Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  There’s the sound of Josh saying hello and Anise’s familiar voice, deep and raspy, answering him. Then she walks into the room behind Josh. Seeing her face again and smelling her Anise-smell makes memories of Sarah and our old apartment fill my mind so fast, I have to lie down for a moment and feel the cool wood of the floor against the skin of my belly. I see Sarah and Anise singing along to black disks and talking about The Old Days, Sarah telling Anise about Laura and Josh back before I knew that, someday, Laura would become my Most Important Person. I remember Sarah holding me in her lap while she told Anise there was something wrong with her heart, and Anise saying, You should tell Laura, Sarah. She’d want to know. She loves you more than either of you realizes.

  Laura stands, and Anise and Laura look at each other for a long moment. I can tell from the way Laura’s eyes widen that she’s remembering things, too. “My God,” Anise finally says. “You look just like her. I’d forgotten.”

  “Not the eyes,” Laura replies. “She always said I had my father’s eyes.”

  Anise’s laugh is loud and hoarse-sounding. “We won’t hold that against you.” She crosses the room in only three long steps and wraps her arms around Laura. She seems to grow taller, so that all of Laura is folded up into her hug. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible thing to lose your mother, especially when she was so young.” Anise’s eyes over Laura’s shoulder are shiny with water. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.” She pulls back to look at Laura. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for her funeral.”

  Laura takes a step back from Anise. “I know how hard it can be to reach you when you’re overseas.”

  “I have a cell phone now,” Anise says. “I don’t think you would have had trouble reaching me, if you’d really wanted to.”

  Anise looks at Laura, who seems to shrink a bit until it looks almost like she and Anise are the same size. Anise’s words sound like an accusation, but then she smiles and adds, “You must have gotten your stubbornness from your father, too.”

  Laura doesn’t seem to know what to say to this. Josh, who’s been standing there watching them asks, “Anise, what are you drinking?”

  “Just some tea with lemon, if you’ve got it,” she tells him and Josh disappears into the kitchen.

  “Have a seat,” Laura says, and Anise perches on the shorter end of the couch. Now that she’s closer to me, I realize how familiar she smells. There was a hint of this same smell on the bird-clothes Sarah kept in the back of her closet.

  Anise notices me sniffing her leg and grins. “Prudence!” Putting one hand beneath my nose, she says, “It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, baby doll.” She begins petting me almost before I know what’s happening, but her fingers are so skilled they find all the good places behind my ears and under my chin that I’m helpless to protest. I fall to the ground and flip onto my back, sad when Anise pulls her hand away too soon. “Look at this apartment,” she says, her bright eyes darting around the room. Then she laughs. “Sarah must have hated this place.”

  Laura laughs, too, in an unthinking way that seems to surprise her. “You’re right,” she tells Anise. “My mother said buildings like this look more like hotels than homes. But then,” she adds, “I remember her complaining about how hard the stairs in her building were on her knees whenever it rained.”

  “It stinks getting older,” Anise agrees cheerfully. The little lines around her eyes crinkle as she smiles again. “Your whole life you’re young, and that’s all you know how to be. That’s all you remember being. Everything anybody says to you starts with, You’re young. You’re young so you don’t know any better. You’re too young to know what being tired feels like. And then one day they stop saying it. You realize it’s been years since anybody called you young. These days everything people say to me begins with, At our age. At our age, who has the energy to run around Asia with a rock band?” Josh has returned with two cups of tea, handing one to Anise and the other to Laura. Anise sips at hers and says, “I don’t think I’ll ever be the grown-up your mother already was at nineteen, but she also had a gift for staying young. That’s tough to pull off. I appreciate it more every day.”

  Laura drinks from her teacup, too, but doesn’t respond to this. Josh walks across the room to fiddle with something next to the TV, and music fills the room. Anise is also silent for a moment, then says, “Is this Sarah’s copy of Country Life?”

  Josh looks surprised. “It is,” he tells her. “How did you know?”

