Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue Page B

the wrong place, above her tail, which flapped like an enemy flag. When he took hold of her face, her paw came round so fast that she left a red line down the inside of his wrist. Liz and Sophie apologized over and over, like the parents of a delinquent child. Dr. McGraw, dabbing himself with disinfectant, told them to think nothing of it. Then he called in Rosalita to wrap the cat in a towel.
    Swaddled in flannel, Cleopatra stared at the doctor's face as if memorizing it for the purposes of revenge. He put a sort of gun in her ear to take her temperature and bared her gums in an artificial smile to see if they were dehydrated. He squeezed her stomach and kidneys and bladder, and she made a sound they'd never heard before, in a high voice like a five-year-old girl's, but it was hard to tell if she was tender in the areas he was pressing, or just enraged.
    Liz had to make out the check for fifty dollars as Sophie was already up to her Visa limit. They carried the basket to the car, Cleopatra's weight lurching from side to side. They joked on the way home that the vet wouldn't try calling her Sweetums next time.
    That night on the couch Sophie yawned as she put down her book, let her head drop into Liz's lap, and asked in a lazy murmur what she was thinking. In fact, Liz had been fretting over her overdraft and wondering whether they could cancel cable as they hardly ever watched it anyway, but she knew that was not what Sophie wanted to hear, so she grinned down at her and said, "Guess." Which wasn't a lie. Sophie smiled back and pulled Liz down until her shirt covered Sophie's face, then they didn't need to say anything.
    Cleopatra still wasn't eating much the next day, but she seemed bright-eyed. Sophie said the clinic had rung, and wasn't that thoughtful?
    The following evening when Liz came home the cat wasn't stirring from her chair. Liz began to let herself worry. "Don't worry," she told Sophie as she dropped her work clothes in the laundry basket. "Cats can live off their fat for a good while."
    The two of them were tangled up in the bath, rubbing lavender oil into each other's feet, when the phone rang. It was Rosalita from the clinic. Liz felt guilty for the cheerful way she'd answered the phone and made her voice sadder at once.
    Rosalita was concerned about little Cleo, how was she doing?
    Liz didn't like people who nicknamed without permission; she'd never let anyone call her Lizzy, except Sophie, sometimes. Not bad, she supposed, she told Rosalita; hard to tell, about the same really.
    By the time she could put the phone down, her nipples were stiff with cold. She'd left lavender-scented footprints all the way down the stairs. When she got back to the bathroom, Sophie had let all the water out and was painting her nails purple. What did she mean, the cat was not bad? Sophie wanted to know. The cat was obviously not well.
    Liz said she knew. But they could hardly take her for daily checkups at fifty dollars a go, and surely they could find a cheaper vet in the Yellow Pages.
    No way, said Sophie, because Cleopatra had already begun a course of treatment with the clinic and they were being wonderful.
    Liz thought it was all a bit suspect, these follow-up calls. The clinic stood to make a lot of money from exaggerating every little symptom, didn't they?
    Sophie said one of the things she'd never found remotely attractive about Liz was her cynicism. She went down to make herself a cup of chamomile and didn't even offer to put on the milk for Liz's hot chocolate. When Liz came down, Sophie was curled up on the sofa with the cat on her lap, the two of them doing their telepathy thing.
    Sophie was probably premenstrual, Liz thought, but she didn't like to say so, knowing what an irritating thing it was to be told, especially if you were.
    She knew she was right about that the next day when Sophie came in from a pointless interview at a salon downtown and started vacuuming at once. In five years Liz had learned to leave