by Rachel Toor
Instead, he said, “Huh,” and guided us across the street.
We were almost back to where we’d started. On the way out, we had run by a youngish couple sitting on a porch and yelling at each other. They were still there, but now they were making out like crazy. Miles must have noticed it too, because he looked at me and grinned.
“You must be tired,” I said, feeling uncomfortable for some reason. “How far did you go today total?”
“Around seventeen,” he said. “I’m a little beat,” he added, although there was no way to tell. When he ran he didn’t make a sound. It was as if his feet stayed above the ground like one of those hovercrafts they used to cross the English Channel. You could hear my feet hit. Every. Single. Step.
“How far have we gone?”
“At the corner it will be five miles.”
“Five miles! I’ve never run that far before.”
“Now you have. Easy, right?”
“Easier than I could have imagined.”
“You’re a natural. Before long, you’ll be busting out a half marathon.”
“Don’t think so,” I said, but I wondered: Could I do a half marathon? That would be something to aim for. That would be an achievement.
Potato had started to lag behind. I thought maybe he was trying to save face by pretending to be a big man, peeing on things when what he needed was to take a break. Maybe I was just projecting.
“This was fun,” I said, when we got back to Ruffner.
Miles stood on the curb with his heel hanging over, stretching first one long lean leg and then the other.
I pondered the things I’d learned about him in addition to his questionable choice in favorite books: his dad was a carpenter and his mom baked bread and supplied local restaurants. His parents had a big organic garden and they sold vegetables at the farmers’ market in the summer. I didn’t tell him I’d written my personal statement about how much I hated Holden Caulfield. I’d been able to skip over the whole college-admissions thing because Miles didn’t seem to care about college at all. He said when he was finished with high school, which would be next January, he thought he’d probably go woofing.
I said, “Is this something to do with Potato?”
He laughed and spelled it out: WWOOF, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It was a global network where you could volunteer to work on different farms.
“Lots of people take a gap year between high school and college—or during college, or even when they’re adults on vacation—to become WWOOFers. You can do beekeeping in Italy, be a shepherd in New Zealand, pick Syrah grapes in France, harvest coffee beans in Kenya. You get room and board in exchange for work. Harry thinks I need to see more of the world, and this would be one way to do it.”
“Wow,” I said. And I barked out, “Woof.”
Then I barked some more. “Woof woof woof!”
Potato cocked his head at me as if I was crazy, and I may have been. It had never occurred to me you could do anything other than go straight to college.
Then Miles said, “Woof.” And Potato shook his head so that the tags on his collar tinkled like the beginning of a song.
22
When I got back to the house, my mother said, “You were gone a long time. Is everything okay?”
“Now you’re timing my runs? What’s next? Measuring how fast my hair grows?”
“Excuse me for worrying about you,” she said, and if she could have frowned, she would have been frowning big-time.
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Fine,” I said.
Then I felt bad and said, “It’s just that I’m getting better at running and have been able to go longer.”
I didn’t want to tell her about Miles. It would make her too happy. She’s always saying I need more friends, and aren’t there any cute guys at school?
She said, “Have you spoken to Jenni?”
I didn’t answer, just went into the kitchen and poured myself a big glass of chocolate milk. I took it into the living room and lay down on the floor and smiled to myself thinking about how Miles and I had ended the run woofing at each other. I realized we still hadn’t exchanged numbers and wondered when I’d see him again.
I tried to do some stretching. Unsuccessful. Then I ended up falling asleep. I’m sure I still had a smile on my face.
I woke up starving, so I went into the kitchen and made myself a pb&j-with-banana sandwich to share with the dude upstairs.
Walter was in his cage, hunched and trembling. His fur was sticking up and he looked disheveled.
When I opened his door, he didn’t move.
“What’s the matter, little man?” I put my hand in, and normally he would have run over to it.
But he didn’t.
He stayed hunched and trembling.
“Walter. Walter?”
He looked skinny. And frail. And there was something red around his nose and eyes. It looked like blood. Oh god, it looked like blood.
Gently I grabbed him and pulled him out. He didn’t look at me.
I put him on my pillow and he continued to shake. I ran downstairs and called out for my mom.
“Mom!”
She didn’t answer.
“Mommy!”
I found her in the living room.
“Something’s wrong with Walter.”
23
I put the travel cage on the floor of the car but held Walter in my hands. His whole body was shuddering and his eyes were closed.
Mom had called ahead and said the vet would see us when we got there. She looked at Walter and said, “Sweet little guy.”
Mom had come a long way to be able to say that.
