I, Richard

  She felt embarrassment creep up on her like the secret police. She decided to leave her offering and phone Anfisa Telyegin about it. So she lifted the lid of the grocery box and set the drop-dead brownies inside.

  She was lowering the heavy lid when she heard a rustling in the ivy behind her. She didn't think much about it till a skittering sounded against the worn wood of the old front porch. She turned then, and gave out a shriek that she smothered with her hand. A large rat with glittering eyes and scaly tail was observing her. The rodent was not three feet away, at the edge of the porch and about to dive into the protection of the ivy.

  “Oh my God!” Willow leapt onto the metal food box without a thought of Ava Downey, Beau, the poker game, or the neighborhood seeing her. Rats were terrifying—she couldn't have said why— and she looked around for something to drive the creature off.

  But he took himself into the ivy without her encouragement. And as the last of his gray bulk disappeared, Willow McKenna didn't hesitate to do so herself. She leapt from the food box and ran all the way home.

  “It was a rat,” Willow insisted.

  Leslie Gilbert took her gaze away from the television. She'd muted the sound upon Willow's arrival but hadn't completely torn herself away from the confrontation going on there. My Father Had Sex With My Boyfriend was printed on the bottom of the screen, announcing the day's topic among the combatants.

  “I know a rat when I see one,” Willow said.

  Leslie reached for a Dorito and munched thoughtfully. “Did you let her know?”

  “I phoned her right away. But she didn't answer and she doesn't have a machine.”

  “You could leave her a note.”

  Willow shivered. “I don't even want to go into the yard again.”

  “It's all that ivy,” Leslie pointed out. “Bad thing to have ivy like that.”

  “Maybe she doesn't know they like ivy. I mean, in Russia, it'd be too cold for rats, wouldn't it?”

  Leslie took another Dorito. “Rats're like cockroaches, Will,” she said. “It's never too anything for them.” She fastened her eyes to the television screen. “Least we know why she has that box for her groceries. Rats bite through anything. But they don't bite through steel.”

  There seemed nothing for it but to write a note to Anfisa Telyegin. Willow did this promptly but felt that she couldn't deliver such news to the reclusive woman without also proffering a solution to the problem. So she added the words, “I'm doing something to help out,” and she bought a trap, baited it with peanut butter, and bore it with her to 1420.

  The next morning at breakfast, she told her husband what she had done, and he nodded thoughtfully over his newspaper. She said, “I put our phone number in the note, and I thought she'd call, but she hasn't. I hope she doesn't think I think it's a reflection on her that there's a rat on her property. Obviously, I didn't mean to insult her.”

  “Hmm,” Scott said and rattled his paper.

  Jasmine said, “Rats? Rats? Yucky yuck, Mom.”

  And Max said, “Yucky yucky yuck.”

  Having started something with the deposit of the trap on

  Anfisa Telyegin's front porch, Willow felt duty bound to finish it. So she returned to 1420 when Scott was asleep and the children had gone off to school.

  She walked up the path with far more trepidation than she'd felt on her first visit. Every rustle in the ivy was the movement of the rat, and surely the scritching sound she could hear was the rodent creeping up behind her, ready to pounce on her ankles.

  Her fears came to nothing, though. When she mounted the porch, she saw that her effort at trapping the critter had been successful. The trap held the rat's broken body. Willow shuddered when she saw it, and hardly registered the fact that the rodent looked somewhat surprised to find his neck broken right when he was helping himself to breakfast.

  She wanted Scott there to help her, then. But realizing that he needed his sleep, she'd come prepared. She'd carried with her a shovel and a garbage bag in the hope that her first venture in vermin extermination would have been successful.

  She knocked on the door to let Anfisa Telyegin know what she was doing, but as before there was no answer. As she turned to face her task with the rat, though, she saw the venetian blinds move a fraction. She called out, “Miss Telyegin? I've put a trap down for the rat. I've got him. You don't need to worry about it,” and she felt a bit put out that her neighbor didn't open the front door and thank her.

