Eighteen

I left the classroom hearing laughter. It seemed to start near where Lindy was sitting.

I didn’t go to the trash bin. I went home.

My mother was sleeping. She had been awake earlier, but I knew that since she had gone to the hospital, she slept whenever she could manage an hour or two away from me and my younger siblings. I took a big spoon out of a kitchen drawer, gathered up a box of toothpicks, a rosary, a St. Francis holy card and some sewing thread. I quietly went out to the backyard cemetery and buried the mouse between the bodies of a hamster and a sparrow I had found not long before. I gave him the traditional gravemarker: a cross made with two toothpicks, on which the crossbeam is held in place by wrapping the thread around the intersection of the toothpicks. I put the rosary around my neck, recited the Prayer of St. Francis, and moved my right hand in benediction over the grave.

I could hear a bell tolling; the telephone. I ran inside. I wanted to catch the phone before it woke my mother. But I was too late; she stood in her robe in the kitchen, looking at me as I stood with dirt caked on me, spoon in hand, rosary around my neck. She had the phone to her ear, but I don’t think she was listening too closely.

She knew.

She knew I had been caught with a dead mouse in my pocket. But her face wasn’t angry like Mrs. Hobbs’s.

“Yes, she’s here,” I heard her say. There was a long pause, then she said, “No. I think I’ll keep her home today.”

She hung up the phone. I thought she might be angry about my ditching school, but she just told me that maybe I should get out of my priest’s clothes and wash up, maybe put on some pajamas instead. I nodded, then hurriedly followed her advice. By the time I was in my pajamas, she was lying down again. I tiptoed into her room, thinking she might have fallen back to sleep, but she was awake. She patted the bed next to her, and I crawled in beside her. She held me as if I were much smaller, close to where she had once had breasts. I had not ever been allowed to see her chest after the surgery, a radical double mastectomy, but I imagined that day that I could hear her heart better.

“Did you say the Prayer of St. Francis for the mouse?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then he had a very nice funeral,” she said, and fell asleep.

Eventually, I went back to school. I don’t remember now how long I stayed out; it seems to me I might have been allowed an extra day at home with my mother. No one mentioned the mouse to me. Doreen asked me if I wanted to walk to catechism with her. I said yes. We didn’t talk on the way there or the way home, though, and we never did anything together again after that. But she stopped hanging around Lindy.

The cancer moved to my mother’s liver. I said the Prayer of St. Francis one hundred times, but God didn’t accept it as a trade. She died the summer I turned twelve.

I started seventh grade the next fall at a new school, a junior high. All the kids from my school went to it, but kids from two other schools went there, too. I was making new friends and was feeling pretty good about the fact that I hadn’t cried at school, not even when other girls complained about their mothers.

One day, one of the new friends, Barbara, stopped me in the hall outside of geography class. She seemed uneasy about something, and asked me to walk away from the other kids who were waiting for the teacher to arrive. We moved a few feet away, closer to the lockers. “I have to ask you something,” she said. “Lindy has been going around saying that you used to walk around school with dead mice in your pockets. Is it true?”

“No,” I said quietly. “It’s not true.” I hesitated, wondering if anyone would believe the truth if I told it. Was every other kid from Mrs. Hobbs’ class saying the same thing?

But before I could make up my mind about what I would reveal, a locker closed behind us. I turned to see Doreen. She must have heard every word.

Doreen had changed a lot since fifth grade; we had even less in common. She had grown much taller and had really big breasts now, and I was still short and flat as a griddle. Doreen had beautiful long hair, and was popular. My hair was cut even shorter after my mother died, and my circle of friends was much smaller than Doreen’s.

She looked from me to Barbara, then her face set in a frown. I was expecting the worse. “Barbara,” she said, shaking her head. “Use your brain.”

She walked off. Barbara smiled at me and said, “Yeah, now that I think about it, that was a pretty stupid story Lindy was telling.”

But every now and then, throughout the school year, I was asked about dead mice.

I moved to a neighboring town the next year, when my father remarried. I grew my hair long again and, after a couple of years, I even got breasts and grew taller. No one at my new school knew about what happened when I was in fifth grade, or even that my father’s new wife was not my birth mother. By then, I knew how to keep a secret. And my stepmother defied the fairy tale image, loving her stepchildren so well that I decided God had not, after all, abandoned us.

Until the day before my college graduation, I never saw anyone from elementary school. That day, I had gone into a department store to buy some new underwear. As I approached the counter, I recognized the saleswoman. Lindy.

My first impulse was to run from her, my second to think up something cruel to say. Or maybe something snotty. (“Lindy, I’m giving the commencement address tomorrow. Why don’t you come on down and heckle me-you know, mention the mouse thing from fifth grade.”)

Instead, I just bought underwear. She didn’t seem to recognize or remember me.

In the car in the shopping mall parking lot, I held on to the steering wheel and screamed behind my teeth. As much as I wanted to, I knew I would never forget Lindy, or fail to recognize her.

To my surprise, Peggy cried when I told her the story of the dead mouse in my pocket. It dawned on me, as I finished telling it, that just about all of us have these memories of some moment of humiliation, have secrets that weigh down our pockets, but are really no larger than a mouse. The things that we think will bring our lives to a halt, don’t. And no one remembers our shame as well as we do.

The next day, Peggy told me that she had gone home and told the story to her mother and to her elementary-school-aged daughters. Her mother cried, too.

Her daughters wanted to know if it was really true that I used to carry dead mice around in my pockets.

“Tell them yes,” I said, “it’s really true.”

Revised Endings

Harriet read the letter again. She wasn’t sure why; each rereading upset her as much if not more than the first.

“Once again, I must tell you that the ending of this story positively reeks,” Kitty Craig had written. “I can’t imagine any reader believing Lord Harold Wiggins would choose this method of killing off his enemy, nor would any reader believe he could manage to mask the taste of antimony by mixing it into the braunschweiger. Rewrite.”

Harriet Bently had been writing the popular Lord Harold Wiggins series for ten years now. She knew exactly what dearest Harry (as only Harriet had liberty to call him) would choose to do in any given situation, even if her editor did not. After all, Harry had moved into Harriet’s life-lock, stock and barrel. No, she didn’t invite him to tea like a child’s imaginary friend; but she thought of him constantly, and had grown comfortable with his presence in her life. Like any series character and his author, they had become quite attached to each other.

It was more than Kitty Craig’s rude tone that upset her. Kitty was notorious in the publishing industry for her biting, sarcastic remarks; Harriet told herself (not entirely successfully) that she shouldn’t take Kitty’s insults personally. What upset Harriet was Kitty’s disregard for Lord Harold Wiggins’s intelligence. His trademark was to effect justice without costing the English taxpayers a farthing for an imprisonment or a trial; once Lord Wiggins knew who the guilty party was, he cleverly killed the villain. In this book, Lord Wiggins made sure the poisoner Monroe would never age another day by slipping him a lethal dose of antimony. Monroe was a villain of the first water, and certainly deserved the punishment Lord Wiggins meted out. Harriet couldn’t help but feel proud of her protagonist.