Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  Instead, Sarah found me. Of course, I didn’t know she was Sarah then. I just knew she was a human—taller than most of them, with brown hair to her shoulders. She looked older than a lot of the humans who live in Lower East Side, but not really old.

  Usually, I’m very good at staying hidden from humans when I don’t want them to find me. Most people would walk right past my hiding places without ever seeing me. I don’t think Sarah would have seen me, either, except that she stopped in front of the lot and stared at it for a long time. She stared so long that the clouds went away and the sun came out, and that’s when she spotted my hiding place.

  I thought she was just going to walk away and leave me alone. Instead she came closer and squatted down to hold out her hand to me. But I’d never been touched by a human before and didn’t trust any of them. Plus, I couldn’t understand what she was saying because I didn’t understand much of human language back then. I backed up until I fell into a puddle, shivering at how cold the rainwater made my fur.

  And that’s when Sarah started singing. It was the first time I’d ever heard music—almost everything I’d heard until then were ugly and scary sounds, like machines, and things shattering on the sidewalk, or humans yelling at my littermates and me when they chased us away.

  Sarah’s music was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. I’d seen beautiful things before, like the plates of perfect food that people ate at outside tables in warm weather. Or the shady grass under trees in the park that humans go to, which meant my littermates and I could do nothing but hide from the humans and look with longing at how pretty the sunlight was and how cool the shade looked.

  But when Sarah sang, it was the first time something was beautiful just for me. Sarah’s music was my beautiful thing, and nobody was going to chase me away from it or try to take it from me.

  I couldn’t understand the words she was singing, but there were two words her song kept saying: Dear Prudence. She sang Dear Prudence right to me like it was my name. And it turns out Prudence was my name. I just didn’t know it yet.

  But Sarah knew it all along. That’s how I knew I could trust her, even though she was a human. I decided then and there to adopt her, because it was clear we were supposed to be together.

  Mice hardly ever find their way into our apartment, but whenever one does I catch it and present it to Sarah, to show her that I’m willing to do things for her in exchange for her doing things for me. And I practice very hard at catching mice even when there aren’t any around. I train on empty toilet paper rolls or crumpled-up balls of paper, leaping on them and rehearsing my fighting techniques so that when a mouse does come in, I’m ready. If I work hard, I hope that Sarah and I can be a real family one day, instead of just roommates.

  It’s as I’m thinking this that I see, from my perch on the windowsill, Laura across the street. She’s getting out of a car with a man I don’t recognize. Laura and the man are carrying a bunch of big empty boxes.

  And I couldn’t tell you how I know it. Maybe it’s because Laura so rarely comes over even when Sarah is here. I get a tight feeling in my belly that spreads up to my back and makes my fur stand up higher than it usually does. My whiskers pull back flat against my cheeks, and the dark centers of my eyes must be bigger because everything suddenly looks too-bright and startling in its clarity.

  Even before Laura gets to the front door of our building, every part of my body knows already that something terrible has happened.

  2

  Prudence

  LAURA AND THE STRANGE MAN BRING THE SMELL OF OUTSIDE IN WITH them. They also smell like each other. Not exactly like each other, because male humans smell different from female humans, but enough so I can tell they live together.

  If Laura had come in by herself, I would greet her at the door with a loud demand for explanations. Although humans aren’t as good at understanding cat language as I am at understanding human language, a firm and direct meow usually prompts a response. For example, if Sarah hasn’t remembered to give me a cat treat, I’ll stand next to the kitchen counter and meow pointedly. This always makes Sarah either give me a treat or explain why she hasn’t by saying something like, Oh no! We’re out of treats! Let me run across the street and buy you some more. Sarah says this means I have her “trained.” Training is what humans have to do to dogs, because a dog doesn’t even know when to sit or lie down unless a human tells it to first. (The humans who keep dogs must be very patient and kind to burden themselves with such simple-minded creatures.) That’s not how I think of Sarah at all. It’s not that I train her, it’s just that sometimes I have to gently remind her.

  But Laura is here with a man I don’t know, so I decide to wait under the couch until I’m sure coming out will be completely safe. Humans can be unpredictable. Sometimes they lunge at me and rub my fur the wrong way, or even (this is so demeaning) pick me up off the ground! So all I can do is watch and wait while Laura props the front door open with her foot to allow the man to enter in front of her, then kicks it shut behind her and turns the three locks.

  A long time ago Sarah gave me a red collar with a little tag attached to it that Sarah says spells PRUDENCE in word-writing. Sometimes, if I move too quickly, the tag makes a jingly sound. So I creep very slowly to the edge of under-the-couch, where I can get a better look at the strange man with Laura.

  He’s taller than she is, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes, and he’s skinnier than a lot of humans. What I can see most easily, though, are his feet and ankles. He’s wearing the kind of feet-shoes called “sneakers” (because they help humans sneak quietly, the way cats do), and they must be old because they’re covered in black smudges and dried mud, and there’s a little hole he probably hasn’t noticed yet just under his left big toe. He hasn’t been around any cats lately, because there isn’t any fur or cat-smell on his ankles—which is the first place a cat would rub her head to mark him with her scent. One of the laces from his sneakers dangles over the side of his foot. As I watch it wave in a tantalizing way while he walks, the temptation to attack it is almost irresistible. But I force myself to remain still, crouching so low that the fur of my belly brushes the floor and tickles my skin uncomfortably.

