The Other Mrs. Mary Kubica

       MOUSE

      Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father had called her that.

      The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it was something special between her father and her, even if she didn’t know why.

      Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.

      She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse. If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip, ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom, climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but she didn’t see any whiskers there.

      Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.

      But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cookies that he called her Mouse.

      Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing its way through wood.

      Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night, when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pockets for a late-night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.

      Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would taste just as good as the cookie had.

      But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her. There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.

      But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called her Mouse.

      Because by then, she already was Mouse.

      Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even cartwheels on the moon if that was what she wanted to do because Mouse didn’t need silly things like oxygen or gravity. She was afraid of nothing because she was immortal. No matter what she did, no harm could come to imaginary Mouse.

      Mouse loved to draw. Her bedroom walls were covered in pictures of her father and her, her and her teddy bears. Mouse spent her days playing pretend. Her bedroom, the only one on the second floor of the old home, was full of dolls, toys and stuffed animals. Each animal had a name. Her favorite was a stuffed brown bear named Mr. Bear. Mouse had a dollhouse, a toy kitchen set with pretend pots and pans and crates of plastic food. She had a tea set. Mouse loved to set her dolls and animals in a circle on her floor, on the edge of her striped rag rug, and serve them each a tiny mug of tea and a plastic doughnut. She would find a book on her shelf and read it aloud to her friends before tucking them into bed.

      But sometimes Mouse didn’t play with her animals and dolls.

      Sometimes she stood on her bed and pretended the floor around her was hot lava oozing from the volcano at the other end of the room. She couldn’t step on the floor for risk of death. Those days, Mouse would scramble from her bed to a desk, climbing to safety. She’d tread precariously across the top of the small white desk—the legs of it wobbling beneath her, threatening to break. Mouse wasn’t a big girl but the desk was old, fragile. It wasn’t meant to hold a six-year-old child.

      But it didn’t matter because soon enough Mouse was clambering into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the bedroom floor. As she did, she took extra care not to step on the floor, breathing a sigh of relief when she was safely inside the basket. Because even though the basket was on the floor, it was safe. The basket couldn’t get swallowed up by lava, because it was made of titanium, and Mouse knew that titanium wouldn’t melt. She was a smart girl, smarter than any other girl her age that she knew.

      Inside the laundry basket, the girl rode the waves of the volcano until the lava itself cooled and crusted over, and the land was safe enough to walk on again. Only then did she venture out of the basket and go back to playing along the edge of the rag rug with Mr. Bear and her dolls.

      Sometimes Mouse thought that that, her tendency to disappear to her bedroom—quiet as a church mouse, as her father put it—and play all day, was the reason he called her Mouse.

      It was hard to say.

      But one thing was certain.

      Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And then she no longer did.