Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  Prudence, the voice sings, open your eyes. I don’t want to open them, though. I’m too comfortable and sleepy. But the voice keeps singing and saying, Dear, dear Prudence … won’t you open up your eyes? My little love. It’s so insistent that I have no choice. I have to fight with my eyelids, which have become heavy and stubborn. There’s a powerful light over my head, hurting my eyes and pushing my eyelids down. I finally pry them apart, and it takes a moment to focus and see things around me clearly.

  When I look up, it’s not Sarah’s face I see. It’s Laura’s.

  “Dr. DeMeola!” Laura cries. “She’s awake!” The blurry shape of a familiar-looking woman drifts through my vision, somewhere behind where Laura is standing. Laura’s smiling, and there are tears in her eyes. I don’t realize I’m on my side until I feel her hand start to rub gently behind my right ear, the one that isn’t pressed against whatever it is I’m lying on. There are bad smells in this place—scary smells—but Laura’s Laura-smell is stronger than they are as she continues to stroke behind my ear and down the length of my body. I try to lift my backside the way I usually do when my back is scratched like this. But my body won’t move when I tell it to, so I blink once at her, slowly, instead.

  Laura brings her mouth close to my ear and murmurs, “Don’t scare us like that again, little girl. We need you to stay with us. Can you do that, Prudence?” Her eyes look into mine, and I recognize her expression. It’s the one I used to see on her face sometimes when she looked at Sarah. I used to wonder what that look meant, but now I know. Her eyes are filled with love.

  My throat is raw and scratchy. It feels like something bad happened to it. But I’m still able to answer with a faint Mew.

  “Good,” Laura murmurs, and she kisses my forehead.

  From the cage they make me sleep in (I have to sleep in a cage!), I can smell nervous cats all around me. They stand and pace, hoping to find some warm new corner or a way to get out they haven’t discovered already. Their movements disturb the air and make my whiskers tickle. At night, when most of the humans who work here have left, some of the cats cry out, wanting their own humans to come and take them home. But I never cry. Sarah is never coming back for me.

  There are whole chunks of pink skin showing on my front paws, where my beautiful white fur used to be. One of the stabbing people here shaved the fur off so they could attach dripping tubes. Sarah was the first one who ever said my white paws looked like human socks. Now, with so much of the fur missing, they don’t look like socks at all. I lick and lick at the spots where fur is supposed to be and think, This is what happens when the human you love dies. Pieces of you go missing.

  But Laura will always come back for me. I saw it in her eyes when she sang to me and woke me up. When I think about Laura singing the Dear Prudence song, the hole in my chest from missing Sarah begins to fill. There’s something growing there. Soon it will fill up the whole space.

  For three days I’m forced to live here, and every day Laura and Josh come to visit me. A woman with curly hair unsticks my front paws from the tape that fastens dripping tubes into them, and then she wraps me in a strange blanket that doesn’t even smell like me and carries me into one of the smaller rooms where Sarah brought me once a year to get stabbed with needles. The room smells like the metal of the high table where needles get stuck into cats. It also smells like Laura and Josh fresh from being outside, sweating slightly under their coats and forced to stand too-close when the stabbing lady comes in to tell them how I’m doing. She says I’m not really sick, that they’re making me stay here “just as a precaution.” A precaution against what? It’s being locked in a room with sick cats all the time, away from my own food and special Prudence-bowls, that’s going to make me sick if anything will. I try showing Josh and Laura how little they should trust the stabbing lady by hissing at her every time she comes near me, but that just makes them laugh and say things like, Look how feisty Prudence is! She’ll be better in no time, won’t you, little girl?

  I recognize this stabbing lady—she’s the same one who once agreed with Sarah that my front paws looked like socks. Josh keeps standing, but Laura sits cross-legged on the floor next to me and strokes my back while I lick. “It’ll grow back, Prudence,” she says gently. “It’ll all grow back.” She hums the Dear Prudence song while she pets me. Her humming voice sounds so much like Sarah’s that I stop licking my paws and walk into her lap, sitting on my haunches and pressing the whole side of my face against her chest. Her arms come around me and one hand rubs the good spot underneath my chin until I purr.

