The Cat at the Wall Read Online Free

a Coke?” “Is this really where Jesus was born, or are they just guessing?” “If this is how you are going to behave, next time we’ll leave you home and your Aunt Alice can watch you.” “There’s only so much junk we can pack in the carry-on, and I’m not paying extra for shipping, so get that in your head right now.” “Many beautiful Holy Land souvenirs, right this way.” “Are there toilets over there?”
    I understand the animals, too, just as clearly as if they were speaking English. They’re not any more interesting. They mostly talk about food and the stupid things humans are doing. Dogs on leashes talk about wanting to run away. Cats think they’re better than everybody, so they make fun of everything. Except the birds. The birds make fun of the cats. If they are fast enough.
    Not a single one of them, human or animal, has ever even bothered to ask me how I am doing and if they can do anything to help me. All selfish. All of them.
    Anyway, I figured out, with no help from anyone, that there are only two languages — human and animal. The difference between the two is that animals can’t lie. Or don’t. Really, they have no reason to lie. Humans wouldn’t hear them and other animals wouldn’t believe it. Which is too bad for me because lying is the thing I was best at when I was a girl.
    So when the two soldiers talked in Hebrew, I could understand them. And when the people out in the street spoke Arabic, I could understand them, too.
    I can only make cat noises, though. In my head I’m saying words, but it comes out of my mouth as meows.
    Daylight was beginning to replace the darkness. Aaron spoke occasional updates of “All quiet” into his little voice recorder. The soldiers went through their duffel bags and spread their things out as they settled into the house. I watched them closely.
    I like Things. I did when I was a girl and I still do now that I am a cat.
    I was a pretty good little thief when I was a kid. I kept a shoebox in the back of my closet of little things I stole —an eraser from one classmate, a ruler from another, a red marking pen from the teacher’s desk, my sister’s favorite My Little Pony, a brooch from my mother’s jewelry box, a Pittsburg Penguins hockey puck my father kept on his desk in the den. Later I took things of more value, like a watch out of someone’s gym bag in the school change room, a set of pastels from the art class, and any money I could get my hands on.
    I spent the money, of course, but I kept the Things. I liked to look through my treasure box in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I thought about people looking for their things and not being able to find them because I had them. It made me feel powerful.
    I guess someone probably went through my closet after I died and found the box. My family should have kept my room the way it was and turned it into a sort of shrine to me. But my mother was way too practical. She probably moved Polly in there and turned Polly’s room into a study for herself so she could work at home without having to share space with my father.
    I hope it was Polly who found my box of Things. I wasn’t very nice to her, but she would never rat on me, not even after I was dead.
    All this is making me sound like I was a really bad person, but I wasn’t. There were a ton of things I could have stolen but didn’t. And I wasn’t always mean to Polly. Sometimes we would listen outside the door of my father’s study while he helped a client write a will and we would hear who would get what. That was fun, and I was nice to her then.
    One time we listened in on the parents of one of the boys in my class. They were asking my dad about dividing their estate. “Our daughter is a star but we don’t think our boy will amount to much,” they said. “Do we have to leave them the same amount?”
    I never told that boy what I heard. I could have. But I didn’t, because I knew it would hurt him. So I wasn’t all