Love Saves the Day

I stretch for a long moment, pushing my front paws all the way out in front of me and arching my back. My tail stretches, too, pointing straight up and curling at the tip. I have to get up and move around, or else I’ll just lie here not really sleeping and not really awake, thinking I see Sarah everywhere. The hurt I feel when I remember Sarah isn’t here starts to spread from my chest to my belly again. Trying to make the hurt leave me alone, I stand up and walk toward the stairs.

I used to wish Sarah and I lived together in a house with stairs, but it turns out stairs are tricky if you’re not used to them. I’m trying to figure out if it’s better to move each of my four legs individually to the step above or below me, or if I should move both of my front paws at the same time and then sort of hop with my back ones. I try to practice the stairs when Laura and Josh are out of the apartment so they won’t see me. That would be embarrassing. Poor Prudence doesn’t know how to use stairs! they might say, and chuckle at my ignorance. Two days ago, I happened to walk into Josh and Laura’s bedroom and saw the two of them rolling around on top of each other in the bed, making odd noises. It was the least dignified thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. I have no intention of making myself look equally foolish in front of them.

There’s a spot exactly halfway down the stairs where the floor gets flat for a little way before turning back into steps. When Laura and Josh are home, I can still practice walking up and down the top half of the stairs and then rest on the flat spot, peeking around the wall to watch what they’re doing in the living room.

The smallest part of the living room is the dining room next to the kitchen, which has a long table of dark wood and four matching chairs that look exactly like the ones that live stacked up in my room. The only time I’ve seen Laura and Josh in the dining room is when they pay bills and talk about money. Laura worries that they’re not putting enough into savings, and Josh says Laura worries about money too much. Once I heard Laura tell Josh he only thinks that because he doesn’t know what it’s really like to have no money at all.

Even though this apartment is much bigger than Sarah’s and mine, Josh and Laura don’t have nearly as much stuff in it as we did. There’s nothing hanging on the walls, and none of the “knickknacks” Sarah loves so much, like beautiful little glass bottles or the prisms she hung in our windows to make the sunlight sparkle and dance in different colors. Sarah used to keep plants, including a special kind called “cat grass” that was good to eat when my belly was upset with me. Here there’s only one plant that lives in a corner of the living room, and it’s made out of silk.

There are some framed photographs on shelves—mostly pictures of Josh at different ages, doing things like standing outside in the snow (which is just cold water!) holding up a pair of big wooden sticks or on a stage somewhere with lots of other young-looking humans, wearing funny costumes. There aren’t nearly as many pictures of Laura, and none from when she was younger. There are a few of Laura and Josh together on the day they got married, and also from their honeymoon in a place called Hawaii. (There’s a lot of water in the background of the honeymoon pictures, so Hawaii must be near that river we drove past on our way to Upper West Side.)

There’s also one from their wedding day of just Laura and Sarah. Laura’s wearing a plain, short white dress with a little white jacket and holding a cluster of long, beautiful white flowers. Sarah’s dress is light purple. This is my favorite photograph, because I remember when I helped Sarah decide that this was the outfit she should wear to see her daughter get married. It makes me happy to look at it, even though Laura and Sarah don’t really look comfortable, posed stiffly, each with one arm around the other.

Now Josh stands up from the couch and walks past the shelves with the photographs on his way into the kitchen. I hear the sound of heavy pans being jostled free from a cabinet, and after a few moments the smell of cooking floats toward the stairs. It smells like Josh is making eggs, although that can’t be right. Josh only makes eggs on Sunday mornings, and Laura goes out to get bagels for them to eat with the eggs. Laura says Josh makes the best scrambled eggs ever, although I wouldn’t know because nobody’s thought to offer me any the way Sarah would if she’d cooked something for breakfast.