Kitty
...Kitty, a magical little cat who appeared from nowhere one day, hungry and bedraggled and who decided that we were the family she was going to adopt. (from the introduction, The Gift Best Given)
On Sunday, I finally cried. I wondered when I was going to do that. I wasn’t sure if I could, but I knew that I had to. My chest wasn’t a big enough vessel to contain the grief inside me. I worried that if I didn’t cry, then I might burst.
I sat in the car in a parking lot. There were only a few other cars, all of them empty, and the occasional dog walker or runner taking a short cut through the lot on their way home.
Thinking of you nestled between Linda and me. Both of us stroking you. Your butterscotch-dipped paws, your amber nose and your coat, still soft and beautiful, hiding your cruelly shrunken body. Linda singing to you. Both of us allowing our tears to flow.The little egg-shaped sound you made. You didn’t move. It just escaped you. Linda thinking it was pain. I closed my eyes, sure that it was your spirit leaving your body. Going to wherever it is that only trust and unconditional love are found.
I gripped the steering wheel. My fingers clutching it, squeezing it so tight that it might have screamed. Then I wept. My face against the backs of my hands, tears running down to my wrists.
If someone, well meaning, appeared at my window then—maybe the young woman who passes me every morning with a wave, her feet not seeming to touch the ground as she runs—and asked if everything was okay, if I could find my voice I would have told her no. I would have told her that nothing was okay.
If someone else—the stern-faced woman who, at the same time every day no matter the season or the weather walked an ancient little dog that hobbled on the end of his leash, until one day, then the next day and then the day after that she walked alone--stood in front of the car peering inquisitively through the windshield, I’d have looked back at her and shook my head, signaling her to please leave me alone. If anyone, she would have understood.
My tears didn’t last long. As they dried, the weight of my sorrow was lifted. I wasn’t about to burst open as I’d feared I would minutes before.
Still, when I came back home there was the same sense of emptiness as when I left. So many things reminded me of you. I stared past the hallway to the glass panes beside the front door where you’d look in or we, without thinking, every so often would look out for you on the porch, perched in the big flower pot you’d long ago claimed as yours. Your nose prints are still on the glass.
In your eleven years with us, you never weighed more than ten pounds. When you left us, you were only a pitiful fraction of that. But it was part of your magic, as little as you were, that you could command so much space both in our home and in our hearts. Both seemed like voids that would never again be filled.
A couple of days after my Sunday in the parking lot, they called. In a cheerful voice the woman on the telephone said we could come to pick you up. She said it just like that—as if you’d been visiting. The thought of you returning home to us made me smile.
I still can’t help looking to the front door to see if you’re at the window peering in. It’s an eleven-year-old habit that I know will fade with time. But now, you’re back home. The vast and sorrowful emptiness that you left us with disappeared when you returned. A little blue satin bag of ashes like some wondrous potion housed in a varnished wooden container. Your magic is still with us.
I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. (Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street)