by K. Ryan
“You and I are not going to discuss the irony of this song right now,” I told him as his head popped up from where he sat on the chair. “We have a much more pressing matter at hand to discuss instead: I’m gonna open this screen door and walk through it. Then I’m gonna walk real slow and sit down on that empty chair next to you. Let’s just see what happens, okay? No funny business. Don’t go...you know, attacking me or anything.”
The cat’s chest hiccuped.
Meh.
I took that as a sign to proceed.
So, with a heavy, anxious inhale, I gingerly slid the screen door far enough to my left so I could sneak through and step onto my patio. To his credit, the cat stayed put, instead choosing to watch me with wide grey eyes—in the fading sunlight, his eyes definitely looked more grey now than green—and his mouth formed a tiny O as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
I sort of couldn’t believe it either.
My eyes darted nervously from the cat to the chair I needed to get my ass into and I swallowed hard as I sank down right next to him. We sat there like that for a few long beats, both of us staring back at each other, not knowing what to do next, who should make the next move, or what that next move needed to be.
Finally, a beat later, the cat leapt down from his chair, trotted the few paces between us, and hopped right up onto my lap. I froze, stunned into immobility yet again, my socked hands hovering over his little body in mid-air...I just didn’t know what to do. He circled my lap a few times, his claws digging into my bare legs the whole while.
“Ow, buddy,” I winced and twitched my leg back as a knee-jerk reaction to two pairs of claws flexing into my skin. “Shit, that hurts.”
What did someone do about cat claws like that? Declawing? I didn’t really know what meant or what it might all entail...and then I realized what had just happened.
The second he’d jumped on my lap, I was a goner. Hook, line, and sinker.
He’d gotten me right where he wanted me.
And for what it was worth, I was sort of okay with it.
I let my socked hands run up and down his back, scratching into his cheeks and under his chin, around his tail as he purred and nudged me right back, and then, I finally let myself hold one of those little white paws, despite the barrier between us.
“You know what’s weird?”
Meh.
“I don’t feel sniffly at all yet. I mean, I know I’ve only been out here a few minutes, but still...kinda weird, right? If my throat starts to close and I have to throw you off my lap, don’t be offended. It’s not you, it’s me.”
The cat just stretched a paw up at me from my lap like he was saying, As if it could possibly be me. Have you seen me lately? I’m awesome.
I don’t know what I’d expected, but here I sat, with a stray cat cuddled into my lap as I petted him with my socks over my hands. God, he was skinny. And bony. All elbows and knees as my dad used to say. I needed to start feeding him a little more, get some more meat on his bones, and get him healthy again.
And then my thoughts caught up with me. And then I realized what I’d done. What I was still doing and that old, familiar feeling ripped through me.
Cold, hard panic.
It couldn’t have come a moment too soon because the cat was getting a little too comfortable on my lap. My hands swiftly dipped underneath his little body to scoop him off my lap and I carried him back over to his chair, holding his body out at arm's length to keep him as far away from me as possible.
Once he was safely nestled back against his towels, I scrambled back inside my apartment and shut the screen door behind me. The cat was already sitting up on his chair, watching me with wide, stunned grey eyes and I couldn’t really blame him.
There was no way he’d still be hanging around me if I wasn’t giving him food, water, and a comfy place to sleep. I was too neurotic, too screwed up, too set in my ways for anyone—even a stray cat—to look past all my shit, all my heartbreak, all my destruction, and all my damage.
No sane person at least. That went for cats, too.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the cat, who was still gaping back at me with that stunned expression. “I wish I could be what you wanted me to be, but I just can’t right now.”
After one last look to make sure he had enough food and water for the night, I turned off the light and shut the door.
Sooner or later, that cat would follow the same path as everyone else in my life, the path that led him right out of it, and now, I found myself hoping he’d just be gone in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next day, I felt like complete shit during my whole shift. Not because I was sick or hungover or any other logical reason why I might feel this way. No, I felt guilty because of what had happened with the cat the night before. I walked around the café the whole day with a sick, gnawing feeling in my gut that got so bad, at one point I thought I was going to puke all over a customer’s French silk pie.
The relief that washed over me the second I saw him sitting there, right where I’d left him that morning, knowing that he hadn’t left me, that he hadn’t decided to cut his losses and run, even though he probably should, I had to swallow back a thick, heavy lump.
Now that I had the rest of the night, I put on Soul Asylum’s Grave Dancers Union album on my turntable, burdened by the weight of everything I’d left behind in Hickory...all the bad and what little was left of the good. I’d moved to Milwaukee looking to escape, to outrun the demons chasing me right out of town, hoping that I’d find peace and quiet. All I’d gotten in exchange was loneliness.
I hadn’t realized just how lonely I was and how completely I’d screwed up my life until last night. Until I ran away from a stray cat.
Ever since the ashes of my life scattered in the wind, I’d given up on happy endings. I’d given up on fate. I’d given up on the hope that anything, anywhere, anytime, was meant to be. I couldn’t accept that fate, that God or whatever force existed out there, had sent my life so disastrously off the rails because it was all part of the plan.
