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.
THE TWO SISTERS had lived apart once, for four months in 1952. Sylvia, who was older, was going to marry a man she’d met in Galveston. But she was riding in his car one evening when she felt a wash of cold fear and told him to stop and pull over.
“My sister has been in an accident,” she said.
A phone call confirmed it. Lili had fallen down the stairs and hadn’t woken up. The young man drove Sylvia straight to the hospital, where the nurses had already shaved Lillian’s head for surgery. The doctors were going to open her skull, a very dangerous operation. Sylvia stroked her sister’s pretty face. An orderly came and stood behind her, ready to wheel the unconscious Lillian away.
“It’s time to wake up now,” Sylvia had said. “Lili, listen. It’s time to wake up.”
And Lili did. She opened her blue eyes and gazed at Sylvia with such sweetness. “I’m thirsty,” she said in a small voice. The orderly fetched the doctor, who was amazed.
Lili was not the same after her fall and couldn’t remember things well. So Sylvia broke off her engagement to look after her. The young man she’d intended to marry was sent to Korea, where he was killed, and the sisters moved in together in the two-story blue house. Sylvia began teaching school, and Lili crocheted blankets and made the curtains.
Now Sylvia peered out the window, through the gap in those curtains. A car was parked the wrong way on the street. A red car. She knew it shouldn’t be parked that way.
That scruffy, pink-haired girl h
ad left her feeling disturbed, knocking at just the wrong moment. People had tried to interfere before, but Sylvia had always stood her ground. Lili had, too, when she was able.
They’d had a dog first, who could guard the door: a loyal boxer named Hercules, who loved Lili and slept at her feet. When he died, Sylvia thought Lili might never get over it. Next they had an indifferent and yappy schnauzer, some haughty cats, a parakeet, and a series of finches that reproduced and died so quickly that it was impossible to get attached. Loving finches was like loving a box of tissues: one was plucked out, and crumpled, and gone.
And then came the new era. When Sylvia first noticed the rats’ pellet droppings in the pantry, she suggested they get a trap. But Lili had cried out as if in pain.
“You can’t kill them!” she said. “Listen to them! They have plans!”
So Sylvia listened, and she began to understand what her sister meant. The sounds in the walls were not the random scufflings of an inferior species. The rats would move an object deliberately and position it with a small thunk. Then drag something else beside it. They might have been arranging furniture in a small living room. They were intelligent beings.
Lili, at home all day, had seen them do remarkable things. They could steal a whole egg and carry it away. One rat clutched it and lay on his back, and the other dragged him by his tail. Lili had put eggs on the floor to test them, and hidden to watch. Soon they became trusting, and would just eat the egg where it was, no need to be coy.
At Lili’s urging—because Lili was generous and wanted to share—Sylvia had taken their tamest pet to school, and the children had been delighted. He was an unusually sleek, handsome creature, and the children had let him run around their little necks. They fed him cheese. They called him Templeton, after the clever, greedy glutton in Charlotte’s Web. Sylvia was teaching them reverence for all living things, showing them that we share the planet with other species, no better or worse than our own.
But then the parents—the awful parents—had marched in screaming of disease, just like that pink-haired girl at the door. Of rabies, even, of all the ridiculous things. And that was the end of teaching for Sylvia.
She looked out through the curtains again. Was someone watching her from that red car? The glare on the windshield made it impossible to tell.
A rat moved across the mantel behind her. Sylvia never made a fire in the fireplace; it would disturb too many nests. She went to her sister’s room. They had moved their beds downstairs years ago with the help of a neighbor—now dead—because it was too difficult to be always running up and down. So Lili slept in what once had been the dining room, and looked so peaceful. Her breathing was barely perceptible. Sylvia sat beside her and touched her face.
“Lili,” she said. “It’s time to wake up.”
Lili didn’t move. Beneath her sister’s time-ravaged face, Sylvia saw the child’s smooth one, the face she cherished.
“Lili,” she said. “They’re coming. Wake up.”
But Lili was silent.
“Lillian,” she said, lightly slapping her cheek. “They will take you away from me.”
Nothing, just shallow breathing. Sylvia looked out the side window at the sycamore beyond the fence next door.
I have a small child, the pink-haired girl had said. There was a word for the way she’d said it, but Sylvia couldn’t think what it was. As if having a child gave you all the rights in the universe, and having a sister gave you nothing. As if that girl was better than other people just because she had spawned another human being. Sanctimonious—that was the word. Sylvia was pleased to have recovered it. She was not so far gone yet. She had produced unfeigned at the door—she was proud of that, too.
Dangerously infested, the girl had said. But rats were cleaner than people. People were filthy creatures. If the health department came now, with Lili unwell, they wouldn’t understand. They would claim that Sylvia couldn’t take care of her sister. At the hospital they would put tubes in her sister’s thin arms. Lili’s body was like dry sticks beneath the bedcovers. She should be moved soon. Otherwise there would be problems, bedsores.
If Sylvia called the hospital herself, then they might understand that she had the situation under control. She was a responsible person, and they would let her have her sister back. But the telephone no longer worked. The wires were chewed through, and Sylvia had trouble remembering the bills.
