Andre looked over his shoulder and waved. Raymond waved back.
Then he broke free of his pose and slid through a missing window into the basement of the abandoned building, dropping onto the concrete floor with a slap of his athletic shoes.
“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” he called. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
He sat down on a hard stone bench that, he assumed, had been too heavy for anybody to bother hauling away. It was ornate, in an oddly affecting way. It had leaflike curls of stone where the legs met the bench. That made it special to Raymond, because nothing else in his life was ornate, especially for no reason in particular. Just for its own sake like that.
The cat jumped up on the bench and mewed to him. She was a tiny cat. Not a kitten, but young and small. Long bodied and skinny. An orange tabby with a thin little cry, like a mouse would make. Or something else not even one-tenth her size.
“I know,” he said. “I’m late. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”
He dug through his backpack and pulled out the treat he’d bought for her. A little individual half-sized can of tuna with a ring-top lid. He opened it and set it on the bench.
For a moment—just the count of two or three—she didn’t go straight for it. Instead she lobbied for one extra moment of affection. She rubbed her long body against Raymond’s side, and when he ran his hand down her back, her tail end rose up into the air. Her tail itself stood straight up, like a furry antenna. It quivered in the air.
Then she dug into the tuna.
But that one moment. That one moment when she chose him over food. It was so sweet. It almost made Raymond want to cry. Or maybe that was his friend moving away. Or a combination.
He didn’t cry. He never did.
“Guess it’s just you and me now,” he said.
The cat raised her head and looked at him earnestly, licking her lips. Then she returned her attention to the food.
He climbed the stairs slowly, using the bannister to pull himself up. He felt drained, almost completely devoid of energy.
Just as his head came level with the second-floor landing, he saw her again. And heard her. She was wringing her hands in front of her flowered skirt.
“Is that Raymond?” she asked. “From the fourth floor?”
Once again those eyes seemed to search a spot Raymond did not quite occupy. Almost, but not precisely.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s me.”
“I was just thinking . . .”
Raymond stepped up onto the landing and walked a few steps down the hall in her direction. A voice in the back of his head told him not to. If Andre were here, Andre would have told him not to. Maybe that’s who the voice was, in the back of Raymond’s head, giving unwanted advice. But it seemed silly to fear her. She was so completely ancient. If Raymond felt the need to get away, he could turn and vault up the stairs two at a time and be safely inside his apartment before she could even reach the stairwell. The way she seemed to struggle with her vision, he might be safe inside before she could even locate the stairs.
“Yes, ma’am?” he said when he was as close to her as he cared to go.
“Thank you for stopping. Most people don’t stop. Most people hurry by. When I ask a question, they hurry faster. I wonder sometimes why we’re all so afraid of one another. Or . . . actually . . . no, I don’t really wonder. I know why. But I reflect on it. And I think it’s a shame.”
Raymond noticed a trace of an accent as she spoke. Nothing obvious. More like some speech pattern she had mostly left behind long ago. Raymond wasn’t good at identifying accents, but it sounded vaguely European to him.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” he said. “I was late for school.”
He was staring into her eyes, but she didn’t seem to notice. They had a rheumy look about them, those eyes. Cloudy where most eyes looked clear. It dawned on Raymond that the problem might be confined to those eyes. That her mind might be sharp and clear, and maybe it was only the literal mechanism of her eyes causing malfunction.
“I understand completely,” she said. “I was just thinking . . . You live with your parents? Up there on the fourth floor?”
“Pretty much. My mother and stepfather.”
“Maybe they know Luis Velez? I know it’s not a likelihood, because people come and go from this building and never speak. Look at us. We never said a word to each other before this morning. But I just can’t help thinking . . . for more than four years he came here to help me and check on me. Three times a week, at a bare minimum. Maybe someone else who lives here might have seen him.”