Finding Emma

by K. Ryan

  “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. “Goddammit. I can’t believe I forgot.”

  I marched right into the kitchen and popped a 24-hour allergy pill. That was probably the only way I would ever survive this, so even if I had to pop one of those little white pills every day, that was what I was going to do.

  Since I was already in the kitchen, I got to work unpacking all of Oliver’s new things, set up his fancy ceramic food and water dish with the cartoon cats on it, put away all his treats in a cabinet, and tucked everything else away underneath my sink to keep it all hidden as much as possible. Oliver, again, waited patiently.

  “Should we put your collar on?”

  Meh.

  I grinned back at him and held out the collar, a thin, structured tan band with plaid squares of brown, blue, and orange. Very manly.

  “Finn said this was a fancy-boy collar,” I told Oliver, who’d moved a little closer to me now at the sound of my voice. “I like it. I think it’s you. A fancy new collar for a not-so-fancy life, huh?”

  I held the collar out to him and his hind legs hit the floor right in front of me. With quick movements, I snapped his new collar around his neck and straightened it just enough so the little bell sat right at the center of his white chest. It all felt very official and final. He was mine now and from a certain point of view, I was his now, too.

  You know what they say, Finn had told me at the pet store as I’d perused the toy aisle, you don’t own the cat, they own you.

  It was only our first night in this thing, but it looked like that he wasn’t too far off with that particular sentiment.

  “So,” I told him with my hands on my hips. “What should we do now? You wanna watch something on Netflix?”

  Meh.

  I took that as a yes and plopped down on my couch, reaching for my remote and nearly jumped out of my skin when Oliver leapt up over the side, landing right on my stomach. He circled around a few times—I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised seeing as how we’d done this dance before—until he found a good spot and settled into the fabric of my T-shirt, nuzzling my arm until my hand started stroking his soft fur.

  It was probably a few hours later when I jerked awake with a random episode of Orange Is The New Black playing on my TV. Oliver cocked one eye open at me from his little nest on my stomach and yawned, stretching one tiny white paw up until it gently tapped my cheek. I slid up against the couch, prompting the cat to scoot off my stomach and jump over the side.

  As I moved down the hallway towards my bedroom, I glanced over my shoulder to find Oliver crouched down over his water dish and figured that was probably as good a time as any to get ready for bed. But when I stepped out of the bathroom, I stopped short to see Oliver lying down right in the middle of the hallway, waiting for me.

  “Hey,” I murmured.

  Meh.

  “I’m gonna go to bed now, okay?”

  Meh.

  I chewed on my bottom lip. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do here. Did I run into my bedroom and slam the door in his face? Did I let him in and risk waking up a sniffly, snotty, stuffed-up mess? What if he didn’t even want to sleep by me? That was probably the worst option of all and I knew just how pathetic that was.

  Finally, I chose not to decide. That was still a choice, right?

  I left my door open, opting to let him do whatever he wanted to do and see where that landed. And as I climbed into my bed, it took about 30 seconds for a tiny grey and black striped cat to jump up onto the bed, step around my limbs and all my pillows, and finally settle right against my stomach, purring away as I stroked his fur.

  “I think I might love you,” I whispered to him in the darkness. “Night, Oliver.”

  Meh.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Goddammit, Oliver,” I grunted, pushing both hands into his little body in a vain attempt at shoving him in the plastic carrier. “Get. In. There. Now.”

  He had both front paws planted on the sides of the carrier’s mouth as I struggled—sweating and everything—to get his furry ass inside. Well, wasn’t this just a marvelous failure. This was pretty much what my morning had consisted of: chasing after a cat, not to mention being woken up at 4:00 in the morning by a pair of sharp claws kneading into my shoulder and Oliver meowing in my face.

  I pressed on his butt to push him in the carrier, but his super-feline powers of strength held out until he managed to flip himself away from the mouth of the carrier, vaulting in the air and using my bare arms as his launch pad.