  “Because I gave it to her.” She puts her teacup down on the coffee table. “Before I moved to California. You always recognize the crackle of your own records.”

  “We have a bunch of her records and things upstairs,” Josh says. “You guys should look through them.”

  Laura’s face tightens. But Anise says, “I’d love that, if it’s okay with you?”

  She looks over to Laura, who hesitates before nodding and putting her teacup on the table next to Anise’s. Standing, she says, “Come on. I’ll show you where everything is.”

  My fur prickles as I follow everyone into the room with the Sarah-boxes. I haven’t been in here since before I got sick. Even now, knowing that it doesn’t matter if everything in them stays in the right place because remembering things won’t bring Sarah back, it’s hard for me to watch Anise take things out.

  Still, it’s nice to hear her talk about Sarah. She has memories that are different from Laura’s and mine. She exclaims over the box of matchbook toys (I can’t believe she kept them all these years!) and tells Laura stories about the places she and Sarah used to go and the things that happened to them there. She also tells Laura stories that Laura is too young to remember. “We had your fourth birthday party at Ear Wax. You wouldn’t stop trying to rip up record covers, and it drove your mom nuts. She was always so patient with you, though. More patient than I would have been.” She looks through Sarah’s collection of black disks like they’re old friends. “I remember you!” she exclaims a few times. Laughing, she pulls something from one stiff cardboard holder. It’s not a black disk, but a colorful one that looks just like Anise except smaller! The cut-out is Anise holding a guitar and throwing her head back with her hair flying around behind her. There’s a hole right in the middle that lets you put it on the special table Sarah had, just like the black disks. “I always told your mom these picture disks would never be worth anything,” she says to Laura. “But she insisted on holding on to them.”

  “She put most of this stuff into storage when we moved into the apartment on Stanton.” Laura shakes her head. “I could never figure out why she kept it all.”

  Anise’s eyes narrow in confusion. “Why does anybody keep anything? To help you remember.” Then she looks around this room, which is still empty except for the Sarah-boxes, and doesn’t say anything else until she sees the black garbage bag with the bird-clothes. “No way!” she says happily. “Look at all these! I made most of these for your mom, you know. We had disco outfits for when we went to her kind of clubs”—Anise makes a face—“and all these little punk-rock-girl clothes for when she came with me to the places where I played.” She holds up a shirt that looks like it’s been clawed up, held together with silver safety pins. “Did you know your mom was a drag king for about thirty seconds back in the day?”

  Laura has been sitting cross-legged on the floor with me in her lap, watching as Anise looks through everything but not doing much herself. I feel her surprise in the sudden slight movement of her arms and shoulders as she says, “Wait, what?”

  Anise laughs. “Nobody wanted to give a girl DJ a break back then. It used to kill me to see Sarah spending so many hours at Alphaville, making audition tapes nobody would listen to. So one day I came up with the idea of dressing her like a guy. Neither of us had much in the way of a chest”—Anise looks down at her own skinny shape—“and she was so tall anyway that all it took was some clever needlework. In the clothes I made, and with her hair up under a hat, she looked like
a very pretty boy.” Anise’s smile is gentle. “I never saw anyone as beautiful as your mother who was so completely unaware of how beautiful she was. Like it was nothing. The first time I met her was in a store where she was trying on dresses. She came out of that dressing room looking like a model, but you could tell just by looking at her that she didn’t see it when she looked in the mirror.” Anise makes a funny face and sticks out her tongue. “I thought somebody should tell her what a knockout she was.”

  Laura’s voice is hesitant. “So why did she stop? Being a DJ, I mean,” she adds, when Anise looks confused. “She talked about it sometimes, and even when I was a kid I could tell how much she loved it. Why did she give up the way she did?”

  Anise’s eyes widen. “Because of you,” she says. “Because once you came along, nothing else was more important. Not even her music. She used to say you were her music.”

