Kiko

    Just before Valentine’s Day my cat started vomiting regularly and losing control of his bladder. Spencer was only about eight years old and had always been extremely healthy. I couldn’t find anyone who would see him in less than six weeks -his last vet had died of cancer- so I took him to an urgent care center. They didn't seem too worried but took some blood and said they’d call me in a few days with the results. They called that night and said he had terminal kidney disease and that wanted me to have him put down the next day. I was stunned; I had assumed he just had a urinary tract infection or something. I asked them if it would be a mistake to wait until the following weekend. The vet got real quiet but finally said I should bring him in the moment he stopped eating.

    That week I went home after work every day and spent time with him. I knew I was being selfish and prolonging his suffering, but they gave me some pain meds for him and aside from the vomiting he seemed his normal affectionate self. He would curl in my lap while I drew or watched movies, and I slept with my arm around him every night. By the end of the week he was really starting to slow down though, and not eating anything aside from his treats, and so I finally called the clinic.

    I was late getting to the appointment but the women there didn't say anything. I sat in on a cot in a room with green painted walls and a wave machine whooshing in the background. On a little table sat a jar decorated with paper hearts and filled with treats. A woman with pink hair brought him in swaddled in a blanket. They had given him a sedative so he was quite docile until I gave him one of the treats, which he attacked as ferociously as if he was completely healthy, as if these weren't the final moments of his life. I sat there petting him for a little while and when I was ready I pressed the buzzer and the vet came in and gave him an injection in his front leg. He stopped breathing almost immediately but because he was so tightly wrapped I didn't notice until she said, "He's gone." I saw that eyes were glassy and lifeless. She said I could sit with him a while if I wanted to, but I said I couldn't do it and handed the body to her. She said I should take all the time I needed and closed the door behind her. I sat with my head in my hands and sobbed for a few minutes then got up and left. A week later I received a package with a paw print baked in clay and a tuft of his fur, and this is all that remains of my darling Spencer. It had been six years nearly to the day since I’d brought him home. 

    A few months went by and my friend Amy said she wanted to take me to the Humane Society. "Just to browse," she said. "Besides, Analee wants to look at the rats even though I told her she can't have one. "

    The cats were all being housed temporarily in a cordoned-off section of the dog kennels because of renovations to their usual area. Analee skipped and sang to herself while I went from cage to cage. You could look at the pets but you couldn’t meet with them unless you first filled out a form online. There weren't many there anyways. One gorgeous honey-colored cat gazed up imploringly but she was 14 years old and I couldn't bear the idea of taking home some animal that was going to die in a few years. The entire experience was discouraging but I knew I probably wasn’t ready to adopt yet anyways. Besides, I didn’t actually want a new cat; I wanted my old cat to still be alive. 

    My mind was ragged and fraying. I was fifty years old and every day I felt freshly crushed by the realization that my entire life needed to change. My foot was fucked up again, I was being eaten alive by loneliness, and things at work were a nightmare. My anxiety, which has always remained at more or less manageable levels, was raging out of control. And now I no longer even had a furry friend to comfort me. I finally scheduled some time off for late spring, in the hope that getting away for a while would help me relax enough to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. I planned on looking for a new cat when I returned.

    A few weeks before I left for vacation, Amy told me her boss had a kitten she had to find a new home for in a hurry. While I had been hoping for an adult cat rather than a baby, and the timing was not ideal, I thought I needed to take the chance. Maybe this was fate. I tell myself I'm not superstitious and that I don't believe in signs and portents but this is not in the least bit true.

    I expected to just meet the cat and maybe decide in a day or two, but Cindy told me to bring my cat carrier, so I grabbed it and hopped on the bus to the other side of the river. I felt like I was on a blind date. It wasn't a long ride and their home was only a few blocks from the bus stop, in the pretty neighborhood of Alameida. Cindy and her husband took me out back to the garage. 

    "Leo just showed up one day and wouldn't leave," they said. They had two other cats in the house and none of them got along, so the kitten was staying in the garage. The garage was full of boxes and clutter and a small fleet of motorbikes. I caught a flash of fur between the tires but the cat wouldn't come out. They offered me a drink and we sat on the patio to wait. Eventually Leo came to the glass door of the garage and looked out through a dusty pane. He was a gorgeous animal, very pale gray with darker gray stripes and dazzling blue eyes. He looked remarkably like Robyn's cat who had disappeared years ago. It was uncanny, as if Nootenboom had come back as a kitten. 

    Cindy and her husband were kind enough to give me a ride home. Leo climbed right into the carrier without any coaxing and purred placidly beside me in the back seat. When I got home and let him out, he bolted for the closet. He didn't emerge for two days. I could hear him climbing around but I couldn't see him. 

    I got home from work a few days later to find most of the plants in my studio apartment had been knocked over. That night I was woken up by Leo's pounding back and forth across the room, jumping off the furnuture. My upstairs neighbor had a cat which did the same thing nearly every night; I had barely had a decent sleep in the past nine months. Now I was inflicting this same punishment on the guy below me.

    The next day I noticed the faint odor of cat urine wafting through the apartment, though I couldn't tell where it was emanating from. That day Leo was moderatly friendly, and would occasionally jump on the bed and let me rub his belly. He wasn't like Spencer though, who used to meet me at the door every day and was by my side or on my lap almost constantly. Also unlike Spencer, Leo was enormous. The paperwork said he was only six months old but I didn't see how that could be true. I had never seen such a gigantic kitten, and he didn't seem to be a Maine coon or any of the other large breeds. He was just huge.

    The following morning I propped open the balcony door and did some housecleaning. On either side of the balcony is a window, one of which is quite small. When I went back outside, I saw Leo crouched in the smaller windowsill, which was much to narrow for his bulk. He looked at me and meowed in terror. I felt a moment of panic and then he leaped across the chasm into my arms.  I staggered against the railing, then ran inside with him and shut the door. He bolted for the closet and I collapsed onto the couch and waited for my heart to stop pounding. 

