Path

BY JANE MARSTON, ATHENS, GEORGIA

     IN AUGUST OF 1988, I found myself planning a return move to Athens, Georgia, having taught for one year at Mercer University in Macon. On the eve of vacating the apartment I’d been renting, I hoped against hope I’d have no trouble transporting my cat, a five-year-old gray tabby. Flash—so named because of his exceptional agility—had proved a handful on the Athens-to-Macon move the year before. Confined within a bedroom while the movers came and went, he’d clawed the carpeting and nearly cost me a security deposit.

In Macon, his daily routine was to exit the apartment in the mornings via the sliding glass door to the balcony, spring to a wooden railing, and proceed to the forested regions which lent not just privacy but aesthetic value to the apartment complex. On moving day, deprived of his routine, the Flash-cat went nuts. At first light, he began to pace along the sliding door, his cries plaintive in the best tradition. Seeing through my own glass darkly, I tried confining him to the bathroom, but this constraint only heightened the yowling and elicited a vigorous and incessant scratching. Rationalizing that I would be easing his stress, and thinking it likely he’d return to the apartment after lunch, I let him go outside.

When I first moved to Macon, Flash had been terrified, especially of the footsteps thudding across the floor above us. He’d hidden in the woods and had not come out until I went looking for him, calling his name. Since then, he’d become street smart. While my movers packed, I ranged the borders of the woods and followed its overgrown paths—fruitlessly. Soon, my presence was demanded elsewhere. And my cat had not returned.

A few days earlier, a new tenant had moved into the apartment above mine. I hadn’t met her, but now I introduced myself to the youngish, slender woman with short brown hair who answered my knock on her door. Glimpsed from the entryway, her apartment was bright and celestial, housing, as it did, cockatoos in gleaming cages. I’d come to the right place.

Explaining the situation, I gave the cockatoo-owner a key to my old apartment and asked her to keep an eye out for Flash. If she spied him on the balcony, she was to let herself into the apartment through the front door; let the cat in through the glass door; and phone me in Athens.

The next morning at seven o’clock, as I sat, forlorn, on my old sofa in my new duplex in Athens, my phone rang. The plan had worked. Flash was inside the old apartment, waiting.

I drove back to Macon and was reunited with my cat. In short order, I surrendered my key once and for all to the apartment manager who’d helped make the reunion possible, thanking her and expressing my sense of order restored, chaos set to rights.

A week later, my car broke down. No matter that its rattle proved prophetic. It had held together magically for the crucial interval. What did matter was the woman with the cockatoos—the grace and low-key understanding which shaped her vigilance on my behalf, the promptness of her phone call that summer morning.

Her name was Susan Bello. It’s inked into an old address book whose entries constitute my history.

When history is done, may her name be inscribed in the Book of Life.