Love Saves the Day (36 page)

But there are still traces of the place I once knew. The
DIE YUPPIE SCUM!
graffiti on the occasional brick wall. Chico’s
Loisaida
mural on Avenue C. Walking through these streets I used to know so well is like running into a girl you once knew at your twentieth high school reunion, some girl who’s had a lot of plastic surgery. She looks older and yet she also looks younger. Like herself and also like a different person from the one you remember.

One day I found myself walking down Stanton Street, where Laura and I used to live. It was raining, and maybe that was what drew my feet in that direction. Where our building had been was now a construction site littered with cement blocks, stacks of lumber and steel beams, and a silent crane. Gaily striped banners proclaimed that luxury lofts were being erected.

I stood there in the rain and looked at it for a while, the way I’d stood in the rain that night, watching our old building come down. I couldn’t remember the name of Mr. Mandelbaum’s cat anymore, that cat Laura had loved so much she’d been willing to risk her life for her. I tell myself all the time that I’m too young to be so forgetful, even though I have a grown daughter. I’m not even fifty yet. But my memory has become full of holes.

This day wasn’t rainy as that other day had been. After one intense, tropical burst, the clouds cleared and the sun was beating down again. Just as I was preparing to leave, I saw something move near one of the cement blocks scattered on the ground.

It was a kitten. A tiny little thing. Probably no more than a few weeks old, cowering behind something solid. The creature looked soaked through. She was trying hard to remain unseen, and for a
second I did consider leaving her to her privacy. And yet—surely this was some kind of miracle, wasn’t it? That I should find a kitten—one who looked so much like how I remembered the Mandelbaums’ cat—on
this
spot, in
this
place? She had the same green eyes, the same black tiger stripes and little white socks on her paws. Surely I was being offered a second chance, to save now what I hadn’t been able to save for Laura all those years ago.

And didn’t I also need saving? Didn’t I also need someone to love?
It was meant to be
, a voice in my head whispered.

I crouched down, holding out my hand. “Hey, kitty,” I whispered. “Are you lost?” The kitten shrank back, afraid.
Poor thing!
I thought, and something in my chest that had been hard and frozen for years began to loosen. I reached out to her again, and she seemed to draw herself inward until she was a tight ball of watchful fluff, just beyond the reach of my fingers. It was probably prudent, I told myself, for such a young kitten to be wary of a strange human. As this thought crossed my mind, I remembered Anise’s cats, all named for Beatles songs, and I smiled. “Prudence?” I said. “Is that your name?”

The kitten looked at me with enormous, fearful emerald eyes. And then, without thinking about it, I began to sing. For the first time in fourteen years, I found my voice.
“Dear Prudence,”
I sang softly.
“Won’t you come out to play?”

At first the kitten looked bewildered. I wasn’t surprised. My voice sounded scratchy, and it was deeper than it used to be. I didn’t even sound like me anymore. But as I sang, my voice gained strength and I started to recognize it again.
“The sun is up, the sky is blue … it’s beautiful, and so are you …”

Timidly, cautiously, the kitten crept out from the shadow of the cinder block. She sniffed my fingers, inching forward, and allowed me to lift her. She was soaking wet, and I bundled her under my jacket, against the warmth of my chest. She pressed one paw, tentatively, softly, to my cheek. I noted what looked like a funny little extra toe.

“Let’s go home, Prudence,” I whispered. The kitten responded
with a series of cheeping mews, as if she were trying to sing back to me.

One day Laura came to my apartment with the news that she was engaged. I was happy for her, of course I was happy for her, and yet I also thought,
My only daughter is engaged to a man I’ve never even met
. Laura tells me so little about her life. But there was a happiness, a sweetness that seemed to exist despite itself in her blue, blue eyes, so much like her father’s. I know my daughter well enough to know when she’s happy. And when she invited me to have lunch with her and her fiancé and I met him for the first time, I could see why.

I actually ran into Josh once after that, completely unexpectedly. It was at night, maybe around eleven o’clock or so, during one of my endless walks. One small club I passed had live music playing, and, impulsively, I drifted inside. It was a three-piece acoustic band, performing a cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.”

