Good Luck Cat

by Lissa Warren

  Always something of a workaholic, I let my job become my life. I tell myself that, given what my family has been through recently, it’s a normal and acceptable response—more productive, say, than drinking. But the truth is, working is much easier than living, even when I have to lay off an assistant I practically raised from a pup. The truth is all calls don’t have to be returned before I let myself have lunch, all paperwork doesn’t have to be filed before I head home at night, and my in-box doesn’t have to be empty of e-mail before I let myself go to bed. I know I’m being neurotic, but I don’t know how to stop. I confide in a colleague who recently lost her dad, and she suggests I see a psychologist. Some of my craziest authors have been shrinks. I wave off her idea.

  It’s harder, though, to wave off the pains I’m having—or think I’m having—in my left arm. Going to a doctor is out of the question, as I’ve completely lost faith in them. Besides, it’s classic psychosomatic behavior. I tell myself I’m fine, but should take this as an opportunity to change my diet for the better. I start snacking on walnuts and almonds—ten at a time, exactly ten. I eliminate red meat and egg yolks. Then I eliminate meat in general. I consult my company’s myriad vegan cookbooks, and though the health benefits are undeniable, I decide I’d starve to death because it’s hard to go vegan if you mostly just know how to bake. I consider, and dismiss, learning how to really cook. Too. Much. Effort. I start downing instant oatmeal like it’s going out of style. I start taking a multivitamin, and a fish-oil supplement. I consider taking up jumping rope—something I used to love as a child, something that would be good for me now. But I’m afraid I’ll have a heart attack while jumping. I decide to leave well enough alone.

  Soon it’s May, and no one at work seems to notice I’m half-cracked, which is good, except it’s lonely. My authors continue to demand the usual attention: book tours, media, praise. My colleagues continue to demand results, and I continue to get them. I book an author on the Today show, and train it to Manhattan to escort him to the studio. When I get back, I score him three national NPRs, even though the shows normally compete. I convince C-SPAN’s Book TV to tape another author’s talk. I secure a review in the New York Times Book Review, another in USA Today, and land a book on the New York Times bestseller list—by the skin of its teeth, but it makes it. I’m nuts, but no one’s the wiser: On the outside, things are status quo. Nothing feels good or normal, though. I’m on autopilot.

  A robin builds a nest in the tree outside my office in one frenetic day, then decides not to use it—or finds she has nothing to fill it with. Most of the time I feel empty, too, and I’m becoming equally manic. I’m working every waking moment. Ting is the only thing I’ll stop for. Holding her is the best part of my day.

  Sometimes I wonder how Ting would react if Dad walked into the room. I have no doubt she’d remember him, but I don’t think she’d go to him—at least, not right away. In cat years, six months is an awfully long time to be gone. He’d have to earn her forgiveness first.

  But of course there will be no reunion, joyful or reserved. I’m not sure of the extent to which cats can understand death, but I know they can feel absence. And right now that’s pretty much where I’m at when it comes to the subject of acceptance. Dad’s death as a permanent state is beyond my comprehension.

  In June, the lilac bush I gave my mom for Mother’s Day years ago—the one Dad dug up, transported, and replanted when we moved to New Hampshire—blooms in its reliable way. I cut some branches and put them in a vase on the kitchen table, knowing they remind Mom of her parents, who had a row of lilacs along the fence in their backyard. I remember my grandparents’ lilacs, too, from summers spent with them before we lost them—Nonnie first, then Grampa a decade later. I remember being a family of five, remember saying the number when giving our name at a restaurant reception desk. No one asks anymore. They look from me to Mom, and write “two.”

  Nonnie liked cats and cats liked her; in fact, her lap was Cinnamon’s favorite. But Nonnie was also a bit wary of them. She would shoo Cinnamon off the dinner table and the kitchen counters, terribly afraid that cats spread germs. And yet, she was far more comfortable around cats than her own mother had been. My great-grandmother Katherine, who died many years before I was born, believed a cat could steal a baby’s breath, and never let one near a crib. For some reason, she still kept cats in her home, though.