I had been asking for a dog for forever, and finally, on my fourteenth birthday, Mom said, “Alice. No dogs. You can have a small pet that will stay in your room. A hamster, maybe. A guinea pig. But no dogs. I don’t have the time to do all the work a dog would require.”
So we went to the pet store, and, while I was tempted by the mice, when I saw Walter and his brothers, I knew that was it.
“Come on, Alice,” my mother said, like I was being annoying, like I wanted a rat just to upset her.
“What’s wrong with a rat?”
“Why can’t you get a hamster? Or a gerbil?”
And that was that. The more she tried to convince me not to get a rat, the more I knew a rat was the perfect pet for me.
The pet store guy opened the top of the rat cage and asked which one I wanted.
How to pick? I had no idea.
“What about this fellow?” He plucked one of them out by his tail and put him on the flat of his hand. The rat immediately pooped out four good-size pellets. Mom groaned.
“Not him,” I said.
He picked up another one, who cowered in his hand.
“Nope.”
Then he picked up Walter. Instead of seeming scared, Walter was curious. He nosed the guy’s hand and sat up on his hind legs and sniffed the air. He looked at me.
“Can I pet him?”
“Sure,” said the guy. “The rats never bite. The hamsters, those little bastards—um, those suckers, will draw blood. The gerbils too, if they get scared. But the rats, never.”
I held my finger out so Walter could smell it. He grabbed it with his tiny star hands and put it in his mouth. I pulled away.
“He’s not going to bite you—he’s exploring.”
So I gave him back my finger and he didn’t bite. Instead, he nibbled under my nail. My first manicure from him.
“This one,” I said. “This one.”
We got his cage, and to line it the guy recommended something that came in a bunch of colors and looked like shredded egg cartons or clumped-up toilet paper—not wood shavings, the pet store guy said. Cedar and pine give off acids toxic to rats. My mother made me promise to clean the cage at least once a week. No problemo, I said.
We got him pellets of food, some wooden chew toy
s shaped like vegetables, and a wheel to run on. He ran on the wheel exactly once. Did a few laps and that was the end of it for him. I can imagine that is the way I would feel about running on a treadmill.
24
When we got to the vet’s office, they showed us into a room. I held Walter—he wanted to be near my neck—and Mom carried the cage. The vet, a large woman with short gray hair, came in and said, “Let’s see what’s going on with this cutie.”
She reached for him.
Walter, who usually loves new people, didn’t even look up.
Just let her take him.
She looked at his eyes and nose, used a stethoscope to listen to his heart.
“He’s an old-timer,” she said.
Mom nodded.
I thought, What?
“How long have you had him?”
“It will be four years on my birthday, in a couple of months.”
She made a low sound, an I see sound. “How big was he when you got him?”
“About that size,” I said. I didn’t know exactly how old Walter was, so we always celebrated my birthday and his adoption day, which were the same.
“That’s ancient for a rat. They generally only live a thousand days.”
A thousand days?
I couldn’t do the math. If Walter was four years old, how many days was that? Walter was old?
“He’s in pain. That’s why he’s hunched over and why his hair is sticking up. This red stuff around his eyes and nose isn’t blood, it’s porphyrin. It’s an indication of stress. Has he been eating?”
I shook my head.
No. No. No.
How had I not noticed he’d gotten so old? He looked the same as he always did—until I saw him in the vet’s hands. Saw how skinny he was, how his fur wasn’t sleek and glossy the way it had been. He’d been moving slowly, jumping less, sleeping more. I had been so focused on my college applications and on running and on Miles I hadn’t been paying enough attention.
Mom put her hand on my shoulder and I shook it off.
The vet said, “It looks like he’s led a good and healthy life. We don’t usually see rats this old. As you know, rats do everything fast. Including completing their life span. He’s lived far beyond what you could expect. Obviously you’ve taken great care of him.”
This couldn’t be happening.
This could not be happening.
I took Walter from the vet and sat down. I held him up to my face and kissed him. Normally he would raise a front paw and push me away. Or he’d kiss me back on the lips. Now he stayed hunched.
He wouldn’t look up.
The vet and my mother were whispering. Mom came and sat next to me. She tried to put her arm around me. I moved away.
The vet crouched down to talk to me. She said, “We can give him some pain medication, but he doesn’t have much time left.”
Mom said, “Alice, the hardest thing in the world is to watch someone you love suffer.”
I shook my head. This could not be happening.
He was fine.
He had to be fine.
Mom said, “With people, we do everything we can to prolong their lives, even when what it means to be alive seems far worse than the alternative. Human medicine hasn’t caught up to this.” She gestured to the room, to the vet. “People don’t get to make the choice when they’ve had enough. We keep pumping them with chemicals and putting them through tests, doping them into oblivion. They never get to say, ‘Enough. I’m ready.’”
