Switched (5 page)

I didn’t want to die like that, frothing at the mouth from mice cooties, alone in a filthy house with a moldy shower curtain and no sheets. I wanted to die at the Four Seasons in New York City in my sleep after having sex with a masseur named Paolo when I was one hundred and five years old.

“It was only one mouse,” I reminded myself, ever sensible. “You’ll never see it again.”

And I was right. I never saw that particular mouse again. I threw the sweaters off me and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I would need a four-hour shower, I reasoned, but I would eventually get the mouse cooties off me.

That’s when a totally different mouse ran across the bed and hopped onto the floor by my feet. I did the air raid siren scream again, which seemed to lift me in the air with its force. I flew off the bed, out of the room, down the stairs and straight out the front door.

I was the Usain Bolt of the scared-of-mice set.

All the running and screaming wouldn’t have been half as embarrassing if I hadn’t tripped over my luggage, which Nataniel had thoughtfully fetched and left for me right outside the front door. It also wouldn’t have been half as embarrassing if I wasn’t dressed only in pink bikini briefs and a tank top. No bra for my ample, bra-definitely-needed knockers, either.

I tripped over the luggage in stages. There was the
Whoa! What’s my luggage doing here?
stage when I whipped open the door, which was quickly followed by the
I’m falling over the luggage! I’m falling over the luggage!
stage, and finally a
I’m not going to fall! I’m going to find my balance!
stage, with my arms going round and round in big circles and my legs kicking out from behind me.

None of it mattered. I wound up facedown in the street, my lower half propped up on a pink Samsonite.

“Ow,” I said.

“Buenos días,” Nataniel said, leaning over me with an expression of concern on his face.

“Buenos días,” I said. “Ow.”

“Are you going jogging?”

“No,” I said. “I was running away from mice.”

Nataniel helped me up, and I caught him looking at my boobs. I crossed my arms over my chest to cover the worst of my cleavage.

“There’s mice in there!” I cried, pointing into the house.

Nataniel nodded knowingly, as if there was nothing wrong whatsoever with mice. In fact, he didn’t seem surprised by anything, not by my claims of rodents or my braless fall into the street.

The other residents of Capdepera seemed surprised, however. About five of them surrounded me, firing anxious questions at me in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word, but I figured they were wondering why I had been screaming bloody murder and was now half naked in the middle of the street.

I did my best impression of a mouse, and gestured wildly at the house. “Oh,” they said in the universal word of understanding. Smiling and nodding like they were dealing with a crazy person, they herded me back inside and a woman got into my face, talking a mile a minute.

“This is the mayor,” explained Nataniel. “She says the house up the hill has many, many mice. They are working to get rid of them.”

The mayor smiled at me as if that solved the problem. “So the mice from that house are running to this house,” I deduced.

“She says that they will fix this house, too,” Nataniel translated.

I had limited experience with hunting mice, but I did know that it could take some time to get rid of them. The mayor and her crew from Capdepera didn’t play around. They invaded the house en masse with numerous mice-fighting tools that didn’t look out of place in the medieval home.

Nataniel and I stood in the entrance way and watched the action around us. I was dying to pee. I thought I was going to rupture something important if I didn’t get to a toilet quick, but there was no way I was going upstairs by myself.

The mice were upstairs.

“Nataniel, would you go upstairs with me, please?” I asked. He glanced quickly at my breasts and nodded. I thought to clarify the situation, in case he had the wrong impression about my asking him upstairs, but I was tired, jet-lagged, traumatized, and full of dread. I wanted to complain to Nataniel, to tell him that the house was disgusting and filthy, but I didn’t want to embarrass the owners by telling their neighbor that they were pigs.

What would it help anyway? I would still be stuck there with the filth and vermin, and the charming Swedish couple would still be bathing in the lap of luxury in Chicago in a condo with a view. Besides, I was feeling stupid. Stupid to have jumped into a horrible situation without two minutes of thinking beforehand.

We reached my bedroom, and I gingerly shook out some clothes. “I don’t see mice,” Nataniel said, looking around.