    I realized I could live with the stress brought on by this animal but I felt so guilty and embarrassed, especially when Amy texted me to tell me how much Cindy had liked me and had said how happy she was to have found a good home for their baby. I texted her back saying I was losing my mind and didn't know what to do. She was at a picnic but she called me immediately. I was nearly hysterical but she said not to worry, that she would take care of things. 

    The next day she texted that she had found a new home for Leo in Hood River and that she was driving out there this weekend and could come collect him. In the meantime Leo continued to dig in my plants and urinate in locations that I still could not pinpoint, despite the fact that is is not a large apartment. But that weekend Amy came and took him away. I felt sad not so much to see him go but for the idea of him, the void left by this big beautiful monster that had appeared so suddenly in my life and was just as suddenly gone. 

    I went on my trip and it thankfully ended up being the restful, rejuvenating experience I needed it to be to help me feel human again. I returned feeling ready to face the challenges my stupid life. 

    A few weeks after I got back, I asked my friend Mia to take me around to start shopping for a new cat. We went to the county shelter first. It's not the nicest place but it was where I had found Spencer all those years ago. He had been lying in the back of his cage and when I looked in he looked back at me, stared me right in the eye for a full minute. I had them open the cage and he came running over to me and headbutted my hand and started purring and that was that. 

    There weren’t many cats in the shelter and most of them were kittens. I asked to be allowed to meet a handsome tuxedo cat and they put us in a little room together, but he showed no interest in me, started climbing around looking for ways out. I met another cat with shaggy tan hair who was a little friendlier but it just didn’t feel right, there was nothing there. I couldn’t tell if it was me being defensive or not ready, but I trusted that feeling and we left without him. I had managed to make an appointment to see one cat at the Humane Society, a tiny gray two year old named Kiko. We had a lot of time before the appointment so we had lunch and she asked if I minded stopping by her old apartment so she could pick up some cleaning supplies. I’d never been there before. It was an unsavory feeling place, carpeted and moldy and smaller than I’d imagined. There were two bathroom sinks for some reason and both were situated not in the bathroom but in a pointless hallway separating the bedroom and the kitchen. 

    “Was this place originally a motel?” I asked. She said she didn’t think so. "I'm glad you're getting out at least," I said. 

    We dropped the cleaning products off at her new apartment, which was just a mile up the road but much less creepy feeling, then drove to the Humane Society. We were early but they said we could wait in the feline area. They had moved the cats back into their old quarters but it was still under construction so whole parts of it were unfinished. The sections had names like the Purr Palace and the Cattery. We circled the cat area three times but I didn’t see Kiko.

    It was peak kitten season and there were rooms filled with nothing but kittens, most of them kept in big common areas or paired in cages. A bunch of them were named for meats; Salami, Pastrami, Pepperoni. I watched a tiny black kitten named Prosciutto bat at a ball trapped in a plastic ring. Those toys always make me nervous for some reason. I want to free the ball from the ring, and watching a cat paw at it fills me with anxiety. His cellmate, a grey kitten with a head not much larger than a golf ball, stared at me with tiny blue eyes and would not look away. 

    I heard someone call my name and a cute woman with gray-frosted dreadlocks and a clipboard came running around the corner. I asked her if I could just lie down in one of the rooms and let kittens crawl all over me. She laughed and led us into one of the meeting rooms and told us to sit down. “I like to sit on the floor myself,” she said, and proceeded to do so. I sat on the bench and Mia sat down next to me.  I thought of introducing her but I didn’t. The woman asked what I was looking for and I explained about Spencer dying and she said she was sorry, that she had just lost her Chihuahua of 18 years. 

    She flipped through the pages on her clipboard and seemed to be stalling for time. Finally she warned us that Kiko was not the loving, cuddly kitty that she sensed I was searching for. She was being kept away from the other cats because she seemed so skittish and unsociable. The woman took out her phone and read us the comments her previous owners had made. “They say here that she’s affectionate but... She will head butt me and let me pet her but she also gave me a warning nip,” she said.  "So I don't know." 

    I felt myself deflate. I hadn't realized that, despite how guarded I thought I was, and careful not to harbor any sort of hopes or expectations, I had really been secretly wanting this cat to be the one. I wanted to feel that magical connection that only ever seems to happen when you're not looking for, when you're not ready for it. I thought about asking to meet Kiko anyways but I knew it was a bad idea. What if I caved and took her home, even though she wasn't right for me?  The woman didn’t offer to bring her out but started to scroll through her phone, saying maybe I could meet another available candidate.  But she kept shaking her head; all the cats left had health or personality issues or both. “There’s a reason they’re still here,” she said. 

    As we drove past the strip clubs and construction equipment rental places, past the fast food joints and cannibis shops, I wondered again if I shouldn’t have had her bring Kiko out anyways. Maybe I would have been the one person she warmed up to. I had already been there, why hadn't I at least given her a chance? What was I afraid of?

    When I looked on the website a few days later, all the kittens named after meat had been replaced by other kittens named after pasta. Capellini, Fettuccini, Linguini. Kiko was nowhere to be found. Had someone adopted her, had she finally found someone to love her? Or -more likely- had they euthanized her for the crime of being too antisocial? Could I have saved her life? Could I have given her that poor, unhappy kitty the home she needed? I felt awful. I thought about Leo and hoped he was happy in Hood River. When I got back to the apartment I pressed my finger into Spencer’s paw print in the clay. And that night I was awoken on the hour by the cat upstairs galloping back and forth, back and forth, until finally I screamed shut up, shut up, shut up.