The Cat Who Signed
I was pretty sure Molly would have mentioned epilepsy.
"I'll make you a deal," I signed, because I was punch-drunk with weariness. "I will give you any food you want if you let me sleep through the night until seven o'clock."
Milord dropped his paws, then circled around on the area rug three times. Which I took to be an affirmative, or maybe a truce.
At the pantry, I held out a green can of food. The cat's tail curved left. I tried a green can. Still left. The roast beef from the refrigerator earned a curve to the right. I put a generous heaping on a plate and put the plate on the table. Milord leapt up, eyed it, and then curved his tail left again.
I remembered #10 on the list and chopped the meat into tiny slivers. On my way to bed I left the bedroom door ajar.
The cat woke me up at four in the morning by pouncing on my chest.
"You promised!" I accused, all aggravated.
He yawned in my face and made no attempt to sign. Obviously I'd hallucinated the whole strange episode.
#
Once I wrote a middle grade library book about the great financiers of American history. I'm pretty sure no one's ever read it. One of these titans was James Pierpont Morgan. In one infamous cartoon he was depicted as a burly old sea salt rowing a boat with the feeble assistance of a short and weak Uncle Sam. The nice thing about Morgan is that he bought a lot of art for his collection on Madison Ave, and the Morgan Library wasn't too crowded on this, my fourth day in the city.
My favorite part was the old building, with Morgan's multi-level, wood-paneled library. In the modern wing I found a seat near the Samuel Clemens manuscript exhibit and plopped down in weariness. Maybe four days of museums was too much. Or maybe that damned cat was going to be the ruin of me. I had three days of feline hell left ahead of me unless I fled to Ohio early.
I texted Gary: What if I have 2 leave early?
He sent back: No u don't you promised don't make me kill u.
The other museum visitors drifted through the gallery as singles or pairs, some wearing tour headphones, others murmuring to each other. Growing up in mainstream classrooms, without interpreters, I sometimes felt like a ghost. In the world but not really part of it. Later, at the Ohio School for the Deaf, everything changed for the better. But it's still hard sometimes to get hearing people to notice or interact with me.
I'd looked up deaf social events in New York before getting on the plane, and one was blinking now on my phone calendar. Some bar in Brooklyn was hosting a cocktail hour. To get there I would have to take three different trains and then walk five blocks. The bar was actually a Russian dance club with poor reviews on Yelp but I was feeling pretty lonely, actually, and maybe someone there would have advice on manipulative, tyrannical, sleep-stealing cats.
The dance club turned out to be a windowless brick building near a T-mobile store. The place was empty except for two middle-aged gay guys arguing about the Yankees. Their names were Bill and Tom. They bought me a beer because I was a visitor to the city. Bill worked in web design, which he hated, and Tom was a travel agent for the deaf, blind and disabled. He could get me a good deal on a group trip to Paris in December, he said. Or maybe I'd like to visit Auschwitz. For the first half hour we were the only three customers, surrounded by the smell of old beer and old cigarettes, our gestures reflecting from neon-lit mirrors. When a gaggle of women showed up I was very relieved, but it turned out they were Russian and not deaf and perhaps prostitutes.
By five-thirty I was ready to abandon the place, but in quick succession a number of people my age showed up. Among them was Sam. He was tall, slender, with longish brown hair and silver earrings. One look and I perked right up. He said he'd cochlear implants put in, but in hindsight she wished he'd never had the surgery.
"Too much noise and too much confusion," he complained.
He signed fast and sloppy, drank fast and sloppy, and by the end of the hour was kissing me fast and sloppy in a dark corner. When he went to the bathroom, Tom gave me a deep frown. I thought he was anti-gay or something, but instead he had a warning.
"Sleep with him and you'll bring home a souvenir that keeps on giving," he signed. "That's what they say."
But I'd had some beers as well, and there was a condom in my wallet that was rapidly reaching its expiration date. Sam might not be my ideal date but his hand was warm on my shoulder, and I liked his wide, warm mouth, and who was Tom to be spreading rumors?
Molly's apartment was only eight blocks away. We headed that way through the neighborhoods that seemed a lot more pleasant in the golden dusk than they did in the harsh light of day. Sam knew a lot about real estate and he used the same word Molly did - gentrification - to describe what was happening to the brownstones and shop fronts around us.
"It's a good time to buy," he signed, as if I had the money or inclination to invest in Brooklyn real estate.
As I was putting the key in Molly's door, Sam stepped back and pointed at water pooling out into the hallway. I stepped inside cautiously. Milord was perched on the bathroom sink, where the cold water faucet had been pawed open and the drain cover closed.
He raised his paw at me in a gesture every American understands.
