Henry
The weather did what our phones said it would: It got cold—the legit kind you don’t normally get here until the sustained grayness of late January. I zip my coat to my chin and knock on Grace’s front door. Bella and Harry Styles answer.
“Finally,” Bella says. “We got a bunch of ’em!”
I shudder because it’s freezing and because I’m not sure what “a bunch” of mice means. There were two last night when Grace and I watched Edward Scissorhands. She texted me this morning and told me another one had shown up overnight.
It’s like a little party in there.
I’ll come over later and take care of it.
No hot dates today?
Stop it.
I’ll be at work. I & B will let you in. Say hi to the vermin for me.
I follow Bella and the dog into the warm house. Ian is at the coffee table drawing. Cartoons are on the TV.
“Hey, buddy,” I say.
“Hi,” he says, standing up.
“What’re you guys watching?”
Bella hits pause. “It’s a Barbie Christmas movie.”
“It was her choice,” says Ian. “I’m not really even watching it.”
“Boys can watch Barbie now,” Bella tells him. “The movie with all the singing elevated Barbie and made it feminist and ironic.”
I laugh because she struggled through some of those words and because I know they came from Grace. “No argument here,” I say. “Barbie rocks.”
I ask Ian what he’s drawing. He looks down at his pad and squeezes his forehead.
It looks like just doodles—elephants, like the sketch at the Walters, a few interlocking candy canes, more mice.
“I worked on some stuff at my grandma and grandpa’s,” he says.
“But…I don’t even know. It’s hard to come up with good art. ”
“I know, buddy,” I say. “You’ll figure it out.”
“I hope so.”
He comes with me into the kitchen where we find Bella and Harry Styles standing over the trap.
“There’s six of them!” says Bella.
“Whoa,” I say, shuddering again, “that really is a bunch.”
The kids’ nanny is here. She’s maybe in her early sixties. She’s wearing a purple scarf and long cardigan over a black T-shirt, and she doesn’t look nearly as excited about the mice as Bella does.
“Hi, I’m Nadine,” she says. “You’re the mouse man, huh?”
I shake her hand. “That’s me. Hi, I’m Henry.”
She looks down at the trap, which wriggles with life. “This was your idea, then? Giving them a little apartment here in the kitchen?”
“Yeah. Maybe not my best.”
“Mhm,” she says.
“Ian said he thinks it’s a mouse family,” says Bella, poking the trap.
“Kinda looks like it,” says Ian.
I crouch and pat Harry Styles’s head as I take a look. There’s no way to tell, but I get his point. Two mice stand at the front of the cage while the others hide behind them, like kids would, and since I’m all in now on personifying these creepy little things, my heart sinks for them.
“You wanna take them to the stream?” Ian says. “I’ll get my coat.”
I look out the window at trees swaying in the cold wind.
“You know what, buddy? Maybe I’ll handle this one. How about you hang back?”
“It’s really cold out,” Bella says. “I took Harry Styles to the bathroom before and it made my face hurt.”
“The mice have little fur coats, though,” I say, trying.
“You could watch the rest of Barbie with us if you want,” says Bella. “Take them to the stream after. Maybe it’ll be warmer then. It still has thirty-seven minutes left.”
Nadine and I exchange a look. If anything, it’ll be colder in thirty-seven minutes.
“I was just making us a little snack,” Nadine says. “Welcome to stay. You like dino nuggies?”
“Who doesn’t?” I say. “So, what’s this Barbie movie about?”
Bella rolls her eyes, like I should definitely know this. “Barbie and her sisters go to a small town and sing songs and have the best Christmas ever.”
“It’s actually kinda okay,” says Ian. “And we can draw. Maybe I’ll get an idea.”
“More the merrier,” says Nadine.
Bella heads back to the TV room. “You can’t sit on the couch with me, though, Henry. It’s my turn to lay on it with the Ravens blanket. You can have the chair.”
I was in a decent mood a few minutes ago, because the Barbie cartoon was surprisingly cute and because Nadine’s dino nuggies really hit the spot. Now, though, I’m grimacing as I walk through Grace’s neighborhood holding the humane trap.
“It’s not that cold,” I tell the mice, but of course it is, and I’m freezing my ass off.
The playground is desolate: frozen teeter-totters and empty swings rocking back and forth. At the drop-off point, what little water is left is topped with a glaze of ice.
When I set the cage down and open it, the mice do nothing. I give them a second, then lift one end and try to pour them out, but that doesn’t work, either. I shake the cage, then smack the back like dislodging ketchup.
“Come on, guys,” I say. “You gotta go.”
My only option, I’m realizing, is to pull them out, probably one by one.
Normally, a move like that would take some emotional gearing up, but it’s cold and I want to get this over with, so I take a deep breath, reach in, and find that the mice have huddled together for warmth.
As I pull one away, it squeaks and squirms in my hand.
“Shit,” I say. “Goddammit, I’m sorry.”
The mouse goes rigid, either from fear or the cold.
I set it on the ground, but the instant I let it go it leaps up and attaches itself to my shin.
Thankfully Ian isn’t here for my scream, which echoes through the woods.
I nearly swat the thing, but then I see that it’s looking at me.
I shake my leg a few times, but its eyes, beady and damp, stay fixed on mine.
I’m not scared of it anymore, or skeeved out, because I can see what’s happening.
With its tiny nails dug into my jeans, the mouse is pleading with me.
It knows that if I leave it here it’ll die.
I pull it as gently as I can from my leg and set it back in the trap with the others. “Okay,” I say. “You win.”
I’ve driven by this Petco on York Road a hundred times, but I’ve never been inside. There’s a bin full of candy cane–shaped dog chewies beside me, and I’m talking to a skinny young man with green streaks in his hair who works here.
“Um, yeah, those’re some pretty nice mice, man,” he says. “But, um, yeah, we don’t really take, like, donations.”
“You can’t sell them?” I ask. “You could just stick them in with those mice over there. No one would know, right?”
We look to an aquarium near the Guinea pigs that’s full of mice. They’re sticking their heads out of cardboard forts and climbing on one another, living it up. One stands on its hind legs atop a plastic riser, like it’s giving a speech.
“Those aren’t the same kind, though,” he says.
“They aren’t?” I ask.
Warm now in the trap, the mice—my mice—stare at me. They stared at me like this from the passenger seat on the way here, too. Thanks for not killing us, they seemed to be saying. But where are we going?
“Nah, man. We get ours from corporate. Like, an official inventory, tested for funguses and stuff. Lots of red tape.”
“Oh,” I say. “I had no idea.”
“If you’re dying to get them off your hands, I could feed them to the snakes. But the fact that you’re here looking to put them up for adoption makes me kinda think that’s not your jam, though. Yeah?”
Yeah. Saving them from a slow death by exposure only to feed them to snakes is something only a cartoon villain would do. Plus, the looks on Ian’s and Bella’s faces—particularly Bella’s—if they ever found out would haunt me.
There’s a guy in line behind me holding a bag of dog food the size of a beanbag chair. “Mind if I pay for this, bro?” he asks. “My back’s starting to go numb.”
The Petco guy looks at me, waiting. The guy with the dog food looks at me, too. So do six displaced mice.
It’s then that I notice Petco is running a special on aquariums. Twenty-five percent off. Not a bad deal.