He’d come around the island and was standing beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him but not so close that it felt like a rescue.
“She’s a remarkable animal,” Peter said to the couple, picking up the briefing where I’d dropped it. His voice was steady and professional and carried the authority of a veterinary surgeon who was also, I realized, running interference for me with a smoothness that suggested he’d done this before.
He told them about Beyoncé’s enrichment needs, her escape history, and her relationship with General Tso. He told them about her latch technique and her window exploits and the time she’d climbed a bookshelf using the spines as footholds. He told them she was fearless and clever and that the home she’d come from had loved her very much.
That last part wasn’t in his notes.
That last part was for me.
I placed Beyoncé in the carrier.
She went in without protest, which was unlike her. She looked at me through the wire door with an expression that I was absolutely projecting human emotion onto, but that I chose to believe was her way of saying, “I know. It’s okay. I’m going to be fine.”
“Take care of her,” I said to the couple.
They were the only words I could manage.
“We will,” the woman said. I was certain she meant it the way people mean things when they’re about to love something with their whole hearts. I nodded and smiled and maintained composure until the door closed behind them and their footsteps faded down the hall.
Then I sat on the kitchen floor and pressed my palms against my eyes and breathed.
Peter sat down beside me.
We weren’t touching or talking.
We were just existing.
He was present, the way I was sure he was present with his fosters on their worst days, a steady warmth beside a creature who needed company but not words.
Hiro limped over and pressed his head into mylap.
General Tso, who had watched every kitten leave with an expression of increasing satisfaction, jumped down from the refrigerator and walked past me; but on his way, he paused and pressed his massive orange side against my knee for exactly two seconds. Then he continued to the living room, jumped onto the couch, and began grooming himself as though nothing had happened.
“Did General Tso just comfort me?” I said.
“I didn’t see anything,” Peter said.
“He touched me. Hedeliberatelymade physical contact with my body. That’s never happened. That’s a first-contact situation. That’s a moon landing.”
“It’s possible he was just walking past and you were in the way.”
“He detoured. He changed his trajectory. I saw the course correction, Peter. He was heading straight for the couch and he curved.”
“Cats don’t curve for emotional reasons.”
“That cat just curved for emotional reasons, and you know it.”
Peter was quiet for a moment, sitting on the floor beside me with Hiro between us and the empty bathroom echoing with the absence of five small voices that had been the soundtrack of this apartmentfor two months.
“He might have curved,” Peter said.
I laughed.
It was a wet, messy laugh, the kind that lives next door to crying and borrows its kitchen supplies; but it was a laugh. Peter’s mouth did a thing, not a twitch but an actual movement. We sat on the kitchen floor together in the quiet apartment that was emptier than it had been that morning and fuller than it had been two months ago.
“This is the worst part,” I said. “Of fostering. Isn’t it?”
“No,” Peter said. “This is the best part. You just can’t see it yet because you’re in the middle of it.”
