Rats!
by Michelle Hulan
Danny and I are in the waiting room of a wild animal hospital. He’s playing it cool, considering. He’s sitting in his seat, swinging his legs, his toes barely grazing the terrazzo floor, and staring at the animals in rehabilitation near the front window. There’s a shallow water tank with a small family of turtles in the front, a hawk with a broken wing, and two pigeons in the cage against the wall. He turns to me and asks how much longer. I lean back in my chair. It’s hard to tell. There’s only one other person here—a grizzled woman in her seventies if I had to guess. “Excuse me,” I say to her. “Do you have the time?”
The woman jerks her head in my direction and then points to the clock on the wall. It’s four fifty-five, and she pulls her covered, portable birdcage in toward her thighs. Whatever’s inside lets out a small, frightened squawk.
I consider whether I should be offended, but I know how I look: hair wild and wind-blown and my pale hands holding this plastic bag open like an offering to the veterinarian Gods.
“Soon,” I tell Danny.
We got here about fifteen minutes ago from the playground. It was the first time I’d been to the park since my mother died. I sat on the bench near the east side, drinking my coffee and watching Danny climb the play structure. A group of young kids around Danny’s age were running in circles playing freeze tag. I recognized one of them—Ellie. She was in Danny’s class last year. I watched her break away from the other kids playing tag and start to kick a pile of leaves near the bottom of the slide.
I called out to Danny, who was lying completely horizontal on top of the monkey bars watching the clouds, and pointed out Ellie. He jumped off the bars with ease, disturbing a flock of feral pigeons. They flew into the air, made a lopsided circle, and settled in a nearby tree.
#
The woman with the birdcage has her body turned away from me now. But when the vet tech comes through the swinging door and calls out “Marvin,” she stands and looks back at us, her small eyes focused on the bag in my hands.
“Rats,” I tell her. “Baby rats.” She opens her mouth, would have, had she not been holding the cage, put her hand to her chest before walking away. I can tell Danny’s embarrassed. He’s made himself small in the chair and won’t look at me. But as far as I’m concerned, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Danny.
He was aimlessly skipping around the park until he wasn’t. He stopped and stared at something on the ground and then waved Ellie over. She skipped toward him, dragging a large stick behind her, and then waved over two twin girls with matching green wool coats and orange beanies. She whispered into the other’s ear before handing Danny the stick. He poked something, and one of the twins screamed. Noticing the other kids at the park starting to run toward the drama, I stood up from my bench, threw my coffee in the garbage, and made my way to the front, gently shouldering the other children to the side. And there, at the front, was Danny, now holding the stick behind his back, his eyes and mouth open at seeing me see him with a dead rat sliced open along its stomach, and next to that, three small, pink rat pups writhing next to their mother. Rats. I just stared, stunned.
“I bet it was a cat,” one of the twins said. Another kid yelled from the back of the group, “No, a hawk!” Danny was quietly watching me when Ellie bent down before I had the sense to stop her. She picked up one of the rats and ran to her mother who was on the phone near the south end of the playground.
What a sight: Ellie dropped the baby rat on her mother’s lap; her mother dropped her phone and started screaming; and Danny dropped the stick. He looked very guilty.
#
It’s been five minutes since the woman and Marvin left. I watch someone smoking a cigarette outside the door. She doesn’t look like my mom. She was three decades younger than she was, but any plume of smoke will make me think of her now. She was a lifelong smoker, and I guess I’d been bracing for the news since I was a kid. When she started coughing about a year ago, I said she should go to the doctor. I even offered to make her appointments, but she waved me off. She said I should worry about my own health, that I was always too concerned with everyone but myself.
“You’re so selfless, it’s selfish,” she used to say.
In the end, it was me who took her to her appointments, and in the hospital, I did what I could. I clipped her nails and put dry shampoo in her hair. I even read her the hospital’s copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I read slowly until she complained that I read too slowly. She waved her finger in a small circle, saying, “Hurry up. I don’t have much time left,” and she was right. Always right. She passed days later, refusing pain medication, determined to experience what she had called raw death. “I only get one chance, theoretically,” she said, and on her last day of living, I watched her open her eyes wide one last time before closing them. Her chest deflated. That was that.
The vet tech comes back and calls out my name. Danny and I follow him through the swinging door and into the hallway. One of the doors on the right is cracked open, and I can see the old woman on the floor holding an old cockatoo with patches of pink skin and sparse feathers. I look away to give her privacy.
The vet tech leads us into a room on the left and closes the door behind him. He’s young, in his twenties. Both of his nostrils are pierced.
“So what’s going on here?” he asks, his eyes on the open bag.
I tell him it’s baby rats and shrug apologetically.
“I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“Oh, God,” he says, typing into the computer. “I think most people would have left them where they found them. His eyebrows are raised, and he turns toward me, studying my hands. “Lucky rats, I guess. I’ll be right back.”
Maybe I should have left the rats at the park, but there they were—helpless, alone, and about to die from the cold if nothing else. As we stood around the rats, I told the kids to move back. I pointed to a plastic bag stuck on the metal fence near the edge of the park.
“Go get that bag,” I said to Danny.
“Mom, really?” He said, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean it.”
Danny came back with the bag. I could tell he was worried about what the other kids were thinking.
