26. Elara
Elara
“Oh good, you’re back! Everything’s fine!”
I say it from the kitchen, where I am washing a plate that was already clean, because my hands needed a job and the plate volunteered.
They come in quietly, but everything happens at once.
The door leans against the wall, the bags go down.
And then four large men are standing in my living room not asking me anything.
They’re just looking around like they can find evidence of something.
Something that I’m going to pretend didn’t happen like my life depends on it.
Then the looking stops, because they’ve found something.
My couch.
Where Muffin sits in the exact center of the pull-out, tail wrapped around his feet, staring right back at all of them. He does not get up.
“Since when do you have a cat?” Gunnar says.
“She doesn’t have a cat,” Erik says, with the full authority of three years and a shared wall. He is looking directly at a cat.
“I do now. His name is Muffin. He showed up this morning. He lives here now, and before anybody starts — he answers to it. We checked.”
“Muffin,” Gunnar says.
“Muffin.”
Erik just keeps staring at him. Rayner crouches down and offers the back of his hand, and Muffin sniffs it once and then ignores him with tremendous dignity, and this appears to delight Rayner completely.
Then their eyes start drifting from the cat back to me, and I know exactly what’s waiting behind that.
Erik’s eyes go around the room once. Then stop on the vacuum, still parked in the doorway, which I should have moved and did not, because apparently I wanted a witness.
“Ella—”
“Door first.” I don’t look up from the plate. “Please.”
Erik looks at me a second longer than I’d like. Then he nods, and the room turns into a job site.
They do.
If they know, they’ll make it a thing. If it’s a thing, I’ll have to talk about it. If I talk about it, either my voice is going to do something embarrassing or I am. Probably me. And I have already met my quota of embarrassing for today, and it’s not even lunch.
So it’s not a thing.
Muffin follows me back into the kitchen and sits on my foot. All of him, dead center, like he won’t leave me alone. Maybe he can’t.
“You didn’t have to do that earlier,” I tell him. Barely a whisper. Whispers are private. “But thank you.”
Behind me, the living room goes very quiet for a second.
My heart starts pounding before I can stop it.
There’s no way they…
Probably a tool thing.
Yep, definitely a tool thing.
The door goes up fast. Alarmingly fast. Rayner holds it in place with one hand while Erik sets the hinges, and Brock feeds them hardware in the right order without being asked, and there’s a rhythm to it that no group of old friends has ever had in the history of old friends, and I am too tired to really think about that, so I don’t.
The deadbolt comes out of the bag and it is not a normal deadbolt. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect on a vault.
“That’s a lot of lock,” I say.
“It’s rated for pawn shops,” Gunnar says, with real pride.
He hasn’t made a joke about anything else.
My article is still open on the monitor, big and bright, seventeen hundred words of houseplant propaganda aimed directly at him, and he’s walked past it twice.
The first time his eyes went to it, and then they came to me, and stayed on me, and the bit I built all morning just — didn’t happen.
I’m a little pissed off at that.
I’ve known him for less than a day but I don’t know what to do with a Gunnar who won’t take a shot that’s been left open for him.
I’ve got bigger problems right now.
Brock is looking at Muffin.
Specifically, Brock is looking at Muffin’s front paw, which I cleaned, which I definitely cleaned, which I am now ninety percent sure I cleaned, and Muffin is looking back at him with the round, blank innocence of a cat who has never done anything in his life.
Nobody says anything.
The door swings. The lock throws. Erik works the deadbolt twice, and both times it goes home with a sound I feel in the floor, and my shoulders come down an inch without my permission.
Done. Finished. Everyone can go home now, except one of them lives across the hall and the rest are apparently permanent.
Then Gunnar goes back into the bags.
He comes out with a box I didn’t see before, and a pencil, and he gets down on his knees in front of my brand-new door and starts measuring the bottom of it.
“What are you doing?”
“Improving it.”
“That door is nine minutes old.”
He doesn’t answer. He’s drawing a rectangle on the bottom of my nine-minute-old door, tongue between his teeth, checking the lines twice, and the box has a picture on it, and the picture is a cat door.
A cat door.
Wait.
“You bought that this morning?”
“I bought a lot of things this morning.”
“I got Muffin after you left.” The math is doing something in my head that math should not do. “You didn’t know he existed. Nobody knew he existed. How did you—”
“It was on sale,” Gunnar says. To the door.
It was not on sale. I don’t know how I know that, but I have never been more sure of anything in my life.
Behind him, Erik has become deeply interested in the deadbolt he already installed.
I stand there and watch Gunnar cut a hole in the door they just paid for, fit the little frame into it and tighten every screw twice, and the whole time he doesn’t say one word about it. Nothing.
Muffin walks over and inspects the work. Puts his head through the flap. Pulls it back out.
“You’re welcome,” Gunnar tells him, gruff, and it doesn’t sound like a joke.
And that’s the thing that does it.
Not Kyle in my doorway. Not the vacuum. Not four men silent rather than interrogating me when they got back. A pet door. A pet door bought before there was a pet, installed by the one who keeps calling me beautiful like it means nothing. For a cat I’ve had since this morning…
He bought the door before the cat existed. Before there was any reason. Before there was anything to be kind to.
I look for the catch. There’s always a catch. Good things have invoices, that’s just math, I’ve done the math my whole life —
I can’t find the invoice. There isn’t even a receipt. The kindness happened before the cat did.
My eyes go hot. The walls come in a little. The apartment is full of men and hardware and kindness and it is suddenly the smallest room I have ever stood in, and my lungs put in a request for air that isn’t in here.
“I’ll be right back,” I hear myself say.
Somebody says my name. I’m already at the door.
The new lock is smooth. The new door swings without a sound, very pleased with itself. And the first person to ever use it is me, going through it, down the hall, down the stairs, and out.
So much out because I can’t stay there.
Not with that kindness.
Not with them.
The street doesn’t help. The street is cars and noise and people who all seem to know where they’re going, so I keep moving, and I don’t pick a direction, my feet pick it, and I let them, because they seem sure and I’m fresh out of sure.
Left at the corner. Past the coffee place. The blocks go by and my breathing doesn’t fix itself and I don’t stop.
There are trees at the end of this street. There have always been trees at the end of this street, the little urban forest preserve with the trails I’ve never once used, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing about what’s in there.
They look like the only quiet left in the world.
I go in.