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The Cat Boy

Jean-Marc Duplantier

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When my sister-in-law Amy died, Pascal, her seven-year-old son, moved in with us, and he brought his cat Minou with him.

On that first night, I watched from the door of the guest room as my wife Christina kissed Pascal, tucked him in, and put Minou onto his bed. Then we went to sit on the couch. A minute later, the cat—a fat male tabby—poked the door open with his nose, walked out, and sat in front of us. He looked at Christina. He looked at me, right into my eyes. He looked at Christina again. Then he turned around and strutted back into the guest room.

Christina stood to close the door again, peeking in at the boy. Then she came back to the couch and reached for my hand.

“I love him so much,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

“And Amy,” she said. “I want to tell her. I keep wanting to call her to talk about it, about how much I love him, our new little boy.”

“I know,” I said. And I thought at that moment that it was all too much, this love and this grief, that it might swallow us both, and Pascal too.

 Christina was crying silently, the way she’d cried after her miscarriage three years earlier. We’d tried again for a baby, but it hadn’t worked. We chose not to take drastic measures. We had our nephew Pascal, just down the street. Amy, Christina’s sister, was raising him alone, and she needed our help. Maybe that was enough?

Then Amy discovered a terrible tumor. She chose not to take drastic measures. She bravely lived for six more months and then there he was, sleeping in our guest room: Pascal, our little boy.

But we were wrong about that: he wasn’t our little boy. Pascal tried to tell me this when we went on a walk to find Minou the next afternoon.

“We better check my house,” he said to me as he put on his jacket.

“I don’t mind going over there,” I said, “if you want to stay here.”

Pascal looked up at me with one squinty eye. Then he smiled with his head cocked to the side, intentionally cute.

“You think going there will make me sad,” he said.

“Will it?”

“Kind of,” he said, “But not sad like you think. Come on.” He opened the door and headed down the front steps to the sidewalk.

“Minou probably forgot you moved in with us,” I said.

“I miss Mom,” he said, “but I’m not sad like you were, when your baby died.”

“You remember that?”

“Yes,” he said. He was walking fast, leading the way over the cracked Gentilly sidewalk. “Aunt Chrissy cried. You did too. But I don’t want to cry. I don’t feel like it. It’s different.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to cry. However you feel is okay. And it’s okay to be sad, too. Even mad. These are normal feelings to have.” Christina and I had read a book, Children and Grief, in anticipation of this moment. I was supposed to validate his feelings, but it felt weird now. He wasn’t looking for validation.

“I know that,” he stopped and took my hand and smiled up at me. “Uncle Craig, you can say things to me. I don’t mind. But you don’t have to. We can just walk.” I began to tear up. He’d always been a perceptive kid, but how did he know to say things like this?  Maybe he’d read a book too? Adults and Grief.

The cat wasn’t at the house. I unlocked Amy’s shabby bungalow and gathered the mail from the floor around the front door. Pascal disappeared into the dark house. I sorted out the junk mail and then walked towards the back. Pascal was in Amy’s room. I heard him say something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. When I peeked in, I saw him pulling a blanket over the bare mattress of the hospital bed we’d rented, when Amy came home to die. I stepped back into the hallway, to give him his privacy. My heart tightened in my chest, and I took a deep breath, trying to hold it all together. It was impossible to imagine what he was feeling at that moment. It was too much for anyone, let alone a little boy.

Pascal stepped back into the hallway and stopped when he saw me. I wanted to hold him, to swoop down and pick him up and run out of there, to save him from this painful place, but I didn’t. I just smiled at him. Pascal looked down at the Lego car in his hands. He’d made it and put it near the hospital bed on Monday, Amy’s last day. He tilted the car, put its wheels on the wall, and drove it down the hallway to his own room.

I watered some plants and then sat to wait for him. He came out a few minutes later with the car and a Lego book, then we walked home to wait for Christina to get back from work.