That smelled like a heaping pile of cow manure to me.
If this sorry existence in self-induced misery was all part of the plan, then I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t want to accept it. Not anymore.
And then my eyes fell on the cat. With his wide, expressive, sea foam-greyish eyes, his ringed tail that flicked and curled to communicate his moods, those four little white paws...somehow, over these last four days, I wondered if maybe I’d been wrong this whole time, if maybe there was another reason why he’d chosen this patio on that particular night four days ago and decided to stay.
I was reading too much into things. I knew that, but that didn’t stop me from compulsively approaching the screen door again, this time sock-free as another song, “Runaway Train”, started playing softly through my speakers.
“Wrong way on a one-way track...”
“I’m sorry about last night,” I whispered to him and he promptly hopped down from the chair to sit right in front of the screen door. His front paws latched onto the wiring again as he leaned and stretched against the door. Let me in. Let me in. Let me in.
“Whoa, buddy,” I scolded gently, reaching down to unlatch his paws as best as I could from the other side of the screen. “Try not to shred my door, okay? I’d like at least a little of my security deposit back.”
Maawhr.
“We’re gonna try this again, okay, buddy? I can’t make any promises, but I wanna try again.”
Meh.
That was as good as I was going to get. As I started to push the screen door to the side so I could step through, the cat moved back a hair to give me a little space, but this time I didn’t sink down into the chair. Instead, I kept my distance, creeping out to the far edge of my patio. I wasn’t ready to go anywhere near that chair yet. My bare hands felt clammy, unprotected, and shaky with nerves. My stomach wasn’t much better—rolling and churning and knotting wi
th hot anxiety.
“Somehow I’m neither here nor there...”
The cat eyed me carefully, his head tilted to the side a little like he was trying to figure me out.
Good luck with that, buddy, I thought warily.
Then he was moving towards me while I pretended to inspect the planter he still used as his personal litter box, and I froze when his little body rubbed up against my legs, weaving in and out, taking his time, making sure I wouldn’t forget he was there. Like I could forget.
Meh.
His chest kept bumping and hiccuping those little half purrs-half mumbles. We were at a crossroads now, him and me. If I sat down and he hopped up into my lap again, I think that would be it. But if I didn’t sit down, if I was too afraid of what might happen if I took the risk, I think that would be it, too. I’d have to take him to the humane society or something, but that would be it. I couldn’t keep feeding this cat and letting him sleep on my patio if I couldn’t keep him.
The actual act of loading him up in my car, driving him to the humane society, and then leaving him behind, never seeing him again...tears pricked my eyes just at the thought of it.
I wasn’t so sure I could do that.
Finally, I took a deep breath and sank down into the chair. Two seconds later, the cat hopped up onto my lap. This time, though, he didn’t circle my lap. His talon-like claws didn’t dig and flex into my thighs. This time, he sat right down on his haunches facing me and stared back at me. Then his two front paws reached all the way up until they settled onto my shoulders. His head nudged forward, kneading and searching until his little cheek buried itself right in the corner of my jaw.
“Can you help me remember how to smile…?”
I don’t know when I started crying. I do know I sat frozen to that plastic patio chair, the music surrounding me and sending me right to the pit of despair, as this cat nuzzled my jaw, my chin, and finally, swept his rough, prickly tongue up the side of my face.
It all just poured out of me. The humiliation. The betrayal. The invasion. More humiliation. The destruction of my life’s dreams burning up right before my eyes. The shock. The shame. I couldn’t stop it now that it’d started. Wave after wave of horrible, degrading memory washed over me and I was reliving it again, the stares, the whispers, the outpouring of disgust and horror—I thought I’d gotten through that part. I thought I’d gotten past it enough to be able to push it aside...but it looked like I was wrong about that, too.
All I could do was let my hands pull the cat’s furry little body against my chest, hugging him to me—or maybe it was the other way around—and hoping that maybe, maybe, my life had finally started getting better.
Finally.
I wasn’t happy like this. I knew that. Somewhere along the way I’d convinced myself I liked the silence, the solitude, that it was a good thing to just be alone right now and have some time to myself. Tears flowed freely down my cheeks, my shoulders shook with sobs, my hands trembled around the cat’s body and the softness I found there was comforting. Reassuring. Soothing.
Maybe I didn’t have to be alone anymore.
“I think I want to keep you,” I whispered against his head.
It felt good to cry. It felt right to cry. I think I’d earned that right. And the most surprising part of all was that I didn’t feel so scared anymore.
. . .
About an hour after my cry fest, I was still sitting out on my patio, but this time I had my computer in my lap and a chilled glass of wine at my feet. Music played softly in the background from my music library—the great thing about modern technology when it came to current turntables was that I’d been able to convert all my dad’s records into mp4s and then uploaded them onto my laptop. The cat sat on his chair next to me, nestled down into his towels, his ears twitching every once and awhile as he reclined leisurely from his usual spot.