  On a cold March day in 1984, when we were living in a western suburb of Cleveland, Nonnie died of renal failure. I was eleven. I remember three things from that day: the garage door going up too soon for visiting hours at the hospital to be over; my grandfather walking into the house with his shoulders so weighed down with grief that I thought he must have suitcases in his hands; and my mother taking me to a department store to buy a dress for Nonnie’s funeral. The dress we chose was the color of lilacs, but I didn’t make the connection until many years later.

  My father accompanied my mother and me to upstate New York for Nonnie’s funeral, but he didn’t attend the interment. He had a bad cold, but I have my doubts that it was bad enough to warrant missing the burial. The truth is, I don’t think he could bear it. The idea of putting my grandmother in the cold Fort Edward soil, and leaving her there, was something he couldn’t process. He had loved my mother’s mother like she was his own.

  He felt the same way about my grandfather, who moved in with us shortly after Nonnie’s death. Grampa was a man of few words, a former prison guard who was still strong and imposing well into his eighties. He had a soft spot for Cinnamon, though, and I would often come home from school to find bits of his lunch beside her food dish.

  Grampa died on my mother’s fifty-third birthday. I was home from college on Thanksgiving break. We were celebrating at the kitchen table and I thought he was bending down to reach a dropped napkin, but his body just kept going, landing with such force that it knocked out his dentures and sent his glasses sliding across the floor. While my mother called 911 and my father ran to turn on all the outside lights so the ambulance could find the house, I knelt beside Grampa and tried CPR, which I’d learned years prior in a babysitting class. I didn’t hear his ribs crack, but I remember feeling them give. When his lips blued I was sure that I had bruised them. In my last memory of him, he tastes like birthday cake.

  June 18 is the six-month anniversary of my father’s death, and because he was a man who celebrated half-birthdays, the date seems somehow momentous. I try to come up with a decent way to mark it. Because he wasn’t Catholic, going to church to light a candle like my grandfather used to do for my grandmother doesn’t seem quite right. Neither does sending a check to “Our Lady of Angels” like my mother does for her parents on their birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths, so that masses will be said in their honor. And of course there’s no grave to visit. It’s then that I remember what my father used to do when he visited my grandparents’ grave—place a pebble on their headstone, in the old Jewish tradition. I go outside and find the prettiest stone I can, and when Mom isn’t looking, I put it in his sock drawer. Ting hears the drawer open and looks up from her nap.

  June is normally pie time, because it’s when the strawberries come in. The summer before Dad died they were unusually plentiful at our local farmers’ market, and Mom made almost a dozen of her strawberry rhubarbs—the ones with the tapioca mixed in—because she knew it was his favorite. That fall she made his second favorite, sour cream apple, practically once a week, using Granny Smiths from nearby Mann Orchard. She felt good he’d had the foods he liked best the last year of his life.

  But this summer there’s no pie, no fried green tomatoes or ears of fresh corn. Not even on my birthday, which we agree to treat like any other day.

  On the Fourth of July, Mom and I settle on the couch with a bowl of cherries between us and watch the Esplanade festivities on TV. As the Boston Pops plays “The 1812 Overture,” the fireworks flood the screen—a brittle star, a lion’s mane, a weeping willow. They’re good, but we’re ind
ifferent. We could do without the drama. In fact, we’d prefer that nothing more explode, because everything already seems to be in pieces. Mom cracks the window to see if the air has cooled enough that we can turn off the AC.

  By mid-July, the loosestrife and Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod have filled the banks of the brook in our backyard—the brook where our neighbor, Charles, scattered his father’s ashes a decade ago, and Zulu’s ashes last year. “A lot of good people in that creek,” he had told my father once. But my dad remains in his sock drawer. We just can’t let him go.

