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I Choo-Choo-Choose You!

I Choo-Choo-Choose You!

Gwen Cooper

BenBella Books, Inc.

Dallas, TX

Copyright © 2018 by Gwen Cooper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

BenBella Books, Inc.

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e-ISBN: 978-1-946885-83-8

Distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand www.tworiversdistribution.com

I Choo-Choo-Choose You!

Pandora (“Pandy” for short) was a purebred Siamese and could only be described—although this phrase wasn’t in common use twenty years ago—as a hot mess.

Some of her problems were obvious even to a casual observer. For one thing, Pandy was morbidly obese. She had all of a Siamese cat’s fine-boned delicacy of frame from the shoulders up and the hips down. But her midsection carried an excess seventeen pounds of pure lard. The tiny, porcelain-doll perfection of her head and neck made for a jarring contrast with the enormous belly—ballooning out on each side of her body—that swayed ponderously as she walked. Watching Pandy stroll about the house always made me think of a song popular on Miami dance radio at the time, which admonished, Shake it . . . don’t break it . . .

I loved Pandy dearly, but I was probably the only one who did, aside from Maggie, my boyfriend Jorge’s mother. She didn’t do a very good job of keeping her hindquarters clean, bless her heart. (Pandy, that is—not Jorge’s mother.) Whether this was because her girth hampered her ability to reach around and get in there, or because Pandy had given up in some fundamental way, was unclear. But every upward flick of her tail revealed an incriminating brown ring, as permanently fixed as if it were tattooed to her fur, no matter how often or assiduously Maggie tackled Pandy with the Baby Wipes.

Pandy would unerringly zero in on the visitors and houseguests who were the least interested in cats, and when—after she’d repeatedly pawed at their legs for attention—the hapless visitors would finally relent and try to pet her, she would lash out violently, leaving confusion, claw marks, and little tufts of yellow Siamese fur in her wake as she fled for refuge under Jorge’s parents’ bed. And woe betide the unsuspecting cat lover who attempted a friendly scritch behind Pandy’s ears and ended up pulling back a bloodied hand for their trouble.

At seven years old, Pandy still suckled daily at the long-dry teats of her mother, Persephone (aka “Persy”), from whom she’d never been separated a day in her life. This, according to Maggie, was the true source of what was alternately referred to as “Pandy’s quirks,” “Pandy’s problems,” or, perhaps most accurately, “Pandy’s neuroses.”

“Cats aren’t supposed to live with their mothers their whole lives,” Maggie would say. And then she’d add, “Nobody is, really.”

In human years, Pandy would have been somewhere in her mid-forties. I thought about Grey Gardens and The Glass Menagerie, and the entire literary pantheon of bitter or dotty middle-aged spinsters who’d never left their parents’ homes—and then I tried to imagine what I might be like if I were still living with my own mother when I was in my forties.

“Definitely not,” I’d agree, with a shudder.

I was twenty-three and had just moved in with Jorge, my first serious relationship post-college. We were living in a small one-bedroom apartment in a two-story low-rise owned by one of Jorge’s uncles, nestled deep in the warren-like side streets of Miami’s Little Havana. The people living all around us had emigrated from the mountains of Cuba, and they kept chickens in the postage-stamp backyards of their tiny, ranch-style homes. It was an odd (and often irritating) thing to be living in Miami in the 1990s—among bustling traffic and construction and silvery skyscrapers gleaming on the horizon—yet wake up at five thirty every morning to the sound of roosters crowing twenty yards away.

My own family were also “animal people.” My father liked to spend time at the stables where Miami’s mounted police kept their horses, and the puppies we adopted came from these animal-loving officers, inevitably with some heart-rending back story: Misty, a petite German shepherd/whippet cross, had been thrown from a moving car on I-95; Casey, a yellow pit bull/Lab mutt, had been used as bait in a dog-fighting ring. And so on.

We made much of these dogs, conspicuous even in a neighborhood of pampered, pedigreed pooches as a family who “spoiled their dogs rotten.” Often we came home to find that one or another of our neighbors’ dogs had escaped from his own yard and was camped out on our front porch. We would joke that the neighborhood dogs must have some kind of communications network, a way of telling each other that while they all might be treated well, at the Coopers’ a dog lived like a king! We laughed about it, but I do think we were always trying—with years of love and slavish attention—to make up for those early traumas our dogs had suffered.

I’d always imagined that I would get a dog of my own when I finally moved into my first “grown-up” apartment. But the place Jorge and I shared was very small, without so much as a proper patch of grass for a dog to run and play on—and, as young adults striving to build our careers, the hours Jorge and I worked were long. I was running a youth outreach program that promoted community volunteering among middle- and high-school students. Jorge was a production assistant on commercial video shoots. When we weren’t working, we were often at after-hours networking functions, trying to make the connections that would give us the next leg up. Nothing in our lifestyles seemed conducive to canine guardianship.

Still, as far as I was concerned, a home wasn’t a home at all if there weren’t any animals living in it.

The highlight of my week was always Sunday, when we’d go out to brunch with Jorge’s parents and then back to their house to while away the afternoon until Sunday dinner. It was a joy to spend time with Pandy and Persy and Olympia—a slender, auburn-hued Abyssinian—along with the family dog, a coal-black pit bull named Targa. Targa was more utterly gaga over humans than any dog I’ve known before or since. In fact, Jorge’s parents’ house had been robbed three times (such was Miami in the ’80s and early ’90s) while Targa was in it—and, according to the one intruder the police had eventually caught, Targa had done little to foil the burglars beyond licking them ecstatically and bringing over her toys.

Targa may have loved people, but she hated all three cats with a deep and murderous hatred. I never witnessed any of it firsthand, but I heard stories of close calls and surprise attacks that very nearly ended in bloodshed. Jorge’s parents never left Targa and the cats together unsupervised when they were out, and even when they were home they always kept Targa’s muzzle close at hand.

The feeling was more than mutual. The cats delighted in finding little ways to goad Targa when they thought no one was looking. Pandy, in particular, would take malicious glee in peeing on Targa’s dog bed the moment Targa left it unattended to play in the backyard.

