by Gwen Cooper
“I thought I’d take the kids down to the Lower East Side next week,” he tells Laura one night, after she’s come home from work.
Laura’s eyebrows come together. “Really?”
“It’s not like Manhattan ends at Fourteenth Street,” Josh says in a dry voice.
Laura doesn’t seem to like this idea. I’m not sure why, though, because going back to Lower East Side sounds wonderful. Maybe Sarah is there someplace, waiting for me! And even if she’s not—even if she’s still doing whatever it is she went off to do—I bet smelling all those familiar Lower East Side smells again would make me remember all kinds of things about her.
I have no way of asking Josh to take me with him if he decides to go to Lower East Side, but I try to give him hints by jumping into the cloth shoulder bag of “supplies”—like games and fruit-juice boxes—that he takes with him whenever he spends time with the littermates. Sometimes I have to push little toys and plastic-wrapped packets of tissues out of the bag and onto the floor to make room for myself (it still surprises me how not-skinny I’ve become). Josh always laughs when he sees me curled up in his bag with just my head poking out of the unzippered top, but he also always lifts me out of the bag and puts me back on the floor. It was foolish to let Josh trick me with fish and silly singing into not hissing at him when he touches me, because now he’s not hesitant about picking me up. If he were, he’d have no choice but to let me stay in that bag and go with him to wherever he takes the littermates.
Josh laughs at some of the things I do (as if I were here to entertain humans!), but he’s also been laughing and smiling a lot more in general. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to him before to notice the small changes in his posture and expressions that showed how unhappy he was becoming, being in the apartment all the time. Humans like spending time with other humans. Sarah was always happiest when both Anise and I were there to keep her company. Now Josh’s shoulders are straighter than they’ve been since before he lost his job, and even his face looks different. It’s darker from spending time outdoors under the sun, and there are tiny brown freckles on the skin of his nose.
“I didn’t expect to love being with them as much as I do,” Josh says to Laura one night.
“I’m sure they love being with you, too,” Laura tells him with a smile.
Josh and Laura order a pizza tonight, because Josh says he’s too exhausted from running around in the heat all day to even think about what they should do for dinner. Laura is tired, too. She’s been staying up very late again—later even than she used to when I first came to live here. She isn’t spending time with her work papers, and the pink marks on the sides of her nose have begun to fade. (Maybe she’s not reading as many papers at her office, either. She doesn’t have nearly as many little ink smudges on her fingers as she used to.) Mostly what she does now is put the TV on low and let her eyes go unfocused, as if she’s thinking hard about something. She’s also started putting little bits of food beside her on the couch and making a pss-pss-pss sound that calls me over to come eat them. Lots of times I don’t bother moving off the couch after I’m done. I stretch out and settle into a deep sleep, and lately this has become the most restful sleeping I do.
Laura doesn’t put any pizza cheese (I love pizza cheese!) on the couch next to her as she and Josh eat, but she does drop a bit onto the floor for me. Normally, when a pizza comes to our door, the man who lives behind the counter downstairs calls us on the phone to announce that the pizza’s on the way up. He didn’t tonight, though, and when the doorbell rang, Laura said, “That’s odd, Thomas must be away from the desk.” She and Josh are eating the pizza anyway, which I definitely won’t do. It’s always bad when things are different from the way they usually are, but when the thing that’s different is with your food, that’s the worst of all. So, ignoring the cheese Laura and Josh keep dropping onto the floor (as if they expect me to eat the next piece when I didn’t eat the last one!), I devote myself instead to pushing the little plastic caps from their soda bottles around the coffee table with my front right paw.
“So what’d you and the kids do today?” Laura asks as they eat.
“We went down to Katz’s. I had an urge for corned beef.” Josh drinks from his glass and puts it back on the table. “Then we walked around for a while and went over to Alphaville Studios on Avenue A.” He looks at Laura curiously. “Do you know the place?”
