by Helen Ellis
What I find is a cat.
Sitting on top of the bus stop is the strangest cat I’ve ever seen. It’s not six-toed or deformed in any way. It’s a calico, but its markings make it look like it’s wearing a mask. The rest of its face is copper, except for a patch on its mouth that looks like zinc oxide. It has long black whiskers. Its eyes are emerald green.
The thing is big. And this big thing is looking right at me.
Except for deli cats, you never see strays in Manhattan. Health inspectors fine delis $400 the first time they find a cat, then $1,000 the next. Owners won’t get rid of them because cats keep out rats, and rats will shut a place down. Deli cats are obese and dirty from sleeping on floors covered in filth from constant streams of customers. Octavia won’t go into delis because she swears she can smell cat piss over burnt coffee, open vats of creamed soup, stale mops, and even sponges. Plus, she’s scared of a paw coming out from under somewhere and taking a swipe at her shoelaces. Often, you see a pair of eyes blink at you from behind the potato chip rack. I recognize these emerald eyes from the deli, right around the corner.
What these eyes are saying to me is: Open your window, and let me spring in.
There is a knock on the bathroom door.
When I don’t answer right away, Mom turns the handle. Her face melts in relief. She’s happy to see me on my feet and in Dad’s robe. She thinks I did my time in the tub and felt well enough to get out and get dressed. Slipping the digital thermometer under my tongue, she steers me to sit down. She sweeps my clothes into a messy bunch under one arm and drains the water by pulling the plug. She’s out and back from the hamper before the thermometer beeps. She reads it. More relief.
“Ninety-nine point nine. This must one of those twenty-four-hour bugs. Twelve hours maybe. Thank God for small miracles.”
chapter four
In bed, I’m too hot to get entirely under the covers. I start with one leg out and then stick both legs out so I’m wearing a loincloth. Then, I’m on top of the duvet. I push and pull at it with my feet and hands until I’ve made a feathery nest. I’m not interested in my pillow. I kick it off my top bunk onto the floor.
“Stop squirming!” Octavia scoots out from her bottom bunk. She picks up the pillow and swings it military, soap-in-a-sock style across my side.
“Oof! Quit it! Leave me alone.”
“Leave me alone,” Octavia says. “You’re like a wrestler up there. How many body-slams does it take for you to go to sleep?”
“Girls…”
My dad’s voice is right outside our closed bedroom door. He’s in the kitchen, and we’re getting too loud. Riled up is what he calls it. We have to calm down. It’s a school night. There is nothing my parents value more than a good night’s sleep. Girls…used to be followed by don’t make me come in there, but in all these years, he’s never come in.
My folks dread a rebellious phase, but they should know that such a phase will never come. When you’ve lived the lives Octavia and I lived before we were adopted, you’ve been punished enough. Nowadays, you do what you’re told. You are grateful for parents who love you (or even tough-love you). You are grateful for corny TV shows, for a roof over your head, and beds—even if those beds are bunk beds and y’all are sixteen.
My sister whispers, “Go to sleep, and cover your face with your pillow. I’ve got a debate against Nightingale tomorrow, and I am not catching your germs.”
“I’m not sick.”
“Okay, Britney, then you are delusional.”
“Am not.”
“You have a fever.”
“Do not! I’m just warm. Like I’ve got a mohair sweater on and can’t take it off.”
Octavia says, “Thanks so much for the gory details. The flu is all I need tomorrow when I argue whether Harry Potter is a threat to Christianity.”
“You’re not going to catch anything! There’s nothing to catch.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I just know. It’s like a lisp. You can’t catch a lisp.”
Octavia laughs. “People pick up other people’s accents all the time. You go all backwoods when you talk to Kathryn Ann.”
“Kathryn Ann’s from Mississippi, not Alabama.”
“Southern is Southern.”
“This ain’t a debate.”
“See, there’s that accent. You get angry, out it cuh-hums.”
See? Jugular. I try: “Maybe I’ve got allergies. You can’t catch allergies.”
