I had no idea if water had a smell that was discernible to a kitten and didn’t want to leave it to chance that he would find it on his own. I had placed the water bowl next to the dish that held the dry food, and I wiggled a few fingers in the water. “Are you thirsty, kitty?”
At the light splashing sound my fingers made in the water, Homer raised his head from the moist food and cocked it slightly to one side. Then, as if he’d intended to do it all along and had simply been awaiting a cue, he buried one minuscule paw in the bowl of dry food and immediately began to fling it into the water bowl. The sound it made as it hit the water was nearly identical to the sound my fingers had made splashing around in the bowl, and Homer turned a proud, expectant face in my direction.
I burst out laughing. “Not exactly what I had in mind,” I told him. “Let’s try this again.”
I walked back over to the litter box and called Homer over. As he had before, he headed straight for the sound of my voice. When he reached me, I once again picked him up and placed him in the litter box. This time Homer appeared confused. Didn’t we do this already? Then I repeated the walk over to the food bowl, and Homer once again ate eagerly from the moist food. I waggled my fingers in the water bowl, and Homer once again flung the dry food into it.
I wasn’t sure if Homer found this entertaining or if he was doing what he thought I wanted him to do. Either way, I decided it was best for all concerned if I moved the water bowl out of range of the dry-food dish. This time, when I splashed my fingers around in it, Homer walked over and drank. Scarlett and Vashti, when drinking from their water bowl, would center their heads over the bowl and drink from the middle. I noticed that Homer, however, carefully pressed his tongue against the inside of the ceramic bowl, forcing up a few drops at a time into his mouth. I remembered when he’d fallen face-first into the water bowl at the vet’s office, and it occurred to me that he was afraid it might happen again.
By now, the square of sunshine in the bedroom window had purpled into twilight. I heard Melissa’s car pull into the driveway. The front door opened and closed, and then there was a light knock at my bedroom door. “Is he here?” Melissa’s voice said softly through the door. “Can I see him?”
“Come on in,” I replied in an equally restrained voice.
Melissa opened the bedroom door a crack, poking her face in and peering around before she quickly opened the door just wide enough to slide her slender frame through, closing it soundlessly behind her.
Homer was sniffing around the edge of the bed, but he came to an abrupt halt when he heard the door open. He turned his face up in Melissa’s direction. The blackness of it, in the middle of that plastic cone and unbroken by color of any kind, looked like the velvety black heart of a sunflower.
“Ohhhhhh,” Melissa whispered. Her hands flew to cover her mouth. “He’s so tiny!” She took a step toward him, and Homer uncertainly backed away. Melissa looked at me. “Can I pet him?”
I patted a spot next to me on the bed. “Let’s see what he does,” I told her.
I was curious to see what would happen. Many cats are shy of newcomers—it’s one of their most common traits. And Homer had more reason to be leery of new people than most cats. But I had also sensed, when I’d first adopted him, that he was friendlier than the average cat.
Now we would see.
Melissa settled next to me on the bed, and both of us held our breath. Homer walked slowly in our direction. “It’s okay, Homer,” I said. He appeared unsure how to get from the floor, where he was, up onto the bed, where the sound of my voice was coming from. He reached out a paw tentatively and sank his claws into the bed’s comforter, which hung all the way down to the floor, tugging it slightly as if testing its weight. Finding it to be strong enough for climbing, he hauled himself up onto the foot of the bed.
“Hey, Homer,” Melissa said. She lightly patted a spot on the bed in front of her. “Come here and say hi.”
Homer trotted across the bed with his wide-legged, neck-rolling gait, his fur even fluffier after his climb. Purring loudly, he placed his two front paws on Melissa’s leg and stretched his head up again, sniffing the air around her. Melissa gently rubbed behind his ears and under his chin, and he fervently pressed the entire front of his face against her hand. It was as if, because there were no eyes to become irritated by such a gesture, there was nothing to keep Homer from rubbing as much of his head as he could against someone else.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’d always been somewhat intimidated by Melissa. She had been a good friend to me—after all, she’d taken me in with my two cats after Jorge and I had broken up—but it had always seemed to me that there was something flinty and unyielding in her. That she was compassionate was something I knew; Melissa clocked even more hours than I did with nonprofit causes. But on a strictly personal level, she could be tough. She had little patience with my everyday fears and foibles, and this made sense—because when you were as beautiful and wealthy as Melissa was, what could you possibly know of ordinary human failings?
But holding Homer, something in her seemed to unbend. Her face lit up in a way I’d never seen. We flipped on the TV to catch part of an old movie and chatted idly for a while about nothing in particular—her day at work, a party we were supposed to attend later in the week—but she was almost wholly focused on Homer, who purred and nestled happily into her lap.
Eventually, Homer climbed out of Melissa’s lap and walked carefully toward the side of the bed. When he reached the edge and his outstretched paw encountered empty space he paused, obviously flummoxed. My first impulse was simply to pick him up and place him on the floor. It would be so easy for me to do it for him, I thought.
Homer, however, gave no indication that he was waiting for assistance—from me or from anybody. He backed up into a slight crouch, then took a wild leap. He landed with enough force that his front legs splayed out a bit, and the bottom of his cone hit the floor and bounced back up. “Oh!” I exclaimed, one hand rising involuntarily to my face. But Homer was fine. He collected himself for a moment, then took off in a loopy half run toward his food dish. I was somewhat surprised, yet enormously pleased, to note that he seemed to remember exactly where it was—either that, or the smell of the moist food was detectable enough to guide him in its direction.
“Are you concerned about how unsteadily he’s walking?” Melissa asked.
I had been concerned about it, to the point that I’d been mulling over whether I should call Patty in the morning. But I heard myself saying, “No. I think … I think it’s just because of that cone he’s wearing.”
I’d started out wanting to deny I was worried, in that irrational way that makes saying you’re unworried seem like the same thing as being unworried. As I said it, though, I knew it was probably true. At first I’d thought the cone was too heavy for Homer and was tempted to remove it, even if it meant jeopardizing his stitches. But then I realized that it wasn’t the heaviness of the cone—it was the fact that it was interfering with Homer’s ability to use his whiskers.
Cats have two sets of “eyes”—their actual eyes and their whiskers. Cats’ whiskers are three times thicker than the rest of their fur, and the roots go far deeper than other hair roots, connecting all the way into their nerves. Whiskers are a constant source of sensory feedback for a cat: They detect air currents that alert cats to movement around them, and they sense the presence of furniture, walls, and other solid objects, acting as a sort of extended peripheral vision that helps a cat maintain balance and a sense of orientation in space. They’re part of the reason why cats are so famously able to see in the dark.