Kit

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Molly Cameron

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There was a YARD. It was mostly cement, and the surrounding chain link fence only gave the illusion of privacy, but it could be OUR YARD. After nearly six years of being together but living separately, my boyfriend Lucas and I were finally ready to share a space. Like most New York City apartment searches, ours was stressful and all-consuming, but we relaxed a little as soon as we saw the private yard attached to the pre-war, first-floor Astoria apartment. Even in Queens, a private yard was a rare find. This would be the perfect place for us to share.

Then we had a surprise: there was also a cat in the yard. She was light brown with darker brown stripes, scraggly, a little jumpy, and would occasionally stretch out her paw to us and flex her claws a little, like a toddler asking for a snack. We talked to various neighbors and learned she didn’t belong to anyone and had lived outside for years, primarily in that yard. So Lucas and I decided that we would respect her space, since she had been there first. I was OK with being nice to her, but not too nice, because I didn’t want her to become fully dependent on us. We wouldn’t even name her. She was “The Cat.”

That was easy to say when we’d only lived there a week. Over the first couple months, as it became summer, we were outside basking in the joy of the yard more often, and so we hung out with The Cat more often. Then sometimes, when we were inside, she’d climb up the steps to the back door and meow at us. So Lucas started to feed her. At first, just a bit of meat if we were outside grilling. Then, one day as we were shopping together at Key Food, Lucas grabbed a few small cans of Fancy Feast. I narrowed my eyes.

“For The Cat,” he said, “Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“You know, in case she’s hungry. When we’re not grilling.”

I rolled my eyes. I opened my mouth to protest, but felt mean. Was it really that awful to feed her? The tip of one of her ears was clipped as a signal that she’d been spayed, so I knew this wouldn’t get to the point where she’d suddenly have kittens in the yard. Still, Lucas and I were just getting used to living together. Did I also want to take care of a cat I didn’t ask for?

Growing up, my family wasn’t really a pet family, and our one attempt at owning a cat went south. The cat was technically my sister’s, and she named him Broccoli solely because she was obsessed with the Dana Carvey “Choppin’ Broccoli” SNL sketch. My parents decided that Broccoli would be indoor-only and got him declawed, and Broccoli’s reaction was to lose his mind and jump out of dark corners and bite us. My whole family found Broccoli too much to handle and gave him away to a different family when my sister went off to college. Now I get it: declawing an animal is cruel, and I would also bite someone if I had to be indoors all the time. But as a kid, I was scared of Broccoli, and never experienced the calm and cuddly relationship you’re supposed to have with a cat. I also learned that I was allergic to them, so even my brave attempts to play with cats at friends’ houses made me retreat into a sneezing fit. I decided it was not meant to be: I was not meant to be a cat owner, and cats didn’t want to be my friend anyway.

The only pet my family ever successfully accepted into our home was the hamster I got for my eighth birthday. I named her Eponine, after my favorite tragic character from the musical Les Miserables, because that’s the kind of eight-year-old I was. Eponine was the perfect low-commitment pet: I fed her, played with her now and then, and cleaned her cage once a week, but other than that she just hung out in her home, running in her wheel or nuzzling into piles of wood shavings.

All of this meant that while it felt good to take care of The Cat, I didn’t want her to be a full-time pet. That would be too much work. Not only was I allergic to cats, but Lucas was too! It was silly of us to even try to get near her. If we let her inside our home there would be hair
everywhere. And we’d have to get a litter box—where would we even put that? And would she be one of those cats that jumped on our bed in the night? Would she pounce out of dark corners and bite me like Broccoli did? And shoot, what might we learn if we brought her to the vet? The neighbors implied she was very old, so what if we learned she was full of tumors? Would we be running a cat hospice care? As I learned with Eponine, the worst part of owning a pet is knowing that they’re going to die. Eponine only lived two years and it broke my 10-year old heart. She died in the middle of winter and I was crushed when my dad said the ground was too frozen for us to bury her. We kept her body wrapped up inside a box in the freezer until the ground thawed enough for a ceremonial burial, meaning that for four months I relived her death each time I went in to retrieve ice cream. What happens when the animal is bigger and has a more unique personality?

Meanwhile, Lucas’s magical bond with dogs—the kind that will make a dog he’s never seen before joyfully bound towards him from the far end of a sidewalk—suddenly applied to The Cat. He would reach out to pet her and she kept stretching out her paw towards him and flexing her claws, but now it was like they were going to share a formal handshake. He was determined to win her over and reached out his hand to her every day. Eventually, she let him pet her on the head, and then on her back.