  August arrives, and it’s a hot one. Ting pancakes herself on the bathroom tiles every chance she gets. I hold my hands under the faucet and run them over her body to cool her, starting behind her ears and dragging down past her haunches. She normally hates getting wet, but seems grateful. Mom makes a giant batch of pasta salad, and we eat it for a week because it’s just too hot to cook. We take turns filling the big glass pitcher with bottled water and bags of black tea, tenting it with tinfoil before setting it on the porch to brew. The three of us—me, Mom, and Dad—used to eat dinner on the porch in the summer, but we don’t do it this year because we are two, not three, which makes it somehow not worth the effort to walk the distance from the kitchen to the deck. Baseball games—the background music to our summers and, somehow, to my childhood—are strangely absent. I catch myself hoping the Yankees are having a good season, and catch myself hoping they’re not. If they win the pennant and Dad isn’t here to see it, it would be unbearable.

  Everything reminds me of loss this summer. Things that should make me happy—fresh peas to shuck, sun tea with lemon, falling asleep with the windows open—are irrelevant and irreverent. The swallows swooping above the pond, so close to the water they’re like stones being skipped, don’t even do it for me. My favorite things depress me, and the world doesn’t know enough to stop being beautiful.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ting Is Sick

  Life is life—whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man.

  —Sri Aurobindo

  It’s a Sunday morning in early September—cold enough that we put the heat on for a bit to take the chill off the house, and open every blind in an effort to let in the sun. The leaves on the maples are threatening to change, and the birches have already started surrendering. Warblers dart from tree to tree. They just arrived last week, and soon they’ll finish migrating south. Like everything, they’re temporary.

  Dad loved the pond at this time of year, and it’s our first fall without him.

  I’m up in Mom’s room with Ting, who doesn’t seem like herself. Normally she’d be sprawled in the slant of light that falls across the couch at this hour, but today she’s crouched on the floor in a shadow. I go over to her and drag my nails along both sides of her jawbone, but get no licks in return. In fact, she shifts away from me. I take the cushion off the orange armchair and put it on the floor for her. She looks at it, but doesn’t move. I pick her up and put her down on it, and go sit on the bed to watch her. Maybe her stomach’s upset. She must have gobbled her food again.

  Less than a minute later she falls fast asleep, and rolls off the cushion and onto the carpet. The tumble wakes her. It’s almost comical, except she’s not a klutzy cat—and she’s swaying back and forth now, almost like she’s drunk.

  I call Mom to come upstairs, and the urgency in my voice makes her decide not to argue, even though she’s busy making us tea. When she hits the landing, I tell her what just happened—push her toward Ting, who is sitting on her haunches now, very, very still. Mom assesses the situation with a glance in my direction and decides I’ve gone batty. Reassuring me with a “Cats do that sometimes,” she heads back downstairs with a shrug. Cats do sometimes do that—but not our graceful, dignified Ting. My mind immediately starts racing to the worst.

  I go down a mental list of poisons she could have ingested. Poinsettia? No, too early in the year. Some kind of cleaning product? Unlikely—we’ve been slobs as of late. Some sort of toxic mold or mildew? Doubt it. I boot up my laptop and Google “feline fainting spell.” Just one entry. Damn. I click on it, and see words like leukemia and degenerative myelopathy. I don’t click the hyperlinks—too scary.

  Before I exit out of the screen, I see that human medication is sometimes the cause. I go to the bottle of Valium Mom’s been keeping beside the bed, but the cap is on tight. I get down on my hands and knees, half expecting to find a half-dissolved tablet next to her slippers, but all I find is a Ting toy—a green pipe cleaner coiled like a pig’s tail. It’s all I can do not to cry.

  A few minutes later Mom comes back with the tea. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at Ting, who is still sitting on the floor, staring into space.

  “How is she?” Mom asks.

  “Still not right,” I answer.

  Mom hands me my cup and goes over to Ting, who of course flops immediately onto her side and stretches herself out in a glorious swan dive. She yawns, licks her paw, and rubs her face. Mom leans over and pets her head, and Ting-Pei starts to purr. I can hear it from across the room.

  I’m an idiot.

  Then Mom gets down on all fours and kisses Ting between the ears—five, six, seven times—before going into the bathroom to do her makeup and curl her hair. I reach for the New York Times Book Review, and lose myself in it until the fourth or fifth review, when Mom whispers my name. I look up to see her watching Ting walk toward her food dish. Ting takes two steps. Stops. Three steps. Sits. Two more steps, and she crouches down. Mom looks at me, and I look at her. Ting topples over like a too-full bag of groceries.

