The T-shirt is yellow and embossed with a kitten; a blue-eyed kitten of an indeterminate breed. “There wasn’t much of a selection,” Albie explains. “And I wasn’t sure about the size, so I got a large. Better too big, right?” From a different bag, Albie takes out the fresh three-pack of legal pads, more pens, a birthday card—a cartoon of cats in a chorus line—and purple tissue paper. “The guard confiscated the ribbon and the Scotch tape,” he says.
“Scotch tape?” Bunny ponders. “I suppose you could tape your mouth and nose shut and suffocate yourself.”
“It was the metal teeth on the dispenser,” Albie tells her, and Bunny asks, “Dispenser? Is that the right word?”
“Yeah. It’s the right word.”
“It doesn’t sound like the right word.”
“I got this, too.” Albie sets a cat calendar on the table. “I thought maybe you’d want to give her two gifts.”
Albie’s kindness overwhelms her, and she says, “You deserve better than me.”
Each month on the calendar features a different breed of cat. Bunny turns the page from January’s Maine Coon to February’s Russian Blue. June’s cat is a white Persian, and then comes July. A Siamese. All Siamese cats do not look alike, far from it, but July’s Siamese bears an uncanny and unsettling resemblance to their Angela, right down to the one crossed eye.
Bunny loves Jeffrey because he’s Jeffrey, and there is room for new love, but new love does not replace what was lost. It does not mend the tear or fill the hole or heal the wound. To replace lost love, the way you can replace your broken computer with a new one or replace the battery in your watch, is not an option.
Folding her into his arms, Albie rubs her back. “I’m sorry. I should’ve looked.”
When Bunny is done crying, Albie brushes at the sizable wet spot on his shirt. Because salt is a nonvolatile substance, tears evaporate at a slower rate than water. It was an experiment Albie did as a boy: to put a cup of salt water alongside a cup of fresh water and measure the rates of evaporation. Curiously, it was a question Bunny had once asked him; something to do with something she was writing, and it was not dissimilar to the question she asks now: “For how long can you cry before you’ve cried yourself dry?”
Albie cups her face in his hands. He kisses one eye and then the other. Her eyelashes are wet. He tastes the salt. One more kiss, this one to her forehead, and then he says, “I’m pretty sure a person can go for seven weeks, four days and three hours before dry-eye syndrome sets in.”
What Albie knows, but will not say, is that, excepting when we are asleep, the lachrymal glands never cease secreting protein-rich and antibacterial fluid, tears, which keep the eyeball lubricated. In other words, with sleep and death as the only respites, we cry forever.