The days were growing shorter, the nights cold. His thin windbreaker was no longer enough for Rufus’s after-dinner walk around the block. Late one overcast afternoon he was in Kenny’s room, digging a sweater out of the cedar chest, when a flurry in his peripheral vision made him turn his head. As he did, an instant too late, a dark shape the size of a cat flitted around the corner of the doorway as if fleeing him.
Its presence was so unexpected, for a moment Henry only stared after it as if it were a trick. A mouse or even a squirrel that had found its way down from the attic he might have understood, but this was bigger. The windows were closed, so where would it have come from?
Sweater in hand, he scanned the den and the hall beyond, gray in the muted light. In Margaret’s room he got down on all fours and looked under the bed. Just dust.
There’d been a raccoon in the alley, shredding garbage bags left overnight.
Cat or raccoon, it made no sense, unless one had chewed through the drywall.
He whistled for Rufus, who came bounding up the stairs, bright-eyed, his tongue hanging out.
“Where’s the kittycat? Get the kittycat.”
Rufus closed his mouth and cocked his head, intent.
“Cat? Squirrel? Bunny?” Henry tousled his ears. “I know you know squirrel.”
Together they checked the other rooms, Rufus tagging after him. Henry left the lights off, creeping through the gloom, listening for any movement. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing.
“You think it was a haint?” Emily asked.
“I saw something. I could have sworn it was an animal.”
“Not a mouse.” She was squeamish when it came to them.
“Definitely not a mouse.”
“Did it make a noise?”
“I don’t remember any.”
“It was probably just a shadow from the window. A bird flying by.”
“It was big.”
“Maybe a cloud.”
“Maybe.”
As a boy, if he’d never seen his uncle’s ghost, he’d felt his presence. A lifelong Christian, he accepted the earthly intervention of angels as part of his faith, yet if questioned, he would have denied any belief in the spirit world. While Emily claimed to have some vestige of the Sight passed down from her homespun grandmother, he’d never had visions, only normal dreams that unspooled like movies and evaporated come morning. What happened in Kenny’s room had been the very definition of an optical illusion: He’d seen something that wasn’t there. Whether his eyes were tired, or his mind, he trusted there was a physiological explanation, most likely related to age, and was tempted to view the cat as yet another symptom of his decline. He kept the outside possibility of a brain tumor to himself.
At the same time the strangeness of the encounter fascinated him, and when his mind was unoccupied—too often now—he found himself replaying the moment, breaking it down in slow motion, the blurry stirring off to his left, then swiveling his head with the sweater still in his hands, the shadow already slipping around the door frame before he could tell what it was—all silently, elusive and disquieting as a nightmare. He stayed on guard if it should happen again. When he entered a room, or even the garage, he checked the floor and the corners to make sure he was alone, and every so often glanced up from what he was doing and peered around as if something might be sneaking up on him.
He was prepared for another phantom animal or fleeting apparition, so he was surprised late one night, as he padded back from the bathroom, to look outside and find a man standing on the Millers’ walk. Stock-still, in silhouette, he hid behind a brick pillar of their gate like a mugger about to pounce. Henry’s phone slept on his dresser, charging. He was trying to remember what number the Millers’ was when, from another angle, he realized the man was just a flat shadow cast by the streetlight, and shook his head at how easily he was fooled.
Later he came awake and in the meager light of his clock radio his bathrobe slung over the closet door was one of the big tiki heads from Easter Island.
He didn’t tell Emily about these little slips, or flashing on the headline PHILLY MAYOR ACCURSED, when on second glance it was clearly ACCUSED. While curious, they weren’t uncommon, like seeing shapes or faces in clouds, yet privately he counted them against himself.
The cat was enough of a novelty.
“Your father’s finally lost it,” Emily told Kenny when he called after church, and though Henry resented her teasing, he played the straight man.
“It was fast. Even if it was real, there was no way I was going to catch it.”
“What about Rufus?”
“Please, he doesn’t have a clue.”
Margaret, veteran of a dozen twelve-step programs, wanted it to mean something. “What’s eluding you in life right now? What are you missing?”
Sleep, he could have said, but didn’t want to broach the subject. “Nothing. I’ve got everything I need and then some.”
“You said it was dark. Was it a black cat?”
“I couldn’t tell you what color it was.”
“Cats can be good luck too.”
“That’s what I’m hoping. How’s everything there?”
“Good,” she said, and then it was her turn to change the subject.
He was more interested in the cat as a natural phenomenon than an omen, though once she’d suggested it, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. Symptom or omen, it begged investigation. There wasn’t much to be concluded from a singularity. To prove anything, he needed the behavior to be repeatable, and while he prided himself on treating it logically, he had to admit he was intrigued. If he interrogated his brush with the uncanny like a scientist, it was because it was a wonder. Having glimpsed the unknown, he wanted a closer look, and so he kept watch, trying to duplicate the conditions under which he’d first observed it, wandering the upstairs on cloudy days, haunting the empty rooms, the subject of his own experiment.