Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  He hadn’t finished the sentence, and Laura hadn’t finished it for him. The last time he’d brought up trying to get pregnant again, Josh had told Laura that the history of the world was people having babies under less-than-perfect circumstances. As if Laura didn’t know this—as if that wasn’t how Sarah had gotten pregnant with her in the first place. But what was she saying? Laura wondered. That she and Sarah would both have been better off if she’d never been born?

  When Laura was a little girl, she’d thought that the saddest thing in the world was a child without a mother. There was a girl in her class whose mother had died of AIDS, and Laura would lie in her bed at night and cry for this girl who she wasn’t even really friends with, this poor girl who would now have to live the rest of her life without a mother. Sarah’s shadow would appear in the trapezoid of light from the hallway that fell onto the floor of Laura’s bedroom, and then Sarah herself would be sitting on Laura’s bed, holding her and saying, Shhh … it’s all right, baby, it’s all right … you’ll never lose me … I’m not going anywhere. Laura would bury her face in her mother’s neck and breathe in the flowery smell of her hair, hair so much prettier than that of any of the other mothers she knew, clinging to her kind, beautiful, loving mother who would never never ever let anything bad happen to either one of them. Only after this ritual of assurance could she fall asleep.

  She’d never considered what it would feel like to be a mother without a child. She’d never thought about how many different ways there were to lose a person. She had resented Sarah for so long for not giving up the music and the life she’d loved so she could have given Laura a more secure childhood. And then she’d resented herself for having wanted Sarah to give up what she’d loved, for being angry she hadn’t given it up earlier, even after Laura had seen the happy light in Sarah’s eyes fade, year by year, as she trudged to and from that dreary desk where she’d typed endless documents for other people who had more important things to do.

  And now that Laura was old enough to have children of her own, she was afraid of all the things she couldn’t even begin to foresee that might take her and her child away from each other. She was afraid of not having enough money to keep her own child safe, and afraid of the price that would be exacted (because everything had to be paid for in the end) in exchange for the money and the safety that money provided.

  She looked at Sarah’s picture sometimes, the framed photo they’d taken from her apartment, and wondered how Sarah had felt when she’d first learned she was pregnant. Had she been happy? Had she foreseen a long future of laughter and sunny days together with her husband and the child they were going to have? Would she have done things differently if she’d known everything that would happen?

  But Sarah’s perpetually smiling face gave no answers. She’d clearly been happy at the moment the photo was taken, her eyebrows arched and her eyes holding a hint of laughter for whoever had held the camera. That was all Laura could tell.

  Prudence greeted Laura at the foot of the stairs. Her tail twitched three times and then stood straight up, and Laura thought that she’d never seen a cat with a tail as expressive as Prudence’s. It could swish from side to side in annoyance, and puff up when she was scared of something, or puff just at the base and vibrate like a rattlesnake when she felt full of love (as Laura had seen it do in Sarah’s presence), or curl at the very tip when Prudence was feeling happy and complacent. This straight-up posture, combined with the series of urgent meows, meant, Give me my dinner now! Laura obliged her, carefully cleaning the bits of food that had spilled from the can off the otherwise spotless kitchen counter. Josh must have eaten his lunch out today.

  Spending so much more time among Sarah’s things lately—among the music and picture frames and knickknacks—had made it almost painfully clear to Laura how empty her own home seemed by comparison with her mother’s. She had been reluctant to become too attached to the apartment and the things in it—not to this apartment and these things specifically, but to the idea of apartments and things in general. Looking at the sheer volume of everything Sarah had accumulated over the years, she’d marveled at the courage (for it had been a miracle of courage in its own way, hadn’t it?) it must have taken for Sarah to unearth and display old treasures, and even add new ones.

  Perhaps it would make her feel more rooted if she and Josh were to finally unpack all their wedding gifts and do something with this apartment they’d spent weeks hunting for together (“Someplace with room to grow,” Josh had said, eyes sparkling). Maybe, if they filled bookcases with well-worn paperbacks and the glossy hardcovers about music that Josh dearly loved, and decorated bare walls with paintings and prints, maybe after all that they could rest to admire their work and think, How lucky we are to get to live here!

