The Rats Under Pine Street Part One

The thing about basements is that they remember everything.

The cold stays in the walls long past the season that put it there. The smell of old pipes and turned earth never quite leaves. I’ve lived in the basement apartment at 511 Pine Street for two years and some months, long enough that I had stopped noticing either. I came home the same way every evening, down the side steps from the street to the hallway that connected my small apartment to the rest of the basement where the furnace was. I placed my key in the lock, pushed against the door’s familiar complaint against the frame as it opened, and then the silence of a place that had been empty all day and had not minded.

I hung my jacket on the hook by the door. I set my keys in the ceramic dish on the shelf, the one with the chipped rim I kept meaning to replace. I stood for a moment in the center of my small living room while the refrigerator hummed its indifferent note.

It was a Friday in September with no plans for the weekend.

I had been going to make soup.

I had just taken my first step towards the kitchen when I heard it.

It was a very small sound. Thin and frightened and insistent, the kind of sound a small, frightened thing makes when it has been frightened for some time and has begun to lose hope that anyone is coming. It came from the hallway outside, just beyond my door.

I stood still and listened.

The sound came again.

I went back to the door and opened it. The hallway was dim, the single overhead bulb amber with age. I crouched down and looked along the baseboard, and after a moment my eyes adjusted and I saw her. She was small and light gray, and her tail was bent at a wrong angle where the wire of the trap had caught it. She looked up at me.

I would remember that later. That she looked back.

Most things, when you found them frightened in the dark, shrank away or went still. She did neither. Her big black eyes caught the amber light and held it, and she looked at me with an expression I would spend a great deal of time thinking about in the weeks that followed.

It seemed only right to free her.

I did it carefully, speaking in a low voice as I worked the spring back, the way you speak to something that has no reason yet to trust you but that you hope might come around to it. She flinched once when the wire released. Then she sat in my cupped palm and breathed, her sides going fast and shallow, and I brought her inside.

I made a bed for her in an old shoebox with a dish towel and a handful of torn newspaper. I put the box on the floor near the radiator where it was warmest. I found half a heel of bread in the kitchen and broke off a small piece and set it beside her, and then I sat cross-legged on the floor next to the box and watched her breathe.

My soup was forgotten.

“It’s all right,” I told her, after a while.

The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere above me the building settled, its old bones shifting in the cold.

“You’re all right now,” I said.

She looked up at me from the shoebox with her bright, attentive eyes while she ate the crust, and I, who had not spoken to anyone about anything that mattered for longer than I cared to measure, found that I had quite a lot to say.

I talked to her about the bread first. Whether she preferred it soft or whether she’d prefer to crunch some toast. I asked how her tail was, which looked tender and bent at its sad angle. I told her the radiator knocked sometimes at night, that it was nothing to be alarmed about, that I had startled the first few times I heard it myself. I told her the apartment was small but that I kept it clean, which was true then, and that she was welcome to stay as long as she liked.

She listened with great patience.

After an hour or so she had eaten most of the bread and was sitting up in the shoebox with an air of cautious assessment, the way a person looks around a new place before deciding whether to take off their coat. I took that as an encouraging sign.

By the second hour she had moved to the edge of the box.

I held out my hand flat on the floor beside it, the way I had read somewhere you were supposed to do, and I waited. She sniffed at my fingers for a long time. Then she stepped onto my palm with the deliberate care of someone crossing a puddle and sat there.

She was very light. I had not expected that. There was almost nothing to her and yet the warmth of her was immediate, a small warmth against my skin, her whiskers moving, her sides still going with that quick soft breath. I raised my hand slowly until she was level with my chest and she did not flinch. She simply looked at me.

I talked to her about the building for a while. About the pipes and what they sounded like on cold nights. About the way the light came through the casement window in the mornings at a low flat angle that was almost pleasant if you were in the right frame of mind for it. I talked to her about the neighborhood, about Pine Street, about Providence in the fall when the leaves came down and the whole city went gray and quiet and pulled its collar up.

She sat in my hand and she listened.

I am aware, of course, of what I must have looked like. A man alone in a basement apartment on a Friday night, talking to a rat he had fished out of a trap, the soup unmade, the evening going on without him. I am aware of that. But there is a certain quality to being listened to that does not much care about the nature of the listener. She was warm and she was present and her eyes were bright and she did not look at her watch or change the subject or offer advice I had not asked for. She simply sat in my hand and looked at me and that was enough. More than enough. It was, if I am honest, more connection than I had had in some time.

It was late when I finally set her back in the shoebox. I turned the lamp down low so she would not be disturbed, and I stood up to put some music on while she settled and nested.