  “Ow! God!”

  Both my arms now had angry crimson claw marks running up the sides and I cringed at the sting. There was no time to be a baby. I had a cat to wrangle.

  Unfortunately, that little reprieve had given Oliver ample time to scamper down the hallway so he could throw himself under my bed. Right in the middle. Just out of my reach. At least he wasn’t hissing at me or anything...the scratching I might be able to live with. Hissing, not so much.

  Now, I found myself on my stomach with half my body lodged underneath my bed, trying and failing to coax my cat out from under it.

  “Come on, buddy,” I pleaded. “We have to go. We’re gonna be so late."

  I’d totally underestimated how long it would take to actually shove the little guy in that equally tiny carrier. Finn hadn’t mentioned that getting cats inside those crates was a next to impossible feat. He’d probably conveniently left that part out...all the better to torture me with. What a jerk.

  Finally, my last resort was sticking a broom under my bed to literally force Oliver out the other side. Then I had to chase after him yet again when he made a beeline for the hallway, not that I could really blame him. I’d probably run for my life, too, if some crazy lady was trying to shove me into a cage.

  Now, I set the plastic carrier on top of my bed with Oliver squirming under my arm.

  “I’m going to get you in this stupid thing if it’s the last thing I do, cat,” I told him firmly, dead set with resolve.

  His sea foam-grey eyes widened in panic. Maawhr. Don’t even think about it, you bitch!

  With the carrier lying flat on my bed, I switched up tactics, holding the edge of the carrier with one hand as I simultaneously shoved the cat in head-first and slid the carrier towards the edge of the bed. Oliver was defenseless against the trick, outdone on all sides, and helplessly skidded right inside the carrier until he’d cleared it enough that I could snap the metal door closed.

  “Ha!” I pointed in his caged face. “Take that, sucka! In your face! I win!”

  Oliver stared up at me from the edge of the bed, his eyes round and devastated as if to say, How could you do this to me? I thought we were cool.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered quickly. “I didn’t mean it. Okay, maybe I did, but I’m still sorry. We really do have to get going though.”

  Which reminded me...how in the hell was I going to smuggle him out of my apartment and into my car? If the wrong person, like my landlord for instance, happened to walk by at the wrong moment, they’d see everything and I’d sink before I even had a chance to really swim. Taking him through the hallway was a bad idea, too. While Finn wouldn’t care if he heard some suspicious animal sounds coming from outside his door, Mrs. Johannsen and the couple that lived right in front of Finn’s apartment or anyone who lived upstairs might. I definitely didn’t know Mrs. Johannsen well enough to expect her to turn a blind eye and right about now, I really wished I wasn’t such a hermit and had actually made an effort to at least be neighborly towards her.

  Any way you looked at it, I’d sort of screwed myself.

  So, with a deep breath in a fruitless attempt at calming my thundering heart, I wrapped Oliver’s carrier in a blanket—that wasn’t at all suspicious, right?—and stepped out onto my patio.

  As the opening trill of the Mission: Impossible theme played in my head and that syncopated, disjointed two-bar riff took off, I tip-toed around the corner of my building with the blanketed cat car
rier tucked underneath my arm. I heard one painful maawhr and then a high-pitched yelp, like Oliver was in actual physical duress just being in that stupid carrier.

  “Knock it off, you big baby,” I murmured harshly down to the large, not-so-inconspicuous rectangular box in my hands.

  I rounded the front corner, my eyes frantically scanning the near-empty parking lot for tell-tale signs of life. Luckily enough, I’d had the foresight to make the appointment after I knew everyone who lived around me would have already left for work. Practically sprinting to my car, I skidded to a stop as one hand reached for the passenger door handle on my beat-up Corolla and the other haphazardly balanced Oliver, er, I mean the box, against my hip. Once the box was secured, I jogged around the front of my car, hopped inside, and got us the hell out of there before we got caught.

  And of course, the entire ride over to the vet, my cat treated me to the most horrific sounds I’d ever heard in my entire life.

