The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  What would she be willing to sacrifice to stay alive? Her arm? Her eye? She wonders what she is willing to sacrifice for the baby-to-be, or the baby-who-might-be. Or for her relationship. The night before she left, Dale’s reflection appeared inverted in the Steuben crystal cat in their living room. “Whatever you need to do,” her upside-down boyfriend said to her, “you must do.”

  The thought of his generosity makes her vomit off the deck. Her stomach is tight and angry. The doctor says the nausea is good: the baby is settling in, taking hold. In a month, at the end of her first trimester, her queasiness should go away. In the kitchen, she rinses her mouth out with water before she sweeps the trap and the bloody mouse tail into a dustpan and throws them both over the railing of the deck. Then she calls Dale. She thinks she will tell him she is pregnant, and this is why she has gone away, though this is not the whole story. She doesn’t understand the whole story, only that now that she is pregnant, she feels the need for certainty—not absolute certainty but enough.

  “I thought we were incommunicado,” he says bravely.

  “Señor Avocado, how did you know it was me?”

  “Señora Mango,” he answers, “don’t be a fruit case. We salsa together rather too well for me to have forgotten your juicy flesh so quickly. You haven’t met a spicy jicama, have you?”

  “Well, there is a yam here who is stripped to his starched underwear,” she answers, sickened by how easily they banter even under difficult circumstances. They should know better.

  “I’m getting jealous,” Dale says.

  “Don’t be. He’s rotten. I threw him away.”

  “So cruel.”

  Deirdre begins to cackle but can’t keep up the game. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Dale asks. “You can’t help it. You needed some time to yourself.”

  She hates him for saying this, for being so reasonable. She should try to explain. What? She’s not sure—that she is pregnant and this, along with a slow accumulation of other things, has made her question whether they should stay together. But doubt, fear, something—what is it?—keeps her quiet, makes her cowardly. She would like to punch herself in the stomach, but she can’t. “There are mice. The cabin is overrun with them.”

  Dale snorts.

  “They’re driving me crazy,” she continues. “I caught one this morning, but it gnawed off its tail and got away.”

  “You maimed a mouse.” Dale sounds offended. “Great. Now he’s dying slowly somewhere in the cabin.”

  She groans. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Just live with them.”

  “But they’re small. They’re always underfoot, or worse, they’re not underfoot, and then I’m worrying about where they are, when they’re going to surprise me.”

  “They sound just like children,” Dale snorts.

  This silences Deirdre. If Dale knew of her pregnancy, he would, she thinks, happily insist on having the baby, even though in the abstract he supports zero population growth and draconian quotas on births. He would behave gallantly, mustering a smile and proclaiming, “Rules are made to be broken,” just as he’ll eat vegetables cooked in butter when they are dinner guests of people unacquainted with his recent transformation from vegetarian to vegan.

  “Just don’t kill them,” Dale pleads. “They haven’t done anything to hurt you. Do the dishes and keep the food put away. Next time, we’ll bring catch-and-release traps and figure out how they’re getting in.”

  His plan is so reasonable. “I love you,” she says.

  He doesn’t say anything back. Of course she loves him, though something has changed. She loves him from habit. She loves him because he is her boyfriend, and she has loved him for five years, and it is difficult to imagine a life that does not involve loving him.

  “Be nice to the mice,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says. “I guess I’ll go.”

  “You go.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Okay, you’re gone,” he says, getting in the last word. This irks her.

