Love Saves the Day (7 page)

Laura’s workdays are much longer than Sarah’s ever were, and
it’s usually long after dark before she comes home to give me my nighttime feeding. Most nights Josh goes out with friends from his own work, but even so he still gets home before Laura. Sometimes he tells her that he wishes she could come home earlier, and Laura explains how her clients’ businesses would fall apart if she didn’t do as much work as she does, and then her bosses would give her even less work in the future. Getting less work sounds just fine to me, but Laura obviously thinks this would be a bad thing. It seems like the more work some humans do, the more work they
have
to do, which doesn’t make any sense. But very little of the way humans think about things makes sense to me.

The walls in this room are painted yellow, and the paint in here smells new. The floor is made of smooth wooden boards that have been polished until they shine in the sunlight like water. The first few days I was here, I thought maybe the floors really were made of water, they were so slippery. It took me days to learn how to walk here without my hind legs sliding out from under me if I ran or turned too quickly.

These same slippery wooden boards cover all the floors in the rest of the apartment, and even Laura and Josh slip a little on them sometimes. The other day Laura slid right into Josh as they were walking down the hall, and he reached out and grabbed her before she fell. I would have hated having a human grab me that way, but Laura squirmed and laughed. She laughs at a lot of the things Josh does. Sometimes he crumples a paper napkin in his hand, brings his hand to his mouth, and then coughs—making the crumpled paper napkin fly out.
Oh, excuse me
, he’ll say.
I don’t know how that happened
. It looks ridiculous to me, but Laura always rolls her eyes and laughs. This hardly seems fair. When
I
cough up a hairball for real, Laura doesn’t roll her eyes affectionately while she cleans it up and say,
You’re so funny, Prudence!

This room is mostly empty aside from the Sarah-boxes and four dark brown wooden chairs with black leather seats, which live stacked up in one corner. I tried marking just
one
of the chairs in this room with my claws the way I’d marked our couch in Lower East Side (all I wanted was to make this room feel more like my
own), but Laura saw me and said, “
No!
No, Prudence!” in a sharp voice. I don’t see why she had to get so excited. She could have calmly said something like,
Prudence, marking chairs is bad manners in Upper West Side
, and I would have understood her just as well. Maybe even better.

I don’t really need the chairs anyway, though, because the two big windows have sills for me to lie on while I look at things outside. This apartment is so high up that from the windows I can see all kinds of things I never thought about before. Like what the tops of buildings look like. Some of them have black tops, and some of them are white, and some have little brick areas where humans grow flowers and sit outside in the sunshine. A few of the roofs have these giant, pointy-topped round things I once heard Josh call “water towers.” All around us is more sky than I’ve ever seen, and when the sun is very bright and the sky is very blue, I see little squiggly things behind my eyes if I stare at it too long.

If Sarah lived here with me, she would probably carry one of those chairs from the corner next to the window, so the two of us could sit and look out at the sunshine together. She’d hum and stroke my fur while I sat in her lap, and maybe she’d even sing the Prudence song to me until I fell into a deep sleep.

But I’m alone in here almost all the time, and the only music anybody has sung to me since I left Lower East Side is the memory-music Sarah sings inside my head.

I hear a key turning in the lock of the front door downstairs, and from all the jingling I know it’s Josh. Laura must always have her key ready as soon as she steps out of the elevator. I never hear her jingling keys around, looking for the right one, before she comes in.

The sound of Josh’s feet-shoes comes up the stairs, and the faint scent of his cologne that smells so much stronger in the mornings drifts past as he walks toward his and Laura’s bedroom. After he changes out of his work clothes into socks and sweat-clothes, he spends a little while clackety-clacking on the scratching post in Home Office. Then he goes downstairs to listen to music in the
living room while he waits for Laura. I hear the muffled sounds of it coming up through the floor of my room.