Lucas would show off their new bond and try to get me to pet her too. I’d reach out towards her head and she would sense my hesitation and duck away from my hand. It was just as I suspected: cats are angry and don’t like me so I should keep my distance. But she was always in the yard, and as the weather got warmer, she was impossible to avoid. She kept visiting our back door, rubbing up against the metal railing on the stairs and meowing for a snack. It was like she knew I was trying not to see her, so she kept making herself more visible. And more adorable. She’d stick her head through the bars of the railing to peer at us through the kitchen window. She’d curl her legs up under her and squish her eyes shut, looking like a furry bread loaf. She’d yowl her old lady meow that would catch in her throat a little: meh-mow.

Within a month we were feeding her every day. Based on the neighbors’ tales of how long she’d lived in that yard, and based on how slowly she moved, Lucas decided to splurge on a big bag of special “senior formula” dry food. The first time he gave it to her, we watched her chew it slowly and determinedly from one side of her mouth.

“Awww she doesn’t have good teeth!” said Lucas, gazing at her like she was a Dickensian orphan.

He decided to dampen the dry food with water and mix it with the Fancy Feast wet food. When he fed her, he’d leave the bowl at the top of the stairs that led from our kitchen into the yard so we could peek out the window and watch her eat. Soon, I was feeding her too, carefully combining just the right amount of dry and wet food. The Cat became as much of a yard project as planting tomatoes and pulling weeds from the cracks in the cement. We were caring for her, and keeping her fed, and letting her live her yard life of freedom. But only in the yard. Our yard, which I was beginning to acknowledge, belonged to her just as much as me and Lucas.

The more we talked about The Cat, the more we started calling her “The Kit,” which soon became just “Kit.” Maybe it’s Lucas’s Texas roots that show through when he talks to animals, or maybe we were just being cute, but it stuck.

“Wait,” I said once. “Did we just name her? Is her name ‘Kit’ now?”

“Nooooo,” Lucas said. “It’s a nickname for ‘cat’! It’s not a real name.”

Right! Phew. She wasn’t our cat. She was just a cat who lived in our yard and who we fed twice a day. Well: a Kit who lived in our yard.

One day as we watched her eating through the window, carefully chewing her special blend of food, Lucas declared, “That cat needs a brushing.”

“A brushing?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Lucas. “Look at her, she’s so scraggly. She could have such nice fur if we brushed her.”

He grabbed an old hairbrush and went outside. I watched from the window, wanting no part in it. Despite Kit being a little more friendly, now that she knew we had food, she was still hesitant when Lucas hovered over her and there was a part of me that always feared she would pounce and scratch one of us. Lucas slowly brought the brush near her and while she didn’t scratch him, she did repeatedly duck away.

Determined to win her over and brush her, this became Lucas’s new project. He figured that if he could pick her up and hold her, brushing her would be easier, so he studied YouTube videos with very straightforward titles like “How to pick up a scared cat.” The key, he learned, was to squish her a little—not to smother her, but to make her feel secure. The next time he was outside petting her, he swiftly picked her up and put her over his shoulder a bit, securely squishing her middle. Then he grabbed the brush from his pocket and brushed her head. She squirmed for a few seconds, but then she closed her eyes and purred as loud as a motorcycle. I watched from the stairs, amazed.

“Holy shit that worked! You just needed to squish the cat!”

It became their new daily routine. Lucas would come home from work, pick her up, and give her a brushing. If she got really comfortable, she’d claw at his shirt, which I learned cat owners call “making biscuits” because of how they look like little cat bakers kneading bread. Lucas didn’t mind that her biscuit-making was making holes in all the shoulders of his shirts. She looked so happy that it was worth it.

I was a little jealous. My relationship with Kit was a lot like my relationship with most babies: I thought she was cute, I liked giving her snacks, and I liked singing songs to her—like a Kit remix of The Isley Brothers “Who’s That Lady:” “Who’s that kitty? (Who’s that kitty?).” But I was still afraid to pick her up because then I might drop her. Or, I would tense up, nervous that she might scratch or bite me, and she would sense it and turn away. I didn’t know how to fully relax around her.

I’d come to see that Kit wasn’t like Broccoli and had no intention of scratching or biting me. She was just a sweet old cat, and Lucas had done a sweet thing by taking the time to win her over. It made sense: Lucas was good at slowing down and relaxing and chasing his curiosity. I was ruled by lists and packing my calendar with activities; I had been looking at Kit like another new-home task to wrap my head around. But now Lucas and Kit had a bond, and I wanted that too. I wanted to show Lucas that I could also relax and let an animal into my life.

