Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  We passed into a newer subdivision, its look more familiar to me.

  “My mom just doesn’t think highly of someone voluntarily disappearing,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  He pointed down the street, the end of which had a diamond-shaped sign tiled in yellow and black. “Park near the dead end. My mom would just rather I forgot about anything to do with Grace.”

  “Including me,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  I parked the car and we got out. He dragged the shovel and his backpack through the passenger side door and the pointed blade of the shovel clinked against the asphalt. He said, “I need to dig something up.”

  “What? Here?”

  “Here. Keep watch and tell me if anyone notices what we’re doing.”

  He walked toward the dead end. I could hear the sound of the shovel striking the hard earth, John jumping on the blade’s footrest to sink it deep into the ground. I leaned against the back of my car and scanned the houses for activity.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “See the beige house? I used to live there.”

  I examined the house but nothing suggested it was any different from any of the others in the neighbourhood. Behind me there was the unzipping of the backpack and John’s breath coming heavily. He shovelled for a few more minutes, interrupted once by a brief, deep thud, and then he made his way back to the car. The backpack looked full and hung heavily from the straps.

  “Step one is complete,” he said. “Let’s get to your mom’s house and unload your car.”

  As we pulled away, I noticed that the diamond-shaped dead-end sign had been toppled and there was a large hole where it had stood. John’s face had a glaze of sweat across it and he looked rattled.

  —

  We unloaded Grace’s things into the foyer of my childhood home. My mother cried and cursed and tugged at her hair, saying, “She was always so goddamned difficult.”

  I hugged her short, squat frame, the older and overweight version of Grace’s figure, and avoided her questions about why I’d visited so infrequently over the last year. I wasn’t entirely sure myself, but it had something to do with the last family dinner we’d had. John stayed out of the way.

  My mother said, “Why would she do this to me?”

  After our visit I waved to her as we drove off. John didn’t look back and didn’t wave, which bothered me, but he spoke up before I could mention it.

  “School’s almost out,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You and Grace went to the same school until grade eight, right? Would you mind showing it to me?”

  I pulled into the next driveway and turned around. We passed my mother’s house again but she was no longer on the front porch. We continued down the slow curve of the street. At the corner was the patch of grass we once called a park, and as always it was flooded in parts and the sod was torn down to the mud by kids playing sports. A line of unremarkable children trudged along the sidewalk toward their equally unremarkable houses in the subdivision. At the origin of this line of children was my old elementary school.

  I turned left and followed the edge of the park until we reached the parking lot of the school. It was still mostly full of cars but there was a slow trickle of adults coming out the teachers’ exit.

  “Have you ever thought about why we swing things like sticks and bats?” John asked.

  I put the car in park and turned off the ignition. “Jesus Christ, John, what are you on about? Do you want to see this school or not?”

  “I do,” he said. “I was just thinking about physics. Who is that?”

  A pudgy, be-sweatered teacher was huffing his way through the parking lot.

  “No idea,” I said.

  John was staring at his hands, squeezing and releasing them slowly. “I mean, why not just use your fist or hand in baseball? Why use a bat?”

  I sighed. “Because it hurts.”

  He shook his head. “Tennis, then. Tennis balls don’t hurt. Why do we use a racket?”

  “This is sounding like a conversation with Grace,” I told him. He didn’t reply, so I thought about it for a moment. “I suppose we use sticks and bats because we can hit the ball farther.”

  “Exactly,” he practically shouted. An older woman made her way to her car. “So why can we hit the ball farther with a stick versus our hands?”

  “No idea. Because it’s harder? Because it makes our arms sort of longer?”

  John smiled, opened his door, and got out of the car. Before he closed the door he reached back inside for the shovel. He said, “Come on.”

  I climbed out of the car but left the keys in the ignition. The car made a persistent dinging sound while my door was open. Outside it was still brisk but some sun had found a hole in the cloud cover and it felt amazing on my face. Another man left the school and John asked again, “Who is that?”

  The man was bundled heavily and his hair was a little greyer but it still didn’t take long to recognize him. “Christ, that’s Mr. Stanley. I had him for homeroom in grade six. He taught the junior elementary kids science. I can’t believe he’s still here.”

  “Speaking of science,” John said and grasped the shovel’s handle like a bat. He lifted the arrowheaded blade off the ground a little and feigned hitting a ball. “So what’s happening in a swing that’s so magical?”

  “No idea. John, what are we doing here?”

  “In a minute,” he said. He stuck the blade in the ground and pulled a toque and gloves from his pocket. I couldn’t help smiling at his outfit: black pants, black pea coat, black toque, black gloves. He grabbed the shovel again by the end of the handle. “I’m going to swing again and you tell me what you see. Observation! That’s half of science.”

  He stood in front of me waggling the blade of the shovel like an idiot until I said, “John, I have no idea what the hell you’re getting at.”

  “Well, how far is the end of the shovel moving in one swing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. A couple of feet?”

  “And how far are my hands moving?”

