Page 27 of Kitten

The bathwater grew cold. Flakes of pastry floated on the surface. From the door, there was a scratching sound.

“James?”

The door opened. It was Silver. I straightened. “How’d you do that?”

Silver propped her paws on the rim of the tub. They were puffy and shapeless, little balls of dough. I thumbed the smooth padding of her feet. When I pressed down, her toes flared so the space between them became visible, the fur fine as strands of cotton candy. Why were people always warning about claws on cats? Silver didn’t have any claws.

My hands looked ashen and two-dimensional in the bath. I turned the tap to let more hot water fill. Hearing the rush, Silver wiggled her hips in preparation to jump.

“No,” I said. “Don’t—” But she leapt. It was a small leap, graceful and calculated, barely making a splash. I turned off the tap. The water was so high now that any movement would spill it over.

Silver waded into my arms. Against my bare chest, her body was soft and slimy, the texture of wet food. I rubbed my lips over her silken head. I wished I could eat her, keep her shrunken and warm inside me. I sank lower in the bath, letting the water rock us, and thumbed off the new gunk that had gathered in her eyes.

“There we go,” I whispered. “Now you can see.”

Silver blinked slowly, then began to purr. How lovely to be so helpless. In my hands, her face felt tiny, barely the sizeof an apple. I was certain that if I pressed down hard enough, I could break through the bones. One of her ears slanted back while the other, the one with the missing tip, remained perked. I ran my finger across its thin, hard line. I was overcome with awe for all that she must have endured out at sea, and for how she’d found James.

“How did you survive all by yourself? And where did the rest of your family go?”

Her whiskers shook. I pinched them between my fingers. “You’re a perfect little thing,” I said. “A very lucky girl. Who knows where you’d be if you weren’t here.”

Silver squirmed out of my grasp and swam across the bathtub. Her tail snaked over my knees, the satin tickle of algae. My phone balanced on the rim, flecked with soapy water, the screen still black. This was it, now I knew: my mother did not want to speak to me anymore. I still felt sad, but it was a vague kind of sadness, like I was carrying the feeling on behalf of somebody else. Silver continued to do laps around the bath while I closed my eyes, imagining that I was a very good and important person, that this bathtub belonged to me. At the same time, I felt like a piece of coal shrinking in fire, numb and dumb to the world, like I had yet to be born.

8

I’d always known that my mother never planned on being a mother, but for many years our closeness distracted from the fact. At the beginning of each day, she braided my hair, and at the end, she brushed it smooth. Once, while we lay in her bed and listened to the rain, vicious like it always was in late summer, she asked me to never grow up. I promised I wouldn’t in a confident voice, like I could really pull it off. That made her laugh. Back then, making my mother laugh was easy.

There wasn’t a particular moment when I realized my mother’s love for me had changed, but the knowledge of it underscored everything. I became attuned to failure and the places it lurked: bouts of silence I could no longer conquer, conversations that ended in shut doors. She didn’t like that I started to want things other people in my grade had. I didn’t like sleeping in her bed anymore, listening to her tell the same stories. Unless it was with great effort or luck, I could no longer make my mother smile. Worse, if she did smile, it was not a real smile, which led me to believe that her smiles had never been real.

Yet though her love looked different, I knew it was there. I sensed it in the way she left her door open at night. Or when she slipped me a tube of her old lipstick, a red so bright I could never wear it to school yet beautiful and once, I knew, expensive. And I only had to paint something good for her to grasp me tight again. With time, I grew used to our constant negotiations. And then I became motivated by them.

So I wasn’t telling the truth when, earlier, I told James I’d learned to swim by being shoved in. I’d jumped. All the parents came running, but my mother got there first. She yanked me out by the wrists like I was something precious, a piece of jewelry slipping helplessly down the drain. Her grip was tight; she was furious. I’d betrayed her by showing the other parents that I couldn’t swim, but still she saved me, because she loved me. No matter how things had changed between us, we needed each other.

