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Illustration by Jasmine Zhang
It’s eight o’clock on a hazy September evening in Southwestern Ontario, and I have a knot of foreboding in my stomach.
It’s the second hour of our search for Phoebe: fat, cherished family pet and fierce little black panther rolled into one wonderful cat. Phoebe hasn’t been home in 24 hours, and her still-full breakfast bowl from Friday morning is a bad omen.
“I can feel her presence … is that a bird or do you maybe hear a whimper?” asked Hanna, my friend who’d come to look with me.
It is a bird, and there are no signs of Phoebe – not yet. Hanna and I scour almost every inch of the long, rolling backyards halted by a murky river. The backyards are divided with invisible property lines, which are famously irrelevant to cats. Days later there will be a clue as to Phoebe’s disappearance, and the depths of my grief will both shock and comfort me. And yet it is a gift it is to experience the kind of cross-species friendship I had with Phoebe. Not everyone gets to love a cat.
Take my neighbour a couple of houses down the road, for example. While Hanna and I stand on his property, we’re caught red-handed peering into his garden shed. I am barely holding back tears.
“Are you looking for a cat? I’m not really a cat person.” The man eyes us up in our tennis outfits – two pretty young women in distress – and our damsel-like helplessness annoys me. “Not the time, buddy,” I think.
“Haven’t seen it around,: he says. “I did hit a cat with my car last month though. Tried to circle back, but it was gone.” Both Hanna and I are dumbfounded by the man’s blasé attitude – her at the violent anecdote, me by his use of the pronoun it. We briefly thank him before hightailing it once the conversation turns to whether we “girls” are in university, why we’re dressed like “that,” and so on.
Dusk drops like a thick curtain and Phoebe has not come home. We meet moths, rabbits and jittery black squirrels as we yank back thick brush, scratches blooming on our shins as we look. These creatures are her wilder, less-fortunate cousins. We feel distinctly as if whatever twilit backyard realm we’ve entered is not meant for our eyes. If this is where Phoebe exists when she slips off the back patio and into the night, we are trespassing.
Not knowing is the worst. Often, I catch myself feeling an achy empathy for the parents of human children who have gone missing, and guiltily chastise myself for my ludicrousy. I remind myself that she’s a cat – even an it, depending on who you ask. She kills things, too. If a coyote got to her, isn’t that the circle of life? But Phoebe isn’t a part of nature, I argue back to myself. She’s a cherished family pet. She sleeps on cuddly blankets, hides inside torn Christmas wrapping paper and nuzzles my face with her chin. From a utilitarian perspective, Phoebe is responsible for vastly more pleasure and joy than a wild rabbit is, living a solitary life down in the backyard sticks. Every pet is a therapy animal. Phoebe is a small, non-verbal friend. When humans domesticated cats, didn’t we agree to put them on a pedestal? Stubbornly, I refuse to remove her from it.
Days later, in the most open, obvious patch of backyard, I find the telltale sign of Phoebe’s last moments: thick swaths of torn black fur in a lonely pile. I stand sobbing in the open, giving anyone watching me the show Phoebe deserves. My grief is hyperbolic: she was the world’s most wonderful cat, the feistiest, cleverest, most thoughtful, elegant cat – an angelic little being. (Of course she was not at all angelic. Like most cats of the indoor-outdoor variety, she killed things and sometimes presented them as trophies, no better than a billionaire on safari.)
But we loved her – as pure a love as one being can feel for another. Purer even, because Phoebe couldn’t say it back.
Nothing prepared me for the violence of Phoebe’s end, and with nothing but a pile of fur to tell her story, I don’t know that I’ll ever accept it. But as I stand sniffling in the grass I catch the eye of my unsympathetic neighbour, and I know then that I’m privy to something he’s not: an optional compartment to the human heart. We cat people are the lucky ones.
Mathea Treslan lives in Toronto.