Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

She nuzzled into my neck. “You smell like beer.”

  “And you smell like oranges,” I said.

  A few hours later Nicole shook me until I awoke. Nothing made any sense at first.

  “Don’t you hear that?” she whispered into my ear. We held our breaths and listened until finally there was a hard knocking against our bedroom window. “You see? It was coming from the living room first.”

  I scanned the room for a weapon and some clothes. It was too dark to make anything out.

  “Who’s there?” I shouted.

  “Let me in.” The voice was muffled on the other side of the glass but unmistakably Grace.

  “Jesus Christ. Go to the front door.”

  I switched on the night-table light and handed Nicole the first clothes I could find. She was hiding under the blankets and still wired with fear. I found my own clothes and went out into the living room. Grace’s outline was on the window of the front door.

  I unlocked the deadbolt and hissed, “What are you doing?”

  Grace was bundled in her parka and was carrying a small backpack. She stepped inside and took off her hood. Her hair was tangled and oily.

  “I need to borrow your car,” she said.

  “Absolutely not,” I told her. “It’s the middle of the goddamned night. Couldn’t you have called?”

  “Why can’t I borrow the car?” she asked.

  I raised my voice. “Because you took it without asking, at Mom’s house. Remember?”

  “You’re making a mistake. Do you remember the nail?” She looked me in the eyes. Then she walked off into the night as if she hadn’t just scared the shit out of us.

  I curled up behind Nicole and let my breathing settle again. Just before I drifted off, Nicole roused me. “What’s ‘the nail’?”

  I thought of that day when we were kids, the vivid image of the rusty nail pushing through Grace’s shoe, my obliviousness to her suffering, my foolish behaviour, all that shame I had carried, and I told Nicole, “I don’t know. Something from when we were kids, I guess.”

  She pushed her warm, soft body against me and said, “She’s getting worse. You should call John.”

  But I didn’t.

  —

  The next afternoon, Grace called from the Yorkdale shopping mall, the northern edge of town, looking to be picked up. She sounded near the point of exhaustion. She was standing in the parking lot near the highway when I arrived, and her appearance was shocking. Gone were most of her bohemian layers of shawls and fabric, replaced with a thin shirt and trousers. Her hair had been chopped down to a bob with short bangs. There seemed to be strands of grey in her hair. She had no winter coat and wore only canvas shoes.

  I brought her back to the basement apartment. There, Nicole greeted us cautiously and helped me get Grace onto the couch, where she fell asleep at once.

  “You need to call somebody,” Nicole told me.

  “I tried John but—”

  “No, someone who can actually help.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who’s the expert in this situation?”

  “You can’t handle this alone.”

  In the end I called my father. He listened as I explained the last few months leading up to that day.

  “What the hell do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

  I said, “Maybe she could come stay with you for a little while.”

  “Christ, son. She’s never listened to me once in her goddamned life and I don’t expect her to start now. Take her to somebody who can help. What do you think I am, a shrink?”

  No, Dad, I think you’re a shitty father. “I have to go.”

  Nicole stayed with me and made a simple dinner with what was in the house. Grace roused herself from the couch as Nicole was plating our meals.

  “You look young,” she said to me. Her skin was puffy and pale. “When is it?”

  “What? It’s seven o’clock.”

  “What’s the date?”

  “It’s the fifteenth,” I said.

  “December? 2006?”

  Nicole put two plates down on the table. “Grace, are you all right?”

  “You stay out of this,” Grace snapped.

  “Hey,” I said. “You can just stop that bullshit right now. Sit down.” She listened, and Nicole brought her a plate. It was hardly out of Nicole’s hands before Grace tore into the food. I had never seen her eat with such enthusiasm.

  Through a mouthful she said, “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”

  “I’ve seen the side of the highway before,” I told her. “What the hell were you doing out there?”

  “Hitchhiking.”

  “And what happened to your parka? You could have frozen.”

