Love Saves the Day

Laura’s hands are shaking a little now, but they still manage to make precisely folded and ordered stacks of things. She pulls Sarah’s clothes from our closet with the kind of efficiency I use when burying something in my litterbox. From the clothes Sarah wears to the office, Laura creates a tidy, four-cornered pile. She uses a fat black pen to put word-writing on one of the brown boxes, which she then fills with Sarah’s work and everyday clothes. Sarah’s other clothes, the ones with shiny stones and fringes and feathers that I used to think were birds, go into a less tidy pile, and then Laura puts the pile of bird-clothes into a garbage bag.

Sarah doesn’t wear the bird-clothes often, but I can tell (at least, I thought I could tell) that they matter to her like everything else in our apartment does. It’s important to keep your past organized, Sarah likes to say.

One night three months ago, Sarah was on the phone with Anise and kept using the word remember a lot, like when she said, Remember the first time I came to hear you guys play Monty Python’s? That place was such a pit! or Remember the night that crazy woman chased us down Fourteenth Street with a knife? And we had to beg that cabbie to get us out of there even though we didn’t have any money?

That didn’t sound funny to me, but Sarah laughed until she couldn’t breathe. I’d only heard Sarah laugh that long and loud when I had one of my very rare clumsy moments. Like the time I tried to run straight through a closed window (how was I supposed to know that you could see through something but not necessarily run through it?), or once when I reached up to a paper plate on the kitchen table to try a tiny bit of the food on it, but instead the plate and all its food fell on my head. (I still say that was Sarah’s fault; she should never have left a plate of food on the edge of the table like that.)

After Sarah hung up with Anise, she pulled a bunch of boxes and bags from the big closet in the living room. She took some black disks off the shelves and the apartment filled with music while the two of us looked through the matchbook toys. (Actually Sarah looked through them and I batted them around, because what good are toys if you don’t play with them?) She kept saying things like, I completely forgot about this place! or, This was the very first club that ever let me spin, and I had to do it for free. It was so much harder for girl DJs. She showed me newspapers and magazines so old they don’t make them anymore, full of word-writing (which I can’t understand, but Sarah read some of it to me) about the music she used to listen to and the places she used to go to hear it. Then Sarah went into the bedroom and put on the outfits she hasn’t worn since she as young.

She was so happy while she looked at herself in the mirror in those clothes! Except that after a while her face turned a light pink, and finally she shook her head and murmured the word stupid under her breath. Then she changed back into her regular nighttime clothes, silenced the black disks, and tidied up the apartment before getting into bed.

The best thing about all that old stuff isn’t that it helps Sarah organize the past. The best thing is that it smells like the two of us, here together in this apartment. And now all those clothes and everything else in our closet is disappearing into that bag and those boxes. I twitch the fur on my back to try to stay calm.

Maybe if I get to go with the bag and boxes, the things in them will still smell like me. But unless Sarah comes back, little by little the Sarah-smell will disappear from them. And then one day there won’t be anything left in the whole world that smells like the two of us together.

By now the bedroom looks empty, the bed naked the way it is on laundry-doing days when I help Sarah dress it in fresh sheets by running from corner to corner of the mattress to make sure the sheets don’t go anyplace they’re not supposed to. Laura is holding one of the Army boxes, to carry it into the living room, when the sound of a door slamming in an apartment upstairs startles her and makes her drop it. “Dammit!” she mutters under her breath. Water rushes to fill her eyes, and she wipes it away impatiently with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Laur? Are you all right?” the man with light brown hair calls from the kitchen.

“I’m okay, Josh,” she calls back. Her voice sounds shaky, and she takes a deep breath. “I hate these old walk-ups,” she adds. “You can hear everything.”