Missing

It’s been four days now since she’s been gone. We weren’t really paying much attention. It wasn’t that we were so busy. We were just tired. It had been a busy week.

A week and a half ago, on a Sunday afternoon, my son and I went to an apartment viewing. I had seen the 44 square meter apartment announced on Hemnet and immediately felt it would suit my son very well. He had been talking about wanting to have his own place for a while now but hadn’t gotten around to starting the process of actively looking yet.

I told him, “On Sunday we are going to look at an apartment.”

I sent him the link, so he could look at the pictures of the place. He liked what he saw and was excited about going to look at it. So on Sunday afternoon we took the bus and subway over to Kungsholmen to take a look.

There weren’t that many people at the viewing when we were there. Mostly young people, like Bevin. We walked around the apartment investigating the bright livingroom and small but adequate bedroom from all angles. The kitchen was clean and modern with a small dishwasher and a nice gas stove, plenty of storage for a young man with not much in the way of kitchen utensils anyway. The bathroom was small but very well designed and it even had a small washing machine. The bedroom had good closets and enough room to walk around in even with a 140 cm wide bed.

Bevin fell in love with it and on Monday put in a bid for it. Unfortunately so did someone else. The bidding war went on till Friday. And for various reasons the other bidder won. My son was disappointed but, hey, how often do you actually get the first and only apartment you look at and like. There will be more to look at and he learned a lot about buying an apartment.

At the same time as the nerve-racking bidding war was going on, our friend Gayle was visiting us from New York City for a few days. Håkan and I took her out to Drottningholm that Wednesday and we took a tour of the theater there. Then we got her settled in, in our co-op’s guest apartment.

Thursday was spent doing chores while Gayle tried to put back into her suitcases all the stuff that had exploded out of them in the week and a half she had been in Stockholm. While I made a very late dinner of home-made Swedish meatballs with sauce and potatoes, Håkan had to dash down to our so-called office to finalize a sale of some photo equipment to the guy who was coming by to pick up the stuff. Dinner for all of us, was finally on the table just before 10pm. Phewwww.

At 3 o’clock early Friday morning, I helped Gayle drag her suitcases down to the street and said goodbye as she got in her cab. Then I went back to bed.

Friday evening, Bevin texts us that he didn’t get the apartment. A feeling of gloom envelops our home. Bevin texts us again, saying he will be meeting some friends right after work. He comes home late. He acknowledges me as he passes by on his way to his room but that’s about it.

I honestly don’t remember much of what I did Saturday morning – probably got up late. As I said, we were tired.

Around 2pm Bevin asked us if anyone had seen Coco. We do a half-hearted search around, looking in all the usual places our cats find to sleep in. We can’t find her so we start to look in the unusual places. Still no little brown cat. We look harder. She is nowhere to be found in our apartment. We’ve all been home all day so the door to the hallway hasn’t been opened. Slowly, we start to realize she must have fallen out of one of our two slightly ajar windows. We know (because we’ve seen her there) she sometimes pokes her head outside, putting her front paws on the slanted outside window sill, sometimes more than half her body is outside by the time we notice and pull her back in. Saturday we weren’t paying attention.

She must have fallen out.

Coco the cat

Our windows are four stories up. We rushed outside, looking under all the bushes below our apartment. No dead brown body. But no cat either. We looked all around calling her name. Nothing. After dinner Bevin sat outside on the park bench, watching till almost 10pm, in the drizzling rain. He had his umbrella.

It’s now been four days since she’s been gone. We covered the island with color posters of her and my telephone number. I placed an announcement with her picture on the Reimersholmen Facebook page saying she is missing. And another on a missing cat website. While Bevin’s at work I go around the island looking for her, talking to all the dog walkers, asking if she’s been spotted on their rounds. People recognize my name on the posters and come up to me, asking if she has been found yet. They put my number in their phones, for, you know, just in case.

While Coco has never been outside, here on Reimersholmen, she is not totally unfamiliar with the outdoors – she spent all summer at our country place running around outside, proving herself to be a very able huntress. But Reimers is not the same as Stavsnäs. There’s a lot more danger here; more strange cats, more cars on more streets, more people with dogs. I hope she’s savvy enough. I hope she finds her way back to our building. I hope we find her.

We miss her.