A Sister and a Brother

We'd gone to our friends' for dinner, a pot roast, simple enough and rustic. They sent us home with half a pie and two kittens. The first was a little white thing with black marks around her eyes that made us think of Angels with Dirty Faces. Her brother looked straight out of Pinocchio, the dream of an artist's pen. Angel and Figaro.

Angel pushed her paw underneath the bathroom door when you were occupying it. Figaro attached your feet when they were covered by a blanket. They'd bring in mice, they knew the clink of their dinner bowls, they were cats. They slept curled into one another, they cleaned each other's fur. They would go out and not come back when called, crying and batting at my bedroom window in the middle of the night. Figaro was a risk-taker, playful and temperamental. Angel was a homebody, sweet and open to strangers. We never saw them apart for very long, and if one was sleeping the other was never too far behind. They always found the time, no matter when in the day, to rest beside each other. They were a sister and a brother.

One day Figaro disappeared, and Angel cried her eyes out. And there was nothing I could do to take the pain away. They say that cats are independent, that they really don't need us at all. But I couldn't help but think that Angel needed me that day. I wanted to tell her I'm sorry, I wanted to say what happened. I wanted to tell her about the coyote, the fight, that he didn't just go out into the woods for a walk or to hunt. He would never ever be coming back.

But I couldn't. I tried, I did, but she couldn't understand me. I even purred it into her fur, hoping that somehow the feeling would translate, some sort of humming grief. But she stood, every night, on our dresser, looking out the window into the backyard, waiting for that cartoon cat to come bounding out from the bushes, chipmunk in his teeth. She cried, and mewed, and howled, and watched, and waited, and there wasn't a goddamn thing anyone could do. We could only hold her, pet her, watch the spots on her face change from black to white.