Bats

I

When I opened the door to the attic, it lay perfectly still on the stairs. At first I thought it was a pair of socks, but when I peered up close, I saw the brown fur, the wings, the ears. I backed away slowly. Abandoning the Halloween box I’d meant to haul up there, I slammed the door.

Later, I implored my husband, Mark, to please take care of the bat.

He was making lemon pasta for dinner. Steam rose around his face. BBC News was rolling low-key from a specialty radio he kept on top of the fridge. “I’m not going to kill a bat,” he said.

“But I’m terrified of bats,” I said. “You know that. It’s actual terror I feel. Terror.”

He looked at me long.

“You know the bat population is down,” he said. “There’s a fungus that’s killing them all off.”

I was supposed to be setting the table but went to stand before him. “You used to kill bats for me.”

He zested the lemon peel, drained the noodles. It was time to call the kids down for dinner. “I can’t kill the bat,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

II

My father used to kill bats while my mother and I huddled under an afghan, screaming. Our drafty old Victorian was a bat’s dream with dozens of easy entrances. One of their favorites was scootching down the attic walls and slipping in through the pocket parlor doors on hot summer nights.

My father kept a tennis racket by his bed for exactly this purpose. Because my mother kept me fully shrouded, most of what I remember are the sounds: the wet scritchy squeak of the bat, the thump of my father’s sudden footsteps as he ran to corner it, my mother’s tight, labored breathing as she clutched the afghan around us, a few swipes of air through tennis racquet strings, then finally the clean thwack of death upon contact.

My father would carry the bat outside and toss it in the lilac bushes. Only after he came back inside would my mother release me from under the blanket. It was hot under there with her. She smelled like day-old deodorant and coffee breath. To be released into fresh air was exhilarating.

My father would then sit in the living room with us and smoke a cigarette, regaling us with how tricky the bat was, which rooms he’d had to close off, how many tries it took until he was able to kill it.

It often took me days to feel safe again in our house. I’d run from room to room, hunched, searching up in corners with a dishtowel wrapped around my head.

III

The next day, I tried again. “Mark,” I said. He was eating breakfast this time, granola with fresh blueberries and rice milk. In minutes, he’d be leaving for his thirty-minute commute, not the best time to talk. “So, can we revisit the bat issue?”

The look he gave me was a combination of love and endurance. “Okay.”

“See, I can’t be in this house, honestly, knowing there’s a bat up there.” I clutched my mug of coffee to my chest. “I don’t think you have any idea how hard this is for me. It’s all I can think about.”

He nodded. He was trying so hard to be patient. “But I really don’t want to kill it. It’s not right.”

“Well, do you think you could just capture it and release it somehow?” I asked. “Didn’t you do that once with a cookie sheet and a mason jar?”

“I can’t remember,” he said. He put his bowl and spoon in the sink. “Anyway, I have to get going.”

After he left, I went upstairs to work in my study, the room closest to the attic door. But I couldn’t focus knowing the bat was just a few feet away: breathing, sleeping, waiting.

IV

Once, on an island in the Philippines, I’d been dancing...