  Except that now there was no telling how much longer they’d get to live here. Laura knew that if they did end up having to move, it wouldn’t be like that other time. This time they would be able to pack everything neatly into labeled boxes that would follow them to wherever their new home would be. Still, she had hoped never again to be forced to leave a home, and she raged inwardly against the cruelty of a world that could never allow you to consider anything in “forever” terms, no matter how much of yourself you were willing to sacrifice for the sake of permanence.

  The apartment was stuffy, as it tended to get during the summer when nobody was home to turn on the central air. On sweltering summer nights like the one now overtaking the failing daylight, she and Sarah had sometimes slept outside on the fire escape, listening to the car alarms and music and laughter and angry shouts that drifted up from the street. It had been a glorious day when they’d finally been able to afford a small, secondhand air-conditioning unit, even though they’d had to wedge it into place with old magazines to make it fit the roughly cut hole in the wall.

  Laura moved into the living room to unlock the clasp that would allow her to push open the top half of one of the tall windows and let fresh air in. She could see people in other apartment buildings watching television, many of them unknowingly watching the same show in different apartments on different floors. All the way down on the street was a cluster of teenagers dribbling a basketball up the block, and Laura remembered the boys who’d made basketball hoops out of milk crates in the neighborhood she’d grown up in, sloppily duct-taping them to lampposts and telephone poles. Across the way the amber-and-white pigeons rested peacefully, settling in for the evening. Their numbers had grown of late, and Laura wondered when the mating season was for pigeons, if perhaps their little group had swelled to (she carefully counted) upwards of thirty because they’d had chicks she hadn’t seen, even though she looked at them every day.

  As she watched, the black door that led to the roof where the pigeons slept opened. The head of a broom appeared, followed by a dark-haired man in a white T-shirt. The man began yelling something and waving his broom at the pigeons. The startled birds took flight in circles that grew in breadth and number as more pigeons from the roof joined their widening arcs of panic.

  Laura didn’t know what came over her. There was a part of her mind that watched with a kind of bewildered detachment, even as she pushed her head through the open window and screamed, “Leave them alone!” The man must have heard her, even if he couldn’t tell what she was saying, because he looked directly at her (the crazy lady in the apartment across the way) as he kept shouting and flailing his broom. Laura waved her fists in the air and continued to scream, “Leave them alone! Leave them alone!” Over and over she shrieked, “Leave them alone!” until her throat was raw and the man grew tired of his work and disappeared again through the black door. The circles the pigeons made in the air began to tighten and shrink until, finally, a few brave souls were the first to alight. Soon all the pigeons had settled back onto the rooftop, as if nothing had happened to disturb their rest.

  Laura pulled her head back through the window and closed it. She discovered small, red half-moons where her fingernails had
dug into the flesh of her palms. Her hands were shaking, and she ran them through her hair and took a few deep breaths to steady herself. Prudence was sitting on her haunches in front of Laura, eyeing her steadfastly.

  “What are you looking at?” she demanded hoarsely of Prudence, thinking that now she really must be losing her mind. “My mother never yelled in front of you?”

  To Laura’s surprise, Prudence purred and bumped her head affectionately against Laura’s ankles. Then she turned and curled the tip of her tail around the bottom of Laura’s leg.

  11

  Prudence

  IT’S BEEN RAINING ALL DAY. ALL THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS ON THE SIDEWALK, humans struggle against the wind with inside-out umbrellas that pull them backward or into the street. Some of them finally give up and throw the umbrellas into trash cans with disgust. In Lower East Side, our apartment was close enough to the street that I could look out the window and see if Sarah was about to walk in. From this high up, though, I can never tell if any of the humans on the sidewalk is Laura or Josh. I don’t know if Laura had any trouble with the little black umbrella she took with her this morning, but she’s sopping when she gets home. “Give me a minute, Prudence,” she says when she sees me waiting for her by the front door. “Let me get out of these wet clothes first.” She leaves little drip-drops of water behind her as she walks toward the stairs.