There are moments when a song hits you in a certain way. You know it’s soupy and self-indulgent, but even knowing that doesn’t stop the tears from rising. And suddenly I was so tired, a bone-deep exhaustion I’d been feeling more and more lately. I sat down at the bar, needing a moment to pull myself together.

And then, out of nowhere, Josh was beside me. “What a surprise!” he exclaimed, kissing me on the cheek. “I’m here with some of the writers from my magazine, checking out this band. Come over and I’ll introduce you. I’m sure the three of you could talk music for hours.”

Josh was only nine or ten years younger than I was. Still, he looked like he belonged in this place. Looking around at all the young faces, I was suddenly aware of my age, how far-too-old I was for Lower East Side dives where young artists played in the hope of being discovered. One day you look around and realize everyone in New York is younger than you are. “Oh,” I said to Josh.
“That’s okay. I was just going to have a quick drink and head home.”

“I’ll have a drink with you, then.” He sat on the bar stool next to mine and ordered a Maker’s Mark rocks from the bartender.

“How’s your family?” I asked, at a loss for anything else to say. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.”

“They’re good,” he said. “My parents still live out in Parsipanny in the house I grew up in. My dad’s getting ready to retire soon. My sister has a house near them, but she’s looking for a place in the City, closer to where she works.” His face hardened subtly. “She and her husband split up and he … doesn’t do a lot for their kids. She’s basically raising them on her own.” Then he sighed. “Oh well. It’ll probably make her and the kids closer with each other as they grow up.”

“Yes,” I said faintly. “It happens that way, sometimes.”

There was a mirror behind the bar. The Josh sitting next to me on the bar stool was looking into it. But the Josh reflected in the mirror was looking at me. I turned my eyes down and twirled the straw in my drink a few times.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you ever hear how Laura and I met?”

“No.” I tried to smile. Tried not to think of all the little ways I’d long ago stopped being a part of Laura’s inner life. “I don’t think I have.”

“She came to my office one day. Her firm represents my company and they had a meeting of some kind. Anyway, I was on my way to see somebody when I saw this beautiful woman near the elevator. She has those
eyes
, you know? And she was struggling with these two enormous briefcases.” He laughed. “I mean, they looked
heavy
. Heavier than her, maybe. So, naturally, I went over to help, but she didn’t want me to. She didn’t just say,
No, that’s okay, I can manage
. She
really
didn’t want me to carry those briefcases for her. I could tell she was embarrassed. She
cared
about managing those two heavy briefcases on her own.

“For days, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Why would somebody care so much about such a simple thing? It wasn’t stubbornness, I could tell that, but it was something. I thought about it all
the time, trying to figure it out. Finally, I called her office and asked her out.” He paused, took a sip of his drink.

“Later she told me it was her first client meeting. Apparently, it’s a customary thing for an associate to carry a partner’s briefcases when they go to meetings. I said to her,
But that guy you were with was all the way back in the conference room. It’s not like he would have seen me helping you
. And she kept saying,
But an associate is
supposed
to carry the briefcases. That’s part of the job. It’s what you’re
supposed
to do
. And I thought that I’d probably never met anybody who cared so much about doing the right thing, doing what you’re
supposed
to do, all the way down to the little things.

“I couldn’t have known it that first time I saw her. But I
did
know it somehow, you know? How sometimes you look at someone’s face, and you don’t know what exactly it is you’re seeing, but you know it’s important. Laura thinks she has such a poker face.” He laughed again. “I know how hard she works to convince herself she’s in control of things all the time. But you can tell when she really cares about something. It’s written all over her face.” His eyes in the mirror found mine. “I saw it when she looked at you at lunch,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe you think the two of you aren’t as close as you’d like to be. Laura doesn’t talk about it much. I have an older sister. I know it can be rough between mothers and daughters sometimes. My sister loves my mother, and the two of them talk all the time. But I never see in her face what I saw in Laura’s when she looked at you.”

