Baba and The Mouse

Disclosure: Animals were harmed in the making of this blog. Fair warning to all PETA advocates: I support you, except for rodents (and bugs).

The mouse and my 94-year-old widowed grandmother have been cohabitating for six weeks now. It is far from a consensual arrangement. The woman survived a world war, childbirth in a 1940's Catholic hospital, a rare form of blood cancer, several hip replacements, and the loss of Downton Abbey on PBS. And yet, somehow this meager rodent has enfeebled her.  She is beside herself. And truthfully, I don’t blame her.

It started with a single squeak in the cavernous black of night. Baba flung open her eyes, alert, anxious, unsure if she had dreamt the sound. She waited, stiffened her limbs under the sheet, straining to decipher fact from fiction. When it came again, a high-pitched whimper followed by a rustling in the hall, she hollered into the vastness, her voice hoarse with age and fractured sleep. She struck her cane against the bed frame, making such a racket that her intruder wouldn’t dare mistake her room for a recreational playground. In the morning, after limping to the kitchen to brew her chicory coffee, she spotted five inky turds dotting the countertops.

Evidence.

Baba closed her eyes, remembering what her late husband had spouted over the years when they suspected vermin had breached the basement. “There’s never just one.” 

She knew right then, she was no longer alone. In fact, she was probably outnumbered.

The cavalry (aka my mother, my uncle, my siblings, my husband, I, and a few selfless neighbors) arrived in shifts throughout the next day, bearing traps, glue boards, and peanut butter. Baba drummed her fingers on her cheek, waiting for evening, picturing her nocturnal interlopers rousing from slumber, stretching their joints, their pointed noses curiously sniffing the air, now subtly perfumed by peanut oil. As she dressed for bed, Baba wishfully beckoned them out of crevices and closets and cracks, inviting their whiskers to fan out, to become bewitched by the delicacies lain bare on innocuous rectangles of wood until…SNAP.

Right before dawn, still tortured and awake, she rejoiced in the metal-clanging glory of two traps ensnaring prey. With that behind her, she was able to succumb to the delirium of early morning slumber, the peaceful sleep that rewards a host after bidding adieu to unwanted guests.

“We got them both,” she bragged into the phone a few hours later, swirling the last of her coffee in the chipped mug painted with red poppies.

I could hear the smile lingering on her face.

“I’m so glad, Baba,” I answered, cracking my neck, relieved our arsenal had worked.

It was then I heard the yelp, so suffocated I almost mistook it for a hiccup.

“There’s a third,” she strangled out, her voice low and muffled. “She’s staring at me right now from the corner of the kitchen.”

“She?” I probed, briefly amused by the assuredness with which my grandmother had assigned the feminine pronoun to an androgynous pest.

“It’s definitely a she. I killed her brother and her husband and now she’s taunting me. She knows I can’t move fast enough to catch her and now, just watch; she won’t venture onto any of the other traps.”

“Baba, that’s ridiculous. It’s a mouse. It’s brain is the size of a dust mote. The only thing she knows is instinct, not logic.” I halted, recognizing how quickly I had adopted the “she”.

“No, she’s smart,” Baba countered. “You’re not the one looking at her.”

The next morning, Baba lumbered into the kitchen and found a desecrated bag of Skinny Pop, half-gnawed popcorn kernels strewn over the linoleum. Three days later, with peanut butter dehydrating in the open air, we replaced all the traps with Skinny Pop.

“Maybe she has a nut allergy,” I suggested to my mom that evening. “She’s meticulously evaded the peanut butter, but I think she has a weakness for salt.”

My mom flashed me a wry smile. “So, you think it’s a ‘she’ too, huh?”

“I’m starting to agree with Baba. This mouse seems to possess an uncanny amount of intelligence. You know, for a varmint with an infinitesimal sized cerebrum.”

Each night thereafter, Baba listened helplessly for the third SNAP or for the frantic squeaks billowing from one of the glue strips, but the mouse avoided each pitfall as if she'd memorized the battlefield. When I came over to check on the traps, the popcorn had been stealthily stolen without activating the traps.

She was a clever old girl.

A week elapsed before we added another dozen, supplementing the bait with bacon and aged gruyere and relocating them to the mouse's favorite hangouts. Behind the microwave. Next to the fridge. Under the walnut dresser in the front bedroom.

But the cured meat failed as spectacularly as the peanut butter and popcorn.

“My neighbor thinks it’s the nitrates,” Baba lamented. “That she can smell the preservatives in the bacon.”

I shook my head, scanning the kitchen for any shadow of movement. “That’s absurd. Unless we have the Ratatouille rodent on our hands, I don’t think she’d be that picky or give a rat’s ass about the long-term health effects of sodium nitrates. Sorry, no pun intended.”