  She chewed her food and ignored me. Nicole took her own plate to the living room and ate there. I watched my sister clean her plate, fill it again from the pan, and finish her second serving.

  “You need to come with me,” she said. “For your own good.”

  “What are you talking about? Come with you where?”

  “You have to trust me. You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it for yourself.”

  I cleared the table and did the dishes. Grace didn’t stir from her seat. As I was drying my hands there was a knock at the door. I found John standing on our doorstep.

  “Why the hell are you here?” Grace said.

  “I can’t imagine it’s for the pleasant company,” Nicole said.

  “Mind your own business,” Grace told her.

  “You’re in my house,” Nicole said. “That makes it my business.”

  “Let’s go home, Grace,” John said.

  Grace turned from them and pleaded to me. “Come with me. Show me it isn’t inevitable.”

  “You’re unstable,” Nicole said. “You need help.”

  “You don’t know a fucking thing!” Grace turned her head and shouted. “God, you’re unbelievable. Never have I seen someone give so little and get so much in return. Why do you get to live out the rest of your meaningless, ignorant life in such bliss?”

  Then she looked back to me and bared her teeth in a horrid, pleading smile. “Come on, little brother. Prove yourself wrong. Help yourself. You just have to trust me.”

  I didn’t recognize the person standing in front of me, not her smile or her closely cropped hair or her sudden appeals. I said, “Grace, I’m not going anywhere. Nicole’s right. You do need help.”

  She looked devastated, flattened. She moved John out of the way and opened the apartment door. “Fuck you both, then. I should have known you couldn’t help but choose her, when it came down to it.”

  “Please take her to the hospital,” Nicole said to John.

  I took a few steps toward Grace. She was shivering. “Please just take it easy, O.K.? I’ll come see you tomorrow.”

  “It won’t be tomorrow,” she said.

  John had taken a taxi to the apartment. He walked Grace to the cab and they drove off. Nicole came up behind me and put her arms around my waist.

  —

  We lived. We worked. We nested as the cold weather made walking around the city unpleasant.

  I called John to keep updated. He told me she was sleeping well, feeling better after a few days of rest. Her doctor had made her an appointment with a psychiatrist in three weeks. I visited the apartment a few times to see her and, unlike John, I wouldn’t have said she was feeling better. She looked sedated and almost never spoke.

  And then one afternoon John called me at work. I stepped out of the office to avoid my bosses.

  “Everything O.K.?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure,” John said. “Grace is gone.”

  “Oh, for the— I thought you were watching her.” I went back into the office and grabbed my pea coat and toque.

  John’s voice was deep and defensive. “I was. One minute she was in the living room, and the next minute she was gone. Things were under control.”

  I rushed down the stairs and outside. “Clearly
they weren’t, John. Goddamn it.”

  I started at Union Station to see if she was taking a train or bus out of town. John tried their neighbourhood and left the city to continue the search. There was no sign of Grace. Nicole insisted we file a missing person’s report, and a day later I met with a short and strong-looking policewoman with her hair tied into a bun on the back of her head. She didn’t know how to smile, only smirk, and she propped her hands on the top edge of her heavy belt. Her uniform was dark blue with flaps on the shoulders and her pistol was huge and black in its holster. Her badge read Officer 2510.

  “You mind if I ask you a few questions about Grace?” Instead of taking off her military boots at the front door of the apartment, she wiped them on the mat and wore them inside. I don’t remember much else about the interview.

  —

  We lived. We worked. In turn, Nicole tried to distract, amuse, and comfort me.

  The holidays started a few days after Grace disappeared and John went home to Oshawa. I wasn’t in a rush to leave Nicole or the city and so I worked some overtime at the office, sending out last-minute grant applications to the government and organizing my bosses’ travel for the upcoming months. The distraction was nice. With the extra money, I bought Nicole a fancy set of pots and pans. During the nights, I would dream there was someone banging on the bedroom window and wake up looking for Grace.

