Theresa Weir: The Girl with the Cat Tattoo

“He disappeared once before. After-” She stopped. No need to tell a stranger about David’s murder. But after David’s death, Max vanished for three days. At first she thought he was afraid of all the people coming and going, but even after things slowed down he remained aloof and skittish. She never found out where he’d been those days, but she’d always figured he’d been hiding in the basement.

Right now Max had kind of a drugged look to his eyes.

“Did you give him catnip?” Melody asked.

“I thought it would be nice. Like offering a guest a glass of wine.”

Now she noticed that Max was heavy and limp.

“I also fed him. Chicken. And canned cat food.” The man’s voice faded, as if he wondered if he’d done the right thing. “I noticed he was fat, so I thought he must have had an owner fairly recently.”

The man was giving her that look. A look she was used to seeing. Yes, she was wearing the Pippi Longstocking costume she wore for story hour, but even when she was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, people sometimes gave her that look. A person had to be what a person had to be. And maybe she’d gotten odder since David’s death. Yes, it was true. She’d admitted that to herself more than once. But when someone died you realized the importance of being true to yourself. Of being honest. The importance of being who you are. And if that meant wearing her Pippi costume home rather than changing before she left the library… well, that was fine. That was who she was. Not Pippi, but someone who wasn’t afraid to be seen in something a bit unusual.

“He’s never left before. He’s never left the backyard.”

She lifted the limp cat so she could look at his face, her hands under his armpits. “What’s going on, Max? First the peeing, now this. You aren’t acting yourself.” But really, he hadn’t acted himself since David’s death. “What kind of catnip did you give him?”

“I don’t know. I just grabbed a bag at the pet store. Does he get special catnip? Maybe you should send him out with a set of instructions so if someone finds him they’ll know what kind of catnip or caviar to give him.”

Melody envisioned a little clear tube that could attach to Max’s collar. Inside was a rolled piece of paper outlining his diet and recreational drug preference. She nodded. “Yes.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I know you were, but the idea has merit.”

The man in the doorway was looking at her in kind of a confused, woozy way-much the same expression Max had displayed earlier.

The cat grew tired of being held. He squirmed out of Melody’s arms, and his feet hit the floor with a solid thud. Then he ran through the living room and down to the basement. Seconds later Melody and her guest heard him digging in the litter box.

“I wondered about that,” the man said.

He was still standing in the doorway. Should she ask him in? She didn’t feel comfortable with that. But why wasn’t he leaving? Did he expect a reward? Yes! He’d fed Max and bought him catnip, and now that she looked closer, she could see that his jeans had been patched in a couple of places, and his shirt with its snap buttons was definitely vintage, maybe thrift shop. “Let me pay you something for your trouble.”

As soon as she spoke, she knew she’d made a mistake. His green eyes lost their softness, and she could almost see his mental retreat.

“I don’t want anything.”

He began backing away, ready to turn and leave.

“Wait!” She ran to the kitchen, opened a plastic container, and pulled out one of the cupcakes she’d baked yesterday for story time at the library. She ran back to the porch and handed him the cupcake, which he took with a baffled expression.

“Everybody loves cupcakes, right?”

“Ah, well, to be honest, I’m more of a beef jerky kind of guy.”

He held the pink cupcake between fingers and thumb. He turned it and eyed it with suspicion. “It has a cat face on it.”

“The cat is supposed to be Max, but I couldn’t get the color right. A little more blue than black. That’s a jelly bean for a nose.”

“And the whiskers?”

“Black licorice. The kids love them.”

“Max must be honored.”

“Oh, he is.”

They talked about next time. Kidding, of course. There would be no next time.

“I’ll have the right catnip.”

She laughed. “I’ll have beef jerky.”

He left with his cupcake, holding it in front of him as if it were something extremely foreign and questionable.

She realized she hadn’t gotten his name, but what did it matter?

Max made a thunderous return upstairs, skidding around corners, full of energy now that he’d visited the litter box. After entertaining Melody with a lot of crazy antics, he began to strut around the small house, going from room to room.

Melody picked him up and tried to cuddle. “What would I have done if you’d never come home?” she asked. The thought terrified her. “If he hadn’t found you? What were you thinking? Don’t ever go away again, do you hear me? Never, never!”

He wriggled out of her arms to once again roam the house, finally settling on the bedroom where he sat in the middle of the floor and yowled.

If she didn’t know better, she would swear he was looking for David.

“Max, here. I made cupcakes with your face on them.”

Cats weren’t supposed to be able to see their own image, but Melody often caught Max admiring his reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Now she bent at the waist to show him a cupcake, but even the image of himself in frosting and jelly beans failed to cheer him up. If he was still acting odd tomorrow, she’d take him to the vet. “Should I make you a cupcake out of cat food and catnip? That would be adorable, don’t you think?”

He ignored her, went straight to the front door, and scratched to get out.

It didn’t seem like he missed David. It seemed like he missed the stranger who’d brought him home.

That night, long after Max’s return, Melody’s thoughts kept going back to the stranger’s visit. With a start of surprise, she found herself recalling small details that she’d missed when he’d stood in the doorway. Almost like looking at a photograph or watching a video, picking up things you were too busy to notice during real time.

His voice.

Deep, but soft. Soothing.

His eyes. Kind, and when he smiled he’d had the most pleasant laugh lines at the corners. No beard, no mustache, but he’d needed to shave. Not the bad kind of needing to shave. The good kind.

How tall had he been? She hadn’t noticed that, so probably average. His sleeves had been folded up two turns to reveal nice forearms. Strong. Lean. But even as she struggled to remember, it wasn’t really the way he looked that captured her attention in recall, it was him. The feeling of who he was that intrigued her.

Replacing the lid on the cupcake container, she laughed softly to herself, thinking about how he’d held the treat, how foreign it had seemed to him. As she laughed, she felt Max brush up against her bare leg. He stepped on her fuzzy pink slippers, trying to get her attention.

“I’m mad at you.”

But she wasn’t. Not really.

“How could you run off like that? What were you thinking?” Was he lonely? Melody wondered. “Maybe I’ll start bringing you to work with me. How would you like that?”

He meowed.

“The kids would love you.”

He meowed again.

The day after returning Max the cat to his cupcake-baking owner, Joe heard suspicious scratching. He opened the shelter door a crack, and Max the cat shot inside and immediately began rubbing against Joe’s leg.