As I said, many of Pandy’s problems in life were apparent at a first glance. That Pandy was a menace to new people, however—or even to people she already knew; Jorge, his father, and his sisters bore their share of Pandy-inflicted war wounds—was something I didn’t know initially. I didn’t find out for months, until Maggie confided it to me one afternoon in a kind of shocked undertone, upon finding a blissed-out Pandy, purring and unconscious, draped across my legs. By that point, Pandy and I were already deep into the early stages of our four-year love affair.

Pandy and I fell for each other instantly, from the first day we met.

Jorge’s family were a bookish clan, and I was a reader myself. Many a Sunday would find me lounging in one of the comfy chairs in his parents’ living room, nose buried in a novel while Pandy sprawled on my lap or my chest, belly fat oozing out and around until her body was an enormous perfect circle atop which perched a teeny-tiny cat’s head.

Her weight should have made her an unwieldy lap cat; the body heat generated by her bulk should have made her a sweaty, uncomfortable burden on a humid Miami day. But something about us just meshed, and neither of those things ever bothered me. Pandy’s rumbling purr was a deep, intensely happy vibrato that sank into my chest and radiated through my entire body as I absentmindedly stroked her back or rubbed her chin in between turning book pages. If I got too immersed in my novel and neglected to pet her for more than a few minutes, Pandy would bonk her head against my hand or paw gently at my shoulder until petting was resumed. My fingers seemed to know instinctively how to find just the right scratching spots that would make her purr deepen, her half-closed eyes turned to my own in a gaze of such melting adoration that it could break your heart.

As for me, I sometimes felt that I hadn’t known true serenity until those Sundays with Jorge’s parents, when the late-afternoon sunlight would slant through the windows and transform the fur of Pandy’s rising and falling chest, lying across my own, into a gleaming mound of golden flax.

Pandy’s instant affection for me—unprecedented in the annals of Jorge’s family lore—became something of a tall tale among them, the story about The One Person Pandy Liked. It was heady stuff for a budding, inexperienced ailurophile.

You heard all the time about people who one day discovered some latent talent or ability they’d never known they had. Maybe I was one of those people. Maybe I had this previously untapped, deeply instinctive understanding of cats. Maybe I intuitively “got” cats in a way that other people didn’t.

Maybe I was secretly a cat genius.

And so, when one of Jorge’s sisters announced one Sunday that her mechanic had found a litter of four-week-old kittens, and did any of us know somebody who might want them, I didn’t hesitate before claiming one for myself.

* * *

It was another two days before Jorge’s sister could drive out to her mechanic’s garage to pick up the kitten, and I was in a fever pitch of excitement the entire time. For two nights, I tossed in bed with the restlessness of a ten-year-old on Christmas Eve. A KITTEN is coming! I’m getting a KITTEN!

I went to the pet store for a litter box and kitten food, and came home with a toy-filled shopping bag so large that I struggled to carry everything up the stairs to our apartment. I’d been an easy mark for the enthusiastic store owner, who’d probably closed up shop and gone home for the day after I left. (I imagined her calling her husband and saying, Good news, Herb! We can go back to imported wine!) I’d bought miniature mice by the dozen: some made from felt, some from plastic or sisal rope, some that rattled or squeaked when shaken, some with hidden compartments you could stuff with catnip. I’d gotten a toy that consisted of a circular sisal-rope base with a large metal spring jutting up from it vertically, at the end of which was attached a belled cluster of feathers. There was another circular toy, this one a plastic wheel with a ball trapped inside and slats through which a cat could shove a paw to push the ball around and around in an endless loop. And I’d bought balls in every color of the rainbow: some made of cloth and plush with stuffing, some that whirred and sparkled when pushed, others made from candy-colored plastic. Last but not least, I’d bought a toy worm made from three puffs of cottony material with a little bell attached to one end.

I spent the hour before the kitten arrived arranging this bounty strategically around the apartment as Jorge looked on, until our home resembled a kitty day-care center through which a dozen or so cats might troop at any moment, demanding entertainment.

“They always end up being more interested in the bag the toys came in than the toys themselves, you know,” Jorge told me.

I knew that Jorge had far more experience with kittens than I did (I having no experience at all). Still, I silently pooh-poohed him. I knew the kitten would be delighted with this avalanche of playthings—would love the toys not only for their own sakes, but also because of all the love for her and excitement at her arrival that they represented. And we would be so much more than cat and owner, this kitten and I. From the very first look—from the very first moment—she and I would form an instant, unbreakable bond and be the best and closest of friends forever. These toys were merely the first step in that process.

At the very least, they certainly brightened up the place. Jorge and I didn’t have much in the way of décor in those early days of living together—just a futon, battered coffee table, and highly weathered entertainment center in the living room; a hand-me-down circular plastic table and three chairs in the kitchen area; and another futon along with an ancient dresser in the bedroom. I didn’t want the kitten to look around and wonder if maybe her luckier littermates had gone to better, fancier homes, while she’d drawn the losing ticket in the lottery of life.

Cats, I’d been given to understand, could be very judgmental creatures.

I’d barely finished arranging everything just so when the doorbell rang and Jorge’s sister entered. She toted a kitten-sized lavender plastic carrier, across the top of which a piece of masking tape with SCARLETT written in black marker had been affixed.

One of the things I’d been looking forward to most was getting to name the kitten. I’d never been the one to name a pet before—with our dogs, that privilege had always fallen to my parents—and I’d seen naming rights as one of the adult prerogatives I would now assume with a cat of my very own.

“She was so dehydrated when the mechanic found her that she kept fainting,” Jorge’s sister explained. “So he named her Scarlett.”

Any disappointment I may have felt upon learning that someone else had already named my kitten dissolved, along with my heart, upon hearing this. The poor little thing! I knew I could easily rename her. Young as she was, she wouldn’t know the difference. But this name was so closely tied to her origins in life—and the hardships she’d endured before being rescued—that it seemed as if changing it would also erase something important and essential about her.

Scarlett, then, she would be.

Jorge’s sister had placed the carrier on the floor at my feet, and I knelt before it, fumbling with the clasp until it sprang open. A tiny black nose poked its way out, quickly followed by the head and body of what was probably the smallest living creature I’d ever been close to.

She was a gray-and-black tiger-striped tabby, with a white belly and chest, white chin, and white “socks” on her lower legs and feet. I marveled at her miniature perfection—the little pink pads of her paws; the tiny, nearly imperceptible tufts of fur sprouting from the tips of her ears; the wee, feathery whiskers on each side of her nose, as if an adult cat’s features had been rendered into something small enough to fit in a dollhouse. The next time I went to Jorge’s parents’ house, only a few days later, their cats would seem to me almost monstrous in size.