“You don’t have allergies.” Octavia insists. “You’d be sneezing or breaking out in hives or your throat would close up. Allergies are all about dying or phlegm. Besides, you’ve never had them. What crossed your path in the last twenty-four hours that’s never crossed it before?”
Other than the deli cat, I can’t think of anything. Like the rest of my sister’s opponents (no matter what color their cardigans), I roll over and concede.
***
I wake up at 3:00 a.m. I don’t have to pee. I didn’t have a bad dream. I’m not hot. I haven’t gotten too cold. I am simply wide awake in what is officially the middle of the night. It is dead quiet.
Unlike every other room in our apartment, ours is the only one that faces the courtyard—which isn’t a courtyard, really, but the back service area. Instead of a metal fire escape, you step out of our windows onto an 8-by-14-foot cement landing. The landing connects to a long, unsafe row of cast iron steps that lead down to a cement pit bordered by tall brick walls. Over those walls are B-sides of four three-story town houses.
When our second-floor neighbor gets off the elevator with her five Shih Tzus, you can hear them yipping from our living room. In my parents’ room, you hear our aging upstairs neighbor’s TV when she falls asleep. Mom and Dad wake up having learned odd facts by osmosis about catfish noodling and 198-pound tumors with teeth. In our kitchen, for two hours every afternoon, you hear our second-floor opera-singer neighbor practice her scales. Scales are not La Traviata. Scales are shorthand for shrieking. When Octavia and I moved in, we thought this place was haunted.
But in our room, you rarely hear anything other than rain against the metal air-conditioning unit. About four times a year, we hear a doorman sweep stuff off the landing. You’d be amazed at what the so-called Upper East Side elite toss out their windows for fear of discovery: cigarettes and condoms.
The only other time anyone else is back there is when the exterminator comes to clear the rat traps. No building exists without vermin in this city. Mice and rats don’t care if you reside squarely in the center of the 10021 zip code. If there is a way in, they will get in. Once, we caught a mouse that had eaten a hole through a Wonder Bread bag on our kitchen countertop. When we found its chewed entryway around the dishwasher drain pipe and stuffed a Brillo pad into it, my dad said to us girls, “Don’t look so relieved. Where there’s one, there’s a hundred.”
I imagine a charcoal-gray blanket of them on the landing, lying side by side by side, head to tail to head to tail to head to tail. The blanket moves with their combined tiny breaths. Their backs ripple like lake water in the night.
Okay, I’ve scared myself into having to pee.
I ease down from my top bunk so as not to wake Octavia, who’s a light sleeper. She keeps a wool throw tucked under my mattress so it hangs down and curtains her bottom bunk like a train’s sleeping compartment. Eight years ago, she originally asked for the blanket to muffle my tossing and turning, but I think she wanted to hide how scared she was of sleeping in a new place with new parents and, underneath me a new sister. Now, the blanket provides her with privacy. The curtained bunk is her very own studio apartment. She reads in there and talks on the phone in there. She gets dressed and undressed in there too. Despite her bravado, she’s bizarrely shy about her body. In all our years together, I’ve never seen her fully naked. I don’t know what she thinks she’s got
that I don’t.
Octavia shouts: “Witch!”
My flesh goes goose for the second time tonight. Then, I realize my sister is debating in her sleep. She does it before every match. When her topic was assisted suicide, all night long she shouted, “Syringe!” My guess is that she’s hoping she wins the coin flip tomorrow so she can argue that Harry Potter is indeed a threat to all things holy and call J. K. Rowling a witch. When debating, Octavia has much more fun bible-thumping on the overzealous religious right.
I creep across the carpet. Windows are on one side of the room; desks line the opposite wall. Our shared bathroom is half the size of our parents’. I shut the door and take two steps to the toilet and then sit down with my back to the bathroom window, which also overlooks the landing. In the darkness and solitude, I remember the blanket of mice.
I drop my face into my hands. I’m getting myself worked up over nothing. I don’t have a fever anymore. At least, I don’t feel as if I do. Dang it, I’m not afraid—of anything or anyone. To prove it, I dare myself to wake up Octavia. I pee without putting toilet paper on top of the water to soundproof the stream. I flush instead of letting the yellow mellow until it’s time to rise and shine. Emboldened, I stand up, face the window, and yank the cord to the blinds.