When winter came, we were worried about Kit being cold outdoors. We knew she’d survived previous winters outside, and we saw remnants of a cardboard box that she seemed to sleep in, but Lucas wanted to do better. One day he bought a litter box with a domed lid and a little clear swinging door and turned it into a home. He filled it with old blankets, then covered and waterproofed the top with a rug and a trash bag. He put it under the stairs that lead into the yard, giving her another level of shelter. At first I thought it was overkill, but when Kit ran right into it and snuggled up inside, I felt my heart melt a little.

“OK, you were right,” I told Lucas, as I stared at her inside, being a little bread loaf. “It does feel good knowing she has somewhere warm and dry to sleep.”

But a few weeks later, the temperature dipped into the single digits in the evening and I felt bad for her, even though she had blankets.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” I told Lucas, “But maybe we let her inside to eat her food? Just to eat?”

“Yes!” said Lucas, and I knew he’d been waiting for this moment since we moved in. We cracked open the door and she strolled in. She seemed immediately comfortable, circling around the kitchen purring and rubbing against furniture before eating her food.

As the weather stayed cold, this became the new routine: throughout the winter, we brought her in for a little while every night to feed her, maybe brush her, maybe sing some “who’s that kitty?” to her. When it got warm again, we were back to feeding her outside, but also still letting her in when it seemed right. Like when we wanted to brush her or sing to her.

One afternoon that following spring, she let me pet her. I spontaneously scratched above her nose, right between her eyes, and she purred. She purred! She didn’t flinch from my touch or claw at me! I got bolder and moved my hand up to the top of her head, giving her a good pet between her ears. She still seemed content. And her fur was now so soft from all the brushing that I actually enjoyed petting her. Maybe she actually did like me.

Lucas and I even found that our allergies were getting better, like our sinuses had adapted to her particular coat of fur. As Kit became more comfortable with us, our bodies were literally relaxing to welcome hers.

One day, about a year and half into our cohabitation, Kit learned how to jump up on the kitchen windowsill from outside. It was hilarious, because there are bars on the window, but she had found a way to balance by wrapping one little paw around a bar. Holding on tight, she’d stare at us in the kitchen and meh-mow, meh-mow, as if to say “Hello, I’m right here and I see you eating food in there without me!”

She was demanding to come in. Sometimes it was annoying—her meows could range from sweet to mournful to angry—but it often worked. We’d let her in and feed her, brush her, talk to her in our cartoon voices. But it got harder and harder to get her back outside, especially as it started getting cold again. So we thought… maybe we let her hang out in the living room with us? And, ok fine, on the couch sometimes? But on an old blanket! And not overnight!

As soon as Kit knew she was welcome in the living room, it was like she had always been there. And we’d wonder: maybe she had been? Maybe this had been a thing with past tenants? Or was she really just that comfortable with us? Maybe we were the part-time owners she’d been waiting for all along, like she’d been planning this scheme for years and could now revel in the joy of making it happen.

By the middle of our second winter in the apartment, we had fully embraced Kit’s routine. She’d meow at us from her precarious window perch, we’d let her in and feed her, then she’d be a little bread loaf on the couch and hang out, purring loudly. Even though we sometimes grumbled about her demanding meows, we almost always let her in because we couldn’t resist how cute she looked.

When we were ready to go to bed, we’d let her out. Somehow, I became the one to pick her up and bring her outside. I did it once without even thinking, just swooped her up like Lucas did, squishing her just right, and bringing her down the stairs to her little outdoor home. I was so proud that I could do it and that she trusted me. If I was feeling generous or extra guilty about making her go back outside, I’d feed her a treat (because yes, now we also kept treats in stock) and scratch her between the eyes. Squatting there under the stairs, watching her sleepily curl up under her plastic roof, I had to laugh at how deeply I was under her spell. When we moved in, I’d assumed that we would live completely separate lives and that maybe we would hang out with her in the yard sometimes. Now we had built her a home and were slowly making space for her in our own home.

As we got fully into the depths of that second winter, it was getting harder to get her back outside. She’d be in such a deep loaf-sleep that I had to gently wake her to pick her up. And when I did pick her up, she wouldn’t protest as much, but go straight into her home back outside. Then she started leaving food behind in her bowl, and Lucas and I knew this wasn’t going to be good. We joked again about us becoming a cat hospice care, but we also weren’t really joking.

On a cold Sunday morning in February I went out to check on Kit. She hadn’t left her house in two days, and hadn’t eaten the food we left outside. I peeked in her little door. Her head was tilted in a strange way and when I pet her, she was breathing heavily, and her body felt a little stiff. Shit. This was bad. I knew this was the beginning of the end. I started crying and ran up the stairs, calling for Lucas.

