Love Saves the Day (24 page)

Why
can’t those boxes sit up there? Who are they hurting? It’s not like Josh doesn’t have lots of his own “junk” filling up Home Office. Why can’t there be
one
room in this whole huge apartment just for me and all
my
stuff? A spot in the middle of my back stings with an itch, and I turn to attack it angrily with my teeth.

“I don’t know, Josh.” I see the dark centers of Laura’s eyes widen in a flicker of panic. “Things are just so … unsettled … right now.”

“The history of the world is people having children under less-than-perfect circumstances,” he tells her, gently.

They’re discussing something else now, and I don’t understand what it is. All I understand is that if Laura doesn’t find a reason to
care about the things in the Sarah-boxes, Josh is going to make her send them away. I get distracted, and my right paw—which is still batting at the plastic soda-bottle cap—hits Josh’s glass of soda harder than I expected and sends it spilling all over the coffee table.

Josh and Laura both cry,
“Prudence!”
and jump up to get paper towels from the kitchen. I leap to the floor and crouch there. Really, this is
their
fault for leaving a bottle cap right next to a full glass and then distracting me with odd conversations. Still, humans tend to blame cats for things that aren’t really the cat’s fault. Neither of them scoops me up to kiss my head the way Sarah did that time when I spilled a full glass in Lower East Side, but at least they don’t yell at me. They just wipe up all the soda and throw the dirty paper towels into the tall trash can that lives in the kitchen. By the time they’re sitting on the couch again, I can tell that Laura has decided to talk about something else.

“So how
was
Alphaville?” she asks Josh—and she must
really
want to change the subject from the mysterious threat Josh had brought up, because I could tell how much she didn’t like hearing Josh talk about this Alphaville place. “Did the kids have a good time?”

Josh hesitates and throws her a quick look. But he just says, “They did. Although from what the guy I know there was telling me, they may not be around much longer. The landlord’s trying to sell the building. The tenants in the apartments upstairs are up in arms about it.”

“That’s a shame,” Laura says, and there’s real sympathy in her voice. “But that’s what happens sometimes.”

“I don’t know,” Josh says thoughtfully. “It sounds like there’s something sketchy going on. I thought I’d poke around online tomorrow and see what I can find out.”

“Is it really that strange? Real estate changes hands every day in this city. It’s not like you can do anything about it.”

“I don’t know,” Josh says again. “If there’s something shady about the deal and getting press would help them out, it’s not like
I don’t know a ton of music journalists. That’d be a place to start, anyway.”

“But if there really is something ‘sketchy’ going on,” Laura argues, and I can tell she’s trying hard to come up with a reason why Josh shouldn’t care about this anymore, “wouldn’t the music press already be on top of it?”

“Not necessarily,” Josh says. “Alphaville’s pretty much fallen off the radar over the last decade or so. It’s been a while since any major albums came out of that place. Now they mostly serve the community and young bands that haven’t signed with labels yet.” Josh stretches his arms above his head and yawns. “I’m beat. All that walking in the heat today really did me in. I think I’ll go take a shower.”

Laura smiles and nods, but as soon as Josh’s back is turned, her smile goes away. Then she sighs and pushes her fingers through her hair, the way Sarah always did when she was thinking about something she didn’t want to think about anymore.

I can hear the shower running in Josh and Laura’s bathroom as I work my way frantically through the Sarah-boxes. I know I can’t stop Josh or Laura if they do decide to make these boxes go away, but there has to be
something
I can do. I spin around in jumpy circles as I go from box to box, my plumper belly knocking things out of the boxes and onto the floor. Normally I’d
hate
the idea of things going out of the boxes they’re supposed to be in, but this is an emergency. I have more important things to worry about right now.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my left eye, I see a rat on the floor!
A rat!
An enormous black rat with bright-red eyes and a long skinny tail! I haven’t seen one (except for in bad dreams) since that day when I lost my littermates, and Sarah and I found each other. I know how easily I can kill mice, but a rat is something else altogether—and this rat is
huge
! I spin around to face it head-on, my fur puffing all the way up, and with the force of the jump I take
backward, I knock one of the Sarah-boxes onto its side where it lands with a terrific
crash
! My heart is pounding, and by the sudden brightness of the room, I can tell that the dark centers of my own eyes must have gotten as big as they possibly can.