I put in the cassette for Sinéad O’Connor’s newest album, titled I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got and thought about what to call my new friend.

She deserved something, I felt. Something that suited her. Something that acknowledged the fact of her survival, the small bright truth of it, given what the evening might have been if I had gone straight to the kitchen and put on the kettle and not listened for the thing I heard.

I leaned down beside her box. She lifted her head and looked up at me.

“Daisy,” I said.

It came out with a certainty I had not planned. A sunny name. The kind of name that belongs to something that persists, that pushes up through cold ground because it does not know enough to do otherwise. She blinked her bright eyes at me from the folds of the dish towel.

“That suits you,” I said.

The radiator knocked once in agreement, or something like it.

I picked up her box and placed it on my bed next to my pillow for the night so she was close. I went to bed feeling, for the first time in a long while, that the apartment was not entirely empty.

 

Saturday morning I found Daisy asleep on my pillow. As much as it warmed my heart knowing that she stayed with me, I decided Daisy needed a proper cage. She’d need a place to be safe when I went off to work on Monday.

I had my jacket on and my keys in my hand when I opened the door and nearly stepped on Mrs. Moretti.

She was crouched at the baseboard in her housecoat and slippers, her little dog, Principessa tucked under one arm like a very agitated purse. Principessa was a white mop head thing of indeterminate breed with bulging eyes and a bark like a squeeze toy being stepped on repeatedly. Above its pink rhinestone collar, it regarded me with naked hostility from the moment I opened my door.

Mrs. Moretti did not look up. She was examining the sprung trap near my doorframe, the one I had not thought to remove the night before, and her expression was the expression of a woman whose worst suspicions were being confirmed on a Saturday morning before she had finished her coffee.

“Blood,” she said to no one in particular.

“Um, Good morning, Mrs. Moretti.”

“Blood, and the trap sprung, and now the smell.” She straightened up with the careful architecture of someone who had learned to negotiate bad knees without acknowledgment. “You smell it? From the walls. It’s getting worse.”

I said that I had noticed the smell, which was not entirely true, well, not for any new smells anyway.

“That damned Paolino.” She tucked the dog more firmly under her arm. It continued its hostile assessment of me. “Rats were never a problem when Buddy was mayor. You know that? Not like this. Cianci, he understood what this city needed. That’s why I’m voting to bring him back.” She raised her finger and proclaimed, “He never stopped caring about Providence.”

I said that I could see her point.

“The whole street is infested.” She gestured broadly, encompassing Pine Street, Providence, and possibly the entire eastern seaboard. “You see a rat, you tell me. Don’t go feeling sorry for them. That’s how it gets worse.”

She said this last part while looking directly at me, which I thought was an unremarkable coincidence.

As she walked off muttering “If there’s one, there’s a hundred.” I told her I would keep an eye out and went to the mom-and-pop pet shop on Westminster Street to purchase a home for my new pet rat..

 

The man behind the counter had the look of someone who had answered too many questions about hamsters and had made a certain peace with it. I told him I had a rat. He showed me cages. I selected one that seemed appropriately spacious, with two levels connected by a small ramp, and then I stood in the aisle for some time considering accessories with a seriousness I had not brought to a purchase in recent memory.

I bought a water bottle with a metal spout. A ceramic food dish, heavier than plastic, less likely to tip. A small wooden block for chewing, which the man said was important for their teeth. I bought a small wooden house, a little shelter she could go into when she wanted privacy, which struck me as the kind of thing a person ought to have regardless of their species.

For bedding I reached for the cedar chips, which seemed like the obvious choice, but the man stopped me with the weary authority of someone who had given this speech before and had stopped expecting it to be appreciated.

“Cedar’s no good for rats,” he said. “Pine neither. The dust and oils. Gets into their lungs.” He tapped the bag back onto the shelf. “They’ve been finding it in the lab studies. Respiratory problems.”

I asked what he suggested instead.

“Shredded paper works. Old T-shirts, soft cloth, anything like that.”

He caught me reaching for the seed mix next and sighed in a way that suggested he had been personally let down by this choice many times before.

“That’s fine for hamsters,” he said. “For a rat you want the lab blocks. Complete nutrition. The seed mix, they just pick out what they like and leave the rest. Like a kid with a cereal box picking out the marshmallows.” He set a bag of compressed brown pellets on the counter beside my other items. They were not cheap. “She’ll live longer on these.”

The total was considerably more than I had intended to spend. I did not mind. On the walk home I passed a hardware store and thought about a cardboard tunnel I had planned to make her, which now seemed both inadequate and entirely reasonable at the same time. I would have to improvise something that didn’t cost any more real money.