“Mom, please. I’m sorry,” he said, like he was in trouble.
I grabbed the bag and bent down. I tried picking one of the baby rats up with the side of the bag, but it was so sticky that it stuck to the side. I took a deep breath, and with my bare hands picked them up and dropped them in the bag. I poked the mother, and about five flies scattered before resettling. She was gone. By the time I looked up, the children had backed away. They weren’t staring at the rat anymore. There were now a group of parents covering their children’s eyes.
“Just put them out of their misery,” one dad said.
I held the bag open so the air could flow inward.
“You can’t just kill them. What are you going to do step on them?” I extended the bag toward him. “Here, take them and step on them. Please.”
The dad shook his head and stared at me over his shoulder as he guided his kid out of the park.
“Not so easy is it?” I said. “Would you rather I just let them die?” I sounded like my mother and hoped no one would recognize me the next time we came to the park.
I remembered Ellie took a rat and walked over to the bench her mother was standing on. Ellie was next to her, hands on her hips, proudly watching the rat on the ground. Grass and dirt were stuck to its body. I picked up the poor, small thing and put it in the bag with the rest.
“What are you doing?” Ellie’s mother said, leaning away from me.
I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged and said matter-of-factly, “Someone’s got to do something.”
She just stared while her phone rang and rang. Ellie tugged on her jacket. “Mom, can I go with them?”
She didn’t answer. She just pulled Ellie close to her body, not noticing her face was pressed against the wet patch of rat blood on her jeans.
#
A moment later, the pierced vet tech comes back with a shallow cardboard box with paper towels lining the bottom.
“Are they dead,” Danny asks.
They hadn’t moved in a while.
“They might not make it,” the vet tech says. He tells me to put the rats in the box.
I think about pouring the rats out of the bag but that feels inhumane, so I reach in and carefully place them one by one.
“Oh, wow” he says, sarcastically, but I’m not mad. I get it. He looks me over again and, picking up the box, says, “There’s a restroom across the hall you can use.”
All three of us walk out of the room together, lighter. I tell Danny to meet me in the waiting room, The vet tech opens the restroom door for me, and I thank him, hoping it comes off as sincere, but he smiles too big, like he feels bad for me.
In the restroom, I look at my reflection, and a middle-aged woman looks back. I lean toward the mirror. My face is ghostly. There are tear stains around my eyes, but I don’t remember crying. I look like my mother. After her funeral, a few people gathered at her apartment for the memorial. It was a blur of distant relatives, condolences, and cured meats. She had few friends. I spent most of the night standing against the wall with Danny, nervously picking at a plate of ham until the last guests left.
After I put him to bed, I noticed that the granite counter was covered with crumbs from careless snacking. My mother never would have allowed it, so I pulled out the cleaning solution from the cabinet and sprayed the counter, making large circles to avoid streaks, and when I finished, I noticed dust sitting on the grooves of the baseboards, so I grabbed a cloth and, on my hands and knees, wiped the baseboards, making my way around the entire apartment. I vacuumed. I washed the floors. I even rolled up the rug in the living room and grabbed the old baseball bat my mom kept near the front door. I brought them to the terrace and positioned the rug half-over its edge. Slow at first but intensifying, I swung at the rug with the bat until my arms ached.
When I woke up the next morning in my mother’s bed, I only vaguely remembered dropping the bat, slipping off my shoes, and falling asleep.
Now, I look tired. This year has aged me. There are wrinkles where smooth lines once were. More grays than I remember. I wash my hands twice. Once to get the blood off. Twice to feel clean.
#
Danny’s sitting in the waiting room chair, kicking the air with his legs. He’s still young enough to dangle them. I hold out my hand for his and start toward the door.
“Harriet says ‘Thanks,’” the vet tech says from the front desk, waving.
We wave back and head out the door. “Who’s Harriet?” Danny asks.
“No idea.”
Outside, Danny points at the large window. “Mom, can we look at the animals again?” He runs ahead, his finger tapping the glass—but then he starts to pull my arm away. “Never mind. I don’t want to see it,” he says.
Danny doesn’t want me to see, but he’s too late. I stare at the hawk staring at me, blinking its eyes one at a time. Its right wing is bandaged, and next to it is the vet tech wearing a rubber feeding glove.
Danny squeezes my hand and tries to pull me away from what I’m about to witness, but I step closer. The box of baby rats is on the table. They’re all dead. I can see that now. He’s dangling one of them by the tail above the hawk’s head.
“Harriet,” I say.
She opens and closes her beak in anticipation. Her broken wing doesn’t move, but the other one flaps in what I can only assume is excitement.
“Mom, let’s go,” Danny begs, but I can’t.
“Mom. It’s just rats.” He’s pulling the back of my coat. “Please. Let’s go.”
I can’t look away and watch as Harriet grabs and holds the small thing down with her talons, shredding it into pieces. My forehead is now pressed against the glass, and I grab my stomach like I can feel each tear. Like I can see my mother’s final breath deflating her chest. Like I can hear her saying what she always said, “we’re born alone, and we will die alone. We’re lucky if it’s quick.”
Tk
Michelle Hulan is a poet and writer. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Journal, HAD, the Citron Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. She received her MA in English from the University of Ottawa and now lives in Brooklyn with her family.