Fear and Evidence

Mom doesn't want to talk about it. Mom never wants to talk about it. But she told me about it. About it. She was sitting on the couch with Andy tonight, drinking margaritas, when they heard a cat over on the other side of the apartment.

"And then what?" I asked. Mom was talking about the Ghost Cat. She usually pretends it doesn't exist.

"I told Andy about the Ghost Cat," she said.

"And?"

"And what? That was the end of the conversation," Mom said.

"Well, what'd she say?"I asked.

"She didn't say anything. That was the end of the conversation."

"Well, whud her face look like??" I asked. To no avail. That was the end of the conversation, Mom said.

She knows something. This is her house. How can she not know how haunted it is?

Coincidentally, my mother acts a lot like my first college roommate, Cherisa. I spent one lovely Saturday in February sitting in our pie-shaped University of Hawai'i dorm room with the curtains drawn on the day so I could watch the OC for six hours straight. It was horrible. It was wonderful. I couldn't look away from Peter Gallegar's Eyebrow. Cherisa had gone to Wal-Mart with her cusins and left me with half a season of the OC to catch up on so I could watch with all the girls Later that week and not bother anyone with questions. God damn questions during shows.

Cherisa didn't come home for a long time.

Periodically I would see a light reflected in my glasses and feel the rush of fresh air that meant the door was open. Then I'd wait. Stillness. I'd turn and look at the door. Closed. Never opened. That happened six times during those hours of mindless California drama and countless other times when I was alone in the room.

When Cherisa came home that evening she had a lot of bags. I was relieved to see her, the stillness had been so tense, so I went out to the elevator to help with the bags.

"Our room is haunted," I said.

"I know," she said. Really?? I attempted to proceed telling her about the strange events with the door. "I don't want to hear about it, V!" she snapped. From then on she would purse her lips every time something spooky happened. She knew but to acknowledge it might be too scary.

I suppose my mother has a point. This loft is a scary place. If there really were a Ghost Cat, why is she here? Why has she started acting up to much recently? Here's the big question: are my theories right, that she could only have been called forward in such a manner because there's something worse here. Something bad. Something a cat would be able to protect her family from.

Every member of this family loved her. My mother, father and brother. When she slipped out the front window in May 2005 and fell five stories she survived the fall and lived just long enough to die of shock in the hospital. Unaware where she was and that she was dying. Or maybe, Brother Sam says, she was dying to protect our family from something.

I'll post a picture of her sometime. She was a beautiful cat.

My mom and her friend heard a meow coming from the North end of the loft. I'm hoping it was the neighbor's cat; but Mom seemed spooked.