by Maile Meloy
“[Meloy is] a wise and astonishing conjurer of convincing realities.”
—The New Yorker
The perfect house, near the right school, and thrillingly affordable. How could Eleanor resist? A twenty-something single mother, sharing a room with her four-year-old in her parents’ house, she’s desperate for a new plan. This little bungalow, with its yard and tree, feels like a lucky gift.
It is only after the house is hers—having eaten her savings and set to devour her future income—that she realizes that something is terribly wrong. Investigating, she discovers her new neighbors: two ancient sisters who are feeding and fostering thousands of beloved “pets.” And what had looked like a fairy tale turns out to be closer to a nightmare.
In Devotion: A Rat Story, Maile Meloy takes on the hopes and horrors of domestic life with a story that is riveting and exquisitely unsettling.
“She’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.”
—Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
“Maile Meloy combines the meticulous realism of domestic fiction with the witchery of a natural-born storyteller.”
—Laura Miller, The New York Times Magazine
“Maile Meloy is a bit of a magician.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“In a Maile Meloy story, the thrill is in our own perception . . . [Her] style is disciplined and sly. She keeps a perfect poker face. And we’re players in the game.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Don’t let the easy accessibility of Maile Meloy’s writing fool you; she’s capable of witchcraft.”
—Time
ALSO BY MAILE MELOY
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
A Family Daughter
Liars and Saints
Half in Love
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2013 Maile Meloy
First published by Byliner, Inc., 2013
First Riverhead edition: 2015
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ISBN 978-0-698-40715-2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise for Maile Meloy
Also by Maile Meloy
Title Page
Copyright
DEVOTION
About the Author
That the yellow house was thrillingly affordable might have been a warning sign, if Eleanor had known how to read it. But she’d been desperate. She was sharing a room with her four-year-old daughter, Hattie, in her parents’ house, and she had to get out. Her parents didn’t want her to leave, but that was part of the problem. What her mother really wanted was to have Eleanor back inside her, along with Hattie, nested like matryoshka dolls.
So when the neat bungalow came on the market, close to the school her daughter loved, Eleanor thought she’d made it up. A wish on a candle. The seller was a pixie-like blond songwriter who was never there and was selling it as is—another red flag. But Eleanor had never bought a house before, and the real estate broker had the air of an authoritative and impatient aunt, waiting for a decision. She tapped long nails on the steering wheel of her parked Lexus while Eleanor gazed at the little house from the passenger seat. The sycamore in the yard had good roots, the broker said.
“Won’t someone outbid me?” Eleanor asked her.
“It’s too small for most people. And the seller thinks you’re sweet. I think we can wrap this up, if we do it now.” The broker tapped the steering wheel.
“You really think so?” Eleanor asked.
“Look, do you want it or not? You’re getting manna from heaven, in your price range. What do you want, a burger?”
What Eleanor wanted was to ask her father to come walk through the house. But the broker already didn’t take her seriously because she had a streak of pink in her hair and a bracelet of vines inked around her wrist. She didn’t want to be the hapless tattooed girl who had to call her dad.
“No, I want the house,” Eleanor said. “I do.”
“All right, then,” the broker said, dialing her phone.
The offer was accepted, and Eleanor promised her soul and her future income to the bank. It was a little dizzying. Her father raised his eyebrows at dinner. “Want me to look at it?” he asked.
“When I’ve got it all set up,” she said.
“You’ve got an inspector?” her mother asked.
“The broker does.”
“I want to see the house,” Hattie said. She’d been refusing to use the booster seat because she was not a baby, and her head barely cleared the table.
“You will,” Eleanor said. “You’ll have your own room there.”
Her daughter eyed her. Eleanor knew Hattie was thinking that she didn’t really want her own room, but she wasn’t going to be caught saying it.
“How about a real estate lawyer?” her father asked.
“It’s a very straightforward transaction,” Eleanor said.
At that, her parents fell silent. It was fraught territory. They’d wanted her to get a lawyer when Hattie was born, too, but she’d refused. She had met, in her last year of art school, a boy as fierce in his independence as she was, and their friends had bet against the romance lasting six months. When she got pregnant—a broken condom—she discovered that she had complicated feelings about fate, about why the latex had broken, about that particular sperm and that particular egg. James had moved to Australia. Struggling for his art wasn’t going to include taking care of a baby. He had no money, and sending lawyers after him would only have prolonged the pain.
