I bought “talking” buttons for my cat, but the cat wasn’t the only one who used them…
It’s actually my youngest son’s cat who learned to use the buttons. I inherited the cat after my son lost control of his car on the icy roads last winter. It happened on the day he received a scholarship to his top college choice. He and his boyfriend were feeling on top of the world and were on their way back home from a trip…
His boyfriend survived. He did not.
You cannot imagine the grief. Either you have experienced the loss of a child, or you haven’t.
I did not weep—not at the funeral nor for many weeks after. I became a stone, an object. It was as if all the sorrow were locked far from reach. Instead of feeling anything, I simply thought many times of retrieving the pistol that I own from its case in the back of my closet. And on a few occasions, I even went and took it and sat with it, feeling its weight in my hand…
My son Vinh—Vinny to his friends—was my world. One day he would have been famous, I am sure of it. You may think that is a father’s pride talking. Maybe it is. But he had a music scholarship. He would have performed for presidents and world leaders. In my mind, when I see him, it is usually at his piano… playing for his cat.
When he was 15, I promised him a kitten if he did well in school, and he picked out this tabby—the tiniest and angriest tabby in the world—and named her Terri. She loved only him, and hissed and growled at anyone else who came near, including me. She also peed on his clothes, and on mine, and on my bed. To say I wanted to get rid of Terrible Terri (as I called her) is an understatement.
But then my brilliant son died.
And suddenly it was just me and Terrible Terri and the gun.
I felt nothing but resentment toward the cat. But… she spent hours and hours slouched on the windowsill in his bedroom where she always sat while he played piano. I used to think she sat there to watch the birds and couldn’t care less about his playing. Now, she didn’t even lift her head. She just loafed on the sill, as if waiting for him to come bursting in and pull the dust cover off and play.
And there were the buttons.
You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Those gimmicky buttons that people get to train animals to “talk.” Bunch of nonsense if you ask me. What has a dog got to say? Nothing but “food,” probably. And anyway people are supposed to give commands to dogs, not the other way round. But Vinny would watch all these videos of dogs and sometimes cats pressing the buttons—even though to be honest the cat videos he showed me looked like the cats walking onto the buttons completely by accident. And that’s what I told him. Complete waste of money. People wishfully projecting their ideas onto their pets. The cat pressed “love you” and meant it? Hah! Cats only know hunger and selfish desires.
Well, my stubborn, dreamy-eyed, cat-loving son bought a set of those buttons. He pre-recorded dozens of them, but began with just a handful: FOOD, CUDDLE, OUTSIDE, MUSIC, DAD, and VINNY.
Yes, he put me and himself as buttons, and MUSIC, too, because he was convinced in his silly teenaged way that the cat liked his music and might want to request it.
Terri was terrified of those buttons. No matter how he tried to train her, she refused to use them. She hissed. She swatted. She wouldn’t go near them. She knew exactly what they were for, I’m sure of it. She even knew the words, because he’d say to her, “Let’s have some music,” and she would go to her perch by the piano and wait for him. But when it came to the buttons she refused.
Terri loved those buttons about as much as I loved Terri.
But then, like I said, came the accident.
Suddenly my son was gone. The house felt wrong. Empty. Terri was a husk. I put food out but she didn’t eat. I didn’t know how to read her signals. She hissed at me if I came near. I decided I should get rid of her. I couldn’t keep his cat. The cat hated me anyway. I will get rid of her, I thought, and then I will be done with me, too.
But I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my son’s cat. And I couldn’t shoot myself while the cat was still alive. And so we were stuck, me and the cat.
And then one night, I was up in my room contemplating the gun when I heard the recorded voice, downstairs, speak:
VINNY.
I assumed it must be a mistake. She must have walked over the button. But then it came again.
VINNY.
VINNY.
VINNY.
I stood there, listening to that cat press VINNY over and over, and tears came into my eyes. It was like a key turning in a lock. A crack in the dam that then finally burst. I gasped. Loud, gulping sobs. Finally, the tears came for my son. And when the flood was over I came down and found tiny Terri sitting by the buttons, looking miserable, and I scooped her up and told her, “I miss him, too.” And for once, she didn’t swat me. She gave only the smallest growl. I put her down and got her some food. Got myself some, too.
We both ate.
