I want to be clear that I am genuinely, severely allergic to cats.
This is not the mild kind — the occasional sneeze, the
slightly itchy eyes that resolve with an antihistamine and a good night's sleep.
This is the kind that closes my eyes and fills my chest and has caused more
than one doctor to use the word avoid with the particular emphasis of someone
who means it. I have avoided. For my entire adult life I have maintained a
household that contains no cats, and this has been the medically sensible and
personally comfortable arrangement.
Then I heard something in the storm drain on my street on a
Tuesday evening in November, in the rain, and I made a decision my immune
system has not entirely forgiven.
She was tiny. Soaked completely through, which made her look
even smaller than she was — the particular smallness of a wet animal, all the
volume gone, just the essential structure of a very young kitten clinging to
the inside of a drain and making a sound that was too large for her body. I
stood in the rain for a moment looking down at her and then I picked her up and
carried her inside and that was the end of my policy on cats.
Three days. That was the plan. Three days while I found her
a placement — a rescue, a willing friend, someone who could offer her a
permanent home that did not come with the side effect of dismantling my
respiratory system. I set her up in the bathroom with towels and food and a
litter box and I took antihistamines around the clock and I sneezed with a
regularity and force that my colleagues found concerning on the video calls I
attended with swollen eyes and the voice of someone who had been crying for
days.
She was worth it. This was apparent immediately and made the
whole thing worse and better simultaneously. She had opinions. She communicated
them. She had recovered from the drain with the speed and completeness of a
creature that has decided life is for living and is not interested in dwelling
on prior difficulties. By day two she had claimed the bathroom rug as sovereign
territory and was conducting herself accordingly.
I was carrying her outside on the third day — some air, some
light, an attempt to introduce her to the concept of a world larger than a
bathroom — when my neighbor came out of his house next door.
He is eighty years old. He had lived next door for the
eleven years I had been in my house, and we had the relationship of good
neighbors who look out for each other without requiring much — a wave, a word
at the mailbox, the quiet mutual awareness of someone nearby who can be called
on if needed. His wife had been part of that arrangement for all eleven years,
a small cheerful woman who grew tomatoes and had strong opinions about birds
and had died two months ago while I was traveling and whose absence had settled
over the house next door with a visible weight.
He had been quieter since. This was all I knew. The lights
still came on and the mail was still collected and he appeared at intervals in
the ordinary way, but there was a quality to his movements that had not been
there before — the unhurried, unanchored quality of a person whose days have
lost their structure and are not yet sure what to build the new structure
around.
He came down his front steps and looked at the kitten in my
arms.
He said: what's her name?
I said she didn't have one yet. I was finding her a home.
She was a stray, I explained, a storm drain situation, and I was allergic, and
I had just been keeping her temporarily.
He looked at the kitten for a moment. The kitten looked back
at him with the direct, assessing gaze of a cat who has decided someone is
worth considering.
Then he said: she has one now. Give her to me.
I said: are you sure?
He said: I haven't had a reason to wake up at 6am in two
months. She'll fix that.
I stood on the front path holding the kitten and I looked at
him — this man I had waved at for eleven years, this man whose house had gone
quiet in a way I had noticed and not known how to address — and I understood
that he was not making an impulsive decision. He had looked at a small
wet-weather survivor and done a calculation that had nothing to do with
practicality and everything to do with the specific arithmetic of grief, which
is always about finding the next thing that makes the morning make sense.
I handed her over.
He named her Rain, which was right. He took her inside and I
went back to my house and sat for a while with the particular feeling of
something having just resolved itself in a way you didn't plan and couldn't
have planned.
The first photo arrived that evening. Rain on the kitchen
floor, investigating his shoes with the thoroughness of a small animal
establishing the parameters of a new territory. He had typed her name
underneath it, just that, just Rain, with the slightly effortful typing of a
man who texts with two fingers and means every word.
The photos have come every week since.
Rain on the windowsill watching the street. Rain asleep in a
patch of afternoon sun on the kitchen floor. Rain sitting beside his chair in
the living room with the proprietary ease of a cat who has decided where things
belong and has placed herself accordingly. Rain on the pillow on the right side
of the bed — his wife's side, the side that had been empty for two months,
which he did not explain and did not need to explain and which I have thought
about more than I have told anyone.
He is up at six every morning. He has mentioned this several
times with a satisfaction that is not about the hour but about what the hour
means — that there is something waiting for it, something that requires his
presence and his attention and his hands to open a can and fill a bowl and
begin a day that has a shape to it again.
I see him most mornings when I leave for work. He is often
on the front step with his coffee and Rain is often somewhere nearby,
conducting her own morning business with the independence and occasional
condescension that is a cat's natural mode of existing in a world that she has
decided belongs to her.
He waves. I wave. We are still the neighbors we always were,
but something has shifted in the texture of it — there is a story between us
now, a small and specific and slightly ridiculous story about a storm drain and
a Tuesday in the rain and a severely allergic woman who made a three-day
decision that turned into something else entirely.
I brought her to him because he asked and because what he
said was true and because some requests answer themselves before you have time
to think about them.
A kitten I was allergic to gave an old man something
medicine couldn't give him, something grief had taken, something no amount of
well-meaning condolence or careful neighborly concern had been able to replace.
A reason to open his eyes in the morning.
Six o'clock.
Every day.
Rain is waiting.