The first year was a blur of tears and lost sleep, a demoralizing return home, and her mother’s delight in coming to the rescue. People felt sorry for Eleanor and sent her design jobs, and she took anything that was offered, staying up late after Hattie went to bed. Gradually the jobs turned into steady freelance work. She had saved money, living with her parents for four long years, and she had inherited a little more from her grandfather, and now she was trying to regain her own ground.
IT REALLY WAS a straightforward transaction. Escrow closed quickly, and she took possession right away. She bought two beds—an optimistically big one and a small one—and the mattress company delivered. There were no bookshelves in the house, but her father would help her build some. She drove her few boxes there by herself and was happy to be unpacking, making the beds, imagining her new life. Hattie would play in this yard and learn to climb the sycamore. Eleanor would get a swing set for the yard and hide Easter eggs in the spring, like her parents had done for her. She might even meet someone now, if she wasn’t living at home.
“No,” she said. But still the rat stared.
She took a threatening step forward, and it darted away.
She carried the box up the walk, haunted by the appraising way the rat had looked at her, and saw another toast-colored blur disappear along the side of the house. She called her father at work.
“There are rats here,” she said.
“There are rats everywhere,” her father said. “They live in the ivy.”
“No, these are serious,” Eleanor said. “They’re huge.”
“How huge?”
“Like small Chihuahuas.”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “Where are they?”
“One was on the lawn, and one running along the foundation.”
“Should I come over?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I don’t want you to see it like this.” She heard a small, patient sigh.
“Then call an exterminator,” he said. “And stay with us tonight.”
“I can’t do that. It’s admitting defeat.”
“Defeat to whom?” he asked. “To your mother? Don’t be a hero, Ellie.”
“Do rats carry disease?” she asked.
“I think what they carry is fleas, and fleas carry disease.”
“Oh, God,” she said.
“Ellie,” he said. “Call a professional and come home.”
She hung up and searched for exterminators on her phone, and called one who could come the next morning. She tried not to think about how thrilled her mother would be to have her back.
Outside the school, she watched the other mothers: the tall, thin, grown-up, married mothers, with the diamonds on their fingers and the tiny pleated workout skirts. One wore a pink silk shirt printed with riding tack, without irony. They didn’t have rats at home. Or fleas.
That night, her mother beamed with triumph over take-out pizza at the kitchen table. She said, “You know you can stay here as long as you like.”
“It will be good to have our own place,” Eleanor said.
“I don’t see why,” her mother said. “If it’s I-N-F-E-S-T-E-D.”
“What does that spell?” Hattie asked. She was already starting to read.
“She means the house is an investment,” Eleanor said. “A good thing to spend money on.”
Hattie pushed a crust across her plate. “Infestment,” she said.
“If I’d known you were coming home,” her mother said, “I could’ve cooked something special.”
“It’s not a special occasion, Mom. It’s a temporary setback.”
“It’s always a special occasion,” her mother said, tweaking Hattie’s nose.
IN THE MORNING, in Eleanor’s childhood bedroom, a battle raged. Hattie had two shirts that she was willing to wear, one red and one green. The green one was in a box at the new house. The red one was crusted with food and dirt from the day before. Hattie needed the shirts in order to be Manuel, a boy she worshipped at school. She didn’t want to be like Manuel, or even to be liked by Manuel. She wanted to be Manuel.
It was understandable. Manuel was handsome and dark-eyed, quiet and popular and effortlessly confident. He was a natural athlete. When they played catch, some of the boys adopted a showy flourish of elbow and knee, to make sure everyone was watching. With Manuel, you barely noticed the ball leave his hand. He was an efficient creature, with no wasted movement, and no apparent care for how he was seen.
Eleanor thought of her gay art history professor joking, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make women.” She wondered sometimes if Hattie identified as a boy. But she thought Hattie just wanted to be Manuel, and Manuel wore T-shirts in solid colors—like the green one Eleanor had left at the new house, and the red one she had forgotten to wash.
“I don’t want that one!” Hattie cried, pushing away a blue-striped shirt with a sailboat on the front.
“Hattie, please. We’ll be late for school.”
“No!” Hattie cried, throwing the striped shirt to the ground. Eleanor picked it up and tried to wrestle it over Hattie’s head, but her daughter was surprisingly strong, and squirmed and fought free. She threw her naked torso onto the bed and sobbed heartrendingly into the quilt, her tiny vertebrae countable down into her jeans.