Most of Josh’s music lives on small silvery disks that go in a different kind of machine than the table Sarah uses to make her black disks sing. He also has a few black disks, although not nearly as many as Sarah. Even Sarah didn’t have more than a few when I first adopted her. Her posters and black disks and the special “DJ” table she plays them on were living by themselves for years and years in a place called Storage. It was only after I’d been living with Sarah for nearly two months that she went out one day and brought them home.
It was you, you know
, Sarah murmured later, when we were on the couch listening to the black disks together.
You brought my music back. I thought I’d lost it forever
. I rolled onto my side and purred, because I could tell from Sarah’s voice and hands how much love there was between us in that moment. But I didn’t know what I’d done to give Sarah back her music. Maybe I’ll do whatever it was again. Maybe (if I have to be here that long) in a couple of months Laura and Josh will drive out to Storage one day and come back with hundreds of their own black disks.

Josh likes music almost as much as Sarah. If he’s listening to music and Laura is in the room, he’ll pucker his lips and put his hands on his hips and pretend to strut around. He looks pretty foolish when he does this, but it always makes Laura laugh. Or he’ll take Laura’s hand and put his arm around her waist, and the two of them dance for real. It makes me wonder if Sarah would have liked to have another human to dance with when she used to listen to music in our old apartment.

Sometimes lately, because I haven’t slept well in so long, I get confused about what’s really happening
now
and what’s a memory or part of a dream I might be having if I were asleep. A breeze from the open window in my room makes the white curtains move. When its shadow on the opposite wall moves, too, I think for a moment that I see Sarah here in this room, bending down to stroke the fur of my back and saying,
What should we listen to tonight, Prudence?

I stretch for a long moment, pushing my front paws all the way out in front of me and arching my back. My tail stretches, too, pointing straight up and curling at the tip. I have to get up and move around, or else I’ll just lie here not really sleeping and not really awake, thinking I see Sarah everywhere. The hurt I feel when I remember Sarah
isn’t
here starts to spread from my chest to my belly again. Trying to make the hurt leave me alone, I stand up and walk toward the stairs.

I used to wish Sarah and I lived together in a house with stairs, but it turns out stairs are tricky if you’re not used to them. I’m trying to figure out if it’s better to move each of my four legs individually to the step above or below me, or if I should move both of my front paws at the same time and then sort of hop with my back ones. I try to practice the stairs when Laura and Josh are out of the apartment so they won’t see me. That would be embarrassing.
Poor Prudence doesn’t know how to use stairs!
they might say, and chuckle at my ignorance. Two days ago, I happened to walk into Josh and Laura’s bedroom and saw the two of them rolling around on top of each other in the bed, making odd noises. It was the least dignified thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. I have no intention of making myself look equally foolish in front of them.

There’s a spot exactly halfway down the stairs where the floor gets flat for a little way before turning back into steps. When Laura and Josh are home, I can still practice walking up and down the top half of the stairs and then rest on the flat spot, peeking around the wall to watch what they’re doing in the living room.

The smallest part of the living room is the dining room next to the kitchen, which has a long table of dark wood and four matching chairs that look exactly like the ones that live stacked up in my room. The only time I’ve seen Laura and Josh in the dining room is when they pay bills and talk about money. Laura worries that they’re not putting enough into savings, and Josh says Laura worries about money too much. Once I heard Laura tell Josh he only thinks that because he doesn’t know what it’s
really
like to have no money at all.

Even though this apartment is much bigger than Sarah’s and mine, Josh and Laura don’t have nearly as much stuff in it as we did. There’s nothing hanging on the walls, and none of the “knickknacks” Sarah loves so much, like beautiful little glass bottles or the prisms she hung in our windows to make the sunlight sparkle and dance in different colors. Sarah used to keep plants, including a special kind called “cat grass” that was good to eat when my belly was upset with me. Here there’s only one plant that lives in a corner of the living room, and it’s made out of silk.

