Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  There’s a clatter of plates and silverware, and then the sounds of Laura and Josh walking from the kitchen to the living room couch, where I can see them again. The two of them talk about what they did at work all day while they eat. When the music that was playing stops, Josh walks across the room to where his music lives. This time he takes out a black disk instead of one of the small silvery ones.

  The song that starts playing sounds like one Sarah and Anise used to listen to the two or three times a year when Anise came over. Something about a “personality crisis.” The two of them would act silly, singing into things like hairbrushes and empty paper towel rolls as if they were the microphones that singing humans on TV use. Anise has a nice singing voice (even though her regular speaking voice is deep and scratchy), and I can tell Sarah likes Anise’s singing better than her own. After all, Sarah says, Anise is famous for her singing.

  Humans and cats must like different things in singing voices, because I think nobody has a nicer voice than Sarah. Anise would always say how Sarah should have tried being a singer professionally. I would rise up on my hind legs, butting my head against Sarah’s hand because it made me so happy when she sang. And Anise would bend down to scratch behind my ears the way I like and say, Look—even Prudence agrees with me!

  But Sarah says she never had that Thing Anise has that lets her perform on a stage in front of other people. That’s what she liked about being a DJ, she says, and about the record store she opened after she stopped being a DJ. She could still give people music without having to stand in front of them. And anyway, Sarah would say to Anise, I was never as talented as you.

  All I hear for a few moments is this song and the sound of one fork scraping across a plate. Josh is still eating, but Laura’s fork is hanging halfway between her plate and her mouth. Then Josh says, “Is everything okay?”

  “Hm?” Laura shakes her head slightly, the way Sarah does when she’s trying to “clear her thoughts.” “I’m sorry,” she says. “I got distracted.”

  Josh’s face flushes pink, although I can’t tell whether this is because he’s embarrassed or because he’s about to say something that isn’t true. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking. I saw this same record in your mom’s collection when we were cleaning out her apartment.”

  “Probably,” Laura answers. “She liked the New York Dolls.”

  Josh is watching Laura’s face, which is trying to look the way it normally does, and would almost succeed if not for the crease between her eyebrows. Finally, Josh says gently, “Why don’t we go upstairs when we’re done and go through some of her boxes. We can do the records over the weekend. I really think,” he adds in a hurried way, as if he’s afraid Laura might cut him off, “you’ll sleep better once it’s done. And if we cleared a few out of the way, we could make life a little better for Prudence. I see her pacing around that room all the time. She hardly has space to turn around in.”

  The muscles around my whiskers tighten. If Josh really cared about me, he’d know that the very last thing I want is to see even one of those boxes go away.

  Also, if he really cared about me, he’d have let me try some of his eggs.

  “Prudence is still getting used to being in a new place,” Laura says. “She’ll be fine. And I’ve got a ton of paperwork to go through tonight.” She stands, holding her plate.

  “Don’t worry,” Josh says. “I’ll clean everything up.”

  “Thanks,” Laura tells him, and stoops to kiss him on the cheek.

  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.

  The day it snowed, Josh came upstairs to my room with the Sarah-boxes to pull out his and Laura’s heavy winter coats from the back of my closet. He’d thought they’d put them away for the
year and wasn’t expecting to have to wear them again so soon. He also wasn’t expecting to find so much of my fur clinging to the wool. He complained to Laura about it, which just seems unreasonable. After all, my fur is what keeps me warm, so having some of my fur on their coats could only keep Laura and Josh warmer, too. Really, Josh should be thanking me, if you think about it.

  Not that most humans know how to show cats the gratitude we deserve.

  Josh asked Laura if maybe they should start closing the closet door to keep me out, and the fur on my back twitched hard at the thought of losing my favorite dark, cozy sleeping place. But Laura laughed and said it would be easier to move the coats to another closet than to get a cat to change her habits.

  Two weeks after Laura gave me Sarah’s dress to sleep with, things between us haven’t changed a lot. It’s true that I’m sleeping much better than I was, now that I have something that smells like Sarah and me together to curl up with. I also spend a lot more time downstairs, now that I’m more used to things. Laura’s eyes have a way of following me whenever she looks up from whatever work papers she has in front of her. Sometimes her fingers bend and straighten, and I can tell that she’s thinking about touching me. She hasn’t tried to pet me so far, though.

