Love Saves the Day (39 page)

For all of Laura’s young life, before all the things that had gone wrong between her and her mother, the most comforting thing in
her small world had been the sound of her mother singing. She reached down to stroke Prudence’s head, and suddenly she heard a voice that sounded like her mother’s issuing from her own throat.
“Dear Prudence,”
she sang.
“Open up your eyes …”
Then she stopped, the threat of more tears choking her throat shut. She imagined her mother standing next to her, holding her hand and adding her voice to Laura’s, the way they’d sung together in that music studio when Laura was a child. Laura sang now, and could have sworn that she heard her mother’s voice singing with her here in this room.
“The wind is low, the birds will sing … that you are part of everything …”
Then Laura bent to kiss Prudence’s forehead at the spot where her tiger stripes formed a little “M” above her eyes. “Dear, dear Prudence,” she whispered. “Won’t you open up your eyes?” Laura’s voice was her own again. Desperate now, she pressed her lips to Prudence’s ear and murmured, “Come on, little girl. My little love. Open your eyes for me.”

And Prudence did.

T
HERE
’
S A TALL GREEN PLANT THAT LIVES NEXT TO THE LIVING ROOM
window leading to the fire escape. The sunlight through the window today is brighter than usual, so bright I have to squint my eyes. That doesn’t make the game any less fun, though. This is Sarah’s and my favorite game.

Sarah is walking from the bedroom to the kitchen. She passes my hiding place inside the plant, and the rustling sound of leaves as I crouch lower makes her head start to turn. The movement is so small only a cat would notice it. I know she knows I’m here, but she keeps walking.

Just as she passes the plant, I leap out and pounce on her ankles. Sarah pretends to be very surprised by this. She thinks I don’t know that she knew I was about to pounce, but pretending is what makes this game fun for both of us. Now my paws are wrapped around her right ankle, my teeth on the skin of her heel (although
I don’t press down in a
real
bite). “Oh no!” she cries. “It’s the deadly attack kitty!” I switch and wrap my paws around her left ankle. But Sarah knew I was going to do this, because she’s already bending to her left to scoop me up in her arms. “Who’s the vicious kitty?” she says, in the voice she only uses when she’s talking to me. “Who’s my brave little hunter?” She brings my face closer to hers, and I press my forehead against hers. She knows I don’t like being held in the air for very long, though, so she puts me back down on my own legs. She shakes off some of my fur that got onto her hands and says, “I think somebody could use a good brushing. What do you think?” From a drawer in the kitchen, she takes out the special brush that’s only used for brushing my fur, and the two of us settle on the couch with me in her lap.

The brush-bristles against my skin feel nice, and Sarah’s hand following the movement of the brush down my back feels nicer. Sarah’s smell is even more wonderful in my nose than it usually is.
I knew you weren’t really dead!
I think.
I knew you’d come back to me!
I don’t know why I think that, though. Whoever said anything about Sarah being dead?

“Don’t leave,” Sarah says. “Please don’t leave us.” Her voice sounds different, a little deeper than normal maybe, and I wonder why she’s asking me to stay. Where would I go? And why is she saying
us
? There’s only one of her. When I look up at her, her eyes are full of sorrow. The skin of her forehead puckers just a little above the inner corners of her eyebrows. But the brush feels so comfortable, and Sarah smells so warm and safe, that my eyes start to close before I can think any more about that. I feel a purr start in my throat, spreading its warmth into my chest.

That’s when Sarah starts to sing. Her singing voice also sounds different, like maybe it’s the voice of someone I’ve heard talk before, but who I’ve never heard sing. This is strange, because singing is almost the first thing I ever heard Sarah do. The voice is Sarah and not-Sarah at the same time. Still, it’s a voice I know I could listen to forever and be happy. It sounds the way love feels.

