Teabone

It happened when Lily came over to my place one day during that weeklong thunderstorm over winter break. She’d shown up without warning, soaking wet from the rain and shivering with cold, a bundle of wet blankets wrapped in her arms. Her eyes were red and puffy. She didn’t say why. I didn’t ask. Instead, I made her a cup of tea.

Just a few days before that, we had found a kitten, a tiny black stray as long as a palm and as slight as a whisper. She was all by herself, curled into a black ball under a bush by the side of the road, chilled to the bone by the rain. We knew she wouldn’t make it if we didn’t do something.

“Only until the rain lets up,” said Lily’s mom when Lily brought the cat home. “As soon as the storm clears, I want you to take her to the shelter.” That was how it was decided that for the first time ever Lily would be responsible for a pet.

That week, there was a determination in Lily’s eyes, a strength that I’d never seen shine through quite as clearly, even when I’d watched her splinter boards clean in two that time she’d invited me to one of her belt tests back when she did karate. “I want to prove it to her,” she said. “That I can do it. That I’m dedicated.” In short, she wanted to keep the kitten.

That was why even though we said nothing about it, I knew that whatever made Lily show up at my place that day on the verge of tears must have been bad. Because when she unwrapped the bundle of blankets in her arms, peeling back layer after wet layer, out from the warm and dry interior jumped the tiny black kitten. The kitten’s eyes were wider than when I’d last seen them, and brighter too, her coat sleeker and her presence fuller with life. I could see clearly that Lily had been doing all she could. So why bring her out in the wet and cold again? Why run all the way here? Another fight with her mom, I suspected. A bad one.

A few hours passed. Lily was feeling better. We were talking about what we would name the kitten. We still couldn’t decide.

“Really?” she’d asked, crossing her arms and smirking. “Come on. We’re not kids. What kind of name is Phantom?”

“A cool one. She’s jet black, like a ghost. It fits. Oh, and we are kids. Fourteen is kids.”

“Ghosts are white. Or clear. And it’s not cool at all. How about… Vader?”

“Like from Star Wars?”

“Yeah. Seems like a good name for a black cat.”

I had already vetoed “Bruce” and “Chuck.” I wasn’t about to let the stacks of old martial arts movies that Lily kept in her room name the kitten. Regardless, all we were doing was killing time. I knew that she was just going to choose whichever name she liked, even if I didn’t approve.

But our discussion was cut short when all of a sudden we noticed that the kitten was nowhere to be seen. I still remember Lily’s eyes going wide. We had only taken our eyes off of her for a second. Lily sprang to her feet.

We searched every room from top to bottom. Even my little sister, unusually quiet and unusually cooperative, helped out, I think because even she recognized how important this was to Lily. Finally, we found her. She was lying on her side in a corner in the kitchen, breathing heavy. Her heartbeat was racing.

We had no idea what had happened to her. All we knew was that she needed help. Quickly, almost silently, we wrapped her again in blankets, towels, anything dry and warm we could find. “Not like that,” Lily told me as I wrapped her. “Like this. So she can still breathe.”

The emergency clinic for animals was miles away. We ran all the way there that night, taking every shortcut we knew of, kicking up mud and limp grass as we sprinted through sloshy fields in the freezing rain. As Lily and I carried the bundle, trying to keep the rain off of it, my little sister ran half a step behind us, drenched, holding the one umbrella we had over our heads and not her own. Still, the downpour, cold and bitter and indifferent, stung the backs of our necks and soaked through our clothes. It was all we could do to keep the kitten dry.

Things were worse when we got there. They took her in immediately. She needed intensive care. We sat in the lobby, drying off and listening to a woman explain how to make carbonara on a TV that I wished they would turn off. And then, all we could do was sit and sit and sit and wait for news, good or bad. We were dry and we had caught our breaths and we could sit if we wanted to, but somehow, it was much worse than running through the dark and through the rain as fast as tired legs and sore feet would carry us. Lily wouldn’t stop pacing back and forth.

