The skittish black-and-white one, though, we did name after someone we knew. We decided to call her Maggie, after my childhood best friend (who, by the way, is still very much a part of my life). When I posted a picture of Maggie (the cat) on Instagram with her name as the caption, I got a text from Maggie (the human) that just said: “Really, Laura?”
Now, my conversations with Stephen about Maggie go like this:
“Oh God, Maggie is pissing everywhere again.”
“Cat or human?”
“Cat, but perhaps human as well. I haven’t checked in with her this week.” It’s a valid question, seeing how much Maggie and I peed in public as kids.
The way the cats were at the shelter pretty much stayed the same as their whole personalities developed. Allen was fearless, loving, and kind; and Maggie constantly thought she was going to get murdered. Maggie sort of has the traits of an untreated alcoholic. She’ll steal Allen’s food and eat all of it, but she never knows when enough is enough. And just like an alcoholic . . . Maggie eventually hit her rock bottom.
When Stephen and I moved from the one-bedroom apartment to the two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, the cats were so upset. Cats HATE moving. They hate moving more than they hate water. It just makes no sense to them. Why leave your home for a new home where you don’t know where all the footholds are and you have to relearn how to climb into all the drawers? I actually agree with them: moving sucks.
Maggie was stalking around all wide eyed and scared. As soon as we got settled in, she made a break for it. I think she wanted to find the old apartment, her REAL home. Two days passed and I was so worried. She wasn’t familiar with these streets. She didn’t know how to come back. Stephen, on the other hand, was fully convinced that she was dead. “Well, the circle of life,” he’d said with a shrug.
Allen would go out to look for her. He’d cry out here and there, but after a while he just accepted the reality that she was gone. Animals are great teachers in that way; they get on with life quickly.
I, however, was not ready to get on with my life. One week turned into two, two turned into three, and eventually she had been gone a whole month. Every day, I would go to our local animal rescue, asking if anyone had seen a skittish black-and-white cat.
“No, sorry.”
And then again: “No, sorry.”
And then: “No, Laura, sorry. We just got an orange one in though. His name is Hamilton. Want to take a look?”
The employee at the shelter, Craig, was a skinny boy who always wore the same baggy shelter-volunteer T-shirt. The next time I ran into the rescue, Craig was sweeping the floor. He looked up and automatically said, “She’s not here, Laura.”
“But did you look??”
“Yes. It’s my job to look! I’m always looking! Laura, cats don’t come back home after a month.”
No! This wasn’t true! Maggie was my freaked-out, skittish, black-and-white CHILD. She was not gone.
“Your mom doesn’t come back home after a month!”
“What?”
“YOUR MOM—I don’t know . . . I’m sorry.”
Craig put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. Grief is difficult.”
“Your mom’s difficult,” I whispered. But he heard me. And then demanded I get the fuck out of his shelter.
I wasn’t about to give up hope, though. One night at around four a.m., I heard a cry from outside my window. It wasn’t so much a cry as a horrified meow. I ran out onto the balcony and there she was, looking like she had just stepped off the battlefield. She had scaled up the wall to the second story of the building and climbed over our balcony. She was wheezing! CATS DON’T WHEEZE.
I hurriedly pulled her inside and took a look at her in the light. This black-and-white cat was now completely black. She was covered in dirt and so skinny. She was crying. I put a bowl of food in front of her and she dove into it, eating as fast as she could and crying at the same time. And then she would throw it all up. We’ve all been there, am I right? No? Anybody?
She repeated this for an intense ten minutes: eating, crying, throwing up, crying, eating again. It must have been a while since she had eaten, because her body just wouldn’t accept food. When she was done, I placed her in the sink and washed her fur. On a normal day, she would have scratched my face off if I tried to bathe her, but Maggie was so dirty and exhausted that she just accepted it.
The next day we took her to the veterinarian (with a short pit stop at the shelter to prove to Craig that miracles do happen). The vet checked her out and found nothing wrong with her except a urinary tract infection. Really Maggie, a UTI? Must have been living it up in the great outdoors.
Since then, Maggie has never tried to get out again. She’s got some heavy PTSD from whatever happened out there. It was like she went on this crazy month-long binge, hit rock bottom, and won’t ever do it again. It’s just incredible that she found her way back.
Maggie and Allen feel like my spiritual teachers sometimes. Allen goes through life leading with love, and Maggie leads with fear. I learned this from reading A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, which says that we are constantly in a state of either love or fear, and these states control the choices we make and the way we live. This idea really helped me in early sobriety because I used to be so fear-driven. I was hindered by this self-seeking fear that I was going to lose what I had or not get what I wanted. Then I read this book and realized that I could choose to lead with love and walk through my fear. I chose to start looking at life through a loving, giving lens, asking every day what I could give rather than what I could get. I wanted to know what my life would look like if I focused on tolerance and forgiveness. The answers are right in front of me in the form of Maggie and Allen. I’d either be happily basking in the sun and getting belly rubs from everyone around me or vomiting and crying next to my food bowl at four in the morning.
Then there’s our one-eyed pug, Oliver. I have to preface this with the fact that there is nothing spiritual about Oliver.
Three years after we got married, Stephen would hint that he wanted a dog by randomly texting me dog pictures. Some guys send dick pics, Stephen sends dog pics. That turned into full-on links to dog profiles on adoption websites. And that turned into pulling me into animal shelters to “just peruse.”
Dogs are a huge responsibility that I didn’t know if we were ready for. We already had Maggie and Allen, and although they were both very low-maintenance pets, another pet just felt like a lot. One morning we went out for coffee, and as we were walking back to the car, we saw a pug rescue nearby. Stephen’s face lit up.
“Let’s just look,” he said while hopping around like a kid on sugar.
“If we go in, we’re going to walk out of there with like ten pugs!”
“No, no, let’s just look! I can just look!”
Yeah right, but I said okay and we walked inside. And then . . . I saw them. Just tons of ugly, misfit pugs. Pugs are pretty weird-looking to begin with, but since this was a rescue, these ones were next-level funky-looking. Which is to say they were amazing and I WANTED THEM ALL.
Stephen went off on his own with so much exuberance it was like his dreams were coming true. I strolled around and then saw him. The One.
He was facing a wall, not moving, except for some nervous twitching. I picked him up and he started foaming at the mouth. I think that means he likes me? He had only one eye, which hopefully explained the staring at the wall. He was super skinny. The dog slipped through my hands a little; he was . . . gooey. Did something spill on him? I took a closer look at his skin and saw that it was irritated, oozing pus and goo. He was fucking disgusting.