Devotion by Maile Meloy

Author:Maile Meloy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE TWO SISTERS had lived apart once, for four months in 1952. Sylvia, who was older, was going to marry a man she’d met in Galveston. But she was riding in his car one evening when she felt a wash of cold fear and told him to stop and pull over.

“My sister has been in an accident,” she said.

A phone call confirmed it. Lili had fallen down the stairs and hadn’t woken up. The young man drove Sylvia straight to the hospital, where the nurses had already shaved Lillian’s head for surgery. The doctors were going to open her skull, a very dangerous operation. Sylvia stroked her sister’s pretty face. An orderly came and stood behind her, ready to wheel the unconscious Lillian away.

“It’s time to wake up now,” Sylvia had said. “Lili, listen. It’s time to wake up.”

And Lili did. She opened her blue eyes and gazed at Sylvia with such sweetness. “I’m thirsty,” she said in a small voice. The orderly fetched the doctor, who was amazed.

Lili was not the same after her fall and couldn’t remember things well. So Sylvia broke off her engagement to look after her. The young man she’d intended to marry was sent to Korea, where he was killed, and the sisters moved in together in the two-story blue house. Sylvia began teaching school, and Lili crocheted blankets and made the curtains.

Now Sylvia peered out the window, through the gap in those curtains. A car was parked the wrong way on the street. A red car. She knew it shouldn’t be parked that way.

That scruffy, pink-haired girl had left her feeling disturbed, knocking at just the wrong moment. People had tried to interfere before, but Sylvia had always stood her ground. Lili had, too, when she was able.

They’d had a dog first, who could guard the door: a loyal boxer named Hercules, who loved Lili and slept at her feet. When he died, Sylvia thought Lili might never get over it. Next they had an indifferent and yappy schnauzer, some haughty cats, a parakeet, and a series of finches that reproduced and died so quickly that it was impossible to get attached. Loving finches was like loving a box of tissues: one was plucked out, and crumpled, and gone.

And then came the new era. When Sylvia first noticed the rats’ pellet droppings in the pantry, she suggested they get a trap. But Lili had cried out as if in pain.

“You can’t kill them!” she said. “Listen to them! They have plans!”

So Sylvia listened, and she began to understand what her sister meant. The sounds in the walls were not the random scufflings of an inferior species. The rats would move an object deliberately and position it with a small thunk. Then drag something else beside it. They might have been arranging furniture in a small living room. They were intelligent beings.

Lili, at home all day, had seen them do remarkable things. They could steal a whole egg and carry it away. One rat clutched it and lay on his back, and the other dragged him by his tail.

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