Fully emerged from the carrier, the kitten looked at me with wide blue eyes (which would turn a yellowish green in only a few weeks’ time). “Hey, Scarlett,” I said. I knew I must look like a giantess to her, so I made my voice soft. “Come to your new mama.”

This was the moment I’d been waiting for. My mind soared off on flights of quasi-poetic fancy that even now, some twenty years later, I’m embarrassed to remember. This would be a moment of epiphany—a moment when the workings of Destiny (with a capital D) would be revealed. That I was about to publicly assume my previously secret identity as “Gwen Cooper, Cat Genius” was a given. Jorge and his sister—and even I, myself—would see that my immediate rapport with Pandy hadn’t been a fluke. But it would be more than that, this happening of an instant that was fated to change all our lives. Our eyes would meet, Scarlett’s and mine, and that meeting would strike a gong that would resound down through all our remaining years together.

For the merest fraction of a second, Scarlett’s blue eyes rested squarely on my own. “Come here, baby,” I said encouragingly.

I held my breath, waiting for Scarlett to leap rapturously into my outstretched arms, until my arms began to tire from being extended for so long. But still they remained empty of kitten flesh, rapturous or otherwise.

Scarlett’s eyes seemed to glaze over—was I imagining it?—into a look of indifference. She looked at me, and then she looked through me, and then she kitten-waddled around me as if I were no more than an inconveniently placed traffic cone.

“Awwwww . . . look at her go!” exclaimed Jorge’s sister.

When Scarlett had gotten about five feet away, she flipped suddenly in a kind of half-turn so that she was facing me again. She lifted one of her front paws slightly off the ground as her back arched and her tiny comma of a tail puffed up, and she did a funny little sideways crab walk.

She wants me to play with her, I thought, feeling the beginnings of a smile. Rising to my feet, I hurried over to where she was now standing and hunkered down again, stretching out one hand toward her. “Hi, baby girl!”

For a second time, the kitten turned a blank, wide-eyed gaze in my direction. Then she spun around and scurried off into the bedroom.

Jorge and his sister were watching, and I was painfully aware that the kitten had now rejected me not just once, but twice. But that was silly, I told myself. Of course she hadn’t rejected me. She was in an entirely new and foreign place, after all—naturally she was a little thrown off. You didn’t have to be any kind of a cat expert, secret or public, to know that much. So, trying to shift the tenor of my thoughts to more practical matters, I asked Jorge’s sister, “Will I need to train her to use the litter box?”

“She’ll probably figure it out if you just show her where it is,” Jorge’s sister replied. She leaned down to pick up her purse, then walked over to give Jorge and me each a peck on the cheek. “I should be getting home,” she said. “I still have a half-hour drive ahead of me. Good luck with your new kitten!” she added, aiming a warm smile in my direction, as Jorge walked her downstairs to the parking lot.

We didn’t have any big plans for that evening, having set aside the whole night to help our new kitten acclimate. Scarlett reappeared from the bedroom a few minutes later, and I watched as she ran around for a while, keeping an eagle-eyed lookout for any signs of distress or potential hazards that might have gone overlooked when I’d kitten-proofed the apartment. But Scarlett seemed fine in her new home—more than fine. She skittered around for a while, chasing shadows across the floor and invisible bugs up the walls, pausing every so often to impatiently knock one of the cat toys I’d bought out of her way. I crouched down a few more times—trying to get her attention by tapping my fingernails on the tiled floor or tossing a tiny toy ball in her direction—but Scarlett seemed to find my presence as extraneous as she found the toys themselves. Finally, right in the middle of hopping repeatedly into and then out of the shopping bag the toys had come in (thus fulfilling Jorge’s prediction), she fell into a deep sleep while still sitting up.

I was pretty tired myself, not having slept much the two nights before. Whenever my family had brought a new puppy into our home, it was always an unspoken rule that the puppy would spend her first night in bed with one of us—born out of a feeling that nobody should spend her first night in a strange place all alone.

And so, as Jorge and I headed into the bedroom, I knelt and gently lifted the sleeping kitten in one hand, marveling at how easily she fit into my palm. It was the first time I’d touched Scarlett. My heart dissolved again at feeling her soft fluff, at seeing up close the little whiskers that swayed gently with her breath, the rise and fall of her tiny, perfect chest.

I carried her into the bedroom and deposited her gently on the bed, lying down next to her once Jorge and I had changed into our pajamas and turned out the lights. I’d thought her likely to sleep all the way through the night, so exhausted did she seem. But, at feeling us settle down next to her, Scarlett awakened, stood up, and bent into a deep, languorous stretch. Then, without so much as a backward glance, she clambered down from the bed and toddled back into the living room. When I checked a few minutes later, I found her asleep in a ball on the couch, her tail wrapped snugly around her nose and forehead.

I couldn’t help feeling that the two of us hadn’t exactly gotten off to a roaring start. Still, we were in the early stages of our relationship. It had been unrealistic to expect everything to happen all at once. There would be plenty of time for Scarlett and me to bond, I assured myself, and for that bond to blossom into everything I’d imagined it could be.

After all, tomorrow was another day.

* * *

One of the great charms of living with a dog is that a dog has a way of making you feel as if—unbeknownst to anyone else—you might actually be the greatest person in the world. And not just the greatest, but also the most fascinating. A dog might not understand anything you say beyond her name—from a dog’s perspective, your monologues may sound like nothing more than, Blah blah blah blah, Casey, blah blah blah—but she’ll still hang enraptured on your every word like ancient scholars trying to unravel the mysteries of the gods. Even Pandy the cat, in singling me out so decisively, had made me feel as if I just might be special and interesting in ways that I, myself, had never suspected.

Scarlett, however, had none of that particular brand of charm. Scarlett’s great power was her ability to make me feel as I might actually be the least interesting person that the entirety of human civilization had ever produced.

I would never have said that Scarlett was charmless. She was a kitten—she was charming by definition. Everything she did, every gesture she made, every time she chased some microscopic ball of fluff, or raised one miniature paw to her face in a grooming ritual (she was immaculately clean, my Scarlett was), or rubbed a fuzzy cheek against a table leg or door frame to mark it with her scent, I was charmed. I was enthralled. Seeing her play and gambol about was an endless source of fascination.