  She steeled herself to the job before her—she'd never liked coming across dead animals, and this occasion was no different from finding roadkill adhering to the treads of her tires—and she scooped the rat up with the shovel. She was just about to deposit the stiffened body into the garbage sack, when a susurration of the ivy leaves distracted her, followed by a skittering that she recognized at once.

  She whirled. Two rats were on the edge of the porch, eyes glittering, tails swishing against the wood.

  Willow McKenna dropped the shovel with a clatter. She made a wild dash for the street.

  “Two more?” Ava Downey sounded doubtful. She rattled the ice in her glass and her husband Beau took it for the signal it was and went to refresh her gin and tonic. “Darlin', you sure you're not sufferin' from somethin'?”

  “I know what I saw,” Willow told her neighbor. “I let Leslie know and now I'm telling you. I killed one, but I saw two more. And I swear to God, they knew what I was doing.”

  “Intelligent rats, then?” Ava Downey asked. “My Lord, what a perplexin' situation.” She pronounced it perplexing in her southern drawl, Miss North Carolina come to live among the mortals.

  “It's a neighborhood problem,” Willow said. “Rats carry disease. They breed like… well, they breed…”

  “Like rats,” Beau Downey said. He gave his wife her drink and joined the ladies in Ava Downey's well-appointed living room. Ava was an interior decorator by avocation if not by career, and everything she touched was instantly transformed into a suitable vignette for Architectural Digest.

  “Very amusin', darlin',” Ava said to her husband, without smiling. “My oh my. Married all these years and I had no idea you have such a quick wit.”

  Willow said, “They're going to infest the neighborhood. I've tried to talk to Anfisa about it, but she's not answering the phone. Or she's not at home. Except there're lights on, so I think she's home and… Look. We need to do something. There're children to consider.”

  Willow hadn't thought of the children till earlier that afternoon, after Scott had risen from his daily five hours. She'd been in the backyard in her vegetable garden, picking the last of the autumn squash. She'd reached for one and in doing so had dug her fingers into a pile of animal droppings. She'd recoiled from the sensation and pulled the squash out hastily from the tangle of its vine. The vegetable, she saw, had been scarred with tooth marks.

  The droppings and tooth marks had told the tale. There weren't just rats in the yard next door. There were rats on the move. Every yard was vulnerable.

  Children played in those yards. Families held their summer barbecues there. Teenagers sunned themselves there in the summer and men smoked cigars on warm spring nights. These yards weren't meant to be shared with rodents. Rodents were dangerous to everyone's health.

  “The problem's not rats,” Beau Downey said. “The problem's the woman, Willow. She probably thinks having rats is normal. Hell, she's from Russia. What d'you want?”

  What Willow wanted was peace of mind. She wanted to know that her children were safe, that she could let Blythe-or-Cooper crawl on the lawn without having to worry that a rat—or rats' droppings—would be out there.

  “Call an exterminator,” Scott told her.

  “Burn a cross on her lawn,” Beau Downey advised.

  She phoned Home Safety Exterminators, and in short order a professional came to call. He verified the evidence in Willow's vegetable plot, and for good measure, he paid a call on the Gilberts on the other side of 1420 and did much th
e same there. This, at least, got Leslie off the sofa. She dragged a set of kitchen steps to the fence and peered over at 1420's backyard.

  Aside from a path to the chicken coop, ivy grew everywhere, even up the trunks of the fast-growing trees.

  “This,” Home Safety Exterminator pronounced, “is a real problem, lady. The ivy's got to go. But the rats have to go first.”

  “Let's do it,” Willow said.

  But there was a problem as things turned out. Home Safety Exterminators could trap rats on the McKennas' property. They could trap rats in the Gilberts' yard. They could walk down the street and see to the Downeys' and even cross over and deal with the Harts'. But they couldn't enter a yard without permission, without contracts being signed and agreements reached. And that couldn't happen unless and until someone made contact with Anfisa Telyegin.