Laura stops chewing, but swallows hard before Josh notices. “Of course,” she finally says.
“I figured you would. Evil Sugar recorded their first few albums there.” Josh sprinkles garlic powder onto his pizza slice. “I never realized how cheap it is to book studio time there. They even let a lot of the bands leave their equipment set up so they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg lugging it back and forth. And they have programs for neighborhood kids who are interested in music. They’re good people down there—it’s a real asset to the community.”
Laura is chewing slowly. She tries to sound casual when she speaks, like she’s just asking the questions a human normally would at this point in the conversation, but she doesn’t quite succeed. “What made you think of going there?”
“I thought Abbie and Robert might get a kick out of seeing the inside of a recording studio. You know how kids like that kind of thing. I used to know one of their techs, and it turns out he’s still there. He must’ve been there forever. He’s got this beard practically down to his knees.” I try to imagine what a human with no arm and no leg and a long, long beard might look like. Before I can get a picture in my head, though, Josh’s cheeks turn a shade of pink so deep, it’s almost red. “And,” he says in the kind of voice humans use when they’re confessing to something they think they should feel guilty about, “I’ve been looking through some of your mother’s old albums. I keep seeing Alphaville Studios in the liner notes.”
This time Laura puts the plate with her half-eaten pizza slice down on the coffee table and turns to look straight at him. But before she can say anything, Josh rushes ahead with, “Look, you promised way back in March that we could look through your mother’s albums at home. I haven’t pushed it. I’ve been trying to give you space to get things done on your own schedule. But those boxes can’t just sit up there forever, Laura. At some point you’ll need to figure out what you want to keep and what you want to toss or put into storage. And I’d hoped”—his voice gets softer—“that we’d find something else to do with that room.”
Why can’t those boxes sit up there? Who are they hurting? It’s not like Josh doesn’t have lots of his own “junk” filling up Home Office. Why can’t there be one room in this whole huge apartment just for me and all my stuff? A spot in the middle of my back stings with an itch, and I turn to attack it angrily with my teeth.
“I don’t know, Josh.” I see the dark centers of Laura’s eyes widen in a flicker of panic. “Things are just so … unsettled … right now.”
“The history of the world is people having children under less-than-perfect circumstances,” he tells her, gently.
They’re discussing something else now, and I don’t understand what it is. All I understand is that if Laura doesn’t find a reason to care about the things in the Sarah-boxes, Josh is going to make her send them away. I get distracted, and my right paw—which is still batting at the plastic soda-bottle cap—hits Josh’s glass of soda harder than I expected and sends it spilling all over the coffee table.
Josh and Laura both cry, “Prudence!” and jump up to get paper towels from the kitchen. I leap to the floor and crouch there. Really, this is their fault for leaving a bottle cap right next to a full glass and then distracting me with odd conversations. Still, humans tend to blame cats for things that aren’t really the cat’s fault. Neither of them scoops me up to kiss my head the way Sarah did that time when I spilled a full glass in Lower East Side, but at least they don’t yell at me. They just wipe up all the soda and throw the dirty paper towels into the tall trash can that lives in
the kitchen. By the time they’re sitting on the couch again, I can tell that Laura has decided to talk about something else.
“So how was Alphaville?” she asks Josh—and she must really want to change the subject from the mysterious threat Josh had brought up, because I could tell how much she didn’t like hearing Josh talk about this Alphaville place. “Did the kids have a good time?”
Josh hesitates and throws her a quick look. But he just says, “They did. Although from what the guy I know there was telling me, they may not be around much longer. The landlord’s trying to sell the building. The tenants in the apartments upstairs are up in arms about it.”
“That’s a shame,” Laura says, and there’s real sympathy in her voice. “But that’s what happens sometimes.”
“I don’t know,” Josh says thoughtfully. “It sounds like there’s something sketchy going on. I thought I’d poke around online tomorrow and see what I can find out.”