I may have been fascinated by all things Scarlett, but Scarlett couldn’t have been less fascinated by me. Watching her scamper around—as happy and healthy as any kitten, despite the ordeal of her earliest life—I wanted nothing more than to cuddle and play with her, to entertain her and find new ways of increasing her joy.

But if I walked into a room, Scarlett would either walk out of it or continue whatever she’d been doing with barely a glance in my direction. If she was asleep on the bed at night when I got into it, she’d wake up just long enough to hop down and head off to sleep on the living room couch. Or, if she was asleep on the couch and I sat down next to her—even if I sat all the way at the other end, as far from her as possible so as to avoid disturbing her catnap—she’d promptly decamp for the bedroom and snooze in there.

“Seriously—what the hell?” I said to Jorge one day, as we watched Scarlett unceremoniously exit a room we’d just entered and I fought the sudden impulse to sniff under my arms for offensive body odor.

Her kitten fluff, which refused to lie flat no matter how strenuously she tried to lick it into place, was a sore temptation for my fingers. How I longed to feel the warmth and softness of her fuzzy little body! Scarlett didn’t shrink from my touch, exactly, when I tried to pet her, nor did she violently lash out. Rather, she took no visible notice of my caresses one way or the other. She’d just kind of slide out from under my hand, like someone absentmindedly brushing lint from their shoulder, and trot off to do something else.

That she took no interest in the treasure trove of toys I’d bought her probably goes without saying. I’d dangle a little felt mouse enticingly by its tail over her head, and she wouldn’t even muster a half-hearted swipe at it. I’d bend the vertical spring attached to the sisal-rope base until its feathered-and-belled crest touched the floor, then let it spring back to make the feathers flutter and the bell tinkle merrily. “Look, Scarlett!” I’d say in my best talking-to-a-kitten voice. (It was very similar to my sing-songy talking-to-a-dog voice.) Widening my eyes to feign great astonishment, I’d say, “What’s this, Scarlett? What’s this?”

That voice had never failed to rouse even the sleepiest dog to near frenzies of tail-wagging, hand-licking, and playful crouching. Even Pandy always responded to it with louder purrs and spirited Siamese mews of acknowledgment.

Scarlett, however, would merely level a bored gaze in my direction. It’s a bunch of feathers, stupid. And that was all the response I’d get.

“At least somebody’s playing with them,” Jorge observed, coming home one day to find me flat on my belly in front of Scarlett, a cat toy in each hand, absorbed in yet another fruitless attempt to engage her attentions.

“Don’t you dare say I told you so,” I warned him.

Naturally Scarlett liked to play—she was a kitten, after all. When she wasn’t sleeping or eating, playing was all she did. She chased her tiny tail in dizzying circles until she appeared little more than a gray-and-white blur. She would frequently do that sideways flip and crab-walk that I’d come to call “Ninja kitty.” She found bits of dust or tufts of her own shed fur and chased them furiously from one end of the apartment to the other, or sat up on her hind legs like a prairie dog and tried to catch the dust motes that appeared like flecks of gold in the sunbeams that fell through the windows.

Scarlett’s favorite game of all was to chase a crumpled-up ball of paper around the room, batting it furiously between her front paws and then knocking it just far enough out of reach that she’d have to run after it. It was her favorite game, that is, if she happened to find the wadded paper ball on her own. If, however, I obligingly crumpled up a new piece and tossed it over to her, she’d watch the paper ball as it rolled to a stop at her feet and then stare at me, as if wondering why an apparently sane person would throw garbage around her own home.

Scarlett had, at a minimum, caught on to the fact that it was I, and not Jorge, who was her primary caregiver. As the weeks passed and her kittenish cheeps matured into more adult-sounding tones, she developed what Jorge and I called “Scarlett’s mother-in-law voice,” a harsh, guttural, and distinctly unloving meow that sounded like MRAAAAAAA and was deployed only when Scarlett felt she had something to complain about. And I was the only one she ever complained to.

When her food bowl was empty, for example, or her litter box was dirty—even as a kitten, Scarlett had exacting standards when it came to litter box maintenance—I was the one who heard about it. “MRAAAAAAA,” Scarlett would say, sitting on her haunches on the floor directly in front of me if I was on the couch watching TV. If I didn’t jump up immediately to attend to her, she’d advance to the coffee table, making sure to position herself directly between me and my view of the TV screen. “MRAAAAAAA,” she’d repeat. “MRAAAAAAA!” If I was reading a book with my legs stretched out, she’d sit on my knees until the pressure of her weight made the joints ache and demand, “MRAAAAAAA.” And if I didn’t look up from my book quickly enough, she would put one paw directly onto the page I was reading, insisting at the top of her voice, “MRAAAAAAA!!!”

“All right!” I’d finally say, getting up and scurrying off to attend to whatever it was that was bothering her. “You know,” I suggested once, looking back at her over my shoulder, “it wouldn’t kill you to say something nice every once in a while.”

To Jorge, Scarlett paid literally no attention at all—and he, after a few attempts at petting her or tossing her paper balls, was content to let her go her own way without any further interference. “Some cats just don’t like people,” he said.

He was right, of course. There were cats who flat-out didn’t like humans. Nevertheless, it struck me as a premature judgment in Scarlett’s case. She was still so little! She’d been only four weeks old when we’d gotten her—and she was barely twelve weeks old now. Surely, a kitten rescued at such a young age, and adopted immediately into a loving home, should be capable of forming an emotional bond with someone.

I felt vindicated a few days later when, sitting on the couch, I felt a tickling at the back of my head. Twisting my neck just a fraction so I could see her from the corner of my eye, I observed Scarlett sitting behind me on the futon’s arm, her face buried deep in my hair as she nuzzled gently and insistently. I remembered my mother telling stories like this about Tippi, a little beagle/terrier mix she and my father had adopted before I was born. Tippi had been so attached to my mother as a puppy that she’d insisted on sleeping each night on my mother’s pillow, nestled in her hair.

Awwww, I thought, and my heart began to puddle—what could this new behavior of Scarlett’s be if not, at long last, an affectionate gesture? I knew I was right! I thought, and decided not to say anything to Jorge—not right away, at least. I’d let him discover the two of us like this on his own one day. I tried reaching my hand slowly back and around to stroke Scarlett’s fur as she pressed her nose and whiskers all the way into my scalp. But she wriggled out impatiently from under my touch, and—not wanting to push her too far, too quickly—I left her to it, murmuring, Good Scarlett . . . sweet kitty . . .

