Love Saves the Day

“Is it really that strange? Real estate changes hands every day in this city. It’s not like you can do anything about it.”

“I don’t know,” Josh says again. “If there’s something shady about the deal and getting press would help them out, it’s not like I don’t know a ton of music journalists. That’d be a place to start, anyway.”

“But if there really is something ‘sketchy’ going on,” Laura argues, and I can tell she’s trying hard to come up with a reason why Josh shouldn’t care about this anymore, “wouldn’t the music press already be on top of it?”

“Not necessarily,” Josh says. “Alphaville’s pretty much fallen off the radar over the last decade or so. It’s been a while since any major albums came out of that place. Now they mostly serve the community and young bands that haven’t signed with labels yet.” Josh stretches his arms above his head and yawns. “I’m beat. All that walking in the heat today really did me in. I think I’ll go take a shower.”

Laura smiles and nods, but as soon as Josh’s back is turned, her smile goes away. Then she sighs and pushes her fingers through her hair, the way Sarah always did when she was thinking about something she didn’t want to think about anymore.

I can hear the shower running in Josh and Laura’s bathroom as I work my way frantically through the Sarah-boxes. I know I can’t stop Josh or Laura if they do decide to make these boxes go away, but there has to be something I can do. I spin around in jumpy circles as I go from box to box, my plumper belly knocking things out of the boxes and onto the floor. Normally I’d hate the idea of things going out of the boxes they’re supposed to be in, but this is an emergency. I have more important things to worry about right now.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my left eye, I see a rat on the floor! A rat! An enormous black rat with bright-red eyes and a long skinny tail! I haven’t seen one (except for in bad dreams) since that day when I lost my littermates, and Sarah and I found each other. I know how easily I can kill mice, but a rat is something else altogether—and this rat is huge! I spin around to face it head-on, my fur puffing all the way up, and with the force of the jump I take backward, I knock one of the Sarah-boxes onto its side where it lands with a terrific crash! My heart is pounding, and by the sudden brightness of the room, I can tell that the dark centers of my own eyes must have gotten as big as they possibly can.

The rat doesn’t move. It just sits there, completely still, not even twitching its whiskers. I creep toward it—with my back still arched and my fur still puffed—and bat at its head with my right paw, taking a jump back immediately. But the rat still doesn’t do anything. Once again I creep slowly toward it and bat at its head, and the rat is still motionless. This time, when I hit it, I leave my paw there for a moment. The rat feels strange. And that’s when my fur starts to relax. This isn’t a real rat at all. It’s a fake, made out of something soft and springy.

I hear Laura’s footsteps coming up the stairs. “Are you okay, Prudence?” she calls. “What’s all the ruckus up there?” If my reaction when I saw the fake rat was bad, it’s nothing compared with Laura’s. When she comes into my room and sees it sitting in the middle of the floor, her face turns stark white and she screams!

I know that a fake rat can’t hurt her, but I jump defensively in front of Laura anyway, letting her know that no rat—real or fake—will ever be able to get close to her as long as I’m here.

Laura’s shriek of terror is so loud that Josh hears it in the shower. I hear the scrape of the shower curtain being thrown back, and then Josh’s running footsteps pound down the hall. “Laura!” he yells. “Laura, what happened? Are you okay?”

Josh runs all the way into the doorway of my room and stands there, dripping wet, holding a towel around his waist with one hand. In the other is the baseball bat he keeps next to his side of the bed. But Laura is chuckling now, breathing hard with one hand on the spot right above her heart, which is probably pounding like mine was. “Good lord!” she says. “I thought I saw a rat!” She squats down on her heels, stroking my head with one hand and picking the fake rat up with the other, its rubbery tail dangling down her arm.

“What is that thing?” Josh asks her.

Laura turns it over in her hand. “My mom used to get a lot of swag from the record labels. Most of it was silly stuff—like mini lava lamps and key chains—and she’d give it to me. This, I believe”—she lets the fake rat hang from her fingers by its tail—“was something she got when they released Hot Rats on CD.”

“Zappa.” Josh smiles and turns to rest his baseball bat against the wall, pushing away the wet hair that’s fallen into his eyes. “That was a great album.”