Prudence
, the voice sings,
open your eyes
. I don’t want to open them, though. I’m too comfortable and sleepy. But the voice keeps
singing and saying,
Dear, dear Prudence … won’t you open up your eyes? My little love
. It’s so insistent that I have no choice. I have to fight with my eyelids, which have become heavy and stubborn. There’s a powerful light over my head, hurting my eyes and pushing my eyelids down. I finally pry them apart, and it takes a moment to focus and see things around me clearly.

When I look up, it’s not Sarah’s face I see. It’s Laura’s.

“Dr. DeMeola!” Laura cries. “She’s awake!” The blurry shape of a familiar-looking woman drifts through my vision, somewhere behind where Laura is standing. Laura’s smiling, and there are tears in her eyes. I don’t realize I’m on my side until I feel her hand start to rub gently behind my right ear, the one that isn’t pressed against whatever it is I’m lying on. There are bad smells in this place—scary smells—but Laura’s Laura-smell is stronger than they are as she continues to stroke behind my ear and down the length of my body. I try to lift my backside the way I usually do when my back is scratched like this. But my body won’t move when I tell it to, so I blink once at her, slowly, instead.

Laura brings her mouth close to my ear and murmurs, “Don’t scare us like that again, little girl. We need you to stay with us. Can you do that, Prudence?” Her eyes look into mine, and I recognize her expression. It’s the one I used to see on her face sometimes when she looked at Sarah. I used to wonder what that look meant, but now I know. Her eyes are filled with love.

My throat is raw and scratchy. It feels like something bad happened to it. But I’m still able to answer with a faint
Mew
.

“Good,” Laura murmurs, and she kisses my forehead.

From the cage they make me sleep in (I have to sleep in a cage!), I can smell nervous cats all around me. They stand and pace, hoping to find some warm new corner or a way to get out they haven’t discovered already. Their movements disturb the air and make my whiskers tickle. At night, when most of the humans who work here have left, some of the cats cry out, wanting their own humans to
come and take them home. But I never cry. Sarah is never coming back for me.

There are whole chunks of pink skin showing on my front paws, where my beautiful white fur used to be. One of the stabbing people here shaved the fur off so they could attach dripping tubes. Sarah was the first one who ever said my white paws looked like human socks. Now, with so much of the fur missing, they don’t look like socks at all. I lick and lick at the spots where fur is supposed to be and think,
This is what happens when the human you love dies. Pieces of you go missing
.

But Laura will always come back for me. I saw it in her eyes when she sang to me and woke me up. When I think about Laura singing the
Dear Prudence
song, the hole in my chest from missing Sarah begins to fill. There’s something growing there. Soon it will fill up the whole space.

For three days I’m forced to live here, and every day Laura and Josh come to visit me. A woman with curly hair unsticks my front paws from the tape that fastens dripping tubes into them, and then she wraps me in a strange blanket that doesn’t even smell like me and carries me into one of the smaller rooms where Sarah brought me once a year to get stabbed with needles. The room smells like the metal of the high table where needles get stuck into cats. It also smells like Laura and Josh fresh from being outside, sweating slightly under their coats and forced to stand too-close when the stabbing lady comes in to tell them how I’m doing. She says I’m not really sick, that they’re making me stay here “just as a precaution.” A precaution against what? It’s being locked in a room with sick cats all the time, away from my own food and special Prudence-bowls, that’s going to make me sick if anything will. I try showing Josh and Laura how little they should trust the stabbing lady by hissing at her every time she comes near me, but that just makes them laugh and say things like,
Look how feisty Prudence is! She’ll be better in no time, won’t you, little girl?

I recognize this stabbing lady—she’s the same one who once agreed with Sarah that my front paws looked like socks. Josh keeps standing, but Laura sits cross-legged on the floor next to me and strokes my back while I lick. “It’ll grow back, Prudence,” she says gently. “It’ll all grow back.” She hums the
Dear Prudence
song while she pets me. Her humming voice sounds so much like Sarah’s that I stop licking my paws and walk into her lap, sitting on my haunches and pressing the whole side of my face against her chest. Her arms come around me and one hand rubs the good spot underneath my chin until I purr.

