Fully emerged from the carrier, the kitten looked at me with wide blue eyes (which would turn a yellowish green in only a few weeks’ time). “Hey, Scarlett,” I said. I knew I must look like a giantess to her, so I made my voice soft. “Come to your new mama.”
This was the moment I’d been waiting for. My mind soared off on flights of quasi-poetic fancy that even now, some twenty years later, I’m embarrassed to remember. This would be a moment of epiphany—a moment when the workings of Destiny (with a capital D) would be revealed. That I was about to publicly assume my previously secret identity as “Gwen Cooper, Cat Genius” was a given. Jorge and his sister—and even I, myself—would see that my immediate rapport with Pandy hadn’t been a fluke. But it would be more than that, this happening of an instant that was fated to change all our lives. Our eyes would meet, Scarlett’s and mine, and that meeting would strike a gong that would resound down through all our remaining years together.
For the merest fraction of a second, Scarlett’s blue eyes rested squarely on my own. “Come here, baby,” I said encouragingly.
I held my breath, waiting for Scarlett to leap rapturously into my outstretched arms, until my arms began to tire from being extended for so long. But still they remained empty of kitten flesh, rapturous or otherwise.
Scarlett’s eyes seemed to glaze over—was I imagining it?—into a look of indifference. She looked at me, and then she looked through me, and then she kitten-waddled around me as if I were no more than an inconveniently placed traffic cone.
“Awwwww . . . look at her go!” exclaimed Jorge’s sister.
When Scarlett had gotten about five feet away, she flipped suddenly in a kind of half-turn so that she was facing me again. She lifted one of her front paws slightly off the ground as her back arched and her tiny comma of a tail puffed up, and she did a funny little sideways crab walk.
She wants me to play with her, I thought, feeling the beginnings of a smile. Rising to my feet, I hurried over to where she was now standing and hunkered down again, stretching out one hand toward her. “Hi, baby girl!”
For a second time, the kitten turned a blank, wide-eyed gaze in my direction. Then she spun around and scurried off into the bedroom.
Jorge and his sister were watching, and I was painfully aware that the kitten had now rejected me not just once, but twice. But that was silly, I told myself. Of course she hadn’t rejected me. She was in an entirely new and foreign place, after all—naturally she was a little thrown off. You didn’t have to be any kind of a cat expert, secret or public, to know that much. So, trying to shift the tenor of my thoughts to more practical matters, I asked Jorge’s sister, “Will I need to train her to use the litter box?”
“She’ll probably figure it out if you just show her where it is,” Jorge’s sister replied. She leaned down to pick up her purse, then walked over to give Jorge and me each a peck on the cheek. “I should be getting home,” she said. “I still have a half-hour drive ahead of me. Good luck with your new kitten!” she added, aiming a warm smile in my direction, as Jorge walked her downstairs to the parking lot.
We didn’t have any big plans for that evening, having set aside the whole night to help our new kitten acclimate. Scarlett reappeared from the bedroom a few minutes later, and I watched as she ran around for a while, keeping an eagle-eyed lookout for any signs of distress or potential hazards that might have gone overlooked when I’d kitten-proofed the apartment. But Scarlett seemed fine in her new home—more than fine. She skittered around for a while, chasing shadows across the floor and invisible bugs up the walls, pausing every so often to impatiently knock one of the cat toys I’d bought out of her way. I crouched down a few more times—trying to get her attention by tapping my fingernails on the tiled floor or tossing a tiny toy ball in her direction—but Scarlett seemed to find my presence as extraneous as she found the toys themselves. Finally, right in the middle of hopping repeatedly into and then out of the shopping bag the toys had come in (thus fulfilling Jorge’s prediction), she fell into a deep sleep while still sitting up.
I was pretty tired myself, not having slept much the two nights before. Whenever my family had brought a new puppy into our home, it was always an unspoken rule that the puppy would spend her first night in bed with one of us—born out of a feeling that nobody should spend her first night in a strange place all alone.
And so, as Jorge and I headed into the bedroom, I knelt and gently lifted the sleeping kitten in one hand, marveling at how easily she fit into my palm. It was the first time I’d touched Scarlett. My heart dissolved again at feeling her soft fluff, at seeing up close the little whiskers that swayed gently with her breath, the rise and fall of her tiny, perfect chest.
I carried her into the bedroom and deposited her gently on the bed, lying down next to her once Jorge and I had changed into our pajamas and turned out the lights. I’d thought her likely to sleep all the way through the night, so exhausted did she seem. But, at feeling us settle down next to her, Scarlett awakened, stood up, and bent into a deep, languorous stretch. Then, without so much as a backward glance, she clambered down from the bed and toddled back into the living room. When I checked a few minutes later, I found her asleep in a ball on the couch, her tail wrapped snugly around her nose and forehead.
I couldn’t help feeling that the two of us hadn’t exactly gotten off to a roaring start. Still, we were in the early stages of our relationship. It had been unrealistic to expect everything to happen all at once. There would be plenty of time for Scarlett and me to bond, I assured myself, and for that bond to blossom into everything I’d imagined it could be.
After all, tomorrow was another day.
* * *
One of the great charms of living with a dog is that a dog has a way of making you feel as if—unbeknownst to anyone else—you might actually be the greatest person in the world. And not just the greatest, but also the most fascinating. A dog might not understand anything you say beyond her name—from a dog’s perspective, your monologues may sound like nothing more than, Blah blah blah blah, Casey, blah blah blah—but she’ll still hang enraptured on your every word like ancient scholars trying to unravel the mysteries of the gods. Even Pandy the cat, in singling me out so decisively, had made me feel as if I just might be special and interesting in ways that I, myself, had never suspected.
Scarlett, however, had none of that particular brand of charm. Scarlett’s great power was her ability to make me feel as I might actually be the least interesting person that the entirety of human civilization had ever produced.
I would never have said that Scarlett was charmless. She was a kitten—she was charming by definition. Everything she did, every gesture she made, every time she chased some microscopic ball of fluff, or raised one miniature paw to her face in a grooming ritual (she was immaculately clean, my Scarlett was), or rubbed a fuzzy cheek against a table leg or door frame to mark it with her scent, I was charmed. I was enthralled. Seeing her play and gambol about was an endless source of fascination.
I may have been fascinated by all things Scarlett, but Scarlett couldn’t have been less fascinated by me. Watching her scamper around—as happy and healthy as any kitten, despite the ordeal of her earliest life—I wanted nothing more than to cuddle and play with her, to entertain her and find new ways of increasing her joy.
But if I walked into a room, Scarlett would either walk out of it or continue whatever she’d been doing with barely a glance in my direction. If she was asleep on the bed at night when I got into it, she’d wake up just long enough to hop down and head off to sleep on the living room couch. Or, if she was asleep on the couch and I sat down next to her—even if I sat all the way at the other end, as far from her as possible so as to avoid disturbing her catnap—she’d promptly decamp for the bedroom and snooze in there.