This went on for some days, and I began to cast a complacent eye over Scarlett as she tore around the apartment, absorbed in her play. I still longed to rub beneath her little white chin and hear her purr of contentment, to watch her stir and sigh as she fell asleep in my lap or curled up next to my leg. She wasn’t yet what anyone might call demonstrative, aside from those moments she spent buried in my hair. But a good time was coming—I could feel it. We were finally starting to bond, my kitten and I, and the rest would happen in its own time.

All that newfound complacency was shattered a couple of weeks later, however, when I happened to catch a glimpse of Scarlett in my peripheral vision, sitting behind me with a thick lock of my hair—which she’d gnawed off my head—hanging from her jaws.

“What the—” I sat bolt upright, the book in my hands tumbling to the floor. “Is that what you’ve been doing this whole time?!”

I’d been blessed (or cursed, depending on Miami’s up-and-down humidity) with an extraordinarily full head of hair—enough that I hadn’t noticed from one day to the next as bits of it had begun to disappear. But now, disbelieving at first, I reached around and felt what I realized was a decidedly thinning patch on the back of my head.

I told myself to stay calm. After all, was it even possible for one smallish kitten to chew a bald spot right into a person’s scalp?

With mounting horror—as I clutched at a limp clump of wispy strands that had, only recently, been a thick tangle of curls—I decided that, yes . . . yes, it was.

“Oye!” I cried. “No se hace!” (Jorge and his family disciplined their own cats in Spanish, and I’d fallen into the habit myself.) “Malo gato!” I shouted. “MALO GATO!”

Startled, Scarlett leapt from the couch and I chased her, trying to wrest the lock of my hair from her mouth. Obviously I didn’t think I could stick it back on, but at least I could stop her from swallowing it, if that was indeed her plan. After about three minutes of pursuit—she nimbly evading my grasp, I feeling more than a little ridiculous to be lumbering so ineffectually after a kitten, for crying out loud—she darted under the bed and out of my reach.

She emerged a little while later but ignored me for the rest of the day, not even bothering with the litany of complaints she usually took up around twenty minutes before her dinnertime. The small pot of cat grass I bought the next day—as a more suitable source of fiber, as well as a gesture of reconciliation (like an erring husband coming home with flowers, I thought wryly)—remained untouched.

* * *

Strict honesty compels me to say that there actually was one game Scarlett enjoyed playing with me—although describing it that way requires loose definitions of the words game, play, and with. The “game,” such as it was, consisted of Scarlett hiding behind a table leg, or underneath the couch or bed, and leaping out at me as I walked past. She’d hurl herself at my ankles, latching on with her teeth and front claws while her back claws kicked at me furiously, “bunny feet” style, until she drew blood, or I tripped and fell, or both.

I wore heels to work every day. I didn’t have the greatest balance in them, and I was always terrified when Scarlett jumped at me that a pointy heel might inadvertently puncture her head or vulnerable belly. In the process of trying to quickly shuffle my feet away from Scarlett and remain upright at the same time, it wasn’t at all unusual for me to end up tumbling to the ground, falling heavily against whatever piece of furniture Scarlett had just jumped out at me from. I bruised rather easily, and my arms, shoulders, and chest were soon spotted with incriminating black-and-blue marks.

It couldn’t really be said that Scarlett played this game of hers “with” me, because if I made any attempt to touch or even look at her, the game was immediately over, and off she’d run. And even describing it as “play” seems inapt, because Scarlett’s surprise attacks didn’t feel playful so much as . . . mean-spirited. How else could I describe it? Whenever I hit the tiled floor of our apartment with a loud “Oof!” I always sensed that Scarlett was enjoying a silent kitten laugh at my expense. It’s funny when humans fall down!

Still, I was pathetically pleased at receiving even this much attention from my otherwise aloof feline. Like her complaining, this was something else Scarlett did only with me—never with Jorge. Maybe it was true, I reflected (trying not to notice how desperately I was grasping at straws), that you only hurt the ones you love.

Things came to a head one day at work. The school-based community service program I ran was considered a crime prevention initiative, and our administrative space—located in a small office park in southwest Miami—had been donated by the Miami police department. Our next-door neighbor was the bomb squad, and I spent many a happy work break in our shared parking lot, watching as the puppies who were being trained to sniff out explosives bonded with their handlers.

On this particular day, I’d taken off my blazer in the heat of a broiling afternoon, and the sleeveless silk top I wore underneath left my battered arms bared. I didn’t really think about it until one of the bomb-squad officers I was friendly with—a six-foot-two wall of muscle named Eddie del Toro—followed me through reception and into my private office as I returned from lunch, closing the door behind him. Startled at this unprecedented behavior, I turned to face him with a question mark clearly written in my raised eyebrows. Eddie took one of my hands gently in his own, looked earnestly into my eyes, and said in a soft, reassuring voice:

“Just tell me his name and where I can find him.”

This has gone far enough, I told myself a few minutes later, as I stalked out to my car to retrieve my discarded blazer. Naturally I’d understood the conclusions Eddie had reached upon seeing my bruises—and why his first thought had been abusive boyfriend and not evil kitten. I’d explained to him about Scarlett, but I’d still had to show off the corroborating itty-bitty claw marks on my ankles, and then exaggeratedly mime tripping over a small cat a few times, before I’d finally been able to send Officer Eddie—laughing and shaking his head—back over to the bomb squad.

Things were getting ridiculous. I didn’t intend to start going around in turtlenecks and wigs to cover up bruises and bald patches inflicted upon me by a kitten, as if I were the hapless heroine in a Lifetime movie. Something about an abusive, emotionally unavailable cat and the woman who couldn’t help loving her anyway. Seduced by a Feline, I thought. A Kitten to Die For: The Scarlett Cooper Story.

I headed to Barnes & Noble after work that evening and bought an advice book about kittens. Once I was home, I turned immediately to the chapter on how to deal with early signs of aggression. The book advised that, should your kitten show a tendency to attack you in overly aggressive play, you should say No! in a firm voice, and then provide the kitten with an appropriate toy as a substitute for your own flesh.

