Silent Paws

I have been a cat for eleven days and I still can't get the tongue right.

The drinking, I mean. You'd think it would be instinct, but instinct is a funny thing. It tells you to crouch at the edge of the bowl and lap, and then you do, and the water goes up your nose. Every time. Eleven days and my nose is still wet for the wrong reasons.

My name is Marcus. Was Marcus. I'm still working out the tense on that one.

I had a wife. Her name was Diane. She wore reading glasses on a chain around her neck and she hummed when she cooked, always the same tuneless thing, not a real song, just a sound she made. I used to tell her it was annoying. That was the kind of thing I told her. I'd give anything to hear it now and I hate that I mean that literally. Anything. I'd give my left paw. Ha.

The cat I am now is orange. Not a nice orange. A sort of faded, watered-down orange, like something left in the sun too long. My fur mats along the spine because I can't reach the middle of my back no matter how I twist, and the twisting is undignified. I have a bell on my collar. A bell. Every move I make announces itself with a cheerful little jingle, which makes hunting impossible and thinking difficult.

The bell was Diane's idea. Of course it was.

We got the cat three years ago from a shelter off Route 9. Diane picked him because he pressed his face against the glass when she walked by, and she said that meant he chose her. I said it meant he was hungry. We argued about it in the car, the cat in a cardboard box on her lap, and I remember thinking that this was the kind of argument we had now, the kind about a cat's motives, and that this was probably fine. That this was what a marriage looked like after fifteen years. Small disputes. A box on her lap.

The cat's name was Marmalade. I hated that name. I wanted to call him something dignified, like Otto, or maybe just Cat. Diane laughed at me. You don't name a cat Otto, she said. You name a cat something you'd be embarrassed to yell out the back door. So. Marmalade.

And now I'm Marmalade. Or I'm in Marmalade. I haven't figured out which, and honestly, the distinction stopped mattering around day three.

Here's what I know. On a Tuesday, I died. Heart attack, the doctor said later, though I wasn't there for that conversation. I was at my desk at work, doing something with a spreadsheet, and then I was on the floor, and then I was looking at my own body from a strange angle, from below, and my body looked smaller than I expected. Less important. And then there was a sensation I can only describe as being poured, like water into a cup, except the cup was already full, and the cup was this cat, and the cat was sitting on the windowsill of my own living room, watching Diane cry on the phone with my sister.

So. Yes. I died and woke up in my cat. My wife's cat. The cat I didn't want.

I'm not going to pretend I understand it. I've stopped trying. The universe, or God, or whatever runs this place, has a sense of humor that I don't find funny.

The first few days were mostly panic. I couldn't speak. I tried, and what came out was a sound like a rusty hinge. Diane looked at me, startled, and then went back to crying, and I realized that the sound I made was just a cat sound, just a noise, and that she had no idea I was in here. She couldn't hear me. She set out a bowl of food and I ate it because I was starving, and it was the most humiliating thing I've ever done, which is saying something, because I once threw up at my own wedding.

That's a story for later. Or never.

The thing about being a cat is the smells. I never understood this before. I thought cats just had good noses the way I had good eyes. But it's not like that at all. It's like the world has a second layer that I was blind to my whole life, and now I'm drowning in it. Diane's grief has a smell. It's sharp and metallic, like pennies held in a closed fist. I can smell it when she comes home from work, before she even opens the door. I can smell the days she's been crying in the car. I can smell the days she hasn't.

She's been crying less lately. That's something.

The other thing is the window. There's a window in the living room, the one above the radiator, and I sit in it because that's what cats do, and I watch the street. Our street. Elm Street, though there aren't any elms anymore, just a row of maples that drop leaves all over the sidewalk and a streetlight that flickers in a way that would have driven me crazy if I still had to pay the electric bill. I watch the neighbors. The Hendersons across the way, who argued about their fence for two years and now have a new fence, a nice one, cedar. The old man who walks his dog at the same time every morning, a fat beagle that moves like it's being dragged through mud. The teenagers who cut through our yard on their way to the park, and I hiss at them now, which I never did before, which I find satisfying in a way I can't explain.

And I watch Diane.

She's forty-three. She has brown hair that she's been letting go gray at the temples, which she never used to do. She works at a dental office, answering phones, scheduling appointments. She comes home at five-thirty and puts her keys in the bowl by the door and says, "Hello, Marmalade," in a voice that's trying to be normal, and I meow at her, and she scratches behind my ears, and I let her, because what else am I going to do.

I let her. That's the thing. I used to not let her do a lot of things. I used to correct her when she told stories wrong. I used to leave the dishes in the sink because she'd get to them eventually. I used to say things like "that's not what I meant" and "you're overreacting" and "I don't have time for this right now."

And now I sit in the window and I watch her come up the walk, and I think, I don't have time for this right now. I don't have time. I don't have time.

I have nothing but time.

There's a man who comes by on Thursdays. He started coming about a week after the funeral, which was three days after I died, which Diane planned alone because my sister lives in Arizona and my brother isn't speaking to me, which is another story, another never. The man's name is Paul. He drives a blue sedan and he parks it in front of the house and he sits in it for a minute before he gets out, checking his phone or his hair or something. He's tall. He has a beard that's going gray and he wears shirts that are tucked in, which I never did, which I always thought made men look like they were trying too hard.

He brings food. He brought a casserole the first time, something with rice and cheese, and Diane let him in and they sat in the kitchen and talked in low voices, and I sat in the doorway and watched them, and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time, something hot and tight in my chest, and I realized it was jealousy, and then I realized that jealousy is a stupid thing for a dead man to feel, and then I realized I didn't care.

He came back the next Thursday. And the next. He fixes things around the house. The faucet that dripped. The screen door that stuck. Things I'd been meaning to get to. Things I'd been meaning to get to for years.

I hate him. I hate his tucked-in shirts and his careful hands and the way he says Diane's name, like it's a question he already knows the answer to. I hate the way she laughs at his jokes, a real laugh, not the polite one she used with me at parties. I hate that I can smell her loneliness, and that his smell is all over her now, on her clothes, in her hair, and that she doesn't seem to mind.

But here's the thing. Here's the thing I can't stop thinking about, sitting in this window, watching the maples drop their leaves, listening to the bell on my collar jingle every time I shift my weight.

She seems happy.

Not all the time. Not every day. But sometimes, when Paul is there, when they're sitting at the kitchen table and he's telling her something and she's leaning forward with her chin in her hand, she seems happy. And I made her unhappy for a long time, I think. I didn't mean to. I didn't know I was doing it. But I was. I was doing it the whole time.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I'm a cat. I have a bell on my collar and a name I hate and a tongue that doesn't work right. I can't tell her I'm sorry. I can't tell her anything. I can only sit here and watch her live the life I left behind, the life she's building without me, and wonder if this is a punishment or a gift or just a thing that happened, meaningless, random, like a heart attack on a Tuesday.

The bell jingles. The maples drop their leaves. Diane comes home at five-thirty and puts her keys in the bowl and says, "Hello, Marmalade," and I meow at her, and she scratches behind my ears, and I let her.

I let her.