Homer resisted being turned onto his back with all his might—and the amount of force he was able to command was startling, considering that he hadn’t eaten in two days and was now closer to weighing two pounds than three. When the vet attempted to insert the needle, Homer screamed.
I don’t mean that Homer yowled or yelped or growled—I mean that he screamed. It’s a sound I still hear sometimes in bad dreams, a scream of pain and fear that was almost human. The vet was trying to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear him. The only thing I could hear was the sound of Homer screaming. One of his front paws rose in the air and he clawed violently at me—at me—missing my right cheek by only a few inches.
My face must have looked as pale and horrified as I felt, because the vet said firmly, “I’m going to take him into another room and get some of our techs to help me. You should wait in the waiting room.” Then, more gently, he added, “Try not to worry too much. We won’t hurt him.” He bundled Homer into his carrier and exited, leaving me alone.
When I was growing up, we’d had a dog named Penny, a German shepherd who was exceedingly gentle and was, as we always said, my father’s dog. Penny loved my father, adored him, followed him everywhere with worshipful eyes and would have lived and died only to make him happy. Late in life she’d developed hip dysplasia, as large breeds often do, and my father for two years had patiently helped lift her to her feet when she struggled to get up, had cleaned up after her when she lost control of her bowels. Then one day, as my father tried to help her stand, Penny turned around and snapped at his hand. She was immediately contrite, whimpering and licking his hand in a desperate plea for forgiveness, which was of course immediately granted.
But my father, when he told this story, always said that that’s when he knew. He took her to the vet that afternoon, and Penny never came home again.
It was Penny who had flashed through my mind when I’d seen Homer’s claws—after so many years of unwavering love and loyalty—slash at me. I felt a sudden helplessness. For the first time since I’d brought him home with me, there was nothing I could do for Homer. I was standing alone in that room, Homer having been taken away because there was nothing I could do to help him. Even after September 11, there had been something I could do, a plan of action I could follow. Homer had always needed me in ways that my other two cats, fiercely as I loved them, had not. I’d promised that I would never let anything bad happen to him, had done everything I could over the years to keep that promise, yet ultimately I had failed. Such a promise, I knew in that moment, was by its nature impossible to keep. You could love someone, you could try to protect them from everything you could think of, but you couldn’t keep life from happening to them. And with that realization came the knowledge of pain, of the pain Homer was in now and the pain that would come, of hard decisions I might have to make sooner than I was prepared for.
My cats were getting old—were, by the standards of some, old already. Homer was eleven and would soon be twelve. Vashti was thirteen and Scarlett was fourteen. I was on the brink of getting married, and Laurence and I loved to talk about our future, about what we might be doing five or ten years from now. My thoughts of the future always, unconsciously, included my cats. I simply couldn’t imagine my life without them. They had come to define and shape almost all of the adult life I had known. It was only yesterday, or so it seemed, that they had come to me as kittens, barely old enough to be weaned from their mothers.
But they were getting old. In that moment I understood that I would marry Laurence in a few weeks and start a life with him, but very little of the life we would live together would include all three of my cats.
Soon enough, it wouldn’t include any of them.
I walked out, through the waiting room and the front door of the building to the street outside. I pulled my cell phone from my purse and called Laurence at his office. I’d meant to assume a “brave-but-shaken” tone, to tell him that I didn’t know anything yet but had wanted the reassurance of speaking with him. As soon as I heard his voice on the other end of the line, though, I began to cry.
“I’m coming down there,” Laurence said. I tried to pull myself together and tell him that wasn’t necessary, that I would be okay. But Laurence said quietly, “Gwen, he’s my cat, too.”
The vet released Homer to Laurence and me half an hour later, with a promise to call within twenty-four hours when he got back the test results. “What should we do in the meantime?” Laurence asked, and the vet responded, “Try to get him to drink some water. And if he shows any interest in eating, let him eat as much as he wants of whatever he wants.”
Laurence dropped us off at home and returned to his office. I sat with Homer all day; he crept out of his carrier and, exhausted from his grueling morning, fell asleep on the floor a few inches away from it. Later that afternoon, I wrapped him in an old blanket and brought him out onto the balcony so he could sleep in the sun. It had always been Homer’s fondest wish to go out on that balcony, like Scarlett and Vashti sometimes did, and I’d never let him, feeling that he tended to move so quickly, it would be impossible to keep him safe.
I didn’t think there was much chance he’d dart away from me today, though.
Homer seemed completely unaware of the distinction between inside and outside. He didn’t even sniff the air or flicker an ear to capture the sounds and smells he’d always been so curious to explore. “Eres mucho gato, Homer,” I murmured, sitting beside him and stroking his head. “Eres mucho, mucho gato.”
The phone didn’t stop ringing all day. My parents called every few hours to see if there was any word from the vet, as did Laurence. Laurence must have spread the word that Homer wasn’t well, because his parents and sister also called, as did many of our friends—even our friends who weren’t “pet people,” who’d never had pets of their own, and who I wouldn’t have expected to empathize with a pet’s illness. But it had always been that way with Homer; to have met him even once was to interest yourself in his welfare. As the number of callers swelled, it was clear how important it was to many—and not just to me—that this scrappy little Daredevil, this small cat who’d made a heroic and extraordinary act out of living an ordinary life, pull yet another life from the nine he’d been burning through since he was a blind, half-starved two-week-old a hairbreadth away from an inglorious end in a shelter.
Call me, they all insisted. Call me as soon as you hear from the vet.
The vet never was able to determine what, precisely, had made Homer so ill. When the tests came back, the only thing he could say was that there had, indeed, been some minor damage to Homer’s liver—which could have been the cause of his illness, but could also have been one of its effects. The vet asked me to keep him apprised and to bring Homer back for a follow-up visit in a week, which I did. Homer received a clean bill of health.
And, in a sense, Homer recovered fully. By the next day he was up and around a bit, eating sparingly and halfheartedly batting around a crumpled-up ball of paper. Within three days, he had resumed his usual eating habits.
Homer still scampers and darts joyfully through our home, but not so often as he used to, and not with the same ease. He moves with a certain stiffness to his joints, and I’ve begun adding a supplement to their food that helps promote joint flexibility in senior cats. He sleeps more often and more deeply than he did of old, and if awakened unexpectedly he can be downright cranky. He still loves to doze near Scarlett and Vashti, but sometimes he hisses at them when they accidentally disturb his rest—Homer, who never hissed, except when there was danger. His coat had been as purely black as a piece of polished onyx, but now it’s flecked with gray, and a single whisker grew in a conspicuous shade of silver. He never regained all the weight he lost, and Laurence and I joke that he has the hipbones of a supermodel, but it isn’t a joke that either of us finds especially funny.