After everyone had migrated to the hot tub, I jumped in again. My mother didn’t come running that time. She watched as I thrashed, her eyes bright and unafraid, challenging me to stay afloat, which eventually I did.

—

Toward the end of thatfirst week, I stopped thinking about time or place. Manhattan faded from memory. Lou texted occasionally, logistics over her impending move-out, memes. I didn’t feel the need to reply. I only checked my phone to see if I’d been paid or if my mother had called, but I knew she wouldn’t. She would not run after me again.

Silver and I fell into a comfortable routine. We wouldwake at the same time with the bed to ourselves, James already downstairs making breakfast. Silver never experienced the grogginess that hung over me after waking. She sprung immediately and impatiently to life, kicking her feet into my ribs to persuade me to play. With my head still on the pillow, I’d lift and dangle chunks of my hair, which transformed for her into the arms of some threatening creature; she pounced and swung and bit.

James didn’t bring up the pastry incident again, and I didn’t tell him about being rejected by my mother. I often found him tidying something in the house that seemed to me already clean, his ears free of headphones and a look of perfect calm on his face, or sitting in the backyard with his eyes closed beneath the weak morning sun like an elderly person for whom time meant nothing.

When James went on his runs, I sat in bed and searched for jobs while Silver napped on my lap. But I wasn’t really searching for jobs; I was using one hand to scroll and the other to massage the soft spot behind her ears, which I came to understand as her happy spot. When I rubbed it, her eyes would close and she’d purr violently, the vibrations wobbling through my legs. Sometimes she enjoyed herself so much that her tongue slipped out of her mouth. I loved when this happened but refrained from encouraging it, wary of embarrassing her. Eventually, the both of us would fall asleep. Sometimes I woke to little pools of drool on my pillow. It was unclear whom the drool belonged to.

I loved pressing into Silver’s belly, which had the jiggly give of a water balloon. I loved looking at her ears, fuzzed with white fur and transparent when the light shonethrough, the map of illuminated veins like a leaf held to the sun. It seemed impossible that such fine veins could hold blood, and yet blood did move through them; her ears were always warm. I also loved to put my fingers under her nose and feel her little breaths. I pictured the air sliding through her clean pink lungs and into her brain—oh, the size of her brain—and wanted to cry at the delicate ecosystem of her aliveness. Each exhale felt to me like a miracle.

Most of all, I loved her tongue: a sliver of pink against gray fur, flat as paper. There was a popular pastry sold at a café near campus calledlangue de chat,French for cat’s tongue, because that was what they were supposed to look like. I used to be impressed by them, knowinglangues de chatwere fickle to make and impressive to bring to potlucks. Now I could see that nothing came close to the dainty thinness of Silver’s tongue. I imagined taking Silver to the café and demanding to see their best baker. I would rub Silver’s ears until she slid her tongue out, then say to them: This is what you’re after. This is what you must replicate. Admit it is impossible.

It pained me to remember that she didn’t belong to me, not even to James, but to his parents. What could grown-ups possibly know about Silver’s specialness?

Even James, I felt, didn’t understand her. When she pummeled her legs into him, he simply sat up and patted her, even though she obviously wanted to play. And when they did play, he did not take her seriously, letting her obtain what she desired without a challenge, after which she became uninterested.

But maybe I didn’t fully understand their relationship.Silver still pranced toward him each time he waved his finger. And she loved his smell more than mine. She could spend hours in his drawer, digging her nose into the different fabrics and purring madly, eyes drunken, dribbling dots of saliva on the whites. When he bounced her in his arms, his smile stretching bigger each time he buoyed her higher, I felt slightly jealous. I couldn’t tell what I was jealous of. Silver never let me hold her for that long, and James never held me like that at all.

—

James planned an outing toa historical town down the coast, but when it was time to go, I felt very tired and apprehensive of being around other people. I asked to postpone the trip until he got back from Manhattan next Thursday. James conceded, crawling under the sheets with Silver and me. I held Silver’s paw, rubbing the skin-like pads. She licked the corners of my lips where the remainders of the afternoon’s chicken salad had hardened.