Love Saves the Day (17 page)

Josh is quiet for a long moment while he drinks from the glass Laura handed him. Then he says, “Why didn’t you tell me, Laur?” He picks up the folded stack of papers and hands them to her. “I got my severance agreement today. It’s dated from a week before they let me go. Somebody at your firm must have known what was going on. I thought
you
worked on contracts.”

Laura’s face gets as red as it did the night of that Pass Over dinner. She takes the papers Josh is holding out to her, but she doesn’t unfold them or try to read them. “Josh, I had no idea.” I know she’s telling the truth, because the black centers of her eyes stay the same size and nothing about her posture stiffens the way it usually does when a human isn’t telling the truth. “I never saw this. Nobody said a word to me.”

It’s odd, because humans don’t normally look this upset when what they’re saying is true. And that’s when I know. Laura is upset
because
she’s telling the truth. That doesn’t make any sense, and yet I feel sure I’m right.

“Well, maybe you can help me out with a couple of questions I have, your firm being the attorney-of-record.” Josh’s mouth twists into a shape that’s trying to be a smile but isn’t quite. “I’ve looked over the vacation pay and expense-account money they owe me. And I’ll get another three months on my insurance until COBRA kicks in.”

“That’s boilerplate, standard,” Laura tells him. “We just fill in the numbers based on the information the client provides.” The skin of her knuckles curls and tenses around her wineglass until it’s whiter than the rest of her hand. Maybe she’s afraid of the kicking cobras Josh is talking about. Sarah is afraid of snakes, too, which is why I always check newspapers so carefully.

“What about on the third page? It says something about waiving my rights in perpetuity and throughout the universe.” Josh tries again to smile. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“That’s also standard. They’re just trying to cover all their bases to avoid a lawsuit. Which was nothing you were planning to do, anyway. A nice, clean break—that’s all they want.”

Josh winces when Laura says this, although I don’t think she notices. “Everything might be standard, but I’m not going to call it
nice
or
clean
,” he tells her. “So I’m okay to sign it? Should you take a couple of minutes and look through the whole thing? You’re my lawyer, after all.”

Laura continues to hold the papers without unfolding them. She takes a long swallow from her wineglass. “I can’t do that,” she finally says.

“Really?” Josh sounds like he thinks Laura is saying something not-true. “
Really?
”

“Your company is my client, Josh. Forget all the ethical issues and conflicts of interest. The people at my firm had to go pretty far out of their way to keep me from knowing about this. There were meetings and memos that I didn’t know anything about—about one of
my
clients—and nothing ever crossed my desk. And you really don’t have to worry,” she adds quickly, seeing how Josh’s eyebrows come together to make an angry line across his forehead. “These severance agreements are—”

“Yeah, I know.
Standard
.” His voice gets louder. “And I guess I don’t meet the standards to get some legal advice from my wife. Maybe I should call your buddy Perry—he seems like a nice guy.”

“Josh, if I send you back with this thing all marked up, Perry will
know
it was me. He’s not an idiot.” Laura’s voice is also getting louder. “And even if somehow he didn’t figure it out, I couldn’t look him in the face and lie.”

“It didn’t seem to bother Perry to look you in the face and lie.”

“He didn’t
lie
. He kept client information confidential. That’s Perry’s job. It’s my job, too.” Laura’s eyes look hurt. Sarah says that Laura has her father’s eyes, but Laura looks like Sarah now as she runs her fingers through her hair. “This is the kind of thing that could get me fired, Josh. And for what? It’s not like we can afford for you to walk away from five months’ salary, anyway.”

“You know, I think I’ve heard enough legalese for one day.” Josh takes the papers back from Laura.

“Let me call a friend at another firm. I’m sure I can find—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Josh’s voice doesn’t sound angry anymore. It has no expression at all. “There’s nothing to worry about, right? It’s standard.”

“I’ll make some calls first thing tomorrow morning,” Laura says.

“I said don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t want to see you get your hands dirty.” Josh is completely right about
that
. There’s nothing more disgusting than a human with dirty hands trying to touch you. He gets up and says, “I’m going upstairs to check email.”

