Love Saves the Day (23 page)

Even though it’s not really that pretty anymore—and even
though she only takes it out once a year—this pillow meant a lot to Sarah. She would run her fingers over the material while her music played, and then, finally, she’d stretch out on the couch to nap on it. I’d curl up next to her, nudging at her hand with the top of my head until she started petting me and scratching behind my ears the way I like. I could tell when she finally fell asleep, because her hand would stop moving and rest along the fur of my back. That’s when I would fall asleep, too, stretching out one paw to rest on Sarah’s shoulder, so we were still touching each other even though we were sleeping.

I found that pillow today in one of the Sarah-boxes. It was stuck under a bunch of rolled-up posters and a pair of small bongo drums Sarah used to let me play with sometimes, laughing and calling me a “hep cat.” I had to use all my toes to pry the pillow free so I could lie on it and think about Sarah, and about how she said that if you remember someone, they’ll always be with you. But when I opened my eyes, I didn’t see Sarah anywhere.

I don’t know exactly which day in June was so important to Sarah, so I don’t know whether it’s come and gone already. I guess it’s a holiday just for Sarah and not for other humans, because as we get farther into June the only thing that’s different here is the days keep getting longer, and Laura and Josh are running the air conditioner more frequently. In Lower East Side, our cold air came from a box stuck into the living room wall. If I pressed my ear to it, I could hear things happening outside or, sometimes, the sound of birds nesting in it from the other side of the wall. It was frustrating for me, to be able to hear the
cheep cheep!
of birds without being able to get at them. But it was even more frustrating for Sarah, who had to bang our side of the box with her hand until the birds flew away. She said their feathers clogged up the motor that made the cold air come out.

Here the cold air comes from vents up near the ceiling. It blows all the way down to the floor, though, and sometimes the sudden blast when it comes on tickles my ears until I have to scratch at them with my hind paws. On the days when Josh is home and not out with the littermates, he likes to make the air much cooler than
most cats (including me) would find comfortable. But when he’s not looking, Laura spins a little knob on the living room wall that makes the air warmer. She said something once about how expensive it is to keep the cold air running all the time (even
air
costs money in Upper West Side?), but Josh says that it gets too hot for him on the days when he has to be here.

I keep waiting for Laura to talk more about Sarah, like she did on Mother’s Day. I thought maybe Laura would remember the June day that was so special to Sarah, and come upstairs like I did to look through the Sarah-boxes for Sarah’s wedding-dress pillow. But Josh is the only one other than me who spends any time in my room, and he only comes in to look through Sarah’s black disks for music to play and then put back before Laura gets home from work. I thought maybe he would play one of Sarah’s two special songs, but he hasn’t so far.

I wish I could figure out how to get Laura to talk about Sarah again. Sometimes when I look at her I get confused and think I’m looking at Sarah. It’s what Sarah used to call “a trick of the light” that makes some passing expression on Laura’s face, or the angle from which I see the curl of her eyelashes, so perfect and convincing in its Sarah-ness. But I don’t know if that’s because Laura really looks so much like Sarah, or if it’s because I’m starting to forget what Sarah really looked like. I catch myself watching Laura the way I used to watch Sarah—her hair changing colors in the sunlight, her chin that trembles just a little right before she starts laughing at something I’ve done, her long fingers (that feel nice in my fur sometimes) when she throws me a bottle cap or plastic straw to play with. I’ve noticed that Laura has more of my scent mixed in with her own, which is even more confusing—because it’s
Sarah
who’s supposed to smell like me and be my Most Important Person.

Sometimes I catch myself without any pain in my chest at all from Sarah’s not being here. I have to remind myself to feel it—even though it hurts—because
ideas
don’t mean anything if you don’t also feel them with your body. What if I were to forget about Sarah altogether? Already there’s so much I can’t remember. I can
remember the first time Laura ever touched me, and when she first gave me the dress with the Sarah-smell for me to sleep on, and even the first time I met her when I was a kitten. I know I had lots of firsts with Sarah, too, but she’s been gone for such a long,
long
time. Sometimes I can remember things about her so clearly, it’s like I just saw her yesterday. Other times, no matter how hard I close my eyes and try to think, I can’t remember anything at all. I remember the
idea
of Sarah, and all her warmth and gentleness and beautiful singing music, but the memory of the idea doesn’t bring any specific feeling with it to my chest or belly.

