Love Saves the Day

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.