  Nobody has petted me at all since Sarah went away, which seems like a long time ago now—five weeks. When I think about that, it doesn’t make me miss being touched by a human. It just makes me miss Sarah all the more.

  Even though, with all the snow, it doesn’t feel like springtime, Josh and Laura are having his family over to the apartment tonight for a springtime holiday called Pass Over. Sarah and Anise used to talk sometimes about the casual “potluck” holidays Sarah would have in her Lower East Side apartment when Laura was young. Neighbors and friends and people who worked in Sarah’s store would come in and out all day whenever they felt like it, bringing food with them and eating foods the other humans had brought while Sarah played music on her DJ table. Christmas was one of only two days in the whole year when her store was closed. The other was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving wasn’t so bad, Sarah said, but there would always be at least one person who would call her at home on Christmas Day, begging her to open the store just long enough to sell him one last black disk he needed to give some other human as a gift. When you’re raising a daughter alone, according to Sarah, you have to get your money when you can. So she would run over to her store long enough to sell that one black disk to that one human, and then it was good there were so many people in her apartment to keep an eye on Laura while Sarah was gone.

  I don’t know how Upper West Side humans celebrate holidays, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything “casual” about Josh’s family coming over. It’s Monday morning now, and Laura spent all Sunday attacking our apartment like she was mad at it. She’s always cleaning things whenever she has a few extra minutes, but yesterday she cleaned everything from the floors to the ceiling until every speck of dirt was gone and the apartment smelled unbearable from cleansers. She even cleaned under the bed in her and Josh’s room. Josh laughed when he saw her doing this and told her that his mother wasn’t going to inspect under their bed. But Laura said it was the first time his parents were coming over for dinner since they’d gotten married, and she wanted everything to be “immaculate.”

  While Laura was busy cleaning, Josh went out to buy special foods to serve to his family. Everything went into the refrigerator when he got home, and now whenever Laura or Josh opens it, the smell of wonderful meats and other things I’ve never tasted before drifts all the way upstairs. I hope Laura remembers to be generous when she arranges my special Prudence-plate of food at dinnertime tonight.

  I don’t know who exactly in Josh’s family is coming over, but the one person I know won’t be coming is the man who used to be married to Josh’s sister. That’s because yesterday I heard Josh say, “At least I don’t have to look at that Dead Beat at holiday dinners anymore.”

  I’m not sure what a “Dead Beat” is. Anise used to say that Laura’s father was also a Dead Beat. But Sarah always used the word beat in a positive way when she was describing the music she loved. Anise also said that Laura’s father was a talentless good-for-nothing. He tried being in a band, and then he tried being an actor, and he was even a photographer for a little while, but he never stuck with anything long enough to become good at it, although he took that picture of Sarah that Josh brought to live with us here, and I see Laura looking at it sometimes when Josh isn’t in the room with her.

  I know what dead means (it’s what happens to mice, for example, when cats catch them), but I also know how unusual it is for humans to say anything bad about dead people, because they can’t help being dead. So maybe being a Dead Beat means a human who makes really awful music and then forces everybody to listen to it until they wish they were dead. That doesn’t seem exactly right, though. I almost wish the Dead Beat was coming over tonight, so I could see what one looks like.

  The thump of Josh’s feet coming into my room distracts me from my thoughts. He must be waiting for Laura, because he doesn’t do anything except stand there in the middle of the floor next to the Sarah-boxes. His eyes make a quick circle of the room without seeing me in the back of the closet, and they come to rest on the boxes of Sarah’s black disks. Crouching down, he starts to flip through them. My ears flatten against my head when he takes one out to look at the back of its cardboard cover. Those are Sarah’s black disks! It’s one thing if Laura wants to look at them (I guess), but for Josh to go through them by himself seems wrong.

