Three Years with the Rat (12 page)

ON GRACE
'
S THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY
, the summer before she shaved her head, she invited ten or so girls to the house. My parents, in a drawn-out argument as per usual, kept out of the way, but Grace insisted I be present for the party. I mostly sat in the corner of the living room, using my old toys to recreate crime scenes from the detective book I was reading while I listened to the way the older girls talked to each other. It was a different language, one that matched their tights and make-up, but Grace, in jeans and a boy's button-up shirt, didn't seem to speak it.

Grace left the room for a minute and one of her friends, I think named Laura, came over to my corner.

“What are you playing with?” Her hair was thick and golden and hung to the middle of her back, and she smiled when she looked at me. Something had happened to Grace and her friends recently: they were all beginning to look like women.

I showed her my action figures and she made a little
ooh
sound to appreciate them. I could hear her friends giggling, as if from some great distance, but Laura looked at me so genuinely
that I was beaming from the attention.

“You're so sweet,” she said. “How old are you again? Eight?”

“I'm ten,” I told her, eagerly.

Her smile was so broad I could see her gleaming teeth. She said, “Wow, you're old! Do you have a girlfriend yet?”

My face and my neck got really hot. I could faintly hear one of her friends say, “Oh my god, look at him! He's blushing.”

“What are you doing to him?” Grace said. I had no idea she'd returned to the room. My attention finally broke and went to my sister.

“Nothing,” Laura said. “He's just such a sweet little kid.”

“Leave him alone,” my sister told her. “He's not a baby.”

“He's ten and he still plays with toys,” one of the other girls said, laughing.

Grace spun around and snapped, “The only reason I invited you is because Laura asked me to, as a favour. She felt bad for you.”

There was a momentary hush as everyone took in the insult. Then the girls spoke up all at once, high-pitched and pleading. They broke off into plaintive little groups, some moving to the stairway and front hall while others tried to make things right between Grace, Laura, and the other girl. I stayed where I was and my face and neck continued to burn.

The party didn't last much longer, and eventually my mother burst into the room. She said to me, “What the hell happened? What did she do to them?”

Later, Grace came to my room and sat with me on my bed.

“I'm sorry,” I told her.

“For what?” Her eyes were puffy.

“For playing with toys. I know I'm too old.”

She smiled and sniffled and cried all at the same time, then punched me lightly on the arm. “Don't be an idiot. I like who you are. That's why you're on my team.”

I awoke to the memory of those words,
That's why you're on my team.
Nicole was already out of bed and from the kitchen came the sound of the kettle and the smell of frying onions. I lay there and played that memory over and over. In bed I could let myself feel the loss of Grace, away from the demands of an increasingly erratic John, away from the need to smile through it all with friends. In bed I could breathe the smell of oranges off the pillows and not worry about whether Nicole and I were getting along or not. In bed I could wallow. I heard Nicole humming to herself, the pads of her feet making a slight sticky sound as she danced along the tiles of the kitchen, and like a miserable piece of shit I pulled the sheets over my head.

Next thing I knew Nicole was lying next to me, her orange hair swept to the side, our noses almost touching. We both smiled in that way that we did after a fight, after extended fighting. Then she kissed my forehead, lips barely pressed against my skin, and pulled me out of the bed.

She sat me at our tiny table and plated me a breakfast: eggs Florentine, her Hollandaise sauce from scratch, potatoes and onions, apple cut into chunks with the skin left on, coffee with cream. These were things I loved, and I felt loved when she served them to me. What had we even been fighting about?

Eventually she took a seat next to me with her own plate and a black tea.

I cut a piece of muffin, egg, spinach, and sauce and forked it into my mouth. I had to chew with my eyes closed. For a moment it was all so perfect.

Then she touched the lip of my mug and said, “It's instant.”

I cocked my head. Of course she knew that instant coffee was Grace's favourite. My mouth was full with another bite so I didn't say anything. In fact I chewed slower.

“Please,” she said. “This is me asking you to open up. I need more than just snatches from you.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. I swallowed some instant coffee and it tasted horrible.

“Please,” she said again. “You're going to lose me if you can't tell me what's going on inside your head.”

She hadn't touched her food, hadn't even picked up her cutlery. Her face was kindest without make-up, without any sort of defence to it. On mornings like this she could be beautiful without being alluring. She hung there, practically floating above her chair, and waited on what I'd say next. I wanted to open up, but I knew that once I started talking about Grace, I wouldn't be able to stop.

“Look, it's fine,” I told her. “I'm fine.”

I dug into my food, tore through it with renewed attention, and didn't look away from the plate. When I looked up, she was still staring at me.

“What?” I asked. “I'm just sleepy.”

She sat next to me silently for a minute or two more. Then she stood, showered, and left the apartment without another word. I stared at the wall and drank my bitter coffee, twisting everything tight, hands, eyes, guts, and cursing myself for being a fucking idiot. And when she was gone I made my way back to bed, replayed that memory, and fell into a fitful sleep.

