Waiting

The flat pad of my paw strikes the door, and it makes a sound almost like knocking. After a few long, agonizing moments, I finally hear footsteps approaching.

I always want to apologize when the door opens. Not a very cat-like thing to do, is it? But my automatic response is to reassure her when I return. To tell her that I didn’t leave because I wanted to, but because I had to.

I’m not sure how much comfort that would be, though, especially since she won’t understand me. And what did happen in the intervening years would be impossible to explain—at least to her ears.

“Oh, you look exactly like him,” she says when she sees me. Her eyes fill with tears as she leans her cane against the entryway wall and bends over carefully to scratch under my chin. I tilt my face upwards, eyes half-closing, throat vibrating. She always knows how to hit the right spot. “You’re just like my Leo.”

That was never my name, but I don’t mind. I’m Jacques Leonardo, but somehow my name was shortened to “Leo” when I was rescued from the streets seventy-five years ago. And it was never rectified after Betty adopted me.

She was a young girl back then—five or six or something like that. Human years are hard to determine, to be honest. I saw her walking the same path every day as I hid under a bush on the street corner near her house, and I felt a pang of recognition then—some indefinable spark in her that strongly called out to me. I’d never felt such a thing before, at least not with a human—only with my mother and my littermates. After I grew older and my family parted ways into the wide world, that feeling remained elusive to recapture.

But Betty must have known that same spark too. When she first laid eyes on me, her expression lit up like a kid finding the golden egg in an Easter hunt, and she laughed a golden laugh, a sound both soft and infectious.

“Oh, hello,” she told me when she saw me, putting her bag of schoolbooks on the ground, squatting down and holding out her hand. I twined my way over to it—didn’t want to appear too excited, of course—and gave her fingers an experimental rub with my whiskered cheeks. After that, her hand found its way under my chin and she found the itchiest spot that I’d never known was there.

“Oh, aren’t you a cutie? What’s your name?”

“Jacques Leonardo,” I told her immediately.

There’s a magic about children that isn’t present in adults. They have an intense way of listening that you won’t find when humans grow older and get caught up in their own affairs. Sometimes children can even seem to understand me and others of my kind, although it has to be a special place and time for all the elements to fall into place.

This was one such time. “Jacklenar—” she began, but her tongue seemed to catch on the long words all strung together. “Leo,” she said firmly, shortening it. “You are Leo.”

Close enough. “Meow,” I replied.

“Let me take you home with me,” she said. Her hands scooped me up, and the experience was so novel that I didn’t think to complain. Especially since she continued to scratch under my chin. “I’ll get you some nice food. You’re skinny as a stick.”

And who was I to put up a fight when I got two delicious meals every day? I had a new friend—a friend who quickly felt like the family I’d left behind a year ago.

My favorite times of those days were the stories. Betty would lie on her bed and I would perch on top of her stomach as she ran her hands down my fur and talk for hours. About her dreams, her friends, her parents. What she imagined her future to be.

“I want to marry a movie star,” she told me. Then a moment later, she shook her head. “No, not a star,” she amended with a smile. “A prince.”

I’ve remembered her young wish the many times I visited over the decades. And every instance I appeared again and she spotted me, she would tell me that I looked like her Leo, the one who disappeared suddenly one day when she was a child.

It was just a year after she first found me that it happened. A year of being pampered and loved, but I somehow knew it couldn’t last forever.

I never saw the car that hit me. The one that took away one of my lives and sent me to the bardo, a place of infinite space and echoing emptiness. I had to wait all alone as my first life was weighed and judged. Purgatory, some might call it. Time moved differently there, and what felt like only a few hours ended up being years back on Earth.

“You never completed your mission,” was the judgement. “You must return.”

“What mission?” I called out as I fell down through clouds and sky, twisting my body like a pretzel so I could land on my feet.

My landing was smooth, but not my homecoming. I found my way back to the same house, and hope was a butterfly flapping in my mouth. What would I find?

Pawing at the door brought quick footsteps, but I recoiled when the door opened and a tall, young woman stood there. Someone new—someone I didn’t recognize.

However, she was only a stranger for a moment. She put her hands in front of her mouth, and her familiar scent wafted toward me. “Oh my goodness,” Betty said, and her eyes sparkled. “You look exactly like him! Like Leo.” Then her golden laugh rang out and she reached for me. I relaxed as her fingers found my chin. I closed my eyes and purred, letting her pick me up and carry me inside. No matter what, she was my family and the only one worth returning for.

She’d recently graduated from college, and she’d become engaged to the boyfriend she met there. They were to be married within a few months. “I’ll take you with me to our new home,” she promised, hugging me to her chest. “I don’t care what he says.”

Tim wasn’t a fan of cats, to say the least. And he wasn’t the prince that she should be marrying. I wished that I could have spoken up and be understood by Betty. But all my warnings were in vain—she didn’t know what I was saying and could only hear my frantic pleading as a cat’s meows.

It wasn’t much of a surprise to me that I was roughly awakened one day when Betty was out shopping for her upcoming wedding, and Tim’s angry face took up my whole vision. Despite my struggles and clawing, he shoved me into a brown sack. The trip in the car was bumpy, the landing even worse when I splashed down into a pond or river or some other body of cold, dark water.

The bag I was in sank to the bottom, and I couldn’t free myself. My last meow was Betty’s name.

Back to the echoing emptiness of the bardo.

“You didn’t complete your mission,” was the determination again, and I called out, “What mission?” as I fell to Earth again.

The next time, a sad-eyed Betty and her two sad-eyed children welcomed me. Apparently, her husband had disappeared one day when going out to the bar with friends. No explanation, although he’d turned up on the far side of town with another woman—she’d seen him once, but he just laughed when she pleaded with him for help. Afterward, she’d been forced to work long hours to put food on the table for her children, and she was always so tired.

“We have enough for one more,” she promised as she snuggled me close. “You look like my Leo, and I think that’s a good sign.”

But none of these peaceful moments lasted for long, no matter what I did to try and stay. And each time I returned from the bardo after a long absence, Betty had more white in her hair, more wrinkles around her mouth, and a touch more sadness in her gaze.

Until today.

She doesn’t have the strength to carry me as she did before, so I follow her on soft footsteps as she hobbles to her living room and settles into a threadbare chair in the corner. A cough shakes Betty’s whole body as I perch in her lap and she caresses my ears. Her fingers convulse for a moment and she reaches up to wipe her mouth with a handkerchief.

“Not long,” she murmurs after she gets breath left to speak. Her hand strokes my shoulders in a familiar way. “I’m glad you’re here,” she tells me. “I’ve left the back door open, so you can leave when my time comes.”

This is my ninth life. I don’t know how to tell her that, since I can see how she’s struggling. But perhaps she understands without words. I’m a little more ragged around the edges, and I can feel the rips and tears in the skin of my ears, the thinness of my fur. Betty’s not the only one who’s aged.

When she stops petting me and her hand is still, I don’t take the back door to freedom as she suggested. Instead, I wait with her. I sit with her for however many days it takes, not eating or drinking or sleeping. I sit and I remember all our moments together.

When I fly back to the bardo, I’m told there is good news. My mission is finished.

I turn around when I hear a soft laugh behind me. It’s golden and familiar. For the first time since coming here, I see that I’m not alone.

Not anymore. Not ever again.