Dear Cat,

When we moved to Phoenix, I let Hugo play outside in the hot sun—the first time my city boy had felt pavement since they swiped him off the Moshulu Parkway at 10 weeks old. You were there with your older brother and that orange-haired fellow who lived down the lane. They scoffed at poor Hugo with his domestication-paunch, my little eunuch. But not you.

You came to my door, unabashed, and bathed yourself in rhythm to the swamp cooler’s hum. You proved to me you were clean. My neighbor and I watched you and Hugo in the eucalyptus brush. You reunited him with his inner hunter, and he brought you inside, stood watch while he shared with you his organic, low-ph food, the likes of which you had never tasted. It did not compare, I suppose, to fresh pigeon.

We lived directly below the flight path, so the planes woke us at night, and my neighbor and I would meet in the sweltering summer evenings and watch the parade of strays. I loved her very much: Annie. She was very pretty in a super-WASP sort of way, and she was a cripple (and still is, I suppose, though I hear she has new knees and doesn’t live there anymore, either), and whip-smart, and my exact match in Scrabble. We shared everything: crushes, clothes, a love of Elvis Costello. She was more intelligent and better-educated than I, and though I have failed in my seven attempts to read him, we decided together on Joycean names for your family that milled about the dust and dirt and oleander and palm — trees that only made it dustier and dirtier with their insistent sucking up of water, the wrong plants in the wrong place. Finnegan, we called your brother. And you, we called Ulysses.

I called you. At night, coming home in that harsh desert dark, I sang out the shortened version of your name, Ulee. It was the wrong name for the wrong cat, but it was too late, that was your name.

Annie lost interest in you. She got her own cat, not from the street, all black save a thumbnail speck of white on his neck. She did not let him outside. Not ever.

One evening, you did not come when I called. Warbling, wailing sounds erupted from beneath the oleander, and as I approached, I saw you pressed to the dust, Finnegan on top of you, his front to your back, the orange fellow standing off to the side, waiting his turn, maybe, or perhaps he had just finished. I scared them off, and you ran inside my tiny apartment and hid in the closet. Hugo sniffed at you and left you alone.

Annie started playing Scrabble with some bike-aholic guy in all spandex who dismissed me at first sight; they didn’t need a third player. Annie was prettier than I, and whip-smart, yes, and she had actually finished Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners and made a stab at Finnegan’s Wake. I read a Fitzgerald book once, in high school. I was the kind of girl that only other girls—straight girls—thought beautiful: secularly attractive. Annie’s knees and fingers had terrible scars from so many surgeries, and the biker boy had beautiful, hairless legs, shiny and sleek as dolphin skin.

Later that week, I made a scene. I marched into the Starbucks (this was Phoenix, and there was no such thing as a local coffee shop), and said some things to Annie, who blinked her big blue eyes at me, pulled her blonde hair back with her mangled fingers and said nothing. When I got home, she had piled all the things she’d borrowed from me by the front door, where you were waiting; you’d grown accustomed to the organic food.

When spring came, you were hiding in my laundry bag. I reached in, gingerly, and felt three tiny heads. They were all gray tabbies, like you and your brother: the orange boy had not had his crack at you. It was impossible not to cry.

Hugo snarled at all four of you. He stayed outside all the time, visited the neighbors one by one. They grew attached to him, apartments one through six, all but Annie, immune to the way he rubbed his cheek on pant legs or gently caressed human cheeks with his paws. At night, Hugo and I slept without you.

Once, when you were nursing your babies, Finnegan and the orange-haired boy came to the front door. It was a feline version of some '50s movie, as they hissed and mewed at Hugo, who slid past them and out to the yard, almost with a shrug.

After six weeks, I took your babies—named Nasty, Brutish, and Short, without Annie’s consultation—back east on a plane, two for my brother and one for a boy who had recently broken my heart. The cat-sitter said you cried every day, you mewed your tiny gray-striped head off. Hugo stayed out all night. When I returned, I had you spayed.

In summer, we packed and returned east for good. I tried and tried to get someone to take you, but no one wanted an icy-cold cat, even though you had jadite eyes and silver stripes. No one wanted a small stray with an obnoxious name. Hugo got his shots, and I bought a mesh bag and put him inside, and we flew away, we flew over the apartment and I left you there. Annie did not say goodbye.

Hugo is an indoor cat again, an only child. He stares at the window all day, at the sky, at the pigeons. He makes strange murmuring sounds when he sees them and watches them flit back and forth in the sky. He stands at the window that faces southwest and shudders when the planes rumble by, on their way back to Phoenix, back to the dust and dirt and misplaced trees in which, I hope, you still play, in the city where, somewhere, Annie still lives.

Lisa

 

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Belly, a novel about a 59-year-old man returning to his small town in the age of Wal-Mart. She works as a freelance journalist covering environmental and urban-planning issues for publications from OnEarth to The New York Times, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can scrutinize her at www.lisaselindavis.com.