The Landlord’s Kitten on Delancey Street

**Part 2**

"What do you mean, I won't reach anyone?" Maya turned to face the old woman fully now, her breath fogging in the stairwell's cold air.

"Because there's nobody home, that's why." The woman pulled her cardigan tighter and shuffled forward in her slippers. "Marcus moved out. Packed his truck three days ago and drove off, didn't say where."

"Wait—" Maya's stomach dropped. "How is that possible? He just left? What about the kitten?"

The old woman blinked, like the question genuinely hadn't occurred to her. "What kitten?"

"There's a kitten in there. I've seen it in the window for two days. It's still in there, alone."

"Huh." The woman scratched at her gray bun. "Guess he left it behind. Nothing tying him here anymore, so why would he stay? Boy broke up with his girlfriend back in October — she's the one who wanted the cat in the first place. He probably just didn't want the hassle of it."

Maya had rented her own apartment two buildings down just the day before, and she'd been thrilled with the deal — cheaper than anywhere else in Astoria, a fifteen-minute walk to the subway instead of the forty-minute bus ride she'd been doing from her cousin's place in the Bronx, and neighbors quiet enough that she'd actually slept eight hours for the first time since graduating college in May. She'd spent five months bouncing between her cousin's pull-out couch and a coworker's spare room, and this studio — secondhand furniture, water-stained ceiling tile in the bathroom, but *hers* — had felt like winning the lottery two days before Christmas.

She hadn't planned on caring about anyone else's problems this week. She had eggnog to buy and a string of lights to hang in her window.

But she'd noticed the kitten yesterday morning, walking past that first-floor window on her way to the bus stop — a small gray tabby pressing its paw against the glass, staring out with an expression she could only describe as desperate. She'd told herself the owners were probably just at work. Kittens get bored. That's all it was.

Except last night, walking home in the dark with the neighborhood already strung up in blinking lights, she'd seen the same silhouette in the same dark window. And this morning — her day off, the day before New Year's Eve — the kitten was there again, now beating the glass with both front paws.

"How long's it been in there by itself?" Maya asked.

"Three days, like I said. Since he left." The old woman said it so plainly, like she was reporting the weather. "Look, I got my own knees to worry about, I can't be running up and down these stairs playing rescue squad. You want to do something, call the building super. Rudy's got keys to everything."

"Where do I find him?"

"Basement unit, other side of the courtyard. But he won't be in till after the holiday, most likely." The woman was already retreating into her own apartment. "Or call animal control. That's what they're for."

The door clicked shut, leaving Maya alone in the stairwell with the sound of a radiator ticking and, faintly, through the wall, a thin, rasping meow.

She stood there a long moment, staring at the mail slot on Marcus's door — his name was still on the little paper label, MARCUS D., in blue ballpoint. She thought about the paperwork she'd have to fill out, the excuses she could make to herself about not getting involved in a stranger's mess two days before Christmas. Then she thought about the kitten's paws against the glass, both of them now, like it had given up on subtlety.

She pulled out her phone and called animal control. Voicemail, holiday hours. She called 311. A recording told her the average wait time was forty minutes. She hung up and, instead, called Rudy the super directly — the old woman had rattled off his cell number so fast Maya had to write it on her palm in eyeliner pencil, the only thing in her coat pocket.

Rudy picked up on the fourth ring, sounding like she'd woken him. "Yeah?"

"Hi — sorry to bother you on your day off. I'm renting at 4-B, two doors down. There's an animal locked inside 1-A, no food or water that I can tell, and the tenant apparently moved out."

A pause. Then a heavy sigh. "Marcus. Yeah. He left me a message Tuesday saying he was done, didn't mention no cat." Another pause, longer. "You sure it's still in there?"

"I can see it right now. It's been at the window two days straight."

"Alright. Give me forty minutes."

Rudy showed up in sweatpants and a Mets hoodie, keys jangling on a carabiner clipped to his belt loop. He didn't say much, just muttered "unbelievable" twice as he worked through six keys before finding the right one. When the door finally swung open, the smell hit them both — the sharp, sour smell of a litter box gone three days untouched, and underneath it, something worse.

The kitten shot out from behind the couch the second the door opened, meowing so hard its whole small body shook with it, and wound itself around Maya's ankles like it had been waiting specifically for her.

"There's food in the bowl," Rudy said from the kitchen doorway, looking almost queasy. "Dry stuff. But no water — bowl's bone dry. And look at this." He nudged a cardboard box in the corner with his foot. Inside, wrapped in a stained oven mitt, were two more kittens. Neither one moved.

Maya crouched down. One was cold. The other, when she touched it, gave a weak, barely-there twitch.

"Oh my God." She scooped the surviving kitten into the front of her coat without thinking, zipping it halfway up against her chest. "We need a vet. Now. Is there an emergency clinic near here?"

"BluePearl on Northern Boulevard, twenty-four hours," Rudy said, already dialing something on his own phone — not the vet, she realized, but Marcus. It rang out. He tried again. Voicemail. "This is Rudy from the building, you need to call me back today, we got a situation with the animals you left."

Marcus called back forty minutes later, while Maya was sitting in a molded plastic chair at BluePearl, the surviving kitten — she'd started calling him Frost, for no reason except that it was snowing outside the window — wrapped in a towel a vet tech had handed her.

Rudy put it on speaker in the waiting room, low enough not to disturb the other pet owners.

"Look, man, I know it looks bad," Marcus's voice came through, tinny and defensive. "But Jess left in October and took off with the dog, and I got laid off from the warehouse right after, and I just — I couldn't deal with three cats and rent I couldn't make. I was gonna call the shelter, I just kept putting it off."

"One of them's dead, Marcus," Rudy said, flat. "The tabby's at the emergency vet right now costing this young lady a couple hundred bucks she didn't ask to spend."

There was a long silence on the line. "I'll — I can send her something. I don't have much right now, but—"

"Two hundred and forty dollars," Maya said, loud enough for the phone to catch it. "That's the emergency visit and the first round of fluids. Venmo it to me tonight, or I'm reporting the dead kitten to animal control with your name on the lease, and you can explain it to them instead."

He sent it within the hour. Two hundred forty dollars, no note, just the money landing in her account while she sat in a molded chair watching a vet tech thread an IV line into a kitten smaller than her own hand.

Frost made it. Barely, the vet said — another twelve hours and it likely would've gone differently. Maya carried him home in a cardboard carrier the clinic gave her, snow falling steady over Ditmars Boulevard, the same string lights blinking in windows she'd admired two nights before.

She never gave the kitten back to Marcus, and Marcus never asked. Two weeks into January, she drove to Petco on Steinway Street and bought a proper litter box, a real bed, a scratching post — things a kitten deserves instead of a cardboard box and a bone-dry bowl. She kept the vet paperwork in a folder on her kitchen counter, the receipt for two hundred forty dollars paper-clipped to the front, next to Frost's first vaccination record.

Rudy changed the lock on 1-A a week later, listed the unit for rent again by February. Maya still walks past that window most mornings on her way to the subway. Frost, full-grown now and considerably less gray, usually beats her home — asleep in a patch of sun on the windowsill of 4-B, tail twitching once when the door clicks open, like he already knows it's her.