It takes a few seconds for my vision to adjust, but then I see them.
Mice.
A blanket of them, just as I’d imagined.
They whip their triangular heads in my direction. I draw in a deep breath to scream, but they scatter before I exhale. They are liquid-fast—a lawn sprinkler turned on full blast. They filter into building crevices that are the width of a sheet of paper. They balance side by side, head to tail, upon the railings of the steps and spill out of sight.
I tell myself the mice are more afraid of me than I am of them, but then I spot what’s really spooked them. From the unseen depths of the service area thirty feet below springs a blur of teeth and fur.
The deli cat alights.
Its mouth is pulled back, but I can’t hear its hiss. The mice must have smelled it coming. The cat frolics in their fear. It flicks its copper-and-black-ringed tail. It balances on its hind legs. It paws at the air.
Falling forward onto all fours, it looks at me and runs its narrow pink tongue around the white fur that encircles its mouth. It raises a shoulder and then sets to stalking. It slinks back and forth along the length of the ledge, and as before, it never takes its eyes off of me. It dares me to raise the window and let it in.
This time, I do.
chapter five
The deli cat soars at me like a shot. It’s a cannonball made of cotton. One second, it’s on the landing; the next—KAPOOF!—it’s on the bathroom windowsill. Without scraping its nails across cement, it has sailed through the damp night and dropped what must be twenty pounds without a thud. Up close, the cat is huge—not fat but tall and muscular. It doesn’t have a belly that wags when it runs or balloons out when it sits on its haunches and studies you. Which is what it’s doing to me now.
The window is opened half a foot. The cat’s head is framed by one of eight small, square windowpanes. Its black mask gives it the appearance of an old-timey burglar. Its front feet line up between its back feet. Its considerable butt hovers behind it, but the weight doesn’t throw the cat off balance. The cat looks like it could hold this position for the rest of its life.
An icy sideways breeze bends the cat’s fur. I shiver. All I’ve got on is my Nada Surf hoodie and pajama shorts. The cat shifts. In that frigid moment of revelation, I see that it is a he.
I step back from the window and wave the cat in.
He ducks his head under the molding and dives toward the toilet. The lid is up. He adapts for a crash-landing and splays his four legs. His paws hit the porcelain doughnut. Straddling the water, the cat cranes his head up at me, perturbed.
He hops onto the edge of the tub. Saunters. The side of his body brushes the shower curtain. He turns his head every which way—up at Octavia’s damp towel, at the medicine cabinet and sink past the end of the tub, at me. He cases the small joint.
I reach down to stroke his back.
The cat recoils. His head shrinks into his neck. His chin disappears into his chest fluff. But he doesn’t hiss or take a swipe at me. I figure he’s one of those cats who likes to be petted when he likes to be petted. One of Marjorie and Mags’s Siamese cats is like that. Unlike Jelly, whom the twins’ mom calls an attention whore, Peanut Butter wants nothing to do with you until he’s snoring. (Yes, they do. Cats snore. When we spend the night at the twins’, my sister shuts herself up in their shared bathroom to get away from the noise.) Pet Peanut Butter while he’s awake, and you’re going to get scratched. Before the twins accepted this, their fingers and forearms looked like they’d arm-wrestled a rosebush.
I mouth Sorry to the deli cat and raise my hands like it’s a stickup.
He hops down, slinks toward the closed door, and scratches his cheeks across the bottom hinge. He purrs.
“Shh!” I whisper. “You are not getting into the rest of this apartment. Octavia will kill me if she sees you.”
The cat purrs louder. He is a big cat and makes a suitably big noise.
I flap my hands. Keep it down!
The cat shuts up as if he understands English. Or sign language. Or my anxiety about waking my sister. Or giving my dad a reason to come in here. The cat’s obedience is kind of cute. When does anyone ever do what I say?
