There is a flat plastic container that lives under the bed, in the dead zone past where my paw can reach without real commitment, and until this afternoon I had made my peace with not knowing exactly what was in it. I assumed dust. I assumed the particular nothing that collects in places nobody goes. I was wrong on both counts, and I would like it noted that I was wrong through no failure of surveillance on my part — the thing has been sealed.
She got down on her knees by the bed this afternoon, flattened herself sideways with one arm stretched all the way under the frame, and dragged the box out across the floor with a sound like something scraping its way out of a cave. I had been nowhere near the bed when this started. I was at the bed within the time it takes to say so.
The lid came off and the smell hit me before I had even gotten my face properly over the rim — a hard, woody, slightly medicinal smell, underneath it something that was unmistakably wool, and underneath that, so faint I had to sit very still to be sure it was really there, something that smelled like her from a long time ago. Not her now. Her from before, pressed flat and folded up and left in the dark for months. I don’t know how else to explain it except that I recognized it the way you recognize a room you haven’t been in for a while — not strange, just dormant.
She started lifting things out one at a time. A sweater I had never seen, dark and heavy, with one elbow already gone thin the way fabric gets when it’s been leaned on through a lot of long afternoons. A scarf with fringe along both ends that I made a private note to return to later. Something striped that she shook out and held up and then folded back down again without putting it anywhere, which I took as an unresolved decision I would need to monitor. And a small hard cedar block, rattling loose at the bottom, that I was extremely interested in and was not permitted to handle.
Here is the part where I will admit I lost the thread of what she was doing, because the box itself, once it was down to maybe a third full, became a problem I had to solve immediately. It had sides. It had a floor that was somehow cooler than the carpet. It had just enough room if I folded correctly. I got in.
She laughed, which I ignored, and kept pulling things out from around me, reaching past my shoulder and under my back leg for a pair of gloves and then a knit hat with a frayed edge at the brim that she turned over twice like she was trying to remember where it had come from. I did not move for any of this. I had found the one cool, low, enclosed spot in a house that otherwise offers very little of that in October, and I was not going to surrender it over something as flimsy as her needing access to her own gloves.
At some point she tried to put a folded sweater back into the box, on top of me, as though I were simply more box. I want this on record as the single most insulting moment of the afternoon. I got up, repositioned myself more centrally so that there could be no confusion about who the box was for, and let her figure out that the sweater would have to go on the bed instead.
She gave up taking things out shortly after that. Not because she was finished — there was still a folded stack of something dark at the far end I never got a clear look at — but I think because it became clear that excavating around a cat who has fully decided a cardboard-adjacent surface belongs to him is slower than just doing it some other time. She left the lid off, leaned it against the wall, and went to go put the sweater and scarf and hat wherever things like that get kept when they’re allowed out of the box.
I stayed. The cedar smell has started to fade a little where my fur has been pressed against the plastic, replaced gradually by me, which feels like the correct order of operations. The striped thing she couldn’t decide about is still folded on the floor next to the box, untouched by either of us, and I have decided it is also mine until proven otherwise.
At one point she came back through the room, saw me still in there with my chin resting on the rim like I was overseeing a harbor, and said something to me in the tone she uses when she’s decided not to fight about something. I didn’t catch all of it. I caught my name, and the word “fine.”
That’s really all the confirmation I needed.