Wait. There’s Yolo’s collar. Green to match his eyes, the kind that breaks away if it gets caught on anything.
It’s snagged at the top of the fence. This has happened before, more than once. I walk over to pick it up. Yes. His. Greencollar, silver tag, his name engraved on the front, our phone number on the back.
Sometimes I swear he breaks out of his collar on purpose.
“Yolo?” I call out. “YOLO!”
It’s quiet.
The leaves rustle in the bushes near me. But it’s only the wind, which settles as soon as it started. I kneel down to look for him anyway. Nothing.
There are no other cats for me to mistake for him. There aren’t any small creatures crawling through the underbrush, giving me misguided hope.
“Do you know where he is?” I ask into the quiet.
No one I wished for would have taken him.
But I don’t know who else is here.
119.
now
Okay. Okay. Where have Yolo and I gone together, both before and after this all happened? Is there somewhere he might have liked to try out without me?
Ordidsomeone take him?
Maybe they do feel like I cheated. Maybe I have to go where they want me to go.
Because I’ve known all along where this ends.
I’ve been pretending there’s a way to get out of it. To go to the marquee instead, to pretend that it could all end there, that I could get answers to my questions. But there are no answers.
That cross at the base of the sign.
I’ve known the whole time where the clues were going to lead me.
“No,” I say out loud.“No.”
I can’t gothere.
Not even for Yolo.
120.
now
I am losing the day. The hours are leaving.
It’s going to rain. It’s coming fast. The wind is whipping my hair. Leaves are flapping silver-gold above me, and the sky has gone almost-night dark.
“Yolo!” I call out, one more time. The collar dangles from my hand. Did he lose it going over into the neighbors’ property, or coming back?
All I had to do was keep track of him...
All I had to do was keep him safe.
I know from before that you can try and try and try to reconstruct what happened, and you can maybe get close, but you will never know.