I may have yelled. I can yell, and I suppose it sounds like whatever a yell is supposed to sound like, but usually it makes people wince.
I may have waved my arms in threatening gestures.
I may have whipped a towel at the cat and made him scamper into the other room.
"Don't be mean!" Sam signed, with the fierceness of a cat lover. I knew then my chances of passionate sex were doomed. He followed Milord into the living room, scooped him into his arms, took him to the armchair and proceeded to soothe and talk to him in words I couldn't hear.
The little bastard gloated as I sopped up the floor and hung the bathroom rug in the shower. In my head I was using every curse word I knew and plotting his demise: accidental electrocution, rat poison in his roast beef, smothering him with the embroidered pillow on the sofa that said, "Love me, Love my kitty."
Sam signed, "You have a problem with your temper!"
"I have no problem with my temper!" I replied, and then went into a tirade of complaints about the cat's schedule and behavior that left my shoulders and arms aching.
He shook his head sadly. "Obviously you're not communicating with each other."
"He communicates just fine when he wants to," I replied. "He has his own sign language. Feline Sign Language. FSL."
Sam scratched Milord's ears. "You're not fit to take care of this cat. Poor baby! I'm taking him home with me. I'll bring him back when his mommy comes home."
"Great!" I signed, and pulled the carrier down from the top shelf of the hall closet. "Take him! You'll be sorry!"
Milord pranced right into the carrier like he was going to a feast of rats. I opened the door for them and wished them a happy, merry, lovely time together.
Ten minutes later I realized that I didn't know Sam's last name, his phone number, or even where he lived.
#
I didn't get a good night's sleep. I dreamt that Sam was the son of U.S. Senator Bob Frist, the physician who once admitted he'd adopted animals from Boston animal shelters and used them in unauthorized medical experiments. Years ago I wrote a biography about Frist but had to leave out the part about the animals in order not to traumatize middle school readers. In my dream Sam used Milord for nefarious purposes but when arrested he told the judge it was all my fault.
In the morning I drank three cups of coffee and abandoned my plans to visit the Museum of Natural History. Molly's apartment didn't have a TTY so I printed out a map and list of every travel agency in Brooklyn. Even in this day and age, it was a long list.
The fourth place I visited was the most helpful – the signs on the window were in Arabic, but the guy at the front desk made some phone calls about groups tours for the deaf. A few minute later I had a slip of paper with an address that was two train stops away. Tom, the tr
avel agent from the Polish dance club, looked happy to see me.
"No, I don't want a tour anywhere," I signed, regretfully. "I need to find Sam."
He grinned. "Festering sores show up already?"
The price for Sam's phone number was my email address so that Tom could send me spam travel newsletters. He didn't have his address or last name, though it might have been Carter or Carver or Caldwell or Cottingham.
I texted him, "How is Milord?"
Fifteen minutes later, while I was sitting in a coffee shop look at a brochure for Denmark, he sent back one word.
Escaped.
Maybe I let out a scream, because the barista gave me an alarmed look.
I demanded, via text, that Sam tell me exactly where and when he had last seen Milord.
He sent back a Google map and wrote: "This morning he got out my window leave me alone don't call me I'll call police."
Great. So the cat lover who'd carted Milord off to protect him had in fact lost him, and the cat lover who was his owner was due back from England in forty eight hours, and the man who hated cats now had to find him. I walked twelve blocks to the address Sam had sent and found an empty lot in a blighted neighborhood of barbed wire and barking dogs. His apartment was probably in the building across the street, but I didn't bother looking. It was obvious that a pampered, spoiled, demanding house cat didn't stand a chance on these rough streets.
I was screwed.
#
Museums I did not visit: The Guggenheim. The Whitney. The Tenement Museum, which sounded like something I could definitely use in a book.
Instead, I spent two days walking down alleys, peering past fences, and looking under the neglected hedges in front of crumbling brownstone buildings. I passed hastily made flyers to clerks in bodegas, smoke shops, pizza parlors, and ratty corner bars. I carried fresh roast beef at all times and one of Molly's pillowcases as well, as if that might lure him out. There was only one pet store for a mile around. It only stocked reptiles and mice. The mice looked gloomy in their cages, because they were all destined to be eaten by reptiles. The clerk looked at my Lost Cat flyer and gave me a predatory grin full of silver teeth.
"My dog eats cats," he said. I think. Some lips are better left unread.
Tom called Animal Care and Control for me on his TTY. They said I could look online at the lost pet section but also I should visit the Brooklyn shelter in person. Pets not claimed within 72 hours risked euthanasia. I walked two miles to the other side of Prospect Park, tried to communicate with three staffers who wanted me to show a driver's license and fill out forms, and finally got to tour the cat wards. None of the little beasts were Milord.
