Cat, Always

Three days after she is discharged from the hospital, Shannon hears me on her third-story balcony, howling, soaked to the skin from the rain. She comes out in a light blue slicker and gets down on her knees, shining her flashlight until she spots me backed into a corner under a patio chair, black as night, my eyes gleaming like yellow coals. She reaches in and pulls, and out I come, crying and gasping for air. Inside, she wraps me in a dishtowel and places me on her coffee table. Nothing about me seems abnormal: wet dark fur, long shivering tail, a scraggly mess of whiskers. But a heaviness hangs in the air near my body—she noticed it as soon as she picked me up. As if my simple presence causes the space around me to become cold and still. She feels an urge to back away, to put as much distance as possible between the two of us. Yet she never considers that she could throw me out or banish me back into the storm. That we are bonded together is now a given, and denying this would be as pointless as denying the sun permission to rise.

She calls her sister, Erica. They’ve been checking in three times a day for the past week. Erica is a paralegal at an insurance litigation firm in St. Louis, with two children named April and Arthur as well as a lousy such-and-such of a husband named Mike. To avoid talking about anything else, Shannon tells Erica about me.

“How the hell did it even get up to your balcony in the first place?” Erica asks. “That’s so random.”

“I guess so,” Shannon replies, and as she says it, she realizes it doesn’t seem random to her at all. Just the contrary—she wonders now if maybe she knew I would be out there the whole time. That’s why she was sitting on her living room couch and reading. She was waiting to hear my mewls.

“I mean, as long as it doesn’t shred the furniture,” Erica says. “Remember that crazy cat our neighbor used to have?”

“Yeah,” Shannon says. “Good point.” She points a finger at me. “My couches are innocent, leave them alone.” I give this statement the silent, baleful stare that it deserves.

“Are you sure you won’t let me come out? I’m going to keep asking no matter what you say.”

“I know. And thank you. But I just need to rest.”

“Okay, well…don’t get mad. I talked to my boss.”

“Erica.” Shannon rubs her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I asked her questions, that’s all. She said it would depend on the size of the claim. She asked how much you paid out of pocket.”

“I have no idea,” Shannon says. “There was way too much paperwork. You know how disorganized I am.”

“Well, that’s what she said. Just so you’re aware.”

Shannon is lying. Erica will never know, but I do. After she hangs up, I watch from the coffee table as Shannon walks over to her desk and pulls out an unlabeled manila folder from a drawer. She is indeed disorganized, generally, but in this one instance she has managed to save every invoice, every doctor’s note and automated appointment reminder. Egg removal and freeze storage; two weeks of painful hormone injections; the matchmaker fee from the donor service. Even the receipts for the crib and the stroller and the car seat. She had the half-formed idea that she could show the folder to the baby someday, when he was older, an elaborate documentation of how hard she worked to bring him into the world. Now she sits at her kitchen table and tallies the costs up on her old high school calculator. The total is fifty-five thousand dollars. Or—she punches in another calculation—approximately nine hundred dollars for every minute the baby drew breath.

A coldness comes over her, and she suddenly becomes aware of all the elements of her treacherous body, working away. The acids sloshing in her stomach, the cycle of air through her lungs. The stubborn pumping of her heart. A machine, an automated assembly line, which operates now beyond her control and will one day cease without her consent.

She doesn’t notice me slip out from my towel on the coffee table and patter over to her. Her legs shudder when I leap up into her lap, but she spreads her hands, allowing me to crawl in and nestle between her elbows. She remains still as my claws come out and I bury them to the nub in her skin, drawing blood, smelling the iron in the air as it runs down her forearms and pools in her palms. I watch her face tighten and clench. Her brow flickers in a steady rhythm, as if every few seconds she rediscovers the pain anew, a question she is forced to answer, over and over. Can you bear it? Yes. And what about now? Yes. And now?

*

Starting that first night I become Shannon’s permanent dark shadow. I follow her to the kitchen in the morning where she makes her coffee and out onto the balcony as she drinks it in silence. I accompany her into the bathroom and claim the bathmat while she showers and empties her bowels. One afternoon Shannon goes back into her bedroom, casting a long glance out before she closes the door, as if she had expected to meet someone here. I slink through before the door shuts and curl up on the edge of the bed while she takes off her clothes, folds them in a pile, pulls back the sheets, and miserably attempts to masturbate for the first time in two months.