Josh hands his glass back to Laura. She just stands there for a long time, holding two glasses of wine without drinking from either of them.

Most nights, Laura stays up much later than Josh. She likes to read her work papers when the apartment is quiet. But tonight, Josh is still awake in the living room when Laura gets into bed and turns on the TV. The only times Sarah ever watched the little TV in our bedroom, instead of the bigger one in the living room, was when she was too sick to get out of bed. Laura never watches TV in the bedroom, either. Not usually, anyway.

I remember one night, a year and three months ago, when Sarah came home very late from work. It was unlike her to spend so many hours in a row away from our apartment, and I was worried by the time she finally got back. Our neighbor from the building—the same one who came to feed me when Sarah stopped coming home at all—was with her. Sarah was pale and her face was pinched, as if she were in pain. But when the neighbor helped Sarah get settled on the couch and hovered over her, asking if there was anything else she needed, Sarah said, “I’ll be fine, Sheila. Thanks so much again for everything.”

Sarah stayed in bed watching TV for the next four days, and those were probably the happiest four days I’ve ever known. I had Sarah to snuggle under the covers with, and she didn’t have to go to work or anything. I’d never had Sarah all to myself for so long.

But I wasn’t happy that first night. Sarah didn’t turn on any
lamps after the neighbor left. She just sat on the couch with me in her lap until the sun came up. Even though she didn’t say anything, I could tell that something was very wrong, and that she needed me close. In the darkness I could still see the tiny cracks in the skin around Sarah’s eyes. And when the water from her eyes flowed into those cracks, that was where I licked her gently. To let the light in.

Now I follow the sound of the TV up the stairs and see Laura in bed like she’s asleep, but her legs keep kicking. They kick so hard, she almost kicks the covers right off the bed. That’s something else Sarah used to do—kick the blankets in her sleep when she was upset.

When Sarah was worried about something in her sleep, I used to curl up tight right next to her left ear and stretch out one paw to rest, very gently, on her shoulder. I didn’t want to wake her, but I did want her to know that I was there with her. Sometimes my lying next to her was what made her able to fall into a deep enough sleep that she wasn’t kicking anymore.

Josh is in the living room listening to one of Sarah’s black disks. He’s playing the song Sarah sang to me the day we found each other, the song that has my name in it.
Dear Prudence
, the song says,
won’t you come out to play …

I’ve been trying not to get
too
close to Laura and Josh. After all, only one person can be your Most Important Person. For me, that person is Sarah. And when she comes back, I don’t want anybody—including me—to be confused about the way things are supposed to be.

But Laura looks so much like Sarah, lying there with her eyes closed and her legs scrunched up, that I find myself jumping onto the bed. The ache in my chest from Sarah’s not being here, which I’ve been living with for so long, eases a little. Moving stealthily, so my Prudence-tags don’t jingle and startle her, I settle onto the pillow next to Laura’s left ear. Curling into a ball, with my tail wrapped around my nose to keep my face warm, I reach out one paw and let it rest on Laura’s shoulder.

Laura rolls over so that she’s facing me, with her eyes still
closed. Her breathing gets deeper, the way Sarah’s does when she’s finally falling into a real sleep, and her arm curves out so that my tail and nose rest in the bend of her elbow. Alone in her bedroom, wearing her sleep clothes and without Josh lying next to her, Laura smells more like Sarah than ever. The TV isn’t very loud, and I can still hear the
Dear Prudence
song playing downstairs.

Hearing it now, with all the little crackles and popping sounds in the exact same places I remember, just the way it was when Sarah played this black disk in our old apartment, I drift off to sleep. In my dream Sarah is there, smiling at me and saying,
Who’s my love? Who’s my little love?
When a hand falls onto my back to stroke my fur, I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s Sarah’s hand in my dream. I purr deeply anyway and think,
I am, Sarah. I’m your love
.

I
T
’
S HARD TO IMAGINE IT NOW, BUT DOWNTOWN
N
EW
Y
ORK USED TO BE
dead quiet at night. You could walk down Broadway from Prince to Reade without hearing anything other than the sound of the occasional taxicab and your own footsteps echoing off buildings. You could walk down Elizabeth Street at four
AM
with nothing to keep you company but the aroma of fresh-baked bread from mom-and-pop bakeries.

