The Cat That Knew

At the end of the hall the sleet ticked against the window, and Dana Ruiz counted her way toward it: blood pressure on 216, turn 221, crush the pills for 208, who couldn’t swallow them whole anymore. She held the clipboard flat to her chest the way a waitress holds a tray, and behind her, low along the baseboard, Biscuit stopped when she stopped, a gray smudge pretending he hadn’t been following.

“Marisol,” Dana said, catching the day-shift charge nurse at the med cart. “You look like you slept eleven minutes.”

“Nine.” Marisol snapped a glove. “You’re doing the thing where you’re nice to me.”

“I’m always nice to you.”

“You’re nice to me when you want a favor.” She didn’t look up, but her mouth went crooked. “The transfer’s still with scheduling. I put my note on it. Good words.”

“Good words.” Dana let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You’re a saint.”

“I’m a woman who wants Tuesdays off. Go do your rounds.”

The floor at two in the morning had its own weather. The overhead lights buzzed a flat white that made everyone the same color. The ice machine by the kitchenette held its breath between shudders. Dana moved through it the way she’d moved through it for six years, a body in motion, a list getting shorter. Blood pressure on 216, a whisper of there you go, Mr. Petrakis, back to sleep. A blanket pulled straight on 221. She wrote as she went. The writing was the part that felt like standing on solid ground.

She came to 214 and her feet kept their rhythm and carried her past it.

The door was closed to a hand’s width. Inside, dark, the shape of the bed, the small mound of her mother under the thin cotton. Asleep. Dana told herself that — she’s asleep, no sense waking her, she gets agitated when you wake her — and the telling was smooth from use. She’d been saying it for weeks now, on breaks, when her feet turned toward the vending machines instead of that door. Her mother in daylight sometimes said Dana like a word she’d found in her pocket, surprised and glad. Her mother at night sometimes looked at her like a stranger who’d wandered in, polite, uncertain, and that was a thing Dana had learned she could not carry and still finish a shift. So she carried the clipboard instead.

Biscuit had stopped at 214. Sniffed the gap in the door. Then, uninterested, peeled away and went on down the hall with that stiff-legged trot, tail up, a cat with somewhere to be.

Dana kept walking.

She was crushing the pills for 208 when she noticed the cat was gone from her heels. She found him a few minutes later because Renata found her first, coming quick around the corner with her hand pressed flat to her collarbone.

“Biscuit’s in 219.”

Dana set down the pill crusher. “On the bed?”

“Curled right up against Mr. Alvarez. Won’t move. I tried to pick him up and he — ” Renata shook her hand like it stung. “He’s not moving, Dana.”

There was a thing everyone at Cranston Pointe knew and nobody wrote in a chart. The cat wandered, ignored you, slept where he liked. Except on certain nights he didn’t sleep where he liked. He chose. And the one he chose was always the one you’d be phoning a family about before the sun came up. Six years, Dana had watched it be true. She had stopped being able to call it coincidence somewhere around the third time.

Her hands were already moving. This was the part she was good at.

“Okay,” she said, and her voice came out level, almost warm. “Okay. Renata, you pull the chart, get me the son’s number — it’s the son, Eddie, he’s the one on the sheet. I’ll set the room.”

She went into 219 and the machine of her took over. She dimmed the overhead and clicked on the softer lamp. She wet a cloth and touched it to Mr. Alvarez’s dry lips, and she squared the water pitcher on the nightstand though no one would drink from it, and she moved the visitor’s chair close so it would be there when the chair was needed. Biscuit lay against the old man’s side, chin on his paws, and watched her work with his flat gold eyes and did not move. Dana did not look at the cat for very long.

She called Eddie herself in the end. She was good at the call. She kept her voice low and steady and she said your father is comfortable and there’s still time and come now if you can, take your time on the roads, they’re bad, and she heard the man go from sleep to fear to a kind of terrible readiness in the space of four sentences, and she gave him the door code and told him she’d be watching for him.

Eddie came in stamping sleet off his shoes, a grown man with a boy’s frightened face, and two women behind him with rosaries already in their fists. Dana held the door. She said the things you say. And then, the way she always did, she stepped back into the hall and let the family close around the bed, and she pulled the door most of the way shut, and she stood for one second with her hand still on the cold metal handle, and then she went to find something for her hands to do.

That was how she did it. That was how she’d always done it. You set the room and you made the call and you gave them the space and then you went and charted, because there were eleven other people on the floor and the charting was real and the charting was solid and the charting did not look back at you like a stranger.

