The cat squirmed a little in my mom’s arms and fanned his toes as he extended his legs. She kissed him on the head and bent toward the floor to release him. As soon as she put him down, he crawled into an empty case of soda that was sitting on the floor. I named him Boxes.
Boxes was only an outside cat when he escaped. Some time long before I was born, my mom had a cat that had apparently decimated the furniture. In the interest of having both a cat and places to sit, my mom had Boxes declawed. As a result, we did our best to keep him inside. Despite our best efforts, he would still escape every now and then, and we’d find him somewhere in the backyard chasing some kind of bug or lizard.
Most of the time his prey would simply elude him the old-fashioned way, but there were a couple times when I approached Boxes in the backyard and saw that he had pinned some poor, small animal. But without fail, the tiny creature would pull itself forward and slide through Boxes’ clawless paws, and he would watch in horrified disbelief as his prize literally slipped through his fingers.
Boxes could sometimes be as evasive as the lizards he stalked, but we’d always catch him and carry him back inside. He’d scramble to look back over my shoulder, meowing the whole way — I told my mom that it was because he was planning his strategy for next time and warning the lizards that he’d be back. Once we were back inside, we’d give him some tuna fish.
Partly due to this ritual, Boxes learned what the sound of the electric can-opener might signal, and he would come running whenever he heard it. Most of the time my mother wasn’t opening cans of tuna, but Boxes would howl until she put the can on the ground for him. He would smell it and then look up at her in disgust, as if he was thinking, “What is this? Soup?”
This can-opener conditioning came in handy, because toward the end of our time in that house, Boxes would get out much more often. He would run into the crawlspace under the house where neither my mom nor I wanted to follow because it was cramped and probably festering with bugs and rodents. We attempted to get him out by calling his name, but when that failed, it seemed that we might just have to wait for him to come out on his own accord. Ingeniously, my mom thought to hook the can-opener to an extension cord and run it just outside the opening that Boxes had gone through. Each time, he would inevitably emerge with his loud meows, while causing a miniature sandstorm as he shook the dirt out of his fur. He would look up at us, excited by the sound and then horrified at how we could orchestrate such a cruel ruse — a can-opener with no tuna made no sense to Boxes.
The last time he escaped to under the house was actually our last day in it. The summer between first and second grade had just started, and our house had already been on the market for a couple months. I didn’t want to move, and I protested as sincerely as I could, but my mother told me that the schools were better elsewhere. Of course, I didn’t care about that, but there was no discussion to be had. My mom had already found a new house in another part of the city, so we had begun packing our things slowly so that we’d be ready to move when our house finally sold.
We didn’t have much, and I had already packed up all my clothes at my mom’s request — she could tell that I was really sad about moving, and so she wanted the transition to be smooth for me. I guess she thought that having my clothes in the box would gently reinforce the idea that we were moving, and if it all happened gradually enough, it might be easier for me to accept it once the day finally came. I guess it worked in a way; but even after months of having my clothes all packed up, the room still felt like my room.
A little over a week before we were supposed to move, we were carrying some of our things out to the car when Boxes seized the opportunity and ran full-tilt into the yard. My mom scrambled to catch him, but the cat evaded her and ran under the house. She cursed that she had already packed the can-opener and wasn’t sure where it was, and she tried hopelessly to lure him out by calling him while I pretended to go look for the can-opener so that I wouldn’t have to go under the house in pursuit. Eventually my mom, probably completely aware of my little scam, moved one of the panels on the side of the house and went into the crawlspace.
I stood outside the opening, listening to my mother’s rustling under the house. “Watch for him!” she called to me, and so I crouched down just in front of the hole, ready to catch Boxes if he ran out. “C’mere!” my mother roared, and I heard Boxes howl as he often would when he was caught.
My mom came out with Boxes quickly and seemed unnerved, which made me feel even better about not having had to go in myself. She took him inside and made some phone calls while I sat on the bottom bunk of my bed and played with a Ninja Turtle action figure. I waited eagerly for Josh’s parents to drop him off so we could play.
A couple minutes later, my mother came into my room. She was still covered in dirt from having crawled under the house, and when she moved, I could sometimes see the dirt break loose from her skin and rain down onto the carpet of my floor. The unhinged look in her eyes was still there, and, holding the phone tightly in her hand, she told me that she had spoken to the realtor and we were going to move into the other house right away. She said it as if it was excellent news, but I had thought that we had more time in the house — we weren’t supposed to move until the end of the next week, and it was only Tuesday.
We weren’t even finished packing yet, but my mom said sometimes it was just easier to replace things than pack them and haul them all over the city. I didn’t even get to grab the rest of my boxed clothes as my mom ushered me out of my room and out the back door. “What about Josh?” I protested. “What about him?” she snapped. I reminded her that he was supposed to come over later that day, and she said that we would have to reschedule our play-date. When I asked if I could at least call him to say goodbye, she said that I could just call him from our new house.
We left in the moving van, and I watched my home and my entire life slide out of sight as we rounded the bend and exited the neighborhood.
I had left my home behind, but I managed to stay in touch with Josh over the next several years; which was surprising since we no longer went to the same school. Our parents weren’t close friends, but they knew that we were, and so they would accommodate our desire to see one another by driving us back and forth for sleepovers — sometimes every weekend. The distance did little to weaken the strength of our friendship. As a matter of fact, in many ways our bond actually grew stronger; being farther apart meant that nurturing the friendship was no longer as easy as a taking a five minute car ride or waiting a couple extra stops in the school bus. We had to work to stay friends now, and I think that helped us appreciate what we had.
At Christmas, after the summer that I moved away, I got a number of presents, but only one that I really remember. I unwrapped a box and opened it to see a walkie-talkie. It wasn’t in any kind of packaging, and the cold, utilitarian design stood in sharp contrast to the brightly-colored tissue paper that lay under it. I gave my mom a quizzical and confused look as I picked it up. It was a little heavy for me, and it seemed pretty sturdy. As I ran my eyes over its knobs and buttons, my mom smiled and told me to give it a try while tapping the rectangular protrusion on the side of the walkie. I depressed the button and spoke.
Hello?
I waited, but there was no response. I looked back up at my mom who knelt down and looked at the top of the walkie-talkie and then at a piece of paper she had in her hand. She turned one of the knobs and told me to try it again.
Hello?