Love Saves the Day (6 page)

Sometimes, though, I get fooled for a few moments, and that’s the hardest of all. Like right now. It’s early in the morning, before anybody’s left for work, and I’m in the back of the closet having just opened my eyes. I smell the can of my old food opening and see a woman with Sarah’s hair bending over my bowl.
Good morning, Sarah
, I meow. Sarah looks up in surprise, and when her hair slides back from her face I see it isn’t Sarah at all. It’s Laura who’s looking at me, wondering why I just meowed when I’ve been quiet most of the time since I’ve been here. It was Laura’s hair, so much like Sarah’s, that tricked me.

Besides her voice when she sang, just about my favorite thing about Sarah was her hair. I loved to rub my face against it and bury my nose in it. I could spend hours batting at it with my front paws, or watching Sarah twisting it in and out of ponytails, or noticing the way each strand sparkled and turned a slightly different color from the other strands in the sunlight that came through our windows. Once I was sitting behind Sarah’s head on the back of our couch with my nose and mouth nestled in her hair, and I chewed off a big mouthful. Sarah got mad (although she couldn’t help laughing when she saw me sitting there with a chunk of her hair in my mouth as if it were a mouse I was carrying back to my den). I don’t know why I did it, exactly, except I was thinking how nice it would be if I could have some of Sarah’s hair to take with me to my little cave in the back of our closet.

One of the times when Anise came over to our apartment, she cut Sarah’s hair for her. Anise’s hair always looks different every time she comes over. Sometimes it’s very short and straight, and other times it’s long and curly. Sometimes she even puts streaks of different colors in her hair, like green or pink.

Anise always tells Sarah that she’s been wearing her hair the same way for thirty years—long and straight—and that she should change it now and then “just for fun.” (What’s
fun
about change?!) This one time, though, she actually talked Sarah into it. Anise sat
her down in one of our kitchen chairs with a towel around her neck, and attacked Sarah’s head with scissors until her hair was much,
much
shorter. While Anise worked they talked and laughed about The Old Days, when they were young and too poor to afford new clothes or professional haircuts, so Anise made their clothes and cut their hair for them.

I was miserable when I saw Sarah’s beautiful hair falling in sad little clumps to the floor, and for the first time I didn’t like Anise very much. But Laura’s reaction was even worse. When she came over three Sundays later and Sarah opened the door, Laura’s face froze. Her eyes widened and got shinier than normal. “Your hair!” she cried. “What happened to it?”

“You don’t like it.” Sarah made this a statement instead of a question.

“No, I just …” One hand moved up from Laura’s side as if she was going to touch the side of Sarah’s head, although it stopped before it got there. “I’m surprised, is all,” Laura finally said. “What made you decide to do something so radical?”

“I was ready for a change. Do you like it?” Sarah almost looked shy. “Anise did it for me.”

Laura made a sound like a snort. “That’s Anise,” she said. “You can always count on her for the little things.” She emphasized the word
little
.

Laura’s hair looks and smells like Sarah’s, although she spends more time straightening it in the mornings with a loud hair dryer than Sarah ever did. Laura cares about hair a lot. That must be why she got so upset when Anise cut Sarah’s off.

Sarah let her hair grow back long and never tried cutting it short again after that. When Laura visited, her eyes would travel to the top of Sarah’s head and down the length of Sarah’s hair while Sarah chattered at her. I think she was waiting for Laura to notice and say something about it. But Laura never did.

Laura doesn’t usually linger in this room, but sometimes—like now—she’ll spend long, quiet minutes after she feeds me looking
out the windows, watching a flock of pigeons on the rooftop of the building across the street. You can see these same pigeons from the tall living room windows downstairs that go from the floor to the ceiling and make up two whole walls of the room. The pigeons are the same color as coffee when you add cream to it, which is an unusual color for pigeons. Other than that, though, I don’t see what’s so interesting about them. But Laura can’t seem to move her eyes away. She even winds a single strand of hair around one finger, the way Sarah always does when she’s thinking deeply about something.

