Love Saves the Day

This room is mostly empty aside from the Sarah-boxes and four dark brown wooden chairs with black leather seats, which live stacked up in one corner. I tried marking just one of the chairs in this room with my claws the way I’d marked our couch in Lower East Side (all I wanted was to make this room feel more like my own), but Laura saw me and said, “No! No, Prudence!” in a sharp voice. I don’t see why she had to get so excited. She could have calmly said something like, Prudence, marking chairs is bad manners in Upper West Side, and I would have understood her just as well. Maybe even better.

I don’t really need the chairs anyway, though, because the two big windows have sills for me to lie on while I look at things outside. This apartment is so high up that from the windows I can see all kinds of things I never thought about before. Like what the tops of buildings look like. Some of them have black tops, and some of them are white, and some have little brick areas where humans grow flowers and sit outside in the sunshine. A few of the roofs have these giant, pointy-topped round things I once heard Josh call “water towers.” All around us is more sky than I’ve ever seen, and when the sun is very bright and the sky is very blue, I see little squiggly things behind my eyes if I stare at it too long.

If Sarah lived here with me, she would probably carry one of those chairs from the corner next to the window, so the two of us could sit and look out at the sunshine together. She’d hum and stroke my fur while I sat in her lap, and maybe she’d even sing the Prudence song to me until I fell into a deep sleep.

But I’m alone in here almost all the time, and the only music anybody has sung to me since I left Lower East Side is the memory-music Sarah sings inside my head.

I hear a key turning in the lock of the front door downstairs, and from all the jingling I know it’s Josh. Laura must always have her key ready as soon as she steps out of the elevator. I never hear her jingling keys around, looking for the right one, before she comes in.

The sound of Josh’s feet-shoes comes up the stairs, and the faint scent of his cologne that smells so much stronger in the mornings drifts past as he walks toward his and Laura’s bedroom. After he changes out of his work clothes into socks and sweat-clothes, he spends a little while clackety-clacking on the scratching post in Home Office. Then he goes downstairs to listen to music in the living room while he waits for Laura. I hear the muffled sounds of it coming up through the floor of my room.

Most of Josh’s music lives on small silvery disks that go in a different kind of machine than the table Sarah uses to make her black disks sing. He also has a few black disks, although not nearly as many as Sarah. Even Sarah didn’t have more than a few when I first adopted her. Her posters and black disks and the special “DJ” table she plays them on were living by themselves for years and years in a place called Storage. It was only after I’d been living with Sarah for nearly two months that she went out one day and brought them home. It was you, you know, Sarah murmured later, when we were on the couch listening to the black disks together. You brought my music back. I thought I’d lost it forever. I rolled onto my side and purred, because I could tell from Sarah’s voice and hands how much love there was between us in that moment. But I didn’t know what I’d done to give Sarah back her music. Maybe I’ll do whatever it was again. Maybe (if I have to be here that long) in a couple of months Laura and Josh will drive out to Storage one day and come back with hundreds of their own black disks.

Josh likes music almost as much as Sarah. If he’s listening to music and Laura is in the room, he’ll pucker his lips and put his hands on his hips and pretend to strut around. He looks pretty foolish when he does this, but it always makes Laura laugh. Or he’ll take Laura’s hand and put his arm around her waist, and the two of them dance for real. It makes me wonder if Sarah would have liked to have another human to dance with when she used to listen to music in our old apartment.

Sometimes lately, because I haven’t slept well in so long, I get confused about what’s really happening now and what’s a memory or part of a dream I might be having if I were asleep. A breeze from the open window in my room makes the white curtains move. When its shadow on the opposite wall moves, too, I think for a moment that I see Sarah here in this room, bending down to stroke the fur of my back and saying, What should we listen to tonight, Prudence?