Chapter 11 Soucy
The shelter smells like bleach over something older. The woman walking us back keeps a careful half step ahead, the way people do when they've decided which animal you're getting before you have.
"He's a project," she says, for the third time. "I want to be upfront with you. He came in feral. He doesn't love hands. He put a volunteer in urgent care for two stitches back in March. We've had him eight months. People meet him once and change their minds."
"I read his file. All of it."
"People say that."
"I read the intake notes. The medical history. The three failed fosters. The second foster returned him for, quote, hostility, after nine days. The third kept him five weeks and cited, quote, an inability to bond." I keep my voice level. "I'm not looking for a cat that bonds in five weeks."
"What are you looking for?"
"A cat that takes nine months and means it." Beside me Lundy makes a sound in his chest that he converts, poorly, into a cough.
The cat is in the last kennel. A gray scrap of a thing pressed into the back corner with his ears flat and his eyes doing math on all three of us. Skinny. A notch torn out of one ear. He looks like he's been losing a fight he refuses to stop having.
I crouch down level with the bars and I don't reach in because the file said he hates reaching. I just stay there, low and still, letting him run his numbers.
"You can't pet him through the bars," she says.
"I know. I'm not going to." I keep my hands loose on my knees where he can see them. "I'm letting him decide."
"That could take a while. He doesn't usually come to people."
"Then we'll wait."
It takes nine minutes. I count them.
Lundy stands behind me the whole nine without a word. Its own kind of patience from a man whose entire body is built to fill a room, making himself into furniture so the cat has one less variable to track.
At minute nine the gray scrap uncoils and crosses the kennel and headbutts the bars hard enough to be heard. Once. Like a verdict.
"Huh," the woman says. "He's never done that for anyone in here."
"He'll do it again," I tell her, and my throat does something inconvenient. "We'll take him."
They put him in a cardboard carrier and he screams the entire drive, a thin furious noise with no breaks in it, and Lundy drives one-handed with the other arm braced along the back of my seat and raises his voice over the screaming. "So what's his name."
"I don't know yet. You don't name a thing before you've met it." Which is what I told him in a hotel bed three weeks ago. He knows it, because his mouth moves.
"You've met him."
"I've met the version of him that lives in a cardboard box and hates me. I'll meet the rest of him at home."
"That's a very you distinction."
"It's the correct distinction. You don't name the goalpost in the warmup. You name it once it's saved your night."
"You named both your goalposts."
"They earned it." The screaming hits a new register. "Eyes on the road. He's fine. He's just registering a formal complaint."
At home the screaming stops the second the box opens. The cat walks out into the cleanest apartment in Atlanta. Takes one slow lap of the perimeter. Disappears behind the couch.
I had the litter box set up eleven days early. The food and water bowls are ceramic, evenly spaced, at the distance from the wall the shelter pamphlet recommended, and I arranged the whole thing like a problem I could solve with geometry.
Within the hour he knocks a water bowl across the kitchen tile. Not by accident. I watch him hook one paw under the rim and lever it. He walks away from the spreading puddle without looking back.
I stand in the kitchen doorway holding a towel, processing the fact that this animal has just introduced entropy into a space I've spent months keeping frictionless.
"He's testing you," Lundy says from the couch, where he's been reading and pretending not to observe.
"He's vandalizing me. There's a distinction."
I mop up the water and refill the bowl and set it back in its place. Six minutes later he hooks it again. Same paw. Same angle. Walks away with the same contempt.
I refill it. He does it a third time.
The fourth time, I move the bowl two inches from the wall and weight it with a flat stone from the shelf. He circles it. Tests the new resistance. Drinks. On his terms. I note it.
By that evening he's knocked the TV remote off the arm of the couch. Batted a pen under the refrigerator where I can't reach it without moving the appliance. Deposited a hairball on the exact center of the bathmat. The bathmat I replaced last week. The white one.
I stand in the bathroom looking at it. My hands want the pattern. The counting. The sharp clean edges of a space that stays where I put it. The urge is specific and loud.
I breathe through it. I throw the bathmat in the wash. I don't replace it with a new one because the new one will also get a hairball on it. This is the cost. I read the cost in the file and I agreed to it and I'm not going to pretend I didn't.