That was the beginning.
Since then, I’ve added more buttons.
You see, I’m not an animal person. I didn’t understand Terri’s body language, her wants and needs, without the buttons. She finally started using them, training me (I guess they say cats do that). She has a WET FOOD button. A KIBBLE button. She has a NO button to use if I show her the wrong food. I also added from my son’s collection the LOVE YOU button (yes, I confess, I did add it), and a TERRI button. And I began to make a habit of pressing, LOVE YOU VINNY and LOVE YOU TERRI.
I was genuinely in shock how much she communicated. The first time she pressed DAD LOVE YOU I almost broke down all over. I couldn’t believe it. She looked like she wasn’t even trying. She just casually walked over the buttons. But it was deliberate. It happened more than once.
I still hadn’t learned to read her cat body language at all.
But with the buttons, I understood her.
And I felt like I had a part of my son with me.
Sometimes she said things that just cracked open my soul. Like when she looked at me with those big round eyes one time and hit, VINNY HOME.
“I wish he was home, too,” I told her.
It was uncanny, the things we could discuss. We’d have entire conversations. I know it sounds nuts. I’d have thought myself nuts just a couple of months before. But I added buttons so fast, and she took to all of them. I asked her once if she understood what happened to Vinny. She replied with VINNY BYE-BYE (I’d added the BYE-BYE button to tell her whenever I was leaving the house). Then she asked me VINNY HOME. I had to tell her no, VINNY BYE-BYE. And she stubbornly insisted again VINNY HOME, and she walked away angry (I think) that I couldn’t make Vinny come back.
But the reason I’m sharing this story… and sharing this story here… is because of what happened last week.
Last week, my son Liem came to see me.
Liem is Vinh’s older half-brother. He’s nearly a decade older than Vinh, from a previous relationship, and unfortunately, Liem inherited all of his mother’s worst traits. It is always the same with him. He begs for money, gets abusive if I do not give it, and disappears once I have made him a loan he will never repay. I cut off all funds to him a few years ago and told him I would no longer enable his habits. While I’d never cut him entirely out of my life, I hadn’t allowed him to visit when Vinny was alive because of the way he’d treated Vinny on a previous visit, when he’d sneeringly accused me of “favoring that mincing little…” I won’t repeat his hateful words for his younger brother.
When he showed up on my doorstep, he had the smell of whisky on his breath, and he looked wild-eyed and anxious. “Dad,” he said, and then hugged me tight. “I’m sorry about Vinh.”
It shocked me so much, I hugged him right back, and he came in and sat down and asked how I was doing. He was surprisingly solicitous. I didn’t understand why. His usual meanness didn’t come through at all until he noticed a growling Terri. “You still have that little piss queen?” he asked, and reached a hand for her—only for her to swat and run away. “Little shit,” he said.
“Her name is Terri,” I said defensively.
He laughed. “Didn’t you used to call her Terrible Terri?”
“She doesn’t pee on things anymore.”
From the button area came presses of BYE BYE.
“She wants you to go bye-bye,” I said.
“She can fuck off. She’s not your son. I am.”
BYE-BYE.
I didn’t like the way he talked to the cat. Though a few minutes later, after she peed on his shoes, I found his anger more understandable. And I locked her up to prevent him from harming her. But he seemed genuinely sad about Vinny, and even asked about Vinny’s boyfriend and his recovery after the crash. I wondered if he had come over to try to patch things up between us. Maybe to start off on better footing. Like me and Terri had. Until he asked me what was going to happen to Vinny’s college fund.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I told him. “I’m still processing all of this…”
“But like, he’s not gonna use it. Right? I mean, even before the accident. The money you’d been saving for him… he had a scholarship, right? He wasn’t gonna need it. And he definitely won’t need it now. Dad, I could use a loan.”
“Liem.”
“You still have one son left, Dad!” he burst, and there was the old rage. “Why do you always treat me like this? Even when he’s dead, he still deserves more than I do! I bet you cut me out of your will, too, huh?”
“I did not.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. You both get equal shares.”
“Oh. OK. OK.” He calmed down. “Sorry. I just… I have a lot of resentment, I guess. I’m sorry. But about the loan. Is there any way—”
“I will have to think on it.”
“Ok. OK. You think, I’ll make us drinks, OK?”
