A story told by Kat

I don’t really know how I got here. That’s the first honest thing I can tell you.

My earliest memory is a box. It was a good box, as boxes go — tall sides, a flannel blanket in the bottom that smelled like somebody’s laundry soap — but it wasn’t anywhere I recognized, and the hands that reached into it weren’t any hands I knew. There were five of us in that box: me, my sister Hazel, my brothers Noodle and Shadow, and little Button, who was the smallest of us and mostly slept with her whole face buried in whoever was warmest.

Somebody had put us in a different box, before that one, and left it in a place where the big trucks come and the ground smells like old rain and rust. I don’t remember that part well. I remember being cold all the way through, and crying, and my brothers and sisters crying, and nobody answering. Then I remember a voice — a woman’s voice, going soft all of a sudden, the way voices do when somebody finds something they weren’t expecting — and being lifted, all five of us, box and all, and carried into warmth.

The woman’s name, as far as we were concerned, was the Lady. She had warm hands and a quiet house and a lap that could hold exactly two kittens at a time, which caused arguments. Our mother wasn’t there — I don’t know where our mother went, and I’ve made my peace with not knowing — so the Lady fed us herself, one at a time, with a little bottle that was almost as big as Button. She would hold us against her chest so we could feel her heart going, and feed us in order, and we would line up along the edge of the box like customers at a counter. Noodle always tried to be first and second.

“There’s enough,” Hazel said, the first night any of us talked about it. “She counts us. I watch her count. One, two, three, four, five, every time, before she sits down.”

“She’s counting us so she’ll notice if one of us gets took,” Shadow said.

“Or so she’ll notice if one of us needs help,” Hazel said.

Shadow considered this from the back corner, where he could see the whole room. “Same thing,” he said, “if you’re the one doing the noticing.” He wasn’t wrong about everything, Shadow. He was just wrong first, and right later, which is a different thing entirely.

We got comfortable, the way you do. The food changed first — one morning the bottle didn’t come, and instead there were two low bowls, one with water and one with soft food we could eat standing up like grown cats, and we stood in it a little, all of us, because that’s how you learn. A few days after that, the Lady brought in a shallow pan full of clean gravel and set it in the corner, and we discussed it for the better part of an afternoon.

“It’s a box,” Noodle said, climbing in. “For sitting.”

“It’s not for sitting,” I said, though at that moment I couldn’t have told you what it was for.

Shadow walked around it twice, suspicious as a tax collector. “She put it there on purpose. Everything she does is on purpose. Watch.” And within the day, every one of us had figured out what the pan was for, and Shadow took full credit, and we let him, because the pan turned out to be one of the Lady’s kindnesses too — a private place, kept clean, that she tended for us like it mattered to her that we had one.

Then came the toys — a ball that crinkled when it rolled, a feather on a string that the Lady would dance across the floor until Noodle lost his mind and his footing at the same time. Then, a few days after that, a scratching post: a short, carpeted tree of our very own, standing in the middle of the room like it had grown there, and we could climb it and dig our claws in and nobody said no. Days turned into weeks that way, the way warm days do when you’re small and fed and counted every night — one, two, three, four, five.

So when the Lady picked me up that last morning, I thought I knew what was happening. She picked us up a dozen times a day. I went loose and happy in her hands, the way you do when hands have never once meant you harm.

She handed me to a stranger.

He was a man, and he smelled like outside and soap and something warm I didn’t have a word for yet, and his hands were bigger and less sure than hers. I waited for him to love on me for a minute and hand me back. Instead he turned — and carried me toward the door. The door. In all my life I had never been through the door. Through the door was the place the sounds came from that we discussed at night — the rumble and the barking and the long sighing noise Hazel said was the wind and Shadow said was something else entirely, something we didn’t want to know about.

He carried me out into it.

The sky was so big it had no edges, and the light was everywhere at once, and there was a bird going past making a noise like it owned the whole world and knew it. I dug my claws into the man’s jacket and held on with everything I had, and he just said, “I know, I know,” in a low voice, and kept one hand steady over my back the whole way to the car, and didn’t rush, and didn’t put me down. The car ate us both. He set me in a box in the back seat — a box, like the first box, and my whole heart went cold — and he closed the door with a sound like the end of the world, and then we were moving.

I couldn’t see anything. I could only hear. The motor went on and on underneath everything, and the box bounced — little bounces, mostly, and sometimes a big one that lifted me clean off the blanket — and there were other motors going past outside, and once a horn, far away, and once the long rattling roar of something enormous going by on the other side of the world. I cried once, at the start, and then I stopped, because crying hadn’t fixed the first box either. What fixed the first box was somebody coming. I held onto that with all four feet.

“Somebody will come when the moving stops,” I told myself. “Somebody always comes when the moving stops.”

After a while — a long while, a whole kittenhood of a while — the bouncing stopped. The motor sighed and went quiet. A door opened. Light came through the holes in the box, and then the top opened, and there was the stranger’s face, looking down at me the way the Lady used to look into our box — careful, and glad.

He lifted me out and carried me into a house I had never smelled before. It was a quiet house. It smelled like coffee and old wood and one person living his life in it, slow and regular. The man sat down in a big chair — the kind of chair that has clearly been sat in by the same person for years, that has learned the shape of him — and he set me on his chest and petted me, and talked to me. He talked the whole time: about the house, about the ride, about nothing at all, in that same low “I know, I know” voice, and his hand went over my back over and over, steady as a heartbeat, until my claws came out of his jacket one at a time, all by themselves.

Then he put me down on the floor so I could do what I needed to do, which was the real looking.

I went everywhere, the way you do when it matters. Under the coffee table. Behind the television, where it was warm as a sunbeam and hummed a little. Around the couch, both directions, in case the two sides were different. Under the big chair. I was searching, though I couldn’t have told you for what — some sign of whether this place was a place like the Lady’s place, or a place like the first box.

And then I found it. In the corner by the kitchen door, there was a shallow pan full of clean gravel — and a few feet from it, two little bowls, one with fresh water and one standing empty and clean and ready. I stood there a long time looking at them. He had made the signs before I ever arrived. The pan, and the bowls, and the chair with his shape in it. Houses tell you the truth if you take the time to look at all of them, and this house was saying the same word in every room.

The man got up, slow, and came back with a spoon, and on the spoon was something that smelled so good it reached me before he did. He bent down — it took him a second; I would learn that bending down was not free for him, that he paid for it a little every time, and did it anyway — and he put the food down on a little saucer by the bowls, and I scarfed it up so fast I forgot to be ladylike about it, and it was lovely, warm and soft and rich, the taste of a place where somebody had thought about you before you got there.

I walked around some more after that, because there was more house and I was thorough. I checked behind the television again. It was still warm. Some things you check twice just to enjoy them.

And then I saw the man, sitting in his big chair, doing nothing really. Not sleeping. Not reading. Just sitting there with his hands quiet, watching the room like a man whose work for the day is done and done right. Waiting, though he would never have said so. Giving me all the time in the world to finish deciding something he had already decided before he ever drove out to get me.

I jumped up into his lap.

He gave me a couple of pets — not a lot, not fussy, just a couple, like we’d been doing this for years — and settled his hand where it could stay. And I curled up in the warm hollow his legs made, and put my face down, and went to sleep, right there in the middle of a strange house with a strange man and a full belly.

Because I’d just realized something, all at once, the way the truest things arrive.

I wasn’t visiting. I was home.

God setteth the solitary in families. — Psalm 68:6