The Beast in the Bed

Let me explain my living situation at the time of this adventure. I was renting a room from a retired and widowed English professor named Doris. She was sweet and smart and seriously afflicted with Parkinson’s. She needed in-home care to get by. Five days a week, this was provided by Jerry, a middle-aged clean-freak who could make angels weep with his skill at arranging a dishwasher. Two days a week, it was Micah, a young gent with emo hair who loved to read and loved to talk.

Doris and Jerry/Micah lived on the far side of the house. In the middle was the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. On my side of the house were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The master bedroom was furnished like a living room; we called it “the common area.” The master bathroom was mine, which meant that I had to cross the common area to get from my bedroom to my bathroom, but I didn’t mind. The remaining bedroom and bathroom belonged to my housemate Tim. Tim and I were grad students.

This particular day was the changing of the guard between Jerry and Micah: Jerry would be leaving, Micah would be arriving. These were always hectic days. Jerry would be trying to get through the last moments of his shift with the last dregs of his patience. So I wasn’t surprised when some sort of commotion woke me up earlier than my usual time. I had learned to ignore such things. Jerry would belligerently run leaf blowers and vacuum cleaners at unusual times. I thought nothing of the noise and went back to sleep.

A few hours later, I woke up for real, crossed the common room, and went into my bathroom. There, in the middle of the floor, dark and flagrant as an open wound was a sinister pile of scat. I blinked. Blinked again. Then I turned, went back to my room, made fast the door and went back to bed.

You have to understand that I have a deadly musophobia. I must have been four years old when a mouse got into the house and my mom panicked and got up on a stool leaving me alone on the ground level. For a four-year-old, that’s the world falling apart. I have been terrified of rodents ever since.

I texted Jerry to say that there were signs of vermin in my bathroom. I don’t know what I expected him to do. But he texted back to say there was a raccoon in the house.

Here’s what had happened while I was asleep:

Jerry had gone in to wake Doris up, thrown the sheets off her bed and found, curled up beside her like a cat, a creature.

He screamed. That woke up Tim who came running out, imagining the worst kinds of medical emergencies. Instead, he found Jerry in a panic, saying that something had been in Doris’s bed.

What do you call those things? Jerry said. A raccoon? Help me find it.

Tim dubiously helped look around. Then he saw it, under the bed on all fours, eyes flashing like citrine stones. Not a raccoon, but an opossum.

People always say, “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.” This is true of deer and rabbits. It might be true of skunks and squirrels. But it is by no means true of opossums. Opossums are stubborn and calculating critters. They might decide that you’re dangerous; they will never think that you’re frightening.

The opossum gave its belligerent hiss. Tim started back. Jerry started back. But the opossum calmly slipped past them, out of the bedroom and toward the kitchen. By the time they rounded the corner, it had disappeared.

Sometime before or after, it must have visited my bathroom.

Tim gave me a rundown of the whole drama. I felt relived. For one thing, opossums don’t trigger my musophobia. What can I say? They aren't rodents. Also, an opossum probably wasn’t nesting in the house. I had just got in. Finally, opossums are much bigger than rats. The house becomes instantly less menacing when you can’t imagine things lurking in every nook and cranny. Too big to squeeze under the doors and too small to break them down—that’s the optimal size for home invaders.

That’s how I felt, anyway, but Tim and Jerry were searching every corner and crevice, anxious to find the opossum and drive it out. Jerry discovered the way it must have gone into the house from the garage and he blocked it up. But there was no sign of the creature itself. Being good suburbanites, we called animal control.

Shortly afterwards, Micah arrived. Jerry filled him in on the marsupial situation, then left.

It was a few hours before the gentleman from animal control showed up. He poked around a little, found more piles of scat, and told us that we were definitely dealing with a possum. He said we could call him again if we saw it again. Then he left. Some help.

No one had laid eyes on the beast since Tim and Jerry had found it under the bed at six or seven in the morning. It was almost two pm. Well, maybe it had gone out the way it had come in; and now Jerry had closed up that entrance and we wouldn’t see it again. The hours continued to tick by, and everyone decided that the adventure was over.

It was about eight pm and I was sitting at the desk in the common room, writing. The happy, engrossed clackity-clack of the keyboard. It was a productive session. As I looked up absently from my computer screen—gathering a thought or choosing a word—there it was: poking around the corner of the armchair, the white face and pink nose of a possum, looking straight at me.

I stared at it. It stared back at me. We regarded each other as fellow creatures.

Then it backed away like a culprit, disappearing behind the armchair.

I jumped up from the desk and ran out of the common room. Micah, I said, Tim, come quick! I’ve got it, I’ve trapped it in the common room! Micah got a broom, Tim got a laundry basket. We all processed back into the common room, carefully shutting the door behind us.

The common room had a desk, a sofa, an armchair with an ottoman, a small breakfast table, a small tv console, and something like five bookshelves per wall. (Retired or not, Doris was an English professor.) The desk provided little cover, the table and console provided none at all, and the bookshelves were too flush with the walls to let something possum-sized slink behind them. I figured that the opossum had to be under the chair, the ottoman, or the sofa. One by one, we moved these piece of furniture. No possum.

Well, maybe it have gone into the master bathroom. We made a thorough search—checking the shower and the tub; looking behind the toilet, in the closets; exposing my supply of anti-dandruff shampoo and antiseptic mouthwash as we checked under both sinks. Nothing—no possum.

Tim suggested that maybe our quarry had gotten behind the books on one of the lower shelves. We started pulling out books, stacking them on the ottoman and the console. Are you sure it couldn’t have slipped out the door before you closed it? they asked me. I told them I was positive. They seemed skeptical.

Then, suddenly, Tim caught sight of a wormy tail behind the couch. The couch we had already checked twice by now. That little Houdini must have been moving along with us, staying one hiding spot ahead of our search the whole time! Now Micah came from one side with the broom and Tim came from the other with the laundry basket. I didn’t have a weapon, so I stood back. It was quick and daring work. Tim threw a towel over the laundry basket. They had it!

This was one of those tall, cylindrical laundry baskets with perforations like Swiss cheese. No sooner had they nabbed the possum than it occurred to Micah (who had taken the basket) that it could probably climb. Not wanting to wait long enough for that to occur to the possum, he rushed toward the living room, shouting to us to open the back door for him.

He released the beast near a tree in the backyard, unhurt and much, much smaller than it had seemed during all the ruckus, just a juvenile.

And that’s the story of how I spent a day with a possum for a roommate.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and everyone in-between.