Enter Marmalade. An everyday, fluffy orange tabby cat with bright, eerie green eyes. Apparently, the cat was named after the color of her fur which, I have to say, did look a lot like marmalade, especially if it was backlit by the sun. Man, sometimes it was like that cat glowed.
Whatever, glowing fur, bright green eyes, old Marmalade was still the dumbest cat in the world, I swear. She got stuck on Ms. Grimmel’s roof one time, took hours to get her down. Another time she almost got clipped by a car giving herself a bath in the middle of the street. So, not the brightest animal, okay?
That said, she was also a stone-cold miracle.
You know… until she wasn’t.
SANDY KOLCHEK, NEIGHBOR
It started with Ms. Grimmel, that’s true.
I suppose it all went downhill from there.
By the way, I heard you were going to interview Oliver Shepard. I wouldn’t bet your farm on his facts, as my father used to say. He’s just a kid, not even out of college. He doesn’t even have a job.
…
Well, that’s up to you. Still, after what happened to his father. I mean, what he did.
Just awful.
And the cat … well, you know all about her, of course. What she did for my Ted? That’s why you’re talking to me, am I right?
No need repeating all of it. What happened to Barbara, Ms. Grimmel that is, has been told and retold so many times it’s all but scratched into the concrete streets of our little neighborhood. You know, to look at these green, manicured lawns and white-post porches, the smiling neighbors mowing their grass and walking their dogs… you’d never think something horrible happened here.
Something supernatural.
But it did, of course.
I see the red eye of your little recorder staring at me, unblinking, demanding the truth. The whole of it.
…
I know it’s just a tape recorder. I’m not dense.
…
Fine, fine. Sorry to be snappy.
Well, okay, let’s start with Ted. For me that’s where it starts and stops, anyhow.
First, you need to understand the big difference between Ms. Grimmel and Ted was the type of sickness they had. Barbara most likely had pneumonia, or a bad case of bronchitis, which at her age, true, could have been a death sentence. With my husband, it was different.
He had cancer. In the intestines. Sarcoma.
We’d given up hope, honestly. The doctors gave him no chance at all, but Ted did the treatments anyway, even though all it did was make him sick and bald. Insult to injury, he liked to say. Well, he said it, whether he liked it is something I strongly doubt.
By then, of course, we all knew what happened with Barbara and the cat, Marmalade. We knew what the cat had done, or thought we knew. God, we all thought we were so damn smart. Me included. Unlike the others, however, I actually asked Barbara’s permission. You know, to borrow the cat. To see if there was another miracle hiding behind those bright green eyes.
Barbara said yes, of course, and it was settled.
So, the next day I went and fetched Marmalade. Coaxed her out from the crawlspace beneath the house with treats, scooped her up and carried her home to Ted, who was bedridden by this time.
Good Lord, when my husband saw what I’d brought him, there was this… I don’t know … spark of hope in his eyes. I hadn’t seen any hope coming from him in a long time. Thought it had all been burned up, driven away, lost forever. I was exhilarated … but I was also scared. What if it didn’t work? What if what happened to Barbara wasn’t a miracle at all?
What if it was something else?
What if it was just desperation? A last prayer from people who needed to believe in something. Who needed a miracle in their lives.
Barbara had sure needed one. Heck, ask Dr. Ford, he’ll tell you what happened, and you can believe every word of it because I saw it with my own two eyes. That woman was at death’s door, no doubt about it. She didn’t need a doctor; she needed that miracle I was talking about. That last prayer.
There’s a reason they call it a Hail Mary, am I right?
And I guess, if I’m being honest, me and Ted? We needed a miracle, as well.
But first, we needed to have faith.
OLIVER SHEPARD, NEIGHBOR
Look, nobody knows where the cat actually came from. My understanding and based on the pictures I’ve seen (which are staggered all over Ms. G’s house—like, everywhere—in wall-mounted frames, tacked to corkboards, behind fridge magnets, and pasted neatly into photo albums) is that the cat was nothing special. In fact, it was a bit on the mangy side. It was orange and fluffy, sure, but in some places the hair was matted and dirty since it spent a lot of time outside rolling in mud and leaves; staying cool under the porch on hot days, I guess. And one of its legs was messed up, like it’d been hit by a rock or something? Sure, it was fast as any cat when chasing something, or being chased, but when it was just walking around it gimped a little, moved with a little hitch. Regardless, Marmalade—this not-so-smart, not-so-attractive cat—had apparently been living with Ms. Grimmel for years. Everyone says the same thing: They don’t recall when they first noticed it, but at the same time, no one remembers Ms. Grimmel not having the cat around. You’d have to assume she had it since it was a kitten, right? It’s not like it just appeared from outer space or something. Look, what I’m saying … it wasn’t special, okay? It didn’t drift down from heaven on a golden cloud. On the surface, it was just another neighborhood cat, one that clawed at furniture, rubbed on your leg, meowed at bugs and shat in a box.
But after what it did to Ms. Grimmel, and then Mr. Kolchek? Well, that cat became popular as the pope around here.
After Mr. Kolchek, folks began to leave gifts for Ms. Grimmel all the time. They’d even drop off canned food, quarts of milk, and toys for Marmalade. Some days I’d go by there and see women having tea on the old lady’s porch who’d never given Ms. Grimmel the time of day before. Mr. Benson mowed her lawn every other Saturday, and when her plumbing went bad, Mr. Singer, from one street over? He spent two days running new pipe to the street sewer line, not to mention what he must have taken care of inside the house itself.
