This is Alice.
I didn’t give her a name until after she died. My overdeveloped Critic had a field day: maybe if you weren’t such a loser you could pay the vet bill and she’d be alive.
From the circulation desk, I saw Alice huddled in a corner just outside the library. She’d made herself small—a Hemingway cat between the lamp post and brick wall—but today there was no rain to hide from. The heat index was over 100 degrees and climbing.
The neighborhood isn’t so great here. It’s bail bonds and trailer parks and mostly good kids, but like all neighborhoods, harbors a couple of sociopaths who’d just as soon abuse an animal as care for one. A few feet away, a busy intersection teemed with awful drivers. My brain produced a gruesome slide show of memories—a dead cat on the way to the bus stop when I was in second grade, a Siamese with the skin of one leg pulled away, exposing muscle. Every ASPCA commercial, ever. And those Animal Planet shows. You know, the kind that encourages vigilantism in otherwise peaceful pet lovers. I saw my own cats, both of whom were discovered crying in boxes.
I thought she’d run when I opened the door, but she walked right in and rubbed against my legs and hands, my mental age zooming towards a single digit. I do this with rabbits, too, which become “bunny” in seconds. I sighed, at once loathing and loving my too large heart. I’m convinced strays and fosters don’t actually see a human when I meet them, but rather a giant sucker. She meowed, a little rumble, a perfect short hair tabby with neat markings around her saucer eyes. Alice was tiny, I thought a few months younger than my 1 year old cat, and her spine and ribs stuck out. So into a recycling bin she went, and I deposited her in the staff bathroom, trying to assure her that I was not like those Other People, that I was going to make sure she was okay.
I called my partner,
“Please don’t be angry until I am finished.”
who envisioned a Frankenkitty filled with mites and fleas and missing an ear, the cat equivalent of Pig Pen when I said “stray” into the phone. He explained I owed him sushi and a movie as he hung up the phone and went to clean the cat carrier. Alice chirped on the way home, her voice like gravel.
“This is a lot, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is. But like I said: sushi and a movie. And a backrub.” He assured me a big heart wasn’t a bad thing.
My cats were furious with me. Hallie, my eldest, knows only evil comes from the carrier and today was no exception. She would not stand for low status in what was obviously becoming a three cat household, and took her fears out on Loki, my one year old. I quarantined Alice in the bathroom and they glared at the door for hours while we figured out what to do with her. I didn’t name her. This seemed a bad idea.
I gave Alice some Advantage, and what must have seemed like endless food and water. She grazed at the food and I noticed she swallowed oddly, reminding me of how I eat when my sinuses are filled with cement. She snoozed on top of the carrier and when I took a bath, she paced around the ledge of the tub. When I sat with her she reached up and touched her paw to my forehead. A blessing, maybe. I knew I couldn’t take on a third cat. No one else we knew could take one, either. I brought her downstairs to see the rest of the house and she sat, still and quiet on the couch’s edge. I thought about how loud the world was where I’d taken her from.
Alice improved after four days of decent care, and we took her to a shelter. The no-kills were full. I paid an admission fee. I wished her good luck and knew she'd find a good home. My cats remained suspicious of the bathroom. I explained someone saved them once but they were unsatisfied.
A few days later I received a phone call. Alice, my perfect library cat, had an advanced upper respiratory infection. She was incredibly underweight and not, as I suspected, a kitten, but full grown cat. Alice would not recover.
They could make her comfortable, they said. But, she was not a strong candidate for adoption.
If you watch a euthanasia video on YouTube, you know it happens quickly. They’re given an injection of something that puts them to sleep and stops the heart simultaneously. Hopefully someone pets them. They’re Here for a moment, then all at once Not Here.
There are thousands of Alices. Even if I could save her, there would always be one more.
I’m not a loser. I did give her some dignity. And I can tell her story.