 

Back at the apartment I assembled the cage on the floor in the living room. I cleared off the coffee table, moved it a little closer to the radiator and placed the cage on top. Before I moved Daisy in, I went to the closet and pulled out a stack of old shirts I had not worn in some time and saw no immediate prospect of wearing again. I cut them into strips over the kitchen table, which turned out to be more satisfying than I expected, and spread them across the bottom of the cage in a generous layer. Then I found an old flannel shirt, softer than the others, and cut it into smaller careful squares for the inside of her wooden house. It seemed right that she should have something better in there than what was on the floor. Everyone deserves a good bed.

I moved Daisy in from the shoebox with the ceremony the occasion deserved. She explored the ramp twice, investigated the little wooden house, drank from the water bottle with an enthusiasm that I found enormously gratifying, and then sat on the upper level and looked at me with what I chose to read as approval.

“Better than the shoebox,” I told her.

Over Saturday afternoon I improved things further. I rolled a length of cardboard into a tunnel and secured it with a rubber band, having read somewhere that rats enjoyed tunnels, which seemed reasonable. I hung a small mirror from a broken telescoping inspection mirror on the inside of the cage with a twist of wire, though I was less certain about the need behind that one. It seemed like the kind of thing that couldn’t hurt and the thought of Daisy grooming herself in the mirror like the pretty little rat she was made me smile.

Sunday was for observation.

I made my coffee and sat in the armchair with a library book across my knee, but mostly I watched her. She was a busy creature when she felt safe. She rearranged her flannel squares with great purpose, pulling them into configurations that satisfied some interior logic I could not follow. She ran the ramp at intervals for reasons known only to herself. She discovered that if she pressed her nose to a particular spot on the cage door it would rattle slightly, and she pressed it several times in a row, perhaps testing the principle.

In the afternoon I gave her a small piece of apple.

She took it from my fingers with a delicacy that seemed almost mannerly, holding it in her small hands and eating it with focused attention, turning it as she went. I gave her a piece of cheese after that, and a corner snapped from a cracker, and she accepted each one with the same careful gravity.

“You have very good manners,” I told her.

She finished the cracker and looked up at me.

I had not had a guest in the apartment since the previous winter, when a woman from work had stopped by briefly to drop off a form I had forgotten to sign. She didn’t stay. The apartment had not felt like a place people stayed. But sitting there on Sunday afternoon with the gray Providence light coming in low through the casement window, the cassette player playing softly on the shelf, Daisy moving through her small house with all her small purposes, it felt different. Inhabited. There is a word for a place where something lives that wants to be there, and I could not think of it just then, but I felt it.

I decided to take her out with me while I read, she climbed over my shoulders and arms as I sat with the book. Her whiskers tickled my cheek as she explored and sniffed. I gave her one more piece of apple before bed.

“Goodnight, Daisy,” I said.

She was already in her little wooden house, rearranging something.

 

Monday morning I stood in front of Daisy’s cage for longer than was strictly necessary before work.

She was in her wooden house, visible through the small doorway, a gray curve of warmth in the flannel dark. I had already fed her. I had already refreshed her water. There was nothing left to do and I was going to be late if I did not leave in the next four minutes, and yet I stood there.

I thought briefly about calling in. Nothing was wrong, exactly. I simply could not think of a compelling reason why the filing department required my presence more urgently than my own apartment did. The argument did not fully form before I recognized it for what it was and put my jacket on.

“I’ll be back at six,” I told her. “There’s plenty of food.”

She did not emerge from the wooden house.

“All right,” I said, and left.

 

The day was long as Mondays always seem to be in September, the kind of day that feels like it is made of slightly more hours than other days. I thought about her more than I admitted to myself at the time. Whether the radiator would run too hot. Whether she had enough water. Whether she was lonely, which was a thought I recognized as projection and entertained anyway.

I was home by six-fifteen.

The cage was empty.

I stood in the middle of the living room and looked at it for a moment, the open door swinging gently on its hinge, the tunnel undisturbed, the flannel bedding arranged exactly as she had left it. I could not remember leaving the door unlatched, but I could not remember latching it either, which amounted to the same thing.

I checked under the furniture. I checked behind the radiator. I checked the kitchen and the bathroom and the narrow strip of space behind the bookshelf where the wall had pulled away slightly from the baseboard. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the bed.

No Daisy.

I left the cage door open and put a piece of apple on the floor in front of it and sat in the armchair to wait.

I fell asleep.