CHAPTER 50

Horace

At some point over the winter a cat moved into their backyard. Annabelle noticed him first.

“He’s an orange tabby with white under his chin,” she said. “I think he’s feral.”

That night they left food out for him and a basket with blankets. When they checked in the morning the food was gone. Leda called a few shelters in the area to see if anyone had been missing a cat, but no one had reported an orange tabby with white under his chin.

“Can’t we take him into the house?” Annabelle asked.

“He might not be able to be a house cat,” Leda said. “Some feral cats are just too feral to be around people.”

Leda didn’t see the cat until nearly two weeks later. He was slinking casually along the fence line. She opened the sliding door and called out to him.

“Hey, kitty-cat.”

The cat looked back, stared at her for a moment, and then took off and jumped up and over the fence. There was no other sighting of him for nearly a month after this.

She and John attended a show at a small music hall in western Massachusetts. It was a band John had liked for a few years. He’d play them for her on occasion, and she liked them as well, although she could never remember their name. It was something like Father Paul Radiator, but it wasn’t quite that. They played folky, alternative music. She liked the first song on the album and a few of the ones in the middle, but the second-to-last she’d always skip.

They were late to the show and walked in after the first song had already started. The hall was standing room only, and most of the people were gathered up front or hanging out against the walls. They waded through the pack to get as close to the stage as possible. It was loud and booming. She could feel the music in her rib cage, a feeling she so intimately associated with youth. There wasn’t room for John to stand beside her in the little empty patch they staked out, so he stood right behind her and put his arm around her waist as they joined the crowd’s general sway.

The lead singer of the band was a skinny man with long, dark hair and a slight beard. She’d never seen a picture of him before, and she was surprised at how attractive he was.

“We’ll be playing a lot off the new album you guys haven’t heard yet,” he said to the crowd. “Here’s hoping you like it.”

The crowd cheered in response. He slinked back and changed guitars. His shoulders squared as he played; he leaned his head back and swung it in time with the music. From where she was she could see his collarbone. John let go of her waist and started to clap along with the song.

“I think I’d lay you down. I think I’d lay you do-o-o-own.”

Leda thought this man must lay a lot of women down, but he seemed to be singing about just one and so she couldn’t help but think maybe this woman was her. She smiled up at him and wished he would look at her. He put his guitar down and jumped around onstage. His music wasn’t the type of music that crowds would normally be dancing so hard to, but he led them into it. He reached into the audience and grabbed a cell phone from someone who’d been recording the show. Holding it at arm’s length, he sang into it. He was sexy with the same abandonment that was specific to music. So often this is what we all want to be, she thought. She felt like she did when she would dance around her room in her underwear, and she felt like she did when she was fucking.

By the next song, she was in love. He was on his knees singing a sad ballad. The microphone pressed tightly against his lips. “But I don’t understand why,” he sang. She thought maybe she should have married a man like him instead of someone like John. John was a good man, but how different she would be if she were with a man who sang on his knees and didn’t know why. She looked to her left. There was an average-looking, bearded guy standing beside her. He’d been there the whole time, but only now did she notice him. Or maybe I should have married him, she thought. Who would I be if I were his wife?

After a few more songs she left to use the bathroom. She could still hear the music as she peed. “Ronda S. is a fuck,” someone had written in Sharpie on the bathroom stall. She wondered if they’d meant to write something more but had been interrupted on “fuck.” Can you be a “fuck”? she wondered. She left the stall and went to wash her hands. A girl in a colorful skirt was standing by the mirror wiping mascara off her face. She’d clearly been crying. Leda thought of saying something like, “Whoever he is, he’s not worth it.” But she didn’t. Maybe he was worth it. Who was she to say?

She went back to the hall. It felt lovely to be back into the music away from the bathroom and the crying girl. Now the sound was clear and she could see her lover once more and the way he moved and swayed and seemed so skinny and so sexy that she wanted to break him into pieces and to just inhale him. She danced hard to the next few songs and tried to catch his gaze so she could smile at him. John wrapped his arm around her a few times during the slow songs. It felt nice and didn’t detract from being with her new lover. Why not us all? she thought vaguely. The young bearded guy eventually moved deeper into the crowd, and she could no longer keep track of him. The band played her three favorite songs and the one that she always skipped. She could feel her feet aching and she was getting very sweaty, but it was so wonderful.