That night, I watched again as she tucked Pascal into bed. She hugged him tight, and his little arm came out from under the bedspread and pushed her neck away. She sat up and seemed a bit offended, but she re-tucked the sheet and touched him once more on the head before she stood to leave.

Christina shut Pascal’s door and walked over to Amy’s house again, but Minou still wasn’t there.

“It’s too much,” she said to me when she got back. “He can’t lose a mom and a cat in the same week.”

“He’ll come back,” I said. “Cats always come back.”

Christina broke down crying and curled into a ball on the couch. I wrapped myself around her. I’d held her like this when we lost the baby.

“He’s really smart,” I said to Christina. “And not just at school. He’s emotionally smart.” And I told her what he’d said to me that afternoon, and how he’d visited Amy’s bed.

“Why did he do that just now?” she asked. “Push me like that?”

“It’s got to be hard,” I said. “He’s setting a boundary for us. He’s telling us what he can take and what he can’t.”

“Maybe I’m too much like Amy,” she said. “Maybe I remind him of her.”

“He’s got to find his place here,” I said. “It’s a new family we’re making. It’s a negotiation.”

“But what do we say about Minou?” Christina sat up and wiped her face. “We can’t say he’ll come back. He might be gone, like Amy. Is he going to expect her to come back too?”

“I don’t know what to say.” I pulled Christina close again. “Maybe we just say nothing. Maybe it will all be fine.”

Pascal and I walked back to his house the next morning. He held my hand again.

“Uncle Craig,” he said, “what’s the word for when something is kind of the same as something?”

“Something that looks like something else?” I asked.

“No.” Pascal shook his head.

“Give me an example,” I said.

“Like when you hear one thing, and it makes you think of another thing. Something else that happened, but it isn’t the same.”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You know the book Mimi got me. The dead bird book, and she read it to me, because she knew Mom was going to die soon. Like that. What is that?”

“It’s like, an allegory, I guess?”

“That’s not what this is,” he said. “You think it’s a story, but it isn’t.”

“What isn’t?”

“Minou,” he said. “You don’t want me to be sad about Mom because she died and now Minou’s gone too.”

We reached the house. Pascal climbed onto the porch and looked behind a bench.

“I was worried about that,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “Minou is different. Not like Mom.” He stood next to me on the porch. We looked out over the street. The cat wasn’t there. We walked around to the back yard and called for it.

“Maybe we should leave some food,” I said.

“No,” said Pascal. “He needs to eat with us, at the new house. He needs to get used to it.”

We knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked him to keep an eye out for the cat. I gave him my phone number. His splotchy cat was Minou’s mother. Pascal petted her while we talked.

“Mimi and PawPaw are coming tomorrow,” I said as we turned for home. “They’re going to stay here, in your old house. Maybe Minou will see them here and come back.”

“Minou’s not in trouble,” Pascal said. “You don’t have to worry. He’ll be back soon.”

“I’m sure he will be,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You’re not sure. You don’t know. But I do. I know where he is.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” he said. “He’s visiting his friends. He has to tell them where he’s going. It’s what cats do.”

“He’s visiting the other cats?” I asked.

“Yes, but not just cats. Birds too. And rats. And dogs. And trees. That’s what he’s doing right now, talking to trees. He wants them to know that he’ll be at your house, and that if they see him walking around over there, it’s okay. He’s in a new place. It’s hard for the trees, because they need the cats. The cats tell them things about what’s going on, because the trees can’t walk around. That’s why cats climb trees, to talk to them and say what they see when they’re walking around. Minou’s in the trees right now, telling them about where he’s going. He’s telling them about my new room, and where the food is in the house, and how far away the house is, in case it takes Minou a long time to go back and talk to that tree again, because four blocks is far away, for a cat. And the tree is telling Minou about the other trees near your house—his friends, that Minou can climb and talk to. The trees talk to each other, and now they’re telling each other where Minou will be, so in case Minou gets lost, he can just climb a tree and talk to it and the tree will tell him where to go. And the trees can tell the other cats too, and all the animals.”