  Josh must be thinking the same thing, because he seems cautious at first, keeping one ear tilted toward the door, but it’s like he can’t help himself. And he’s forgotten all about his caution when Laura’s footsteps approach. “Look at this!” He turns his head up to her. “There’s a picture of your mother on the back of this Evil Sugar album! Right here.” He holds the black disk in its cardboard cover up to Laura, pointing to a spot I can’t see from where I am. “There she is with Anise Pierce in front of the Gem Spa awning.”

  “She and Anise were roommates.” Laura’s voice sounds like she doesn’t really want to talk about this. “Before Evil Sugar moved out to LA.”

  It’s funny to hear Josh call her “Anise Pierce,” because Sarah always calls her “Anise’s to Pieces.” Back before Anise was famous, crazy things always seemed to happen to her. Sarah teases Anise that she couldn’t even go out to buy a can of tuna for her cats without getting hit by a car or having her purse stolen or a tree branch fall right onto her head, or making some poor guy fall desperately in love with her at first sight—and usually all those things would happen in the same day.

  “This was my favorite album in junior high,” Josh says. “I was obsessed with that whole generation of New York bands recording at Alphaville Studios.” He laughs. “I was devastated when Anise Pierce married Keith Amaker. That’s when I tried to convince my mother to buy me a drum set. I figured if drummers got girls like Anise Pierce, then I’d be a drummer, too.” Josh turns the cardboard cover over in his hands. “I never realized how tiny she was until I saw her standing next to your mother.” He looks up at Laura, his eyes shining with excitement but also looking confused. “How could you not tell me your mom knew her?”

  “It never came up.” Laura shrugs. “Come on, let’s get these chairs down to the dining room before we’re late for work.”

  Josh seems reluctant as he puts the black disk back into the box with the others, but he walks with Laura over to the black chairs that live in the corner without saying anything else. “There’ll be seven of us tonight, right?” Laura asks.

  Josh puts one hand on her shoulder. “It’s not too late to call it off,” he says gently. “My parents would understand if you weren’t ready yet for a houseful of people.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ve been planning this forever.” Laura turns her head around so she can smile up at him, although her nostrils widen slightly the way humans’ do w
hen they’re irritated. “And I keep telling you, I’m fine. Honestly.”

  Laura carries one chair and Josh carries two as they pick their way around all the boxes on the floor. This is the only room Laura didn’t clean yesterday. She still doesn’t like coming in here, and I notice how her eyes don’t look into the Sarah-boxes on her way out, just around them to make sure she doesn’t bump into anything.

  I think about that man Sarah talked about once—the one who lost his cat and all his reminders and didn’t want to be alive anymore after that. I wonder why Laura doesn’t want to look through these boxes and remember Sarah with me, so both of us can make sure she has a reason to come back.

  The day seems to go by more slowly than usual while I wait for Laura and Josh to come back so tonight’s wonderful holiday dinner can get started. I try to pass the time by sleeping in the places I don’t get to sleep in when Josh is home, like the cat bed on the desk in Home Office and the spot on the couch where Josh likes to sit and watch TV sometimes while he waits for Laura to get home from work. I’ve learned, though, that if I roll onto my back and pretend to be deeply asleep, Josh isn’t as likely to make me move. “She looks so comfortable,” he says to Laura. “I feel guilty.” Whenever he says this it makes me feel sorry for humans, who are forever doing the wrong thing and then having to feel guilty about it.

  I’m also drawn again and again into the kitchen, even though none of the holiday foods have started cooking yet. I should probably spend more time here, because kitchens are where some of the best things live. In Lower East Side, the kitchen was where I sometimes found things that are lots of fun to practice my mice-fighting with, like the twisty-ties that keep bread closed in its bag, or the plastic straws that Sarah sometimes uses to drink her sodas through. (I could never make Sarah understand what straws are really supposed to be used for, although I tried to show her many times. Finally I started hiding my straws under the refrigerator or the couch, so she wouldn’t try to take them back from me to use the wrong way.) And there are delicious things to eat and drink in the kitchen even when there isn’t a holiday dinner, like tuna fish from a can, or the thin pieces of turkey meat that live inside crinkly paper in the refrigerator. Sarah had to stop keeping things in the kitchen like cream for her coffee and cheese when the doctor said dairy products would be bad for her heart. Maybe if I come in here more often when Laura and Josh are here, I could get some of those little treats again.