by Suzy Eynon
My cat escaped in Colorado. We lived in three different states together, Kyle the cat and I. Colorado was the pit-stop between two other places that felt more like home. We stayed with my friend Larry, Kyle’s former owner. We had worked together at a grocery store back in Arizona. Larry and I, not the cat. Kyle was his cat in Arizona, but when he moved to Colorado six months ahead of me, Larry gave Kyle to me. He was going to stay with his mother, and she had a cat already. I was always falling in love with a friend’s cat, accepting other people’s strays.
I stayed Friday nights on Larry’s couch after my shift at the grocery store in Arizona because my roommate had a new girlfriend who had walked into my bedroom completely naked to ask to “borrow” lotion, then lubed up with her leg hiked on the side of my bed. Larry and I would get nachos from Aliberto’s drive-thru and watch movies with Kyle circling the periphery until I passed out. Kyle would wake me the next morning as desert sunshine seared my eyes through the miniblinds. He would jump off the window ledge above the couch and onto my head, and I would say good morning. It was the best sleep I got at the time even with Kyle’s greeting. I watched as the cat knocked Larry’s mugs off the kitchen counter to the linoleum floor.
“Since you like him so much,” Larry said, “do you want him?”
I moved into my own small apartment. This was still in Arizona. I did want the cat. He was a beautiful Siamese tabby mix with startling blue eyes the color of shallow tropical waters. Pizza delivery drivers commented on his attractiveness. Larry didn’t have a cat carrier, so I bought one at the pet store on my way to retrieve him, then drove across town to my new apartment while the cat screamed at a high pitch. I took backroads because I was afraid of driving on the highway, and of making left turns. I was living alone for the first time in my life. Kyle and I became roommates. I had no couch or cable to receive any TV channels as reception was blocked by proximity to a mountain, but we had a tidy quiet place, just a couple of single youths.
When Larry left Arizona, I felt adrift. I was from the place everyone else left, permanent when everyone else was passing through. Then I left too. I picked Colorado since Larry was already there and it wasn’t too many states away. That, and I was probably in love with him. I told myself that I would visit my family every month on the Greyhound, since my fear of driving had expanded into a fear of flying. Larry wanted to move out of his mother’s place, so we could be roommates and he’d be reunited with Kyle.
The morning in Colorado when Kyle escaped, I’d woken up early to go to a breast cancer walk. Did you know you have to pay to participate in those? I didn’t. In those days, Kyle didn’t always want to sleep with me because he wanted to hang out with Larry, his former owner, who always had a clique over, carrying on in a raucous manner late into the night. Kyle would cry to be let out of my room where I hid and watched The Office DVDs and ate curry takeout, which I’d picked up on my walk home from the college where I was a thirty-year-old undergrad. My closest friends during this time, my first time moving away from home, were the cat and Pam Beesly. That morning I opened my bedroom door and the quality of light in the hallway was wrong, too bright for the early hour. It felt surreal, like entering a portal.
I sleep-shuffled to the kitchen and poured cat kibble into a dish. It was drafty inside. I’d had trouble adjusting to the cold in Colorado, wearing the wrong type of coat and boots, soaked and slipping through that winter. As I went to grab a sweater, I saw that the front door was wide open to the landing outside our second-floor apartment.
Larry was asleep in his room with the door closed. Our front door had an unfortunate quirk where if you didn’t slam and lock it, it wouldn’t always latch. It slowly swung back open over time. I glanced in the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding in there. Since this was Boulder in 2008, no one was in the apartment while we slept with the door wide open, keys left on the kitchen counter for the taking. Kyle didn’t come running from his spot in the living room. The dish was untouched.
I started out the door without the sweater, without shoes, calling for Kyle. He’d never been outside before. He was an inside cat. I wasn’t even sure he’d encountered stairs before. I stood on the landing, frozen for a moment against my rising panic. I turned to run down the stairs and there was Kyle, light on his feet, jogging up and then past me right into the apartment, as if we were pals passing in the hallway. He let out a chirp as I hurried in behind him and slammed the door before he could change his mind. He purred loudly as he ate.
“Sorry I almost lost the cat,” Larry said when he came out of his room.
I felt lucky that Kyle was smart enough to return for food after a brief adventure. It horrified me that I came so close to losing him that day, that I had been asleep while he was running down the landing outside to frolic in the night or galloping down Arapahoe alongside cars in the dark. He’d been lost and found without my knowledge while I slept dumbly. I was young then and carried less anticipation of loss. I wouldn’t lose him for another 13 years, after we’d moved together one more time, to another state and finally to a house where he had more space to play, and he was my cat again. I let Larry know when the cat wasn’t doing well, gave him health updates along the way, until the final day.
After Kyle died, I wanted to find a piece of him previously unknown to me, a secret final message from the other realm he’d moved to. I’m not a religious person but I still looked to him for guidance as I did for years. We’d traveled through phases of life together. I picked up an old digital camera in hopes of finding forgotten photos of him but there were none I hadn’t seen before. I scoured the house for hidden memories and was frustrated to realize I couldn’t find the stuffed red monkey he’d once loved, the one that made a too-long shriek when its tummy was poked. I feared I’d given it away years earlier, before I fathomed losing him, when it was just an annoying monkey doll.
Now that grief has dulled, my aging mind and the passing of time occasionally provide memories new to me, a photo I’d forgotten or a memory like the time he got out. I hope he had fun that night. Now I tell the story to friends like one might share the tale of a lost night in youth, reminiscing about a cool friend who disappeared for hours only to return wearing nothing but a cape, embellishing the story with each telling. It’s part of his lore. Maybe there was snow on the ground into which he sunk his striped legs. Maybe he met the raccoon that lingered in the strip mall behind the apartment complex and they ran free together through the field. Like a close friend, some parts of him remained unknowable, unreachable, even after spending 15 years together. I’ll never know what he saw or did that night. Kyle, my old friend.
Suzy Eynon is the author of Terrestrial and the chapbook Being Seen. She lives near Seattle with 3 cats.