There are some framed photographs on shelves—mostly pictures of Josh at different ages, doing things like standing outside in the snow (which is just cold water!) holding up a pair of big wooden sticks or on a stage somewhere with lots of other young-looking humans, wearing funny costumes. There aren’t nearly as many pictures of Laura, and none from when she was younger. There are a few of Laura and Josh together on the day they got married, and also from their honeymoon in a place called Hawaii. (There’s a lot of water in the background of the honeymoon pictures, so Hawaii must be near that river we drove past on our way to Upper West Side.)

There’s also one from their wedding day of just Laura and Sarah. Laura’s wearing a plain, short white dress with a little white jacket and holding a cluster of long, beautiful white flowers. Sarah’s dress is light purple. This is my favorite photograph, because I remember when I helped Sarah decide that this was the outfit she should wear to see her daughter get married. It makes me happy to look at it, even though Laura and Sarah don’t really look comfortable, posed stiffly, each with one arm around the other.

Now Josh stands up from the couch and walks past the shelves with the photographs on his way into the kitchen. I hear the sound of heavy pans being jostled free from a cabinet, and after a few moments the smell of cooking floats toward the stairs. It smells like Josh is making eggs, although that can’t be right. Josh only makes eggs on Sunday mornings, and Laura goes out to get bagels for them to eat with the eggs. Laura says Josh makes the best
scrambled eggs ever, although I wouldn’t know because nobody’s thought to offer me any the way Sarah would if she’d cooked something for breakfast.

It’s always bad when things happen in a different way than they’re supposed to, but when the thing that’s different is with your food, that’s the worst of all. I think maybe, even though she likes Josh’s eggs, Laura is going to be upset when she comes home and finds out Josh is making them on a Tuesday night instead of a Sunday morning. But what actually happens when Laura finally comes through the front door, and then walks into the kitchen to see what Josh is doing, is that she says, “What’s all this?” in a voice that sounds surprised and pleased.

“Breakfast for dinner,” Josh says. “I had a jones for scrambled eggs. And I thought it might help you sleep. You usually go right back to bed after breakfast on Sundays.”

“I don’t go back to bed
alone
.” Laura isn’t laughing, exactly, but her voice sounds like she’s smiling.

“Hey, I’ll try anything if it helps you relax.”

“Thanks,” Laura says, in what Sarah would call a “dry” voice. Then I hear the wet, puckering sounds Josh and Laura make when they put their mouths together. After a moment, when the sounds stop, Laura says in a quieter voice, “You don’t have to worry about me, Josh. I keep telling you. I’ve just got a lot on my mind, with work and everything.”

There’s a clatter of plates and silverware, and then the sounds of Laura and Josh walking from the kitchen to the living room couch, where I can see them again. The two of them talk about what they did at work all day while they eat. When the music that was playing stops, Josh walks across the room to where his music lives. This time he takes out a black disk instead of one of the small silvery ones.

The song that starts playing sounds like one Sarah and Anise used to listen to the two or three times a year when Anise came over. Something about a “personality crisis.” The two of them would act silly, singing into things like hairbrushes and empty
paper towel rolls as if they were the microphones that singing humans on TV use. Anise has a nice singing voice (even though her regular speaking voice is deep and scratchy), and I can tell Sarah likes Anise’s singing better than her own. After all, Sarah says, Anise is famous for her singing.

Humans and cats must like different things in singing voices, because I think nobody has a nicer voice than Sarah. Anise would always say how Sarah should have tried being a singer professionally. I would rise up on my hind legs, butting my head against Sarah’s hand because it made me so happy when she sang. And Anise would bend down to scratch behind my ears the way I like and say,
Look—even Prudence agrees with me!

But Sarah says she never had that Thing Anise has that lets her perform on a stage in front of other people. That’s what she liked about being a DJ, she says, and about the record store she opened after she stopped being a DJ. She could still give people music without having to stand in front of them.
And anyway
, Sarah would say to Anise,
I was never as talented as you
.

All I hear for a few moments is this song and the sound of one fork scraping across a plate. Josh is still eating, but Laura’s fork is hanging halfway between her plate and her mouth. Then Josh says, “Is everything okay?”