Missing Cat

One of the saddest times of my life was the month Tummywumps, my ginger tabby, went missing. I’d left a window open overnight, and while I dozed, she sliced a hole in the screen and stole away like a jewel thief.

She was gone … and I was heartbroken. Tummywumps had always seemed happy, or at least indifferent. Like abstract art, the emotional state of a cat is subject to interpretation.

Whatever my pet felt about our relationship, she left me that night. And a writer without a cat is like a cup without coffee in it — a sad spectacle, indeed.

For weeks, I couldn’t eat or sleep, couldn’t write a word. I passed my days wandering the streets, my nights wondering what had become of her.

I was the saddest man on the planet.

It’s a funny story.

*

I didn’t even realize my pet was missing. Not at first. Being feline, she often preferred to sleep through my every waking moment. So I busied myself that first day doing whatever writers do. I even found a little time for writing. But when my six o’clock dinner date (Tummywumps) was a no-show, I grew concerned.

I called her name — a decorative gesture, as a cat answers to nothing and no one.

I checked her primary hiding spots. I checked her secondary ones.

Then I saw the hole in the screen.

I bolted outdoors. All I found, though, were faint cat prints leading down the dusty gravel drive. I followed them to the street, where they disappeared. I gazed down the street.

“Tummywumps?” I inquired of the shadows.

“Tummywumps,” answered my echo, coldly.

It was a still mid-September night. But a wind blew through me.

*

For days and nights, I surged up and down the streets like an alternating current, calling out for my cat. In the process, I made the acquaintance of many friendly felines, even some overstuffed orange tabbies. Alas, none of them was my overstuffed orange tabby. I still stopped to pet them all, of course.

One afternoon, dog-tired from digging through the city for my cat, I stopped a minute to sit on a park bench and gaze forlornly at phone-photos of her. I couldn’t, I knew, do this forever. I had the end of my rope in a death grip.

Then I lifted my head and saw a cat — an ornery tortie tomcat practically dragging its master via a nylon cord. The old woman anchored herself on the bench next to me, breathless.

“That’s a gorgeous cat,” I said as it stared evilly at me.

The woman beamed.

“He’s my Sweetheart.”

I could’ve pet Sweetheart but wasn’t up to the challenge of typing with nine fingers.

“Why, what’s the matter?” asked the woman. My devastation was obviously obvious.

“Nothing. Everything. My cat is missing.”

If I’d said I was about to spontaneously combust, the woman couldn’t’ve looked more alarmed — or sympathetic. She took my hand.

“That is just the worst news,” she said. “The worst.”

She was right. It was.

“When my husband died … it was winter all year. Then my daughter brought me Sweetheart.”

Sweetheart hissed. His owner patted him on the head and turned to me.

“Do you know what I’d do,” she said, “if my Sweetheart went missing?”

“What?”

The old woman looked me earnestly in the eye.

“I’d die,” she said. “He’s my everything.”

Sweetheart was a devil-cat. To his owner, though, every ring in his tail was a halo.

It was the same with Tummywumps and me, I realized. There’s no accounting for cats — or a cat-person’s love for them.

“You have to find your kitty,” said the woman, squeezing my hand. “You have to. And you will.”

 I thanked her. I relaxed the grip on my rope while she tightened hers on Sweetheart’s cord.

I watched fondly as he hauled her across the park.

*

A week passed, and I was still catless. I decided to enlist some help. I live close to a police station, anyways.

“Did you say a missing feline?” said the woman behind the desk, narrowing her eyes. Women behind desks are always narrowing their eyes at me.

“Correct,” I said. “I’d like to fill out a report.”

The woman squinted even harder. It was something to see.

“Are you joking?”

“I never joke about tabbies,” I said.

We both watched a police officer escort a handcuffed man dressed like Dracula across the room and down a dark hallway.

The woman behind the desk sighed.

“Listen,” she said. “I sympathize. You love your pet — you want to find it. We just don’t have the resources to help you.”

I heard crazed, faraway laughter.

“Are you joking?” I said.

The woman resumed squinting.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Slap some posters up,” she said. “And hope for the best. Next!”

A long queue of people had formed behind me. I hadn’t realized it. Their faces brightened as I walked despondently toward the door.

