Ruth was sitting in a metal folding chair, the kind people take to parades. She was wrapped in a blanket. All I could see of her was her face. Ruth looked tired, but otherwise not too different from when I’d seen her last.
“Ruth! I was so worried about you! What are you doing down here? Are you okay?” I was so relieved to see her, and so confused. I edged a little closer.
Ruth chuckled. It was such a familiar sound – it evoked all those games of Crazy Eights in the Happy Cat House lunchroom. “Well, darling, I don’t think I would exactly describe myself as `okay’; I’m dead, after all, so `okay’ is a little beside the point, don’t you think?”
“But …?” I remembered that I had no idea how she’d died.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal. I slipped and cracked my head in the bathtub. It was very tidy.” Ruth’s voice was kind, but I could tell she thought I was focusing on the wrong thing. Barking up the wrong tree, would have been her way of putting it.
“Yes, but Ruth – no one could find you. We checked, we looked for you, but you had just … vanished.” I knew I sounded a little petulant, but I couldn’t help it.
Ruth smiled, as though she was proud of how she’d mystified us all. “That’s right. They couldn’t find me, because the cats ate me.”
“Ate you?”
“Yep. Every little bit of me. It’s such a cliché, isn’t it? But they didn’t do it for the usual reasons. They weren’t hungry, they weren’t locked in the house. They did it to bring me down here, with them. So we could be together.”
The longer I stood here listening to Ruth in this dark, smelly, chaotic room, the more revolted and sad I felt. The cats had gradually stopped milling around. Now they sat silently, listening. Ruth waited for me to respond. Finally I said, “Won’t you come upstairs? We could be together – with the cats, too, of course.” There was a deep stillness among the cats now, as they waited to hear what Ruth would say.
“Oh, Bea. I wish I could, I really do. Remember how much fun we had?” Ruth smiled, and I thought she is the only person I have ever truly loved. “But you see,” she continued, still smiling, “I can’t do that. I belong here now, with my sweeties.” There was an audible hum in the room, all the cats purring. “Plus, I’m afraid I’m not exactly ambulatory.”
“Why not?” I asked, without thinking.
“Well … they are cats, after all. They aren’t doctors, or mechanics. I’m afraid they did a rather poor job of reassembling me.” Ruth nodded at her own blanket-wrapped form. The cats looked at her, anxious, loving.
“We tried, Ruth,” said the white cat, who had reappeared and was sitting at her feet.
“I know you did, Thaddeus,” said Ruth in her most gentle voice. The cats began to surge around her, rubbing against her blanket with sorrowful expressions on their faces.
I stood there watching, at a loss. Tears ran down my face. “Oh, God, Ruth … what can I do?”
She looked back at me calmly. “I don’t think there’s much you can do, darling. But how are you? How do you like the house? You’re living here now, aren’t you?”
I had a sudden vision of myself, living in Ruth’s house, calmly going about my life upstairs while she was down here, with the cats. …
I cried out, turned and stumbled toward the door. Ruth called out, “Beatrice, wait -” but I ran up the stairs without answering her. I could hear the cats hissing. I reached the closet and slammed the door behind me. Within minutes I was in my car, driving blindly down Pratt, away from Ruth and her house, away from those cats.
***
I sold the house to a developer. It was on the market for two days. A few weeks later Ruth’s house was a pile of rubble, and I was driving to New Mexico. I bought a condo in Albuquerque, filed for a divorce, and got a German shepherd puppy named Millie.
I think about Ruth a lot. But it’s too late to change anything. And though I’ve tried to levitate, I can’t do it. It’s probably just as well.
The end
