Devotion (2 page)

I
N THE MORNING,
in Eleanor's childhood bedroom, a battle raged. Hattie had two shirts that she was willing to wear, one red and one green. The green one was in a box at the new house. The red one was crusted with food and dirt from the day before. Hattie needed the shirts in order to be Manuel, a boy she worshipped at school. She didn't want to be
like
Manuel, or even to be
liked
by Manuel. She wanted to
be
Manuel.

It was understandable. Manuel was handsome and dark-eyed, quiet and popular and effortlessly confident. He was a natural athlete. When they played catch, some of the boys adopted a showy flourish of elbow and knee, to make sure everyone was watching. With Manuel, you barely noticed the ball leave his hand. He was an efficient creature, with no wasted movement, and no apparent care for how he was seen.

Eleanor thought of her gay art history professor joking, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make
women
.” She wondered sometimes if Hattie identified as a boy. But she thought Hattie just wanted to be Manuel, and Manuel wore T-shirts in solid colors—like the green one Eleanor had left at the new house, and the red one she had forgotten to wash.

“I don't want that one!” Hattie cried, pushing away a blue-striped shirt with a sailboat on the front.

“Hattie, please. We'll be late for school.”

“No!” Hattie cried, throwing the striped shirt to the ground. Eleanor picked it up and tried to wrestle it over Hattie's head, but her daughter was surprisingly strong, and squirmed and fought free. She threw her naked torso onto the bed and sobbed heartrendingly into the quilt, her tiny vertebrae countable down into her jeans.

Eleanor wanted to cry with her. But she was the mother now, which was confusing. She had so recently been the daughter, allowed to fling herself facedown and weep. She wanted to ask if this was how Manuel would behave—cool, collected, unflappable Manuel—but she would only sound peevish and ineffectual. She had new compassion for her mother, especially when they weren't in the same room together. You just couldn't win, as a mom. She went to brush her teeth and let Hattie cry it out.

In the mirror, there were shadows like thumbprints beneath her aching eyes. The rats had invaded her dreams: the ghostly touch of fur against her cheek.

Back in the bedroom, Hattie had taken the dirty red shirt from the hamper and put it on. She turned, wet-eyed and solemn, quietly triumphant in her red shirt.

“I am Manuel,” she said. “Why is Hattie crying?”

“I don't know,” Eleanor said. “I guess because she was sad.”

It was always unsettling, this transformation into the idealized boy in the correctly colored shirt, but Eleanor would take it if it got them out the door. She had known that she and James might produce a strong-willed and visual child, but she hadn't expected this obsession with color and identity, or the struggle that would be daily life.

In the chaos of the school drop-off, Eleanor caught sight of the real Manuel, standing by the steps. He was wearing a blue shirt. No stripes, no sailboat, but blue! Hattie didn't seem to notice. She didn't need to talk to Manuel because she
was
him now, calm and sure. She looked an inch taller as she carried her pink backpack inside.

Eleanor drove to her new street and parked to study the neighborhood. The yellow bungalow was there, still neat and unassuming on the east side of the street, dwarfed by the huge sycamore. The neighboring house to the south was a newly built stucco number with a clay tile roof. The builder had used every possible square foot, as usual, and the house was boxy and top-heavy, crowding the lot.

On the north side, beyond the sycamore and a wooden fence, was a two-story blue clapboard house, with a peaked roof and peeling paint. The picture window had heavy gray curtains hanging closed against the sunny fall day. The broker had warned Eleanor that two ancient sisters lived there, and when they died, it would be a teardown. In full rationalizing mode, Eleanor had decided that the tall fence would block the noise and the dust.

It was easy to choose which house to approach, when one looked like a witches' den and the other like a Taco Bell. She rang the doorbell of the boxy new house and heard the chime echo inside. After a minute a woman answered, in yoga pants and no makeup, her hair in a short silvery bob.

“I'm so sorry to bother you,” Eleanor said. “This is an awkward question, but I just bought the house next door, and I was wondering if you've had any trouble with rats.”

“I just came by to water the plants,” the woman said, blinking. “The owners are away.”

“Oh, okay,” Eleanor said. “So—you haven't seen any rats?”

“Well, not lately.”

“Lately?”

“I'm sort of not supposed to talk about it,” the woman said.

Eleanor stared at her. “
Please
do.”

“It's about property values, I think,” the woman said nervously. “It really stresses them out, the whole thing.”

Eleanor's stomach seemed to flip over, like a pancake. “What whole thing?”

“You seem like a nice kid,” the woman said. “Look, I didn't tell you this, but I think those ladies—the sisters—were feeding the rats.” She started to draw back into the house.

“Wait!” Eleanor said, putting a hand out. “Please!”

“I have to go,” the woman said, and she closed the door against the pressure of Eleanor's hand.

Eleanor stood a moment, listening to the soft footsteps draw away inside the house. Then she went to the yellow bungalow and walked along the high fence she'd thought would protect her from construction when the sisters were gone. The slats were too close together to see anything between them. So she went to the sycamore and got a handhold and then a foothold. The bark was pale and mottled, resilient beneath her fingers, and she climbed until she could sit in the yoke of the tree, holding on to a branch. She looked down into the sisters' backyard, where the grass was dead and the patio cluttered with broken furniture and cardboard boxes. Why had she never looked back here before? There were three shallow bowls set out, empty. There was a bag of cat food against the house. But she saw no cats.

Movement caught her eye in the shadows, beneath a spiky, untended plant near the foundation. It took a moment before she could identify individual bodies. They seemed to cluster and confer, and then break up and gather again, on some urgent, mystifying business. They had matted gray fur and tails as big around as her finger. She tried to count them, but there were too many and they moved too quickly, disappearing into the darkness of the undergrowth and then weaving out again. There was a basement vent without a cover, and they darted in and out of the dark.