Nicole left the city to see her family for an early Thanksgiving dinner, an invitation that had been only half-heartedly extended to me. I avoided the calls from my mother, and instead I got in touch with John. He suggested dinner at his place and mentioned that he had a surprise to show me.

The rats were sitting on the kitchen table in a translucent Plexiglas cage with a wire lid, our dinner displayed on the table around them. There were three of them, each with black fur on their heads and down their spines, and white fur on their bellies
and haunches. They had protruding, shiny black eyes, pink paws with sharp clear claws, and awful tails that were as long as their bodies and covered with scales. They were inquisitive, the three of them coming to the front of the cage and twitching their thick whiskers at me when I approached the table, but they were also lanky and repulsive.

Over dinner, John explained that the rats were a present to himself. They were from the lab but no longer needed for research, and so John had snuck them out and brought them home instead of
retiring
them. Though we both actively ignored the topic of Grace and her disappearance, I didn't doubt that these animals were meant to console John in some small way. I imagined that he and Grace had bonded over lab rats early in their relationship. John was still thin, perhaps even thinner, but at least his spirits were higher. I felt hopeful when I left the apartment that night.

I spent much of October at John's place, avoiding arguments with Nicole, keeping an eye on him, and over that time I grew fond of the rats. In a way, they reminded me of dogs: they were furry, curious, established relationships, and seemed to have distinct personalities. Once I got over my initial revulsion, John taught me how to pick them up and how to appease them with a gentle scratch of their bellies or ears. Eventually I even let one crawl up onto my shoulder, its nails like little pinpricks across my skin, its whiskers and nose tickling my neck. I dreamt of that sensation for days.

One evening, while relaxing over scotch and popcorn, I gave one of the rats a kernel. It held it in its forepaws and ate it thoughtfully and I couldn't help thinking it was happy.

“Why rats?” I asked John. “I mean, why are they the lab animal of choice?”

John had the others in his lap, two balls of fur. “Well, plenty of other species get used. Slugs, snails, flies, monkeys, mice. Each is good for a different kind of research.”

I held the rat up to my ear and listened to its chewing and light breathing. They were mostly noiseless creatures, despite films and TV portraying them as squeaking all the time. “And what are rats good for that mice aren't?”

“Behaviour,” he said. “Mice are morons, really. Put two mice that don't know each other in a cage and one of them will end up dead. With rats, they may scuffle but most of the time they'll get along in the end. Rats are inquisitive, stubborn, resilient. They're successful, evolutionarily speaking, because they find a way to deal with whatever you throw at them.”

The door to the second bedroom stayed shut during that period, and John never asked about our group of friends, but in some strange way I felt we were getting back to a normal life, just us and his new pets. Eventually John even named the rats: the largest of them was
Little John
and the fat one with the fewest black markings was
Little Grace.
Although all three were male, we still referred to Little Grace as
her
and
she.
John offered to name the third rat, the runt, after me.

“Not a fucking chance,” I told him. “Call him Buddy.”

The first of the rats to show signs of distress was Little Grace.

It was a particularly bad day. I'd fought with Nicole in the morning, a pointless row that escalated to me shouting, “What the fuck do you want from me?” Between that and skipping breakfast, I was weak and unmotivated at work. My bosses gave me grief, heatedly from the husband and coldly from the wife, over forgetting about a funding deadline. And on top of everything else, John hadn't answered my calls for two days. I was nauseated over the noodle lunch I brought back to my desk, alternately dialling John and Nicole, tumbling between feeling concerned and apologetic. Neither answered my calls.

I skulked out of work early to courier the grant application to Ottawa overnight. The courier service was on Bloor, just a couple of streets east of John's apartment, and so I thought I should check on him before heading home. The light in the second bedroom window was on when I arrived at his doorstep. John's shadow occasionally passed across the wall, as though he was examining something from many angles. I buzzed at the door, hands stuffed in my sleeves from the cold, but he didn't answer. His silhouette continued to flit in the window and after a few minutes I was irritated enough to shout up at the window from the street.

Eventually my yelling caught his attention. He crept up to the windowsill, backlit and ominous, posture rigid. When he finally recognized me, his shoulders relaxed and he disappeared from the window. I stared into the sushi restaurant storefronts. Both were full of happy, smiling, warm people I resented. The entrance to the apartment building opened enough for me to squeeze through, but it seemed as if John was hiding behind the door.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” he said.

There was a plaintive sound in the stairwell, and as we ascended it became louder and more urgent. When John opened the door to his apartment, the source became clear: one of the rats was shrieking in their cage. Little Grace was in the corner and raised up onto her back two legs. Her front legs were outstretched like arms and her teeth were bared as if to say,
Stay away from me.
She looked terrified of everything and her fur stuck out in all directions. Buddy crawled into a plastic tube and shuffled the bedding around in nervousness, and Little John kept his distance. I tried to pick up Little Grace but she was too jumpy to grasp.