The rat doesn’t move. It just sits there, completely still, not even twitching its whiskers. I creep toward it—with my back still arched and my fur still puffed—and bat at its head with my right paw, taking a jump back immediately. But the rat still doesn’t do anything. Once again I creep slowly toward it and bat at its head, and the rat is still motionless. This time, when I hit it, I leave my paw there for a moment. The rat feels strange. And that’s when my fur starts to relax. This isn’t a real rat at all. It’s a fake, made out of something soft and springy.

I hear Laura’s footsteps coming up the stairs. “Are you okay, Prudence?” she calls. “What’s all the ruckus up there?” If my reaction when I saw the fake rat was bad, it’s nothing compared with Laura’s. When she comes into my room and sees it sitting in the middle of the floor, her face turns stark white and she screams!

I know that a fake rat can’t hurt her, but I jump defensively in front of Laura anyway, letting her know that no rat—real or fake—will ever be able to get close to her as long as
I’m
here.

Laura’s shriek of terror is so loud that Josh hears it in the shower. I hear the scrape of the shower curtain being thrown back, and then Josh’s running footsteps pound down the hall. “Laura!” he yells. “Laura, what happened? Are you okay?”

Josh runs all the way into the doorway of my room and stands there, dripping wet, holding a towel around his waist with one hand. In the other is the baseball bat he keeps next to his side of the bed. But Laura is chuckling now, breathing hard with one hand on the spot right above her heart, which is probably pounding like mine was. “Good lord!” she says. “I thought I saw a rat!” She squats down on her heels, stroking my head with one hand and picking the fake rat up with the other, its rubbery tail dangling down her arm.

“What
is
that thing?” Josh asks her.

Laura turns it over in her hand. “My mom used to get a lot of
swag from the record labels. Most of it was silly stuff—like mini lava lamps and key chains—and she’d give it to me.
This
, I believe”—she lets the fake rat hang from her fingers by its tail—“was something she got when they released
Hot Rats
on CD.”

“Zappa.” Josh smiles and turns to rest his baseball bat against the wall, pushing away the wet hair that’s fallen into his eyes. “That was a great album.”

Laura stands and laughs again. “Not for me, it wasn’t. This thing lasted exactly one day in my room. I woke up in the middle of the night and was sure I saw a rat on my dresser. It took my mother hours to calm me down enough to fall back asleep. The next day she brought it back to her store.”

I keep my eyes intently on the fake rat hanging from Laura’s hand as Josh puts one arm—the one that isn’t holding his towel up—around her shoulders. “You should give it to Prudence,” he says. “I think she wants to play with it.”

Laura leans her head against his shoulder and looks up into his face. “You think?” Now Josh is looking into Laura’s face, too. Without looking away from him, she tosses the fake rat in my direction. “Here you go, Prudence,” she murmurs.

Josh keeps his arm around her as they leave the room. I swipe at the fake rat with my claws a few times. But silly toys aren’t what I’m thinking about right now.

T
HE WOMAN ON THE SUBWAY WAS MIDDLE-AGED AND FORMIDABLE
. Short but sturdily built, she had caramel-colored hair and red fingernails so long they arced gently half an inch from the tips of her fingers. She spoke emphatically to the man standing in front of her. Also middle-aged, tall and slender, his head seemed too large for his frame. It bent slightly toward the woman, like a flower beginning to droop on its stem.
“La gente cambia,”
the woman said, aiming one red nail in the direction of his face.
“La gente cambia.”
And then, in heavily accented English, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.” The man didn’t do much in the way of response aside from nodding his head dolefully from time to time. Whether because this conversation pertained to him in particular (could they be splitting up, this middle-aged couple in this very public subway car?), or in silent acknowledgment of the fickle
mystery of the human heart, was impossible for Laura, seated half the car’s length away from them, to discern.