  She thinks about the moment she started to feel differently about Dale, how insignificant it was. They were on vacation, up here on vacation, and she was lying on the couch, reading the Rough Guide to Australia because she wanted to go diving on the Great Barrier Reef, and popping chunks of dried pineapple into her mouth. Her tongue hurt, her gums stung, but she couldn’t stop herself from reaching for another piece of pineapple. And then Dale came in and said, “Wanna shoot some hoops?” And she agreed because she had to get away from the pineapple, and she’d read everything she could about the reef. What if the circumstances had been different? What if she’d been eating grapes and reading a mystery? She might have rolled her eyes at Dale’s offer. Playing basketball wasn’t her idea of fun. But they walked to the basketball court (where they also occasionally played tennis), and Dale taught her how to bend her knees, flick her wrist. “That’s right, baby,” he said, “it’s all in the follow-through.” She sunk that first three-point shot, and later she made a whopping three in a row and felt so giddy, so suddenly sure of her ability to learn all kinds of new things after telling herself for many years that she was the kind of person who liked knowing things, not learning them. After the ball’s third swish, Dale jumped in the air, doing an impromptu cheer: “Two, four, six, eight! To whom do I masturbate?” He came down so hard on his ankle, it sounded like Velcro being ripped. If none of this had happened, if she’d just stayed put, maybe she would not have felt the unbearable weight of him on her arm as they walked together back to the cabin.

  Of course this is not the real reason she wonders whether they should split up.

  It is one among hundreds of reasons. People change in all kinds of small ways. What can she say? My boyfriend turned into an animal rights nut. He refuses to try new things. He’s started exaggerating the seriousness of his hobbies. He’s lost his edge. Each on its own is so petty, so insignificant. What’s the point of saying anything?

  For several days, Deirdre treats the mice like houseguests who have overstayed their welcome. When she finds a mouse in the deep tub in the master bedroom, she gets a bucket. Leaning against the porcelain side, she senses the limit of her stomach’s give and imagines the thing inside her solidifying, forming opinions, mouthing, “Stop doing that.” The mouse refuses the invitation of the yellow bucket tipped on its side.

  “Little guy,” she says in a voice she reserves for children. “You’re a cute little guy, and I want to help you get out of there.”

  The mouse scampers to another corner of the tub, as if they are playing a lighthearted game of tag: he skitters away, she moves the bucket; she reasons with him, he ignores her. Her belly hurts—she is hungry or sick. “Get in!” she shouts, pressing the lip of the bucket into the corner, edging it under his body, trying not to do internal harm.

  She drapes a towel over the bucket, not because she fears the mouse escaping, but because she is afraid of being infected with his panic. It doesn’t work. As soon as she walks outside and into the trees, tiptoeing around the nettles and keeping an eye trained on the ground for slugs, she starts to worry about separating the mouse from his mouse friends, about his nestbuilding and foraging-for-food skills. She thinks of the raccoons wearing their bandit masks ambushing the mouse. She peeks down at him. He is already vibrating like an old-fashioned alarm clock.

  Her only choice is to take him back inside. The mice have moved to a foreign country, learned the language, and now the place that was once home is strange, full of potential peril. She will have to adjust. Back in the living room, she tips the bucket on its side. The mouse rushes underneath the couch.

  As though to test her resolve, another mouse is quivering beneath the eye of the bathtub drain that night. She frees her in the walk-in closet, then sets out finger dishes of water and feta crumbles for her miniature guests. The mice emerge in packs. Tucked into the top bunk, gently rubbing her stomach, she listens to the cabin rustling. Knowing that the mice are r
esponsible for the noise doesn’t lessen her fear. Sometimes the unexpected happens, and you have to decide if it’s a miracle or just the opposite.

  To give the mice their space, she contemplates sleeping on an air mattress on the deck, but that would mean contending with the slugs, who might be tempted to lay a sticky silver trail across her pillow in the middle of the night. Slugs do not interest her; though gastropods, they are all body and no shell. She moves her meals from the table to the couch, where she can keep her feet in plain sight. After eating, she naps. Then she combs the beach for treasures. Her collection of shells has taken over the kitchen counter: the clamshells come in two varieties like potato chips: traditional or ridged. Mussels are shaped like thumbs and so intensely green they appear black. The spiraled snails are as small as a baby’s pupils, and she can find them only by sitting on a log and studying the sand in the small area between her feet. The big snail shells are thick with calcification and brilliant white and soft from being dragged back and forth across the sand. Faded browns and grays pattern Chinaman hats, and the warty exteriors of oysters hide their iridescent insides. She wonders whether Dale would object to her collecting shells on the grounds that she is appropriating creatures’ homes for her own selfish pleasure. Probably. She arranges them in pleasing designs.