Right now, my focus was trained on a Craigslist search to see if anyone had put out a notice for a lost cat that looked like the one sitting right next to me. If I was even going to attempt to try to keep him, I had to make sure there wasn’t somebody out there looking for him, wanting him to come home. If he did have a home, which was probably unlikely at this point, I had to make sure.
The last thing I wanted to do was steal someone else’s cat. Still, I secretly hoped my search would come up empty.
I wanted to keep him. As risky as it was, with allergies and the whole illegal-per-my-lease-agreement thing, I still wanted him. There was no way I could take him to the humane society and just drive away. That wasn’t happening. He was either leaving this patio with his actual owner or he was coming inside my apartment with me.
I knew which outcome I wanted.
Maybe I’d known it the second my new neighbor, Finn, had taken one look at our little set-up out here and just assumed the cat was mine anyway. It was an understandable assumption to make and one I wanted to come true.
I’d be the first one to admit I didn’t search all that hard on Craigslist and the local humane society’s website, but I didn’t really feel guilty about that either. Now, I knew what I had to do.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I told the cat and his ears twitched at the sound of my voice. “I’m gonna make an appointment at the vet for Friday. So that’s one week from when you first started showing up here. I know, I know...I’m sure that’s the last place you wanna go, but we still need to make sure everything’s alright with you before you come inside, okay? No fleas, no worms...all that stuff. If you’re still here by Friday, we’ll go to the vet and then you can move in. Deal?”
Meh.
If he was still chilling on my patio four days from now, I was just going to take that as a sign he was meant to be my cat.
“This is kinda weird,” I muttered to myself and glanced at the cat to find him drowsing again in his chair. “In four more days, I could be a cat owner...who am I kidding? I’m pretty much a cat owner already.”
The writing was on the wall the second I bought that bag of cat food. Even then, he’d had me.
Now, my fingers were itching to do something...to call someone and tell them the news, which wasn’t really news at all, but still, I wanted to tell someone. My fingers flew across my screen and I hit my speed-dial to call my brother. A few seconds later, all I heard was my brother’s clipped voice telling me he wasn’t around and would get back to me if he had time. Ever the classy guy, that one...
Of course, now that I wanted to talk to someone from back home, it looked like no one was around to actually take my call. Go figure.
Irony, you black-hearted bitch.
It was just my luck that—my thoughts tripped up mid-sentence when my phone rang in my hand.
“Shit, that was quick,” I muttered to the cat. “I bet he thinks my apartment burned down or something.”
I swiped across my screen to both answer my phone and alleviate my brother’s panic. “Hey, brother.”
“Em? You okay? What’s goin’ on?”
Yep. Pretty much what I figured. In his defense, our communication had been relegated to short text message conversation over the last few months, especially after the epic disaster that was our last ‘family’ dinner, so I couldn’t exactly hold his overblown reaction against him.
“Everything’s fine,” I laughed. “Seriously. I promise. I just...I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Okay.”
Again, I couldn’t really hold the hesitation in his voice against him. I never called him and I definitely never called him just because I wanted to talk. This was uncharted territory for both of us right now.
“So...um, how are you guys doing?”
There was a long pause on the other side of the line before I heard Noah take a deep breath. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I laughed again and reached across the short space between me and the cat so I could scratch the top of his head. “I’m okay. Promise. I don’t know...I guess I
just called because I wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
I huffed out another laugh. “Geez. Will you cut the gloom and doom shit?”
“Sorry,” Noah told me from his end and I could practically see him shrugging his shoulders and mouthing to Cristina, I don’t know what the hell is up with her. “I’ve learned only to expect bad things when a woman says she wants to tell me something.”
From over the line, I heard my sister-in-law’s muffled high-pitched, What’s that supposed to mean? and then Noah’s half-laughing, half-mumbled, “Ow! Jesus, don’t hit!”
“Wow,” I muttered under my breath. “You two are a walking advertisement for dysfunction.”
“Hey, now. That’s not very nice. Just because we like it a little rough sometimes doesn’t mean—”
“Aaaaand I’m gonna stop you right there,” I cut in. “I don’t want to hear the end of that sentence.”
“Fair enough. So what’s up? What do you wanna tell me?”
Now that the opportunity was at hand, I suddenly couldn’t find the words to adequately express what I was feeling and what I wanted to say. It was one thing to entertain the idea of keeping the cat and just keeping those thoughts to myself. Admitting it out loud and hearing my brother’s reaction was a whole other beast.
“I, um...I sort of got a cat.”
Sort of being the operative phrase.
Again, another long pause. “What do you mean sort of?”
“Well,” I forged right ahead and shoved my nervousness aside for the time being. “There’s this cat that keeps hanging around my patio. Well, not around; he’s literally on my patio. He sleeps in one of my chairs, too. I’ve been feeding him and giving him water...yesterday I came out by him and he jumped right in my lap, so yeah...”
“Huh.”
That was not the reaction I expected. “What do you mean huh?”
“I don’t know,” Noah laughed, relief flooding the deep timbre I knew so well. “I thought you were gonna tell me you got fired or you got kicked out of your apartment or...something.”