Something moved in the tree and Eleanor flinched, but it was only the wind in the leaves. The sky was blue and cloudless between the branches. She climbed unsteadily down to the ground and stumbled away, feeling an enormous head rush, the world going briefly white.

“I
KNEW THIS ADDRESS
when you called,” the exterminator said. He was bearish and bearded, in jeans. “I thought, Oh boy. She sold it, huh? The musician girl?”

Eleanor pressed her hands together to keep them from shaking. “She should be an actress,” she said. “She gave a brilliant performance of someone with nothing to hide.”

“She's nice enough,” the exterminator said. “She was pretty frantic.”

“Those women are feeding them
cat
food!” Eleanor said. “Why didn't she
disclose
it?”

But they both knew the answer. The musician girl had wanted out. The exterminator looked sympathetic.

“Didn't she call the health department?” Eleanor asked.

“Sure,” he said. “But the sisters won't let the inspectors in.”

“They
have
to,” she said. “I'll call. I'll keep calling.”

The exterminator nodded sadly, as if he had seen all this before: the hope of the new people who move into the haunted house, their determination to deal with the intransigent ghosts. “This has been going on for years,” he said. “We're talking thousands of rats going in and out of there.”

Her legs felt weak. “Oh, God, not really.”

“Females mature in two months,” he said. “They have five litters a year, if the conditions are good. Maybe eight in a litter? Half of those are females—I just want you to know what you're up against.”

Eleanor didn't trust herself to speak.

“So maybe tens of thousands,” he said, on reflection.

She nodded.

While he went outside to look for holes in her exterior walls, Eleanor drifted through the small, pretty rooms of the house. Everything she had was tied up in it: her income, her grandfather's money, her child's safety, her pride. When she got to Hattie's room, a rat sat up on its haunches on the crisp new sheets, inquisitive nose testing the air.

Eleanor turned and went out the front door and down the sidewalk. She walked around the fence, climbed the sisters' steps, and knocked. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She knocked harder, and something moved in the big curtained front window. Eleanor shivered but rapped on the door again, and would rap all day.

Finally it opened. The face that appeared in the crack had drooping, crosshatched skin and pale blue eyes, cloudy with cataracts. “What is it?” the woman snapped. She was so bent over she had to crane her neck to look up.

A frightening smell drifted out of the house, and Eleanor tried not to wince. Her throat was dry with fear. She felt like a neighborhood brat ringing doorbells. “I'm Eleanor,” she said. “I just moved in next door. I have a small child. I wanted to tell you that—our house is dangerously infested with rats.”

The woman's milky eyes seemed to brighten.

“I understand that you feed them,” Eleanor said. “I'm asking you not to. They carry disease. The exterminator is here, and I'd be happy to pay for him to—”

“Stop!” the woman cried. “How dare you come here?”

“I'm—your neighbor,” Eleanor said.

“How dare you speak to me of exterminators?” the woman cried. “The rats have an unfeigned devotion that you will
never know
.” She slammed the door.

Eleanor stared at the peeling paint, then made her way dizzily down the steps. There was no handrail. She was pretty sure that was not to code.

Inside the bungalow, the bearded exterminator was setting traps. She could feel the adrenaline in her body draining away. His concerned face wasn't reassuring.

“I don't see any new holes,” he said. “The steel mesh I put in before is still in place. I think it's just the doors being open, while you're moving, that's bringing them in. They're curious. But don't poison them, whatever you do. It makes them die in the walls and then they stink.”

Eleanor nodded.

“You okay?” he asked.

She shook her head and felt weak. “That woman next door said the rats had an unfeigned devotion that I would never know.”

“Yeah, I don't think you'll get far with her,” he said. “Escrow's closed and everything?”

She nodded.

“Call if you find anything in the traps. I'll come back and check tomorrow. You sure you're okay?”

She nodded again.

He put a strong hand on her shoulder, which under any other circumstance would have seemed wildly inappropriate, but she was grateful. When had anyone besides her parents last touched her in a reassuring way? Possibly the obstetrician, a round and cheerful mother of two, which didn't count.

She called the health department and was passed from one computerized menu to the next until it was time for the school pickup. When Hattie came running down the steps, in her dirty red shirt with her pink backpack, Eleanor's heart felt so full it seemed ready to spill.

She buckled Hattie in and drove home to her parents. She had been in such a rush to get away from her mother that she had bought a house full of vermin. Where had her caution been? Her due diligence? She was responsible for her daughter, for her safety. And really, her mother was a perfectly nice person. Well-meaning and popular among her friends. A leader in her book club, an excellent cook. An hour or two with her just drove Eleanor into a fetal position, rocking on her bed.

If she had been acting rationally, she would have brought her father to walk the property with her. She couldn't understand why she hadn't seen the signs, and why the inspector hadn't seen them. She should have found her own inspector. The broker had an interest in selling the house. Eleanor should have talked to a lawyer like her parents had suggested. She should have looked in the sisters' backyard. Her face felt hot with shame.

“When do we go to the new house?” Hattie asked from her car seat.

Eleanor glanced in the rearview mirror. “It isn't ready yet.”

“When will it be ready?”

“I'm not sure, baby.”

“I'm not a baby.”

“Of course not,” Eleanor said. “It's just like I call you ‘sweetie' sometimes.”

“I am Manuel,” Hattie said.

“Right,” Eleanor said. “Manuel.”

“Manuel isn't afraid,” Hattie said to the rearview mirror, her eyes serious beneath her dark bangs.

Eleanor hadn't told her about the rats, but Hattie's faultless antennae caught every change in the wind, and she had picked up on Eleanor's anxiety, as she always did.

Eleanor wished that she, too, had an alter ego who wasn't afraid.