alenxa_classic | she came in through the bedroom window

My family came back from vacation in the summer of 1992 a day earlier than we'd planned, and found an extra cat in the house. By the time we'd confirmed that we were indeed not seeing things, we'd had a chance to listen to the message from our cat-sitter on the answering machine, explaining how this had come to pass. Squeaky, as Teresa had dubbed her, was a foundling from beneath her family's pizza parlor's refrigerator, hand-raised and bottle-fed. Teresa had brought her over to play with our cats, as my shelter-rescue brat Mac was about a month older. Squeaky was the shyest, most skittish teenage-equivalent kitty I'd ever met, and also one of the prettiest. We thought we'd seen the last of her. We were wrong.

We had met Teresa through her brother, who was our neighbor. Six months after the vacation, I noticed Mac acting weird while sitting in my bedroom window. When I looked out, I saw a gorgeous gray cat sitting on the fence between our yard and Carlo's, watching Mac. Two and two made four pretty quickly, and I went out to try to pet her. Of course, she ran. And over the next couple of weeks, I broke one of the cardinal rules of dealing with Other People's Pets, and lured her over the fence with food to get in some petting. She had fur unlike any cat I've known before or since: thick yet close-lying, fine and fluffy without being wispy, each hair banded with a couple dozen agouti stripes in alternating shades of gray. The effect, in sunlight, was a metallic pewter sheen. We think a good part of her parentage was Russian Blue. I couldn't resist petting her, and after a while she didn't mind.

The El Niño rain was pretty good that winter. Unfortunately for Squeaky, Carlo wasn't one to take weather into account when putting the cat out. She'd turn up at our back door, meowing her pitch-perfect namesake meow, and make us all uncomfortable wondering whether we should let her in or just watch her get all bedraggled. Eventually we took pity on her, telling ourselves it was only so she could be warm and dry. Carlo didn't mind, as he was keeping late hours at the pizza place and was just glad she was okay. Then we started coming home to find her in the house, and nobody could remember letting her in. One day we came back and Carlo confronted us about her being out in the cage with our cats, and we explained that we had no idea how she had gotten there. He sensed that she was happier with us than with him, and acquired two rambunctious golden retriever puppies "to keep her company." Adding those two to his six-feet-something of beefy bass-baritone was kitty kryptonite, and she basically took up residence in our yard.

I conducted a stakeout to find out how she was getting in. The cats' cage connected to the house via my bedroom window, where a cat-flap door was implanted in the screen. She would jump onto the outside windowsill and walk it between the window and the wire wall of the cage, then get a paw between the screen and the wooden frame around the cage's entry hole. As she wiggled her leg through, the cage swung farther and farther from the house, and eventually she could get her head in. From there it was a piece of cake to get all the way into the cage. Usually she'd turn around and go through the door into the house, but sometimes the cats would be locked out, and she'd get locked out with them. We told Carlo about it and he had to watch her to believe it. It wasn't long before he conceded that she'd chosen us over him.

More specifically, she'd chosen me. I already had Mac, but he was a growling, biting little snot and I was overjoyed to have a quiet, delicate sweetheart. She could walk across a bed covered in craft supplies and not knock any out of place. She loved a little marinara sauce on her food, and if I had any sort of crackers or chips portioned out for myself, I had to keep watch on them or I'd hear *crunch*crunch* and find her helping herself. When she was really happy, she'd suck the end of her tail; Teresa had taught her to do that because she'd been abandoned so young. She didn't purr as loudly as Candy, my sister's cat, but she didn't need to. We knew she was happy.

She was also smart. As if figuring out how to get in to play with her friends weren't enough, she spoke human. When we'd jokingly tell all three cats not to do something or other, she'd studiously avoid it while the other two blundered on. Her most famous skill demonstration happened while my mom was cleaning out the cage. It had two sections, which could be blocked off from one another; and we wanted to put the cats in one section while we hosed out the other. Squeaky was the only one of the three to follow me and the treats down to the far end, and she waited patiently while my mom tried to get the other two to come too. I said something like, "Hey Squeak, go tell those two clowns to get over here." And damned if she didn't trot back into the other section, meow at them, and come back with them obediently following behind her.

When I went to college, I came back on weekends more to see Squeaky than to see my family. I introduced her to my first boyfriend, and agonized over

kelson's allergies. I hated to think of abandoning her, but I knew that leaving a guy I loved for a cat who, in all likelihood, wouldn't outlive him was completely irrational. She was a source of much-needed comfort when my grandfather died, and not long after that I packed up and moved out. I told myself I'd come back to see her, and I did; but the tension between K and my family put as much of a wrench in that plan as the distance between the two households.

Sometime in the early aughts, I came back to my parents' house after at least a year away. Squeaky was still going strong, still gorgeous, albeit noticeably thinner. She didn't run from me, but didn't really know me like she used to, either. She tolerated being petted for a minute or so, then got a very startled look and began sniffing my hand intently. Then she looked up at me and let out the longest, most plaintive meow I ever heard from her, and started purring and rubbing against me. She remembered her person, and her person had come back to her. It was the last time she really knew who I was.

She was never a very robust cat; Teresa thought she might have been the runt of the litter, abandoned for survival reasons. She was gamma cat until Candy died, and never really challenged Mac's right to take over as alpha. He would eat her food, which was how she got to the point, once before, of not having eaten for a few days. Things worked out that time, and the thyroid medication she obediently took afterward helped (somehow) to keep her from projectile vomiting. But when she stopped eating this time, there was no pulling through. By the time she got to the vet and they found the huge sore in her mouth that was keeping her from doing much but drinking water, she was too weak to save. She was 19 years old, pretty much exactly, and we were sad but unsurprised. So this afternoon, my mom and I went down and said good-bye, and let her go. The vet said she probably didn't know we were there, but when I stroked one cheek, she moved her eye ever so slightly and narrowed it a bit, like she used to do. We didn't stay for the end, as we couldn't have held her without causing her more pain; but I'm sure she knew she was loved.

Screw Polar Bear. For my money, she was the best cat ever.