We bought the house in Ohio in October, and for the first few weeks I honestly thought it was the friendliest place I had ever lived. It was old, with wide plank floors that creaked in a soft, familiar way, and a dining area at the back that caught the afternoon sun. My husband Mark called it the good room. Our cat Willow agreed. She was a gray tabby, nine years old, and she picked a spot on the dining room floor within an hour of the moving truck leaving and claimed it for life.
The first odd thing was small enough to ignore. A sock. One of Mark's gray work socks turned up on the bottom stair, folded neatly in half, when neither of us remembered leaving it there. I figured I'd done it while carrying laundry. Mark figured the same. We laughed and moved on.
The second odd thing was not small.
It was a Tuesday, just after four. I was standing at the kitchen counter cutting an apple, and Willow came trotting through the dining area the way she always did, tail high, headed for her sunny spot. Halfway across the room she slid backward.
I want to describe this carefully because I have gone over it in my head a hundred times. She was not jumping. She was not startled. Her paws were flat on the floor and her legs were stiff, and she moved backward across the boards about five feet, smoothly, like she was on a string. Her tail was straight out behind her, pulled taut, the way a tail looks when someone has hold of it.
Nobody had hold of it.
Willow screamed. I had never heard that sound come out of her. She twisted and clawed at the floor and tried to run, but for one long second she couldn't. Something held on. Then it let go, and she shot past me and disappeared under our bed upstairs, and I stood there with the knife still in my hand and the apple in the other and my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
I checked everything. The rug, in case her tail had snagged a thread. The chairs, the table legs, the floor vents. There was nothing. The boards were bare and clean and the afternoon light lay across them like nothing had happened.
When Mark got home I told him, and I watched him do what I would have done, which was look for a reasonable answer. Static, maybe. A slippery floor. A cat startled by a sound we couldn't hear. I let him talk. I didn't argue, because I didn't have a better idea, only a feeling I couldn't say out loud.
The feeling was that it hadn't been cruel.
That's the strange part. I have been afraid in my life, and this was not that kind of afraid. What I saw looked less like an attack and more like what happens when a very small person grabs something they love a little too hard. A quick tug. A hold that lasted a second too long. Then a startled letting go, as if whoever it was had just realized the cat was not enjoying it.
I mentioned it to our neighbor, Mrs. Patterson, the following weekend. I said it lightly, in the driveway, over a plate of banana bread she had brought us. I expected a polite smile. Instead she went quiet and looked past me at the house.
"The Hendersons had a little girl," she said finally. "Lucy. She was four or five when they lived there. Loved animals more than anything. She used to drag that poor old dog all over the yard by the tail, and her mother was forever telling her to be gentle." She shook her head. "They moved away a long time ago. I couldn't tell you where."
I asked her what happened to Lucy. Mrs. Patterson said she didn't know, and I chose to believe her, because I wasn't ready for any other answer.
That night I told Mark about it, and this time he didn't offer an explanation. He just sat beside me on the couch for a while and then said, "Maybe she just wants to play."
The sock made sense after that. So did the cupboard door in the kitchen that we kept finding open, always the low one, always the one a small person could reach. So did the way Willow sometimes lay in her sunny spot and stared at the empty air about two feet off the floor, her head tilting slowly, her eyes following something I couldn't see.
I won't pretend I wasn't nervous. But I kept thinking of that little girl and the old dog and her mother's voice saying be gentle. So that evening I did something that felt a little foolish. I took a ball of red yarn from my knitting basket, sat down on the dining room floor, and rolled it across the boards.
"Here," I said to the empty room. "Try this. She likes this one better."
Nothing happened. I felt ridiculous and went to start dinner.
Weeks passed. Winter came in. I kept rolling the yarn out every evening around four, and Willow slowly began to come back into the room. First to the doorway. Then to the edge of the rug. Then, one gray afternoon in December, all the way to her old sunny spot, where she lay down with her paws tucked and her eyes half shut.
I was at the counter again when I heard it, a soft dry whisper of yarn on wood.
The red ball was rolling. Slowly, from the far side of the room, drawn along in little jerks, the way a child drags a toy on a string when she is trying very hard to be quiet. It stopped a foot in front of Willow's nose.
She opened one eye. She watched it. And then, very carefully, she reached out one paw and pushed it back.
The yarn rolled away across the floor, and I swear I heard something laugh.