“But I’m not ready. I thought, I thought—”
I thought he was going to live forever. That I’d be taking him to college with me next year. That I’d be living with him when I’d finished college and was out in the world working. Even though I knew that wasn’t reasonable, I could never force myself to imagine him dying.
“Honey,” she said, smoothing my hair, “I know. We’re never ready. You need to decide what’s right for Walter. If you think it’s best, we can take him home and try to keep him comfortable with pain meds.”
“Oh my little dude,” I said, and petted his head. He didn’t move. His eyes were squinty. He was shaking. “I love you so much.”
I couldn’t stand to see him in pain, and I couldn’t stand to be without him.
“Leave me alone with him,” I said. “Please.”
The vet took my mom’s arm and they walked out of the room.
As soon as they were gone I went cold. The room smelled scary, like a hospital. Walter trembled in my hands. I told him how sorry I was. I should have known. I should have realized. In all my rat research, in all my Googling of things related to rodents, I had always skipped over anything that mentioned how long they lived. Even when people asked, which they sometimes did, I just said I didn’t know and why would they focus on something so morbid?
I held him up to my neck and, with what seemed like a lot of effort, he nestled his head under my chin.
We stayed like that for a long time.
25
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
PART THREE
1
Woke up.
Didn’t get out of bed.
Didn’t eat.
Didn’t run.
Didn’t go to school.
Didn’t read.
Didn’t play Snood.
Didn’t get dressed.
Didn’t wash my face.
Didn’t want to live.
2
I slept in the second-floor guest room because I couldn’t stand to be in my room.
I couldn’t stop searching the floor for him, couldn’t keep my eyes away from where he used to be.
When Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas, all the Technicolor is gone. She’s back to a sepia-toned life with Auntie Em and a bunch of farmhands.
But at least she still has Toto.
I had no color left.
Mom and Dad asked what I wanted to do with Walter’s cage and I told them to get rid of it.
3
How could I have been so stupid?
How had I not noticed he was getting old and sick?
How was it possible, with everything I’d learned about rats, that I didn’t know how long they were expected to live?
How could I have missed something this big?
4
My parents let me take a few days off from school but then I had to go back.
I walked with my head down so no one could see that I was crying pretty much all the time. I hid out in the library during lunch.
In class I let Sam Malouf ramble on without contradicting the stupid things he said.
I wrote Walter’s name over and over in my notebook.
Jenni had left me a million texts and e-mails, which I didn’t read before I deleted them.
I silenced my phone after the third time she called.
5
REJECTED:
Yale
Harvard
Princeton
Cornell
Brown
Emory
Vanderbilt
Middlebury
ADMITTED:
Trinity
Bowdoin
FUTURE:
Uncertain
6
When I heard the knock on the guest-room door, I said, “Go away.”
“Al,” Jenni said, “can I come in?”
/> “No. Go away.” I added, “Please.” We hadn’t spoken to or seen each other since the horrible birthday debacle the previous week. I knew she’d been in the house, knew she’d been talking to my mother.
I heard her slump against the other side of the door.
“I know how much you’re hurting.”
I started to say, “No, you don’t,” but then I thought about how she’d crumpled in the days after her mother died. We were just kids, but I remembered thinking that was when she had suddenly gotten older than me.
“Al,” Jenni said through the door. “He had a great life. No rat—maybe no one—has ever been more loved than Walter. You were his world, and it was a great world. At least he got to be old.”
I suspected she was thinking of her mom, who died so young.
Nothing she could say was going to make me feel better.
Nothing.
I wanted her to stop talking about him.
I said, “You can come in.”
When she opened the door, I saw she was carrying a bowl of Easy Mac and a diet A&W root beer. As soon as I smelled the cheesy goodness of the Easy Mac, I felt hungry.
I reached out for it, and when I remembered it was one of Walter’s favorite foods, I started to cry.
She sat next to me on the bed. I couldn’t control my body. It shook with sobs that erupted from deep inside. It didn’t take long for Jenni to start crying and we held each other and cried and cried and cried.
After a while, I started getting a headache and said that we were going to get dehydrated.
Jenni said, “I was afraid we were going to be swept away in a pool of Alice tears.”
I surprised myself—and Jenni—by laughing.
Then Jenni laughed.
And then both of us were both laughing and crying.
7
When I made it into work it was clear that someone had tipped Joan off. She said, “I understand you lost a friend.”
I nodded.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” she said, and drew me into one of her tight hugs.