I kept looking. Not everyone I met was nice, and not everyone was helpful, and at least two street punks made fun of my halting attempts to communicate with a homeless lady with her own cat on a leash. But that's the thing about penance: it's not supposed to be fun.
Gary texted me: "Happy going home soon?"
I texted back a happy face that I didn't feel.
On my last day in the city, in the last hours of daylight, I trudged home knowing that I had to pack, clean the apartment, and compose an apology that I could leave on the kitchen table. Although my flight didn't leave until noon the next day, I had no intention of being in the apartment when Molly showed up after her red-eye from Heathrow. Call me a coward, but crying women always make me want to cry, too. And as much as I hated Milord, I hadn't really wanted to see him lost, abandoned, run-over, picked up by unethical scientists, or victim of any other horrible fates.
When I rounded the corner onto Molly's block, a German Shepherd blocked my path. Big, alert, and glaring at me.
I'd seen him before in the neighborhood, but never off a leash.
His lips bared. I'm sure he growled. There was no sign of his owner. I understood that to keep walking meant I risked losing a limb or vital body part to his large, well-brushed teeth.
Abruptly the dog turned and trotted past the open iron gate of the alley beside Molly's building. He threw me a backwards glance that on a woman might be a come-hither. I did hither, in fact, just a few steps – enough to see a terrible sight.
Milord, sitting atop a garbage can surrounded by pets – three cats, four pigeons, a terrier, a rattlesnake, and what looked like a potbellied beg. The cats were not eating the pigeons, and the pigeons were not pecking at the snake. Instead, all the animals were paying rapt attention to Milord.
Who was signing to them with his paws, his ears, and his curved tail.
I blinked several times in the dim light of dusk but there was no mistaking it. With goose bumps on my arms I tried to imagine what he was communicating. A murder plot against me? An animal uprising against the whole neighborhood?
Milord flicked me a disdainful glance. The other animals turned their gazes my way. In the silence I lived in, they looked hostile and vengeful. The snake's tongue flicked out, then retracted. The pigeons cocked their heads as if considering plucking out my eyes. I don't know what kind of violence the pig could commit, but I'm sure it had dirty teeth that could clamp and gnaw.
Slowly I backed away slowly and went into Molly's apartment. My shirt was clammy against my skin and I felt dizzy. A few minutes later Milord hopped onto the ledge outside the bay window. After I opened it, he strolled inside, plopped into his armchair, and began licking his butt.
I got him his seven p.m. food. A few hours later I got him his ten p.m. snack. I set the alarm for four a.m. and fed him half a can of green food. At seven a.m. I fed him the rest and grabbed my duffel bag.
He signed one last thing to me as I left. Not quite ASL, but clear enough:
Don't come back.
#
Molly sent me a T-shirt she'd picked up in London with a note that said, "Thanks from Milord and me! Do you know where his carrier went?"
Gary sent me a note: "Molly says you left the bathroom a mess and was there a flood? There are water stains."
It's been two years and I've never told anyone about Milord. Because, really? It sounds like a story one of Molly's patients would make up. I don't have any video footage or even a blurry snapshot from my phone. The only person who met Milord during my week's misadventure was Sam, and we've established how helpful and reliable he was. If Molly knows her cat is capable of rallying the animals, she missed her chance to make a permanent escape.
Still, I find myself scouring scholarly articles for stories about animals and language. I read tabloids that I'm ashamed to be seen buying. I scan home videos on YouTube, looking for cats like Milord. They're out there, plotting and scheming. Planning our ruin one cat treat at a time.
Maybe I'm compulsive about it, but somebody's got to be on the lookout.
Someone has to look for the signs.
The End
About Sandra McDonald
Sandra McDonald is the award-winning author of Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, a Booklist Editor's Choice and ALA Over the Rainbow Book. She is the author of the Pacific Rim deep space adventures Boomerang World, The Outback Stars, The Stars Down Under, and The Stars Blue Yonder. As Sam Cameron, she writes gay YA including the adventures Mystery of the Tempest, The Secret of Othello, and Kings of Ruin. Her short fiction has appeared in several dozen publications and been noted on the James Tiptree Award Honor List. She graduated from the University of Southern Maine with a master's degree in Creative Writing.
Connect with Sandra McDonald
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Praise for The Outback Stars trilogy
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"Danger, mystery, suspense, romance, conflict, and teen angst woven into a plot that speeds along complete with crackling dialogue--what more could a reader want? Thoroughly enjoyable." - Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies and A Letter to Harvey Milk.
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