  “Sweet girl,” she murmurs. “Who’s my little love?”

  Sarah’s eyes looked sad in my dream because she knew she had to stay in that place, without me, just like I have to stay here without her. But Laura’s eyes smile as she looks down at me now. “You can come home with us tomorrow,” she says, as her fingers keep finding good places beneath my chin. I know now that “home” is wherever I live with Laura.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to get into my carrier than I am the next morning when Josh and Laura come to pick me up. The humans at the Bad Place remember to put my red collar and Prudence-tags back on me before I leave, and there’s no more tape on my front paws. Just the faintest little fuzz of white on the pink skin. Even from inside my carrier and cuddled up with the old Sarah-shirt that Laura put in here with me, the air outside feels cold and scrapes against my furless spots. It hasn’t rained since the day I got sick, but the little patches of dirt around the trees in the sidewalk still smell damp. This is the time of year when leaves change color and start to fall off trees. Sometimes Sarah would come home with red and orange leaves clinging to her hair or coat, and she would put them on the floor for me so I could roll around on them while they made crunching sounds and broke up into little pieces. The pain in my belly when I think of Sarah flares again, until I look through the bars of my carrier and see that Laura and Josh are holding hands.

  Laura is the one who holds my carrier as we leave the Bad Place. I’ve been living high in the air in Upper West Side for so long, I’d almost forgotten how things look and smell down here on the streets. Laura must have stepped right near where a pigeon is sitting, because one flutters up past the bars of my carrier with a gurgling coo. I can hear the squeaks of mice, too high-pitched for humans to notice, burrowing into soft dirt, and cars speeding by on the streets. A woman walks quickly past, talking into a tiny phone. Her voice goes up at the end of every sentence even though it doesn’t sound like she’s asking any questions. So I said to him? I was, like, if you think you can treat me that way? You’ve got the wrong girl.

  The bricks from the buildings here smell older than they used to, and I can’t decide if that’s because I’ve been away from Lower East Side for so long, or because I’ve gotten used to the newer, bigger buildings in Upper West Side. I realize that I’m not an immigrant anymore—that Upper West Side is the country where I live now. Laura stops in front of one building and says to Josh, “This is where my mother’s record store used to be.” The vibrations from her chest when she speaks travel down her arm and make the walls of the carrier hum. The shop she points to has tiny clothes in the window, probably for human infants.

  “This is a nice block,” Josh says.

  “It always was. The guy who used to own this place sold chess sets he made”—Laura points to another window—“and there was a candle shop next to that.” Her arm sweeps back, to her left. “And down there, on Second Avenue, was Love Saves the Day.” She’s silent for a moment. “I think I heard it’s a noodle place now.”

  Josh puts an arm around her shoulders, bringing my carrier closer to the side of her leg. “Did you want to pick up some lunch there?”

  “Nah,” she tells him. “Let’s get something Prudence likes. Maybe tuna sandwiches.”

  They walk to the end of the block, and Josh puts his arm in the air until a yellow-colored car pulls over next to us. All three of us get into the backseat and Laura s
ettles my carrier onto her lap. I think about tuna sandwiches the whole way home.

  It’s funny how a place you know well can feel so different when you come back after a long time. Part of it is realizing how bad I smell now (like the Bad Place) after smelling all the things at home with my regular Prudence-smell. But the whole apartment looks bigger in some places and smaller in others, and just odd in general. Maybe it was being with Sarah in our old apartment while I was sleeping that makes everything around here seem different than it used to, and like I was away for longer than I was. Still, it’s good to be home. First I spend long moments re-marking my scratching post (I didn’t have anything to scratch on at the Bad Place). My Prudence-bowls are filled with food, exactly where I left them. I’m even happy (only for a moment) to see that awful blue mat with the fake-happy cats resting beneath them. When I jostle the water bowl, it’s because I can only drink moving water, not because I’m angry about the mat anymore.