“Is it really that strange? Real estate changes hands every day in this city. It’s not like you can do anything about it.”
“I don’t know,” Josh says again. “If there’s something shady about the deal and getting press would help them out, it’s not like I don’t know a ton of music journalists. That’d be a place to start, anyway.”
“But if there really is something ‘sketchy’ going on,” Laura argues, and I can tell she’s trying hard to come up with a reason why Josh shouldn’t care about this anymore, “wouldn’t the music press already be on top of it?”
“Not necessarily,” Josh says. “Alphaville’s pretty much fallen off the radar over the last decade or so. It’s been a while since any major albums came out of that place. Now they mostly serve the community and young bands that haven’t signed with labels yet.” Josh stretches his arms above his head and yawns. “I’m beat. All that walking in the heat today really did me in. I think I’ll go take a shower.”
Laura smiles and nods, but as soon as Josh’s back is turned, her smile goes away. Then she sighs and pushes her fingers through her hair, the way Sarah always did when she was thinking about something she didn’t want to think about anymore.
I can hear the shower running in Josh and Laura’s bathroom as I work my way frantically through the Sarah-boxes. I know I can’t stop Josh or Laura if they do decide to make these boxes go away, but there has to be something I can do. I spin around in jumpy circles as I go from box to box, my plumper belly knocking things out of the boxes and onto the floor. Normally I’d hate the idea of things going out of the boxes they’re supposed to be in, but this is an emergency. I have more important things to worry about right now.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my left eye, I see a rat on the floor! A rat! An enormous black rat with bright-red eyes and a long skinny tail! I haven’t seen one (except for in bad dreams) since that day when I lost my littermates, and Sarah and I found each other. I know how easily I can kill mice, but a rat is something else altogether—and this rat is huge! I spin around to face it head-on, my fur puffing all the way up, and with the force of the jump I take backward, I knock one of the Sarah-boxes onto its side where it lands with a terrific crash! My heart is pounding, and by the sudden brightness of the room, I can tell that the dark centers of my own eyes must have gotten as big as they possibly can.
The rat doesn’t move. It just sits there, completely still, not even twitching its whiskers. I creep toward it—with my back still arched and my fur still puffed—and bat at its head with my right paw, taking a jump back immediately. But the rat still doesn’t do anything. Once again I creep slowly toward it and bat at its head, and the rat is still motionless. This time, when I hit it, I leave my paw there for a moment. The rat feels strange. And that’s when my fur starts to relax. This isn’t a real rat at all. It’s a fake, made out of something soft and springy.
I hear Laura’s footsteps coming up the stairs. “Are you okay, Prudence?” she calls. “What’s all the ruckus up there?” If my reaction when I saw the fake rat was bad, it’s nothing compared with Laura’s. When she comes into my room and sees it sitting in the middle of the floor, her face turns stark white and she screams!
I know that a fake rat can’t hurt her, but I jump defensively in front of Laura anyway, letting her know that no rat—real or fake—will ever be able to get close to her as long as I’m here.
Laura’s shriek of terror is so loud that Josh hears it in the shower. I hear the scrape of the shower curtain being thrown back, and then Josh’s running footsteps pound down the hall. “Laura!” he yells. “Laura, what happened? Are you okay?”
Josh runs all the way into the doorway of my room and stands there, dripping wet, holding a towel around his waist with one hand. In the other is the baseball bat he keeps next to his side of the bed. But Laura is chuckling now, breathing hard with one hand on the spot right above her heart, which is probably pounding like mine was. “Good lord!” she says. “I thought I saw a rat!” She squats down on her heels, stroking my head with one hand and picking the fake rat up with the other, its rubbery tail dangling down her arm.
“What is that thing?” Josh asks her.
Laura turns it over in her hand. “My mom used to get a lot of swag from the record labels. Most of it was silly stuff—like mini lava lamps and key chains—and she’d give it to me. This, I believe”—she lets the fake rat hang from her fingers by its tail—“was something she got when they released Hot Rats on CD.”