  Somebody left the window open in my upstairs room this morning, and some of the rainwater has spotted the white curtains and dripped inside. I’m pleased to note, though, that while a little water got into one of the boxes Josh moved in here from Home Office, none has gotten into any of the Sarah-boxes, which live farther into the room. It’s more crowded in here than it used to be, but not so crowded that I can’t still throw little things out of the Sarah-boxes for Laura to find and talk to me about.

  The air from outside smells like the rolls of new quarters Sarah used to bring home to feed to the laundry machines in Basement, which means there’ll be lightning soon. It also means that the room doesn’t have as much of the fading Sarah-and-me-together smell, but that’s okay. Listening to Laura talk about Sarah is almost as good as breathing in her smell—my own memories of Sarah seem much more real when Laura tells me about hers.

  There are times when she doesn’t say much. Once we found a little plastic bag with some old pins—the round, colorful kind that humans occasionally attach to their clothing. Laura picked one out of the bunch and said, “I begged my mother to buy me this Menudo pin after I saw my best friend Maria Elena wearing one.” Then she laughed. “I think I wore it on my backpack for about two weeks before I got tired of it and left it at the store.” That was all she had to say about any of the pins before putting them away again. But other times she’ll tell longer stories, or say things that are more about Sarah than other people Laura remembers, and those are the best times of all.

  It bothered me at first, throwing Sarah’s and my old things out of the boxes they’re supposed to be in, because Sarah always said how important it was to keep your past organized. Throwing things on the floor is the opposite of being organized. But if I didn’t show these things to Laura to make her tell me about her memories, then Sarah wouldn’t have a past at all.

  Today I found two white boxes while I was looking for things to show Laura—a smaller one and one that’s bigger, like the kind clothing comes in when one human is giving another human a present. When Laura comes to sit next to me on the floor, wearing sweat-clothes, it’s the smaller box she opens first. “Let’s see what you found today,” she says. Her voice, which was hoarse for days after she yelled at that man across the street about the pigeons, sounds normal again. When Josh asked her about it, she told him she was in a loud meeting at work and must have strained her throat. Josh has been so busy with his own work lately that he didn’t narrow his eyes the way he does when he can tell Laura is saying something not-true. Maybe he didn’t even notice how her cheeks changed color. I don’t know why Laura wouldn’t want to tell him what she did, though, because even things as stupid as pigeons deserve to have a place to live—and they spend so much time on that rooftop that it must be covered in their smell by now. Who was that strange man to try to make them leave? I was proud of Laura for defending them, even though it turns out they came right back without her help to where they’re used to being.

  The inside of the small white box is lined with cotton fluff. Wrapped into the fluff is something made of a smooth, dark-white material that Laura says is called ivory. The bottom part of it is made up of five long teeth, and the top part is shaped like a fan with all kinds of curls carved into it. “It’s a comb,” Laura says. “My mother had this way of twisting her hair up and holding it with a comb. She looked so elegant and glamorous, I couldn’t believe she was really my mother.” Laura’s face used to get so tight whenever Sarah was mentioned, but now it wears a soft kind of smile. Her voice is soft, too. She holds the comb up to the light and says, “I don’t remember ever seeing this one, though.”

  Of course I can’t talk and tell Laura so, but I remember seeing this comb. Sarah showed it once to Anise. She told Anise that Mrs. Mandelbaum had given it to her years and years ago, to give to Laura on her wedding day. She wore it at her own wedding, Sarah said. She said it was only fitting that Laura’s “something old” should come from her. Sarah told Anise she’d thought about giving it to Laura the day she got married, but ended up losing her nerve because Laura always got so upset whenever the Mandelbaums were mentioned. Anise looked sad for Sarah, and she told her, You can’t spend the rest of your life waiting for a perfect moment to say the things you want to say. You have to do the best you can with the moments you actually get. It’s funny—when I think about the Sarah I remember and compare her with the Sarah in Laura’s memories. I remember a Sarah who always knew exactly the right thing to say to me. Laura remembers a Sarah who talked and talked but never said the thing Laura really wanted to hear.