  Laura’s fingers have been stroking my fur, and the pressure from the tips becomes a bit harder, as if her fingers are curling up. I start to purr, hoping it will ease her tension. “But then, why did she have that record store? Why did she raise me in that neighborhood?” Laura is starting to sound angry. “Why did we live the way we did if I was more important to her than anything else?”

  “Go sing that sad song to your husband. My mother didn’t love me enough.” Anise looks as mad as Laura just sounded. “You forget—I was there. What kid was ever happier than you were? What kid ever had a mother who adored her the way your mother adored you?” Anise’s hands rise into the air and start making gestures. “Your mother gave you a family,” she insists. “She gave you a life. Isn’t that what every parent wants, to give their children what they never had? Do you think I can’t tell what you’re hoping to give your children just by looking at this apartment?”

  “You haven’t seen me in fifteen years.” Laura’s voice is low and sharp. “You don’t know anything about me or what I’m trying to do.”

  “Don’t I?” Anise’s voice doesn’t get louder, exactly, but it sounds more powerful. “I know you’ve been letting one horrible day roam around in your head like a monster you can’t kill and won’t ever let die. And yes, I know how bad that day was for you,” she adds when Laura takes a breath as if she’s about to interrupt. “Bad things happen and people spend months and years trying to recover because they don’t get the kind of help from friends that your mother did. Help she didn’t get from those grandparents of yours, who you don’t even remember because they never cared enough to meet you. You had the Mandelbaums for grandparents and that girl who lived upstairs—what was her name? Maria something?—for your sister, and Noel from the store and everybody in the neighborhood your mom made a point of knowing so they’d all look out for you. You had a mother who picked you up at school every afternoon and built an entire life around being able to spend time with you. And she was lucky, because not everybody has the chance or the resources to do what she did.”

  Laura doesn’t say anything when Anise’s rush of words stops. I look up and see the skin of her throat tightening, like those times when she wanted to say something to Sarah, but couldn’t.

  “Look,” Anise says. “It’s not my place to tell you what you should think of your mother, Laura. But don’t ever think she didn’t give you enough. Sarah gave you everything. She gave you a family. And here you sit—smart, successful, and happily married, so she obviously did something right. I don’t think you’ll ever know”—Anise leans forward and touches Laura’s hand—“how proud of you she was.”

  Laura’s touches the tips of her fingers lightly to Anise’s, then moves them through my fur again. I press my forehead against her arm and think about what Anise said, about Laura and Josh, and about how Sarah gave me a family, too.

  When Laura speaks, her voice sounds almost as hoarse as Anise’s laugh. “I still haven’t cried for her.” She raises one hand to run fingers through her hair, just like Sarah used to. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I can’t. I haven’t been able to.”

  The inside corners of Anise’s eyebrows rise, making her face look softer. “Sarah would have been proud of what you and Josh are doing for Alphaville and the people who live in that building.”

  “It’s just Josh.” Laura clears her throat. “I haven’t done anything.”

  Anise smiles and tilts her head to one side. It’s the way she used to look at Sarah sometimes. “You will.”

  Later that night, after Anise has left and it’s just Josh and Laura and me sitting together in the living room, Laura tells Josh, “I’d like to help with what you’re doing for this building on Avenue A.”

  The corners of his eyes push up in a smile. “Really?”

  Laura starts to smile, too, and her voice sounds casual, but her eyes are still serious. “Why not?” she says. “Sleeping twelve hours a day is completely overrated.”

  Just when I finally think I have humans figured out, I realize again what mysterious creatures they really are.

  16

  Prudence

  THE PHONE RINGS WITH TWO SHORT RINGS INSTEAD OF ONE LONG one, the way it does when the man who lives in the lobby downstairs is calling to say someone is on their way up to see us. Laura looks up in surprise from where she’s sitting on the couch with me on one side of her and a stack of papers bigger than me on the other. On the coffee table are a lot of thick books that Laura went to get from her office one night. Josh is out at a meeting, so it’s just Laura and me by ourselves in the apartment.