  Maawhr. Maooow. Miaaaooow.

  Oh my God, he was howling.

  Howling, I tell you.

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmured to him when we finally pulled into the vet’s parking lot. “We’re there, buddy. Geez...I don’t know who that was worse for—me or you.”

  Oliver glared back at me from his tiny cage to say, You really wanna go there right now, lady?

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I murmured down to him again as I pushed through the clinic’s double doors and hurried to the front desk.

  The receptionist sitting there looked a little too much like that crazy clown lady from The Drew Carey Show with her heavy-handed bronze eyeshadow and sky-high hair that had been tortured and teased with hairspray fumes. I sneezed right when I sidled up to the desk, but I couldn’t really be sure if it was due to animal dander or a natural reaction to the sticky hairspray stench.

  “Hello!” the lady greeted me brightly as she stood up from her chair to peer over the side of the desk with her hands clasped in front of her. “And who is this handsome little man?”

  “This,” I gestured down to the carrier in my hand, “is Oliver.”

  “Oh, hello Oliver!” the lady cooed down to him.

  All she got was silence. Oliver, it seemed, wasn’t having it.

  “So, you’re Oliver’s mom then, I take it?” the lady looked to me now for confirmation.

  My heart seized. I swallowed hard, glanced down at the cat in the carrier, who’d somehow wormed his way into my life and in the process, thawed out a piece of myself I’d thought would sit in ice forever, and nodded.

  “Yeah,” I smiled back. “I guess I am.”

  . . .

  As luck would have it, smuggling Oliver back into my apartment was way easier than smuggling him out of it. Of course, it probably had something to do with the fact that once I had the cat, I mean, the box, tucked underneath my arm and took off for the side of my building, I couldn’t see anything but brick and the tree line.

  Out of sight, out of mind, right?

  Just as I’d jostled the blanketed box against my hip, much to Oliver’s vocal dismay, Finn appeared from around his side of our shared wall with eyebrows raised and a wide, goofy smile on his face.

  “How did it go?” he asked, quickly jumping in front of me to slide my patio door open so I could step through.

  “Well,” I exhaled, relieved that it was over and more than happy to finally be back in the safety of my apartment. “Oliver’s got an ear infection in both ears, so the vet gave me some drops for that and apparently, he probably has worms, too. And...he has to get his balls chopped off next week, so there’s that.”

  Finn winced and bent down to get a glimpse of the cat before I let him out. “Sorry to hear that, contraband. Well, it could’ve been worse, that’s for sure.”

  “The vet said all that was pretty normal for strays, so I guess it’s not so bad,” I sighed and reached down to release the metal clamp on the carrier’s door to let Oliver out.

  As he scampered onto the carpet, it took me a moment to realize what had Finn’s shoulders shaking with laughter. That little shit’s hind legs were completely soaked…

  “Oh, no!” I groaned and squeezed my eyes shut. “You pissed in your carrier! Oliver, you rat bastard!”

  Oliver glanced over his shoulder at me as he took off down the hallway, shooting daggers at me to say, This is what happens when you shove me in a cage, you heartless bitch.

  “He is not happy with you,” Finn mused. One hand rubbed across his mouth, but that didn’t do much in the way of masking his obvious amusement over this little hiccup.

  “You think?” I laughed. “Between the shots, getting poked and prodded, and shoved in a car, I guess I’d be pissed at me, too.”

  “Yeah, but he gets to go home to his new apartment now, so I’m pretty sure he’ll get over it.”

  “Right,” I shook my head and then headed down the hallway to catch that little butthead before he dripped piss all over the carpet. “When should we get that pizza?”

  Even while wrangling a piss-soaked cat, I apparently couldn’t go another minute without making sure Finn hadn’t forgotten about our vague pizza plans.

