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Things Kept

Roger Helms

Upon visiting my brother after an August storm ripped shingles off his roof, we bring more rain, big drops pounding above like gravel on swaths of bare, leaking plywood, all of us walking between buckets and pots catching trickles. Our eighteen-year-old daughter, Rachel, soon bored with no one else under forty and no babies to cuddle, wanders through the rooms, transfixed by rain falling inside a house, some in metronome drips, some in frenetic Overture of William Tell streams.

Rachel bolts outside, running into the rain, looking up, spreading her arms, raising them in a cryptic gesture hard to interpret with her back toward me. When I and her mother, Ann, ask what the heck she thinks she’s doing, Rachel turns around, her soaked white t-shirt and bra revealing too much. I turn away while Ann pleads with her to come inside. When, after an obstinate pause, Rachel obeys, Ann grabs a towel and swaddles her like a baby.

Our only child has been in a deep summer funk, reason kept secret. Ann chalks it up to the looming separation anxiety of college, Rachel’s friends making scattering choices.

When we return home, the still brooding sky turns off the rain. My trained eye notes a dead intruder in our cluttered three-car garage, so I stay silent, keeping my family from the too-frequent reality of death. I wait, anxious, until Ann goes down for a power nap and Rachel goes out for a neighborhood stroll. Then I slip on my oldest, dirtiest pair of black leather gloves.

Opening the third stall’s garage door, which provides the best light and fastest exit, I take a deep breath before facing my self-appointed duty. With but two cars, the third stall has become our “maybe donate” holding area for things of value we keep but no longer use. I creep past boxes of watched DVDs, replaced drapes, retired pofts and pans, and outgrown clothes, including a box of our daughter’s baby clothes Ann keeps, believing Rachel might want them someday.

My grim task waits beneath poster-size pictures of our daughter’s milestones through the years. There she is on her first birthday, chocolate cake on her face. There’s her first trip to Disney World, mouse ears up. And there she is emerging from full immersion baptism, eyes showing some deep, unfathomable personal moment. And then the most recent photo, from her senior prom, capturing her on our front steps in that gorgeous blue formal, waiting for that boy, that boy who looked just a bit too much like Charley Manson. Rachel’s bright face in each photo reveals how much her light has dimmed.

I get down on one knee, peering underneath a low shelf holding potting soil and fertilizer, its greater purpose hiding the trap.

The U-shaped wire—the “hammer”—had snapped on its neck, just behind the skull, an instant kill, giving me a moment’s relief that it didn’t suffer. Then I realize this is not a common gray house mouse but one of its slightly larger and more disease-carrying cousins—a deer mouse—its tawny coat and white underside making it cute in death, like a tiny stuffed animal, if one that bleeds. I grasp the trap with a gloved hand, not sensing the intruder—one of a different, larger kind—behind me until too late.

“What in God’s name are you doing, Dad?”

At least it isn’t Ann, who would have screamed and demanded a hotel stay until an exterminator could assure her—in writing—that no mice remained. Rachel has caught me holding the trap out away from my body, like it has the plague. With death so visible, any creative lie is as trapped as the mouse.

“Well, Rachel, I’m performing the manly duty required to keep your mother from being institutionalized.”

I make no move to hide the trap, figuring disgust will scurry Rachel fast away to whatever activities await depressed university-bound girls in the twenty-first century.

“My God, Dad, you seem happy about it.”

“Just smiling at my institutionalized joke—which I think is overboard, although I don’t dare test the waters. So, please don’t tell your mother about this. If she doesn’t know mice are around, she doesn’t think mice are around.”

“I’m very disappointed to learn my own dad—who’s taken the Hippocratic Oath—is cruel to animals.”

“The oath concerns people, Rachel.”

“Cruelty to animals, Dad, is a sign of—”

“I’m not being unnecessarily cruel. Adhering to that oath, in fact, requires me to not harm your mother’s mental health by making her fear mice crawling into bed with her.”

“They only come inside because we’ve wrecked their habitat, Dad.”

“That’s not correct, Rachel. Having grown up on a farm, I assure you mice love human structures despite great habitat all around.”