When she decides she’s ready to return to work, she brings me along in an oversized canvas bag. Throughout the day I sit like a sphinx on her desk, casting my judgment upon her co-workers who dare to encroach upon her time. They wilt under my gaze and suddenly remember an important urgent meeting. “So good to have you back,” they say, before they scurry away. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you!” Everyone saw her belly, of course, before she took her maternity leave. They bought a congratulations cake from Whole Foods and surprised her in the break room.

Maura, Shannon’s closest friend at work, takes her out to lunch on her first day back. Shannon requests an extra chair from the waitress so she can set her bag on it and let me poke my head up to watch while they eat.

“Black all over,” Maura observes, holding her hand out for me to sniff. “Very goth. Or witchy.”

“Maybe both,” Shannon says.

“Hey,” Maura says, “you’re not going to quit, are you?”

“Quit?”

“I don’t know.” Maura looks from me to Shannon and then back at me. “You just have that look in your eyes. Like you’re already somewhere else. Just give me some warning first, okay? Don’t leave me alone in this place.”

Shannon laughs and sips her iced tea. Maura has ordered a cocktail, despite the daytime hour, but Shannon hasn’t gotten used to drinking again, and finds she doesn’t miss it. In fact, she will never take a sip of alcohol again.

The veterinarian is bewildered by me. On first glance she assumes I must be a kitten, or at most an adolescent. But then she examines my teeth, and my eyes, and the condition of my coat, and the conclusions are bizarrely divergent. She tells Shannon that it’s like reviewing the notes from four different case files. “Honestly, that cat could be anywhere from three months to twelve years. It’s the strangest animal I’ve ever seen.” She is uneasy with me, touching me only when necessary—but her hostility is nothing compared to mine. During my first check-up, Shannon drops me off and attempts to return to the waiting room. As she walks away from me, I let out an unhinged wail, like a haunted siren, my claws swinging savagely in the air for her. The vet tech shrieks and backs into a corner, covering her ears; the vet’s mouth twitches as she clings to the last vestiges of professionalism. In eight years of working together, they’ve never heard a creature make a sound like this. From that point forward, there is an unspoken agreement that Shannon may accompany me into the examination room. As long as she’s there, I am docile.

Shannon doesn’t name me. She calls me “Cat,” like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, even though I am nothing like the cat in that story. That cat was simply a charity case, whereas she is certain my presence is more weighty. I have responsibilities. I came to her for a reason.

*

As the months pass I allow Shannon some distance, if only temporarily. Sometimes I vanish into another room in her condo and when she stands up from the couch I ambush her, like a sudden head rush, winding through her legs as she walks to the kitchen for a glass of water. At work, I disappear from her sight for hours. Shannon will lose herself in a long phone call with a client—despite Maura’s concerns, she still loves her job and works hard at it—and when she hangs up, she’ll feel a prickling on the back of her neck and turn around to find me, a dense dark cloud watching her from atop a bookshelf. She’ll experience a pairing of shocks: first, that I’m there at all, and second, that she managed to forget about me as long as she did.

Erica finally wears Shannon down and obtains permission to visit the following summer, when school is out for break. She tows along both kids but no Mike. “Don’t even get me started on him,” she says. April has already heard about her aunt’s mysterious cat and drops to her knees as soon as she sees me, reaching for my ears. I take one look at her and dash away into the bedroom, leaving Shannon to apologize on my behalf. The younger one, Arthur, has more luck with me. He is four years old but has spoken only two words so far: “Mom” and “No.” At snacktime he takes his juice box and baby carrots and wanders away into Shannon’s kitchen where he sits alone, munching at her breakfast table. A few minutes later I appear in the doorway and creep closer, my nose in the air. Sniffing the dirt on his shoes, the sweat on his skin. He holds out his hand and I lick the saliva off his fingertips.

Shannon puts the kids in one guest bedroom and Erica in the other, on a futon. Erica hesitates at the threshold to the room, clamping her lips tight, crossing her arms and hugging herself. “Oh Shan,” she whispers. She recognizes it from the blue wallpaper in the pictures Shannon had sent her—it used to be the nursery.

“I know,” Shannon says. “But it’s okay.” She has known this exact moment would come and wants it to be over as soon as possible.