Finally, one of the vets came out. She had an update for us. She tried to bring all three of us into one of the checkup rooms for some privacy, but my sister didn’t want to go in. Instead, she decided to wait outside, under the awning out front, and watch the rain cut through the dark, pretending she could convince us she didn’t care. She didn’t have to act so tough.

In the checkup room, which felt much smaller to me than it should have, and somehow less clinical, the vet told us what had happened. Apparently, the kitten had consumed a large amount of tea, and she was sick from the caffeine. They had her on an IV, and they were inducing vomiting. If her condition worsened, they may have to pump her stomach, she explained. But she said she would be upfront with us: there was a chance that even that might not work. I felt a chill run through my body as she said it. My fault. It was my fault. I’d brewed the tea. I’d left it out, and the kettle unlidded.

But Lily said no, it wasn’t my fault, it was hers. She’d taken her eyes off the kitten when she shouldn’t have. If she had been as responsible as she said she would be, none of this would have happened.

Of course I couldn’t accept that. But at the same time, I thought that when I said it was my fault, Lily probably couldn’t accept that either.

“And we never came up with a decent name for her,” she said with a hollow laugh. “And now she’s—” The rest was caught in her throat, or in the gleam of eyes too proud to ever cry, or in the sickly pallor that seemed to veil her and shrink her down before my very eyes. I had never seen her like this before.

I don’t know what came over me then. All I knew was that at that moment words would be better than silence. That for now, something was better than nothing.

Even if I didn’t believe it.

Even if it was a lie.

“We’ll give her a name,” I said. “She’ll come out. And when she does, we’ll give her a name.”

Lily didn’t say anything, but instead nodded, a nod so slight as to be nearly imperceptible. A nod that seemed to say everything that words couldn’t. To believe everything that I didn’t.

At the time, I thought that somehow, some way, my words carried us through that night. As dawn broke, the rain finally let up, and the clouds parted to reveal the stars that were blinking out in the lightening sky, remnants of what had gone unwitnessed the night long. Two vets, the one we’d talked to before and another one, came out of the operating room and into the waiting room, where we were.

In their arms was our cat, her ears perked, looking this way and that.

Lily sniffled, and I caught the end of a tear rolling down her cheek. Slowly, the vet let her take the kitten into her arms. “You saved her. How did you do it?”

One of the vets smiled and said, “Oh, it wasn’t so hard. She was sick from tea, so all we had to do was remove her teabone. That did the trick.” It was a lame joke but I guess she thought we needed the levity at the time. She was probably right. She gave us a wink.

“... Teabone?”

Just then, Lily’s eyes met mine. We were both thinking the same thing and we both knew it and we broke out into relieved and joyous laughter.

After that, things didn’t go exactly how we imagined they would. I can still remember the look on Lily’s face when her mom told her that she couldn’t keep Teabone. That she clearly wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a cat, and that this incident, not to mention the bills that our trip to the vet was forcing her to pay, proved it. That even though Lily had come through this time, she would just throw in the towel when the going really got rough, just like she had quit karate. And that then it would be up to her to take care of Teabone, because Lily just wasn’t strong enough, and she wasn’t having that.

She was wrong. I knew she was. But there was nothing I could say or do about it.

That was how Teabone came to live with me instead. Unlike Lily’s mom, mine was overjoyed to have a pet in the house. Even my sister couldn’t help but crack a smile now and again when Teabone would brush her soft fur against her leg or yawn while napping in the sun. And for her part, Teabone seemed to enjoy her new home.

But even still, the one Teabone remained most attached to, the one whose lap she never hesitated a moment to jump on, the one who made her pur and smile in that way that only animals smile, with their eyes, was never my mom or my sister or me.

It was always Lily.

At the time, I didn’t understand why. Now I think I do. I was lucky, impossibly lucky, I realized, to have a friend like Lily, whose strength had nothing to do with splitting a board in two. Because back then, what carried us through that night wasn’t words alone, even if they were better than silence. It was also the heart that believed in them.