The Cat We Never Owned Sleeps On The End Of Our Bed Every Winter

We have never owned a cat. My wife is allergic. This is a fact of our marriage, like the mortgage.

Every winter — and only in winter, and I have checked, and it is roughly November to February — there is a cat on the end of our bed.

You feel the weight first. Then, if you sit up, the dip in the duvet stays for a second longer than it should, which is the sort of detail that sounds made up and which I cannot help.

My wife heard the purring first. She did not tell me for a year, because she thought she was ill.

I heard it in our second winter here, at about two in the morning, and I lay there absolutely still, and I said, "Can you hear that?"

And my wife said, in a voice that told me everything about the year she had had: "Yes. Since last February."

We have never seen it. Not once, and we have both tried, and we have both — separately, secretly, and we confessed this to each other on a New Year's Eve — put a hand out toward the weight, slowly, in the dark.