There’s a right way to introduce a cat to a new house, I learned from the training book, a gift from my mother the Christmas I was thirteen. Nearly three decades later, I remember the instructions: You must enclose her in a small room with her litter box for several days, until she feels safe. You expand the territory slowly until she feels secure in all the rooms of the house. Eventually, once she is secure, you might let her roam freely outside.
I wanted a puppy. But for Christmas I received an I.O.U. for a kitten, hand-written in my mother’s elegant script, wrapped up in a pretty box with the book. Later that week, my mother drove me deep into the Maryland suburbs to pick one out. A volunteer foster instructed me to choose one of the cats running up and then back down the stairs of her townhouse in a wildish pack. Trailing behind the rest, struggling with the steps, was the smallest—a fluffy black and white ball with a bushy black tail. “That one,” I remember whispering to my mother. She was the most kittenish of the bunch, pouncing, tumbling, blinking in the adorably bewildered way of tiny mammals. I liked the idea of taking care of her. I was also deeply nervous about it.
I followed the instructions in the book carefully. For the first few days I kept her in the rarely used guest bathroom at the back of our split-level house. I fed her and cleaned her litter box before school. Afternoons, I perched cross-legged on the toilet and played with her. Her favorite toy was a mylar pompom attached to a long stick, which I would drag and which she would chase across the tile floor, the metallic ribbons flashing and shining like a living thing. She was even smaller than she looked, weighing practically nothing. When I held her, I could feel her wildly beating heart, if she were frightened, or her radiating purr, if she were content—emotions so big within her tiny frame that they vibrated right out of her body and into my hands, as though I could hold them, too.
I could not have explained this to my mother, but I was uneasy in those moments. The kitten was so tiny, and caring for her felt so serious. I tried in that first week to come up with the perfect pet name, one that would reflect her too-big coat and her shy meow, but I couldn’t. I think I felt unqualified for the job. In the meantime, we had all been calling her “the kitty,” or, simply, “kitty.” It stuck.
“Kitty was the nicest cat,” my mom will say now, if in the course of conversation one of us stumbles upon a memory that takes place during Kitty’s era. My mom has never had another pet, so she has nothing to compare her to, but she’s right: Kitty had a sweet nature. She was shy with guests but affectionate with us, napping on my father’s chest while he watched football, allowing my mother to brush her, her spine rolling like a wave from her skull to the tip of her thick tail. But somehow she knew she was my cat. She sought me out when the house was sleeping, butting her head against my bedroom door, cracking it just wide enough to let herself in. When I felt her jump up on my twin bed, I’d roll over to make room for her. She’d rattle a purr and knead my chest until we both fell back to sleep.
For two years of mid-adolescence, I doted on her. But when I entered high school, I got busy with other things. Days divided into blocks for school, sports, and homework. I still fed the kitten, and she still slept in my bed, but she slipped quietly into the background of the household.
By then she wasn’t a kitten anymore, anyway. Fully grown, though always petite, she had developed an independent life, too. On all but the coldest and wettest days of the year, she spent her time in my father’s backyard garden. This was her favorite place, the spot I could always find her doing whatever cats do in their secret lives. The cat book had been right. Though there was nothing to stop her roaming the neighborhood, she never left the sanctuary of our yard.
Perhaps it helped that our yard was the perfect cat kingdom. My father had cultivated our suburban quarter acre into a lush garden with pleasantly over-stuffed flower beds and winding, grassy paths. It was designed symphonically, with a chain of blooms timed to burst throughout the season. The delicate white dogwoods unfurled first, marking the end of winter. Yellow daffodils and lollipop tulips trumpeted spring. Fiery azaleas in red and fuchsia blazed through May, burning out just as the showy irises and fragrant peonies arrived. By the time the real heat hit in July, the shade greens and hosta that bordered the paths had grown fat, and the bright black-eyed Susans were peaking.
Somehow, in the final glare of August, while the rest of the neighborhood gardens were burnt out and dry, my father coaxed a regiment of leggy daylilies into position. They bordered the back fence and traced the curves of the garden paths, their elegant, rust-colored faces poised in attention, surveying the end of summer.
When I’d go searching for my father at dinnertime, I’d most often find him outside, standing with his back to me, sipping a beer and quietly watering the flower beds. It’s the pose of his I can still see most clearly now, decades later—his long, strong legs tanned by the summer sun, his head bowed. He was a moody man, quick to anger, but he was always calm in those moments. Meditative, even. I’d walk out to where he stood and I’d tell him that dinner was ready, knowing we wouldn’t rush inside. We’d linger a bit as he finished watering whatever section of the garden he was working on. Before we went back in, he’d let me drink directly from the hose, the water icy and metallic.
I was fifteen when my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was fifty-one.
*****
Kitty ran away the summer my father died, when I was twenty-four. My parents had just retired. They wanted a smaller home, one that would be easier to manage, one without multiple levels and a lifetime of clutter. The house my parents moved to was nothing like the split-level I grew up in, which rattled with stuff. The new house was just built, never lived in—a bright and airy open floor plan with shiny floors, clean and empty as a box.