  The only way to manage this was to waylay the woman when she left one night to teach one of her classes at the local college. Willow appointed herself neighborhood liaison, and she took up watch at her kitchen window, feeding her family take-out Chinese and pizzas for several days so as not to miss the moment when the Russian woman set off for the bus stop at the end of Napier Lane. When that finally happened, Willow grabbed her parka and dashed out after her.

  She caught up to her in front of the Downeys' house which, as always, was already ablaze with Christmas lights despite the fact that Thanksgiving had not yet arrived. In the glow from the Santa and reindeer on the roof, Willow explained the situation.

  Anfisa's back was to the light, so Willow couldn't see her reaction. Indeed, she couldn't see the Russian woman's face at all, so shrouded was she in a head scarf and a wide-brimmed hat. It seemed reasonable enough to Willow to assume that a passing along of information would be all that the unpleasant situation required. But she was surprised.

  “There are no rats in the yard,” Anfisa Telyegin said with considerable dignity, all things considered. “I fear you are mistaken, Mrs. McKenna.”

  “Oh no,” Willow contradicted her. “I'm not, Miss Telyegin. Truly, I'm not. Not only did I see one when I brought you those brownies… Did you get them, by the way? They're my specialty … But when I set a trap, I actually caught it. And then I saw two more. And then when I found the droppings in my yard and called the exterminator and he looked around…”

  “Well, there you have it,” Anfisa said. “The problem is with your yard, not mine.”

  “But—”

  “I must be on my way.”

  And so she walked off, with nothing settled between them.

  When Willow shared this information with Scott, he decided a neighborhood war council was called for, which was another term for a poker night at which poker wasn't played and to which wives were invited. Willow found herself overwrought at the idea of what might happen once the neighborhood became involved in the problem. She didn't like trouble. But by the same token, she wanted her children to be safe from vermin. She spent most of the meeting anxiously chewing on her nails.

  Every position taken on the situation was a turn of the prism that is human nature. Scott wanted to go the legal route in keeping with his by-the-book personality. Start with the health department, bring in the police if that didn't work, turn to lawyers subsequently. But Owen Gilbert didn't like this idea at all. He didn't like Anfisa Telyegin for reasons having more to do with her refusal to let him do her income taxes than with the rodents that were invading his property, and he wanted to call the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. and have them deal with her. Surely she was involved in something. Everything from tax dodging to espionage was possible. Mention of the I.R.S. brought the I.N.S. into Beau Downey's mind, which was more than enough to enflame him. He was of the persuasion that immigrants are the ruination of America and since the legal system and the government clearly weren't about to do a damn thing to keep the borders closed to the invading hordes, Beau said they should at least do something to close their neighborhood to them.

  “Let's let this gal know she ain't welcome here,” he said, to which suggestion his wife Ava rolled her eyes. She never made a secret of the fact that she considered Beau good for mixing her drinks, servicing her sexual needs, and not much more.

  “How d'you suggest we do that, darlin'?” Ava asked. “Paint a swastika on her front door?”

  “Hell, we need a family in there anyway,” Billy Hart said, chugging his beer. It was his seventh and his wife had been counting them, as had Willow, who wondered why Rose didn't stop him from making a fool of himself every time he went out in public instead of just sitting there with an agonized expression on her face. “We need a couple our own age, people with kids, maybe even a teenage daughter… one with decent tits.” He grinned and gave Willow a look she didn't like. Her own breasts—normally the size of teacups—were swelling with her pregnancy and he fixed his eyes to them and winked at her.

  With so many opinions being expressed, is there any doubt that nothing was settled? The only thing that occurred was passions being enflamed. And Willow felt responsible for having en-flamed them.

  Perhaps, she thought, there was another way to deal with the situation. But wrack her brains though she did for the next several days, she could come up with no approach to the problem.

  It was when a letter went misdelivered to her house that Willow came up with what seemed a likely plan of action. For stuck within a collection of catalogues and bills was a manila envelope forwarded to Anfisa Telyegin from an address in Port Ter-ryton, a small village on the Weldy River some ninety-five miles north of Napier Lane. Perhaps, Willow thought, someone in Anfisa's former neighborhood could help her present neighbors learn how best to approach her.

