Agathe Gindrey
Sugardust
DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WITH A “NEW” CAT? ask the missing pet posters on the way to school. They’re growing aggressive, the posters:
heavy-duty tape, laminated to protect the colors, pupil-pounding red let-
ters and blue feline irises. The same hues diluted by rain on the previous signs, paper that melted with the plea: Have you seen Snowflake?
At intersections, forced to stand by streetlights, Matt distracts his daughters, pointing out a cardinal, a tree already sprouting leaves, a cute doggie. Luckily, Lou is too little to spot the signs, but Astrid at each crosswalk inspects the photo, then her father. DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WITH A NEW CAT? Matt, Astrid, and Lou definitely do.
She’d climbed up the fire escape and wailed at the window one Saturday in February, Matt told the girls. Shaking, dirty. Blue eyes wide, hungry. Grateful for Matt as he combed her fur, as he bought, then cracked open, a can of Friskies. That Sunday, the girls actually ran up the steps, away from their mom, to meet the kitty.
“Sugardust,” Astrid declared.
Sugardust! Life changer, miracle worker, a being to come home to on nights the girls are at their mother’s, warm and pouncing, shedding tufts of white fluff like pillows for mice, and now the girls are less sad to leave Sonia, less eager to return to her. Matt is less tempted after work on empty evenings to outdrink the interns and avoid the mere sight of unused LEGOs, dry Frozen toothbrushes, strewn bedsheets he hesitates to tidy into twin beds formal and unoccupied. Now there is a being to feed! A litter box to clean. Toy mice to toss.
Bedtime phone calls have become longer, too, Lou asking what Sugardust is doing and Astrid double-checking. “You fed her? How much? You cleaned her litter box? Did she play?” Questions answered, “Yes, yes, yes,” until one night Astrid whispers into the phone, “Daddy, do you think Sugardust might be Snowflake?”
Matt has prepared his speech. “Snowflake looks scared and unhappy in those posters. Sugardust is the happiest cat on earth!”
On Astrid’s side, Sonia is impatient about sleep. “OK, Daddy. Good night.”
Since Sugardust appeared, Sonia’s quicker to drop the girls off, too. Cat fur or protein, whichever, is poison to her. Matt has less time to linger on the memory of their united family. Less time to remember the last spring they spent together, when Sonia still seemed to love him though, he’s learned since, she didn’t. Sonia sees the cat, kisses the girls, but today doesn’t leave.
“A word?”
In the kitchen she, too, whispers doubts about Sugardust. “You’ve seen those posters. That Snowflake’s been gone the same amount of time you’ve had her. They’re almost identical.”
“The vet said she was a stray. And we had Sugardust for weeks before the posters appeared.”
“But they say she’s been missing since February.”
“She isn’t chipped.”
“Come on, Matt. It’s a strange coincidence.”
“What’s stranger is the thought of a house cat hopping a whole bunch of fences, crossing, what is it, ten-ish blocks from Verandah Place in traffic and snow and not dying in the process.”
Sonia sneezes. “Maybe. I better go.”
And Sugardust will stay.
On the school playground, a boy taunts Astrid, calls her “Ass-Turd,” and receives in response a handful of wood chips, so Matt must co-parent through the crisis with Sonia. Co-parent. What a cold term, how corporate: Sonia and Matt assigned to collaborate, as if parenting were a project.
Nine years already since Sonia stroked her beach-ball belly and whispered, “Astrid,” then sneered when Matt said, “They’ll call her ‘Ass-Turd,’ sweetheart.”
“This isn’t Indiana, Matt. No one’s going to call her that here. These kids are more mature. Better behaved.”
So Matt’s a little vindicated. Indiana, Brooklyn, boys’ brains don’t change. But instead of “I told you so,” he says, “We just have to teach her more subtle ways of standing her ground.”
“I really thought at a school like theirs creative naming would be the norm.”
“I can help her come up with mean nicknames for the boys.”
“I mean, there’s a boy in Lou’s class named Eros. Eros.”
“Yes, but the kids don’t know what that actually means yet. It’ll bite him in
the ass later.”
“Astrid isn’t even that rare of a name! It’s not like we named her Styx, or Nebula.”
“But the problem isn’t just that. It’s also that she threw wood chips at a classmate.”
“Words hurt more than wood chips.”
“I thought the saying was, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones . . .’”
“That saying doesn’t apply to smart girls, Matt. That saying is bullshit.”
They call the boy’s mom, whose voice wavers when she says she understands that Astrid is going through a rocky family patch, that it’s normal, well, kids—
Sonia corrects her. “It’s not a patch. Our divorce is official.”
“Which, of course,” Matt adds, “isn’t a reason to, uh, throw things at a classmate.”
No conversation has ever made his shirt feel so tight on his shoulders. Growing up, kids’ arguments or fights were dealt with by a parental “figure it out.” No pussyfooting around apologies for playground tiffs that didn’t even end in bruises. And certainly no acting as if the situation were a diplomatic crisis— parents like ambassadors smoothing things over, an apology summit planned, a delegation readied by texting Jayne the babysitter, who texts back, “OK got it,” then, “Apology went well. Then they played together on the jungle gym.” Matt wonders how Lou will react the day someone calls her Lou-ser.