  Laura is also wearing sneakers, except hers are all-white and look much newer. I can tell by the little bumps in the tops of her sneakers that her toes are curled up, which means Laura is tense. She smells tense, too. Even more tense than she usually smells when she comes to visit us. The man with light brown hair must be able to smell her tension, too, because he sets down his own boxes and puts his hands on her shoulders. Sarah always strokes my back when I’m upset about something, like when I think I have a fly cornered but it buzzes out of my reach, or when a car outside makes an unexpected boom! sound and frightens me. Laura seems to relax at the man’s touch, but when he asks, in a kind voice, “Are you okay?” her toes curl up again and she says, “I’m fine.” Then she pushes her fingers through her hair the way Sarah does. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “We could wait,” the man says. “I’m sure the super would understand if …”

  But Laura is already shaking her head. “Thursday’s the first of the month,” she says. “If we wait we’ll have to take over the rent.”

  My right ear turns forward so I can hear better when Laura says this. If Sarah’s not paying rent money to live here anymore, that means she’s decided to live someplace else. The anxious feeling in my belly gets stronger as I try to understand why Sarah would go and not tell me or take any of her favorite things with her. On TV, when two humans are living together and one of them decides to move away, first she tells her roommate why she has to leave (usually it’s either because of Her Career or The Man She Loves). The two roommates get angry and fight about it, until they start remembering all the fun they had together. Then they cry and hug each other and they’re friends again, and that’s when the second roommate, even though she’s sad to lose her friend, says she understands why the first roo
mmate has to go and tells her she hopes she’ll be happy.

  Roommates have to tell each other before they move away. I’m almost certain it’s the Law.

  Laura has a way of moving that says she knows exactly where she’s going and wishes she’d gotten there earlier. That’s the way she tries to walk into our bedroom, but she doesn’t quite succeed. Her steps are the smallest bit slower than usual, and if she were something I was stalking, I’d probably think this was a good time to pounce. She tells the man that she’ll take care of the bedroom and he should start on the kitchen. She hands him some old newspapers, and at first I think maybe they’re going to play one of my favorite games, where Sarah crumples up newspaper and throws it for me to chase so I can practice my mice-fighting. But instead the man is using it to wrap up our dishes and glasses before putting them into the boxes. He even wraps up the big ceramic bowl that lives on the little table next to the front door. That’s the bowl I like to sleep in when my body tells me it’s almost time for Sarah to come home, so I can be right there at the door when she walks in. Once, when I was especially excited to see Sarah, I jumped out of the bowl so fast that it fell on the floor and broke. The sudden crashing sound drove me all the way into the bedroom and under the bed, where I stayed twitching my fur for a long time. But Sarah was very patient and calm as she glued the bowl back together. There were cracks in it after that, but Sarah said that was okay, because cracks are how the light gets in.

  Laura and the man work silently, except when Laura tells him that the Army is coming over later to pick up our furniture and kitchen things and some of Sarah’s clothing. I don’t know what the Army is going to do with a bed that smells like me and Sarah sleeping together under the covers on cold nights. Or a couch that smells like the time I accidentally spilled a glass of milk all over it (it was the glass’s fault; it was pretending to be shorter than it really was), and I got so startled because the milk splashed on me so suddenly, and because I thought maybe Sarah would yell at me, but she only scooped me up and pressed her cheek to the top of my head and said, Poor Prudence! Then she hugged me tighter and said, Oh, Prudence, life would be so boring if you weren’t here. (Which was so obvious she didn’t need to point it out.)

  I don’t understand what use the Army could have for those things, but there’s a lot happening right now that I don’t understand. Sarah once knew a man who lost his cat and everything else he’d ever had, all on the same day. After that, Sarah said, he didn’t want to live anymore. Maybe Sarah left because she knew Laura was going to come here with this man to take all our beautiful things away and she couldn’t stand to see that happen. And now it occurs to me for the first time that if Sarah is going away, along with all our furniture and everything else we need, I might have to go away, too.

  I crouch down lower under-the-couch and wish Sarah would come back and explain things. She could have told me before she left, even if the reasons why she had to leave were frightening or confusing. She knows, more than any other human, how much I understand.

  Cats always understand things. That’s why we make such good roommates.

  Laura and the man with light brown hair are in opposite sides of the apartment, which means I can only watch one of them at a time. Even though my whiskers will let me follow the general movements of whichever one of them is behind me, I can’t decide who I should follow with my eyes. Then Laura finds the floorboard in the bedroom that sounds like a human voice crying out when you step on it the wrong way. This brings my attention instantly to her. The doorway to the bedroom is exactly opposite the right arm of the couch, and by creeping all the way to the edge of the space underneath the couch, I can see into the bedroom and watch Laura work.

  She and Sarah don’t look exactly alike, but enough so you can tell Laura must have come from one of Sarah’s litters. Their hair is the same color and length. Laura’s not quite as tall as Sarah, but she’s stretchier, and when she stands on her tiptoes to reach something on a top shelf she can reach as high as Sarah can. Her eyes are lighter than Sarah’s and not as round, and her jaw is more square-shaped, and the makeup she usually wears when she comes over makes these differences more obvious. Laura isn’t wearing any makeup today, which is unusual. The skin under her eyes is darker than normal, which makes her eyes look almost as dark blue as Sarah’s, and her skin is so pale that it’s even lighter than Sarah’s. She and Sarah have the exact same hands, though—surprisingly big for such slender humans, with long fingers.

  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.”

  I realize now that I’ve heard about this man. The last time Anise visited us was seven months ago, and Sarah told her then that Laura was getting married to someone named Josh. Anise seemed surprised Laura was getting married at all, and Sarah said she was surprised at first, too, but that Josh was a Good Man. Anise said Laura’s marrying a Good Man was pretty miraculous, all things considered. Then they started talking about the man Sarah used to be married to, and I fell asleep eventually when I realized nobody was saying Prudence.