The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [115]
“You absolutely should adopt her,” she continued. “She’ll bring you a lot of joy.”
Martin nodded. Something had changed between them; she seemed so much less wounded and unhappy than in his memories, and he was encouraged by the idea that the same could no doubt be said of him. “What do you think I should name her?” he asked with a laugh, pointing at the cardboard sign attached to the outside of the cage. “She’s obviously not a Mango.”
“Given that you already have Dante, wouldn’t Beatrice be appropriate?” she proposed, using the Italian pronunciation.
“Beatrice,” Martin repeated as if hypnotized. He remembered how he and Jane had always shared an intuition, and if he felt some regret at how needlessly frightened of it he had been as a teenager, he was now consoled by the thought that they were more like reflections of each other, each able to follow where the other chose to walk.
He went to the cage where Beatrice cowered and trembled in the corner and looked up at him with wet eyes, much more fearful than Dante. Her face was also heart-shaped, but smaller and more angular, except for some very long and prominent nose whiskers that in the reflection of the light gave her the appearance of a walrus. She was really quite tiny, Martin realized, and a bit bedraggled, with some of her fur matted down on the sides of her face and along her belly. Her tail, he further noticed, appeared to be only five or six inches long—perhaps half the length of Dante’s—with a little knob on the end, which though not raw or infected made him wonder if it had been cut off in what he imagined had not been an easy life. She covered her face with a paw, and he noticed that this, too, was misshapen; it looked like a mitten. He counted at least seven toes, including one that had an impressive nail in the shape of a lobster claw.
“Did you see her foot?” he asked as he turned back to his mother, who had pushed the sunglasses down over her eyes again.
“She’s polydactyl,” she replied, her tone still recognizable to him. “You get that in cats, but it’s good luck, I promise—take her home, and you’ll see.”
THAT AFTERNOON, THE three of them—Martin, Dante, and Beatrice—arrived at Martin’s house, where he was disappointed to find that Beatrice was extremely skittish and refused to budge from a spot under the bed, even after he made clear his intention to rescue her from the cruel life she had thus far endured. Days passed, and he was at times disconcerted by his failure even to touch her. Dante by contrast was completely fixated; he spent hours roaming the perimeter of the bed and whining until she emerged to eat or use the litter box, at which point he stayed two inches behind her unless Beatrice—clearly ambivalent about the attention—lost patience and gave him a quick swat in the nose with one of her big paws.
As Martin remembered how much calmer things had been with just Dante, he questioned his attachment to the cats, not to mention his mother’s advice. Although Beatrice gradually emerged and began to explore the house, she still seemed petrified of Martin, and would dash out of any room where he happened to find her. After two weeks she still refused to eat if he remained in the kitchen, except when he offered her a piece of cocktail shrimp or a slice of turkey breast—but only from Zabar’s, and no more than one day old—which she would deign to receive after emitting a demure, plaintive meow, no louder than the creak of a closing door.
As more weeks passed, he knew that there was no possibility of giving her back; Dante would never have forgiven him, and his mother’s words about responsibility continued to resonate. He tried to be patient and remind himself—now that he was giving himself to the pursuit