On Sunday, the girls come home from Sonia’s with a bag full of painted, glittered, feathered, googly-eyed wine corks. Toys for Sugardust, who is so excited she can’t seem to figure out which one to pounce on. Lou’s are the most sparkly: sapphire, emerald, bright pink, like tropical birds. Most of Astrid’s are practical: mouse-gray and whiskered, or brown mock-roaches, complete with antennae, meant to “train her.”
“Except we don’t have mice or roaches,” Matt says, fearing Sonia now thinks his apartment is crusted with vermin. In his mind, she opens a bottle of wine for friends, tosses the cork aside. “For the girls. They like to paint them for Matt’s cat—yes, a cat—and apparently they have to train her to catch bugs. I hate thinking of my girls in a dirty apartment . . . ” Then Matt remembers Sonia has seen how pristine the place is, and why so many corks, anyway, Sonia?
Matt counts sixteen. A bottle a day and divorce goes away?
He rubs his temples and the noxious thoughts scatter.
Sugardust, overstimulated, leaps on the low shelf and sends flying a framed photo of the girls at Christmas. It crashes, breaks. The cat scrambles out of sight, tail puffed, chased by Astrid.
“Maybe that’s enough for today,” Lou says, and begins gathering the corks.
“But you know what, Daddy, I don’t think she’s Eros’s cat.”
“Eros’s cat?”
“Snowflake! You know, Daddy, the posters. With the cat that is kind of like
Sugardust.”
“You think she looks like her?”
“Kinda. Except Eros said Snowflake is afraid of everything. And never plays. Sugardust is only afraid of some things and always plays.”
“She can’t be Snowflake, anyway.” He gives the Lou-friendly version of Sugardust’s origin story.
“So what happened to Snowflake, then?”
“Ever heard of cat heaven?”
Lou nods slowly. “That’s where Grammy Esther’s cat went.” She beams. “Oh, maybe he and Snowflake are friends now!”
In the doorway, Astrid crosses her arms, doubtful. “Sugardust is under your bed, Lou, but she needs alone time.”
Usually, signs—French tutoring, stoop sales—come and go. Week three and the DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WITH A NEW CAT? posters are still up, still ignored by Matt on the way to school. Astrid glances, frowns, so he drops “I hope they find her” and “Maybe they just haven’t removed the signs, yet” to avoid suspicion.
Why are the former owners so insistent? Only multi-millionaires have the means to live on that street—former carriage homes facing a small park—and surely multimillionaires can afford a new cat. Our children are devastated, whine the posters. Perhaps it’s the devastated brats, delicate city kids, who keep pushing for Snowflake to be found. Eros hasn’t heard of Thanatos. Easier to teach them about theft than what happens to indoor cats who sneak out—Lou’s account, gleaned from Eros, of how Snowflake went missing.
Lou always fidgets by her cubby as Matt buttons up her blue smock. Her fingers twitch toward the puzzles in the playtime section. But Matt is too interested in the conversation behind them, so he fumbles on purpose.
“I just think, if we get a new cat right away, what are they learning? That death isn’t a big deal because something new will show up?”
“Right,” the friend says. “You don’t want to stunt them emotionally.” Eros’s mom kisses her son goodbye and promises to keep looking. “Can you look in cat heaven today, Mommy?”
Lou swings around. “You can’t look in cat heaven! It’s in the part of the sky that’s higher than airplanes.”
Then Eros tells his mom Lou has a new cat that looks a lot like Snowflake.
Valerie Cotten introduces herself, her face impossible to read—intimidating, like those expressionless abstract artworks Sonia’s parents collect—and Matt shakes her hand and covers his own features with the VP of North American Sales mask.
“It is eerie,” he says, reaching into his pocket for phone and photos.
“But that is Snowflake! That looks exactly like her!”
“You know, I thought so, too, but see, look at her forehead. That splotch of gray.”
“That could be dirt.”
“Actually, it’s dust we can’t clean,” Lou explains. “That’s why Astrid named her Sugardust.”
“This is uncanny. Who is the breeder? I suppose they could be related.” “We found her.” Lou tells the story of the snow and fire escape.
“Wow,” says Eros. “I wish Snowflake could do that.”
“It almost seems like that’s impossible! A cat climbing a fire escape.”
“Oh, for house cats, sure. But for a stray like Sugardust ... ”
Mrs. Wallis rings her musical triangle and startles the grownups—“Class is starting!”—and the note follows the straggling parents into the hallway, where Valerie’s friend stops pretending to be on her phone. “We have pilates, Val.” They’re off, Valerie’s smile, stretched to show her canines, etched in Matt’s vision.
He’d once said their love had deepened, its giddiness replaced by more meaningful joy. Sonia smiled and kissed him—signs, he thought, of a wordless agreement. He winces at the memory now. Sonia hadn’t looked that happy since Lou, babbling with arms outstretched, took her first steps.