“Sweet girl,” she murmurs. “Who’s my little love?”

Sarah’s eyes looked sad in my dream because she knew she had to stay in that place, without me, just like I have to stay here without her. But Laura’s eyes smile as she looks down at me now. “You can come home with us tomorrow,” she says, as her fingers keep finding good places beneath my chin. I know now that “home” is wherever I live with Laura.

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to get into my carrier than I am the next morning when Josh and Laura come to pick me up. The humans at the Bad Place remember to put my red collar and Prudence-tags back on me before I leave, and there’s no more tape on my front paws. Just the faintest little fuzz of white on the pink skin. Even from inside my carrier and cuddled up with the old Sarah-shirt that Laura put in here with me, the air outside feels cold and scrapes against my furless spots. It hasn’t rained since the day I got sick, but the little patches of dirt around the trees in the sidewalk still smell damp. This is the time of year when leaves change color and start to fall off trees. Sometimes Sarah would come home with red and orange leaves clinging to her hair or coat, and she would put them on the floor for me so I could roll around on them while they made crunching sounds and broke up into little pieces. The pain in my belly when I think of Sarah flares again, until I look through the bars of my carrier and see that Laura and Josh are holding hands.

Laura is the one who holds my carrier as we leave the Bad Place. I’ve been living high in the air in Upper West Side for so
long, I’d almost forgotten how things look and smell down here on the streets. Laura must have stepped right near where a pigeon is sitting, because one flutters up past the bars of my carrier with a gurgling coo. I can hear the squeaks of mice, too high-pitched for humans to notice, burrowing into soft dirt, and cars speeding by on the streets. A woman walks quickly past, talking into a tiny phone. Her voice goes up at the end of every sentence even though it doesn’t sound like she’s asking any questions.
So I said to him? I was, like, if you think you can treat
me
that way? You’ve got the wrong girl
.

The bricks from the buildings here smell older than they used to, and I can’t decide if that’s because I’ve been away from Lower East Side for so long, or because I’ve gotten used to the newer, bigger buildings in Upper West Side. I realize that I’m not an immigrant anymore—that Upper West Side is the country where I live now. Laura stops in front of one building and says to Josh, “This is where my mother’s record store used to be.” The vibrations from her chest when she speaks travel down her arm and make the walls of the carrier hum. The shop she points to has tiny clothes in the window, probably for human infants.

“This is a nice block,” Josh says.

“It always was. The guy who used to own this place sold chess sets he made”—Laura points to another window—“and there was a candle shop next to that.” Her arm sweeps back, to her left. “And down there, on Second Avenue, was Love Saves the Day.” She’s silent for a moment. “I think I heard it’s a noodle place now.”

Josh puts an arm around her shoulders, bringing my carrier closer to the side of her leg. “Did you want to pick up some lunch there?”

“Nah,” she tells him. “Let’s get something Prudence likes. Maybe tuna sandwiches.”

They walk to the end of the block, and Josh puts his arm in the air until a yellow-colored car pulls over next to us. All three of us get into the backseat and Laura settles my carrier onto her lap. I think about tuna sandwiches the whole way home.

It’s funny how a place you know well can feel so different when you come back after a long time. Part of it is realizing how bad I smell now (like the Bad Place) after smelling all the things at home with my regular Prudence-smell. But the whole apartment looks bigger in some places and smaller in others, and just
odd
in general. Maybe it was being with Sarah in our old apartment while I was sleeping that makes everything around here seem different than it used to, and like I was away for longer than I was. Still, it’s good to be home. First I spend long moments re-marking my scratching post (I didn’t have anything to scratch on at the Bad Place). My Prudence-bowls are filled with food, exactly where I left them. I’m even happy (only for a moment) to see that awful blue mat with the fake-happy cats resting beneath them. When I jostle the water bowl, it’s because I can only drink moving water, not because I’m angry about the mat anymore.