And on top of the keys, sitting very upright with his tail wrapped around his white feet, was Oliver.
The fallboard was open. I don't know who had opened it; someone must have, earlier, and not closed it again. Oliver sat on the keys at the treble end, his weight spread across them so carefully that none of them sounded. He was looking at the wall above the piano, where there was nothing but our wallpaper, a pattern of little brown baskets. His eyes caught the streetlight and glowed green.
"Oliver," I whispered. "Hey, buddy."
He didn't look at me. He lifted his right front paw, the white one, and reached down, not walking, reaching, the way you'd reach for a doorbell, and set it on a single black key just to the left of the middle. He pressed. The note came again, right there in the room with me, so close I felt it in my teeth.
Then he put his paw back down where it had been and went on looking at the wall.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my arms wrapped around myself. I had a feeling I couldn't name then and can only partly name now. It wasn't fear exactly. It was the feeling you get when you walk into a room and a conversation stops.
After a minute Oliver jumped down, soundless, and walked past me and up the stairs, his tail straight up with a little hook at the end like a question mark, and I heard him go into my parents' room.
I went back to bed. I lay looking at the grate in the floor for a long time.
* * *
"It was the cat," I said at breakfast.
My father was eating Cheerios standing up at the counter in his work clothes, the way he did, with his thermos already filled and his lunch pail open beside him. My mother was at the stove making Sam's oatmeal because Sam wouldn't eat cold cereal in the winter. The radio on top of the refrigerator was playing WJET, and the man was saying it was nineteen degrees.
"What was the cat?" my father said.