The trees had changed, many already letting loose their browns. Crunchy pieces of autumn sprinkled across our lawn. The air nipped at me, a good ten degrees or so lower than I was ready for.
Halloween decorations had taken over the world. Scarecrows in the fields we passed to get to school. Decals of ghosts and witches and Frankensteins in every other window. Pumpkins carved up, some of them aglow with candles in their bellies.
So when I got home that chilly afternoon, I didn’t even blink at the cat on the piano bench. My mind shuffled it back into the deck without a thought. It was another decoration, a creature as black as they come, perfect for witching hour.
I took off my jacket and the cat pounced on it. That got my attention.
“Um, hello?” I called into the house.
“Shit!” Something heavy thudded to the floor. “Ow, crap. Ow ow ow.”
“Dad?” I was surprised to find him here. His flight wasn’t supposed to bring him back until the next morning. Part of me was disappointed; it meant I wouldn’t be able to spend the night sketching in peace. But I tried to summon some good cheer. It was rare to have him home on a Friday.
“Leigh!” My father rounded the corner of the hallway, and his face lit up with relief. “You’re just in time. I persuaded your mother to go run errands, but she’ll be back any minute. Come help with this.”
He beckoned me into the living room, where this weird geometric structure had fallen over on its side. I helped him push it back up, and he clicked something on the bottom into place.
“There. What do you think?”
“Uh. It’s great?” The structure was taller than me. There were carpeted platforms and columns wrapped in what looked like rope.
“It’s a playground. For Meimei.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Who?”
The cat meowed then, like she knew we were talking about her.
“It’s a surprise,” said Dad, picking up the creature.
“You got us… a cat?” I tried to tamp down my shock. He traveled so much we couldn’t even keep track of his time zones. He should’ve been the last person in the world to be making decisions about getting a pet.
“I just figured… well. I worry that Mom’s been lonely. Seems like she could use some company.”
“What about me? What about her piano students? We’re just chopped liver?”
“Her piano students,” my father repeated, his face strange. “Right.” He was suddenly very busy fiddling with the cat playground, which already looked fully assembled.
“Dad. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Hmm?” he said innocently.
I thought of my mother, tired and drained when I got home. I’d been taking the late bus every day—Nagori was letting me use the art room to work on my portfolio for Kreis. It used to be that I had to listen through at least four piano lessons after school. But these days I got home so late I missed it all.
Unless there wasn’t anything to miss.
“She is still teaching, right?”
My father said nothing.
The anger boiled up so fast it surprised even me. “She stopped? Again? When was anyone going to tell me?”
And how did Dad find out first?
“Listen, she’s just having a difficult time—”
“How are you supposed to know what kind of time she’s having? You’re barely even here, Dad,” I said, more harshly than I meant to.
He winced visibly.
I crossed my arms. “She’s been getting worse again. She needs help.”
He was silent for a long stretch. Finally, he said, “You’re right. I’m not here enough. I need to change that. One more year of this and I’m done. No more conferences, no more traveling. I’m booked through next summer, but after that, I’ll be home and sticking to a normal—and local—teaching schedule. All right?”
It was my turn to be silent. I didn’t know what to say. Did I believe him? I couldn’t be sure. It sounded too good to be true. And worse, a dark and horrible part of me wasn’t sure I wanted it to be true. Because if my father stayed home, I wouldn’t have the freedom to work on my art. He’d be nagging me constantly. He’d tell me to focus on the practical things. He probably wouldn’t let Axel come over so much.
“And she is getting help,” he said, his voice dropping lower. “Her doctor just switched her to a new medication. Sometimes that can make things a little worse for a while. But we’re keeping a close eye on it.”
I pressed my mouth into a thin line so I wouldn’t blurt out anything about the irony of the pronoun we and the phrase a close eye.
I threw myself down on the sofa. It didn’t make sense for me to be the last to find out about things like this. Wasn’t I, compared to my father, the way more reliable support system? I had to work to keep the disgust off my face.
We heard the garage opening then, the motor humming as it pulled the door up. Dad straightened with excitement. He placed Meimei at the top of her playground.
Mom walked in and the cat meowed.
“Surprise!” Dad half shouted, throwing his arms out.
“Oh,” she said, “my god. Is that cat?”
I’d been under the impression that my mother hated cats. She mentioned a long time ago that she thought cats were evil and tried to suffocate humans in their sleep. But the moment Mom reached out a tentative hand, Meimei pushed her head right into my mother’s palm and began to purr. The two of them took to each other like they were meant to be.
Dad flew out again, and I wondered if he felt any guilt for having upped the head count of those he was leaving behind. As the days grew cold, Mom started sleeping more and more. I was an expert at taking care of myself by then. In the mornings, I rolled out of bed exactly seven minutes before Axel nudged his Camry into our driveway. Just enough time to throw on clothes, brush my teeth, grab an English muffin, and walk out the front door.
It was impossible for me to know how late my mother slept in after I had left for school, but it reassured me that she at least got up to feed Meimei, put out clean water, sift through the litter box.
That dark and horrible part of me envied the cat. I’d learned to be self-sufficient; it was a habit forced upon me by my mother’s condition. But here was a creature who was helpless, an animal who didn’t deserve the name of her species because she couldn’t even be called upon to kill a cockroach. She was the one to get my mother out of bed. She was the reason my mother changed into real clothes, the reason my mother rose to brew a pot of tea.
Sometimes I watched from the other room as Meimei found Mom in the kitchen and went about winding figure eights through her ankles. When Mom bent down to pet her, she flopped over, lifting her fluffy belly to the ceiling and closing her eyes for a good rub.
The cat was the one who reminded her that life was a real thing. All the rest of us might as well have been mannequins on display in the window of a museum.
“It’s funny, I never thought of you as a cat person,” said Axel, pressing chords into his keyboard. It was on the electric guitar setting, and the notes came scraping through the tinny speakers of the headphones hanging around his neck.
I was on the couch, sketchbook propped up by my knees, and shading with a nub of charcoal. “I’m really not. I don’t understand Meimei at all. Like, she’ll rub up against me to make me pet her. And then halfway through the petting, she whips her head around and swats at me to stop. See, look.” I held out my hand to show the scratches on the back. “I just don’t understand what she wants. But whatever. She’s my mother’s cat.”
“I didn’t peg your mom for a cat lady, either.”
“She’s not, really.”
“When I think ‘cat lady,’ I think of, like, Leanne’s mom, who used to be a breeder and now judges cat shows.”
“Sounds like a thrilling life,” I said sarcastically.
Axel raised his eyebrows. “So why’d your dad get Meimei in the first place?”
I shrugged, flipping to a fresh page in my sketch pad. “Who knows? Maybe he thought a dog would be too much work.”
“But why a pet at all?”
“To give Mom a reason to get out of bed and do shit.”
Axel was quiet. The chords stopped. He turned on his squeaky seat so that he faced me. “Is she okay?”
I shrugged again.