“Zappa.” Josh smiles and turns to rest his baseball bat against the wall, pushing away the wet hair that’s fallen into his eyes. “That was a great album.”
Laura stands and laughs again. “Not for me, it wasn’t. This thing lasted exactly one day in my room. I woke up in the middle of the night and was sure I saw a rat on my dresser. It took my mother hours to calm me down enough to fall back asleep. The next day she brought it back to her store.”
I keep my eyes intently on the fake rat hanging from Laura’s hand as Josh puts one arm—the one that isn’t holding his towel up—around her shoulders. “You should give it to Prudence,” he says. “I think she wants to play with it.”
Laura leans her head against his shoulder and looks up into his face. “You think?” Now Josh is looking into Laura’s face, too. Without looking away from him, she tosses the fake rat in my direction. “Here you go, Prudence,” she murmurs.
Josh keeps his arm around her as they leave the room. I swipe at the fake rat with my claws a few times. But silly toys aren’t what I’m thinking about right now.
10
Laura
THE WOMAN ON THE SUBWAY WAS MIDDLE-AGED AND FORMIDABLE. Short but sturdily built, she had caramel-colored hair and red fingernails so long they arced gently half an inch from the tips of her fingers. She spoke emphatically to the man standing in front of her. Also middle-aged, tall and slender, his head seemed too large for his frame. It bent slightly toward the woman, like a flower beginning to droop on its stem. “La gente cambia,” the woman said, aiming one red nail in the direction of his face. “La gente cambia.” And then, in heavily accented English, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.” The man didn’t do much in the way of response aside from nodding his head dolefully from time to time. Whether because this conversation pertained to him in particular (could they be splitting up, this middle-aged couple in this very public subway car?), or in silent acknowledgment of the fickle mystery of the human heart, was impossible for Laura, seated half the car’s length away from them, to discern.
The two of them clung to the steel bar above their heads, the occasional lurches of the train throwing them slightly off-balance but otherwise not disrupting their conversation. All around Laura, seated and standing, people shivered in the too-chilled air-conditioning as they tapped on BlackBerrys (which Laura knew she should be doing, but wasn’t) or fiddled with iPods, or stared blankly into the middle distance. The train stopped, and a hot whoosh of fetid air from the station entered the open doors along with a black-haired man d
ressed in a waiter’s uniform. It was a muggy July day, and faint yellow circles had begun to form at the armpits of his white jacket. He wheeled a linen-draped cart covered with plastic-wrapped platters of fruits and pastries, pasta salads and sandwiches. Somebody catering an after-hours meeting, Laura thought. Somebody who still has a budget to do things like that. The people who had to move to accommodate the cart looked at the waiter in minor annoyance, and he returned their looks with a vaguely apologetic expression on his sweat-slick face that said, Sorry, but I gotta work, too. Then everybody went back to what they had been doing, the middle-aged woman continuing to harangue the middle-aged man even as one corner of the cart dug into the flesh of her hip.
The woman was right, Laura acknowledged. People did change. Or maybe it was just that, over time, you started to notice different things. She’d been thinking about how dramatically Josh had changed these past few weeks, since he’d become involved in the cause of saving Alphaville Studios along with the apartment building on Avenue A. Except, Laura conceded, with the uneasiness of someone who’s deliberately shut her eyes to an unpleasant truth she now has to face, the real change had been happening slowly over the past few months. Once she’d thought Josh exempt, somehow, from the vicissitudes that threatened people like her, whose lives weren’t as charmed as his own. Now she realized what she should have seen in a hundred different ways, in small gestures and offhand remarks. Josh was frustrated. The “changed” Josh she’d seen during the last few weeks was merely the confident, energetic, pleasantly busy Josh she’d first met just under a year and a half ago.