“They’re probably huddled in a hole somewhere, planning their next attack,” I said.

I thought a moment about that. Their next attack. I had to pee like a racehorse. My bladder was ready to blow. Could they be lying in wait for me in the toilet? What if I sat down, and the worst mice experience ever happened?

Toilet attacks were not unheard of. They were all over the news. Snakes, alligators, all kinds of nastiness lay in wait for unsuspecting tushies.

“Are you all right?” Nataniel asked.

I debated whether to tell him that I was contemplating peeing with him standing guard. But I came out on the side of self-dignity, or what was left of it.

“Yes, fine,” I lied. “Just going to get cleaned up and dressed.”

I tiptoed into the bathroom, did a cursory search for mice nests, rabid dogs, and Godzilla. An ounce of prevention, you know. It was clean. I mean, as clean as a filthy, disgusting bathroom could be.

I closed the door behind me and ran the shower. I squatted over the toilet, well out of range of jumping rodents, and peed.

What had I gotten myself into? I was the queen of dumb. I was the queen of bad decisions. Intelligent women don’t let their careers go into the toilet so that they can max out their credit cards to pay for an over-the-top wedding to a man who is going to dump them hours before the ceremony and then go on a crazy trip to another country to stay in a rodent-infested bubonic plague house.

I finished my shower and got dressed in shorts and a tank top. I pulled my wet hair into a ponytail and decided against makeup. Why bother with mascara? It would only get eaten off by mutant mice going after my eyeballs.

I left the bathroom and was surprised to find the bedroom full of people on their hands and knees inspecting holes in the floorboards and cracks in the walls.

The mayor walked in and barked orders in Spanish. She patted me on my shoulder, smiled, and said something in a soothing tone.

“She says that they have found a couple mice, but they will get rid of them quickly,” Nataniel translated.

I was touched at the flurry of activity on my behalf. The Spanish people were very kind. Nataniel suggested we go downstairs while they tackled the upstairs.

A group of people were ferreting out rodents downstairs, too. “They are almost done,” Nataniel assured me. We stood in an awkward silence for a while, watching the activity around us. I wanted a cup of coffee, but even without the threat of mice running up my legs, I refused to use the botulism kitchen.

“Is this your first trip to Mallorca?” Nataniel asked me.

“Yes. It’s beautiful,” I said, covering my nose to block the smell of pesticide wafting in from the laundry room. They were really going at it, determined to rout out the mice.

“You will enjoy our beaches, our water,” Nataniel assured me.

A bubble of enthusiasm floated up to my surface. I felt a little pop of happiness. I had totally forgotten that I was on a beautiful island surrounded by clear turquoise water and with beautiful beaches. Maybe I would have a good time after all. Maybe I would find inner peace and be able to get my life back on track.

The phone rang, and Nataniel went to pick it up. “It is for you,” he said, handing it to me.

“Hello?” I asked into the handset.

“Did you make it okay?” I heard my brother ask. “You go to another country, and you don’t bother contacting your only living family member to tell me you made it okay? You could have been sold into slavery or something, for all I know.”

“No, no slavery,” I said, my voice bright and chipper, as if I wasn’t standing in filth as an entire village tried to hunt down the vermin around me.

“I never know with you,” he said. “You’re not exactly the most mature and sensible-minded person, Debra. I mean, shuttling off at a moment’s notice to Spain for a month when your life is in the toilet.”

“I am too mature and sensible-minded!” I lied, stomping my foot. “I was on the partner track at my firm, you know.”

“Yeah.
Was
.”

Richard was insufferable. He had lived his life exactly how he was supposed to, from being valedictorian of his high school class to making partner at his law firm and settling down with a debutante and producing two children. I loved him, but he was judgmental, to say the least.

“Things are great here,” I lied again. “Beautiful. Perfect. Best decision I ever made.”

A young man tripped over his feet when he tried to catch a mouse as it scampered under the dining room table. I turned and shielded the sound with my hand over the handset.

“I’m in paradise,” I added.

“All right, but don’t find a man while you’re in your state of rebound and wind up as a pregnant tortilla-maker,” my brother ordered.