  I paused, a glimmer of insight coming to me. “Not very far. A couple of inches each way. Is that it? The end is moving faster than your hands.”

  “Almost!” he said. “Do you remember Newton’s equations from high school?”

  “Are you joking?”

  John was wired with energy now, practically skipping from one foot to the other in excitement. I’d never seen him so boisterous before, never experienced anything other than calm and control from him. “Acceleration is the key. If you want more force, you need more acceleration. So your hands pull at the handle, which makes the tip speed up much faster than your hands could on their own, which increases the force. Then that force is transferred to the ball. Isn’t that great?”

  “Riveting,” I said. I brought my hands to my face and blew on them. My fingers became warm for a moment and got cold again almost instantly. A few more teachers passed through the exit, one of whom was Ms. White, another of my homeroom teachers. It was amazing to go so unrecognized by these people, to be a couple of oddballs standing outside the parking lot with a shovel. “Is there a point to all of this, John?”

  He smiled at me and stepped forward. His voice was quiet but bristling. “I’ve been reading about this, trying to figure out how to maximize my swing. Turns out the secret is in your hands. Poor swingers pull both of their hands in the same direction, trying to make the bat move forward faster. But professionals know you need to pull your hands in opposite directions.”

  He took another slow swing, showing me his right hand moving toward his body and his left hand moving away. He said, “When your hands move in opposite directions, it creates torque, and that increases the acceleration at the end of the bat. Therefore, more force. Who are they?”

  Two men exited the school together. One was young and burly, and the other was much older but looked like he used to be a physical pr
esence. I recognized the older teacher.

  “What’s his name?” I said aloud. “He taught Grace for two years in a row. The second year, she practically begged my parents to leave his class—”

  “Thornton,” John said.

  “What? How—”

  “Two of them. That’s a shame.”

  It happened fast. John sprang away with the shovel trailing behind him a little. Something about the lightness of his steps reminded me of a deer running full speed. He shouted, “Hey,” and both teachers looked up at him. There was one last step, still gripping the shovel at its end, and then he swung. His wide shoulders twisted perfectly and his hands pulled in opposite directions to maximize torque and all the force in the flat end of the shovel transferred into the face of Mr. Thornton.

  The sound was like dropping a rock on a pile of meat. The old teacher stumbled and took a knee. At first he looked all right, only stunned. The younger teacher looked at John in utter confusion and before he could gather his senses John cross-checked him with the handle of the shovel as hard as he could. The push caused John’s coat to rip along the seam of the shoulder and the younger teacher bounced off the hood of a car and onto the ground. This happened in an instant.

  I looked back to Thornton and a black stream of blood began to gush from each nostril. He opened his mouth and it was a red, wet hole. John turned and said something to me but all I could hear was my heartbeat.

  A dozen disjointed pieces of my sister’s life suddenly fit together, connections that I’d been either too stupid to make or too eager to avoid. On his knees in front of me was the source of so much of Grace’s unhappiness, the scar that my parents never truly acknowledged because they were too wrapped up in their own fighting, the secret everyone had kept from me. There was enough of a pause that I could have stopped what was about to happen, enough space and time to shout at John or hold him back. But instead I crossed my arms and let John continue. He took two quick steps toward the old man, like a track and field athlete, and swung again as hard as he could.

  This time John’s aim wasn’t as precise and the shovel made contact where the blade’s footrest and the handle connected. There was a terrific snap and I wasn’t sure if it was the shovel or Thornton’s cheekbone. Thornton twisted and fell and his face made a rough sound as it scraped across the asphalt. He was unconscious but he coughed and bits of teeth and tissue sputtered into a pool in front of him.

  I thought for an instant that it would be cathartic, this late revenge for Grace. Instead it felt empty, a mistake, and John’s logical extreme was horrific, not heroic. I ran to stop him from doing anything else, grabbed his shoulder, and he turned to me with a fist raised. When he saw it was me, he gave me a grotesque smile. Then he looked over my shoulder and stiffened.

  The young, brutish teacher was rushing toward us. I put out my arms to block him and said, “Hold on—”

  He grabbed my right arm and pulled it down and toward him. I stumbled forward into his blocky fist. It made contact with my left eye and I heard a crack and my neck snapped back. There were white and pink flashes and something hard slammed against the back of my head. I tried to move and realized I was on the ground, on my back. The world swam when I lifted my head so I put it down as lightly as I could.

  There was a scuffling sound and some grunted half-words and another sharp crack. Then there were hands on me, pulling me up by the collar of my coat. I heard John say, “Come on. Come on.”

  He wrapped one of my arms around his neck and carried me. The toes of my shoes dragged against the ground. He opened a car door and threw me into a seat, and a moment later I heard the interior bell dinging for a few seconds as John got in. The ignition turned, the car went into gear, and we were away. It surprised me that he didn’t squeal the tires but rather drove off calmly.