For ten days the condo vibrates with noise and chaos. Shannon brings them to the Space Needle and the fish markets, to coffee shops and waterside parks. One afternoon she brings cupcakes home as a surprise, declining to ask Erica’s permission beforehand and silently relishing her sister’s grimace as the kids ruin their appetites. In the evenings they watch Pixar movies. April cuddles up next to Shannon and tells her about each of the characters as soon as they appear on screen.

“That’s Marlin. He’s the papa fish.”

“Really? Who’s the baby fish?”

“You have to wait, Auntie. He’s coming soon.”

“Oh, okay. I’m sorry.”

Arthur is not on the couch and doesn’t participate in these conversations. He sits on the floor by himself, petting me with his meaty hands.

At first Shannon is dreading their departure. She’s not sure how she will handle returning to an empty condo, with no shouting down the hallway, nobody who is requesting a snack or another bath towel. Yet as she drives back from the airport with me curled up in the passenger seat, she feels a weight slipping from her shoulders, as if she’s shrugged off a heavy coat. At home, the two of us walk together through all the bedrooms, breathing the still lingering smell of the children. We stand in the room that was supposed to be a nursery, contemplating the blueness of the walls. I plop down on my back in the middle of the carpet, stretching my legs in every direction, and after a moment Shannon lies down next to me and follows suit, the two of us reaching out with hands and paws as if trying to swallow the entire room inside ourselves.

She has trouble sleeping. She’s always been a light sleeper, even as a child, but now she can rarely catch more than a few hours at a time. She starts herself awake at night with a gasping breath, blinking in confusion—she was just having a dream. A tumble down a well, a wave pulling her out across an empty beach. As the last remnants of the dream fade, she becomes aware of something on her stomach, so heavy that its weight seems to wrap around her torso and squeeze her from underneath. When she looks down she can only see my gleaming eyes, the rest of me reduced to a black fog in the darkness. She reaches down to stroke me and feels a painful prick on her finger, the wetness of blood. This happens occasionally when she touches me. It’s part of the exchange: I accompany her, forever, but also sometimes I hurt her, whenever I feel like it.

*

Years go by. Then decades. The first veterinarian retires to a condo in Boca Raton and Shannon finds a new one, who is equally befuddled with me. “You really don’t know his age?” he asks Shannon, flipping through the paperwork. “Even a guesstimate?” He narrows his eyes when Shannon states how long she’s had me—that’s practically impossible, given my good health and spryness. But why on earth would anyone lie about the age of their cat? Eventually, he decides it’s a mystery not worth solving. Because I have no name, the staff start calling me the Always Cat, referencing the fact that my health is always the same at every single check-up. “Who do I have before lunch?” the vet will ask, and his assistant will reply, “Oh, it’ll be quick. You’ve got the Always Cat.”

Shannon’s hair is completely gray now, though she colors it. In the mornings she stands under the vanity lighting in her bathroom and examines the gossamer thin lines that have appeared all across the skin on her arms. She is ensconced in a head manager role at her company, nine years running and as far as she can expect to go, which is fine with her. On weekends she leads a book club that she co-founded with Maura and practices Tai chi to stave off arthritis.

There’s a man in her life. There have been other men before, of course, a number she considers respectable and appropriate for a woman her age. All of them were nice; they had good steady careers; they cooked her breakfast in the morning or took her out for a night of dancing. Yet in the middle of those moments, as they were still happening, she could feel them being snatched away. Sometimes I would make my entrance via flying leap onto the dinner table, clattering dishes and spraying the floors with red wine. Other times there would be a growl and hiss in the middle of the night and suddenly I would be under the blankets, between them, pulling their heat into myself and making them shiver. None of the men said it out loud, because it would sound crazy: I am leaving you because of your cat. But she knows it’s the truth.

Preston, however, is different. For starters he’s at least a decade younger than Shannon, a fact that secretly delights her. He is also a widower. They meet on the job—he is the general counsel for one of her consulting clients—and for their first date he takes her to a movie, followed by ice cream cones and a leisurely downtown stroll. A few blocks in, he turns around and discovers me padding along behind them, ten or fifteen feet back, a dark blight on the sidewalk. My narrow yellow eyes are trained on him, never straying.

Shannon looks too. “Sorry,” she says. “That’s my cat.”

“No problem,” Preston says. At this point she’s already aware of the previous wife, and her passing. He gives her his ice cream cone to hold, then walks over to me and stoops. In a single swift motion he reaches under my belly and scoops me up and holds me to his chest.

