I Couldn’t Give It Back

   “We have to go to Lups.” Hedy said, rolling her cuffs and adjusting her vest. Rosa nodded vigorously. Hedy whispered in her ear laughing, while Astra waited patiently to get going.

   Outside the dorms, the university and the city seemed to Astra to be all dirty air and concrete. As they got onto the bus, Astra stopped, seeing something below between the bus door and the curb. It was a wounded stray cat. A grey calico, underfed with patchy fur, limping up on the curb and away on the sidewalk. Hedy pulled, while Rosa pushed, Astra onto the bus.

   Hedy took up court at the back seat of the bus. Rosa smiled at the guys. Astra looked out the back window for the grey cat. Was it night so quickly, or did all the high buildings block out the sun?

   They got off at some littered corner where an old five story brick apartment building was. Hedy tried one of the buttons in the front entrance, then pressed them all until someone buzzed to open the front door. The hallways were musty and smelled. Hedy waved them both away from using the pill box elevators, and went directly to the stairs.

   They knocked on the three fourteen. A man in his fifties opened the door. He was dress in cheap pink pajamas wrapped with a full-length blue velour robe. He half hugged one side of Hedy and welcomed everyone in. He led them past the bathroom, a closet, and a kitchenette, to a tiny living room. The lights were down in the living room and the windows were black curtained. A young couple were drinking. Rock music was playing from a vinyl turntable. A four-inch ceramic ball on the mantle of a dead fireplace was rotating and casting dots of colored lights on walls.

   “Beers in the fridge.” Lups offered, then took Astra’s hand. “You. You, I have to show my bedroom to.”

   Hedy nodded to Astra, and Rosa gave her a suggestive smile.

   With extended hand, Lups led Astra back to his bedroom by the apartment door. Inside the bedroom, Astra looked about to see an mattress on the floor. Clothes and blankets were strewn about the room where ever Lups had discarded them. The walls were bare, except to the right side of the door where a single nail sticking out. Hanging on that nail was a bugle. A horn. It was all dented and bent.

   “I hope to play again one day.” Lups said, laughing as if he had made a joke. “Okay, out, out, this is my private room. You can go anywhere else.”

   As Astra made her short way back to the living room two guys came in with cases of more beer. They dropped them off in the kitchen then lit the stove. Lups greeted them. Astra stood in the hall looking between the kitchenette and Hedy and Rosa who were drinking and moving to the music. More people came in, Lups greeted them. The guys started inhaling some sort of smoke off of butter knives in the kitchenette. Astra starting coughing.

   In no time she was sitting on a loveseat, some strange, though not unpleasant guy beside her.

   “Great music, eh?” the guys said. His voice was coming to Astra like it was under water. She looked at Hedy whose head was right back on the other couch totally out of things. Rosa was wrapped around some guy on the floor in the opposite corner. Astra couldn’t make out much in the darkened room. How much time had passed?

   Astra got up and went to the bathroom. In the hall she heard people saying good-byes. They were saying to tell Lups they said good-bye. They were asking where Lups was. Astra finished in the bathroom and looked around the apartment.

   Lups’ bedroom door was open, but the bedroom was empty. She looked for him again. When she was sure he was not about she stepped into his bedroom. She looked at the broken horn. She touched it and fell through the floor like a ghost. But instead of passing through into the apartment below, she landed on a grassy pasture.

   The air was fresh, the sun was shining. A cat gave a small cry and brushed her leg. She sat down, no longer in jeans and a blouse, but now wearing a summer dress. The cat rolled on her hem and pawed at it. The cat purr lured her to scratch at its cheek. They played together for quite a while. She a warmth as if her grandparents were still alive and living in their home in the field just beyond.

   A knock on the apartment door and Astra found herself standing in front of the horn, in Lups’ bedroom. She opened the apartment door and more partiers had arrived, pushing in, and squeezing past others to get to the kitchenette or the living room. Smoke filled the air, and laughter and music pounded the walls.    

   Astra found the bathroom door ajar and inside Hedy was being sick. Astra looked out into the hallway to see Lups chatting with a neighbor. He was getting, or giving, a bottle of wine it appeared. In the bathroom she checked on Hedy. By the toilet was an empty waste basket with plastic shopping bag lining it.

   Astra took the shopping bag and reverse wrapped it over her hand. She ducked back into Lups’ bedroom and took the horn into the shopping bag without letting it touch her skin again. That secured, she tore Rosa away from her male friend in the living room.

   “Hedy’s sick. We got to get her home.” Astra announced. With a stumbling Rosa, she dragged Hedy out of the apartment. Lups waved goodnight from down the hall.

   Hedy was a mess, and it turned out they were too late for any bus. They mostly carried her under each arm for many blocks back to the campus in the cool dark night. They met a few guys, also under the influence, who offered to help. Rosa liked the idea, but Astra was quick to thank and wave them away.

   The next morning Astra took the wrapped horn down to the common room and used a storage room there for privacy. Touching the horn again she fell through the ceramic tiled floor. It was as gentle as dropping into warm water. ‘Grey’ brushed her leg, as she now called him. Her summer dress had returned. The sun was shining. The air was so pure.

   She heard, but could not see, the horses she had grown up with. They were running nearby. In the open. Grey purred and rolled in her lap.

   It was someone laughing at a joke that brought her back. She opened the storage door to find several other students chatting.

   Astra attended classes as before but now her marks steadily improved. She declined further invitations to go out with Hedy and Rosa but they never held it against her. Months past and Astra found more and more opportunities to sneak off with the horn. She wished she could bring Grey here but she seemed to understand that the horn didn’t work that way.

   One day coming out of the storage room Hedy and Rosa were there.

   Hedy was explaining, “No, that was Lups! That’s Lups.”

   “What’s Lups?” Astra asked.

   Rosa said, “There’s a guy in the news who took off all his clothes in a grocery store downtown. He was screaming and nutting out. Hedy says it’s Lups.”

   “It is. He’s at the Embrace, Psych Ward. Here’s the article.” Hedy held up her phone. Astra didn’t read it. She left them and went back to the dorm room and hid the horn again.

   The next day going from class to class she saw a janitor in coveralls by the campus bus stop. Shocked faces watched the man lift something with shovel and deposit it into a garbage bag. Astra did not need to look. She did not need to get any closer. She knew it was Grey. Grey in this world. Not the place the horn took her to, but this place where she had made no attempt to help the stray.

   She skipped her afternoon class and went to Embrace General Hospital. Lups sat by a window in his pink pajamas without his bathrobe. Astra gave him the horn, in the plastic shopping bag.

   “I think you need this more than me.”

   Lups wept and nodded. “I did want you to take it. You looked so lonely and lost, like me.” Lups reached for her hand. “I want to tell you a secret. I couldn’t give it back. I took it, like you did. I took it. And I couldn’t give it back. I loved him. Even as he was dying in this place, I couldn’t give it back.”

   When Astra graduated Hedy and Rosa gave her a certificate to go with her diploma. The certificate read, ‘Official Crazy Cat Lady’. Astra had managed to adopt five cats by this time. She only held off from adopting more because the city demanded a kennel license after five. At the daytime ceremony a poorly dressed man waited to catch Astra’s attention. When she approached him, he explained Lups had died and wanted her to have something.

   The man handed her a small envelope, inside was a card with shaky calligraphy writing, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve made arrangements to take it with me.’

   Astra half hugged one side of the man and thanked him. He left feeling he had done his duty by Lups, and by this Astra.