Love Saves the Day (5 page)

I’m still angry with Sarah for leaving me without saying good-bye. Mostly, though, I just hope I get to see her again someday. She’s the only human I’ve ever loved.

The only things still unpacked in the whole apartment are Sarah’s collection of black disks and the special table she plays them on. Josh washes his hands before he touches them, and from the way he approaches I can tell how badly he’s wanted to look through the black disks since he first walked in. I don’t like it, because those are
Sarah’s
black disks and even
I’m
not allowed to touch them. But Sarah doesn’t live here anymore. She must have had her reasons for leaving them, and that must mean that wherever she’s living now, she still gets to hear music.

“I can’t believe how many there are,” Josh says to Laura. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vinyl collection this big.”

“I never noticed how big it was, either,” Laura says. “She must have kept more than I realized after she sold the record store.”

“There’s such a range.” The way Josh sounds makes me wonder if maybe not all humans have a wall of black disks like Sarah does. From behind the metal bars of my carrier I can see Josh in pieces, the way I used to see the world in pieces when I’d crouch beneath our big window and look up through the fire escape bars. He sits down cross-legged in front of the records. “Look at all this.”

“My mother was mostly into dance music,” Laura says. “But her roommate was in a punk band and the two of them swapped records a lot.”

Josh grins. “I guess that explains why she’s got the Dictators’
Go Girl Crazy!
shelved next to Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes.”

“Let’s pack them up. We can look through them later at home,” Laura says. When Josh hesitates, she turns her mouth up at the corners and says, “Scout’s honor.”

Josh nods. Then he says, “Oh!” He stands and walks over to an open brown box and pulls something from it. “I didn’t wrap this because I thought you might want it for the apartment.”

Laura walks over to see what Josh is holding. It looks like one of the framed photographs that used to live on the table next to the couch.

“How old was she here?” Josh asks. “She looks so young.”

Laura takes the picture from his hand. “She was nineteen. This was right before she had me.”

“She was beautiful.” Josh looks at Laura and smiles. “Like you.”

“No,” Laura says. “I’ll never be as beautiful as my mother was.”

At first I think she’s doing this thing called modesty, which is when humans pretend not to be as special or good at something as they know they really are. (This is something a cat would never do.) But there’s too much sadness in her smile when she adds, “When I was little, I always used to think how lucky I was to have the prettiest mommy.”

“Our kids will feel that way about you someday.” When Laura doesn’t respond, Josh puts his arm around her shoulders and says, in a gentler tone, “They will, Laur. I promise.”

It seems like a nice thing for him to say. Especially since it’s hard for me to judge human beauty (anything stripped of its fur and forced to walk on its hind legs looks naked and awkward to me). It doesn’t seem like there’s any reason for Laura’s eyes to fill with water again because of what Josh said. But they do.

I think Josh wants to give Laura privacy to make the water go away, even though she swallows hard a few times and blinks it back before it can fall. He goes over to the black disks again, takes one out, and puts it on Sarah’s special table. Music fills the apartment one more time. It’s so much like the kind of thing Sarah would do that, for the first time, I think maybe I could get to like Josh. He even sings along with the music, the way Sarah sometimes used to.

Love is the message, love, love is, love is the …

Most of the big brown boxes stay in the apartment for the Army to come and take them. The rest are carried down by Laura and Josh to the giant metal box on wheels that’s attached to the car. Laura carries the garbage bags down the outside hallway to Trash Room. She leaves the front door open when she does this, and through the open door I hear her footsteps pause on her way back from Trash Room. Then I hear her go back and pull one of the garbage bags out. Her footsteps get faraway sounding, like she’s taking the bag outside, and I guess she’s adding it to the boxes we’re bringing.

I stay in my carrier the whole time. I have to. Laura has closed and locked it, which is just plain rude because didn’t I get in here of my own free will? Is there any good reason to treat me like some stupid dog trying to run out of a kennel? I think humans don’t even realize how much they insult cats’ dignity sometimes. But I don’t have long to be angry about this, because Laura quickly comes back inside and picks up my carrier. I catch one last glimpse of the apartment through its bars and wonder if I’ll ever live here again.

Laura takes me outside, and I have to close my eyes halfway because the sun is getting so bright as it comes through the crisscrossed bars of my carrier. She climbs into the car and settles my carrier on her lap, and Josh gets into the car through the other door, so he can sit behind the big round thing that makes the car go.

I’ve never been in a car before. The feeling of it isn’t so bad once I get used to the sensation of something other than legs moving me forward. It’s even soothing me into drowsiness, and I have to fight to keep my eyes open, because I don’t want to miss anything. I had no idea how much I’d never seen before until now, watching everything that moves past the windows of the car.

The farther away we get the wider the streets are, until I’m positive we’re not in Lower East Side anymore. Some of the streets are so wide I can’t believe they’re real. And the buildings! I can’t
even see the tops of all of them, although I stretch my neck as high up as my carrier will allow me. I never saw buildings this tall in Lower East Side. In some of their windows I see other cats, lounging in the late-day sunlight or batting at curtains that try to block their views. I wonder if they’ll get to live in their apartments forever, or if maybe one day they’ll have to move away like I am because their humans stop coming home. I wish I could ask them. Maybe one of them knows what you’re supposed to do to make a human return after she’s left you.

