He stepped inside. He tentatively drew his wrist away from the cloth of the pillowcase to see how the wound was doing. The deep scratch was still bleeding. So he pressed the fabric against it again. He didn’t want to bleed on the old woman’s furniture or rug. Even though she would never know. It was the principle of the thing. He would know he had spoiled her nice things. Nice enough, anyway. Well, he thought, nice or not, these things were all she had.
Mildred Gutermann closed and locked the door behind them. Raymond stood very still and watched her cross to the couch. She lowered herself gently, as if every bone and muscle hurt. Or maybe, he thought, just as if she was very old.
“All right,” she said. “Now let’s have a look at this cat. So to speak.”
Raymond sat on the opposite end of the couch from her, perched on its very edge, and opened the pillowcase. The cat’s head shot out. She looked around, eyes wide with fear. Then she launched out of the sack and skittered away.
“Oops,” Raymond said. “She took off. I better go see where she went.”
“No, she will be okay. Let her explore. You sit here and talk to me. Tell me how she is your cat and at the same time somehow not.”
“She’s a stray,” Raymond said. “I’ve been feeding her. I tamed her. I got her to the point where she would come to me and let me pet her. But I shouldn’t have. Because now she’s in trouble, and it would’ve been better if I’d left her alone. She should be scared of people. She was right about that all along. I made her more trusting. And I feel really bad about that now. And if something happens to her because of that, I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
“But she is right to trust you, Raymond.”
“But what if she’s more trusting with somebody else because of it?” He sat in silence for a moment. Mildred Gutermann did not answer his question. “A couple of neighborhood boys are looking for her. I don’t know what they would do to her if they caught her. But not feed her and pet her, that’s for sure.”
“I see,” she said. “So you will take her home with you.”
“I can’t. I’m not allowed to have a pet. I brought her here because I thought . . . Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You were hoping I would take her in.”
“Yeah.”
“I would if I could, my young friend. But I’m sure you see the problem. You can put tape marks on the rug like I do with the chair, so the cat knows exactly where she should be. But she is a living cat, she is not a chair, so it’s likely she will choose to be somewhere different.”
Raymond sat in silence for a beat or two, hearing himself breathe. He realized he was just at the edge of tears—that it would be so easy to let them go. It surprised him, because he never cried. But it was something about the cat. She had bypassed a boundary, some wall he’d built to keep everybody and everything out of his vulnerable places. And the idea that someone would hurt her for fun . . .
“Do you have something I could put on a cut? So it doesn’t get infected?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and pushed herself up off the couch and onto her feet. “I take lots of bumps and falls. I have everything.” She took him by the elbow, wrapping both her hands around it with surprising strength. “Come to the bathroom sink.”
“Okay,” he said.
And he rose. And followed her.
He felt better. Reassured. He would not get a terrible infection, because she would help him. She knew what to do.
“Where is the cut?” she asked as they walked together.
Surprisingly, she seemed to be leading him. Then again, it was her house. Her bathroom.
“Inside my right wrist.”
They stepped into the bathroom together, and she thrust his right forearm into the sink. Again, with surprising strength. She turned the cold water on and stuck his arm under the flow of it.
“Ow,” he said. It was a serious understatement of the pain that surged through him.
“I know. I’m sorry. But we have to take care of these things. Is it still bleeding?”
“I don’t think so. I think it stopped.”
“Good. Here. Take this.” She pulled a tall plastic squeeze bottle out of her medicine cabinet. Handed it to him. “Squeeze some of this onto the cut. And we will let it sit there for a minute.”
Raymond took it from her. Opened out the nozzle with one hand. Drenched the scratch with the reddish-brown liquid. There was another sharp blast of pain as it flowed into the wound. This time he saw it coming, and held it in. He expressed nothing.