By Nikki Reimer
I Have The Cat
Moving day brought an explosion of ladybugs. They were all over our belongings stacked on the front lawn, crawling on the desk, four and six and eight on each box. For any other insect I’d have called it an infestation, but the word didn’t match this saccharine state of things. Bright red spotted walking gumdrops blanketing the objects in the yard. Like in one of my childhood colouring books or the opening scene to a Disney film; an infestation of twee.
It’s a bright early October day. The air is crisp. The light slants through the air like through glass and I’m trying to feel my body in the world but reality warps and bends away from my touch. My brother has been dead one year, seven months and 14 days. My husband and I are moving house for the third time since the day Chris didn’t wake up. My arrhythmia acts up from the stress. Heartbeat fluttering up into my chest. Mothwings.
The first move was in June 2012, four months after he died. My husband packed up our apartment into a U-Haul. Two cats in two carriers went next. Little ginger tabby Amy buckled into the back seat, her big sister Bella on my lap. For thirteen months we lived in my parents’ basement. Four traumatized adults and three cats trying to negotiate a grief both shared and alone. My brother’s grey Adidas runners neatly stowed behind the door where he left them the night he died.
I had thought we might find a way to process together, but my parents drank in front of the tv every night, and no one wanted to talk. Eventually I gave up and joined their boozy stupor.
The second move was in July 2013. I had found us a house, a post WWII saltbox with a rent so low it should have given me pause. The shingles were in rough shape, and there was an electric wall heating unit instead of a furnace. This is what’s known as ‘foreshadowing’.
After my brother, my cat Bella was my best friend. I adopted her soon after I moved out of my parents’ house, and we grew up together. She was a beautiful medium-haired tortoiseshell with green eyes and a throaty voice. We bonded like only two misfits who grow up together can. At night I held her tight to my body like a teddy bear. She was 16 and she’d survived the move from the coast, and the year with my parents, but a month after we moved into the saltbox she got sick and we had to let her go. Summer turned to fall and the saltbox turned out to be improperly heated. We broke the lease and found another rental. Moved for the third time in October.
***
Boxes line the long hallway, shadowed and eerie. There’s no ceiling light in the oversized living room and we don’t seem to have enough lamps, so half the house is shrouded in darkness.
I’m navigating the maze poorly. Hit my shin, say fuck. I don’t know where anything is, and the long painting boxes are giving me ominous vibes. I’ve never been a fan of horror movies but I know the tropes, and it occurs to me why so many horror movies open with the move to a new house. It’s the embodiment of liminal space. Airless and destabilized. A deconstructed house lets the ghosts roam freely.
Amy’s a sweet baby girl but it’s too quiet without Bella. I've moved away again from the spaces that held my dead and it’s breaking something inside me that can’t be put back together. One night I fall apart completely, wail and scream on the couch, demand my poor husband tell me where Bella has gone.
“Where do cats go? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know, baby,” he says softly.
I can’t be consoled. I won’t be consoled. I want to be dead myself.
***
The Facebook message from my friend Matt the following week was surprising. We were super tight in junior high and high school. I used to call him my big brother. But he’d moved out east and we’d lost contact. It happens.
I need to talk to you. Can we talk on the phone?
He's only recently learned about Chris, and he’s so sorry. Sorry that my baby brother is dead, and sorry that we’ve fallen so far out of touch that it took him so long to hear about it.
I don’t mind. I understand. It’s comforting to hear from him. I only feel close to ok when I’m with people who knew Chris too.
Matt explains that his wife is into what my psychic friend Jen would lovingly call 'woo.' For their anniversary they’d gone to a medium together.
They were trying to make contact with Matt’s wife’s dead grandmother, when someone pushed her aside. The medium described the interloper’s appearance. It’s my brother.
He said, I bet you’re surprised to see me.
The medium tells them that Chris is there because he’s worried about his sister and her mental health.
Through the medium he says, Don’t worry about me, I’m ok.
It seems both implausible, and entirely plausible. My brother was sweet and cynical, sarcastic and joyful and loving. His empathy was boundless. If you were hurting he’d do anything he could to let you know you were loved. Pushing an old lady out of the way to make sure I knew he was alright was in character for him, though he'd be apologizing profusely to her afterwards. I want to believe this visitation could be real.
Then, said Chris, through the medium, through Matt, I have the cat.
And Matt said, “Does that mean anything to you?”
Nikki Reimer (she/they) is a multimedia artist and writer, and chronically ill neurodivergent prairie settler currently living in Calgary / Mohkinstsis. She has been involved with art and writing communities, primarily in Calgary and Vancouver, for over 20 years. They are the author of three books of poetry and multiple essays on grief. GRIEFWAVE, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, was published in February 2022. Visit reimerwrites.com.