I was so ready for a cat, any cat, that I gently pushed Tiger Lily into the cat carrier, and thanked my friend for giving us one of her several house-and-barn-cats. I already loved her.
On our way home, Jake and I renamed her "Hen Wen," after the future-telling pig from The Black Cauldron. It took Hen Wen three weeks to venture out from under the couch regularly. When she had an eye infection that needed care, Jake and Quinn had to lift the whole couch up for me to retrieve her.
I recall the day we moved, five months after bringing her to live with us, I had to seek her out in the farthest recess in the farthest room. She came out when I called, sheepish, because she and I both knew she was just so scared.
At my in-laws' house, where we were moving, Hen stayed in the basement for a week or more. Hugely pregnant, I sat with her in the basement for long periods. I found an old wooden chair and tried to reach down to pet her over my belly. She didn't even see where we slept for a month, since it was past many rooms where many people roamed. She was just so scared. But how far she had come! One day I even found her lying on our bed, out in the open, sunning herself. She loved lying on our bed.
You hear it, right? The past tense that is not just a one-time event, but the habitual turned perfect tense? Because two weeks ago, Hen Wen just wasn't eating much, then nothing at all. It took me forever to realize that she was having trouble breathing. After putting Tessa to bed and leaving the monitor with my in-laws, I took Hen to the emergency vet. It just so happened that Jake was away for the first night since Tessa was born, and I felt like I was on my own on this one. It seems like it all happened very fast after I decided to take her in. The fluid around her lungs was a hopeless matter. I walked in with her in the cat carrier, and I walked out two hours later with a heavy heart and an empty cat carrier. I cried in the car for a while before going home.
On the exam table, I held her still while the vet tech took her vitals. Hen Wen rested the weight of her head on my forearm, too desperate to be scared now: trusting and tired and laboring to breathe, and maybe also glad to have such full attention from me. It was a rare thing that I turned my whole attention to the cat after I had Tessa. Hen just had to find those moments to snuggle when things were quiet, overcoming her fear and finding me. Here she was snuggling with me a few weeks after Tessa was born.