There was no landscaping in my parents’ new yard. A few feet of fresh sod surrounded their deck, a moat of emerald in an expanse of brown construction mud. But even the sod died shortly after they moved in, and then there was nothing green in the backyard except two or three small trees tethered to wooden stakes.
By that time, I was living my own adult life, and it was agreed without discussion that Kitty would go with my parents when they moved. But my father didn’t know that there’s a right way to introduce a cat to a new house. He simply let Kitty loose, where she skittered anxiously from under one bed to the next, looking for the dark nooks and corners she was used to. She refused to go outside.
After a few weeks, my father decided to bring her outdoors, since she would not go on her own. I don’t know why he did this, but I can imagine how it would have gone: My father calling her to the back porch and opening the door for her. Kitty coming obediently, but slinking behind the white wicker chairs. My father swooping her up neatly and depositing her out on the shadeless deck, shutting the screen door behind her. Kitty never came back to the house.
My parents waited until they were sure she was truly gone to tell me this. And by that time they had other bad news. The cancer my father had fought for a decade had returned decisively. He was bed-ridden by the end of June. He decided he would die in the new house with the aid of hospice, rather than at a hospital. My mother, my cousin, and I were at his bedside when he stopped breathing.
In late summer, we returned to our old neighborhood for my father’s funeral service, held at the Catholic church down the block from our old house. As I stood with my family on the church’s front steps, watching the pallbearers load my father’s casket into the back of the hearse, I could also see the house that had so recently been ours—which still felt to me like ours, like we were allowing a strange family to borrow it temporarily. I thought of my father’s daylilies and wondered if they would still be lined up obediently in the backyard. But lilies are, by nature, spreaders. Unless the new owners were gardeners as careful as my father had been, they would, of course, go wild; if they had not already, next season, or the season following, order moving relentlessly towards entropy. I realize now that this is one of the lessons of growing up— something adults understand, that children, if they are lucky, do not.
*****
Late that August, just a few weeks before my father died—during the phase of his illness when I visited every weekend—something strange happened. My mother will sometimes tell this part of the story as though she was the one who was there. We have told it frequently enough in our family that she believes it is her own memory, but it was actually I who spotted Kitty passing through my parents’ new backyard, weeks after she disappeared.
It was a late-summer evening. I was painting my toenails on the back porch after dinner, trying to catch the last of the light, when a band of six or seven cats trotted across the berm behind my parents’ house. The half-built homes had become dens for feral cats, and gangs of them roamed the empty neighborhood. I watched one such posse descend the small, barren hill behind my parents’ house, their dainty footsteps kicking up tiny eddies of brown dust. A small cat at the back of the pack, quietly keeping up with the rest, had a familiar bushy black tail.
It was Kitty, there in the alien landscape of the dusty, half-finished development, folded into the pack as though she, too, had been feral her whole life. The realization was so strange it bordered on surreal, and it took me a minute to believe what I was seeing. But it was definitely my cat. Though Kitty was very clearly no longer my cat, and perhaps she never had been. At least not in any of the ways I thought I had understood.
But, as you know, this story was never about the cat. It is about my own reckoning with my complicated father, his anger and his courage. In my forties now, I can feel various forces pulling relentlessly at the seams of my own adult life and I am dizzied by just how easily it could all come apart. Despite what must have been his own holy-dark terrors, my father insisted for our sake on a world that was ordered and secure, knowing that it was fundamentally neither. Gratitude for this complicated gift pools now, thick and slow as blood.
Back on that parched lawn, nearly twenty years ago, I called Kitty. She stopped and turned towards me. The other cats kept moving, leaving the two of us alone in the fading light of the evening. I got up off the deck stairs and walked towards her through the dead sod, moving very slowly, careful not to startle her.
I called her name again as I got closer. She stared at me, letting me approach. She recognized me.
I understood at the time that even if I could catch Kitty, I couldn’t take her into the house. With his illness, my father couldn’t be exposed to a stray animal—and there was no way to see Kitty other than as a stray now. But I continued to approach slowly anyway, calling her name, with no plan for what I might do if I reached her. I got close enough to observe that she didn’t seem to be injured or starving, but not quite close enough to touch her. She turned away. She took a few steps in the other direction, and when I followed she took a few more, in a strange
I trailed her like this, painstaking and slow, across the dusty yard, through the narrow passage between two houses, and out into one of the development’s deserted roads. It was night by then, the hour of evening just before darkness where the ground is in shadow and the sky is lit cobalt blue. The pavement was still warm from the day. Dust matted my wet toenails.
Kitty trotted across the road to where the development ended. The boundary was marked by a row of young trees on the far side of the street—an evergreen buffer between my parents’ new community and the world. She looked back.
I genuinely expected her to let me catch up to her there. I believed she had purposefully led me to the only corner of this neighborhood that had trees and grass, that even remotely resembled the landscape of our former home. I thought she was going to let me pick her up. I called her softly again and moved towards her. But she turned away, slipped between the evergreens, and was gone.
Kerry Folan’s nonfiction has appeared in the Ninth Letter, the Southeast Review, Literary Hub, and River Teeth, among many other outlets. She teaches writing and literature at George Mason University and is the founder of Shore Lit, an organization that brings free author events to Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore.
Photo by TIVASEE