I want it on record that I was not hiding under the bed. I was conducting a perimeter check from a low, tactically superior position. There is a difference, and I resent that no one in this house seems willing to acknowledge it.
It started with the light going strange. I noticed it before she did, because I notice everything before she does — the window over the reading chair went from its normal late-afternoon gold to a flat, bruised gray in about the time it takes me to walk from one end of the hallway to the other, which, granted, is not fast, but it is thorough. I stopped what I was doing, which was an important inspection of a paper bag she’d left on the floor, and went to the window to assess.
The trees outside were doing something I didn’t like. Bending. Showing the pale undersides of their leaves like they were trying to signal something. I have opinions about weather that misbehaves and this was misbehaving.
Then the first crack of thunder happened directly, as far as I could tell, inside the house.
I would like to say I responded with composure. I did not. I went from a standing position on the windowsill to fully airborne to somewhere under the bed frame in a single motion that I have no memory of choosing to make. One moment I was a dignified observer of atmospheric conditions. The next moment I was flat against the floorboards in the dark, breathing hard, next to a dust bunny and one of her earrings that has apparently been missing since spring.
I stayed there for what I will describe as a strategic interval.
She came looking for me — I heard her feet, then her voice doing the low, silly register she uses when she’s talking to me instead of at me, saying my name like a question. I did not answer right away. A cat in a defensive position does not simply reveal himself the moment someone calls. There are protocols.
Eventually she got down on the floor, which she does not love doing, her knees make a sound when she does it, and looked at me under there with her chin nearly on the rug, and said something like “oh, buddy” in a voice that had entirely too much sympathy in it for what I considered a very controlled tactical repositioning.
I came out. Not because I was persuaded. Because the earring was uncomfortable to lie next to and I wanted to reestablish that I was, generally speaking, in charge of the room.
The thunder kept happening, in bursts, with the rain arriving properly now, loud against the window in a way that filled up the whole house with sound, and I want to explain something about my behavior for the rest of that hour, because I don’t think it was accurately understood at the time. I sat on her lap, yes. I sat there very heavily, yes, more heavily than I usually allow myself to, because usually I distribute my weight with consideration and that evening I did not feel like being considerate, I felt like being a solid and immovable object on top of another object I had decided needed anchoring. This was not me seeking comfort. This was me providing ballast. If the house had, for some reason, needed to be held down, I was prepared.
She kept petting the same spot behind my ear over and over, the same four or five strokes, like she’d forgotten she’d already done it, and every time the thunder cracked her hand would go still for a second and then start again, and I noticed that. I noticed it the way I notice everything. I filed it under Things To Watch, the same folder I’ve had open since that day a while back when she sat very still at the table with her head in her hands for a length of time I still consider excessive and never fully explained to my satisfaction.
Tonight was not that. I want to be clear about the distinction, because I take my record-keeping seriously. Tonight she was fine — actually fine, laughing a little, in fact, at one point, when a particularly enormous crack of thunder went off and I made a sound I don’t usually make, something between a question and an accusation, and she laughed so hard she had to put her tea down. I did not appreciate being laughed at in a moment of vigilance. But I noted, filing it properly, that her laugh had its normal shape to it. Not the thin, careful kind. The real kind, the kind that moves her whole chest, which I was sitting on, so I felt it before I heard it.
That was worth something. I don’t say that lightly. After the business a few days ago — the quiet evening, the strange morning, the whole unresolved matter I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of and fully intend to keep an eye on — I had been monitoring her the way I monitor a stove that’s just been turned off. Still hot, possibly. Worth respecting. But tonight, under all that racket, she was just a person laughing at her enormous cat for being embarrassing during a storm, and I’ll allow that. I’ll allow being the embarrassing one if the alternative is the other kind of quiet.
The storm went on for a while after that, long enough that I got used to it in the graceless way I get used to things, which is by pretending I was never bothered in the first place. By the third or fourth roll of thunder I didn’t even flinch, I merely acknowledged it with a slow blink, the way one acknowledges a delivery truck idling outside that isn’t, technically, one’s problem. I want this improvement noted as well. I adapt quickly. I am not a cat, if I may say so without a frame of reference I don’t actually have, who stays rattled for long.
By the time the rain settled into the ordinary, unremarkable kind — the kind that just sounds like the house breathing — I had relocated from her lap to the arm of the couch, close enough to supervise but far enough to reclaim some dignity, and she’d gone back to whatever she’d been doing on her phone before the sky fell apart. Normal. Boring, even, in the specific way that boring is the highest compliment I know how to pay an evening.
I did check on her twice more before I let myself properly settle for the night, once from the doorway and once by getting close enough to put my chin briefly on her knee, just to confirm the reading. Steady. Warm. No excessive stillness anywhere in her posture.
Good. Whatever that was the other day, it seems to have passed. I’ll keep the file open regardless. But tonight the only emergency in this house was the weather, and I handled it, eventually, magnificently, from her lap, where I remain the single heaviest and most reliable object in the room.