Baba didn’t laugh. I could see her weariness in how her head slumped to the side, how little she had been sleeping, her eyes clouding with exhaustion and worry. Her back sagged into the chair.

“Emily, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t cook without worrying about leaving behind some minuscule remnants. I can’t lay in bed at night without wondering if she’s crawling around under my mattress. I don’t feel like myself. My house isn’t my own. It’s been invaded. I feel like selling it.”

I stroked her back, smoothing the fabric of her sweater, trying to comfort, to remain steadfast in my belief that we would catch the invader—that she’d be gone by the end of the week.

The mouse had begun visiting every morning while Baba ate her breakfast. She’d scoot out from behind the oven, race along the baseboards, leap over the sticky traps, and then skid to a stop in front of the fridge, vetting the air with her whiskers.  

“This morning she almost ventured close enough to me to whack her with my cane. She peered up at me, begging for a crumb, but then I shouted for her to leave me alone and she sped into the hall.”

“We’ll get her, Baba. I know we will,” I whispered, but my voice thinned out as if afraid to make promises it couldn’t keep.

Thanksgiving came and went. Weeks elapsed. We purchased a Chinese ultrasonic rodent repeller that claimed to emit a high-pitched sound, intolerable to rodents, but inconsequential to humans and other pets. The device sounded too good to be true, but I happily paid  $29.99 through Amazon Prime and waited for our miracle to arrive via one-day shipping.  

Meanwhile, the excrement accumulated. Puny pellets resembling grains of black rice tainted everything. Countertops, bedspreads, bathroom towels, the lip of the toaster. I felt terrible. This was my grandmother, reduced to living in filth, declining from her own distress. My mom begged Baba to stay at her house, to get some fresh air, just for an hour or two, to get her hair done, but she stubbornly refused. It was as if Baba had sealed her fate with that mouse and only one of them would emerge alive.

In early December, we introduced a “humane” trap into the home and baited it with tuna and hard-boiled egg. Baba claimed to have reached the point of compromise, having explained to the mouse over breakfast that she would allow it to be captured alive and released in the forest preserve. As long as it would leave imminently, she would grant a reprieve.
         I began to question her sanity and then my own. The night prior I had woken up at four in the morning in a sweaty Ambien-induced fog, having just dreamt that the mouse was, in fact, my grandfather reincarnated, coming back to visit his home and lovely wife.
        But even Baba’s negotiations proved futile. At times, I was tempted to check the doors and archways for signs of Charlotte’s infamous spider webs. Surely, they had to be somewhere, spelling out “Some Mouse” or “Radiant Rodent” or “Terrific Templeton”. After all, this mouse was no ordinary creature. Her male counterparts had been eradicated on night #1 and yet, somehow, she had managed to survive in the suburbs amid a minefield of deathtraps.

          Ultimately, we brought in the d-CON. The poison was long overdue.
        “You know this will mean this mouse is going to die in your house somewhere, burrowed in some linen closet or in the hollow of one of Grandpa’s old sneakers?” I tested Baba to ensure we had her consent.

“I don’t care about the carcass. I gave her a chance. If she’s going to be here, I’d rather have her dead than alive.” She peered up at me, her chin wobbling. “I didn’t even get to make my Christmas cookies this year.”

She spoke with such muted sorrow, so little left to claim. She didn’t drive or go anywhere unless we were taking her to the doctor or dragging her on an afternoon adventure in the wheelchair. Those Christmas cookies were her tradition, her connection to her Czech homeland. She had made them every year since she was a 21-year-old war bride. 73 straight years of whipping butter, flour and sugar into submission. They made her feel useful and worthy and alive. And this year, a rodent weighing less than an ounce had stolen that away.

“Okay, we’ll put out the poison. And Baba,” I extended my hand over her own, “that mouse will die. And once she’s dead, we’ll sterilize the kitchen and make the cookies for the New Year. I promise.”

For days, the mouse ingested pellet after pellet of poison. My husband and I kept refilling it every afternoon when we came to check and saw more had been consumed.

“How is it not dead yet? This seems obscene,” I’d beseech him.

There was a small part of me that felt bad for the mouse, for the suffering that would befall her, but all I had to do was look at my Baba, wilted as a neglected houseplant, to know I would do anything to spare her more grief.

The last time the mouse visited during breakfast was three days ago. I don’t know if Baba spoke or shook her cane or even bid her farewell. I do know she swept the poop into the bin and then sprayed the counter with bleach. She reported that the turds were tinged an unnatural shade of green.

And so, six weeks into this ordeal, ‘tis the night before Christmas.

I am straining to believe in miracles, that all through her house, not a creature is stirring, especially the mouse.