She started with the closet door, which meant something, because the closet door only gets opened all the way like that — pushed flat against the wall so it stays — on days that matter. I know this because on ordinary days she takes one thing off one hanger and shuts it again before I’ve even gotten up to supervise. Tonight the door stayed open the whole time. I had a clear view of everything, which I appreciated, even if nobody consulted me about any of it.
The first thing she put on was a dark blue shirt with no sleeves. She stood in front of the mirror on the back of the door for about as long as it takes me to finish grooming one front paw, turned sideways twice, and then pulled it back over her head without unbuttoning it, which seemed inefficient and possibly dangerous. It landed on the bed. I went over and sat on it immediately, the way I do with anything newly arrived on a flat surface, and got a good smell of her off it — the ordinary smell, not the going-out smell, whatever that ends up being tonight.
The second shirt was also blue, a different blue, with buttons down the front that she did up slowly while watching her own hands in the mirror instead of looking at her face. This one she kept on longer. Long enough that I started to think the matter was settled. She even went to the drawer and got out a necklace, the thin silver one that lives in a little dish I’m not supposed to put my paws in, and held it up against her collarbone without putting it on. Then she looked at herself for another stretch, made a face I didn’t have a name for — not unhappy exactly, more like she was translating herself into a language she wasn’t fluent in — and took the second shirt off too. Also onto the bed. Also inefficient, also abandoned mid-decision as far as I could tell, since the necklace never got put away, just set down on top of the dresser where it caught the light.
The third thing was a dress, dark, no sleeves either, and this one she didn’t try at the mirror right away. She stood holding it against herself first, over the clothes she already had on underneath, as if asking it a question before committing to the real attempt. I have seen her do a version of this before with smaller things — a mug before deciding which one, a pair of shoes held up and turned over — but never with this much time spent on it, and never for something that was just going to end up, like the others, draped somewhere I’d have to investigate.
I moved from the shirt pile to the growing pile in general, because by then there was enough of one to be worth sitting in. Fabric does something specific when you press down into a heap of it instead of one flat layer — it gives in stages, not all at once, so you can feel exactly how deep you’ve gone. I settled in about halfway and watched her disappear into the dress.
This one she kept on. She did the necklace this time, fumbling the little clasp behind her neck twice before it caught, and when she turned around and looked at the mirror straight on instead of sideways, something in her shoulders let go that had been held the whole time before. I don’t know what that particular looseness means exactly, only that I’ve seen the opposite of it — the holding — often enough to recognize when it stops.
She found shoes, the low dark ones from under the bed, not the heavier ones she wears for the cold, and spent a while standing in front of the full mirror doing something with her hair that involved a lot of turning her head and a lot of bobby pins held in her mouth, which always worries me a little, though she’s never once dropped one where I could get to it. Then she sprayed something at her own wrist and rubbed her wrists together, which put a sharp, sweetish, slightly powdery smell into the air that had nothing to do with any of the ordinary house smells and that I know, from experience, means she is about to go somewhere I won’t be invited.
She came over before she left, the way she usually does, and crouched down enough to put her face near mine, and I got the new smell directly then, stronger, mixed in with her regular smell underneath it the way cream sits on top of milk before you stir it. She said something to me I didn’t retain the content of because I was too busy memorizing the smell for later identification purposes, in case it showed up again and I needed to place it. Then she stood, checked something small and flat in her bag, and the door did the sound it does when she’s actually leaving and not just stepping out to the car for something — a longer pause after the latch, like she’s checking she has everything, which she did, and then nothing, the house just being the house again.
I went back to the bed to assess what had been left behind. Both shirts, the first blue one and the second blue one, still warm in places where her body had been inside them most recently, both smelling like her in the ordinary way, neither one smelling like wherever she was going. The necklace dish was still out on the dresser without its necklace. One shoe — just one, the left one from an earlier pair, abandoned somewhere in the shuffle — was on its side near the closet, and I gave it a thorough sniffing out of professional obligation before deciding it wasn’t worth further attention.
I don’t know what tonight is for. Nobody tells me these things in advance, and by the time I’ve worked them out from the available evidence she’s usually already gone, which means I end up solving a mystery I can’t do anything with. I settled into the shirt pile properly this time, flattening it down into something closer to my own shape, and put my chin on the second blue one, the one she liked better, the one that smelled most like the ordinary her and not yet like whatever she’d be bringing home. The necklace dish caught the last of the window light and did nothing else all evening. Neither did I, mostly, except wait, which I’m good at, and which nobody ever seems to notice takes effort.