He moves toward me. I’m pinned where I stand. I manage to take a step in reverse, but the toilet rim presses against the back of my bare knee. Frosty air gushes through the open window and finds its way down the neck of my sweatshirt.
The cat is a space heater. His nose is less than an inch from my shin. Maybe he’s ready to be friends, but I no longer want to pet him. Every hair stands out from his every pore as if he is being electrocuted. He looks up at me and purrs like a cell phone on vibrate—no sound, but I hear it anyway. He rubs his cheek against my leg.
He is not soft. His hair is thick and coarse. My flesh tingles.
Now it’s me who recoils.
The cat looks up at me again. His emerald eyes are real jewels glistening in the moonlight pouring through the open window. He blinks expectantly for my hand or my voice to encourage him.
“Good boy,” I whisper.
He rubs his cheek against the same spot on my shin.
The tingling turns to an itch. I reach down to scratch. The cat jerks his head out of the way of my hand. He wriggles backward and then sits to watch me watch him. My fingers hover above that patch of my skin, which feels as if it has been swabbed with honey, then plastered with fire ants. Maybe I’m allergic to cats. Aren’t Peanut Butter and Jelly hypoallergenic? If my throat closes up and I have to go to the emergency room, I am going to be mortified because I haven’t shaved my legs in a week. But when my fingernails make contact with the sore spot on my shin, I know I am hallucinating.
I don’t feel stubble. I feel fur.
The cat’s face is the same: friendly but expectant. He rises off his haunches and casually steps toward me.
I hiss. I want him out of here. I open my mouth and press the sides of my tongue against my top molars. I take a deep breath and then force that air out like one of our radiators. The cat is showered in my spittle.
He doesn’t budge or blink those green eyes.
I hiss again.
The cat stays put.
I prop my foot on the tub and turn my shin to the moonlight.
There is a patch of fur beneath my kneecap the size and shape of a Post-it note. The fur isn’t thick and coarse like the cat’s. The texture is like chick’s fuzz before it feathers, except, unlike the chick or the note, the fur on my leg isn’t yellow. It’s not copper, black, white, or any combination of the deli cat’s calico mix. It is pumpkin orange.
&nb
sp; I want the cat gone. I reach down to grab him.
He swats at me. Fast as fast, he rolls onto his back, and—one, two!—his front paws swipe the air between us. Unlike the chipped, Chanel Blue Satin–polished, squared nails of girls at Purser-Lilley, the deli cat’s claws are pointed and flecked with dried blood.
Sorry! I stick ’em up again.
The deli cat flicks his tail. When it comes down, the long rope lashes the top of my left foot.
Tingling. The fire ants are back.
Across my foot, a diagonal line emerges. The strip of skin is pink, then red, then swollen. The strip blisters and pops but expels no liquid. The wound (rash?) is changing fast—too fast. Fine fuzzy orange fur sprouts out. I am frozen in fear.
The cat slides his front feet forward, lifts his rear end, and curls his tail toward his head. His haunches rise. He shuts his eyes because the stretch feels so good. His ecstasy lasts and lasts and lasts.
In his temporary blindness, I remember what the twins’ mom does to their cats to clip their nails or get them into their carriers without a fight. I yank Octavia’s damp towel off the shower rod and drop it over the deli cat like a tarp. He mrowls! Disoriented, he goes limp, and I scoop him up in the towel sack. With one hoist, I capture him in my arms. With one heave, I catapult him though the open bathroom window.
He drops from sight. I don’t see him hit the back landing, but I know he lands on his feet because I hear his claws grate the cement. I worry he’ll spring back—attack! I grab the window and slam it shut.
It is this crash that wakes my sister. On the other side of the closed bathroom door, through the wool curtain encapsulating her bottom bunk bed, I hear Octavia’s voice.
“Oh. No. You. Di’hint!”
I don’t say a word. I slide down the wall, sit on the bath mat, and wait for her to fall back asleep.
But I fall asleep instead.
***
In the morning, I wake up with her towel balled beneath my cheek and her knuckles rapping against the bathroom door.