“Tortillas are Mexican, not Spanish,” I said. “Besides, I’m only here for a month.”

“Famous last words.”

“Another besides, I’m not going to rebound with anyone. I don’t need a man to validate my existence. I’m Zenning it. I’m yoga incarnate. I’m serene,” I assured him.

“I wish you would have let me look at your home exchange contract before you signed it. I’m a lawyer, you know.”

Contract. Are there home exchange contracts?

“It was a standard home exchange contract,” I said. “I don’t need help from a lawyer for a standard home exchange contract.” I hadn’t signed a contract. I hadn’t been offered one. I wouldn’t have known what I was signing anyway.

“Oh, lord. I hope there was something in there about damages and reimbursements,” he said.

“Of course there was!”

“And exit agreements?” he asked.

“Of course exit agreements! Not that I need one. Everything is perfect.”

The mayor and her entourage approached me. She was all smiles, but her hair had gotten disheveled, and she had a little rivulet of sweat running down her reddened face. My mice situation had taken a toll on her.

“I gotta go,” I told my brother. “I’m about to hit the beaches.”

“Don’t do anything crazy,” he said.

“Right. No on the men and tortillas. Yes on the sunscreen.”

I hung up the phone, and the mayor gave me the rundown, speaking a mile a minute.

“She says they have it under control,” Nataniel translated. “No more mice. All gone.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “That was pretty fast.”

“There were only a couple of mice,” he explained. The mayor patted my arm, and the meaning was clear: I was a spoiled American who freaked out because of a couple measly mice. I was a wimp. I was a hysteric.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry I put you out.”

The mayor shook my hand and signaled to her troop to leave. Half of them had made it out of the house when the stampede happened.

It was like a scene out of a horror movie. Normally I would have covered my eyes, but this wasn’t a film, and I wasn’t sitting safely in a movie theater seat, gnawing on a Milk Dud waiting for the scene to change. Instead, I was in a dirty house, standing in the path of what had to be at least one hundred mice, fleeing from under the laundry room door, running as fast as their little mice feet could run, right toward me.

I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Yep, I was actually seeing a horde of mice. It was like
Lord of the Rings
but with mice. It was like
Troy
but with mice. It was like a hell of a lot of mice.

My voice kicked into gear, and I did the air raid siren thing again. The scream started off slow and low and got louder and higher. If I hadn’t been so freaked out, I would have been impressed with my breath control.

They spread out and took over the whole house like a giant wave. A mice wave. They stopped for nothing, and they were mere inches away from running over me. I was dimly aware of the panicked, shrieking villagers pushing one another out of the way as they exited the house, some doing impressive long jumps, flinging their bodies through the open front door.

But I was paralyzed. I realized I needed to move my feet, but my freak-out was impairing my neurons from firing and sending messages to my lower body. Besides, if the neurons could have fired a message to my lower body, it would have probably been to pee in my pants.

Paralyzed as I was, I continued my air raid siren scream as the mice closed in. They had just about made it to my naked toes when Nataniel’s arm wrapped around my middle and pulled me away from the rodent parade and out the front door, closing it behind us.

It took me a moment to realize I was out of the house, away from the mice. Safe. I finally stopped screaming when the mayor threw a cup of cold water in my face.

“She says that is what we do here when a woman is hysterical,” Nataniel translated. I wiped the water from my eyes. The mayor patted my arm and rattled off more Spanish. “She says they will take care of it. Another hour and there will be no more mice,” Nataniel explained.

I gave the mayor my best are-you-shitting-me look, but she was undeterred. Her smile never wavered.

“Nataniel,” I said, ignoring the mayor. “There is no way to get rid of those mice. Not in an hour, not in a week. They’ll probably have to burn down the house to get rid of them. Maybe burn down the whole town. Who knows? One thing is certain; I’m never going back in there.”

With my mind set against returning to NIMH, my new reality sank into my already battered psyche. Homeless. Penniless. To top it off, the mice were probably transforming my luggage into nests for their future generations of super-mice, insanely robust rodents destined to take over the planet. A zombie apocalypse but with mice.