I had to turn my head aside and clear my throat, embarrassed for Josh to see me cry. He was silent as I pulled a tissue from my purse and blew my nose. Then in the mirror, his eyes smiled at mine.

“Let’s have one more drink,” he said. “I want to toast my mother-in-law this time.”

Last week I had chest pains so bad I had to go to the emergency room. After a battery of tests the doctors came back with their
conclusions: angina. Also high blood pressure. Who knew? They say it’s unusual for a woman my age, but my father’s dying prematurely of a heart attack puts me at higher risk. Sometimes these things happen. There are all kinds of things I have to do now to manage my condition. They tell me there’s no reason why, with diet and exercise and medical care, I shouldn’t live out a normal life span.

That conversation I had with Josh keeps coming back to me. And I know, somehow, that the doctors are wrong. I don’t have much time left. I don’t mean that I feel sick. I feel fine most days. And yet, as Josh said, sometimes you know a thing when you see it.

Last night I went into my closet and went through some of the things I’d taken out of storage after Prudence had given my music back to me. I pulled out the old Love Saves the Day bag where I’d put a bunch of old newspapers and magazines and, all the way at the very bottom, the crushed metal box I’d managed to find in the wreckage of our old building. I had to struggle to open it. Old, broken things don’t like giving up their secrets too easily. Hidden in the clutter of that little box was the red collar Mr. Mandelbaum had bought for Honey on the morning of the day when our building came down. I put the collar around Prudence’s neck and told her, “Tomorrow we’ll get some tags for you that say
PRUDENCE
. And maybe we’ll have Sheila downstairs take a picture of the two of us together. Would you like that, little girl?” I buried my fingers in the ruff of her neck, and Prudence leaned her head against my hand and purred.

I know now what Laura knew already that day when she risked her life for Honey’s—that love is love, whether it goes on two legs or four. Someday Prudence will love Laura. Prudence will love her on those days when it seems as if nobody else does. She’ll make Laura laugh when nobody else can even make her smile. Prudence will carry my love for Laura into her new home and her new life. She’ll carry my memories back to Laura, too—memories of fourteen years of love and music and a life that was too good to be
destroyed altogether, even by that one terrible day. She’ll help Laura find her way back into those memories—memories of all of us, of Honey and the Mandelbaums, who loved her also, and of days in a dusty downtown record store when nothing in the world mattered except a mother and daughter who were always happiest when they were together. She’ll take with her a love that never died, even if it did change forms.

I
was
meant to find Prudence that day. I know that now, and it seems as if I’ve known it always.

I’ve always known I was keeping her for Laura.

L
AURA WAS IN A TEN-THIRTY MEETING IN
C
LAYTON
N
EWELL
’
S OFFICE
when she got the call. There was a 250-page contract to review for one of their largest clients, and the client wanted notes by the end of the day. The matter was pressing enough that Clay himself had gotten involved.

The phone on Clay’s desk buzzed, and his assistant’s voice over the intercom said, “There’s a call for Ms. Dyen, Mr. Newell.”

“What is it regarding?” Clay asked before Laura could say anything.

“It’s her husband,” Clay’s assistant answered. “He says it’s an emergency.”

“I left my cell in my office,” Laura said. Her stomach, which had started to unknot after her fight with Josh that morning as the familiar routines of work took over, clenched again. “He wouldn’t call on this line if it wasn’t important.”

Clay nodded. “Put the call through, Diane.” Laura remembered the day she’d gotten the emergency call from her mother’s office, only six months earlier. She rose from the couches where she’d been sitting with Clay and Perry, and crossed the room to the ringing phone on Clay’s desk. Her hand trembled as she answered it.

“Josh,” she said. “Josh, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Prudence.” The anger of two hours ago was gone from his voice, replaced by a controlled panic. “I went out for a walk, and when I came home she was just lying there unconscious. It looks like she threw up all over the place.”

Laura, who didn’t know what she’d expected to hear, but hadn’t expected this, needed a moment to redirect her thoughts. “Is she breathing?”