“She’s not good,” I said. “This is it.”

I carried her whole plastic home inside because I didn’t want to pull her out of it. Her breathing was strained, and every few minutes she let out a sad, noisy exhale, like the mournful meows we’d heard before, but deeper. We paced and thought aloud.

“Should we bring her to a vet?”

“Should we call a vet to come to our home?”

But we slowly accepted that there wasn’t much a vet would be able to do, except maybe end it more quickly.

I said, “I think we should just keep her here and keep her comfortable.” Lucas nodded, and we both started to cry. At that point in our nearly eight years together, it was only the second time I’d seen Lucas cry, the first time being after the death of his friend. That time, we’d cried together on a sidewalk in Manhattan, me mostly crying because he was crying. And now we were crying together on the floor of our kitchen.

We kept watch over Kit, taking the roof off her plastic home so we could pet her whenever she made a sound. We occasionally talked to her in our dumb cartoon voices, both trying to lighten the mood and hoping those familiar sounds would comfort her. After three hours, she eventually let out her last rough exhale, and was still. Lucas and I sat on the kitchen floor for another 20 minutes, faces already wet from the hours of crying, not wanting to face the next step.

“I think she knew.” Lucas said. “This was part of her whole plan. She won us over, she got fed, she got cuddled, so it was OK for her to finally go.”

It was astonishing to cry so much over an animal. Here was the beautiful creature who I had once refused to let inside, and now I didn’t want to let her go. Even then, with her body so stiff, her fur was impossibly soft. At age 10, I had found my hamster dead in her cage, but I hadn’t gone through the devastation of watching her die. Watching Kit die, I thought how protected I’ve been from death in general. If this is how wrecked I am over a cat we barely owned, what’s going to happen when this happens to a human I love? I thought of the time we cried for Lucas’s friend, and how I didn’t care that all the people walking by us on 30th St could see us. I wanted all of them to know how sad this was, and found it strange that people could just keep living their lives when someone we knew had died. When this happens to a human I love, I’m sure that grief will consume me even more. I’ll be on the kitchen floor or on the sidewalk even longer, wanting the world to stop with me.

After we pulled ourselves up from the kitchen floor, Lucas and I took a long walk, then came back and sat with Kit again and asked the next hard question: what to do with her body? It didn’t take much deliberation to decide to bury her in our yard. Her yard, her home. We didn’t like the idea of bringing her to a vet who would likely just put her in a trash bag or cremate her. We wanted her to be in the yard forever. We sensed that this might go against some kind of sanitation law, but we’d made up our mind and didn’t want to Google it. Lucas dug a hole that went two feet deep and hit concrete, which made us feel secure about her not decomposing into a water source. It was nighttime, so by the light of the other apartments (and with someone probably watching), we wrapped our sweet yard Kit tightly up in a bedsheet and gave her a proper burial, carefully repacking the dirt and scattering some rocks on top to try to make it look less like an obvious grave. Then we went inside and poured a glass of whiskey to share.

“This was awful and beautiful,” I said. Lucas agreed.

Kit died a month before the city shut down from Covid, which made that time a horrible preamble to a terrible year. For the first few months of us being inside, I would still look at the window and expect to see her balancing there against the bars. Sometimes Lucas would still poke his head out the bathroom window and call to her, like that might make her magically emerge from her home under the stairs that we couldn’t bear to take away. I felt silly for missing her as much as I did, and even sillier for stubbornly thinking I could keep an emotional distance from her, just because she was an animal I was allergic to who lived outside. She was playing a long game, and she won.

By the middle of that first pandemic summer, there was a new cat in the yard. A fluffy, solid black one, younger and more skilled at jumping over the fences between all the yards. She started jumping into our yard and sitting on the concrete facing our kitchen window and staring, patiently waiting. It was like she knew we were the softies with food, like she’d been observing our whole relationship with Kit from afar and now swept in to fill the sad hole in our lives. And she was right: we did still have cat food that we were too sad to throw away. And yes, we would probably start buying some more. It was our yard to share.

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Molly Cameron‘s cat, Kit, sleeping in the “cannonball” pose in her favorite spot on the couch.

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Molly Cameron is a technical and creative writer in NYC. Her work has been published in The Belladonna, Memoir Land, Alternative Milk Magazine, and Press Pause Press. She is currently querying a memoir about her body, her mother, and getting hit by a Chevy Suburban on the streets of NYC.

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