  One night as she eats—her plate of steak, steamed asparagus, and dirty potatoes balanced on her stomach, her feet propped up on the armrest of the sofa, her sparkling water on the floor—the baby kicks. This is impossible. Her mind must be playing tricks on her. At this stage, the heartbeat is barely visible, the baby just a four-inch wisp of cells, buds of baby teeth, soft nails. And yet she is sure. She puts her plate on the ground and cradles her stomach, even though it is still mostly flat, and waits for the baby to move again. Now there is no denying the something inside of her, the thing that kicks, the baby, the baby that she and Dale have made. Another tiny ripple. She begins to cry. In the kitchen, the mice are scrambling, scratching, gnawing. They are sampling everything, wasteful little creatures. They nibble a corner of a granola bar before they change their minds and break into a box of cereal for a flake or two.

  Deirdre’s clothes are strewn across the floor along with piles of books and magazines, glasses choked with cherry pits and orange rinds and shriveled slices of lime and cucumber. Dale would be appalled. The baby is quiet now, gone, turned back into a motionless thing sleeping inside of her. What do you think of mice, little one? She pushes herself up from the couch, filled with resolve to tidy up, but just then three mice mosey around the corner and stop in the middle of the living room, sitting back on their hind legs and waving their pointy noses in the air like orchestra conductors. That night Deirdre sleeps on the couch, shifting uncomfortably and dreaming of small things: Our cupboards are emptying, they tell her. Soon they will be bare.

  The next morning, Deirdre goes into the bathroom off the master bedroom. Here, the light is good, and there is a full-length mirror on the back of the door. She looks like she has eaten a large meal, but otherwise nothing is different. She probes her stomach with her fingers, trying to find the small thing, but it seems to have folded itself up and disappeared into a tight nook.

  There is another mouse in the bathtub, a gray one, just like the one trapped earlier in the week, trying to climb the slippery walls. She wonders whether mice have suicidal impulses. She imagines this one darting along the edge, gathering speed, then veering into nothingness, its tiny paws still moving.

  “I put water out for you,” she scolds. “Why didn’t you drink it?”

  The phone rings. When the answering machine clicks on, Dale clears his throat. “Deirdre, are you there?” He pauses. “Uh, well, I just wanted to tell you that the crystal cat burned a hole in the wooden table next to the window. I guess she’s like a magnifying glass. I smelled something burning and thought I’d left the stove on. Well … I feel dumb talking into the answering machine. It would be easier telling you this in person. Anyway, when I came back, I saw smoke curling up from the table. That cat really heats up. I burned my thumb. Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d both been away?”

  Our apartment would have burned down, Deirdre thinks. Or, like the cabin, it might have been infested with mice. She has an irrational urge to pick up the phone and yell: “Things happen, Dale. They just happen.”

  He pauses again, his breath raspy and audible. “Well, okay, then. Good-bye.”

  She walks. It is easier to leave the cabin to the mice, and the upper island is crisscrossed with trails to explore. She laces on her hiking boots, packs herself a lunch—two bologna sandwiches, slices of cheese, crackers, orange soda, apples. Beef jerky for a snack. A liter of water. The lower half of the island was cleared fifty years ago, but the upper island is thick with Douglas-fir, cedars, spruce, and other trees she doesn’t know. Halfway up the big hill, the pavement ends, and the road turns first to gravel and then to dirt. She passes the hulking metal water tanks where the water that is piped from the first lake is purified, the small electric station, the road to the old dump. At Horseshoe Lake, she sits on the steps of a small cabin that was built by loggers, the island’s early inhabitants. She spots something floating in the middle of the lake and moves down to the small dock. It’s a canoe. “Hello,” she calls out, because it’s just far enough away that she can’t see it clearly. “Is someone out there?” Something rustles, and she feels a tinge of fear, but a deer steps out of the trees and gracefully lowers its head to drink. She wonders where the boat will stop.