She could ask to use the phone at that big, ugly new house, but the people there had been such a bother. They had sent that young lawyer to say they were going to sue if she didn’t get rid of the rats. She had said that no pansy was going to frighten her, and the young man had looked as surprised as if she had struck him. But he certainly was a pansy, in his tight trousers and no tie. She wasn’t so old that she didn’t know that.
Up the street was a neighbor she knew, but he was an ancient enemy. He had asked Lili to go to the movies once and Lili had wept, wanting to go. Sylvia had been furious. He would have taken advantage of the fact that she was like a child, but how could she explain that to Lili? It had made so much trouble, that stupid invitation to the picture show.
She went back to her sister’s bed. There was a scrambling noise from the second floor. Something being dragged. Sylvia hadn’t been up there lately. Her knees hurt too much, and, if she was honest, she was a little afraid. The rats had plans, Lili had said.
“Lili,” she said. “You simply must wake up.”
ELEANOR DROPPED HATTIE off at school the next morning, in the red Manuel shirt her mother had washed. She still needed to get the green one from the new house. She wrote on her hand in blue ballpoint: GREEN SHIRT.
She would also have to check the traps, which filled her with dread. She’d wanted to become a homeowner, an independent person, a full-fledged adult, and instead she’d become an animal trapper. Maybe she and Hattie could live in the woods, roasting varmints on sticks.
The thought made her laugh—a giddy, helpless laugh—until she saw the dead rat by the refrigerator. Its mouth was open in protest, teeth visible, neck snapped by the trap. Its fur looked soft. Eleanor shuddered. It was strange how any loss of life caused revulsion, even if you had intended it. She turned away, fumbled with the phone, left a message for the exterminator.
In Hattie’s room, she found the green T-shirt, averting her eyes from the trap in the closet, and set it on the kitchen counter with her phone, where she couldn’t forget it. Then she heard a noise. At first it sounded like a siren. Next she thought it was a smoke alarm, but it was too faint. The sound grew closer and she realized it was a human voice, and it was keening.
She crept toward the front door, and the old woman from next door stumbled into the house. Her eyes were wide with panic. She was tiny, viewed whole, without a door to shield her: a shriveled being. “Help me!” she moaned. “Help!” She grabbed Eleanor’s arm with a claw-like grip.
“What happened?” Eleanor asked.
“Please!” the woman said. That evil smell of madness and neglect filled the hall.
Eleanor drew back. “I don’t understand,” she said.
The woman limped as she dragged Eleanor out the door and around the fence. They took the front steps slowly, the old woman bringing one foot up to meet the other, toward the peeling front door.
“Wait!” Eleanor said, with a burst of clarity. “Is she sick? Is your sister sick?”
The cloudy blue eyes turned toward her. “Yes,” the old woman whispered.
“Let’s call an ambulance,” Eleanor said. She didn’t want to go through that door. “I’ll get my phone. I don’t even know your name.”
The woman shook her head. “Sylvia. My name is Sylvia. No ambulance. They’ll take her away.”
“The police, then,” Eleanor said.
“No!”
“I don’t think I can help you.”
“Please come,” Sylvia b
egged. She pushed open the door into the yawning, reeking darkness.
The smell made Eleanor choke, and the room was dim and cluttered. Swift, dark shapes moved along the streaked and greasy baseboards. She could hear them everywhere. In her rolled-up jeans, her ankles felt naked and exposed. She pressed her free hand over her mouth and nose. The old woman, limping, pulled her toward the back of the house.
A decaying dining table had been shoved against the wall, piled with china plates, newspapers, unopened mail, garbage. The windows were grimy and fly-spotted. One window looked out on the fence and the sycamore, beyond which was Eleanor’s little house, her hope of a new life. In the middle of the room was an empty bed—or Eleanor thought at first that it was empty. It was covered with a surprisingly clean white sheet. And beneath the sheet something seemed to be struggling to breathe.
Eleanor gasped, in spite of the foul air. The sister! Why had Sylvia covered her up? She must be horribly shrunken.
Sylvia stared at the bed in horror. “Oh,” she moaned.
“She’s alive,” Eleanor whispered.
“My sister,” Sylvia said. “I wanted to protect her.”
“But she needs to breathe,” Eleanor said. She reached for the edge of the sheet and tugged it toward them, and then wished she hadn’t.
Two fat rats sat alongside the sister’s throat. The flesh was torn, the cheek half-devoured. The rats looked up when Eleanor pulled the sheet away, but they didn’t run. They were used to Sylvia watching them eat; they had her blessing. The unconscious sister’s chest rose, a ragged breath.
“No!” Sylvia screamed, and she lunged forward. The rats darted away, but not with the preternatural quickness of wild animals. They waited like pets to see if this was a game. “Stay away!” she cried. “Help me!”
Eleanor turned for the door. A rat ran past her bare ankle and she staggered away.
Outside in the bright day, the air burst from her lungs and she filled them with clean air. It was bracing, like cold water rushing over her. She put her hands on her knees and tried to concentrate on breathing. A crow hopped up on the curb and gave her a beady look, black feathers glinting turquoise in the sunlight.