“No!” I said to Scarlett the next time she leapt out at me from under the coffee table. Reaching down carefully to remove her, claw by claw, from around my ankle, I held out one of the neglected toy mice that had been gathering dust in the corners of our apartment these past three months. “Here,” I told her firmly, “is your appropriate toy.”

Scarlett looked at the felt mouse in my hand with an air of disdain. Then, with all the offended dignity of a society matron in a state of high dudgeon, she turned her little rump to me and strode away, swishing her tail twice to emphasize her displeasure. This silent treatment lasted until Scarlett’s next surprise attack—which happened about fifteen minutes later.

It was a pattern we repeated four or five times over the course of the night, always with the same results. The book advised that, if all else failed, the best way to break a cat of aggressive habits was simply to ignore her. When she wrapped herself around one of my ankles, I should detach her and then disregard her. I wasn’t to talk to her, pet her, try to engage her in play, or even so much as look at her. There was no worse punishment for a playful young kitten, the book assured me, than being denied interactive play time with her human.

“HA!” I exclaimed when I read this. The next day, I dropped the book off at the Salvation Army donation bin.

* * *

I told myself that Scarlett was just independent—and, moreover, that being independent was a good thing. I was a little fuzzy as to why, exactly, independence was a desirable quality in a companion animal. (It wasn’t as if I were preparing Scarlett to pursue an equitable marriage or high-powered career someday.) Still, “independent” was one of those generically positive descriptors—like “attractive” or “has good taste”—that most people were pleased to have applied to themselves. Why wouldn’t I want it applied to my cat?

I also told myself—and actually knew, deep down at the bottom of things—that it wasn’t Scarlett’s job in life to interact with me in any specific manner, or to make me feel a certain way about myself. Our relationship was based on what my job was—and it was my job to keep her healthy and safe, to love her no matter what her personality turned out to be, and to give her everything she needed to live a happy life on her own terms.

But what if, I sometimes wondered, I simply wasn’t able to give her that happy life? What if Scarlett and I had been mismatched—what if the reason she hadn’t yet “chosen” me was because she’d been meant for somebody else, and I’d interfered somehow in her destiny? Maybe Scarlett’s true human soulmate—a person who could make her happier than I ever could—was still out there, forever to remain undiscovered.

It would be a gross mischaracterization of our relationship to say that it was all bad, that I didn’t love her, or even that I wished I’d gotten another kitten instead. The truth was, I’d fallen irretrievably in love with this bossy, snooty, semi-sadistic little imp who—when she wasn’t tormenting me or demanding something from me—seemed otherwise uninterested in my existence.

I didn’t love her just because she was mine (although that—as with any other parent, cat or otherwise—would have been enough to raise Scarlett above all other kittens in my eyes). I loved the little freckle of black fur, which I called “Scarlett’s beauty mark,” resting on the left side of her upper lip. I loved the way she cocked her head thoughtfully to one side before leaping at a paper ball. I loved the serious, evaluating expression she wore as she sniffed at some new variety of food I put before her when she outgrew her kitten food. I loved the little sway of her backside as she walked away from me in a huff.

When she developed a large sore on her lower lip—the result of a feline herpes virus she’d inherited at birth from her mother, which would plague her on and off for the rest of her life—I fussed and fretted and dragged her to the vet (which didn’t exactly raise me in

Scarlett’s esteem), and mixed the icky pink antibiotic formula the doctor prescribed with some water from a can of tuna, trying to make it more palatable. I’d give her some of the tuna itself afterward to get the yucky-medicine taste out of her mouth, as miserable over her obvious discomfort as if it were my own.

Sometimes, watching Scarlett nap peacefully on a pillow in a patch of sunlight, surrounded by toys she didn’t seem to care about—representing a love she didn’t seem interested in—I thought about what might have become of her if she hadn’t been rescued or found a home. I often took my teenage volunteers to local animal shelters, and had spoken with their staffers enough to know the kinds of things that happened to very small kittens left to fend for themselves on the streets. That Scarlett had been saved against all the odds—that she now had the privilege of being indifferent, if she chose, to a human who provided her with food and shelter and love—seemed like a kind of miracle. My cat was daily proof, in my own home, of goodness in the world. How could I not have loved her?

There are two sides to every story, and I’m sure that Scarlett would have had her own list of complaints about me if she’d been able to talk. She tries too hard, Scarlett might have said. She intrudes on the games I like to play by myself. I can’t even stretch out comfortably on my back without her trying to rub the white fur of my belly—as if I were a dog! She disappears for hours from the apartment every day, and then turns up again whenever she feels like it. And she expects me to cheer about it like it’s a big deal! She hogs the pillows on the bed. She’ll open a can of tuna and, sure, she’ll give me a little—but she still keeps most of it for herself.

One night Jorge and I were watching a re-run of The Simpsons on TV. It was a Valentine’s Day episode, and Lisa Simpson had, as an act of pity, given a Valentine’s card to a slow-witted boy named Ralph, whom nobody else in the second-grade class had even acknowledged. “I choo-choo-choose you!” Ralph read ecstatically from Lisa’s card, which was decorated with a drawing of a smiley-faced train engine.

Crazy as it sounds, I was envious of that slow-witted little boy. He’d been chosen, and I had not.

* * *

It had been May when we first adopted Scarlett, and it was November when my boss sent me to attend a three-day national conference for youth outreach programs like ours. Although the conference was being held in Miami, the downtown hotel where I’d be staying was far enough away to make it impractical for me to get home to feed Scarlett twice a day. Jorge traveled frequently for work and was scheduled to be away himself that entire week. We couldn’t find a pet-sitter willing to come all the way out to our neighborhood for what we could afford to pay, so Jorge’s parents offered to take Scarlett for a couple of nights.

I arrived at their house early on the morning of the first day of the conference to get Scarlett and her gear—her litter box and extra litter, cans of food, her water and food bowls, her scratching post, her brush, her antibiotic medication in case her herpes flared up in my absence, and a few toys—set up in the guest bedroom. With its adjoining bathroom, Scarlett would have free run of a space nearly as large as our apartment. Keeping her separated from the other three cats—and especially from Targa—meant she would spend most of her time shut in by herself, except when Maggie could slip in for feedings and visits. Given how much Scarlett seemed to crave solitude, however, I didn’t think she’d mind a few days of extra alone time. She’d probably see it as a vacation.