  The next day, she hikes all the way to Spencer, the second lake, where the island’s oldest families keep their rafts for picnicking and fishing. Her family’s sank several years ago. She passes the one-room schoolhouse. “In 1934,” it says in spidery cursive on the old chalkboard, “the last year the school was in use, Miss Jean Davidson was the teacher. Five children were enrolled: two second graders, one third grader, a fifth grader and a ninth grader.” This has been posted for the past twenty years, since Deirdre was a girl, and yet every year, she stops to admire the wood-burning stove, the old-fashioned desks connected to each other like beads on a string, the upper- and lowercase alphabet stenciled in cursive around three sides of the room. Standing against the blackboard, careful not to touch the writing, she thinks about how she first met Dale—they like to joke it was at a bowling league for left-handed singles, but really it was just a bowling club. For a nanosecond, bowling was hip, and they were hip, Deirdre in her platform Pradas that she’d reluctantly exchange for clumsy bowling shoes, and Dale in his orange corduroys, his wool newsie hat. They’d both grown up in Seattle, gone away, returned. They knew the same dive bars, the crumpet shop in the market, the deli where the owner cured his own meat. They both rented top-floor apartments in Victorians, invested in the notion they could walk away whenever opportunity called. After a while, Dale came to the alley with wonderful snacks: wild rice and hazelnut salad, miniature chèvre tarts, stuffed grape leaves, chunks of fresh lamb skewered on rosemary branches and grilled over mesquite. Back then, he cooked anything.

  She glances around the schoolhouse again. How can it remain exactly the same year after year? It doesn’t seem right. There is a thick piece of chalk in the tin cup on the teacher’s desk, and in a corner of the board, she writes in a ghost hand, “I was here.”

  On the third day, she does something she’s never done before. She heads for the wooden bathtub house. Walking up the big hill is easier, or perhaps she’s grown more patient with the pace of walking. A man in a truck passes and shouts, does she want a ride, but she smiles and waves him forward. He’s only the second person she’s seen all week. There may be other people on the island, people who are hiding out as she is, or people who just seem to be hiding but are actually going about their quiet routines. She passes the first lake and the pasture where the lonely black horse grazes. She passes the big organic garden where she has, in years past, snuck in and stolen raspberries. She passes the road to the summit. When she
was a teenager, it was a great adventure to try to ride up there in the dark on motorbikes. Finally, she reaches the turnoff to the wooden bathtub house. Perhaps she visited as a child, or perhaps she has just heard stories about the place. The road is deeply rutted, and when she isn’t paying attention, mud squishes over the toes of her boots. Trees stand at strange angles, and she sees an astonishing sight—six saplings, almost evenly placed, growing out of the trunk of a toppled-over tree. She’s not thinking about anything. She’s not thinking about Dale, or the problems of their relationship, or the mouse in the bathtub, or whether the wooden bathtub will be teeming with mice. No, she is deeply engrossed in the rutted road and the beautiful mess of the forest, where things are rotting and growing in equal numbers and moss stubbles everything in shades of green, including some she has never noticed before.

  The road turns, and she spots the cabin through the trees, but when she draws closer, nothing is there, except for a small pond guarded by cattails. Deirdre trips. It’s a terrible feeling, falling forward as the body automatically recalibrates, shifting weight backward and trying to outfinesse the insistent grip of momentum and gravity. But it’s too late. She lands heavily. She doesn’t even get her hands out in time to break the fall. She lies still for a few moments before gently touching her stomach.

  The mouse is dead. His once wiry and sleek body is lumpy and swollen now, and his face looks bruised and tormented. He has been dead for days, but now that he is rotting, Deirdre can no longer peer down at him in the bathtub’s bottom and pretend he is dreaming of nuts and seeds and small dark places and stuffing. The smell makes her vomit. Her hip has a purple bruise. The small thing—her baby—is holding itself very still right now. She calls Dale. “I’m pregnant,” she blurts out.

  He is silent for a moment. “Are you leaving me?”