  Moments later, Ting comes to and walks away like nothing happened. We’re shaken, though, and debate whether we should take her to our vet’s emergency room, because the regular part of the animal hospital is closed on Sundays. A little unsure of exactly what we saw, not wanting to put her through the stress of a vet visit unnecessarily, and thinking the doctor who knows her best won’t be there on the weekend anyway, we decide instead to take turns watching her.

  “Maybe it’s just a virus,” I offer. “Like a twenty-four-hour flu.”

  “Maybe,” says Mom. It doesn’t reassure me.

  “I don’t think it’s a stroke,” I say. “Or a heart attack.” The last two words hang there, and I wish I hadn’t said them.

  “No, not that,” Mom says after a pause. “She seems fine now.”

  But she’s not fine—not by a long shot. By sunset she has had three more episodes. Twice she loses consciousness completely; once, she’s just woozy and stumbles.

  I take the first overnight shift, midnight to three. Ting sleeps through most of it—snoring, softly—but gets up once to use the litter box and lap a little water. When she’s done, I pick her up and stuff her in Old Bluey, the robe I’ve had since she was a kitten. I walk around the room with her like that, trying to avoid the creaky parts of the floor, her little head peeking out from beneath the checkered polar fleece. I know when I hold her against my chest it’s not sturdy and strong like Dad’s was. I know I can’t offer her what he provided—that solidity, that safety.

  Around three a.m. on Monday morning I wake Mom to take over. Though she officially has the three-to-six shift, I get up at five, too nervous to sleep, and go make us English muffins. I’m extra generous with the strawberry jam in an attempt to make up for our lousy night—and the lousy day I’m quite sure we’ll be having.

  Two hours later our car is idling in the parking lot of the animal hospital while we wait for the reception desk lights to go on. Ting will be our vet’s first patient, although we have no appointment. We’ve learned the hard way that, when it comes to the health of those you love, you can’t afford not to be pushy.

  When we enter the lobby things are already bustling even though we’re the only patients there. An assistant is restocking the shelves with fifty-pound bags of dog food and hypoallergenic cat litter. Files for the day’s patients are being pulled
by the desk manager. Another assistant is wiping down the giant scale where they weigh the really big dogs. There’s hot water standing ready on the counter, and Mom makes us some tea while I get settled with Ting in a corner where it’s fairly quiet. We’ve covered her cat carrier with her favorite pale-yellow towel—for warmth and familiarity, and so she can feel hidden. When I lift a corner and peek at her through the slats, she sniffs the air, trying to identify all the strange smells, but doesn’t make a sound.

  Before the tea has time to brew, a woman with short gray hair and a long white coat comes over to greet us and escort us to the exam room. Dr. Belden is our longtime vet at Bulger Veterinary Hospital in nearby Andover, Massachusetts. She knows her stuff—every test, every procedure, and every medication under the sun, including ones for humans that have been proven safe and effective for animals in small dosages. We love her for her brain, but even more for her compassion.

  Dr. Belden examines Ting with her trademark gentle manner, stopping occasionally to pet her, and speaking to her directly at times. We tell her about Ting’s odd behavior—the tumbling and the fainting spells, their duration and frequency. She asks if Ting is eating like normal, takes her to the scale and weighs her. Seven pounds, ten ounces—about the same as her last checkup. Good. She looks in Ting’s eyes with a light while I hold her, palpates her abdomen, checks her teeth and ears. Ting is very brave as blood is drawn from her left front leg. Then Dr. Belden listens to Ting’s heart while staring at her watch, looks puzzled, and listens and times it again. “It’s slow,” she says. “Slow, like a dog’s heart. I’d like to get an EKG.”

  Mom and I look at each other. “Should we tell her?” Mom asks me, and I nod yes.

  “Karen, Jerry died this past winter. He had a heart attack. So whatever you think is wrong with Ting, we need you to fix it.”