  “Yes?” Laura says when she answers the phone. After a pause she says, “Of course, send him up.” Then she runs to the little bathroom in the short hallway near the front door, where she pulls a brush through her hair and splashes cold water on her face. I stretch and walk over to the entrance of the kitchen, which is also next to the front door, to help Laura in case this surprise is a bad one. She’s patting her face dry when the doorbell rings.

  “Perry!” Laura says, as she pulls the door open. “What a surprise!” There’s a smile on her face, and she reaches out one hand to hold the stranger’s for a moment, but her eyes are cautious.

  Perry’s eyes aren’t cautious like Laura’s, but they look at her closely without seeming to. When he says, “You look good. Better than good, actually,” Laura’s face turns pink. The lids slide closed over his eyes so briefly it almost isn’t noticeable, as if Laura’s face changing colors has confirmed something he suspected. “May I come in?” he asks.

  “Of course.” She leads him into the living room, where he sits on one of the chairs facing the couch. “Can I get you anything?”

  “A glass of water would be nice,” he says, and Laura walks into the kitchen to get it for him. Now I’m standing near the other entrance to the kitchen—the one that opens onto the dining room table and living room—and from here I take a closer look at Perry. Some humans, when they see a cat, immediately want to pet her and say something like, Come here, kitty, come here. Some humans look annoyed (especially if they’re allergic), and some humans don’t even notice cats at all. Perry doesn’t do any of these things. He sits in his chair, his shoulders and spine held in a way that looks alert yet completely comfortable, with the kind of control that cats have mastered but that humans rarely can. He looks right back at me with his dark brown eyes, and in them I see a hint of amusement.

  I notice his outfit, which is a jacket that matches his pants, both of them made from a material that looks wonderfully soft, yet doesn’t bunch up or wrinkle the way a lot of humans’ clothes do when they’re sitting. Around his neck is a piece of dark yellow material that some of the human men on TV wear, although I’ve never seen Josh wear one. His shoes are black and perfectly clean, what Sarah would have called “immaculate.” I can tell why it used to be so important to Laura to make Perry happy with her work, and suddenly I’m glad the fur on my paws has grown almost completely back.

  Laura walks into the room with two glasses and hands one to Perry. The two of them talk for a while. Laura says
the names of humans who work at their office and asks how they’re doing. Both of them seem to know, as they sip from their glasses, that Perry didn’t decide to visit us so he could tell Laura that her assistant got her hair cut too short, or that someone named Greg keeps making everybody look at pictures of his new baby. But Perry seems comfortable and not like he’s in a hurry to say his real reason for coming.

  “So how’s Josh?” he asks. “I don’t think I’ve seen him since your wedding. I was hoping I’d get to say hello.” His voice is deep and strong without being loud. It’s so deep that listening to it starts a faint rumble in my chest, like a purr coming from outside my body.

  “He won’t be back for a couple of hours,” Laura says. “He’s working on a project, and there was a meeting he had to go to.”

  “Ah, yes. The Mitchell-Lama on Avenue A. I read about it in the Times.”

  Laura laughs. “I always forget you know everything,” she says. “Yes, he’s meeting with the owners of the music studio in the building’s Basement. They’re incorporating as a 501(c)(3) so they have a firmer legal standing if it comes down to a hearing. Josh is helping them with the paperwork.”

  Perry nods. “You’ll forgive an old friend for prying, but what are Josh’s plans after this whole thing is over?”

  “If things go our way”—Perry’s eyebrows rise when Laura says our—“we’re hoping that, eventually, he might be able to help them raise enough funds for their community outreach programs to justify some kind of paid position. If not …” She spreads her hands in front of her. “Who knows? It’s tough out there right now. We’re trying to take things one day at a time.”

  Perry tilts his head at her. “You say I know everything, but I have no idea why you haven’t been back to the office in nearly four weeks.”