I’ve tried watching the pigeons also, to see what Laura finds so fascinating, but all the pigeons ever do is fly around in big circles for an absurdly long time, and then come back to land on the rooftop. Naturally I hadn’t really expected to see much because pigeons aren’t even as smart as
dogs
, if you can believe it.

The room is silent while Laura watches the pigeons and I crouch in the closet waiting for her to leave. Upper West Side is quiet in ways that Lower East Side never was. In Sarah’s and my apartment, when the windows were open, I could hear squirrels and large bugs turning in the earth, birds singing while they nested in trees. People would walk along the sidewalk, their voices talking into tiny phones and the sounds drifting up to the third floor where Sarah and I lived. Cars drove past with music flying out of their rolled-down windows to announce that they had arrived. Like the way the man who lives in the lobby of this apartment building calls Laura and Josh to announce when their pizza or Chinese food is on its way upstairs. In Lower East Side, even when our windows were closed, you could always hear people talking in other apartments or water moving through pipes in the wall. Sometimes I would hear loud
crack!
sounds without being able to tell where they came from. It used to startle me until Sarah explained that it was just our building “settling.”

There are neighbors and cars and birds here in Upper West Side, too, but the street is so far below us that you can’t hear any of its sounds. I never hear people talking or playing their televisions loudly in their own apartments next to this one. Most days,
after Laura and Josh have left for work, the only thing I hear is the jingle of the Prudence-tags on my red collar as I walk from room to room. Sometimes, if I’ve been sitting still for a while, I meow loudly and send the sound of it echoing from the walls and ceilings, just to make sure I haven’t gone deaf.

Sarah never liked it when things were too quiet. Maybe that’s why she played music and watched TV all the time. She would chatter and chatter at Laura whenever Laura came over to visit, afraid of the silence she would hear if she stopped because Laura never had much to say in return. Sarah told Anise once that Laura had built a wall around herself with silence. I used to imagine Sarah’s chatter going
chip, chip, chip
at this wall, even though I couldn’t see where the wall was. It must be different for Laura in Upper West Side, though, because she and Josh talk all the time.

Josh walks past the doorway now, in the nicer clothes and dark feet-shoes he wears to work. Laura’s own work clothes match each other a lot more than Sarah’s. Today she wears a black jacket and matching black pants with shiny high-heeled black shoes. The only thing that isn’t black is the white blouse she wears under her jacket.

Josh pauses when he sees Laura standing in front of the window and says, “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine.” Laura smiles a little and turns to face him. “Just daydreaming.”

Something about the way Josh’s eyes narrow and widen makes me think he notices more than most humans do. Whenever Laura’s talking to him, his eyes zip all over her face, and you can tell how interested he is in what she’s saying. It’s not like when Sarah’s eyes stayed focused anxiously on Laura’s face without moving, or when Laura would look off to the side while Sarah was talking to her. Sometimes, though, when Sarah would turn her eyes to watch me do something, Laura would look into her face with an expression that was hard to describe. The skin at her throat would tighten, as if she was about to say something. But by the time Sarah looked at her again, Laura’s face would be wearing its normal expression, and she would say something unimportant to Sarah like,
This is good coffee
.

Josh’s eyes leave Laura’s face now just long enough to look around the room once. “Where’s Prudence?”

“Hiding in the closet.” My tail swishes when I hear Laura describe what I’m doing as “hiding” instead of what it really is—waiting for her to leave already.

“She sure does love that closet,” Josh says.

“She just needs some time.” Laura plucks a strand of my fur from the sleeve of her jacket. “I don’t think she’s very comfortable yet. It doesn’t seem like she’s sleeping much.”

Josh walks toward Laura and brushes his hand gently across her cheek. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

Laura touches his hand with her own, but takes a small step back so he’s not touching her face anymore. “I’m fine,” she repeats. Then she looks down at the watch on her wrist and says, “We’re going to be late if we don’t get a move on.”

I listen to the sound of their feet-shoes going down the stairs and wonder how much longer I’ll have to live here before Sarah comes to take me back to Lower East Side.

