I Was Here(6)
Author: Gayle Forman

“We’ll get the cats for you before you go,” Stoner Richard offers.

“The cats?”

“Meg’s two kittens,” Alice says. She looks at me and cocks her head to the side. “She didn’t tell you about them?”

I refuse to show any surprise. Or hurt. “I don’t know anything about any cats,” I say.

“She found these two stray kittens a couple months ago. They were totally emaciated and sick.”

“Nasty shit coming out of their eyes,” Stoner Richard adds.

“Yes, they had some kind of eye infection. Among other maladies. Meg took them in. She spent a ton of money at the animal hospital on treatments, and then she nursed them back to health. She loved those kittens.” She shakes her head. “That’s what was the biggest surprise to me. That she’d go through all that trouble for the kittens and then, you know. . . .”

“Yeah, well, Meg worked in mysterious ways,” I say. The bitterness is so strong, I swear they must be able to smell it on my breath. “And the cats are of no concern to me.”

“But someone has to take them,” Alice says. “The house has been looking out for them, but we’re not supposed to have pets and we’re all leaving for the summer and none of us can take them.”

I shrug. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“Have you seen these kittens?” Alice goes to the side of the house and starts making kissing sounds, and soon enough two tiny fur balls bound into the living room. “This one’s Pete,” she says, pointing to the mostly gray one with a black splodge on its nose. “And the other one’s Repeat.”

Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved? Meg’s uncle Xavier told us this joke, and we used to torment each other with it. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Alice puts a kitten in my arms, where it immediately starts doing that pawing thing that cats do when they’re trying to find milk. But then it gives up and falls asleep, a little ball against my chest. Something tickles inside, an echo from another time when it wasn’t all frozen in there.

The cat starts to purr, and I’m screwed. “Is there, like, an animal shelter here?”

“There is, but there are dozens of cats there, and they only keep them for three days before, you know.” Alice mimes a knife to the throat.

Pete, or maybe it’s Repeat, is still purring in my arms. I can’t bring them home. Tricia would have a shitfit. She’d refuse to let them come inside, and then they’d get eaten by coyotes or killed by the cold in no time. I could ask if Sue and Joe wanted them, but I’ve seen the way Samson goes after cats.

“Seattle has a few no-kill shelters,” Stoner Richard says. “I saw an Animal Liberation Front thing about it.”

I sigh. “Fine. I’ll swing up to Seattle on my way out of town and drop the cats off.”

Stoner Richard laughs. “It’s not like dry cleaning. You can’t just drop them off. You have to make an appointment for, like, an intake or something.”

“When have you ever had anything dry-cleaned?” Alice asks him.

Pete/Repeat mewls in my arms. Alice looks at me. “How long is your drive back?”

“Seven hours, plus I have to ship the boxes.”

She looks at me and then at Stoner Richard. “It’s three now. Maybe you should go up to Seattle and bring the cats to a shelter, and you can leave first thing tomorrow.”

“Can’t you bring the cats to a shelter?” I ask her. “You seem to have it all worked out.”

“I have a Women’s Studies paper I need to work on.”

“What about after you finish?”

She falters for a second. “No. Those cats were Meg’s thing. I don’t feel right sending them to a shelter.”

“Oh, so you’ll leave the dirty work to me?” I hear the anger in my voice, and I know that it’s not Alice who’s left me the dirty work, but when she cringes, I get a grim twist of satisfaction.

“Dude. I’ll drive you to Seattle,” Stoner Richard says. “We’ll get the felines settled, and you can come here and get out of town first thing in the morning.” He seems like he wants to be rid of me as much as I want to be rid of him. At least it’s mutual.

5

Seattle pet shelters, it turns out, are harder to get into than the hippest velvet-rope night clubs. The first two are full, and no amount of begging works. The third one has space, but it requires an application and a copy of the cats’ vet records. I tell the pierced girl with her hipster no-leather shoes that I’m leaving town, that I have the cats in the car, and she gives me the most snide look in the world and tells me that I should’ve thought of this before I went and adopted a pet. I almost smack her.

“Wanna smoke that bowl now?” Stoner Richard asks after strike three. It’s eight o’clock and the shelters are all closed for the night.

“No.”

“You wanna go to a club or something? Blow off steam? Since we’re in Seattle?”

I’m exhausted from the night before and I don’t want to be here with Stoner Richard and I’m trying to figure out how I’ll get vet records when tomorrow is Sunday. I start to beg off but then Richard says: “We can go to one of those hole-in-the-walls that Meg liked to go to. Once in a while she’d deign to let us tag along.” He pauses. “She had a whole klatch of friends up here.”

I’m momentarily stunned by Richard’s use of both deign and klatch. But the truth is, I do actually want to see these places. I think of the club we were meant to have gone to the weekend I came to visit. All the clubs we were meant to have gone to all the weekends I didn’t come to visit. I know how excited Meg was to be amid the music scene, though after the time I visited her, the breathless emails about it all started to taper off and then stopped.

“What about the kittens?” I ask Richard.

“They’ll be fine in the car,” Richard says. “It’s, like, fifty-five degrees tonight. They have food and water.” He points to Pete and Repeat, who, having squealed and yowled the entire drive up, are now quietly nestled together in their carrier.

We drive to a club in Fremont by the canal. Before we go in, Richard lights up a small pipe and smokes out the window. “Don’t want to give the kitties a contact high,” he jokes.

As we pay our covers, he tells me that Meg went here a lot. I nod as if I know this. The place is empty. It smells of stale beer, bleach, and desperation. I leave Richard at the bar and go play pinball by myself. By ten o’clock the room starts filling up, and by eleven the first of the night’s bands comes on, a very feedback-heavy outfit whose lead singer growls more than he sings.