Гвен Купер - Love Saves The Day

I’ve tried watching the pigeons also, to see what Laura finds so fascinating, but all the pigeons ever do is fly around in big circles for an absurdly long time, and then come back to land on the rooftop. Naturally I hadn’t really expected to see much because pigeons aren’t even as smart as dogs , if you can believe it.

The room is silent while Laura watches the pigeons and I crouch in the closet waiting for her to leave. Upper West Side is quiet in ways that Lower East Side never was. In Sarah’s and my apartment, when the windows were open, I could hear squirrels and large bugs turning in the earth, birds singing while they nested in trees. People would walk along the sidewalk, their voices talking into tiny phones and the sounds drifting up to the third floor where Sarah and I lived. Cars drove past with music flying out of their rolled-down windows to announce that they had arrived. Like the way the man who lives in the lobby of this apartment building calls Laura and Josh to announce when their pizza or Chinese food is on its way upstairs. In Lower East Side, even when our windows were closed, you could always hear people talking in other apartments or water moving through pipes in the wall. Sometimes I would hear loud crack! sounds without being able to tell where they came from. It used to startle me until Sarah explained that it was just our building “settling.”

There are neighbors and cars and birds here in Upper West Side, too, but the street is so far below us that you can’t hear any of its sounds. I never hear people talking or playing their televisions loudly in their own apartments next to this one. Most days, after Laura and Josh have left for work, the only thing I hear is the jingle of the Prudence-tags on my red collar as I walk from room to room. Sometimes, if I’ve been sitting still for a while, I meow loudly and send the sound of it echoing from the walls and ceilings, just to make sure I haven’t gone deaf.

Sarah never liked it when things were too quiet. Maybe that’s why she played music and watched TV all the time. She would chatter and chatter at Laura whenever Laura came over to visit, afraid of the silence she would hear if she stopped because Laura never had much to say in return. Sarah told Anise once that Laura had built a wall around herself with silence. I used to imagine Sarah’s chatter going chip, chip, chip at this wall, even though I couldn’t see where the wall was. It must be different for Laura in Upper West Side, though, because she and Josh talk all the time.

Josh walks past the doorway now, in the nicer clothes and dark feet-shoes he wears to work. Laura’s own work clothes match each other a lot more than Sarah’s. Today she wears a black jacket and matching black pants with shiny high-heeled black shoes. The only thing that isn’t black is the white blouse she wears under her jacket.

Josh pauses when he sees Laura standing in front of the window and says, “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine.” Laura smiles a little and turns to face him. “Just daydreaming.”

Something about the way Josh’s eyes narrow and widen makes me think he notices more than most humans do. Whenever Laura’s talking to him, his eyes zip all over her face, and you can tell how interested he is in what she’s saying. It’s not like when Sarah’s eyes stayed focused anxiously on Laura’s face without moving, or when Laura would look off to the side while Sarah was talking to her. Sometimes, though, when Sarah would turn her eyes to watch me do something, Laura would look into her face with an expression that was hard to describe. The skin at her throat would tighten, as if she was about to say something. But by the time Sarah looked at her again, Laura’s face would be wearing its normal expression, and she would say something unimportant to Sarah like, This is good coffee .

Josh’s eyes leave Laura’s face now just long enough to look around the room once. “Where’s Prudence?”

“Hiding in the closet.” My tail swishes when I hear Laura describe what I’m doing as “hiding” instead of what it really is—waiting for her to leave already.

“She sure does love that closet,” Josh says.

“She just needs some time.” Laura plucks a strand of my fur from the sleeve of her jacket. “I don’t think she’s very comfortable yet. It doesn’t seem like she’s sleeping much.”

Josh walks toward Laura and brushes his hand gently across her cheek. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

Laura touches his hand with her own, but takes a small step back so he’s not touching her face anymore. “I’m fine,” she repeats. Then she looks down at the watch on her wrist and says, “We’re going to be late if we don’t get a move on.”

I listen to the sound of their feet-shoes going down the stairs and wonder how much longer I’ll have to live here before Sarah comes to take me back to Lower East Side.

Every morning, after Laura and Josh have left for work, I wander around the apartment trying to find a place where I can feel comfortable enough to settle into the kind of long, good sleep I need more and more desperately as the days go by. It’s hard to sleep well, though, when nothing smells the way it’s supposed to. Laura makes this problem worse because she’s always cleaning and wiping things down with foul sprays and polishes that smell the way humans think things like lemons and pine trees are supposed to smell when they grow naturally outdoors. She especially hates it when there are any crumbs or bits of food on the kitchen counters or floor. Crumbs are how you end up with roaches and mice, Laura says (although she really doesn’t have to worry about that while I’m here), and I remember Sarah saying how they always had to be careful about that in the apartment they lived in together when Laura was a child.

I crawl in and out of the Sarah-boxes, looking for a way to get comfortable among the smells I know. I press my cheeks on the things in the boxes, rubbing Sarah’s smell into me and my smell into the Sarah-things, but the boxes are too full for me to find a place to lie down and sleep. Yesterday I tried burrowing into the big Love Saves the Day bag that was lying on its side in one of the Sarah-boxes. I thought that, since it already smells like Sarah’s and my apartment, if I could dig all the way into it I could surround myself with that wonderful Sarah-and-me-together smell, as if it were a cave.

It took a while to drag all the newspapers and magazines out of the bag to make enough room for me to squeeze in. But once I got all the papers out, I realized there was something made of cold metal—completely uncomfortable to lie against—at the bottom of the bag. Even using my “extra” toes, I couldn’t pry it out. When Josh came home and saw all the old newspapers scattered on the floor, he chuckled and said, “Looks like somebody had a good time today.” I don’t know what made him think that (I’d had anything but “a good time”), but he must have liked that idea because he was smiling while he put the newspapers and magazines back together. It took him longer than it needed to, since he was reading them while he straightened everything out. He stuffed the magazines and newspapers back into the Love Saves the Day bag, then took the bag into Home Office, which is the room right next to this one. I guess that’s sensible. There are already lots of magazines in that room anyway, because Josh works for a company that makes magazines.

Now I creep slowly into Home Office, listening for footsteps—just to be sure—even though I already heard Laura and Josh leave for the day. Home Office is far too crowded with what Josh calls “memorabilia” and what Laura calls “junk” (although she smiles teasingly whenever she says this) to be a truly comfortable room for me. But there is a wonderful heated cat bed that rests on the desk in front of a small TV screen. Attached to the bed is a toy mouse on a leash, which just goes to show how little humans like Josh know about mice. In the first place the toy mouse looks nothing at all like a real mouse, and in the second place no mouse would ever let a human put a leash on it, because even mice are smarter than dogs.