“Okay,” he says as he returns to her, “I can take it back.” Meaning the ice cream. Then he laughs, because Shannon has pistachio green dribbling across her fingers and doesn’t realize it. She can’t look away from the sight of me pressed into Preston’s shirt collar, without wriggling or fighting. When they resume walking, she realizes that her cheeks have gone pink. Uh oh, she thinks. Be careful now. Take this slow. Yet within a month, she is spending three nights a week at his place: Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I ride along in Shannon’s overnight bag and sleep at the foot of Preston’s bed, below Shannon’s toes.

Preston has a teenage son named Michael—not to be confused with Erica’s now-ex-husband Mike, who has to be prodded by Erica to remember his kids’ birthdays and, last Shannon heard, is shacking up with a thirty-six-year-old tattoo artist in Nashville. No, this Michael is an honor student, treasurer of the drama club, “Mikey” to his family and friends. He plays the oboe. At Shannon’s suggestion, Preston sets up a casual dinner at a burger joint so that she and Mikey can get to know each other better. Shannon arrives early, fumbling nervously with her jewelry. The night goes well: Shannon asks Mikey the right questions about school, Mikey laughs at the right times at Shannon’s stories. But throughout the meal, I sit next to Shannon in the booth, and I glare at the boy, silently baring my fangs whenever he dares to look at me. About an hour in, he can’t stop himself from asking.

“Oh,” Shannon says, looking down. She had managed to forget about me, for the moment. “I hope he isn’t making you uncomfortable.”

“No, no,” Mikey says quickly. “Not at all. Is he always with you?”

“Yes,” Shannon says, stroking my black fur. “Always. He gets a little ornery sometimes, though.” She holds up one hand, pretending to shield her mouth from me, and stage whispers: “I think he might be anxious that he’s getting replaced.”

Mikey smiles; Preston nods. They both understand what it means to worry about replacing someone.

From then on, Mikey gives me a healthy distance. He doesn’t interact with me or bring me up again, after that first dinner. It bothers Shannon a little—I seem to be the one pothole in what she otherwise considers a successful relationship with her boyfriend’s son. Yet she also finds it reassuring, in a strange way. I’ve become another complication in her life, same as her chronic back pain in the mornings and her family’s history of breast cancer. I have hardened into a part of her, an aspect of her character that she cannot abandon, for better or worse, and that others must come to accept about her, however they will.

*

On the tenth anniversary of their first date, Preston proposes to her. Shannon laughs in surprise—a good-natured laugh, not a hurtful one. She’s long assumed that she will never get married, and it strikes her as frivolous and impractical now, like old men who buy sports cars. But his proposal affects her more than she expected. He cooks and arranges a candlelight dinner on his back patio, fills his yard with flowers, pours two glasses of her favorite non-alcoholic champagne. He even manages, with much effort and theatrical grunting, to get down on one knee for her.

She asks if she can think about it. He tells her to hold onto the ring for the time being, a savvy move on his part. Shannon returns to her condo—she still owns it, and likes to spend an occasional weekend here with me, when she needs some alone time—and places the ring carefully on the breakfast table, directly in the center. I leap onto a chair and together we stare down at it.

“I don’t know,” Shannon says to me, answering a question I have not asked. She has pictures of her and Preston framed on her walls now, in front of the Vatican, the Colosseum. I watch her pace slowly down the hallway, stopping in front of each one, tilting her head down to look over her glasses as she squints into her own face, examining the shape and contour of her smile.

She brushes her teeth and changes into pajamas, with the ring still in its box on the table. I wait patiently while she arranges herself in bed before I hop up and take my position on her stomach. She stares down at me, not touching me. “I don’t know,” she says again. “I just don’t know.” She starts crying, so abruptly that the tears seem to burst out sideways like sailors leaping off a sinking ship. At first I sit calmly and watch her, determined to weather out the storm, but eventually the heaving tremors of her chest seem to get to me. She lies flat on her back, covering her face with both hands, and I take this for my cue. Slowly, deliberately, I pick my way upwards towards her neck. Once more, my claws pierce her skin—a thin trail of red runs down her collarbone. I press my head under her chin, my throat against hers, and rest it there until there is a lull in her sobbing. Even in the middle of her outburst, she can perceive the weight of what’s about to happen. At last I’ve decided to open my mouth. All right, Shannon. Let’s talk.