The two of them clung to the steel bar above their heads, the occasional lurches of the train throwing them slightly off-balance but otherwise not disrupting their conversation. All around Laura, seated and standing, people shivered in the too-chilled air-conditioning as they tapped on BlackBerrys (which Laura knew she should be doing, but wasn’t) or fiddled with iPods, or stared blankly into the middle distance. The train stopped, and a hot
whoosh
of fetid air from the station entered the open doors along with a black-haired man dressed in a waiter’s uniform. It was a muggy July day, and faint yellow circles had begun to form at the armpits of his white jacket. He wheeled a linen-draped cart covered with plastic-wrapped platters of fruits and pastries, pasta salads and sandwiches.
Somebody catering an after-hours meeting
, Laura thought.
Somebody who still has a budget to do things like that
. The people who had to move to accommodate the cart looked at the waiter in minor annoyance, and he returned their looks with a vaguely apologetic expression on his sweat-slick face that said,
Sorry, but I gotta work, too
. Then everybody went back to what they had been doing, the middle-aged woman continuing to harangue the middle-aged man even as one corner of the cart dug into the flesh of her hip.

The woman was right, Laura acknowledged. People did change. Or maybe it was just that, over time, you started to notice different things. She’d been thinking about how dramatically Josh had changed these past few weeks, since he’d become involved in the cause of saving Alphaville Studios along with the apartment building on Avenue A. Except, Laura conceded, with the uneasiness of someone who’s deliberately shut her eyes to an unpleasant truth she now has to face, the real change had been happening slowly over the past few months. Once she’d thought Josh exempt, somehow, from the vicissitudes that threatened people like her, whose lives weren’t as charmed as his own. Now she realized what she should have seen in a hundred different ways, in small gestures
and offhand remarks. Josh was frustrated. The “changed” Josh she’d seen during the last few weeks was merely the confident, energetic, pleasantly busy Josh she’d first met just under a year and a half ago.

She’d been certain his interest in the building would fade after a few days. Instead, Josh had committed himself full-time to the project, making endless phone calls, creating a blog and Facebook pages, sending out a steady stream of emails. He’d pressed his niece and nephew into service, bringing them to the apartment once a week to clip together press releases and informational one-sheets that would be packaged and mailed to reporters, music journalists, city council members, congressmen, anybody who might choose to get involved. Even Prudence had gotten caught up in the frenetic activity, making sudden wild leaps onto the small folding table Josh had set up in his overcrowded home office (he’d had to move a few boxes of his own into their spare bedroom to accommodate it), scattering orderly stacks of papers in all directions. “Look, Prudence is helping!” Robert would shriek, and he and Abbie would collapse into uncontrollable laughing fits—especially when Prudence would accidentally get a mailing label stuck to the bottom of one paw and walk around shaking her paw furiously, assuming an air of injured dignity and refusing to let anybody close enough to pull the sticker off for her.

“It’s one of those Mitchell-Lama buildings,” Josh had told Laura a few days after he’d first gone there with the children. “You know, those middle-income apartment buildings they started putting up in the fifties.”

Laura did know. She and Sarah had moved into a Mitchell-Lama complex farther uptown back in the ’90s, when they’d left the Lower East Side.

“Anyway, now the building owner is trying to opt out of the program so he can sell to a developer who’ll reset the rents to ‘market rate.’ Which would basically quadruple or even quintuple what the tenants are paying. A lot of them are elderly and on fixed incomes, or war veterans. There’s a cop who lives in the building, and the new rent would be twice what he takes home in a month!”

Laura was only half listening. Of all the buildings in Manhattan, she wondered, why did Josh have to pick
this
building to worry about? She remembered Sarah, on the day they’d gone to Alphaville Studios, adjusting a set of headphones to fit over Laura’s ears and saying,
This way we can hear ourselves while we record, so we’ll know what we sound like
. Laura had asked,
But won’t we know what we sound like just by listening to ourselves?
And Sarah had explained that the way you sounded to yourself and the way you sounded to other people were two very different things.

“The building’s property value has been assessed at seven-point-five million,” Josh had continued, “and the tenants’ association has raised ten million from city subsidies and a handful of private donations. They want to buy the building themselves so they can keep the rents where they are. But the landlord has an offer of fifteen million from a developer, and he’s holding out.”