Scarlett sprang from her carrier as soon as I opened it. I’d spent half an hour that morning chasing her around the apartment to get her into it, and the fresh claw mark on my hand attested to just how reluctant to travel Scarlett had been. I tried to give her a conciliatory scratch behind the ears with that same hand now, but the decidedly cool manner in which Scarlett shook me off let me know that I hadn’t been forgiven. Exploring the room with her little black nose to the ground, she seemed reassured to find so many things with her own familiar scent on them.

The window in Scarlett’s room overlooked the driveway, and as I headed out to my car I saw her sitting on the sill, watching me. I crept over and, with one finger, lightly rubbed the glass over the bridge of Scarlett’s nose. “It’s only a few days,” I told her. “I’ll be back for you soon.”

Scarlett opened her mouth wide in a mighty yawn, then hopped down from the windowsill and disappeared from sight.

I thought about her in between conference sessions during those three days, and called Maggie both nights to see how Scarlett was doing. I’d be lying, though, if I said I worried about her much. Scarlett’s independence—her apparent indifference to me, specifically, and humanity in general—had become an accepted fact. There would be someone to feed her while I was gone, and to clean up after her, and she’d have her little paper balls and the stuffed worm—the only store-bought toy in which Scarlett had shown even the remotest interest—to play with. What more had she ever really needed?

This assessment seemed borne out by Maggie’s reports when I called to check in. “I haven’t heard a peep out of her,” Maggie told me. “If I didn’t already know she was here, I’d never guess there was another cat in the house.” She added that Scarlett would retreat under the bed whenever Maggie entered the room, or else head for the bathroom where she could watch from an untouchable distance as Maggie put down food and cleaned out used litter.

“Don’t take it personally,” I told her. “Scarlett doesn’t like people all that much.” I realized, as I said it, that I’d been secretly angry at Jorge for saying something not very different, not so very long ago.

I’d dropped Scarlett off at Jorge’s parents’ house on a Wednesday morning, and it was around five o’clock on Friday afternoon when I arrived to pick her up. Jorge’s parents had their own architectural firm and often worked long hours, and the house was empty as I let myself in with the key Maggie had lent me. Jorge’s sister had been by earlier to release Targa into the backyard, and I poked my head out to say hi to her—and, of course, I stopped to give Pandy an affectionate hello as well.

“Hey, Scarlettsita bonita!” (Spanish for “pretty little Scarlett”) I called cheerfully as I opened the door to the guest room. Scarlett leapt from the bed and ran over to where I stood, stopping a few inches away to sit on her haunches and look up into my face with bright-eyed anticipation. Scarlett had never once greeted me at the door like this—preferring, as always, to evacuate any room as I entered—although at the time I didn’t register how unusual her behavior was. My mind was too occupied trying to figure out the most efficient way to get Scarlett and all her things loaded into the car, and a route home that would avoid the worst of Friday rush-hour traffic. There was too much for me to carry out in one trip, so I decided to load Scarlett’s gear into the car’s trunk and backseat first, and then I’d return to the house to put Scarlett herself in her carrier and bring her out.

I had just slammed the lid of the trunk shut over the litter box when I heard it. The wild howling of an animal in great distress rose—sudden and sharp—to cut like a band saw through the peaceful tweeting of birds and humming of insects in the glowing, late-afternoon air.

Jorge’s parents lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, just beyond which lay a wooded copse. There were a few feral cats who lived among the trees who Maggie had arranged to have spayed and neutered some time back, and who she still continued to feed. They reminded me of Scarlett, with their tiger stripes and yellow-green eyes, and their persistent wariness of any human contact. Every so often they would emerge to sunbathe on the hot asphalt of the driveway, and I was always careful when I drove up to the house to make sure the coast was clear before pulling in.

My first, awful thought now was that, despite my precautions, I might have run one of them over. My stomach rose into my throat as I knelt on hands and knees to look beneath my car. Thankfully, there was nothing there.

Loud as they were, the howls had a curiously muffled sound. Maybe a stowaway had crept unnoticed into the trunk or backseat as I’d packed in Scarlett’s things? But a thorough check of both revealed nothing. I also examined the wheel wells of all four tires and popped the hood to see if a cat, or some other small animal, might have crawled in to doze on the warmth of the engine and gotten trapped.

Nothing.

The howls sounded close by, but I couldn’t find anything in or around my car to account for them. As I slammed the hood and doors shut, however, they escalated in both urgency and pitch. Thoroughly mystified, I stood in the middle of the driveway and turned in a slow circle, nerving myself to venture into the darkening woods for further investigation if I didn’t spot anything immediately obvious.

The glare of the setting sun off the guest bedroom window, which had previously obscured my view inside, receded a little. And that’s when I saw her.

Scarlett was on the windowsill. She stood high on her back legs, her front paws clawing desperately at the glass. She was looking directly at me; when our eyes met, she threw back her head and opened her mouth wide, yowling at the top of her lungs.

“Scarlett!” I cried. “Scarlett, I’m coming!”

For the second time, I felt my throat tighten and my stomach clench. I had no idea what was wrong with Scarlett—my only thought was that some unknown, terrible thing was happening to her. My hands shook, and I nearly dropped my keys as I fumbled with the lock to the front door of the house. I raced down the hall toward the guest room, nearly tripping over the purse I’d set down upon entering, and flung the bedroom door open.

Scarlett broke off mid-yowl when I came in, and the abrupt silence was as piercing as her cries had been. She leapt from the windowsill to land at my feet, whirling and dipping in frantic figure eights in front of me. At the head of each loop, she paused to rub furiously against my ankles from her cheek to her hip before resuming her spins once again.

I saw no blood, no swelling, no limping or hobbling, nothing to indicate any kind of injury or illness. I hadn’t seen any sign of the other three cats when I came into the house, and I guessed they’d gone into deep hiding when the howling started. At any rate, they hadn’t gotten into Scarlett’s room to attack or upset her. Targa remained securely in the yard; I’d caught a glimpse of her sitting at attention just outside the glass door that led out back, looking anxiously into the house as a low whine rose in her throat. Clearly, Scarlett’s cries had disturbed her, too.

“Hey,” I said, gently. “Hey, Scarlett.” I crouched down and reached out to her. I wanted to pet her, to try to calm her with the touch of my hand. But I hesitated. When had the touch of my hand ever meant anything to Scarlett?

