Chapter 31 #2
Peter was in my apartment for a twelve-minute conversation about weekend schedules that was actually a conversation about nothing.
Rather, it was actually him sitting on my couch because he wanted to be near me and I wanted him near me and the schedule was a fiction we were both maintaining with decreasing conviction.
When he went back to 4B, I heard the pause in the hallway.
Then his voice, carrying the specific tone of a man confronting a disaster of his own making. “No.”
I opened my door to discover the hallway contained four small tabby shapes moving in four different directions at speed.
“What’s happening?” I asked, though the answer was visually apparent.
“The kittens are out.”
“All of them?”
“All of them. I didn’t close my door. I have Posh. Sporty is on the wall. Scary is by the fire extinguisher. Ginger is unaccounted for.”
“Ginger is unaccounted for?”
“Missing. Take Posh.”
I took Posh.
The hallway became an operation.
Peter extracted Sporty from the wall.
I cornered Scary behind the fire extinguisher using my phone’s flashlight and a series of clicking sounds that I called “kitten-specific auditory lures” and that Peter would later describe as sounding like a man having a conversation with his own teeth. That was rude but not entirely inaccurate.
Three found kittens. One missing.
We checked the stairwell, under every door, in the supply closet.
No Ginger.
Peter lay flat on the hallway carpet and checked beneath every door on the floor, which produced no kitten but did produce a brief, startling moment of eye contact with 4D’s dachshund, who was apparently conducting its own surveillance operation.
“She’s not in the hallway,” Peter said.
“Then she’s in an apartment.”
We split up.
Peter searched 4B. I searched mine.
“She’s not here,” Peter called from across the hall.
“She’s not here either,” I called back.
Then I heard it.
A faint, echoing mew coming from the wall.
From inside the wall.
I dropped to my knees beside the bathroom vent.
“Wait. Peter! She’s in the bathroom vent.”
Peter crossed the hallway at a speed that the beige carpet had not previously experienced from a man in socks. He was on his knees beside me in seconds, his face near the grate, listening.
“She’s in the ductwork,” he said.
“The ductwork connects to the building’s HVAC system. If she goes far enough—”
“Kittens are liquid. Kittens can go anywhere,” he said with the confidence only a veterinarian could possess during a feline jailbreak.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Open the wet food. The fish one,” he instructed.
I got the food, while Peter removed the vent cover with a screwdriver from my kitchen drawer. He set the open can at the duct opening, and then we waited, side by side on my bathroom floor.
Three minutes passed.
Then five.
The mewing grew closer.
Finally, a small orange face appeared in the duct opening, whiskers first, then eyes, then one tentative paw reaching toward the can.
Ginger emerged with the cautious dignity of a spelunker completing an expedition, sniffed the food, and began eating as though refueling after an ordeal.
Peter scooped her up.
“All kittens accounted for.”
We carried our naughty little inmates back to 4B. Peter secured them in the foster room and verified the latch’s closure with the thoroughness of a man who would never again leave his apartment without confirming door closure, a lesson he’d apparently absorbed at the molecular level.
Then we sat on the kitchen floor. Why we didn’t use the stools was a mystery.
We just didn’t.
It was midnight.
The stove light was on.
Four kittens mewed behind a closed door.
General Tso sat in the kitchen doorway with the expression of a building inspector reviewing a code violation.
I started laughing.
Peter laughed, too.
We sat on the kitchen floor and laughed until the laughing turned into breathing and the breathing turned into quiet.
“The hallway is getting shorter,” Peter said.
“It was always short,” I said. “We were just pretending.”
He kissed me on the kitchen floor, in the stove light, with four kittens behind a door and a cat in the doorway, and the kiss tasted like Friday night and fish-scented cat food and the particular sweetness of two people who had tried to do the sensible thing and were discovering that the sensible thing and the right thing were not always the same.
“Good night, Peter.”
“Good night, Benj.”
I stood, dusted myself off, and went across the hall.
I closed my door.
I stood in my apartment with the lamp he’d brought me glowing warm in the corner and Princess Consuela chirping from her carrier and the residual taste of chamomile tea and cat food on my lips.
Something slid under my door.
I’d been slipped a Post-it, pushed under the gap between my floor and front door, with Peter’s handwriting.
The hallway is getting shorter.
I pulled the pen from my pocket and wrote beneath his words.
Crossing count: 49. Your move.
Rather than leave my apartment again and appear even more unhinged than our “crossing count” implied, I photographed the note, sent it in a text, and turned to ready for bed.
Princess Consuela yowled.
“Coming, Majesty,” I called down the hall.