Love Saves the Day

The apartment is silent, except for the scratch of a pen against paper from where Laura works on the living room couch. Josh went to bed a long time ago. From my spot halfway down the stairs, I can see that Laura is tired, too. Every so often she pauses to push up her glasses and rub her eyes. She doesn’t go upstairs to bed, though. Probably because she knows that even when she does, she’ll spend hours flipping from side to side and kicking at the sheets, the way she seems to every night.

Something has been tickling at my left ear, and twitching it back and forth doesn’t make the tickle go away. Finally I reach my back left paw around to scratch at it with my claws. This makes my Prudence-tags jingle, and Laura looks up, startled. Our eyes meet. It’s the first time she’s seen me in this spot. My body tenses, waiting to see if she’s going to do anything.

“Hey, Prudence,” she says softly. “Can’t fall asleep?”

I’ve heard Laura and Josh talk about me since I came to live here, but this may be the first time Laura has talked to me. This makes me feel nervous, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Rising to a crouch, I turn and take the top half of the stairs at a hop, then scurry down the hallway, staying close to the wall, back into my darkened room with all the Sarah-boxes. My Prudence-tags ring the whole way and only stop when I dart into the back of my closet.

Laura comes into my room and pauses. Even though she can’t see me hidden back here without turning the light on, I can tell she knows that this is where I am.

The dark outline of her shape crosses the room and kneels in front of one of the Sarah-boxes. There’s a bang and rustle of things moving around, and then the crinkling noise of a heavy bag being pulled out from beneath heavier things. I remember, now, Laura going back to Trash Room to get one of the plastic garbage bags she threw out the day they brought me to live here.

Laura approaches the closet and I scurry backward, my backside in the air as I keep my nose pressed tightly to my front paws. “Here you go,” she whispers as she hunkers down onto her heels and thrusts something into the closet toward me.

It’s one of Sarah’s dresses from her “going-out” days, dull gold with a white diamond-shaped pattern on it. I remember thinking, that day when Sarah tried on all her fancy bird-clothes, that I’d never seen Sarah look prettier than she did in this dress from when she was younger than Laura is now.

I creep cautiously toward the dress, kneading at it with my front paws to make it into a more comfortable shape. Already I can tell that having something soft with that good, familiar, Sarah-and-me-together smell to lie in is going to make it easier for me to sleep tonight. Laura continues to crouch in front of the closet, and when I look up from the dress, her eyes are looking into mine again. We look at each other, and then, very slowly Laura closes her eyes and opens them again. This was something Sarah did, slowly close and open her eyes when I was looking at her, and I feel a rush of exhaustion wash over my body. As my eyelids droop Laura slowly blinks at me again.

My eyes close into sleep so quickly that I don’t even hear when she leaves the room. It isn’t until the next day—when I wake up after having slept late into the morning for the first time since I can remember—that I realize some things are the same everywhere. Even here in this foreign country, all the way on the other side of the world from the home I was raised in, somebody has taught Laura the correct way to speak cat.

4

Prudence

JOSH AND LAURA KEEP SAYING HOW UNUSUAL IT IS FOR THERE TO BE snow so late in April, but that’s just what happened this week. A giant snowstorm came in with such hard wind that it blew the snow sideways. Back in Lower East side, you would have been able to hear the wind howling through the cracks between the window frames and the wall. It was odd to see so much wind outside while inside, the apartment stayed silent.

Sarah used to laugh when I would press my nose against the windows during snowstorms, trying to catch some of it on my paw. Even knowing I couldn’t get to it through the glass—and even knowing how cold and nasty the snow would be if I could get to it—the urge to catch some as it fell was irresistible. Laura and Josh went to their offices anyway, even though it was snowing so hard. With nobody here to laugh as I batted at the windows, trying to catch snowflakes, suddenly didn’t seem like as much fun as it used to be.