To my surprise, Scarlett half-rose on her hind legs so that her head met my hand in midair. I tentatively scratched along the side of her neck and lower jaw, and she turned to press her whole face into my palm.

I lowered my body further until I sat cross-legged on the floor, facing Scarlett with my back against the bedroom door I’d closed behind me. She sat down on her haunches facing me, and as I continued to scratch gently along her neck and jaw, her eyelids drooped, and the low, rumbling sound of her purr rose to fill the room.

It was the first time Scarlett had ever purred when I touched her.

“Did you think I was leaving without you?” I asked softly. And I realized, as I said it, that that was exactly what Scarlett had thought. She’d seen me walk out with all her things, and then she’d heard the slam of the car door, and she’d assumed that the next sound she would hear was the car engine as I drove away and left her behind.

My fingers paused in their scratching, and I cupped Scarlett’s face in my hand. She regarded me solemnly with her luminous, inscrutable yellow-green eyes.

I leaned forward slightly, to make my own eyes level with hers. “I will never leave you,” I told her. “Not ever. You and I are stuck with each other. Okay?”

I didn’t expect a reply, of course, and I didn’t get one. Instead, Scarlett stretched out her front legs and her neck, until her belly rested on the floor and her chin rested on my ankle. Then she closed her eyes. The vibrations of her purr soon gave way to the steadier rhythms of her breath as she fell asleep.

The room grew dim in the gathering dusk, and I reached up to flip the wall light switch that would turn on the bedside lamp. The fur of Scarlett’s neck was soft on my ankle, and I lowered my arm to stroke her back.

I waited for my legs to stiffen, to feel my arm growing tired or the weight of Scarlett’s head becoming uncomfortable on my ankle. But that never happened. The warmth and drowsiness of Scarlett’s sleeping body seemed to seep into my own, and all I felt was a sense of balm. Balm and ease. The feeling that a tiny, twinging knot, which I’d lived with long enough to have stopped noticing it, had finally begun to loosen.

“Good Scarlett,” I murmured. “Good, good girl.”

We sat together like that, in the amber circle of lamplight, for a long time.

* * *

Things changed between us after that, although not dramatically, and not right away. Scarlett most certainly did not become a lap cat. She didn’t start running over whenever I called her. There was never a moment when Jorge looked at the two of us together and said, Look how affectionate Scarlett’s become! You’re a miracle worker!

In May of the following year, when Scarlett was a year old, we adopted another kitten—a tiny white fluff-ball only five weeks old, who’d been found wandering the streets of Little Haiti alone, near where my mother taught elementary school. My mother called me in tears over this half-starved, mite-ridden creature, who she couldn’t bring home with her but couldn’t bear to leave. So the kitten came to live with us, and I named her Vashti. Vashti was an affectionate cuddle-bug right from the start—and while Scarlett was initially a reluctant big sister, it wasn’t long before Vashti’s gentle sweetness won her over. Having a kitten to boss around put an end, once and for all, to Scarlett’s game of “let’s trip Mom and make her fall down!”

I don’t know when exactly it happened, although I do know that it was well before a month-old, permanently blind kitten named Homer, adopted more than a year after Vashti, came to complete our little family. Maybe it was seeing Vashti so frequently snuggled into my lap or curled up with me in bed that gave Scarlett the idea. But I began to notice how sometimes, waking up in the morning, I’d find Scarlett on our bed, fast asleep between my ankles. Or I’d be reading a book on the couch and Scarlett would come to stretch out across the top of the sofa behind my head—mercifully leaving my hair alone, but resting one small white paw on my shoulder and purring as she nodded off. Before Homer came to rewrite all the old rules, it was Scarlett who was the first to greet me at the door every day when I came home from work—even if she didn’t do much more than quickly brush her head against my ankles and then run off before I could pet her.

And it was Scarlett, when Jorge and I finally broke up for good after nearly four years together, who followed me as I got into bed that first, agonizing night, curling up on the empty pillow next to mine as I cried myself to sleep. When I awakened in the morning, feeling somehow warm and calm even as I remembered what had happened the day before, I realized that Scarlett was lying across my chest. Her heart beat against my own, and her head nuzzled into the crook of my neck as she purred gently into my ear. It was as if she’d known that the hardest thing about that first morning would be waking up by myself, and she was telling me that even without Jorge, I wasn’t alone.

Insofar as Scarlett became affectionate at all, it was only ever with me. Her disdain for humanity as a general concept would remain with her for the rest of her life. Scarlett was always the cat who immediately left the room when people came over, who would reject—with claws and teeth, if necessary—anybody else’s attempts to pet her. She would always be the cat who required an explanation. You shouldn’t touch Scarlett. You definitely shouldn’t try to pet Scarlett. Maybe it’s best if you don’t even look at Scarlett. After Jorge and I had ended things, when I lived for a few years on South Beach—and unexpectedly found myself part of a tightly knit, somewhat snobbish nightlife scene, whose glittering VIP rooms were closely guarded against any incursion by the “hoi polloi”—I would warn visiting friends, with a certain mock hauteur, “Scarlett is very exclusive.” And they would eye her with respect, grasping something fundamental—and, in its way, endearing—about Scarlett’s nature in far less time than it had taken me. It was, after all, undeniably flattering to be the one and only human permitted into a highly selective cat’s inner life.

All that’s jumping ahead, though. What did change immediately—right then on that November day when I picked up Scarlett at Jorge’s parents’ house—was my realization that Scarlett knew who I was, beyond just a hand that dispensed food or scooped out a litter box. She knew who I was to her. It mattered—more than either of us had known—that the hand feeding or cleaning up after her was my hand and nobody else’s.

Maybe Scarlett and I hadn’t “chosen” each other, exactly. There never was that one magical moment, the meeting of eyes, the resounding gong of two souls’ instant recognition of each other. What Scarlett and I had was, as it turned out, something far more elusive and enduring than that. It wasn’t the sort of thing that sprang up in a flash; it had to develop quietly, through months and years of love, patience, and growing trust.

The world may have been filled with other cats who would have come when I called or cuddled in my lap or slept every night next to me in bed. And it may also have been filled with other humans who could empty a can of food into Scarlett’s dish and then leave her alone, just as easily as I could.

At the rock-solid core of things, however, there was only one me for Scarlett, and there was only one Scarlett for me.

And that was enough. It was more than enough. It was everything.

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