Gigi

“Gigi! Gigi!”

I walked around the edge of our five acres as I had every morning and every afternoon for three months.

We had been away, visiting family for four days in February. It had snowed while we were gone. Our house sitter didn’t tell me until we were getting on the plane to come home.

Gigi disappeared the night you left.

My heart ached during the entire flight. In the car I pushed against the floor with my feet, willing my husband to drive faster on the roads, the snow was at least twelve inches, higher where the plow had pushed it aside.

Gigi was a grey tiger cat. He was a rescue that came out to us from the big city at about two years old. We’d had him about two years, long enough for him to learn to snuggle up with the aging collie, a veteran cat friend. He was a snuggler when it came to humans, but defended his home turf with military discipline. His full name was Milton when he arrived but was changed to General Schuyler almost immediately and soon after that became known affectionately among the family as Gigi.

The first night, I made a poster and put out a lost cat photo to my local lost pet social media page. I also downloaded some local neighborhood watch apps and posted his disappearance there. I called him and opened a can of his food on the front porch and shook the bowl of dry food.

The temperature went down to zero Fahrenheit.

By the next morning, regulars on the missing pet site were offering their hopes and praying for his safety. On the doorbell app, neighbors were offering up the last time they had seen him and offering to share their film footage. On the more general neighborhood watch app, people were promising to keep an eye out for him.

We went out and printed 150 flyers with his picture. At first I was putting them in mailboxes, which, worried me when I found out it was illegal, so I started taping the flyers to the outside.

I got a call from the mail delivery woman. She thought she had seen him about a quarter of a mile away, slightly out of our immediate neighborhood and across a county road, under a car at a small apartment complex. I went over and called but no luck. Then I got a call from a woman two houses down. She thought he had been in their shed. There were cat tracks in the snow going in and coming out. I followed them. But they soon became obliterated by snow dropping off the tree branches.

Another woman called. She also thought she had seen him, she fed the local ferals on her porch. She promised to call me the next time. By that afternoon she had called and I grabbed some food and the carrier and drove over. There was a grey tiger there but he was younger, just out of kittenhood.

I went back to the apartment complex. A man there said his girlfriend had a grey tabby. She came out. She hadn’t seen hers either but it had a white bib under its chin.

I walked around the neighborhood each day, casting my voice further and further. I walked up and down the road. Gigi, Gigi.

Encouragement kept coming in from people whose cats had been missing for three months, six months, a year, two years and suddenly showed up at their doorsteps.

I met neighbors I had never seen and saw houses I had never noticed, but no Gigi.

Then, on my furthest walk along a busy road, my heart stopped. There was a grey tiger cat curled at the edge of the road. Light snow had covered it slightly. I wasn’t sure. I reached down with my mitten and gently brushed the snow off its head and neck. The size and markings were familiar. It had a white bib.

As the months wore on and the snow melted, the calls of possible sightings got further apart, but I followed up on all of them.

I looked at lost cats up to 15 miles away. And still I called around our house, Gigi, Gigi, a little quieter, fewer times.

I feel like I would know if he had died but I go back to that moment at the side of the road in my mind often. Is it possible I didn’t recognize my own cat?

After three months I stopped calling. I’m not sure what changed, a moment behind the barn at the edge of the field told me. He would come or he would not. I could call him in my heart to the end and it would change nothing. He would come or he would not. Gigi! Gigi! That was the last call.