*

Missing cat. In any language, are there two gloomier words? Missing cat posters are, of course, our civilization’s saddest artifacts. On neighborhood walks, spotting one, my heart quakes. Though I always stop to read every quaint detail that only a pet owner would absolutely believe (“Answers to the name Queen Flealizabeth the Furred” — a true example.)

I passed a day papering the neighborhood with my misplaced cat’s sweet face. It was a miserable business — knowing that now, on constitutionals, it would be Tummywumps gazing back at me from bulletin boards and power poles.

The following morning, the phone rang.

“Hey,” said a strange voice. “Just wanted you to know — saw your poster — there’s a cat lying on the side of the road. On the corner of 14th and Rae. Could be yours.”

I threw the phone and flew out the door, in my slippers, to aforementioned corner. It was only a few blocks away.

A ginger cat was lying there, in the gutter.

I stood still, for a minute. Quivering.

Then I stepped closer…

It wasn’t Tummywumps. It was some other poor creature. With a bell on its collar and a brass tag that read Cheddar.

I was relieved — but only a little.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, I thought.

Then I thought, poor Cheddar.

*

Though I wasn’t sleeping much, now and then some Z’s caught me. And one evening, I dreamed of Tummywumps…

I was paddling a canoe across dark waters. On the approaching shore, on a soft blanket, lay Tummwumps, bathing in the moonlight.

The closer I came to my missing pet, the harder I paddled, until the water was rabidly frothing. Of course, my progress was unreasonably slow (it was a lot like writing an essay), but after a brief eternity, I reached the shore. I was about to moor the canoe when a man dressed as Dracula sprang out of a shrub — and Tummywumps skittishly sprinted into the darkness.

I woke up shouting her name.

*

Tummywumps strolled into my life for the first time when she was still a kittenish yearling. She stole my heart — and destroyed my home.

Furniture, clothing, carpets. Material things are no match for a Tummywumps.

Over the years, as she matured … nothing changed. There’s an enormous, exploded yarn ball in my office that was once a comfortable (and costly) chair.

After my cat vanished, the house was so calm, so orderly, so undamaged.

I could’ve bought a vase if I’d wanted to. All I wanted to do, though, was stare woefully out the window.

Without that tabby tumbleweed of destruction…

Life just wasn’t the same.

So the month waned; the leaves fell. Autumn is melancholy at best. When your pet is missing, it’s a prison.

One afternoon…

I was raking leaves into high orange piles, thinking that would distract me. Even those golden mounds, though, reminded me of Tummywumps.

While I toiled, something trotted crisply across the lawn and stopped at my feet.

It was a cat. A tabby cat. A ginger tabby.

“Tummywumps!” I cried.

Tummywumps meowed once. That was all she had to say for herself.

I put down my rake and hoisted my pet over my head.

“I can never forgive you for running away.”

Tummywumps purred.

“I forgive you,” I said.

Tummywumps looked pleased — or possibly indifferent. Either way, she was back.

I tucked her under my arm, rushed indoors, and locked the door behind me.

*

I was pulling down the last Missing Cat poster when a voice said: “You look better.”

It was the old woman. She was battling Sweetheart — bounding at all angles and growling — to stop and talk to me. At last, Sweetheart relented. His master glanced at the tattered papers in my hand and guessed: “You found her.”

I nodded. My old friend grinned from earring to earring.

“That is just the best news,” she said. “The best. Isn’t it, Sweetheart?”

Sweetheart sneered. Then sprinted to the limits of his tether.

“You look better!” the woman said again, flying off behind him.

I had to agree. Now that my pet was safe and sound, I was eating well, sleeping soundly — and writing up a storm. Tummyumps, too, had returned to her usual pattern of avoiding me at all costs and breaking anything that looked expensive.

It was bliss.

*

Tummywumps is fourteen-and-a-half years old, now — and still a hurricane with paws. Though she hasn’t escaped once in the intervening years, I know that if I left a door or window open for a moment too long, she’d be off in a heartbeat.

She’s a prisoner of love.

I ought to be prosecuted for depriving her of a lifetime of fresh air and exercise. It’s selfish of me. Unbelievably selfish.

I’ll never let her out of my sight again.

 

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