“This next song,” he said, “is about something really important to me.”

Me? Leda thought.

“The environment.”

Everyone cheered. The environment was something everyone at this concert loved very much.

The song started slow. She had heard it before on the album but had never paid all that much attention to it. Now she took the time to really listen to the lyrics.

“Do you have any idea how much oil it takes to make this record?”

She liked the message, of course, but the lyrics were kind of indulgent and preachy. That’s something I’d have to talk to him about. She imagined herself out to dinner with him, tentatively broaching the subject. The next song started, and she listened closely to the lyrics again. This one wasn’t about the environment, but it was still kind of preachy. His dancing seemed pretty self-indulgent too. He really wanted to be a rock star. She could envision how irritating this would be. He’d always talk about this big thing he was doing and that big thing he was doing, as she’d be just trying to enjoy a bowl of cereal and get through the day. And where was the bearded man through all of this? Nowhere to be found. It was a relief to be going home with John after all.

“Did you like the show?” he asked her as they walked back to the car.

“I loved it,” she said. “He was great.”

“Yeah, he’s quite the showman, isn’t he?”

“And he’s handsome,” she said. “Hey, is calling someone a ‘fuck’ a thing?”

By the time they had gotten home it started snowing. Annabelle was already in bed. The dark house and the softly falling snow left an almost indistinguishable menace.

“It feels too quiet,” she said.

They went straight to bed, and John fell asleep nearly immediately. She stayed up and read a bit until the house felt familiar enough to fall asleep. She turned out the light and lay on her side. Just as her thoughts began to disjoin in the pleasant purgatory between awake and sleep, she heard a loud noise coming from the backyard.

“John,” she said, “did you hear that?”

“Hmm,” John said, and he rolled over to his other side.

She got up and walked to the hall window that faced toward their yard. Everything was covered in snow already. She looked at the tree and then the shed and then the little slide that they’d left up even though Annabelle had outgrown it. Somewhere out there was a rake that they should have moved before the snow; somewhere out there was a sundial. My backyard, she thought. Then the loud noise, like a scraping, started up again. It was still just the snow, as pristine and unmoved as before, but the sound was definitely coming from the yard, this she could tell. She turned on the hall light and headed downstairs. Without even bothering with a coat, she slipped on a pair of slippers and slid open the sliding glass door that led to the yard.

It was silent again. It smelled cold and new like only freshly fallen snow could. She wrapped her robe around herself tightly and breathed in deep. Alone in the night and cold, she only thought about darkness and warmth and her feet growing damp. The elm trees that lined the right side of the yard dropped snow off their branches. For a moment she considered clearing the lone birch tree, which often lost limbs in the winter, but it was too cold to leave the little stoop. She stood for a little while longer listening for the sound, but it was silent so she started back for the house, and as she turned to leave, there he was: the bright orange cat staring out at her from the snow not six feet away.

“Hi,” she said in a low, startled voice. The cat blinked back patiently and then looked up at the falling snow.

“What are you doing here, little cat?”

He looked back at her and blinked again. She expected him to dash off in a moment, but he did not. He seemed like the kind of person who would have stood in that snow beside her all night, just blinking at her and the snowflakes. He was as part of the calm as the night itself, and she thought, What if I’d married someone like him? Would I not have felt so much more patient with myself?

It wasn’t hard to convince the cat to come inside, a few cans of tuna and some gentle coaxing. Annabelle woke up and helped her mom with the kind of quiet enthusiasm that only a child can yield at the prospect of a new pet. Before long he was in the house and eating tuna, and not much longer after that he was on the couch purring and rubbing against the cushions. By the next morning he was on Leda’s lap like he’d always been there, her patient husband who would stand in snow with her. They named him Horace.