  Laura and Josh must have gone shopping while I was staying in the Bad Place, because now the living room floor is crowded with store-bought cat toys. There are little toys that look just like mice—with fur and everything—that squeak when I bite them, and balls with tiny bells that roll in all directions and remind me of the jingly toys Sarah brought home when I first went to live with her. Josh and Laura remembered to save the big paper bag the toys came in, and I crawl all the way into the back of it, holding one of my mice in my teeth and swiping out at their feet with my front paws whenever they walk past. There’s also one toy that’s like a long stick with feathers—like the ones from Sarah’s bird-clothes—dangling from a string at the end. Laura holds the end of the stick over my head and drags it around while I try to catch the dangling feathers. She laughs when I stand up on my hind legs and bat at them with my front paws, until I wonder who’s supposed to be enjoying this toy—her or me?

  They also brought home something called catnip, which looks a little like the cooking herbs Sarah used to make our food with but smells so much more wonderful. Josh sprinkled some on the living room floor, and at first I was just breathing its smell in and noticing how nice it was. Then, the next thing you know, I was rolling around on my back and all I could think was, This is sooooooo gooooood. This, of course, is not a dignified way for a cat to behave. I was able to recover a little bit of dignity when Laura walked by while I was rolling around, and I leapt at her ankles. She seemed as delighted with this display of feline hunting skills as Sarah ever had. She even scooped me up the way Sarah used to and asked, “Who’s my happy girl?” I rubbed my forehead against hers just the way I used to with Sarah when we lived in Lower East Side.

  Days pass, I’m not sure how many. Laura doesn’t go to her office during the day, and she doesn’t read any work papers at night. Now she spends a lot of time napping, and I nap with her. Sometimes we nap together in the big bed upstairs, and sometimes we fall asleep on the couch until Josh comes to throw a blanket over us. He’s always very quiet, trying not to disturb us. He seems concerned about making sure Laura is getting enough rest, even though she isn’t getting sick in the mornings anymore.

  She and Josh talk and watch movies and go out to lunch on days that aren’t even Sundays. Last night, they went out together to celebrate some sort of word-writing about that building on Avenue A. “We got a story!” Josh kept saying. “A story in The New York Times!” But he didn’t say how many times, or times what, so it was hard to know why it was such a big deal. It must have made more sense to Laura than it did to me, because she put her arms around Josh and said, “I’m proud of you.” The skin on her forehead didn’t even tighten the way it used to whenever Josh mentioned that building.

  Later that night, after they came home, Laura told Josh a story about when she was fourteen, and the apartment building she and Sarah were living in got torn down. I was lying on the back of the couch, behind Laura’s head, and she reached one hand back to press my face close to hers when she talked about what happened to Honey the cat.

  Josh was sitting at the other end of the couch. His eyes never left her face, and he moved closer when she got to the part about Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum, taking her hand and squeezing it tight. “I’m sorry,” he said when she was finished talking, and pressed her face to his shoulder. “Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry. But you must know,” he squeezed her hand harder, “you have to know that nothing like that is ever going to happen to us.”

  “How can you know that?” Laura’s voice sounded like she was ready to cry, even though she didn’t. “How can you possibly know what’s going to happen to us?”

  Josh exhaled loudly through his nose and let go of her hand, running his own back and forth across the top of his head. “You’re right. I don’t know for sure. There could be a fire or a flood. Or a freak tornado could flatten New York. But we have resources. And we have each other.” Laura was staring down at her hands while Josh said all this, and he fell silent until she looked up into his face. “Nothing like that is ever going to happen to us, or to our child.”

  Laura didn’t say anything. She leaned her head back against the couch, her hair brushing against my whiskers, and Josh put his arm around her again. He held her until her eyes closed, and she and I both settled into a peaceful sleep.