Josh tells Laura he’s going to take the West Side Highway. We drive past a wide river, which holds more water than I ever imagined seeing in real life. There are boats on the water, and people in other kinds of strange, smaller machines that let them move on top of the water as if they were running on it. (I’ve always felt sorry for humans because they have to get all the way into water to get clean, but here are these humans doing it for no good reason!) The sidewalks near the river are a swarm of humans holding food, shopping bags, or the hands of smaller humans. One of them is throwing bread crumbs to an enormous flock of pigeons and—oh! How wonderful it would be to jump into the middle of that flock and show those silly birds who’s boss!

Laura rolls down the car window on our side, and all kinds of smells come rushing to my nose. The mixture of aromas makes me think of the time before Sarah, when I lived outside with my littermates. I can smell other cars, and birds, and humans sweating in their coats, and the scent of new, fresh dirt. It’s that time of year when the cold starts to go away, so I can smell flowers, too, and other things I can’t name because I’m too overwhelmed. I wish I could stay where we are long enough to identify every single thing I smell and give it its proper name.

And if I did get to stay here—right here on this very spot—I would never have to go to Laura and Josh’s apartment. I would never have to start the life I’m going to have to live, at least for now, without Sarah in it.

T
HE HUMAN WORD FOR SOMEONE WHO MOVES FROM ONE COUNTRY
to another is
immigrant
. I moved from Lower East Side to Upper West Side, which is obviously all the way on the opposite side of the world. And if it’s on the other side of the world, then it must be a whole different country. This means I’m an immigrant, too. (Sarah used to talk about the immigrants in Lower East Side who had to move away because apartments got expensive, just like I had to.)

TV says that immigrants sometimes get homesick. I’ve been here sixteen days so far, and I was sick for the first five of them. That’s how long it took just to get used to how different the food is in Upper West Side. I was nervous about
everything
being so different, and having different food, too, was more than I could bear. I heard Josh tell Laura that they should buy me something “better” than the “cheap” food Sarah used to feed me. (Oh, I loved that
food! I wish Sarah was here to tell Josh to buy me the food I like.) He brought something home in a can and told Laura it was “organic.” That’s a word humans use to describe food that comes from a farm instead of a factory. Except the food came in a can, and cans only come from factories, so how could it be in a can
and
be organic?

Trying to figure out what exactly was in my food that smelled so different from the good food I’m used to made my stomach sick and nervous. The only time I came out of the closet in the upstairs bedroom (which is where they put all the Sarah-boxes) was when I had to throw up. This made Josh worry and tell Laura that maybe they should take me to the Bad Place, which only made my stomach clench tighter. But Laura went out and bought a can of the food I’m used to and mixed some of it with Josh’s new food. Even though it wasn’t as good as just my regular food by itself would have been, at least it smelled familiar enough for me to eat without feeling nervous.

Now Laura mixes some of my old food with the new food every morning, except each day there’s more of the new and less of the old. I think Laura’s trying to trick me into not noticing, so that one day soon she can put down just the new food and none of the food I like. As if that would fool a cat!

When I lived with Sarah, my first feeding of the day was always a happy time. I would stand next to her at the kitchen counter and meow for her to hurry up (humans tend to dawdle when they’re feeding cats) while she emptied the food into my special Prudence-bowl. Then I’d run in excited circles in front of her feet while she carried the bowl to the kitchen table where I could eat it.

I can’t do the same thing with Laura, though. For one thing, Laura is never in a happy mood when she comes into this room with all the Sarah-boxes to put my food down. She doesn’t like it here, in a way that has nothing to do with my living in here most of the time. I can tell by the way the tiny hairs on her arms rise slightly when she enters, or just walks past the doorway. And even if I wanted to run around in circles (which I don’t), the floor in
here is so crowded from the Sarah-boxes that there isn’t room for me to run without bumping into things.

Also I can’t eat in front of Laura the way I did with Sarah, because I don’t want Laura to know too much about my eating habits. For example, I have to drink three laps of water for every five bites of food. When I lived outside, I learned that water that’s been standing still for a long time usually tastes bad. Now I like to rattle my water bowl with my right paw before I drink from it, so I can see the water move and keep it tasting fresh. Sarah understood this and only filled my water bowl up halfway. But Laura fills it all the way to the top, so some of it sloshes onto the dark, polished floor and leaves light spots on the wood when it dries. Laura’s mouth presses into a straight line when she sees those spots, and I think she’d be mad if she saw me sloshing the water bowl on purpose. Yesterday she brought home a blue rubber mat with ridiculous cartoon drawings of smiling cats all over it (is this what Laura thinks cats are
supposed
to look like?), and she put it under my food and water bowls so nothing spills onto the floor anymore. Probably it would have been easier to just stop filling the water bowl so high, but even if I had a way of suggesting this to her, I doubt she’d listen.
Laura has to do things her own way
, Sarah always says. I guess I should be grateful she still lets me eat in here, with all of Sarah’s and my old things around me, instead of insisting I eat someplace else. I don’t think I’d be able to force much down without having safe, familiar smells around me.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, which also makes me feel less healthy and alert than I used to. Sleeping is usually one of my favorite things to do, and this is something humans would be wise to learn from cats. Humans never seem to get enough sleep, and Laura and Josh haven’t napped
once
since I’ve been here! (The last few months I lived with Sarah, she was smart enough to follow my example and started napping with me more frequently.) But sleeping is harder for me now, because every time I wake up I get confused about where I am and why everything smells different. I have to remember all over again that I live with Laura and Josh now
instead of Sarah, and when I remember it hurts from my chest all the way down to my stomach. It’s gotten so I’m afraid to fall asleep because it hurts so much to wake up.