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 Some things are just meant to be, and Ophelia is one of those things.
My fiancée and I were laying in bed on a Sunday night talking about our childhood pets, and how wonderful it would be to have a pet of our own. Alas, we knew that it wouldn't be a good idea, since we didn't really have the money for a pet deposit at the time. Fate heard our conversation and decided to step in.
Monday night I was getting ready for bed when I heard a very distinctive sound - a kitten in distress. I strained to find where it was coming from, and sent my fiancée outside to look by the window of our ground floor apartment. He couldn't even hear the kitten outside, which was strange because it was screaming the whole time he was out. It couldn't be…could it? He tapped on the wall beside our bed. …scratch, scratch. How did a kitten get trapped in between the walls of an apartment building? We did the only thing we could think of, we cut a hole in the wall. Sure, we would probably lose the deposit on the place, but money was certainly nothing compared with a life. We still weren't sure about keeping the kitten, and talked about seeing if there was a no-kill shelter that could take it. Unless, of course, the kitten was black and white, I joked. I have a soft spot for tuxedo cats, but what were the odds of this kitten being those colors? We left a small lamp on close to the hole in the wall, and could still hear the little one desperately crying for her mother. All we could do was wait. I tried to sleep, but woke up at every noise. Finally, I heard scratches at our hole. I opened my eyes to see the most precious little black and white face peering tentatively into our apartment. Our eyes met for a brief second and she panicked, back into the relatively safe darkness. I'm trying to think like a kitten now. What would I want if I was a kitten trapped in a wall with Mom nowhere to be found and these huge scary things on the other side? Food! Tuna was the closest thing to kitty food that we had, so I came back with a plate of tuna for the little one. It took another hour before she was brave enough to venture to the hole again, but I'm sure the smell of tuna helped. I slowly lifted the tuna to the hole, trying to hide my hand under the plate. Again, very tentative, but hunger finally won out. She greedily started eating the tuna, occasionally looking up at that strange thing gazing at her. Slowly I started lowering the plate, little by little. Her tiny paws were on the plate, and as it lowered closer to the floor she half fell, half jumped down from the hole. Instincts taking over, she ran to a corner and hid.
I didn’t even know what a feral cat was, but that’s what I had hiding under a bookcase in the corner. It was very obvious that we were the first people she had ever seen, and her mother cat had taught her quite well to be afraid of us. We knew that we couldn’t take her anywhere, she was too scared and definitely didn’t want to be caught! Judging from her size, we figured she couldn’t be more than 5 to 6 weeks old. We watched for the mother cat, but never did find her.
Ophelia was a very smart kitten, though. We got her set up with food, water and litterbox. We got her KMR, but she wanted nothing to do with that. She only wanted the hard kitten food. She used the litterbox from the beginning, only had one little accident and that was because we didn’t have the litterbox for her yet. The litterbox was almost as tall as she was, so she pushed a paperback book that had fallen off the bookshelf over to the side of the box which she used as a step. Smart kitten.
 I spent every evening after work in there with her, and the other kitten we got when we thought she got out and found her mom. She didn’t get out, she found a really good hiding place and slept all day. So I spent my evenings playing with the two kittens and loving on Trent. Ophelia watched with such curiosity and finally, over a month after she came into our lives, she allowed me to pet her. It was only a couple strokes of the hand on her back, but it was a great breakthrough. It took quite a while for her to trust us, but little by little she did, testing us every step of the way.
Fate definitely had a hand in our lives that night. We don’t know what we did B.C. – before cats. They are the joys of our lives, and Ophelia is especially special to us. Three years later, she is Daddy's girl who still loves the occasional treat of tuna water and really loves curling up on a lap.
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