Here is what I say to her.

Imagine yourself, accepting him. He wraps you in a hug, jokes that he would sweep you off your feet if he wasn’t afraid of breaking a hip. Erica, with her cane, walks you down the aisle and gives you away. You move permanently into his place and rent out yours to a family with a pair of bouncy toddlers—at last, that blue-wallpapered room will fulfill its purpose. Mikey has three children, all of whom call you Grandma. He becomes a constitutional law professor and during holidays he and Preston engage in healthy arguments at the dinner table over the appropriate limits on executive power. When they start to drag on too long, you pat Preston meaningfully on the wrist: Please shut up, dear, you’re boring the rest of us to death. You test-bake cookie recipes, go on more vacations, jointly amend your wills. You sweep the front walk and Preston cleans the gutters; you load the dishwasher and Preston empties it.

As for me, I find myself living on the fringes, skulking along the baseboards of Preston’s house. You spend days without seeing or thinking about me and when you finally spot me, curled up in a dusty corner, you feel a tug inside your chest, like a fishhook around one of your ribs. A whispered suggestion comes to you that by being here and feeling this way, you are somehow doing something terribly wrong. But you don’t listen. You give me a smile, bend to rub my ragged ears—careful of those knees—and walk away. You can hear me mewling softly at you, but you have a busy morning ahead of you, a whole list of errands you need to run before lunchtime. As you leave you raise your fingers to your mouth and blow the dander away.

Now the other side.

You tell Preston to come over to talk. No need to get his hopes up by implying anything more. You don’t mention that it’s because of me, though he says that he understands. And maybe, he does, but either way he’s clearly hurt. The two of you carry on for several more months, acting out the formalities, neither of you willing to take the fatal step. When he tells you he’s decided to move to Virginia to be closer to Mikey and his newborn grandson, it’s almost a relief. He does not ask if you’d be willing to come with him. He’s a lawyer, after all—he only puts a witness on the stand if he knows he’ll like the answers.

You take your vested pension from your firm and retire. You buy a house in San Diego and rent your condo to a middle-aged couple, childless, who replace the blue wallpaper with a neutral cream color and turn that room into a home gym. We adjust to our new lives in California. In the mornings you read in bed while I sit by the window looking out onto the street. Afternoons you walk along the beach for some exercise and I drift next to you in the sand, my footfalls perfectly in tandem with yours. Whenever you look down, no matter if it’s left or right or forward or behind, I am always there, gazing back up at you.

After you die, the responsibilities of handling your affairs will fall to April, now a graphic designer in Toronto, living with her wife and three labradoodles. She will fly out on a red-eye, choose the coffin, identify the charities to which people may donate in lieu of flowers. When she lets herself into your house she braces herself for a scene of spinsterly isolation, but will be pleasantly surprised to find the place neat and chic, sparsely but tastefully decorated. An avocado tree in the backyard; a gallery wall of photographs you took during your walks. In the laundry room, on the floor, will be a freshly cleaned litterbox and a bowl of cat food, but no cat to be found anywhere.

She will call Arthur, who cannot travel to the memorial due to his severe agoraphobia. “It’s strange to be here,” she’ll tell him. “It’s so quiet. And I know this sounds silly, but I swear that I keep seeing something dark running by me in the hallways.” She’ll feel a bit sorry for you—she liked Preston, the handful of times she met him, and hoped he would stick around—but spending time in your house will also be a comfort to her, a balm of sorts. She can picture your daily routine, the path you took each morning from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, tracing the footprints you’ve worn into the carpets. She can kneel and examine your bookshelf, running her finger along the creases that have formed on the spines of the books. Most of all she can imagine a little cat, trailing after you with its paws grazing your heels, meowing for pets and attention. A furry black cloud—because it is black, in April’s imagination—a reflection, a quiet presence that ensured you were never truly alone.

This is what I tell Shannon. She’s fallen asleep by now, exhausted by her own crying, her eyes swollen and her cheeks slick with sticky lines of tears. But I stay where I am, crouched over her sternum, and I continue to talk. You must choose, I tell her. Sleep now, my love, but in the morning you must choose, for the two of us have only so much time left. Don’t worry, it’ll be easy. As soon as you wake up, I promise you’ll already know.