Growing up, seeking solace in the feral cats he fed behind the shed, hearing without listening to his parents’ shouts, divorce exploded with hatred. But here, with tossed corks shedding sparkles all over the rug, divorce is Greek torture, co-parenting the voracious eagle, his heart the liver pecked at, chewed on, regrown; repeat.
Since Astrid’s birth, Matt never misses a call, even from an unknown number.
What if?
“Matt, hello, this is Valerie Cotten.” And, with the wealthy’s habit of waiting for no one:
“I wanted to ask, which vet did you take your new cat to?”
The next evening, Matt has Sugardust in a carrying case and neither knows what’s about to happen—if Valerie’s vet will recognize Snowflake. In the waiting room, Valerie shuts her magazine and sticks her face against the mesh opening.
“Hi, sweetie!”
Matt feels the weight shift—Sugardust backing away as much as she can in the cramped space.
Valerie says it must be nerves. Later, when Sugardust roams around the vet’s table and cowers every time Valerie extends a hand to pet her, there are no excuses.
“You must remember her,” Valerie tells the assistant, who explains that she’s new, and then the vet, who mumbles something about seeing a lot of cats.
“This is why we recommend chipping.”
“How can you not see this cat is mine?”
Sugardust sniffs the vet, giving Valerie a wide berth.
Matt rubs Sugardust’s forehead. The vet says something about a client whose cat will soon give birth and needs takers for kittens.
At the groomer, same circus. Faces break in half in front of Valerie, grinning mouth, glaring eyes. And when she calls the cat-sitter: “What do you mean you don’t remember me? I’ve hired you dozens of times!”
A lesson on how to treat others, Matt reminds himself to tell his daughters years from now, once they’re old enough to understand.
Monthly movie night at school features The Parent Trap, and Lou comes home full of schemes whispered to her sister, the way a child whispers, louder than she thinks and audible to Matt.
“Lou,” Astrid says. “The whole point of The Parent Trap is that they didn’t see each other for a very long time, and they were twins. We’re just sisters, and
Mommy and Daddy see each other a lot.”
About to cry, Lou is much louder. “So we’ll never be all together again?”
“But we’re together sometimes. Like the Spring Dance Jamboree!”
Matt improvises a line about nice weather and going to the park, an excuse to step into the room and hide his eavesdropping.
“Lou’s sad because she’s tired,” Astrid says, giving the same reason Sonia would when infant Lou’s screams drove the elder daughter to mock-wail in frustration.
In Matt’s arms, Lou wipes away confusion and tears.
The asphalt basketball court-cum-baseball diamond is cramped—the first warm day of the year. Soccer balls collide into the girls’ legs and, every other toss, someone accidentally intercepts Matt’s ball. Astrid decides the playground will be more fun.
Lou waves to someone on the slide, and of course it’s the boy with the sandy hair: Eros. Matt has no choice but to approach Valerie and her friend. Bianca’s mom. Matt makes small talk, delays Valerie’s feline investigation, wills his daughters to call him over for a bathroom break or cookie.
Eros interrupts, Lou right behind him. “Mommy. Can I please have a funeral for Snowflake?”
“Sweetie. Funerals are sad things.”
“I want to say goodbye. Before Daddy comes home with Dandelion.”
In a tone that makes it clear she wasn’t consulted, Valerie explains that her husband decided on a new cat.
“Oh, that’s great!” says Bianca’s mom. “The kids have been so sad.”
“And it’s a great life lesson, too,” Matt says. “You know, life goes on, moving past things.”
Matt, at first, feared he’d been seen that day, despite the blizzard. In empty streets there are no witnesses, but no distractions, either. All that remained in his memory were the faint whine, the bright blue blinks he realized were eyes on a whiskered face, on a feline body. Feral cats are seldom docile, but he’d always had a knack, all those years of building trust . . .
There was a colony of strays that lived in the old docks not far away, and Matt convinced himself this one must have fled the river’s freezing winds. It had the scrawny body of a cat whose meals aren’t a guarantee, too.
On his way home, cradling the cat wrapped in his scarf, he could already imagine Lou and Astrid’s excitement. If they missed their mom, if they got upset, they could scratch the kitty’s head until they were soothed.
“She climbed all the way up the fire escape!” he told the girls on the phone that night.
“The boys at school called me ‘Ass-Turd’ again today,” Astrid says at dinner. “What’s an ass turd?” asks Lou.
“Ass means butt and turd is poop. So it means poopy butt.”
“Aren’t all butts poopy?”
Sonia would say, “No poop talk at the table,” so Matt says it, too. “And what did you say to them, Astrid?”
Astrid tells her peas about hugging Arthur and chanting, “That makes you a turd hugger, turd hugger!”
Matt stuffs his mouth to fight his laughter. Lou’s laugh is buttery. Never has poop been a topic of conversation at dinner. Astrid’s face, cold in the anticipation of punishment, mellows into giggles, and Matt can’t hold his in anymore.
Snorts and clinking of flatware. From the couch, Sugardust lifts her head, confused, curious.