  Now she puts the comb back into the little box, and puts that back into one of the big Sarah-boxes, although not the one I found it in. As the days go by Laura seems to be organizing the things we look at together. Some go into boxes with things she probably wants to keep, like this comb, and others go into boxes of things she’ll bring to Trash Room someday, like old ordering slips from Sarah’s record store, or the funny little drum on a stick with strings attached.

  The bigger white box I found is trapped shut with clear tape, and Laura has to slide her fingernail around the edges to get it open. There’s lots of crinkly tissue paper (perfect to play in!), and inside of that are tiny clothes, far too small for even the littermates to wear—little knitted sweaters and hats, tiny denim jackets covered in silver safety pins and neon-colored spray paints, and teeny skirts and dresses and ripped T-shirts decorated to match the jackets. The sweaters have the very, very faint aroma of another cat, along with a bit of Sarah-smell and another scent that’s probably what Laura smelled like when she was younger.

  “Oh God.” The look on Laura’s face is amazement. “Mrs. Mandelbaum knitted these sweaters for my Cabbage Patch Doll. And Anise made her these little rock-star outfits.” It’s when she says Anise’s name that I notice something like anger dart behind Laura’s eyes and fade again, just as quickly. “I told my mother to get rid of these when I was eleven.” She laughs a little. “I insisted, actually. I wanted her to know I wasn’t a baby anymore.” Laura’s smile is wobbly. “I can’t believe she kept them all these years.”

  I put one paw tentatively on Laura’s knee, waiting to see if she’ll make any sudden movements—or try to stop me—as I crawl into her lap to get closer to the little sweaters. I rub my cheeks and the backs of my ears so hard against them—trying to get rid of that other cat’s smell and also trying to get that little bit of Sarah-smell onto me—that the clasp of my red collar gets stuck on a thread and Laura has to untangle me. Once I’m freed I rub my head on the sweaters again, trying to re-create some of that good Sarah-and-me-together sme
ll. Laura begins to massage her fingers gently behind my ears. Closing my eyes, I lean the side of my head into her hand and purr. She cups her hand and runs it from the tip of my nose all the way down my back in a good, firm way that makes the skin under my fur tingle.

  Suddenly we hear the jangling of keys downstairs that means Josh is home. Whenever he comes home this late, it’s usually because he’s been meeting with the humans who live in that building above the music studio—collecting their stories, he says. We hear his footsteps coming up the stairs, and Laura moves the white box top so that it mostly covers the little clothes that aren’t underneath my head. In another moment Josh is in the doorway with speckles of rainwater all over his jeans, saying, “Hello, ladies.”

  Josh still comes in here sometimes to look through Sarah’s black disks. It doesn’t bother me anymore when he does this, because he always washes his hands first and treats them so respectfully. He’s looking for music that got recorded at that studio, I heard him tell Laura. Sarah has hundreds of black disks, so it’s taking him a while to get through all of them. He never touches things in the Sarah-boxes, though—the ones that don’t have any black disks in them—like Laura and I do.

  But now he’s not here to look through black disks. He smiles like he always does when he sees Laura in here with me, looking at Sarah’s things, and tells her, “I picked up a tuna sub at Defonte’s, if you want half.”

  “How did you know I was thinking about cold tuna for dinner?” Laura asks, smiling back at him.

  Josh leans his shoulder against the door frame. “You know, it’ll be our anniversary in a few weeks. We should do something grand.”

  “Not too grand,” Laura says.

  “How many first anniversaries are we going to get?” he asks her. “And I’m talking about dinner out. Not a week in Paris.” He looks at her hopefully. “Come on. We haven’t gone out for a great meal in a long time, and I’ll still have a couple of weeks left of my severance.”