Astrid was enjoying a quiet day at home when her unexpected visitor arrived.
In fact, believing herself alone, she shrieked when something soft brushed against her ankle. Jumping aside, she looked down. Two cool green eyes met her gaze, regarding her with an unblinking stare.
Astrid did blink at that. “How on earth?” she murmured, moving to the open sliding glass door that led to the little balcony. This early in April, she didn’t have to worry about bugs, so she hadn’t kept the screen closed, but flung wide to the unseasonably lovely day. Stepping out, she looked for scaffolding, window cleaners, or any other means a cat could get into her fifth-floor apartment.
There was nothing.
Turning to her uninvited visitor, she found the little creature sitting in a sunbeam, licking a paw and wrapping it around one ear in a steady, metronomic rhythm. After a couple of seconds, the cat turned to look at her. It was a pretty thing: smaller than average, with a beautiful silver-gray coat and those round, intensely green eyes. She opened and closed her mouth in what appeared to be a silent meow.
“Well, yeah. Please talk. I sure wish you could tell me a few things. Like where you’re supposed to be and what you’re doing here. Even better, how did you get here?”
Were shelters delivering cats via drone these days? It seemed less ridiculous somehow than a feline materializing inside her apartment, if only barely.
Moving over to the little creature, she crouched and offered a fingertip for it to sniff. It had been a long time since Astrid had dealt with pets. Raising two boys to adulthood almost on her own, the one dog experience had been more than enough, thank you.
The cat sniffed the proffered fingertip and then gave a slow, lazy blink, rolling to its side and emitting a surprisingly loud purr for such a small animal. Astrid tentatively reached out and stroked its side, finding the fur dense and soft. Velvety.
If anything, the purr intensified and the cat rolled to its back, reaching all its limbs in a trembling stretch and then rebounding to its prior relaxed attitude.
“No, I may not be an expert in cats, but I do know that’s a trap,” Astrid said, pointing at the furry belly apparently presented for her stroking hand. The cat merely looked at her and gave another one of those silent opening-closing of its jaws.
“Can you not meow, or are you just very, very quiet?” Astrid asked, then shook her head. “Okay, now I’m talking to a cat, of all things.” Well, that might not be the only sign of instability. Maybe the animal wasn’t even there to begin with? She dug her phone out of her pocket and took a photo of the cat. Then, for good measure, she texted it to the one person who wouldn’t question her.
Astrid: This is a cat, right?
A pause, then a series of pulsing dots.
Louis: Honey, that’s a cat. Are we branching from cozy mysteries into children’s lit? An ABC book, maybe?
Astrid: Very funny. No, it just appeared in my apartment.
Louis: Sweets, you live on the fifth floor.
Astrid: I know. 🙃
Louis: How did it get there?
Astrid: When I find out the answer to that, I’ll let you know. Thanks for assuring me I’m not hallucinating.
Louis: Any time.
Astrid stood, pocketing her phone. “Well, I know it’s polite to offer refreshments to visitors, but it’s also not right to give food to other people’s pets.” She assumed the little cat had an owner. It was clean and sleek, definitely not starving, though it lacked a collar or tags to indicate who the creature belonged to.
It also probably weighed less than the average D.C. rat, so its odds of survival on the street were probably slim.
Astrid continued about her day, trimming and watering her plants, making her lunch (while the cat sat politely by her ankle, apparently expecting a scrap of lunch meat or cheese), and having eaten her meal without offering her guest a snack, settling on the sofa to read a manuscript she had been asked to write a blurb for. The little cat hopped up beside her and curled into a furry, gray donut pressed up against her thigh. Absently stroking while she read, she realized she found the little animal’s presence rather soothing.
Then she looked down and saw the cat had shifted position and she was stroking its belly. She froze. The cat cracked one eye as if to say, “Do you mind? I was enjoying that.”
“Okay…” Astrid gave the cat’s belly another tentative stroke. The fur here was even downier than the rest of her coat. “How am I going to find out where you’re supposed to be?” she murmured. “Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but you’re clearly meant to be in someone else’s home.” If its owners had noticed its absence, they must be frantic by now. It had been over two hours since it had arrived as if by magic in her home.
As if the cat was agitated by the worry Astrid’s thoughts had stirred up, it stood and stretched, its eyes narrowing and ears pointing back toward its tail. Then it hopped down from the sofa and sauntered, unhurried, over to the sliding door.
Curious, Astrid crept after it, not wanting to spook it into any sudden moves that could lead to a fatal drop. Unconcerned, the cat moved to the edge of her balcony and before Astrid could even gasp, it neatly hopped the distance of several feet between her balcony and the next, sliding between the railings as easily as a seamstress would thread a needle.
“Dear god.” Astrid pressed one hand to her sternum, feeling the sick thump of her heart. She wasn’t afraid of heights but she did have an imagination, after all. Due to her profession, she’d also done research on the effects of falls from great heights on human anatomy. She doubted that cats would fare much better and could imagine what might have happened if it had missed by as little as a fraction of an inch.
In happy ignorance of her worry, the cat sauntered across the other balcony and disappeared into the apartment next door.
The apartment, that as far as Astrid knew, was unoccupied.
“Theo, no, really! There was an actual cat in my apartment today.” She let herself laugh at the absurdity of it. Theo, at twenty-five, was her easygoing baby. He wouldn’t judge her for random feline invasions.
Anders, her elder son, was another situation entirely, dearly though she loved him.
“You checked your front door, right? It couldn’t have come in that way?”
She shook her head. “No, Theo. I did check. You’re getting as bad as your brother.”
“Oops. I’ll get right on removing that stick from my ass, then.”
“Theo.” She pitched her voice into the warning tone that let him know he’d gone too far. It had about a fifty percent success rate on her youngest.
A sigh. “Fine, Mom. I’ll write I won’t be rude about my sainted elder brother a hundred times on the chalkboard now. But how did it get in?”
“I think the same way it got out again.” She described the hair-raising leap the little cat had made, making the death-defying feat look easy and nearly giving her a heart attack.
“Okay, now really don’t tell Anders about the almost heart attack. He’ll insist you move in with him and Jessica.”
“I’m hardly in my dotage at fifty-three,” Astrid said, feeling her jaw tighten.
“I know that and you know that, but tell it to Mr. Responsibility,” Theo said, his tone as light as always.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Astrid said, trying to regain a handle on the conversation. The problem was, Theo wasn’t wrong. Anders did seem to think somehow that his mother was now someone he needed to guide, shelter, and protect. But Anders had had an outsized idea of his role ever since his father died when he was twelve. Maintaining boundaries and a true parent-child relationship between them had often been fraught with difficulties. Astrid had hoped that marriage would give him a new focus.
Sadly, her firstborn was able to multitask.
“Anyway, I’ll send you the picture I took. It’s quite a cute little thing.”
“Think it’ll visit again?”
Astrid shuddered, thinking again about that leap from one balcony to another. “As delightful as the visit would be, the cat’s method of getting here is just too scary, so no.”