  Just before the new year, I locked up the office for the day and wandered downstairs to the coffee shop. The barista and I were probably the only two people in the building. I took a seat near the window and watched the pigeons sift through cigarette butts and chewing gum for scraps of food. Looking up Spadina, past Queen and even to the coloured signs of Chinatown, the city felt wide and empty.

  And then suddenly it didn’t. I could feel her eyes on me before I could find them. She was remarkably close and seemed to come from nowhere. She looked as if she’d borrowed clothes from people living on the streets. She had a toque pulled down to her eyebrows and a scab on her chin but there was no doubt it was Grace.

  I ran outside and hugged her. She smelled like rotten food.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, and when I didn’t listen she pushed me away.

  She didn’t seem to care when I called John, didn’t move from where she was standing.

  “Get her to the apartment,” John said over the phone. “Get her some clean clothes, some coffee, maybe. I can be in town in an hour. We’ll take her to the hospital then.”

  I flagged a taxi and asked him to drive to Grace’s apartment. The sour tang of her body was so bad that the driver wanted no part of our fare. I offered him more money and cursed at him and eventually he drove.

  The cab left us on Bloor Street. Grace walked a few storefronts east and dug in a frozen planter’s pot until she found her keys in the soil.

  She wandered through the apartment and inspected all her belongings as if she’d never seen them before. She left an overpowering trail of smell everywhere she went. “All of this seems so strange, now. Pointless.”

  “Let’s get you cleaned up,” I told her.

  “What are you talking about?” She looked back at me, and her face became a cruel grin. “You don’t get it. I’m not staying. I just thought I owed you a goodbye.”

  “Come on. Don’t talk like that. John will be here soon.”

  “John doesn’t matter.” She kept moving through the apartment, occasionally running her hand along the wall or stopping to look at her possessions. I followed her closely. In the washroom, she pulled the bottles of pills from the medicine cabinet and took her time reading the labels. She carried them with her into the second bedroom, past the giant mirror.

  “Don’t bother trying,” she said. She stared out the window but seemed to be following some other logic in her head. Then she let out one awful laugh. “It’s a pointless thing to say, of course. Everything’s already set in motion here. You’re going to try, and you’re going to fail, and you’re going to suffer horribly for it.”

  “You’re my sister. Of course I’m going to help you if I can.”

  “I’m not talking about right now. You think you’re helping? You’re so myopic that you can’t see the operant chamber you’re in, or how everything you do is being quantified and manipulated. You don’t even feel that detached interest scrutinizing your every idiot move. How could you ever help anything? The only people who could have let me in—well, they made it abundantly clear that they had no interest in doing so.”

  “Grace,” I said, “you’re not in a good state.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. My head is clear. I’ve just had my fill of being alone.” She walked to the large mirror and looked carefully. “I’m tired. I was tired of you all a long time ago. I’m tired of things being inescapable, incomprehensible. I’m tired of getting what I want and I’m tired of not getting what I want. At least when I’m dead I won’t have to be tired anymore.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  She shook her head, glanced at me briefly, then looked back to her reflection. “You know, things would have been really different if you’d come with me instead of listening to Nicole.”

  And without warning she slammed her hand into the large wood-framed mirror. It shattered instantly, a ripple of cracks radiating out from her fist. She twisted her arm and I could hear bits of broken glass grind into her skin.

  “Jesus Christ!” I yanked her arm away from the mirror. A few shards fell but most stayed in the frame. Then I ran to the washroom, soaked a towel under the faucet, and brought it back to the bedroom.

  My error was instantly clear. The room was empty. Behind me, the apartment door was ajar. I rushed back to the window in the second bedroom in time to see Grace running west on Bloor and veering north up a side street. I didn’t bother to close or lock the doors behind me. I sprinted along the path she’d taken until I wasn’t sure which way to turn. If there’d been a snowfall I would have been able to follow her tracks.

