrong between her and her mother, the most comforting thing in her small world had been the sound of her mother singing. She reached down to stroke Prudence’s head, and suddenly she heard a voice that sounded like her mother’s issuing from her own throat. “Dear Prudence,” she sang. “Open up your eyes …” Then she stopped, the threat of more tears choking her throat shut. She imagined her mother standing next to her, holding her hand and adding her voice to Laura’s, the way they’d sung together in that music studio when Laura was a child. Laura sang now, and could have sworn that she heard her mother’s voice singing with her here in this room. “The wind is low, the birds will sing … that you are part of everything …” Then Laura bent to kiss Prudence’s forehead at the spot where her tiger stripes formed a little “M” above her eyes. “Dear, dear Prudence,” she whispered. “Won’t you open up your eyes?” Laura’s voice was her own again. Desperate now, she pressed her lips to Prudence’s ear and murmured, “Come on, little girl. My little love. Open your eyes for me.”

And Prudence did.