Pascal stopped under the sprawling live oak in front of my neighbor’s house. He looked up and scanned the branches. He stepped carefully on the knobby roots at the base of the tree and then circled it, one hand driving the Lego car on the trunk, the other holding his book. He disappeared briefly behind the trunk and then he wasn’t there. I waited. He must have stopped. Then he reappeared on the other side, and he looked at me and saw that I was crying.

“No,” he said, frustration in his voice. “That’s wrong. I told you. I’m talking about Minou. Not me. You don’t worry about me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “Adults are supposed to worry about kids. We don’t know what else to do.”

“It’s okay,” he said, taking my hand again. “Minou is coming home soon.”

We walked up the front steps. Pascal hopped up onto the porch swing, smiled at me, and opened his Lego book to read, his feet dangling a foot from the porch floor.

Amy’s funeral was the next day at Mater Dolorosa on Carrollton, where Amy had been a parishioner for years before moving close to us in Gentilly. Amy had arranged the funeral with her friend Father Francis, before things got bad. Tom, her boss at the Port of New Orleans, read from 1 Thessalonians about how the dead will rise on the last day, and then the rest of us, who are still alive, will also be lifted up into the air, where we’ll bump into the dead and fly around with them in the puffy clouds.

Father Francis’s homily was about faith—Amy’s faith, and the faith he presumed in the rest of us too, I guess. The resurrection is real, he said, not a symbol of something. God is truly present in the host; it’s not a symbol of Christ—he’s really there—and it’s not merely a sign of community or of Catholic identity, although that’s important. It’s really Jesus, right there, fully present in the bread and wine. Amy knew this, he said, this simple truth.

Pascal sat next to me, flipping distractedly through the missalette. Everyone kept looking at him with tears in their eyes.

Then Father Francis invited Christina to the altar to speak, which I guess priests aren’t supposed to do, but he did it anyway. Christina fought through the tears and ended with a funny story about Amy crashing her first boyfriend’s car. Then the ancient cantor stood and sang a wobbly “Ave Maria” as Christina’s parents, Mimi and PawPaw, walked the bread and wine past Amy’s coffin and up to the altar.

Mimi and PawPaw brought the extra food from the reception to our house. My parents were there too, and Christina’s aunt from Memphis. A few people had brought presents for Pascal, left them right on a table at the parish hall like it was his birthday party or something. Pascal unwrapped them in our living room as we all watched—two Lego sets and a book about trains—and then he threw away the wrapping paper and carried the gifts to his new room. When he came out again, my dad gave him a $20 bill, pressed it right into his palm. Pascal gave him a tired smile and then walked over and handed me the money.

“I’ll hold it for you,” I said.

“I’m going outside,” he said, and he grabbed the Lego car from the countertop as he headed out the kitchen door and into the backyard.

“He’s processing his grief,” Christina said. She was behind me in the kitchen, talking to my mother.

I watched Pascal through the window over the sink. He set the car on a patio brick, picked up a stick, swung it a few times at some leaves on the ground, and then smashed the Lego car to pieces.

“His cat Minou is missing,” Christina continued. “And he’s grieving him too. He’s been talking to Craig about it, which is good.”

Pascal walked over to the pecan tree near the back of the yard. He put rounded hands to his eyes, to make binoculars, and looked up into the pecan canopy.

“Was he very attached to the cat?” asked my mother.

“Oh, my God, yes.” said Christina. “They were inseparable. Slept together every night. It was almost like his brother. And the cat would follow him around like a dog and play with him.”

Pascal moved close to the tree, leaning his forehead against the trunk. His lips were moving. He lovingly placed his hand on the knobby bark.

“It’s almost like the cat is a symbol for Amy now,” Christina continued behind me. “He’s using the missing cat to express his grief. I was really worried when the cat ran off, but maybe it’s okay. Maybe he needed it, like it’s a way to talk about Amy without really talking about her.”