I wish I could ask Laura how much she remembers about Sarah. Does she remember the way Sarah smells?
I
can, but maybe that’s only because the things in the Sarah-boxes still smell like her. They won’t smell like her forever, though, and what will I do then? Every day their Sarah-smell is getting fainter.

I’ve noticed Laura holding the picture of Sarah that used to live with us in our old apartment, and that now lives in the living room here. She’ll stare at it for a while before putting it down, and her expression is almost questioning, as if there’s something she’d like to know that she thinks she can figure out if only she looks at that picture long enough. If she hears Josh coming into the room, she quickly puts the photo back down and walks a few steps away from it. Is Laura, too, having a hard time remembering little things about Sarah, now that she’s been gone for so long?

It was so hard when Sarah went away! But now that I’m losing even my memories of her, it feels like she’s going away all over again. Laura’s probably the only one who can help me with this. But Laura never talks about Sarah at all.

Two days a week, Josh takes a train up to Washington Heights, where his sister lives, so he can take care of the littermates. He always smells like them when he comes home—like fruit-juice Popsicles and potato chips and too-sweet chewing gum. He also has the good smell of outside air, the way Sarah used to when she came home from one of the long walks around Lower East Side
she liked to take in nice weather. Even when Josh left the apartment every day to go to his office, he didn’t smell as much like outside as he does now.

Josh likes to take the littermates on what he calls “field trips.” At first I was a little jealous, because I know how much
I
would love to play in a field. I’ve never seen one in real life, but I’ve seen them on TV. They’re big stretches of grass and trees, and even though I can’t smell all the wonderful smells I’m sure are there, I can tell just by looking at the TV pictures that there would be no end of things to do or chase or pounce on.

But, other than one time when they went to see Great Lawn in Central Park, the places they go don’t sound like fields at all. One day Josh took them to Museum of Natural History, and another time he took them to an indoor place where they could paint their own ceramic plates and pots. In between making phone calls to try and get a new job, Josh also calls humans he knows who have litters of their own, trying to get ideas for new things he can do with Abbie and Robert.

“I thought I’d take the kids down to the Lower East Side next week,” he tells Laura one night, after she’s come home from work.

Laura’s eyebrows come together. “Really?”

“It’s not like Manhattan ends at Fourteenth Street,” Josh says in a dry voice.

Laura doesn’t seem to like this idea. I’m not sure why, though, because going back to Lower East Side sounds
wonderful
. Maybe Sarah is there someplace, waiting for me! And even if she’s not—even if she’s still doing whatever it is she went off to do—I bet smelling all those familiar Lower East Side smells again would make me remember all kinds of things about her.

I have no way of asking Josh to take me with him if he decides to go to Lower East Side, but I try to give him hints by jumping into the cloth shoulder bag of “supplies”—like games and fruit-juice boxes—that he takes with him whenever he spends time with the littermates. Sometimes I have to push little toys and plastic-wrapped packets of tissues out of the bag and onto the floor to make room for myself (it still surprises me how not-skinny I’ve
become). Josh always laughs when he sees me curled up in his bag with just my head poking out of the unzippered top, but he also always lifts me out of the bag and puts me back on the floor. It was foolish to let Josh trick me with fish and silly singing into not hissing at him when he touches me, because now he’s not hesitant about picking me up. If he were, he’d have no choice but to let me stay in that bag and go with him to wherever he takes the littermates.

Josh laughs at some of the things I do (as if I were here to
entertain
humans!), but he’s also been laughing and smiling a lot more in general. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to him before to notice the small changes in his posture and expressions that showed how unhappy he was becoming, being in the apartment all the time. Humans like spending time with other humans. Sarah was always happiest when both Anise and I were there to keep her company. Now Josh’s shoulders are straighter than they’ve been since before he lost his job, and even his face looks different. It’s darker from spending time outdoors under the sun, and there are tiny brown freckles on the skin of his nose.