She steps closer, pointing at the dangling mouse, its tiny eyes bulging out, frozen in death. “Who is to say,” Rachel says, pleading, “that a mouse does not have a drop of God in it? If we have a bucketful in us, even a mouse must have a drop.”

With our daughter having never revealed any interest in theology or animal welfare, this surprises me. I guess it shouldn’t since her mother, a psychologist, has told me Rachel’s personality profile makes her introspective, keeping things to herself. Our daughter is, in psychology speak, a highly conscientious, highly emotional, moderately agreeable, moderately open, moderately unselfish person who is low in extroversion. The term introversion, Ann says, is on the outs. Rachel is also high in approval-seeking—Ann worrying about impulsive behavior.

Rachel extends her long thin fingers toward the mouse, as if she might pet it. I withdraw it. Tears form in the corners of Rachel’s big, dark eyes, which now strike me as deer-like.

“You don’t have to kill such … such precious little things, do you, Dad?”

“Your mother’s mental health is very important to me.”

“You’re just rationalizing, Dad. Like all of us.”

She looks up at the ceiling, or maybe through it. A single tear falls from each eye, the head angle forcing the drops to arc out over her high, wide cheekbones, and down around the jaw line, uniting in the sternal notch, tracing the outline of a cartoon heart.

“I’m not rationalizing. Your mother is terrified of mice. If I don’t take care of them, they’ll become houseguests. We had that problem on the farm. I once found a mouse in the shower I was about to turn on—which made me prove self-levitation possible. And one winter I found one—I kid you not—under the covers of my heated waterbed, eating a cracker.”

“Mice hibernate in winter, Dad.”

“Mice do not hibernate, Dear Daughter. In extreme cold they go into torpor—dropping their body temp and moving at a creep until finding more food, water, and heat.”

“Okay, torpor. But it’s summer.”

“They love human shelters year-round—and your mother hates them year-round. And let me make a confession. I’m as startled as your mother when I see a mouse. But since your mother doesn’t like cats, mouse duty has fallen to me despite my being in favor of cat’s rights—and women’s rights, too, in all fields, including extermination.”

Rachel flails her arms. “You’re treating this as a joke, Dad!”

“Well, dark humor is a way of self-numbing. In fact, taking lessons from both my career as an anesthesiologist and your mother’s career, I’ve realized people find ways of numbing themselves to many things when fully awake.”

I turn away, wanting to get the limp, lifeless mouse out of my own sight. “So, excuse me, Rachel, while I take this out to the woods where it will become part of the food chain.”

 “It’s not right, Dad! Mice feel pain!”

More tears fall, her head now hanging, making the drops drip onto the stained floor.

“I’m sure they do, Rachel, but they have no significant consciousness.”

“They see and hear and run from you, don’t they? And mice can learn, right? What’s the difference between mice and your beloved squirrels—which you feed?”

“I do not love squirrels. I find them entertaining. But if one made a nest in the attic—as they can—I would do whatever necessary to keep it from joining us at the breakfast table.”

Rachel’s eyes are now riveted to the mouse. “Do you have to use that kind of trap?”

“It’s the most humane one, Rachel.”

“Ugggh! That’s your worse joke ever!”

“It’s no joke. Now excuse me.”

I stalk through the backyard, trudging up a sloping hill though cottonwood trees to a clearing. Rachel’s mouse emotions seem outsized. Ann specializes in teen counseling, but is careful to treat Rachel as daughter, not patient. My wife sometimes desperately needs a hug after work, a hug to extricate her from what she’s heard that day—things kids would never tell their parents. They’d never tell a counselor, either, if not for confidentiality. Ann keeps it all to herself.

Reaching a clearing, I pull up with a gloved finger the spring-loaded hammer and find the victim needs shaken loose, the thin bar imbedded. I do like this trap—like not the right word. If I told Rachel my mouse-maiming misadventures with other models, she might picket me. I caught one deer mouse by its snout, dooming it to great suffering before it died—marked by drops of blood where it dragged the trap around the garage.

