Starting From Scratch

In the old days, Whiskey greeted her at the front door every morning. Fourteen-hour overnight shifts were no match for the cat’s crippling separation anxiety. Now, she was lucky to get more than one glimpse of her speckled brown coat per day. 

“Whiskey! Breakfast!” she calls and cracks open a pink can of Fancy Feast, a feeble attempt at enticing the cat out of her hiding spot. James had never let her buy wet food for Whiskey, usually picking up one of those unappetizing orange-and-pink kibble mixes himself. It was one of the first parts of her daily routine that she let herself change after he went away. 

She tosses the can into the pantry trash and takes a moment to survey the empty shelves. The paint is peeling again where the door frame meets the yellowed wall, and she absent-mindedly picks at it as she leans her head against the pantry door. She waits there, as she does every morning and night, watching the chipped pink food bowl. Whiskey had not eaten in front of her in six years. She stifles down one of the waves of guilt that had been growing more frequent over the past three months. 

Still eyeing the bowl, she navigates her way through the remaining haphazard stacks of moving boxes taking up most of the free space in the kitchen. No sign of Whiskey, but at least one benefit of the divorce was that, with most of their furniture tucked away in James’s storage unit, there were fewer places for a cat to hide. 

She finally corners Whiskey in the primary bedroom closet. Wet food having proved a disappointment, she attempts to coax her towards the cat carrier with a handful of smelly salmon treats. When her second effort of bribery fails as easily as the first, she grabs the cat around her middle and unceremoniously shoves her, back legs first, through the carrier door. “Sorry, baby,” she whispers as she pokes the salmon treats through the metal bars. Whiskey secured in her carrier, she meets the moving van outside and helps the two men, barely older than teenagers, load the pieces of the last seven years of her life onto the truck.

The two-hour-long drive to their new apartment is as traumatic for both of them as she expected it to be. At least some things don’t change, she thinks as Whiskey bellows and flings her weight against the side of the carrier. She had never liked the car. When she adopted her as an eight-week-old kitten, the shelter volunteer had unironically gifted her a pair of foam earplugs to block out Whiskey’s shrill screech on the ride home. If only Whiskey still resembled that tiny 3-pound creature in any other way. As a kitten, she had been the most social cat she’d ever met, running to greet every new person who walked through the door to their minuscule studio apartment. The late night Whiskey experienced between midnight and 4 am every morning made her want to rip her hair out at times but she would welcome even that annoying aspect of kitten behavior now. In spite of her playfulness, Whiskey had been, somehow, remarkably fat for such an active being; it wasn’t until James moved in that she started losing weight. Her appetite waned, and soon after, she stopped sleeping cuddled up at her feet the way she had every night since she brought her home from the shelter. 

The first and last time she took Whiskey to the vet with James, three or four years ago, he chided her for neglecting the cat’s care. 

“You need to understand that her lifespan will be much shorter if she continues with this level of stress,” he said. “Can you think of any factors, anything at all, that could be causing this kind of behavior?” 

She feigned shock, as she was so accustomed to by then, while James bristled at the idea that there was anything unsatisfactory in their perfect home. In hindsight, she realized how unlikely it was that Dr. Burrows wouldn’t have noticed the long sleeves she wore in ninety-degree weather, and the orange-tinted stage makeup on her neck. She’d been having a lot of similar realizations lately, most of them accompanied by a layer of guilt and self-loathing. For the first month after James's arrest, she could barely bring herself to think about the way he had treated Whiskey. It was easier to push those feelings aside, to focus on her own loss of agency than consider the innocence of a maltreated animal. The road swerves ahead of them and she veers wildly back and forth with each curve between cursing James and condemning herself. To what extent was she to blame? By the time he first laid hands on Whiskey, she was too afraid of him to intervene. And then came the excuses: “He just gets so angry, he can’t help himself; he doesn’t mean to hurt her; he’ll see a therapist; he’ll get better.” 

She glances over at Whiskey in the passenger seat. Her mother always told her that cats had a better sense of human character than humans themselves; she wished it hadn’t taken her so long to believe her. James met Whiskey on their second date, the first night of many he spent at her apartment. Contrary to her then-outgoing disposition, Whiskey squeezed herself under a bookshelf and hid the entire time he was in the apartment. She dismissed the cat’s behavior as a meaningless quirk, and James’s night over turned into a second, which led to a third, which ultimately inspired a drunken decision to move in together. He was a stereotypical whirlwind romance in every way: in hindsight, too good to be true.

They arrive at the new address sooner than she expected, and she hopes the two hours drive is far enough for a fresh start. An emergency protective order, 6 months in prison, a stamp of approval on her address confidentiality application, and a taser as a last resort – she gave herself as much of a barrier between her new life and her old one as she could get. The movers had already started unloading the truck by the time she retrieves her key from the leasing office, and she leads them up to the second floor with Whiskey. Now wide-eyed and silent after two hours spent screaming, Whiskey barely moves a muscle as she opens the carrier and closes her in the dimly lit bathroom, the furthest space from the chaos of the movers. 

By the time the last box is unloaded, Whiskey has made herself a home in the darkest corner of a bathroom cabinet. She creaks the door open as quietly as possible; hours pass, or maybe just a few minutes, but Whiskey finally makes her way out of the bathroom. She has a brightness in her eyes that she hasn’t seen in a long time, and she doesn’t flinch to discover that she isn’t alone. Their new home is more reminiscent of their early days together in the studio than the suburban three-bedroom they came from, sparking a brief memory of when she was still fighting the alarm clock to wake up at 11 pm for her overnight nursing shifts, before James convinced her she’d be better off as a stay-at-home-wife. She holds herself as still as possible as Whiskey tiptoes her way across the bedroom. 

Whiskey freezes when she sees her sitting on the floor, but she doesn’t run or back away. She holds out her hand so Whiskey can sniff it, tensed and ready to bolt at the slightest movement. The cat’s hesitant willingness to acknowledge her presence is nothing more and nothing less than the validation of seven excruciating years erased. Satisfied with whatever it is she smells, finding something changed or restored or irrevocably healing, Whiskey climbs, one cautious paw at a time, onto her lap.