  “It kinda looks like you’ve got your hands full right now,” he laughed heartily, watching with a little too much levity for my taste as I gripped Oliver underneath his shoulder blades and held him out in front of me at arm’s length to keep that wetness as far away from me as possible. “Besides, it’s pretty early for pizza anyway. Why don’t I come back in a couple hours...around noon?”

  At this point, I already had the pissface back in the kitchen and rummaged around for the waterless shampoo. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

  When I turned around, Finn was holding Oliver up in the air in between his shoulder blades, mimicking the way I’d carried him from the hallway, and gestured with his head towards the cat in his hands.

  “Go for it,” Finn nodded to me. “Hurry up before the little RB starts fighting me.”

  I laughed, even as I got to work spraying Oliver’s butt with the waterless shampoo and wiping him down with a towel as fast as I could. “RB?”

  “Yeah, rat bastard.”

  “Oh God,” I just shook my head.

  “You started it.”

  “Oh boy,” I murmured as I toweled the cat off, rubbing him down as best I could. “Good call on this shampoo, by the way.”

  Finn just shrugged, flipping Oliver around so I could get at his stomach. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  Once the cat was back on solid ground, twitching his hind legs to shake out the leftover moisture, Oliver glanced up at both of us with malice in his sea foam-grey eyes and the side of his lips curled up in a snarl. Maawhr.

  “I think he just called me an asshole,” Finn mused.

  Yep. That was my cat.

  . . .

  I sighed heavily and took a step back, surveying the contents of my tiny closet once more. It felt like I’d been standing here, staring at this space for the last few hours, and still came up empty.

  “I’ve got a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear,” I muttered under my breath. “Figures.”

  Feeling soft fur brush against my bare leg, I glanced down to find Oliver standing at my feet, staring up at me with an exasperated expression as if to say, Just make up your damn mind already.

  To add insult to injury, he curled his lips back and let out one of those patent, snippy little mews I’d quickly become familiar with to show me just how annoyed he was with my current state.

  “Oh, shut it, Oliver,” I batted a hand down at him and turned my attention back to my closet. “You’re not helping, you know.”

  He responded by simply lifting his two front paws up to my shin, stretching himself up until I finally relented, dipping down to give him what he wanted. When I scooped him up, nestling him in my arms, he nuzzled his cheek into the side of my face to show his appreciation.

  “Love you too, buddy,” I murmured and kissed the top of hi
s furry head.

  There. I’d kissed a cat. It had only been a few hours since Finn retreated back to his apartment, but already, I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have this cat in my life. Where I didn’t have his little soft mews and purrumbles adding music to my life. I didn’t even feel moderately pathetic about that either.

  With another fruitless glance into my closet, I started my inevitable retreat back into my bedroom and sank down on the mattress with Oliver still snuggling in my arms. When my eyes landed on my closet yet again, my gaze lifted to the cracked ceiling and I groaned, running my free hand over my face.

  This was so stupid. Talk about making a big deal out of nothing...God, I was totally blowing this way out of proportion. It was just pizza. Finn was just my neighbor. When my anxious eyes fell to the digital clock on the nightstand, I practically leapt off the bed, sending Oliver flying towards the opposite side of the mattress, snippy little mews and all.

  It was 11:30. Which meant I had exactly 30 minutes until Finn came over to my apartment for pizza.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I murmured under my breath.

  The first morning I’d had off in a long time had mostly been spent furiously scrubbing my apartment from top to bottom. Some kind of demonic fervor had taken hold and I just couldn’t stop compulsively cleaning and vacuuming every inch of space, like Finn hadn’t literally been in my apartment just a couple hours before and already seen it for the disaster it was. Hell, I’d even rearranged the furniture in my living room, too, with Oliver looking on in confusion like, What is with you, lady?

  If I wasn’t embarrassed with my nervous antics before, that moment was definitely the tipping point.

  Now, with time ticking steadily away, I reached for my phone and hit the speed dial. Unfortunately, if I even had a prayer of getting my shit together in time before Finn showed up, I needed to call in some reinforcements.