Eleanor wanted to cry with her. But she was the mother now, which was confusing. She had so recently been the daughter, allowed to fling herself facedown and weep. She wanted to ask if this was how Manuel would behave—cool, collected, unflappable Manuel—but she would only sound peevish and ineffectual. She had new compassion for her mother, especially when they weren’t in the same room together. You just couldn’t win, as a mom. She went to brush her teeth and let Hattie cry it out.
In the mirror, there were shadows like thumbprints beneath her aching eyes. The rats had invaded her dreams: the ghostly touch of fur against her cheek.
Back in the bedroom, Hattie had taken the dirty red shirt from the hamper and put it on. She turned, wet-eyed and solemn, quietly triumphant in her red shirt.
“I am Manuel,” she said. “Why is Hattie crying?”
“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “I guess because she was sad.”
It was always unsettling, this transformation into the idealized boy in the correctly colored shirt, but Eleanor would take it if it got them out the door. She had known that she and James might produce a strong-willed and visual child, but she hadn’t expected this obsession with color and identity, or the struggle that would be daily life.
In the chaos of the school drop-off, Eleanor caught sight of the real Manuel, standing by the steps. He was wearing a blue shirt. No stripes, no sailboat, but blue! Hattie didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t need to talk to Manuel because she was him now, calm and sure. She looked an inch taller as she carried her pink backpack inside.
Eleanor drove to her new street and parked to study the neighborhood. The yellow bungalow was there, still neat and unassuming on the east side of the street, dwarfed by the huge sycamore. The neighboring house to the south was a newly built stucco number with a clay tile roof. The builder had used every possible square foot, as usual, and the house was boxy and top-heavy, crowding the lot.
On the north side, beyond the sycamore and a wooden fence, was a two-story blue clapboard house, with a peaked roof and peeling paint. The picture window had heavy gray curtains hanging closed against the sunny fall day. The broker had warned Eleanor that two ancient sisters lived there, and when they died, it would be a teardown. In full rationalizing mode, Eleanor had decided that the tall fence would block the noise and the dust.
It was easy to choose which house to approach, when one looked like a witches’ den and the other like a Taco Bell. She rang the doorbell of the boxy new house and heard the chime echo inside. After a minute a woman answered, in yoga pants and no makeup, her hair in a short silvery bob.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Eleanor said. “This is an awkward question, but I just bought the house next door, and I was wondering if you’ve had any trouble with rats.”
“I just came by to water the plants,” the woman said, blinking. “The owners are away.”
“Oh, okay,” Eleanor said. “So—you haven’t seen any rats?”
“Well, not lately.”
“Lately?”
“I’m sort of not supposed to talk about it,” the woman said.
Eleanor stared at her. “Please do.”
“It’s about property values, I think,” the woman said nervously. “It really stresses them out, the whole thing.”
Eleanor’s stomach seemed to flip over, like a pancake. “What whole thing?”
“You seem like a nice kid,” the wo
man said. “Look, I didn’t tell you this, but I think those ladies—the sisters—were feeding the rats.” She started to draw back into the house.
“Wait!” Eleanor said, putting a hand out. “Please!”
“I have to go,” the woman said, and she closed the door against the pressure of Eleanor’s hand.
Eleanor stood a moment, listening to the soft footsteps draw away inside the house. Then she went to the yellow bungalow and walked along the high fence she’d thought would protect her from construction when the sisters were gone. The slats were too close together to see anything between them. So she went to the sycamore and got a handhold and then a foothold. The bark was pale and mottled, resilient beneath her fingers, and she climbed until she could sit in the yoke of the tree, holding on to a branch. She looked down into the sisters’ backyard, where the grass was dead and the patio cluttered with broken furniture and cardboard boxes. Why had she never looked back here before? There were three shallow bowls set out, empty. There was a bag of cat food against the house. But she saw no cats.
Movement caught her eye in the shadows, beneath a spiky, untended plant near the foundation. It took a moment before she could identify individual bodies. They seemed to cluster and confer, and then break up and gather again, on some urgent, mystifying business. They had matted gray fur and tails as big around as her finger. She tried to count them, but there were too many and they moved too quickly, disappearing into the darkness of the undergrowth and then weaving out again. There was a basement vent without a cover, and they darted in and out of the dark.
Something moved in the tree and Eleanor flinched, but it was only the wind in the leaves. The sky was blue and cloudless between the branches. She climbed unsteadily down to the ground and stumbled away, feeling an enormous head rush, the world going briefly white.
“I KNEW THIS ADDRESS when you called,” the exterminator said. He was bearish and bearded, in jeans. “I thought, Oh boy. She sold it, huh? The musician girl?”