Marisol texted at 3:40. scheduling approved it. day shift starts monday. dont say i never did anything for you.

Dana read it by the ice machine, and something under her ribs let go that had been holding so long she’d forgotten it was holding. Monday. Mornings. She’d be off the floor by seven, home, sleeping while it was dark and waking while it was light, and she could come in at the good hour, the visiting hour, the hour her mother sometimes surfaced and knew her. She could bring the coffee her mother liked with too much milk. She could sit in the daylight when there was no stranger-look, only the Dana said like a small found gift. She stood there in the flat white buzz and let herself see it, all of it, mornings stacked ahead of her like clean folded towels.

The ice machine thunked. She jumped and laughed at herself, one short breath.

She started back toward the cart, light on her feet for the first time all night, already spending the mornings she hadn’t earned yet, and she saw the gray shape slip low along the baseboard ahead of her.

Biscuit. Out of 219 now. Trotting with that same purpose, tail up.

He stopped at a door open to a hand’s width. He put his nose to the gap. And he pushed through, into the dark, and was gone.

Dana stood in the middle of the hallway. The buzz of the lights was very loud. Her clipboard was against her chest and she could feel her own heart going against the back of it, quick, too quick, and she did not move for what felt like a long time and was probably four seconds.

Then she walked to the door and put her hand on it and made herself push it open.

The lamp was off. In the gray light from the hall she could see the small mound of her mother, and against her mother’s side, settled in, chin down, the cat. Biscuit lifted his gold eyes to Dana and did not move, and did not look away, and did not apologize for anything.

Her mother’s breath came slow and even and a little rough at the top of each one. Sleeping. Not agitated. Not looking at anyone like a stranger. Just breathing, in the dark, with a cat that was never wrong pressed warm to her ribs.

She understood it the way you understand you’ve cut yourself, a half second before it hurts. The mornings she’d been building — the good hour, the coffee with too much milk — none of them were tonight. The day shift she’d schemed and buttered and begged for, so she could finally be there, would have handed her this exact night as a night off. It would have let her sleep through it. And the cat had walked in without being asked.

Her phone buzzed against her hip. The floor. 208’s pills, 216’s two o’clock check she hadn’t logged, the whole shift going on being a shift.

There was protocol and she knew it cold. You make the call. You notify the next of kin.

She was the next of kin.

There were eleven other residents on the floor and no one to cover and the protocol after the call was that you kept working, competent, moving, hands full, because the floor did not stop for anyone. She could do it that way. She was so good at doing it that way. She could set this room the way she’d set 219 — the lamp, the cloth, the chair squared just so — and make herself the useful one, the steady one, and stand with her hand on the handle for one second and then go find something for her hands to do, and she would never once have to sit in the dark and be no one her mother recognized.

She took her phone off her hip. She pressed the button on the side until the screen went black, and she felt the small vibration die under her thumb.

She paged the float nurse. Take my floor. All of it. Don’t ask.

Then she set the clipboard down on the chair, facedown, and she did not pick up the cloth, and she did not square the pitcher, and she did not straighten the blanket that had pulled loose at the corner. There was nothing to fix. There was no task left. For the first time she could remember she let there be nothing to do with her hands.

She lifted the loose edge of the blanket and got into the narrow bed, careful, on her side, fitting herself along her mother’s back the way she must have been fit against this same body sixty years the other direction. Biscuit adjusted, a small resettling, and stayed. Her mother stirred and made a soft questioning sound, not fear, just the sound of a sleeper finding someone there, and did not wake, and did not have to know who it was. Dana let her not know. She put her arm over the thin shoulder and pressed her face into the gray hair that still, under the hospital smell, held something that was only her mother, and she stayed.

She didn’t count anything. She breathed when her mother breathed and stayed when the breath went rough and stayed in the long spaces between.

Near dawn the ice machine thunked down the hall, and somewhere a cart wheel squeaked, and the window had gone from black to the color of dishwater. Biscuit stretched, front paws long, back arched, and yawned without a sound and hopped down off the bed. He landed light. He crossed the floor and slipped out through the gap in the door and went off down the hall at his trot, tail up, already somewhere else, already someone else’s, a cat doing his rounds.

Dana stayed a while longer in the room that was quiet now in a way rooms are only quiet once. Then she got up, and she stood looking down for a moment, and she pulled the loose corner of the blanket straight after all, gently, because now it was only a blanket. She went to the sink in the hall and washed her hands under the warm water for a long time. She clocked out as the sky came up gray and wet over the parking lot.

Monday she took the day shift. She’d asked for it, and it was hers, and she would be home in the mornings now.