A Halloween Miracle

So our cat Layla died in August, and our house continued to feel empty without her. One thing that did happen in her wake is that our neighborhood squirrels no longer had a feline predator warding them out of our backyard, and so we kept the cat door open and repurposed it into a squirrel food stand. Squirrels would line up and grab a variety of nuts right out of my wife’s hands. Every morning, there’d be a scurry of squirrels waiting for their oeuvre.

Then one morning, all I saw was a black cat staring at me through the cat door. He ran away as soon as he spotted me that first time, but he kept coming back. We left food out for him and he absolutely devoured through his bowl while peering at us suspiciously the entire time. After that, he just kept coming back. Sometimes we’d run into him during our walks, and he seemed to recognize us, meowing like a squeak-toy. He had a non-breakaway collar (!!), bells, and balls, but no tag. In the mornings I’d see him waiting outside in the tiny house Layla would rarely use, and instead of bolting when he saw me he’d instead saunter over to the door.

He started staying inside, but always close to the exit. One day my wife Elle & I were in the midst of a work project but then we heard his telltale bells ringing at our front door and we dropped everything to open the door for him. He went fucking nuts over a $5 pack of misc cat toys. He got really friendly with the visiting squirrels:

He’d still stalk them in the yard, but he stopped pouncing and they learned to somersault over his head in what seemed like taunting provocation. He was very chatty, but could only communicate in that amusing squeak-toy meow. He’d sit on the floor near us as we watched 4-hour-long French movies, but kept a respectful distance. Then, he just wouldn’t leave. Sure, he’d gallivant somewhere out there for a couple of hours, but we’d find him back somewhere near our door, sound asleep, and would follow us wherever we went around the house, squeak-toying throughout. We’d go to sleep with the cat door left open, and he’d instead burrow under our bed.

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We tried to contact his owners. We securely taped a post-it note around his collar, but he somehow lost the collar. We put up notices online and received a medley of misidentifications, and for a while we referred to him as Blanche because of some random woman’s insistence. Then we stepped up the game and posted reverse-lost flyers:

That worked. The voicemail the woman (whom I’ll call Deborah) left had a lot of red flags though. She bought him as a kitten for a $100 from some random guy on the street downtown a few months ago, and he escaped as they were moving away from our neighborhood to another part of town. Her plan was to buy a cat trap to get him back, and she admitted he was her first cat and that she didn’t know what she was doing. His new destination was a shitty-looking apartment building on a busy road, and as glad as we were for him to be reunited, it was a bummer to find out he wasn’t going to have a yard to play in. For our sake, it was sad that he wouldn’t be nearby anymore.

There was no need for a trap when he’s willingly coming up to us all the time, and so we offered to drive him over to her, which also would’ve given us the chance to suss out his new living situation. Elle typed up an insane three-page single-spaced guide to owning a cat for Deborah that covered everything you could possibly need to know, and she included a thoughtful handwritten note about how much we miss our Layla and how important it is to cherish the present moments.

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I don’t think he’s ever been in a carrier before, and he cried the entire drive there, yowling as if it were the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. And maybe it was. Deborah met us outside and let us inside her building. She seemed happy to have her cat back, and she tried soothing him through the yowls. We walked under flickering fluorescent lights and over hallway carpets worn from decades of use to her unit.

The apartment wasn’t great. All the windows had their blinds drawn closed, with curtains and random towels layered additionally on top. The furniture layout was particularly baffling, with the television sitting on what looked like an altar (complete with a red shower liner doubling up as a table cloth) in the middle of the room, with a full-length mirror lying horizontally at the foot of the altar, angled towards whoever was sitting in front of the TV. Opposite the altar was a small table with a chair with candles placed inside painted wine glasses. There were also color-coded printed stickers with Deborah’s name and apartment number plastered up everywhere, including in a diamond pattern smack-dab in the middle of the bathroom mirror. I had more than enough to suspect some sort of mental illness, but perhaps more peculiar than debilitating.

Elle took out the guide and Deborah squinted at the tiny print and told us she just had eye surgery. He stopped yowling once out of the carrier, but he displayed none of the calm and affection we expected from his reunification. None of this was ideal for him, but also, we weren’t in the business of wrenching pets away from owners we deemed unworthy.

I thought about the fork in his life, how luxurious of a life we could have provided him. I thought about the attention and love we could afford to lavish upon him, the medical expertise that would sustain his beating heart, the maximally-engineered toys we could buy for him. And then, I thought about the squirrels he’s gotten to know and suddenly realized he’s never going to see another squirrel again. I saw his eyes wide with alarm, his gaze wandering all over his new home and made peace with the fact that he’ll gradually dull into complacency within these new walls, the vibrant tapestry of experiences he has accumulated so far rapidly forgotten into nothingness.

I could have done something about it. I could have offered Deborah $400 to buy him outright. I could have leveraged my class privileges to yank him out from under her. But it didn’t make sense to get worked up over this particular random cat when there’s billions of mistreated animals around the world or hell, kids getting blown up in wars. Still, it was heart-wrenching to be confronted with an ethical dilemma I had direct influence over.

I held it together enough to leave the apartment, then broke down crying inside the elevator with Elle — I was sobbing because some random street cat wasn’t going to see squirrels again. There’s more than enough misery in the world for me to hold on to this one, so I did my best to shut it all out on the way home.

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The next morning, on Halloween, we got a text from Deborah:

Come get him. He scared pee n shit in living RM I was relaxing n RM f my neighbor knocked on door n asked if he ok. My house already smelling like peee. he really won’t eat or water N i get close he meow like he don’t know me

That was all the prompting we needed. We had extensive vacations planned but we’d deal with that later, all that mattered now was to get him out of that situation. As soon as Deborah opened the door, we got hit by the intense smell of urine. Deborah was busy cooking lunch and told us that he was hiding in one of the corners. We found him cowering under a framed painting leaning up against the wall, screaming at the top of his lungs, his fur absolutely soaked in urine. We coaxed him out and back into the carrier he detested so much to get him back to our home, his new home. The thoughtful note we gave Deborah came back to us, unopened.

The first stop was the bathroom to wash him, and he carved up several bloody lines into Elle’s thighs and she tried to get into the bathtub with him. That wasn’t going to work so she instead swaddled him into a burrito with a towel while I wiped him with some soaked rags.

Then, suddenly, he stopped yowling and started purring. As I continued wiping him, he joined the fray himself and started cleaning himself alongside me. He somehow, instinctively, seemed to understand we had nothing but good intentions for him. I fully expected him to be severely traumatized from what transpired over the previous 24 hours, but nope, he just followed us everywhere we went acting like a squeak-toy again. A few hours later, he was conked out asleep on the floor, as if nothing ever happened.

I have no idea what the fuck transpired over at Deborah’s. That little dude acted like his own tropical storm weather system over there, spraying a precipitation of pee and shit that would be proportional to a major hurricane given his size and impact. The running theory was maybe he was just that fiending to be outside but nope; once we got him home we didn’t want him to go wander off and get lost again, and yet he showed no interest in leaving our side. He was happy chilling near us at a respectful distance while we watched our French movies.

So yeah, a black cat wouldn’t leave us alone and eventually coaxed us into taking him on Halloween. On his first night home with us, he peed in our bed. What a guy.