Every morning, after Laura and Josh have left for work, I wander around the apartment trying to find a place where I can feel comfortable enough to settle into the kind of long, good sleep I need more and more desperately as the days go by. It’s hard to sleep well, though, when nothing smells the way it’s supposed to. Laura makes this problem worse because she’s always cleaning and wiping things down with foul sprays and polishes that smell the way humans think things like lemons and pine trees are supposed to smell when they grow naturally outdoors. She especially hates it when there are any crumbs or bits of food on the kitchen counters or floor. Crumbs are how you end up with roaches and mice, Laura says (although she really doesn’t have to worry about that while
I’m
here), and I remember Sarah saying how they always had to be careful about that in the apartment they lived in together when Laura was a child.

I crawl in and out of the Sarah-boxes, looking for a way to get
comfortable among the smells I know. I press my cheeks on the things in the boxes, rubbing Sarah’s smell into me and my smell into the Sarah-things, but the boxes are too full for me to find a place to lie down and sleep. Yesterday I tried burrowing into the big Love Saves the Day bag that was lying on its side in one of the Sarah-boxes. I thought that, since it already smells like Sarah’s and my apartment, if I could dig all the way into it I could surround myself with that wonderful Sarah-and-me-together smell, as if it were a cave.

It took a while to drag all the newspapers and magazines out of the bag to make enough room for me to squeeze in. But once I got all the papers out, I realized there was something made of cold metal—completely uncomfortable to lie against—at the bottom of the bag. Even using my “extra” toes, I couldn’t pry it out. When Josh came home and saw all the old newspapers scattered on the floor, he chuckled and said, “Looks like somebody had a good time today.” I don’t know what made him think that (I’d had anything
but
“a good time”), but he must have liked that idea because he was smiling while he put the newspapers and magazines back together. It took him longer than it needed to, since he was reading them while he straightened everything out. He stuffed the magazines and newspapers back into the Love Saves the Day bag, then took the bag into Home Office, which is the room right next to this one. I guess that’s sensible. There are already lots of magazines in that room anyway, because Josh works for a company that makes magazines.

Now I creep slowly into Home Office, listening for footsteps—just to be sure—even though I already heard Laura and Josh leave for the day. Home Office is far too crowded with what Josh calls “memorabilia” and what Laura calls “junk” (although she smiles teasingly whenever she says this) to be a truly comfortable room for me. But there
is
a wonderful heated cat bed that rests on the desk in front of a small TV screen. Attached to the bed is a toy mouse on a leash, which just goes to show how little humans like Josh know about mice. In the first place the toy mouse looks nothing at all like a
real
mouse, and in the second place no mouse
would ever let a human put a leash on it, because even mice are smarter than dogs.

Josh likes to use this cat bed as a scratching post, exercising his fingers on it without stopping for hours on end. They make a
clackety-clack
noise and not the clawing sounds that usually come from a scratching post. If he sees me sleeping on it—using it the
right
way—he chases me off so he can take over and use it the wrong way. So now I come in here to nap lightly for brief stretches during the day while he’s gone. The first few times Josh saw me sleeping here, he told me that my having to stay off it was a “rule.” If I weren’t so tired from not sleeping enough, I probably would have thought Josh giving me “rules” was funny. All cats are born knowing that there’s no point in paying attention to unreasonable rules made by humans. Besides, what humans don’t know won’t hurt them.

I’m able to sleep for a little while, but everything still smells too foreign for me to relax very much. I step carefully from the cat bed to the desk, from the desk to the chair in front of it, and then leap from the chair to the floor. Then I make my way back to the room Laura feeds me in. The room with all the Sarah-boxes.

Laura might not like coming into this room very much, but I do have to admit that she’s very good at keeping to a schedule—much better than Sarah. She feeds me at the same time every morning except on Sundays, which is the only day when Laura doesn’t go to her office. She works in a law office like Sarah, and Laura must do something even more important than typing because the humans in her office need her to do her work just about every second she’s awake. When she comes home at night she brings big stacks of paper with her so she can do even more work here in the apartment. She wears glasses while she reads her work papers, and probably she wears the glasses in her office, too. There are always faint pink marks on the sides of her nose from where they press into her skin.