THREE YEARS BACK
It was the week Ian lost his job at Stanford that Keiko first saw the rat in the lemon tree. They were still living in Palo Alto that summer, even though Ian would not be returning to the Biology department in the fall, his tenure having been denied after he’d written an apologist’s defense of a recent article published by the Reversalists. The op-ed appeared on a pop-science website, and the headline the editor had attached to it read: “Just Because They’re Crazy Doesn’t Mean They’re Wrong.”
Have you seen this? Keiko said, thrusting her phone at their son. She was a microbiome researcher. The Greys had prided themselves on being a kind of macro/micro power couple for as long as Nolan could remember.
Nolan was twenty-six and lived in San Francisco and was beginning to regret coming home for the weekend. He had come to complain about his job and be coddled by his parents. No, Nolan had not seen this.
I never said that, Ian said, taking his glasses off. What I told her was—
The trouble is that you told her anything at all, Keiko said. Half of this country doesn’t even believe in evolution. Why would you muddy things with nonsense?
It’s not nonsense if it’s true.
Your father is losing his mind, Keiko told her son.
That was the night Keiko saw the rat, Milo.
Nolan named the rat in an effort to lighten the mood, though both Ian and Keiko had frowned at him when he did it, which at least made him feel as if things were normal again. Keiko had been in the yard picking lemons, thinking to squeeze a wedge over their salmon dinner, and she’d just grasped one when she saw the rat—gray, slinky-bodied, white gullet and long whiskers—trying to disengage a fruit of his own. He touched the lemon all over with his paws, grasping at it like a too-large dance partner he could not quite accommodate.
The sight of his touching and touching the skin of the fruit repulsed Keiko. She dropped her lemon, walked inside, sat at the table, and put her face in her hands.
Then she made her demands.
Ian told her that where there was one rat, there were probably many. Statistically, he said, to get rid of one rat would do nothing.
Nolan knew that what Keiko actually wanted was for Ian not to have aligned himself with crackpots, not to have humiliated himself by losing his job. But this was impossible, and so she was desperate to extract from him instead an infinity of smaller, possible things.
Get rid of it, Keiko said.
Ian complied, less out of understanding and more because she had posed to him a problem, and he was in the business of devising solutions.
He bought a Havahart trap.
At dinner, they ate their salmon quietly and without lemon.
That night, Ian set out to catch Milo.
Keiko had gone off to bed at ten o’clock, in a mood. Defensively, Nolan had tried to do the same. If he could go to sleep now, he could make today end, and in turn tomorrow would come quicker and he could flee to the city. Perhaps his parents, who never fought, would work things out and their life would return to normal while he wasn’t looking.
He was half-asleep on the couch when he heard Ian in the kitchen: cupboards clicked, a glass rang on the counter, a cork popped free of a wine bottle. Ian crept past Nolan’s pullout couch with a glass of wine and a flashlight.
Nolan got up. He was wearing boxer briefs and a Giants t-shirt worn soft and holey at the armpits. He had grown his hair out again and was vain about it. He’d tied it up in a small bun for sleeping, but now pulled it loose. He poured himself a glass of a decent Petit Syrah he couldn’t believe Ian would open for just himself and grabbed another flashlight from the kitchen junk drawer.
Ian was sitting in a plush chaise longue. The red patio tiles were still warm from the day.
Nolan sat on the chaise next to his father, balancing his wineglass on one steepled knee. After a moment, Ian clinked his glass again Nolan’s.
The tree was overgrown, fat lemons dangling like moons over both sides of the fence. The plastic Havahart was balanced on one post, baited with peanut butter. Next door, their neighbors’ mother, an elderly woman with dementia, had been sent out to smoke her last cigarette of the day beneath her grandchildren’s unused basketball hoop. From beyond the fence they could hear her quietly talking to herself in Spanish. At the edge of the patio, Keiko’s potted succulents were purple in the semidarkness. The rosemary border was oily and fragrant.
They played their flashlight beams along the top of the fence where the lemons hung, two spotlights dancing around a stage, anticipating a marquee performer. Nolan ran his fingers through his hair as they drank and waited.
The rat appeared.
Nolan was quiet, but danced his flashlight rapidly to draw his father’s attention. Ian caught Milo in his beam. Nolan noticed the rat’s pink nose and pearl-gray fur and thought he looked quite clean. The rat trotted efficiently along the rails, sniffing the lemons, then caught the scent of peanut butter. As Milo hesitated, deciding, Nolan found himself wishing he would avoid his fate. Go for the wildness of stolen lemons.
The rat let out a small squeak as the door to the Havahart snapped shut behind him.
Ian picked up the trap.
What are you going to do with him? Nolan asked.
Release him in the strip mall.
What if he doesn’t like it?
He’s a rat, he’ll like it, Ian said.
Nolan knew Ian didn’t really believe this and felt sorry for him. He’d never felt sorry for his father before. Keiko and Ian had always been so competent that, even in his late twenties, Nolan considered it agreed upon between the three of them that he was the one to be sorry for—it had been a heavy pour of the Syrah; Nolan threw pity parties when he drank—but really, what was all this for? Maybe it was crazy, but was it wrong if Milo wanted to waltz with fruit when the moon was clear? Wanted to preen his pearl-gray fur and forget the rest of the world as he rolled in Keiko’s rosemary and admired himself? Wanted to sink his teeth into a lemon’s neck and suck all the juice from the evening?
Just Because They’re Crazy Doesn’t Mean They’re Wrong.
He looks quite healthy, Ian said, inspecting Milo through the mesh.
Must be all those lemons.
Ian jangled his car keys.
Nolan got into the passenger seat still wearing his boxers. Brought his wine. Ian gently buckled the boxed rat into the backseat.
They drove, their windows down, the night sweet. A Sibelius concerto was playing quietly from the stereo. Nolan sipped his wine, drinking in the car a slight thrill.
They didn’t talk, but as they drove, Ian began a kind of monologue addressed to Milo. He spoke to the rat as if Ian were a mafioso driving a failed accomplice to the bus depot. He told Milo that their current arrangement was untenable. He had no personal problem with him. He would bring Milo to their destination safely, and no harm would come to him provided he stayed there. But Ian did not want to see Milo again. Not in his yard, not in his lemon tree. If Milo returned, well, then there would be trouble. Ian couldn’t promise Milo he would not come to harm if he returned. Was he understanding him? Capishe?
Nolan inspected his father. He knew Ian would have spoken like this whether or not he’d had company in the car, and Nolan found this charming. But he was also thinking about Keiko saying that Ian was losing his mind. Keiko, so adamant that this rat who had crept into her garden was the thing spoiling it. (But surely things had been spoiled in other ways before. Surely Nolan’s unhappiness had not started with the rat.)
They slowed, pulling into a strip mall, a line of dumpsters behind its restaurants. Several other rats scattered as they approached and idled, but they did not look so clean, so nice, as Milo.
The open driver’s door dinged as Nolan watched Ian set the Havahart by the dumpsters and unlatch it. He heard his father softly talking to the rat again but could not make out his words. Milo did not leave the trap.
Nolan finished his wine and cradled the empty bulb in his hands.