Pascal spoke to the tree again. He twisted his face up and leaned his head back and shouted something, then he laughed and ran to the other side of the yard. I turned from the window and saw Christina bury her face in my mother’s chest as they hugged.

The next day was Sunday. All the relatives left after breakfast, and we drove the car the four blocks over to Amy’s house to load it with more clothes for Pascal, as he was returning to school the next day.

Minou was not there.

Later, I picked up a pizza for dinner and we sat down together, the three of us, to eat.

“What will you do at school tomorrow?” I asked.

Pascal shrugged.

“Do you miss your friends?” Christina asked.

He shrugged again.

“Can I have a fizzy water?” he asked.

“Do you like them?” Christina asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

Christina went to the fridge, brought him back an orange can, and popped it open for him.

“Pamplemousse,” he said, reading the can. Pascal went to a French immersion school, and his pronunciation was absurdly good. He took a sip and swallowed it down and let out a burp.

I smiled, but Christina was annoyed.

“You shouldn’t do that at the table,” she said.

Pascal looked over at me. Then he drank more, several big swallows, and he raised his chin and let out a bellowing frat-boy belch.

“Pascal,” I said, “Christina asked you not to do that at the table.”

“I know,” he said, and he burped again.

“But if she asked you not to, why are you still doing it?”

He shrugged.

We were silent for a while. Pascal ate his pizza. I poured Christina more wine.      

“Because I’m not yours,” Pascal said.

“What?” Christina asked.

“I burped because I’m not yours. You said not to, but I’m not your baby.”

“But you’re going to live with us now,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I’m not your baby. Your baby died.”

I glanced at Christina. She looked alarmed. I hadn’t told her about the dead baby part of my earlier conversations with Pascal.

“You already had a baby,” he continued. “That’s not me. I’m Pascal.”

“We don’t think you’re our baby,” said Christina.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “You’re making a story about me.”

Christina furrowed her brows and looked at me.

“Like Minou?” I asked. “Like when you told me that missing Minou wasn’t like missing your Mom?”

Pascal laughed.

“Why is that funny?” I asked.

“Because Minou is your baby,” he said.

“What?”

“I told you already that Minou was just going on a trip. You thought that Minou was making me think of Mom, and he kind of was. It kind of made me sad. But that’s not all. He is not like Mom because he’s your baby. We got Minou when your baby died. He was born the same day. He’s your dead baby.”

“Pascal,” I said, “This is not very nice. This can really hurt our feelings.”

“I know,” he said, and he looked down. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Mom told me not to. She said it would make you think of your dead baby and make you cry for me to tell this. But I have to now. I have to live here. I have to tell you the whole thing.”

Christina took my hand under the table. Pascal looked at her and smiled.

“You had a belly, Aunt Chrissy. You let me listen to it. And I heard a cat. It made a cat sound. That’s why I called him Minou. It sounded like that. Minou, Minou. And then the day your baby died, Minou was born. I saw him being born, at Phil’s house. Peanut had kittens and Mom and me went over to watch it, and I saw Minou come out, in a little sack, and Peanut licked and licked and then he was clean and Minou sucked on Peanut’s nipple with the other kittens. I knew which one I wanted because I could tell: he sounded different. He was your baby. Your baby didn’t die all the way, it just went into Peanut’s belly. I could hear the same sound when he made it, like in your belly. Minou. Minou. Minou. I knew I wanted that one, and I wanted to keep him safe for you.”

Pascal looked down at the table. Christina was crying silently and squeezing my hand.

“Ok, Pascal,” I said, “So, you think Minou can be like a baby for us, so you don’t have to be a baby. You can be a big boy. That way, we don’t have to treat you like a little child.”

“No,” he said. “That’s a story. This is real. This cat is your real baby. Aunt Chrissy had a cat in her belly. I heard it. This isn’t a story I’m telling. I knew it was a cat when I heard it inside you, Aunt Chrissy. It wasn’t a baby. It was a cat.”