  So on a crisp morning when the children were in school and Scott was tucked away for his well-earned five hours, Willow got out her state atlas and plotted a route that would take her to Port Terryton before noon. Leslie Gilbert went, too, despite having to miss her daily intake of dysfunction on the television set.

  Both of the ladies had heard of Port Terryton. It was a picturesque village some three hundred years old, set amidst an old-growth deciduous forest that flourished right to the banks of the Weldy River. Money lived in Port Terryton. Old money, new money, stock market money, dot com money, inherited money. Mansions built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served as display pieces for inordinate wealth.

  There were inferior areas in the village as well, streets of visually pleasing cottages where the day help and the lesser souls lived. Leslie and Willow found Anfisa's former residence in one of these areas: a charming and well-painted gray and white salt-box structure shaded by a copper-leafed maple with a clipped front lawn and flowerbeds planted with a riot of pansies.

  “So what're we trying to find out, exactly?” Leslie asked as Willow pulled to a stop by the curb. Leslie had brought along a box of glazed donuts, and she'd spent most of the drive gorging herself upon them. She licked her fingers as she asked the question, bending down to squint through the window at Anfisa's former house.

  “I don't know,” Willow said. “Something that could help.”

  “Owen's idea was the best,” Leslie said loyally. “Call in the Feds and hand her over.”

  “There's got to be something less… well, less brutal than that. We don't want to destroy her life.”

  “We're talking about a yard full of rats,” Leslie reminded her. “A yard of rats that she denies exists.”

  “I know, but maybe there's a reason why she doesn't know they're there. Or why she can't face admitting they're there. We need to be able to help her confront this.”

  Leslie blew out a breath and said, “Whatever, sweetie.”

  They'd come to Port Terryton without much of a plan of what they'd do once they got there. But as they looked fairly harmless—one of them just beginning to show a pregnancy and the other placid enough to inspire trust—they decided to knock on a few doors. The third house they tried was the one that provided them with the insight they'd been looking for. It was, ho
wever, not an insight that Willow would have liked to unearth.

  From Barbie Townsend across the street from Anfisa Telyegin's home, they received cups of tea with lemon, chocolate chip cookies, and a wealth of information. Barbie had even kept a scrapbook of the Rat Lady Affair, as the Port Terryton newspaper had come to call it.

  Leslie and Willow hardly spoke on the drive home. They'd planned to have lunch in Port Terryton, but neither of them had an appetite once they were finished talking to Barbie Townsend. They were both intent upon getting back to Napier Lane and informing their husbands of what they'd learned. Husbands, after all, were intended to deal with this sort of situation. What else were they for? They were supposed to be the protectors. Wives were the nurturers. That's the way it was.

  “They were everywhere,” Willow told her husband, interrupting him in the midst of a phone call to a prospective client. “Scott, the newspaper even had pictures of them.”

  “Rats,” Leslie informed her Owen. She went directly to his office and barged right in, trailing her paisley shawl behind her like a security blanket. “The yard was infested. She'd planted ivy. Just like here. The health department and the police and the courts all got involved… The neighbors sued, Owen.”

  “It took five years,” Willow told Scott. “My God, five years. Jasmine will be twelve in five years. Max will be ten. And we'll have Blythe-or-Cooper as well. And probably two more. Maybe three. And if we haven't solved this problem by then…” She began to cry, so afraid for her children was she becoming.

  “It cost them a fortune in lawyers' fees,” Leslie Gilbert told Owen. “Because every time the court ordered her to do something, she countered with a lawsuit herself. Or she appealed. We don't have the kind of money they have in Port Terryton. What're we going to do?”

  “She's sick in some way,” Willow said to Scott. “I know that, and I don't want to hurt her. But still, she's got to be made to see … Only how can we make her see if she denies there's a problem in the first place? How?”