The cat could very well be man’s best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
~Doug Larson
I wasn’t a cat person before I met Marcel. Marcel was Jennifer’s cat, and I was in love with Jennifer, so it behooved me to fall in love with Marcel. But Marcel was hard to love. He was a shorthaired black-and-white tabby with a long body and deep, almost human, brown eyes. He liked to climb into Jennifer’s lap, burrow his head into the crook of her elbow, and let her scratch him on the neck and jaw for hours. But with me, he was aloof, skittish, and quick to claw.
“He’ll come around,” Jennifer said, pressing her forehead against his and rubbing his ears. “When I adopted him, the Rescue said he’d been a stray. Someone found him in the engine of their car trying to keep warm. He’s been through a lot.”
“He puts me through a lot,” I groaned, showing her the scratches Marcel had made on my forearms when I sat in a chair he’d decided was his.
“You just have to be patient. When I first got him, he stayed behind the refrigerator for two weeks,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me touch him, and he refused to eat. But eventually, he came out, and now look at us. Just give it time.”
I did, but Marcel and I never quite warmed up to each other, and I had the scars to prove it.
Eventually, Jennifer and I got married. Marcel and I came to realize that since neither of us was going anywhere, we would have to form an uneasy truce. I fed him at night and stayed out of his favorite spot on the couch, and he’d occasionally rest his head on my lap when I watched TV or rub his chin on my leg when I was eating lunch.
“He loves you,” Jennifer insisted one night, grinning as we sat up in bed. Marcel was lying on my stomach, purring a low, powerful rumble.
“No way,” I protested. Almost immediately, he jumped up, clamped his teeth on my hand, and fled the room. “He loves you. He only tolerates me.”
Then, late one night, there was a knock on the door of our apartment. I answered it and was greeted by our retired neighbor, Lois, fighting tears in her nightgown and curlers.
“Marcel’s been hit by a car,” she said.
Marcel had always been an indoor/outdoor cat. In the fall, he spent most of his time walking the grounds of our complex, eyeing the birds and climbing a tall tree that reached over our building to sun himself on the roof. I’d never seen him cross the street, but apparently, this evening, he had.
I thanked Lois and went back inside to tell Jennifer the news. She broke down crying.
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling my own emotions rise but immediately tamping them down. “I’ll take care of everything.”
I walked downstairs, hoping to find nothing — a false alarm, an over-reacting neighbor — but instead found a sobbing college student standing by a black sedan, and a twisted pile of fur in the street.
It didn’t look like Marcel. It wasn’t meowing for dinner or batting at flies. It wasn’t twisted into impossibly comfortable positions in the shafts of sunlight beneath the windowsill. It wasn’t Marcel, not anymore.
I sent the college student away, insisting it was only an accident, and asked Lois to go back inside so I could take care of my wife’s cat. I wrapped his body in an old blanket and put him in a box that had contained a collection of 1950s detective novels that Jennifer had gotten me for my birthday — one of those gifts you get from a loved one that proves they know you better than you know yourself.
I carried Marcel back toward the apartment, but then I stopped. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t take him inside because I didn’t want to traumatize Jennifer. I thought about leaving him outside or in my car, but that just seemed impossibly cruel.
As I stood at the bottom of our stairs, pondering this, Jennifer appeared, crying and clutching a Kleenex. I put the box at our feet, took her in my arms, and cried. We cried for her loss — the loss of her cat and the loss of her friend. I thought about the times they sat together and the times he let her scratch him and the times we all snuggled on lazy Sunday mornings. I realized I wasn’t only crying for her loss, but for mine as well.
And then I heard him. His purr. Deep and soothing.
I looked around, confused, and there he was — standing at our feet, rubbing his face on the box and looking up at me like, “What’s everyone crying about?”
We laughed — it was all we could do — and then raised Marcel into our arms, despite how much he loathed being carried, and laughed some more.
“It wasn’t Marcel,” I said.
“No.” Jennifer laughed through her tears. Marcel struggled to get out of her arms, pressing his paws against her chest and whining, but she wouldn’t let go.
“He’s alive,” she said. Finally, after she’d received a few scratches, she lowered him to the ground. He ran upstairs and returned to his spot beneath the windowsill.
In the morning, I took the box to the Humane Society and handed it to a teenage volunteer. I waited until she confirmed that the cat had no microchip and had not been reported missing.
“He’s most definitely a stray,” she said, “but we’ll keep him here for a bit just in case someone comes in looking for him.”
“If they do,” I replied, “tell them I’m sorry for their loss.”
“They get under your skin, huh?” she said, catching me.
“What?”
“Cats. Some of them can be real terrors, but I can tell by how you brought in this one, and how you stuck around to see if it had an owner, you’ve got one you care about pretty deeply.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling to myself. “I guess I do.”
I paused to watch her take away the cat that was not Marcel, the cat that was not my cat, and I realized for the first time just how much Marcel meant to me. Losing him for those few minutes made me see just how big a space he filled in my life, in our lives. I didn’t think about the times he scratched me, but the moments before, when he let me pet him, even though he was scared. How we formed a truce that led to acceptance, and an acceptance that turned to love. He didn’t have to try, but he did. He didn’t have to take me in, but he did. He showed me how giving my wife could be, to take in a troubled animal and never give up on it. And he showed me how brave he was to open his heart to me, even when it was hard.
I realized in that moment the gift Marcel had given us: He made us a family.
And I realized that I was a cat person.
~Josh Burnell