It was silent, that is, unless you knew where to go. Even back then—before it became big, and then commercial, and then finally the playground of middle-class college kids and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd—there were pockets and places where the noise went on all night. Soho lofts where an invitation and password got you into underground parties that played the kind of music you’d never hear on the radio. Bars where jukeboxes hummed all night and clubs where bands didn’t start their first set until two
AM
. The
shattering-glass sound of beer bottles, the inevitable thud of a person too drunk to stand who eventually falls down, the
thump thump thump
of someone’s bass turned all the way up.

I’ve always hated silence. I’ve always thought silence was like death. Quiet as death. Silent as the tomb. Dead men tell no tales. Nobody ever says the opposite. Nobody ever says
noisy as the tomb
.

That’s what I loved so much about disco. Disco used
all
the sounds,
all
the beats,
all
the instruments. The
noise
of it was always there for you. It would pick you up and spin you around and whirl you and dip you until you were almost too dizzy to stand on your own, but it never once let you fall.

You’re probably thinking to yourself how silly disco was. Maybe you were even one of those people who wore a
DISCO SUCKS
T-shirt back in the day. But you only remember it that way because, by the end, the major labels thought they had a formula for it and cranked out by-the-numbers fluff, trying to make a quick cash grab. Disco never died, though. It just changed forms. And even today, if you’re at a wedding and the DJ puts on a song that gets every single person—no matter how old or young—out onto the floor, chances are it’s a dance song written sometime between 1974 and 1979.

It was 1975 when I first discovered the New York music scene. When you start coming into the City by yourself at fifteen to sneak into parties and clubs, when you move there permanently at sixteen and live in an unfinished loft above a hardware store, people assume you’re fleeing a troubled home life. Abusive parents, maybe, or some unnamed family tragedy, possibly even a grabby stepfather. When people keep making up the same story for you, it becomes easier and easier to believe it’s true. That’s why it’s so important to keep your past organized. Your past is the
real
truth. Your past is who you are now.

Prudence comes to sit in front of me. Little lady with her dainty white socks and black tiger stripes. “It’s important to keep your past organized,” I tell her. She regards me from rounded green eyes, then meows in an apparently thoughtful way.

I hadn’t heard music in so long before Prudence and I found each other. Not just the music in my records, which sat for years in a storage unit, but the music in my head. It just stopped one day. I lost it. And then there was Prudence. After that, it was like floodgates opened and all that music I’d hidden away came pouring back out.

Prudence, standing on her hind legs to swipe at dust motes in a sunbeam, is a conductor leading a symphony. Prudence curled in my lap while I stroke her little back is “In My Room” by the Beach Boys. Prudence sneaks into the bathroom and unrolls the toilet paper, spilling it all over the floor, in rhythm to “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango.

Pru-dence kit-ten, Pru-dence kit-ten
. That’s what I hear in my mind whenever I look at her. A perfect rhythm in four/four time. The sound of a heartbeat times two. The motor of a life.

What I remember most about the house I grew up in is the silence. We had wall-to-wall carpeting in every room except the bathrooms and kitchen, so even the sounds of us walking around doing everyday things felt more like sleepwalking than living.

By the time I was a teenager, my parents hardly spoke to each other anymore except when necessary.
What are you making for dinner tonight? When is the plumber coming? Sarah, could you pass the peas?

They had been desperate for a second child. When I was eight, my mother gave birth to a baby boy who lived only ten hours. After he died, it was as if it was painful for my mother to be reminded that she’d ever had any children at all. The only thing she wanted was a quiet home. When my junior high music teacher said I had a good voice and should maybe take private singing lessons, my mother declined on the grounds that she didn’t want noise in the house all the time. Trying to stop my “endless chatter” once (I’d been asking her questions about her own childhood), my mother told me I’d better get past my need for constant conversation, or someday when I grew up and got married myself there’d be no end
of fighting in my house. The funny thing is, I never did fight with my husband until one day just after Laura turned three. He said,
I don’t think I can handle this anymore
. And then, the next day, he was gone. Just like that.