“I didn’t expect to love being with them as much as I do,” Josh says to Laura one night.

“I’m sure they love being with you, too,” Laura tells him with a smile.

Josh and Laura order a pizza tonight, because Josh says he’s too exhausted from running around in the heat all day to even think about what they should do for dinner. Laura is tired, too. She’s been staying up very late again—later even than she used to when I first came to live here. She isn’t spending time with her work papers, and the pink marks on the sides of her nose have begun to fade. (Maybe she’s not reading as many papers at her office, either. She doesn’t have nearly as many little ink smudges on her fingers as she used to.) Mostly what she does now is put the TV on low and let her eyes go unfocused, as if she’s thinking hard about something. She’s also started putting little bits of food beside her
on the couch and making a
pss-pss-pss
sound that calls me over to come eat them. Lots of times I don’t bother moving off the couch after I’m done. I stretch out and settle into a deep sleep, and lately this has become the most restful sleeping I do.

Laura doesn’t put any pizza cheese (I
love
pizza cheese!) on the couch next to her as she and Josh eat, but she does drop a bit onto the floor for me. Normally, when a pizza comes to our door, the man who lives behind the counter downstairs calls us on the phone to announce that the pizza’s on the way up. He didn’t tonight, though, and when the doorbell rang, Laura said, “That’s odd, Thomas must be away from the desk.” She and Josh are eating the pizza anyway, which I definitely won’t do. It’s always bad when things are different from the way they usually are, but when the thing that’s different is with your
food
, that’s the worst of all. So, ignoring the cheese Laura and Josh keep dropping onto the floor (as if they expect me to eat the
next
piece when I didn’t eat the
last
one!), I devote myself instead to pushing the little plastic caps from their soda bottles around the coffee table with my front right paw.

“So what’d you and the kids do today?” Laura asks as they eat.

“We went down to Katz’s. I had an urge for corned beef.” Josh drinks from his glass and puts it back on the table. “Then we walked around for a while and went over to Alphaville Studios on Avenue A.” He looks at Laura curiously. “Do you know the place?”

Laura stops chewing, but swallows hard before Josh notices. “Of course,” she finally says.

“I figured you would. Evil Sugar recorded their first few albums there.” Josh sprinkles garlic powder onto his pizza slice. “I never realized how cheap it is to book studio time there. They even let a lot of the bands leave their equipment set up so they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg lugging it back and forth. And they have programs for neighborhood kids who are interested in music. They’re good people down there—it’s a real asset to the community.”

Laura is chewing slowly. She tries to sound casual when she speaks, like she’s just asking the questions a human normally
would at this point in the conversation, but she doesn’t quite succeed. “What made you think of going there?”

“I thought Abbie and Robert might get a kick out of seeing the inside of a recording studio. You know how kids like that kind of thing. I used to know one of their techs, and it turns out he’s still there. He must’ve been there
forever
. He’s got this beard practically down to his knees.” I try to imagine what a human with no arm and no leg and a long, long beard might look like. Before I can get a picture in my head, though, Josh’s cheeks turn a shade of pink so deep, it’s almost red. “And,” he says in the kind of voice humans use when they’re confessing to something they think they should feel guilty about, “I’ve been looking through some of your mother’s old albums. I keep seeing Alphaville Studios in the liner notes.”

This time Laura puts the plate with her half-eaten pizza slice down on the coffee table and turns to look straight at him. But before she can say anything, Josh rushes ahead with, “Look, you promised way back in March that we could look through your mother’s albums at home. I haven’t pushed it. I’ve been trying to give you space to get things done on your own schedule. But those boxes can’t just sit up there
forever
, Laura. At some point you’ll need to figure out what you want to keep and what you want to toss or put into storage. And I’d hoped”—his voice gets softer—“that we’d find something else to do with that room.”