The next morning I wake up to find him sitting on the kitchen counter, the one surface I can't tolerate being occupied, staring at me from between the coffee grinder and the French press like a gargoyle.
"No," I tell him.
He blinks. Slow. The internet says it's a sign of trust, which I choose to interpret as insubordination.
I don't remove him from the counter. I make coffee around him. He watches me measure the beans with the same evaluative stare he gave me through the shelter bars. Running his numbers.
When I sit on the couch with the mug he drops off the counter and crosses the apartment and jumps up onto my chest. Stands there on all four feet directly over my heart, glaring down at me like I owe him money.
"Okay," I tell him.
He sits. Then he lies down. A coiled gray weight right over the center of me. He starts a motor I can feel in my own ribs.
My hands come up to him without any instruction from me. They settle into his fur. They stay. The idle hum that runs them goes quiet under his weight, the way a frequency cancels when something warm meets it. No restlessness. No need to move them anywhere at all.
"Gaspard," I say.
Lundy lowers himself onto the other end of the couch, careful of the cat, careful of me. "Gaspard."
"He's clearly a Gaspard. Look at him. He's appalled by everything and he's staying anyway." The motor revs under my palm. "It's a serious name. He's been through things. He's earned a serious name and I'm not going to insult him with Mittens."
"I'd've lost money betting on Mittens." Lundy reaches over, slow, telegraphing every inch of it, and gets exactly one finger of contact along the cat's spine before Gaspard's head whips around with intent and Lundy retracts the hand at the speed of a man who reads angles for a living. "Noted. No hands."
"He likes the ones who hold still and let him come to them."
"Yeah," Lundy says, and he's not looking at the cat anymore. "I'm getting that."
?
Two days later he texts me an address and a time and the single word studio, no other context, which from Lundy is a held door of his own. I show up at a storefront with brown paper over the windows and no sign, and he lets me in himself.
The space inside is wrong for him in the way the tank is wrong for me. The one room in a life that doesn't match the rest of it. Pale wood floor worn to a shine. A wall of mirror. A barre along the back. Afternoon light coming gray through the papered glass.
He's in soft clothes I've never seen on him, and there's a woman's framed photograph on the little shelf by the speakers, a dancer caught mid-leap, and I don't have to ask.
"My mother," he says anyway, because he wants to say it.
"Kate. This was her thing before my dad's career ate the whole family.
She was good. Could've been more than good, but you don't run a hockey household and a body that demanding at the same time, so she picked us.
" He toes off his shoes. "The one piece she kept was sticking me in classes.
Saturdays. She'd drive me an hour each way and sit in the lobby and not say a word about my father's road trips. "
"Does the team know you do this?"
"The team knows I do ballet. They think it's a flexibility thing for the splits, the lateral push.
Baz outed it two months ago and I let everybody believe it's cross-training.
" He walks out to the center of the floor.
"It's cross-training. It's also the only forty minutes of my week that are hers and have nothing to do with stopping pucks.
Nobody's been in here with me. You're the first."
"Why me?"
"You showed me a shark that's going to need a bigger house." The shrug isn't easy. It costs him, and watching it cost him is the most undressed I've seen him with his clothes on. "Seemed fair. You let me see your loud thing. This is my quiet one."
I stand in the doorway of somebody else's private room and I understand exactly what it costs to hand over a key like this, because I handed mine over in a basement with a 250-gallon tank and a bull shark that eats frozen squid on Tuesdays.
The rooms we keep locked aren't locked because they're shameful. They're locked because they're the realest thing in us and we can't afford to let the wrong person in and watch them shrug.
He's not going to shrug at my shark. I'm not going to shrug at his mother's barre.
He puts me at the barre and it's absurd immediately. The two of us, the biggest men in any room we've ever walked into, hands on a rail built for someone half our size.
"Feet out. From the hip, not the ankle. There." His hand lands flat between my shoulder blades. "Now drop your weight. You're bracing."
"I'm standing."
"You're bracing. You hold tension like you're waiting for a shot that already beat you. Let the floor have it. You know this, it's the crease. Weight low, weight even. Ready to move any direction at once."
"That's a great deal of theory for standing up straight."