Shaking this mouse free is a minor inconvenience compared with the time I caught a house mouse by its hind legs. I found it running around like a dog dragging one of those harness-with-wheels things—inspiring on a dog, not on a mouse. I grabbed an extended-reach tool, chased down the mouse, and grasped the trap with mechanical fingers. I couldn’t bear ending the mouse’s misery—and creating a mess—by bashing it with something, so I dropped it in a bucket of water. The trap pulled the little gray mouse down, a tiny stream of bubbles floating up around its panicked dark eyes, me watching until the bubbles ended, leaving only those eyes—still open—staring up at me, an image that just won’t fade.

I stuff the gloves into my pockets, abandoning the bloodied trap in case Rachel is still in the garage.

She is, staring at me, hands on her hips.

“Can’t you anesthetize them somehow, Dad? Or trap them alive and release them far away?”

“Well, I might end up separating a mommy mouse from her babies, leaving them to starve to death.”

My daughter’s eyes widen—her horror like mine upon seeing the drowned mouse’s eyes.

“Dad … you might have left babies to starve right now.”

“Well, that’s one reason I do this—so they won’t make nests.”

I am not about to tell Rachel of the skeletal trio of mouse babies I found in a chewed-out throw pillow. They seemed to have died clutching each other as their lights went out.

“Please know, Rachel, that I do have some sympathy for mice. They’re amazing creatures, having flexible skeletons that turn them into shapeshifters—one reason they’re hard to keep out. I once saw one disappear into a narrow vent louver on our fireplace. It flattened itself and flowed through like water. They say young mice whose skull bones haven’t yet fused can fit through a pencil-size hole.”

Tears again form in Rachel’s dark eyes. I know I must never, ever mention the time I opened the top drawer of a rag-filled dresser in the basement. The drawer was half stuck, so it opened only a few inches. A young mouse popped up, staring at me, its head resting on the drawer lip. I slammed the drawer shut, unintentionally—believe me—beheading it.

“There has to be a better way, Dad.”

“Well, there’s poison. But that’s just blood thinner, so they start bleeding out of every orifice, desperate for water. So, you’ll often find them near a drain or—”

 “Enough, Dad!”

“Well, you might end up in an infested house, so know your options. Glue traps hold their feet until execution—unless they chew their legs off, maybe. Then there’s what amounts to a mouse electric chair. And there’s one that’s basically a mouse guillotine. But I suspect you’d prefer the sealed plastic boxes they crawl into and never come out. Whatever happens inside the black box, you don’t know and don’t see. Just throw the whole thing in the trash.”

Rachel begins weeping hard, chest quaking. “Please stop! Just do it!”

“So, you’ve decided to live life by an advertising slogan?”

My daughter whirls back. I anticipate fiery anger. Instead, her eyes say what the drowned mouse’s eyes said. What are you doing to me? Why? Her eyes make me see my clinical mousetrap listing as a dose of self-administered anesthetic, keeping me from showing the emotions I do, indeed have—and fight.

“I’m sorry, Rachel.”

My guard down, I reveal another option. “I could, Rachel, seal up every crack against even shapeshifters and stop keeping nesting material around. Lots of effort, but prevention is always best, right?”

I realize, too late, that I’ve trapped myself.

“I—I’ll help you, Dad.” She closes her eyes, tears pouring again. “I’ll do whatever it takes to … to not have to think about it.”

I hug her. She buries her head on my shoulder, sobbing in quiet, quaking fits. My own tears fall, both of us crying hard when the door to the house bursts open.

Ann steps into the garage, forehead wrinkling, eyes filling with foreboding.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

With the trap safely out of sight, an easy lie comes to mind. “Rachel’s just … just sad about leaving her friends.”

Our daughter gives no sign of affirmation, but she does not, let us say, rat me out. She stays silent. I give her a hug of thanks, knowing we won’t be able to cover all the holes, knowing we won’t stop keeping the things we keep, our tears falling like rain.

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Roger Helms has been a journalist, newspaper editor, and technical writer. His fiction has appeared in Fiction on the Web, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Smokey Blue Literary and Art Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Missouri, he now lives in Rochester, Minnesota.

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