  I never caught up with her.

  —

  That night, after John and the police and everything else, Nicole held me close and asked me about what had happened. Grace’s last words had burrowed into me and kept repeating in my head: Things would have been really different if you’d come with me instead of listening to Nicole.

  I told Nicole I was tired and would rather talk about it in the morning.

  WHERE THE WATER MEETS THE TREES

  HERE WE GO.

  It’s been four months since I last crawled into this box but the sensation is identical, a saturating darkness. Before I even have the flashlight out of my pocket, the temperature drops and my breath no longer reverberates off the inner mirrors. The smell of wood and glue gives way to something musky and damp.

  I click on the light and for a moment I’m blinded by my reflection. Foreground, background, everything in between, the illuminated and the obscured, all of it is me. Infinite self-repetition, a line that extends from me to some indistinct haze that fills all space. It should be bright inside the box but instead it’s dim. No matter where I turn I see myself. It’s surprising how varied I appear. Fear, hesitation, anger. Am I making those faces? My features are contorted in threat, menace.

  Buddy scuttles from one shoulder to the other and back again, all the while tapping at me with his forepaw. He curls his tail around my neck to steady himself. I don’t doubt his resolve even if I doubt my own.

  The hairs on my arms rise. The sound of my heartbeat swells and fills my ears.

  There is something approaching and it intends to do harm. It is hunting me, preparing to draw my blood again. I remember how it felt, painless at first and then an intolerable burning. This time it will cut deeper. It will take more of me. It will hollow me out until I am nothing but a husk.

  I spin in circles and shine the light. The space inside the box is now enormous. The air is gelatinous and suffocating. My reflections are all sneer and enmity. I am afraid. I am afraid of pain, of dyi
ng. I am afraid of the thing that is hunting me.

  You’ll always find what you bring with you.

  I close my eyes, breathe slowly. Think of Buddy on my shoulder.

  The hunter reaches me. It snorts its hot, heavy breath onto the back of my neck.

  Eyes still closed, I click off the light. Think of Grace when she was eight years old, my earliest memories, what a happy shithead she had been, how brilliantly she shone. I knew I would never excel and I knew I would never burn bright like her and I knew it didn’t matter. I was just happy to be on her team.

  The hunter circles me. It grunts. It smiles in the dark and I can hear its teeth. It’s deciding how to annihilate me.

  Think of John’s confident handshake and the way he welcomed me into their little social world. His loyalty to my sister was unwavering, despite her best efforts to reject him. He tried to protect us all.

  The hunter places a weight against my spine, something heavy and sharp. It wants me scared. It runs the weapon down my back and the edge catches the fabric of my coat. Claws? A knife? Then the weight is gone and it draws back, poised, a pause before it strikes.

  Think of Steve and Lee, always just trying to be good to each other, and of Brian, who must have been tormented with feelings for his best friend’s girlfriend for so long.

  Think of Nicole and how empowered she had been when we met, how empowered she’d become again since we broke up.

  Think of how they all tried to be good people and how, sometimes, I helped them with that. Think of them.

  And then there is nothing.

  —

  More specifically, I sense nothing. There are no sounds, no blades puncturing or cleaving me. I open my eyes to a complete black, but there is nothing hiding in it. It is just darkness. I’ve avoided its attack for now.

  My muscles ache, remind me I’m still crouching. I click on the flashlight and it projects into empty space. My reflection is nowhere to be seen. The emptiness disorients me and so I put a hand down to steady myself.

  Grass between my fingers.

  In the sky, tiny pinpricks of light appear and disappear as I move my head. At first they are unfamiliar to me. Stars.

  I sweep the light to the ground and find grass and earth. There is no sign of the box at all. My eyes are adjusting to the low light and now I understand why the stars are appearing and disappearing: there is a canopy above me that hides most of the sky. It’s almost too high for the flashlight to reach but I see the unmistakable outline of branches and leaves.