I should have known what was happening when he went into the kitchen and was fumbling around longer than necessary. I should have known, but how could I? I had already lost one son. How could I suspect the other? How could I imagine the worst? I wanted to believe things would be better.
I drank the alcohol he put in front of me without thinking. I assumed the wooziness was just the booze. It had been a long time since I’d had a real drink. Somewhere, in the bedroom where she was locked up, Terri was howling. Howling her little heart out. I’d never heard her make those sounds and said I was going to let her out but when I got up, the whole world lurched.
Liem’s arms caught me and he said, “Got you, Dad,” and then kept whispering in my ear, his breath still reeking, “Sorry, sorry, but you’re making me do this… if you’d just give me that fuckin’ loan…”
I didn’t start to panic, really panic, until he propped me up on the sofa and went upstairs with the question:
“You still keep your gun in the closet?”
The fear hit me in a wave then. I felt like I was floating. Like I was drifting away from my body. Like I was lost in some strange and horrible dream. I tried to stand, to stumble to the table and grab my phone, but I fell and heard the crack of my head against the table’s edge. The ground came up to meet me. Pain shot through my skull.
Footsteps thudded overhead. Cursing as he rifled through my closet.
I tried to pull myself up again. Finally managed to grab my phone. The screen swam in my vision. My fingers were fat and clumsy as I tried to push the keys to call for help—
A hand smacked the phone out of my grip.
“It’s ‘cause you won’t help me,” Liem rambled as he again wrapped his arms around me to try to get me onto the sofa. “Everyone knows you’re depressed. Suicidal. Can’t handle Vinny’s death. You should’ve just done it, man. If you’d just done it I wouldn’t have to.”
“Pluhhh,” I gasped.
“This is the only way. This is how it was gonna be anyway. You don’t even wanna live anyway. In your own way, you’re helping me out here in the end,” he said. And then, in response to the howling from the other room, he suddenly shrieked, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!”
The howling stopped.
Liem glared toward the door, his breaths coming hard and fast. Then looked back at me. Everything had become so blurry, his words were a garble, his features a haze. I felt the cold muzzle of the gun against my temple as my heart galloped in my chest…
From Vinny’s room came a sharp rustle, like a curtain or a sheet.
And then the piano—the notes of a piano.
“The hell?” Liem’s voice slurred through my drugged haze. “Is someone here?”
The playing continued—unsteady, but beautiful. Unmistakably Clair de Lune. Just like Vinny had always played. But slower. Halting. And I wondered—it couldn’t be the cat, could it? It almost sounded like the cat walking deliberately across the keys, the same way she walked across the buttons. But that would've been impossible.
“WHO’S THERE?” snarled Liem.
“V-vih,” was all I could manage.
He snatched up the gun and stalked toward the bedroom door. In my blurry vision, he wavered, back and forth. And when he opened the door… there, at the piano, was a figure, flickering and impossible. A figure that both was and was not there, and Liem screamed and raised his arm and the world exploded as the gun went off. And then there was the yowling of the cat. And the cat came charging out, all bristling like a tiger, and with her that same figure from the piano, and Liem was screaming in terror and fired the gun again and ran out the door…
… What I remember next is waking in the ER. Neighbors apparently called police after hearing the gunshots.
When I was discharged and returned home, my head wrapped from the concussion, I was relieved to find Terri whole and unharmed. She hurried over to greet me, tail up—I’d finally started picking up her body language to know a greeting when I saw it.
But it wasn’t just the tabby greeting me, I knew.
You see, I’d finally realized something. A cat can’t play a piano. And this cat couldn’t use buttons. Not of her own volition. Maybe it hadn’t been Terri talking to me all along. Maybe it was, and always had been, Vinny.
And so as I extended my hand and Terri rubbed my knuckles, I told her, “I love you. I won’t ever hurt myself. I promise, I will survive. You can be free. I love you.”
Terri rubbed my hand again. And again. And rubbed my face when I bent my head to hers. Then she padded over to the buttons and walked across them, and I listened to my son’s recorded voice:
LOVE YOU. LOVE YOU. BYE-BYE.
Terri hasn’t touched those buttons since.
But… every once in awhile, when I’m very deep in dreams, I think I hear the sound of the piano…