“Pascal,” said Christina, “you’re seven years old. You can’t say things like this anymore. You’re too old for that.”

“I can say it if it’s true. You don’t like me to say it, but it’s true.”

“But we had a little boy,” I said. “A human boy.”

“Did you see it?” he asked me. “Maybe it just wasn’t there. Maybe it was already in Peanut’s belly?”

“I didn’t see it,” I said. “But the doctor saw it. He told me it was a boy. It was tiny, but he could see it had a little pecker. It was a boy.”

“Doctors are liars,” said Pascal, and we, all three, knew this to be true.

We sat in silence.

Eventually Pascal reached down for his pizza and began eating again.

“I’m sorry I burped, Aunt Chrissy,” he said, putting the crust down onto his plate.

“It’s okay, sweety,” she said.

“I’m sorry I told you that about Minou. I don’t care if you believe me. It doesn’t matter. I want to be your baby, but I can’t be, because of Minou. That’s why I had to say it. He’s your baby. I’m just Pascal. But now Minou is here too, so you should be happy. He came to live with you again. That’s why I had to live with you and not with Mimi and PawPaw. I had to bring your baby back to you. And you should keep him, even if I die. He’ll stay here now. He’s yours.”

Pascal smiled at us and then wiggled out of his chair and dropped to the floor and walked to his new room. He returned a minute later with the cat.

“Oh, My God,” Christina gasped and moved her hands to her mouth.

Pascal walked through the dining room into the living room and sat with Minou on the couch.

“Come in here,” he said.

“Where did he come from?” I asked.

“He came home today,” said Pascal, petting Minou behind the ears. “After Mimi and PawPaw left. I let him in. He was really sleepy, so he took a nap on my bed.”

I sat on one side of Pascal, Christina on the other. Then Pascal put Minou on Christina’s lap, got up, and pulled me by my hand towards the empty spot he’d left next to Christina and the cat. I moved over.

“Good,” he said. “That’s right.”

Pascal smiled at us, picked up his Lego book from the coffee table, sat down in the chair across from the couch, and began to flip through it.

Minou purred as Christina stroked his head. I put my arm around her and rubbed the cat’s belly. He leaned back and playfully nipped at Christina’s hand, grabbing it and bringing it towards his mouth. Then he licked her twice and closed his eyes and purred again.

“He has a little pecker,” said Pascal, looking up at us, “but it stays on the inside of his belly. You can’t see it right now.”

Minou brought a paw to his face and licked it and cleaned his whiskers.

“And they cut off his balls,” said Pascal “At the cat doctor. He can’t have babies, but I have balls. I can still have babies.”

Pascal stood and walked over to us. He touched Minou on the head.

“I’m going to bed. You can’t tuck me in, Aunt Chrissy. You need to take care of Minou. He’ll sleep with you now, in your bed. Good night.”

My nephew Pascal smiled at us, tucked his book under his arm, walked to the guest room, and closed the door.

We sat there in silence. Minou purred loudly.

Christina reached again for my hand. I kissed her and sighed and took a deep breath. The first deep breath I’d taken in weeks.

“What the fuck was that?” Christina asked, laughing through her tears.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Weird kid,” said Christina.

Minou stretched and yawned and jumped from the couch. He slowly walked away from us, his tail high in the air, past the guest room and down the dark hallway. He sat in the open door to our bedroom and looked back at us, the tips of his whiskers glowing in the soft light that spilled into the hallway. He waited calmly, staring at us, not moving, then he rose again and walked forward and disappeared into our room.

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Dedication

This story is dedicated to my own magical kitty Ruby Slipper. We found him at Christmas brunch at the Ruby Slipper restaurant in New Orleans. His powers are napping and murdering roaches and speaking to the trees.

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Jean-Marc Duplantier teaches in the Humanities Department at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He has a PhD in French Studies from LSU and is a Fulbright Scholar. He has published short fiction in Willow Springs Magazine and The Pinch, and his work won first prize in the short story category of the 2021 Faulkner/Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

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