  —

  Eventually I could open both eyes and found that we were on the highway. The sun was setting and the sky was getting dark. I put my hand up to my bad eye and found that it was swollen and tender from the eyebrow to the cheekbone. The lid was closed. I turned my head to look at John in the driver’s seat. The world was still reeling in my vision and I groaned.

  “You’re all right,” he said, “but you probably have a concussion.”

  I straightened my body in the seat and immediately felt lightning travel from my abdomen to my throat. I cranked open the window as quickly as I could, my stomach wrung itself out, and I vomited into the open air. A car honked behind us.

  “You almost certainly have a concussion,” he said.

  The air on my skin was too much so I closed the window. The signs on the side of the road made it clear we were travelling west, back into the city. There were a number of things I wanted to say, all cycling through me. I settled on “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I’m sorry for dragging you into this,” he said. “I keep saying that to myself, and then I keep dragging you in even further.”

  “Just shut up,” I said. “Shut up. I’m done. I don’t want to hear it.”

  He complied. We drove the highway in silence, no radio, and veered south into town. John parked us right in front of my basement apartment. He turned off the car but didn’t get out. I wouldn’t look at him but I could feel his eyes on me.

  He said, “You know that I had a good reason for what just happened.”

  “Get the fuck out of my car, John,” I told him.

  “You could have stopped me but you didn’t.”

  “Get out!”

  He paused, almost said more, and then he opened the driver’s side door and exited. He left the door open and the bell dinging straight into my skull. Eventually I raised myself from the passenger seat, collected the keys, and locked all the doors. My reliable car looked empty and useless without all of Grace’s belongings filling the backseat. I looked north and could see the dark outline of John making his way toward home, the heavy backpack on his shoulders. The shovel was nowhere to be seen.

  The lights were on in the apartment and it smelled like garlic when I came in the door. Nicole was at the kitchen counter and wearing a spattered apron.

  “Hi,” she said without turning to me. “I hope you’re hungry.”

  The sight and smell of food, even the hiss of the frying pan, made me nauseated. I kicked off my shoes, made my way to the couch, lay down, and closed my eye. I didn’t bother taking off my coat.

  Eventually Nicole noticed my face and came over. “Oh god. Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I told her.

  “Hold on.” She went back to the kitchen and brought some ice in a paper towel. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said. She kept thrusting the ice at my face but it stung to the touch and I didn’t like having her arms so close to me. I pushed her hands away and closed my eyes. “Just lay off for a minute. Jesus.”

  “Did you get mugged? Have you been to the hospital?”

  She was breathing all over me, her hands just above my face. I said, “Can you just leave me alone for once? It’s nothing.”

  She held her breath. She was still. Then she stood up.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asked.

  She went to the kitchen, then yanked out some drawers in the bedroom, and finally she slammed the front door. I kept my eyes closed and must have fallen asleep. When I awoke, I found a half-cooked dinner, cold and congealed. Nicole didn’t come home after that.

  2006

  IT WAS A SLOW MORNING at work. My bosses sent me out on a coffee run, and when I returned there was a sticky note on the computer monitor at my desk.

  Nicole called

  P.S. Keep personal calls to minimum

  I waited until they were out of the office for lunch.

  “Hi, Trouble.”

  “Danger. Your boss man wasn’t pleased to hear from me.”

  “He’s probably in a fight with boss lady. There’s nothing else to do around here right now.”

  “They should let you come hom
e, then. I could find something for you to do.”

  “Hah. Right.”

  “The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. Your bosses should read Russell.”

  “I’ll let them know. Not sure they’ll take philosophic advice from my cook girlfriend, though.”

  “What, I can’t have a rich, intellectual life? Do I suddenly have to frame all my metaphors with food?” She was smiling through the phone. “Listen, when do you want to leave tonight? I want to make sure I have enough time to bake something for your mom.”

  “About that…I’ve been thinking.”

  “Hey.” A pause. “Don’t do this.”

  “I’m sorry, Nicole. It’s just that, after the whole fight between you and Grace—”

  “This has been planned for over a month.”

  “I just think it’d be better if you two weren’t duking it out at the kitchen table. Grace and my mother already don’t get along well.”

  “I booked the day off work.”

  “I’m sorry, Trouble.”

  “I have to go.”

  Nicole was reading in bed when I got home, her legs tucked under the covers. She put down her book when I came into the room. “So let me get this straight: you, Grace, and John are all going to dinner.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s just me who is excluded.”

  “I know it sounds horrible—”

  “It is horrible!” she said. “Do you have any idea how that makes a person feel?”

  “I really am sorry,” I said, crouching in front of her. “If it’s any consolation, I think you’re the lucky one in all this. I’d rather stay here and read with you.”

  “Read?” The faintest hint of a smile, which was a relief for me. She leaned forward for a kiss and then shoved me away. “Now out of my sight, thank you.”

  —

  Despite the mild weather, Grace was huddled with John’s arms draped over her. She climbed into the front passenger seat and John got in the back. I was double-parked and cars honked at me as they got in.