Part 4
Mark was on his knees before Laura reached the doorway.
“Scout,” he called softly, pressing his ear near the baseboard. “Buddy, come on. Come back out.”
Maple shoved her nose against the vent and gave a sharp, urgent cry. The sound made Laura’s stomach tighten. She had heard Maple call like that only once before, the night Scout appeared in the fleece bed. It was not a pet owner’s worry. It was a mother’s panic.
“Can you see him?” Laura asked.
“No.” Mark angled his phone flashlight into the gap, his shoulder jammed awkwardly against the bookcase. “He’s somewhere behind the duct. I can hear him, but I can’t reach.”
Laura looked at the clock on the wall. Mr. Keller and the inspector were due in less than two hours. Even though the first visit had been safe, the idea of anyone opening walls or placing equipment while Scout was trapped inside made her palms sweat.
Mark tried coaxing him with a blueberry. Then with Maple’s bedding. Then with the small clicking noise he used when he wanted Scout to come. Each time, the rat answered from the dark space with a thin squeak that sounded weaker than the last.
“Move,” Laura said.
Mark turned. “What?”
“Your hand is too big.”
He looked at her, then at the vent, then back at her again. “Laura—”
“Don’t make a speech.” Her voice shook, and she hated that. “Just move before I change my mind.”
Mark shifted aside.
The gap looked smaller from the floor. Laura lay on her stomach, cheek nearly against the dusty baseboard, and shined the flashlight into the opening. The smell of old wood and warm metal rose into her face. Something rustled inside. She saw a flash of gray fur, then nothing.
Every childhood fear she had ever carried woke up at once.
She remembered the house in Akron, her mother’s tight mouth, the traps under the sink, the scratching behind the pantry at night. She remembered standing on a kitchen chair at eight years old, crying because something had run across the floor and her older cousin had laughed until she wanted to disappear.
Her hand would not move.
Behind her, Mark said nothing. That helped more than encouragement would have.
Maple pressed close to Laura’s side and made a pleading sound.
“All right,” Laura whispered, though she did not know whether she was talking to the cat, the rat, or herself. “All right, I’m trying.”
She slid her fingers into the gap.
For one terrible second, nothing happened. Then something warm and trembling brushed her knuckle. Laura almost jerked back, but Maple’s body leaned against her ribs, steady and solid. Laura took a slow breath and reached farther.
Scout’s tiny paws gripped her index finger.
“Oh,” she said.
It was not disgust that came first. It was surprise. He was warm. His feet were delicate. His body shook so hard she could feel it through one finger. When he nipped her, it was not an attack. It was the desperate, confused bite of a frightened animal trying to hold on to the only living thing it could reach.
“I’ve got him,” Laura said, her voice barely audible.
Mark stayed very still. “Take your time.”
She curled her fingers as gently as she could and eased her hand backward inch by inch. Dust scraped her wrist. Scout squirmed once, then clung to her. When she finally pulled him free, he was crouched in her palm, dirty, wild-eyed, and breathing fast.
Laura sat back on her heels.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Scout looked up at her.
Laura looked down at him.
Then Maple surged forward, snatched him by the loose skin behind his shoulders with perfect gentleness, and carried him straight to the fleece bed as if Laura had been hired help who had finally performed an acceptable service.
Mark let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You okay?”
Laura stared at her dusty hand. There was a tiny red mark on her finger where Scout had nipped her. It should have horrified her. Instead, she kept thinking about how small his feet had felt.
“I need to wash my hands,” she said.
“That seems fair.”
When Mr. Keller arrived, Laura met him at the door before Mark could. She was still pale, her hair pulled into a messy knot, her sweatshirt streaked with dust from the floor.
“We need humane exclusion only,” she said.
Mr. Keller blinked. “Good morning to you too.”
“No bait in our walls. No glue boards. No anything that can hurt an animal trapped inside. We’ll pay the difference if we have to.”
Mark stared at her.
Laura did not look at him. “I’m not saying I love the situation,” she added. “I’m saying nothing in this house deserves to die scared in a wall.”
Mr. Keller studied her for a moment, then sighed the sigh of a man adding another problem to a long list. “I’ll tell the inspector.”
After that, Scout became official in a way no one had planned. He had a cage, vet records, approved food, supervised time out, and more opinions than any creature his size had a right to possess. Maple continued to mother him long after he was too big to be mothered. She pinned him with one paw to wash his face. He tolerated it with the exhausted patience of a teenager being cleaned in public.
Laura’s rules softened, but they did not vanish. Scout could sit with Mark on the porch. Scout could cross the bedroom floor if Mark was watching. Scout could not, under any circumstances, appear on Laura’s pillow, inside Laura’s shoes, or near Laura’s coffee mug.
“Boundaries,” she told Mark one night, pointing a spoon at him across the kitchen. “I am a generous woman with boundaries.”
“You are,” Mark said.
“I saved him from the wall.”
“You did.”
“That does not mean I want him in my sleeve.”
Mark glanced down at Scout, who was indeed investigating the cuff of Laura’s sweatshirt from the safe distance of the table edge. “He admires fabric.”
“He can admire it from elsewhere.”
They were still laughing then.
Later, Laura would remember that summer as the last stretch of time when she thought fear was the main thing wrong with her body.
The signs had been there, but they came dressed as ordinary life. She was tired after work. Everyone was tired after work. She drank water constantly, but June was hot and the old duplex never cooled properly upstairs. Her vision blurred at the edges sometimes, but she spent all day staring at appointment schedules and insurance forms at the dental office. She woke twice a night to use the bathroom and blamed the water she kept drinking.
Mark noticed more than she wanted him to.
“You should make that doctor’s appointment,” he said one evening, watching her refill her glass for the third time in an hour.
“I will.”
“You said that last week.”
“And I meant it last week too.”
“Laura.”
She gave him a look over the rim of the glass. “I’m not dying. I’m tired.”
He let it go because married people learned, after enough years, that concern could turn into nagging if held too tightly. Laura let it go because admitting something might be wrong meant finding time, money, courage, and an answer she was not ready to hear.
Scout did not let things go so easily.
He began pausing near her side of the bed at night when Mark let him have his supervised floor time. He would lift his nose, whiskers trembling, and watch her with an attention that made her uncomfortable.
“Your rat is staring at me,” she said once.
“He has taste.”
“He has poor manners.”
Mark scooped Scout up. “Come on, buddy. The lady says you’re being weird.”
But Scout kept looking back at her.
Two weeks later, a storm rolled through Cedar Grove after midnight, rattling the windows and flickering the power. Laura went to bed with a headache, a full glass of water on the nightstand, and the irritated certainty that she would call the doctor in the morning just to make Mark stop asking.
Sometime before dawn, Mark woke to a sharp pinch on his finger.
He opened his eyes and saw Scout on the blanket beside his hand.
“No,” Mark whispered, instantly awake. “Absolutely not. You know the rules.”
Scout bit him again, harder this time, then darted across Mark’s chest toward Laura.
“Scout,” Mark hissed, grabbing for him and missing. “Do you have a death wish?”
The rat ignored him. He climbed onto Laura’s pillow, planted both front paws against her cheek, and squeaked directly into her face.
Laura did not stir.
Mark sat up, irritation turning cold in his chest.
“Laura?” he said.
Scout pushed his nose against her mouth, then squeaked again, frantic now.
Mark switched on the lamp.
His wife lay on her back, damp with sweat, breathing fast and shallow, her skin a grayish color he had never seen before.
“Laura,” he said again, louder. She did not answer…
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