  Two days later, at breakfast, Josh’s forehead is knotted, like he’s thinking hard about something. He fiddles with the twisty-tie from the loaf of bread he made his toast from, and when I stretch up one paw to reach for it, he drops it onto the ground in front of me so I can pick it up and toss it into the air. I chase it into the corner behind the kitchen table, where it tries to hide from me. Laura and Josh watch. “I have to tell you something,” Josh finally says.

  Laura’s body stiffens a little. “Okay.” Her voice sounds deeper than usual, the way a human’s voice sounds when they’re nervous but trying not to sound that way.

  “I’ve been getting a lot of calls since the Times article came out,” he tells her. “Magazines and other papers that want to do follow-up stories, things like that. I’ve also been hearing from a lot of the artists who’ve recorded in the music studio over the years. Some of them are pretty big names.” He pauses. “Anise Pierce called last night after you went to bed. She read the article, too. She wants to come out here and help.”

  Laura’s left hand, which has been resting in her lap, rises onto the table. She drums two fingers against it. From underneath the table, where I’m sitting with my twisty-tie, I can hear the light thump thump of fingers against wood. “Anise,” she repeats. “Anise Pierce wants to come here, all the way from Asia, to help save a music studio she hasn’t set foot in for thirty years.” I think Laura may be asking a question, although I can’t be sure. Her voice doesn’t go higher at the end of what she says the way human voices usually do when they’re asking a question.

  “She’s in California now,” Josh tells Laura. “She got back a few weeks ago. To be honest, I think she wants to come out here to see you more than Alphaville.”

  Laura doesn’t say anything right away, although I can see her toes curl up inside her socks. At last she says, “You said yourself that all kinds of people have been coming forward since the Times article ran. Do you really need Anise’s help?”

  “Maybe it would be good for you to see her again,” Josh says. “How many people knew your mother as well as she did?”

  “Let’s talk about it later.” Laura pushes back her chair and stands. “Right now I want to do some grocery shopping, and I’m not sure I have anything to wear outside that still fits me.”

  Laura has been getting fatter lately, probably because she sleeps a lot more and stopped drinking coffee. She pauses in the doorway and, without turning around, says to Josh, “You can call Anise and tell her to come if she wants.”

  Laura walks up the stairs, and I follow her. If she’s unsure about what clothes to wear, she’ll want my opinion, the way Sarah always did.

  For days Laura attacks our apartment. She moves everything around on
counters so she can scrub every little corner, pushes rugs out of the way to sweep away whatever bits of dust might be hiding there, and stands on ladders so she can wipe shelves and the tops of furniture too tall for a human standing on the floor to see anyway. Blue liquid from a spritzy bottle makes rainbows in the sunlight when she stands near the window to clean, but it smells fake sweet and falls onto my fur when I get too close. I squint my eyes and let my mouth hang open, trying to keep the stink of it from invading my nostrils. Even The Monster gets taken from its special closet. I hide in Home Office—which is the one room Josh told Laura she isn’t allowed to clean—until The Monster is safely back in its cave.

  “Maybe we should hire someone to do all this,” Josh says.

  Laura is lying on her belly on the floor of their bedroom, half underneath the bed as she tries to get rid of something called “dust bunnies.” I see little balls of fur and human hair, but nothing that looks like a bunny. “We don’t need to hire somebody,” Laura says. “It’s not like I’m busy doing anything else these days.”

  Josh has been standing in the doorway to the bedroom watching Laura chase the invisible bunnies. Now he turns to leave. “Anise Pierce isn’t going to look under the bed,” he says over his shoulder.

  “Yeah? Thanks for letting me know,” she says in her “dry” voice.

  By the time the doorbell rings the next night, the apartment is so clean it doesn’t smell like anybody lives here. I’m busy rubbing my Prudence-smell back into the living room couch when Josh opens the door. Laura is seated on the couch with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap. After spending a lot of time deciding what to wear, she finally put on a pair of jeans and a soft, light blue sweater that’s big enough to hide her growing belly. I think the color of the sweater looks beautiful with her eyes.