The cat is back.
They've find a routine. Every night on her break, Lauren brings out her staff meal sandwich. Every night, the cat sits up high on a wall that overlooks the cluttered courtyard and waits, her little brown nose sniffing at the air as Lauren emerges. She waits for Lauren to scatter the meat in the corner of the yard, only jumping down from her perch when Lauren is back in her spot on the crate by the door at a safe distance.
"This cat has turned me into an accidental vegetarian," Lauren grumbles when Ray comes out one night to join her.
He watches the cat zip from one piece of meat to the next. "You know, she's skinny, but she's also kind of fat," he says thoughtfully.
"No she's not."
He elbows her. "Look at you getting all Momma bear over a cat you don't even own."
"Shut up," Lauren says through a mouthful.
"Seriously, though. Look at her belly."
Lauren peers through the dim light at the cat squatted on the cement. "I guess, she is looking kind of tubby in the middle. "Too much turkey, maybe?"
"Or too much bun in the oven."
"What?"
"Or, you know, a litter of buns."
Lauren stops chewing. "You think she's pregnant?"
"I mean, why not?"
"Because she's tiny. She's barely more than a kitten, herself." Lauren watches the cat eat the last of the turkey, and retreat to her spot high on the wall to lick her paws clean.
"Well," he says, getting up. "She wouldn't exactly be the first teen pregnancy around these parts. Come on, time's up."
Vanessa hasn't posted anything since Wednesday, when she congratulated her friend Traci, for winning a track meet. You rock, girl! That was three days ago—an eon for V.
It's an eon for Lauren, too.
By Saturday, after three days of quiet, Lauren gets twitchy. She's started relying on this tenuous, online thread to her sister. To preserve her sanity and endless scrolling, she lets herself check for posts once every hour between lab papers and test prep and the stupid film essay that's still hanging over her, mocking her ineptitude at appreciating Hitchcock.
The thing is, V never runs out of things to say. Even when she was a toddler, with barely more than a handful of words to her name, there was always this endless twittering from whatever corner of the apartment she happened to be in. It was like a baby bird had been trapped in there with them. When she got older, and she began to string full sentences into endless stream of consciousness, Lauren was recipient of every thought that went through her head. And even though there was basically zero value add in hearing her baby sister's revelations about every single thing Lauren had already discovered about the world herself, she felt comforted being surrounded by her sister's thoughts. It made their apartment feel lived-in, having her small squeaky voice fill up every space. Lauren loved the small rituals of big sister care, too, teaching her to brush her teeth properly, to tie a shoelace, to wield her manners to get treats from adults. Parenting V meant Lauren could forget she was barely being parented herself.
The only time her little sister ever went quiet was when their dad died. They all did. It was this thick grey silence. Even Jeannie said little as she sat day after day with her dad's brothers, head bowed, sober, receiving a string of guests Lauren barely knew. Every night, after they left, her mother took her martini mix to bed, shut the door and turned the television up loud. She barely looked at Lauren and Vanessa.
V slept in Lauren's bed all week. She lay there, her long legs wrapped around the edge of the duvet, chewing at her fingernails and watching a parade of Disney movies pass by the screen. Lauren sat beside her, hollowed out and terrified of what would come after this initial paralysis was over. How would they exist as three? How would she exist without ever being able to pick up the phone and call him?
Every night, she left V in her bed and tiptoed to the kitchen to slug gulps from her mother's bottle in the freezer. It dulled her thoughts, helped her to find sleep. And every morning she'd wake, that sickly chemical taste on the back of her tongue, to her little sister's sleeping breaths and another day of the same static silence.
What could have rendered her sister so quiet now? What catastrophe might have befallen her—or Jeannie, more likely. It was always Lauren that handled every Jeannie mini-disaster. The epic hangovers. The broken arm from falling in the bathroom. That time the police brought her home because someone tried to grab her bag in the street as she stumbled out of a bar in midtown. The silence is so deafening that Lauren's even picked up her phone a few times, considering a call, in those limbo seconds as the phone hunts out a connection and begins to ring, she hang up, heart beating up a storm.
On Saturday night, in the unusually quiet of her dorm, Lauren swipes her eyes with black liner and mascara. She pulls on a skirt, takes it off, and replaces it with jeans. She brushes out her hair, glosses her lips and goes online one more time. Finally, she feels everything she's been holding coiled unravel. Because there it is. It's just a picture from a school picnic, but it doesn't matter. It's evidence of her sister in the world. Now she can breathe.
But she also knows that silence was not nothing, either.